Morgan: 60-40

Roy Morgan has simultaneously unloaded two sets of polling figures, as it does from time to time. The regular fortnightly face-to-face poll, conducted over the previous two weekends from a sample of 1684, has Labor’s lead nudging up to 60-40 compared with 59.5-40.5 at the previous such poll. Both major parties are down 1.5 per cent on the primary vote – Labor to 49.5 per cent, the Coalition to 34 per cent – while the Greens are up from 7.5 per cent to 9 per cent. There is also a phone poll of 695 respondents conducted mid-week, which finds a slight majority favouring “maintaining a balanced budget” over vaguely defined alternative economic objectives. The poll has Labor’s lead on voting intention at 58-42 on two-party preferred and 46.5-37 on the primary vote. The Greens are on 10.5 per cent.

Plenty happening on the electoral front, not least the finalisation of the federal redistribution for Queensland. This offers a few surprises, and may be a rare occasion where a major party’s submission has actually had an effect. Two changes in particular were broadly in line with the wishes of the Liberal National Party, which marshalled a considerable weight of media commentary to argue that the Coalition had been hard done by. As always, Antony Green has crunched the numbers: all estimated margins quoted herein are his.

• Most interestingly, the changes to Dickson that sent Peter Dutton scurrying for refuge have been partly reversed. As the LNP submission requested, the electorate has recovered the rural area along Dayboro Road and Woodford Road that it was set to lose to Longman. However, only a small concession was made to the LNP’s request that the troublesome Kallangur area be kept out of the electorate. The electoral impact is accordingly slight, clipping the notional Labor margin from 1.3 per cent to 1.0 per cent. Peter Dutton is nonetheless sufficiently encouraged that he’s indicating he might yet stand and fight – or less charitably, he’s found a pretext to get out of the corner he had backed himself into. Labor has received a corresponding boost in its marginal seat of Longman, where Jon Sullivan’s margin has been cut from 3.6 per cent at the election to 1.7 per cent, instead of the originally proposed 1.4 per cent.

• Major changes to Petrie and Wayne Swan’s seat of Lilley have largely been reversed. It had been proposed to eliminate Petrie’s southern dog-leg by adding coastal areas from Shorncliffe and Deagon north to Brighton from Lilley, which would be compensated with Petrie’s southern leg of suburbs from Carseldine south to Stafford Heights. The revised boundaries have eliminated the former transfer and limited the latter to south of Bridgeman Downs. Where the original proposal gave Labor equally comfortable margins in both, the revision gives Wayne Swan 8.8 per cent while reducing Yvette D’Ath to an uncomfortable 4.2 per cent. Retaining Shorncliffe, Deagon and Brighton in Lilley had been advocated in the LNP submission. Almost-local observer Possum concurs, saying the revised boundaries better serve local communities of interest.

• South of Brisbane and inland of the Gold Coast, changes have been made to the boundary between Forde and the new electorate of Wright, with a view to consolidating the rural identity of the latter. Forde gains suburban Boronia Heights and loses an area of hinterland further south, extending from suburban Logan Village to rural Jimboomba. Labor’s margin in Forde has increased from 2.4 per cent to 3.4 per cent, and the Coalition’s in Wright is up from 3.8 per cent to 4.8 per cent.

• Little remains of a proposed northward shift of the boundary between Kennedy and Leichhardt from the Mitchell River to the limits of Tablelands Regional council. Kennedy will now only gain an area around Mount Molloy, 150 kilometres north-west of Cairns. Its boundary with Dawson has also been tidied through the expansion of a transfer from Dawson south of Townsville, aligning it with the Burdekin River. None of the three seats’ margins has changed.

• Moreton gains a park and golf course from Oxley in the west and loses part of Underwood to Rankin in the south-east, with negligible impact on their margins.

• Maranoa has gained the area around Wandoan from Flynn, making the boundary conform with Western Downs Regional Council. This boosts Labor’s margin in Flynn from 2.0 per cent to 2.3 per cent, compared with 0.2 per cent at the election.

• Three minor adjustments have been made to the boundary between the safe Liberal Sunshine Coast seats of Fisher and Fairfax, allowing the entirety of Montville to remain in Fisher.

• Ryan has taken a sliver of inner city Toowong from Brisbane.

