Morgan: 57-43

Roy Morgan has come through with the first poll of this election year, and it’s a peculiar beast combining face-to-face results from last weekend and the distant weekend before Christmas (December 19/20). Labor’s primary vote is down 3.5 per cent to 45.5 per cent and the Coalition’s is up 1.5 per cent to 37 per cent, with the Greens up two to 10 per cent. On two-party preferred, Labor’s lead is down from 59-41 to 57-43.

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.

1,640 comments on “Morgan: 57-43”

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  2. Ron

    You do know that gas has 50% the emissions of coal and that the leakage of methane, which is a much more potent GHG than CO2, can mean there is very little benefit from switching to gas.

  3. Dave,

    I always love it when self appointed monitors like yourself come a cropper. Perhaps, if you can’t handle the pressure of having something vaguely memorable to post, you best worry about the structure of your own posts. I’d start with the notion of having something to say that adds to the conversation.

    Try harder, you might be able to do it.

  4. Rocket Rocket

    I have always understood that the problems facing aboriginal communities are not to do with race or culture but to do with socio economics.

    That is, if you place their statistics against those from others of the same income levels (or lack of) they correlate almost perfectly.

    Poor households all over the world suffer from alcohol and drug abuse, child abuse and welfare dependence.

  5. Oh, to second GG’s point there – nothing more boring than posts criticising other’s spelling and grammar, except perhaps posts frantically correcting one’s own.

    Perhaps we should all just accept that we type here sometimes in haste and tolerate the occasional error, including our own.

  6. I know there are a few Greens on this site – I have a question for them

    Does the whaling issue still occupy a large part of the environmental movemnt’s political platform?

    Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want extinction from whaling, but aside from the spectacle of the aby-gil getting rammed, all this fuss seems to me to be soooo last century.

    isn’t the anti-whaling issue it all a bit tired and worn-out…kind of 1970s? I thought there were bigger issues for the Greens at the moment

  7. Just in – news report from the dog park (of particular interest to Truthy). A lady who just returned from 4 weeks holiday in the UK (her home) and had her beautiful puppy puppy-sat whilst she was away, led the discusion. Her points were:
    1. It was freezing in London.
    2. UK has, since joining the EC , substantial immigration from eastern Europe. Many do not stay long term after discovering the UK is not the paradise they thought.
    3. Uk is really the lucky country. Islamic immigrants complain about lack of freedom (e.g. school uniforms) but in their home country, visitors are expected to comply strictly with codes of behaviour – and failure to do so may carry dire consequences.
    4. Many asians appear less tolerant of other cultures, than the “west”.

  8. Squiggle,

    Where else apart from the armed forces, do you get the chance to trash a $2 milion piece of equipment. It’s the most fun a committed ratbag ever gets.

    The Greens on these intervention projects are old farts living their dreams from yesteryear. The point was lost years ago in a haze of ganga.

  9. Has anyone else started getting right wing racist emails telling them a supposedly “amusing ” take on an old fable?
    Or am I just the lucky one? 😛

    The Coalition must be worried a DD will be sprung on them or they are getting in early with their divisive crap that Howard was so good at pushing!

    I notice also that these emails are originally to do with USA politics but a few paragraphs are added make them seem to refer to Oz.

    I sent the email back to the “friend” that sent it to me telling her not to send me any such right wing racist crap in future!

    No wonder I love animals! (espesially dolphins 😉 ) people piss me off, someone outa blow people up 👿

    here’s a sample of part of the email
    The ant represents the hard working white guy, the grasshopper is the lazy (insert one) Aboriginal, refugee, Muslum, dole bludger etc
    [Prime Minister Rudd condemns the ant and blames John Howard, Robert Menzies, Capt James Cook, and the Pope for the grasshopper’s plight.

    Bob Brown exclaims in an interview on Today Tonight that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

    Finally, Labor in conjunction with the Greens draft the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer.

    The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government and given to the grasshopper.

    The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn’t maintain it.

    The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.

    The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and once peaceful, neighbourhood.

    MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote in 2011]

  12. Amigo Vera, how dare that johnny-come-lately poster criticize our Poet, Amigo Ronnie, especially the 4 Amigos are in the same room.