Other news:

• The Financial Review’s Mark Skulley reported on Wednesday that the federal government was moving quickly to get its electoral reform package into shape. Labor is said to be offering a deal: if the Liberals drop their opposition to slashing the threshold for public disclosure of donations (which the Coalition and Steve Fielding voted down in March), the government will include union affiliation fees in a ban on donations from corporations, third parties and associated entities. Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald says the New South Wales branch of the ALP alone receives $1.3 million in revenue a year from the fees, which unions must pay to send delegates to party conferences. According to Skulley, many union leaders fear a Rudd plot to “Blairise” the party by weakening union ties, with Coorey naming the ACTU and Victorian unions as “most hostile”. It is further reported that the parties propose to cover the foregone revenue by hiking the rate of public funding. VexNews “understands” that an increase from $2.24 per vote to $10 is on the cards, potentially increasing the total payout from $49 million to $200 million. The site says Westpac currently has a formal claim over Labor’s public funding payout after the next election, as the party is currently $8 million in debt. The Liberals are said to be keen because they’re having understandable trouble raising funds at the moment. A further amendment proposes to restrict political advertising by third parties. As well as being stimulating politically, some of these moves might be difficult constitutionally.

• A proposed referendum on reform to the South Australian Legislative Council has been voted down in said chamber. The referendum would have been an all-or-nothing vote to change terms from a staggered eight years to an unstaggered four, reduce its membership from 22 to 16, allow a deliberative rather than a casting vote for the President and establish a double dissolution mechanism to resolve deadlocks. Another bill amending the Electoral Act has been passed, although it will not take effect until after the March election. A number of its measures bring the state act into line with the Commonwealth Electoral Act: party names like “Liberals for Forests” have been banned, provisions have been made for enrolment of homeless voters, and MPs will be able to access constituents’ dates of birth on the electoral roll (brace yourselves for presumptuous birthday greetings in the mail). The number of members required of a registered party has been increased from 150 to 200: if you’re wondering why they bothered, the idea was to hike it to 500 to make life difficult for the putative Save the Royal Adelaide Hospital party, but the government agreed to a half-measure that wouldn’t threaten the Nationals. Misleading advertising has also been introduced as grounds for declaring a result void if on the balance of probabilities it affected the result. The Council voted down attempts to ban “corflute” advertising on road sides and overturn the state’s unique requirement that how-to-vote cards be displayed in each polling compartment.

• Deborah Morris of the Hastings Leader reports Helen Constas, chief executive of the Peninsula Community Legal Centre, has been preselected as Labor’s candidate for the south-eastern Melbourne federal seat of Dunkley, where Liberal member Bruce Billson’s margin was cut from 9.3 per cent to 4.0 per cent at the 2007 election. Constas was said to have had “a convincing win in the local ballot”. UPDATE: Andrew Crook of Crikey details Constas’s preselection as a win for the left born of disunity between the Bill Shorten and Stephen Conroy forces of the Right; Right faction sources respond at VexNews.

• The ABC reports that Nationals members in the state electorate of Dubbo have voted not to abandon their preselection privileges by being the guinea pig in the state party’s proposed open primary experiment. There is reportedly a more welcoming mood in Port Macquarie, which like Dubbo is a former Nationals seat that has now had consecutive independent members.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

791 comments on “Morgan: 60-40”

Comments Page 15 of 16
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  2. [Shows if it is cheaper, show me the facts?]
    Of course it’s cheaper. Victoria is building a solar plant capable of producing 330 GWh which is going to cost about $500 million. Victorian tax payers are paying $100 million, and the private sector the rest.

    One modern 1100 MW nuclear reactor produces about 8000 GWh in a year, and costs about US$5 billion. So to produce the same amount of power you would need about 25 of the solar plants (which of course don’t make any power at night).

    25 X $500 million is $12.5 Billion, therefore, big solar power plants cost a lot more than nuclear plants, while producing no power at night (but the same amount of power over all during a year, assuming of course it is sunny enough).

    There is also another problem. Exactly where do you put 25 large solar power plants?

  3. [Anyone else support an investigation to see if Morant should be posthumously exonerated – on the basis that the court-martial brought bias to the hearing?]

    But they did murder the German priest…

  5. Antony, do you have any thoughts on some additional NSW seats in which independents next time might have a chance? Tell me there are a few, please.

  6. [Shh
    Dont want to disturb shows vibe and make him actually provide proof.]
    LOL! This coming from someone who doesn’t provide proof for ANYTHING? Stop it, you’ll break my irony meter.
    [Gusface, as i said Shows should be in politics as they rarely make decisions based on hard incisive facts….]
    I thought – according to you – I was in politics?

  7. Then their is the waste, the nimbys, and the time it takes to build them…
    I do not think anyone will protest about solar plants near their home….
    What of wind and Geothermal and Gas… Oh forgot about those…

  8. Nice clip on the ABC news showing Kevin Rudd getting on to the plane for Indonesia. At the top of the stairs he pointed to a place on the clipboard the hostess was holding, obviously saying: “That’s me.” Both had a good laugh. Or maybe he was just checking the menu for his preferred meal.