  13. GG – I agree. It was interesting to hear there is a reality TV show filming on the Sea Shephard right now

    and while I’m at it, what exactly is so ‘stealth’ about the stealth boat….I mean, I can see it….can’t I? (when its floating, that is)…

    is it supposed to be invisible to radar Like a steal fighter? Not much point if your running alongside the Jap Whaler

  16. [read Behind Bamboo or the Knights of Bushido,and you understand where they are coming from]

    Or Russell Braddon’s brilliant The Naked Island, a personal recounting of life in Changi and on the Burma Railroad. 2 million copies sold.

    It’s not blaming the grandchildren of the Japanese WW2 soldier/monsters that is the point. It’s not being able to believe that an entire nation with a rich, long and entrenched history of cruelty and glorification of the warrior can change overnight into a law-abiding, peace-loving bunch of get-along-with-everyones, or for that matter in 60 or 70 years.

  17. Finns
    Year they had better leave our Ron alone! He can say and spell however suits him.
    Some of this lot aren’t fit to shine his shoes 😉

    Hang in there Ron, you are numero uno to us amigos 😀

  24. [ady-gil-abandoned-and-leaking-oil]
    Where’s Bob Brown now, if he was true to form he’d be blasting that Watson wangker for poluting the seas and don’t forget how those greenies hate oil slicks!

  27. Finns

    [Diog, it’s good to see you are behaving yourself tonight. Keep it up, you might be rewarded.]

    I spent the afternoon under the Knowledge Tree reading Daniel Tammet’s autobiography (in the paddle pool as we still don’t have air conditioning). He’s the guy with Asperger’s syndrome and synaesthesia. It was a humbling experience.

  28. GG and Vera – if you want to take the Japanese whalers view of the world you will be well repaid in oil slicks.
    And Vera 59 Moral of Story – beware how you vote in 2011. Lets hope the morons behind such twaddle are ready for the election in 2010 after the rest of us have voted.

  29. [found it its called “Whale Whores”. ]

    Squiggy, we call them “The Blue Angels”, although they are a little too fat for our liking. we prefer them slim. 👿

  30. 1. How many war crimes have Australians committed? Please don’t try to tell me none. Now, how many Australians, apart from that cold-blooded murderer Morant, have been tried for their crimes? Dirty little secrets, anyone?
    2. Our nation was founded on massacres. The Indigenous population at invasion was around 3 million, a disputed figure, but not an unreasonable one. If that had doubled every fifty years or so, the Indigenous population now would be about 24 million people.
    3. The last massacre, the Coniston massacre occurred in 1927, virtually contemporaneous with the Japanese invasion of China.
    4. So, in qualitative terms, how different are we really from the Japanese? Have we changed our spots?

  32. Wakefield,

    Yeah, I know, the Green’s rubbish always gets special dispensation from the sanctimonious and the hyporcritical.

  33. Rocket at 46:

    [ I believe the last Democrat is “leaving the station” at the forthcoming SA election – their last elected representative will depart the SA Upper House. ]

    Their last elected one left a year or two back – Sandra Kanck, who got elected in 2002. She resigned and was replaced with David Winderlich, who then quit the party and is now sitting as an independent. The only vague half-chance either him or another Democrat has of being elected is the void left by Nick Xenophon’s 20% last time, otherwise, nope.

    By the way, I used to vote Democrat too, but now Green these days. They’re not extremists on the left… that’s Socialist Alternative et al, and I don’t think they’re that keen on having those elements in the party (although it depends from place to place). Far-left infiltration is what killed the NDP in the 80’s (which at the time included who’d become Australia’s first Green senator), so I guess they’d be a bit shy of that. Some things about the Greens annoy me (the more luddite, the more annoyance), but given the current state of Labor (both state and federal varieties) they’re pretty much the only mob left to vote for. I’d like the Democrats to still be around, trouble is – they’re not. I’m not voting Liberal (unless a Moylan / Georgiou type turns up in my seat), and certainly not CDP/FF, so the Greens it is.

  34. Boer War – I have not ever read a source that put the indigenous population as high as 3 million.

    I’d be happy to go look at it if you can provide the source, (having an open mind) but most of what I have read shows the number to be between 300K – 900K.

  36. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/08/2788590.htm?section=justin
    [A boat carrying asylum seekers has been intercepted off the coast of Western Australia.
    An Australian Customs plane spotted the boat north-west of Ashore Islands this afternoon.
    It is believed 27 people and three crew members were on board.
    The asylum seekers are being taken to Christmas Island for security, identity and health checks.]

    And still the boats come.

    No wonder Rudd hasn’t sent down the Oceanic Viking to take happy snaps in Antartic waters of the Japanese Catch of the Day, they are too busy dealing with the flood of boatpeople arrivals up north!

  37. Mr Squiggle

    A lot of the earlier estimates were based on observations of a population which had been severely depleted by white man diseases before white men ever saw them.

    Of course, those making the population estimates assumed they were looking at tribes untouched by civilisation.

    There was also a political advantage in underestimating the original numbers – it bore out the belief that the aborigines were a declining race before white settlement and were dying out naturally.

    But no, I don’t know the numbers, just that estimates of below a million always sounded a bit unlikely.

    Vera,

    so pleased you’re back. Have been worried that you have been hanging out at Kmart, wearing a white carnation…and I didn’t get up there, after all!!

  38. Mr S

    apparently the Australian Year Book 2008 puts the pre settlement population at between 300,000 to over one million, with a figure at the higher end more likely.

    Impossible to really calculate, for some of the reasons referred to in my post above.

  39. [Have been worried that you have been hanging out at Kmart]
    Zoomster
    Well! I guess I can roll up my sleeping bag. throw away my wilted carnation and head off home now.
    I was getting a few funny looks from the people in the camping dept while I’ve been waiting for you. 😉

  42. [Quick question…. what was the average life span of the indigineous people BEFORE White Settlement?]

    Quick answer. Average.

  43. I suppose a RW poster who isn’t a racial supremacist, a childish spoilt rich kid or just plain obnoxious is out of the question? Come back, Glen!

  45. Zoomster,

    Thanks for the reference, I just checked it (actually I’ve never looked at the year book before), the range is given as you say, although I can’t see any reference to 1mill being more likely.

    From my school history lesson, the biggest killer of indigenous population, and by a large margin too, was the diseases brought by first fleet and subsequent settlers.

  47. If one million and doubling every 50 years, then current Indigenous numbers would be about 8 million.

    Happy to accept that the numbers are in dispute and that some of the views above on the topic are reasonable and as likely to be right as my guess.

    My main point was that before we Australians cast self-righteous stones at the Japanese, we should think glass houses.

  48. Truthy
    Quick question: What was the average life span of a gubber at the time of white settlement of Oz. What is it today? What is the % increase?

  49. Indingenous life span in the late eighteenth century may well have been longer than that of, say, the English who were, in comparison, living in remarkably unhealthy environments, subject to all sorts of infectious diseases, eating unhealthy diets, soaked in gin, wreathed in tobacco and rotting their teeth on sugar. The separation of sewage from drinking water had yet to commence. Rubbish was thrown out onto the streets. Coal smoke did not help. Nor did mass poverty and hideous overcrowding in the slum cities.
    Just why all this made them feel as if they had a superior civilization is difficult to imagine.

  50. vera
    Posted Friday, January 8, 2010 at 8:45 pm | Permalink

    “Has anyone else started getting right wing racist emails telling them a supposedly “amusing ” take on an old fable?
    Or am I just the lucky one? 😛 ”

    Hi , Vera Well j/v posted an old fable “tsory” othr nite about Sumeria , with sub line he hoped it did not ofend God bothers

    problam was j/v , an athiest in his haste to post it thinking it was an embasement to God bothers , did not realise logics as logicaly if th “story” was true & God did exist and made everyting then th Sumerians & there environment etc were his “pre test” run before doing th real thingy

    and j/v was actualy quite chufed at his brillianse , so lft him unchalenged feeling reely happy i ha that efect , wanting all to be happys

    But Am always amused with th superiorty complex peoples so confident in there case they grab anyting aparently suporting not realising th logicals flaws exposing there own argumnt But then CC deniers make th same logics mistake , with own goals

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