  9. And the possiblity of a nuclear plant breaking down or being attacked by terrorists…
    Think not of the consequences… Now much of cost will security amount too… for each plant…

  10. Diog at 687

    [Although her actions may have been correctly described as unlawful, I gather from your post that at the time she acted, she had every reason to consider that she was acting lawfully. It was only the subsequent unforeseeable judgment against Sartor which stuffed her up. She can’t be blamed for that, although the SMH article doesn’t tell the full story.]

    One would not have picked up that flow of circumstance from ABC News either…

  11. [Then their is the waste, the nimbys, and the time it takes to build them…]
    Well, “time it takes to build” isn’t an issue, because the Victorian government isn’t expecting its ONE solar power station to be finished until 2015? That’s 6 years for 1/25th of the power as produced from one nuclear reactor (which I concede would take about 10 years to build for the very first one).
    [Expressions of interest will be called for immediately and the aim will be to have the plant operating by 2015.]
    http://www.premier.vic.gov.au/premier/victorian-government-to-fund-new-solar-power-station.html
    How long do you think it will take to build 25 of these solar power stations?
    [I do not think anyone will protest about solar plants near their home….]
    I disagree. If you need to build 25 solar power stations I think you will eventually run into NIMBYism, because people will start getting annoyed that they are being built everywhere.

    Yes nuclear waste is a big issue, but most of it can be reprocessed into new fuel that can then create more power. What is now considered nuclear waste in a few decades will be considered an extremely valuable source of energy.

  12. marky

    [Shows if it is cheaper, show me the facts?]

    There are too many variables to give a single figure so there are ranges. There is also the problem of load capacity vs actual output and baseload. In Canada, the figures are here.

    Wind, solar (PV and thermal), wave and tidal are not even close to nuclear, gas or coal in terms of c/kWhr. Geothermal is promising. The study is a few years old and solar is getting less expensive, but the other RE sources are still pretty terrible in cost-effectiveness.

    http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:JgmEJ9H10FcJ:www.cna.ca/english/pdf/Studies/Comparative_Costs_of_Generation_Technologies_Sept-06-EN.pdf+relative+costs+of+electricity+generation+technologies&hl=en&gl=au&sig=AFQjCNGXWoJBi18MBjiZCGS3hEP5QjzdAg

  13. Gus, i am pretty good. i see that you are still having fun traveling down the Showy River.

    The “Indonesian Solution” is sounding definitely better than the “Pacific Solution” as me mates in Jakarta will be laughing all way to the banks. 👿

  15. Grog
    [But they did murder the German priest…]
    Yes, but were there any they shot who were blameless? 🙂

    Anyway, the best basis for any ‘quashing’ of the Morant verdicts would be to show that there was bias on the panel – instructions from above to convict – any correspondence or documentation. Even a study of what the court-martial members said at and outside the hearing if sufficient to establish a ‘reasonable apprehension of bias’ could be enough to have the convictions quashed.

    I don’t think I’d be watching the movie 20 times for the answers though, as the lawyer pushing the issue has reportedly done.

  16. [And the possiblity of a nuclear plant breaking down]
    Nuclear reactors are extremely reliable. In fact a reactor in the U.S. recently received an award for running at full power for nearly 2 years. In fact this is one of the huge advantages of nuclear power, sure they are expensive to build, but once they are built they are very cheap to run, in fact with currently uranium prices they are cheaper to run than coal.

    What about solar power stations? You can’t guarantee their output on a day to day basis, because it all depends on how sunny it is.

    [or being attacked by terrorists… Think not of the consequences… Now much of cost will security amount too… for each plant…]
    If a nuclear reactor was attacked by terrorists it would most likely just be shut down (SCRAMed). During the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., the federal government just dispatched National Guard troops to most of the largest nuclear power plants.

  17. [LOL! This coming from someone who doesn’t provide proof for ANYTHING? Stop it, you’ll break my irony meter]

    This infatuation has got to stop shows.

    I’m not your type,am happily married and anyway, you could do better than me

    Someone like leila from futurama is more your type maybe?

  18. [This infatuation has got to stop shows.

    I’m not your type,am happily married and anyway, you could do better than me

    Someone like leila from futurama is more your type maybe?]
    Gusface – too many words, not enough content.

  19. [Yes, but were there any they shot who were blameless?]

    Very few are blameless in a war, but that doesn’t mean you murder non-combatants or POWs.

    (that said I don’t think they should have got the death penalty)

  20. Antony

    I think the ABC News report was presented to be a lurid (sensationalist, melodramatic) account to link the story into the McGurk story. It could have been presented much more soberly and accurately.

    But to echo you, I too give up; Mr Sandman beckons…

  21. [The “Indonesian Solution” is sounding definitely better than the “Pacific Solution” as me mates in Jakarta will be laughing all way to the banks.]

    is the boat thingy getting any mention over there?

  23. Gus,

    [Indonesia is a stepping-stone for migrants from poor countries en route to developed Australia. Indonesian criminal groups are believed to facilitate the shipping of illegal migrants via islands in Malaysia or Indonesia into Australia.

    The boat carrying these Sri Lankans, for example, is registered in Indonesia, and was bound from Pontianak in West Kalimantan to Australia before being intercepted by the Navy in the Sunda strait. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Tuesday he called President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono for his assistance in controlling an increasing influx of alleged illegal migrants into Australia, including a plea to intercept the 255 Sri Lankans, according to Australian media.

    Several immigration officials say Indonesia has to comply with these requests because Australia has been financing Indonesia heavily in an effort to keep boat people away from its territory.]

    http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/10/19/boat-people-sinking-despair-ri-officials-sit-fence.html

  26. Finns, you may have not had a chance to catch up with what constitutes shouting here, or indeed be confused by Korean criteria as to what constitutes shouting. However, the last I looked no-one, let alone Terry Gilliam’s version of God, had determined what was worse shouting…..bold vs. capitals.

  30. Jaundiced view and marky marky:

    As much as it pains me to say it, my vote will be going to the Liberals in NSW election. Probably not going to matter as I live in a safe labor seat. Fully understand that the Libs may not be any better and the situation is so bad it has reached the stage of anyone but labor. The total ineptness and corruption exhibited by the current state government is so breathtakingly bad it is almost funny.

  34. [Newspoll, published exclusively tomorrow in The Australian finds Kevin Rudd’s government is maintaining an 18 percentage point lead over the Coalition in two-party preferred basis.]
    So I take it that is 59/41.

    However I’ve always felt it is stupid to say “18 point advantage”, it is really a 9 point advantage, because 2 party preferred inherently means that a reduction in the support for one side translates into an increase by the same amount for the other.

  35. From Squiggle’s link:

    [Despite a week of dramatic headlines over the Rudd government’s immigration policy and claims the Prime Minister’s policy reforms have opened the door to people smugglers, two party preferred support for the major parties is stable.]

    Aka We tried to help the fibs with their dog whistling, but it blew up in our faces 🙂

  37. [If an election was held last weekend, Labor would have won in a canter, maintaining a strong lead over the Coalition with 59 per cent support of those polled compared to 41 per cent for the Coalition.

    That compares to 42:58 in the previous poll.

    On the question of who would make the better Prime Minister, Mr Rudd on 65 per cent is well ahead of Mr Turnbull on 19 per cent. Sixteen per cent are uncommitted.]

    Wow. I mean wow!

  39. From Newspoll, has the dog whistle gone rusty? We can only hope
    [Despite a week of dramatic headlines over the Rudd government’s immigration policy and claims the Prime Minister’s policy reforms have opened the door to people smugglers, two party preferred support for the major parties is stable.]

  40. Doesn’t look like anyone is buying the pipeline for terrorist illegal immigrant stuff. It’s much harder to dog-whistle from opposition.

  41. [On the question of who would make the better Prime Minister, Mr Rudd on 65 per cent is well ahead of Mr Turnbull on 19 per cent. Sixteen per cent are uncommitted.]

    Hey chin up malcolm.

    you went up 1%.

    the honeymoon is over!

  42. [Aka We tried to help the fibs with their dog whistling, but it blew up in our faces]
    I wonder if Newspoll asked some questions about illegal immigration? You know, like the approx 25,000 people currently living in Australia on expired tourist visas.

  43. Laocoon, the Branxton story arose today because of the court hearing. It happened to be the same day as Graham Richardson appeared before the Parliamentary inquiry into the death of Mr McGuirk.

    Watch both reports closely. The Richardson story made no references to the Branxton judgment. Unlike your claim, the Branxton story made no reference to McGuirk. It did refer to the on-going argument about developer donations and made reference to Mr Richardson. The footage of Richardson was not from today’s enquiry, it was file footage of a dinner at some other time.

  47. I wonder what hose clowns on “Insiders”, Fran Kelly in particular, will say about these figures. They speculated this issue had the abillity to affect Rudd’s polling numbers. Well I guess it did in a way. The TPP difference grew larger.

  49. Just a belated Thank you to Malcolm, no not Turnbull, but Fraser.

    If he had not been so far sighted with the Vietnamese boat people, we would not have enjoyed the beautiful Pho beef noodle soup and the rice paper wrap springrolls.

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