Morgan: 52.5-47.5

The latest Morgan face-to-face poll has Labor’s two-party lead down to 52.5-47.5 after last week’s four point bounce up to 54.5-45.5. This seems a bit odd given that Labor’s primary vote is only down 0.5 per cent to 42 per cent while the Coalition is steady on 41 per cent. The effect comes from the non-major party vote figures, which are showing the same volatility as Newspoll’s without in any way replicating the surge to the Greens recorded on the weekend. Indeed, this poll – conducted at the same time – has the Greens down from 11 per cent to 8.5 per cent, with “others” doubling from 3.5 per cent to 7 per cent.

Besides which:

• The Liberals have announced candidates for two normally marginal seats in South Australia: Gawler councillor David Strauss will run against Nick Champion in Wakefield, and businesswoman Liz Davies will run against Tony Zappia in Makin. Both seats were gained by Labor at the 2007 election, with relative swings of 7.3 per cent and 8.6 per cent producing margins of 6.6 per cent and 7.7 per cent.

• The Liberals have announced candidates for the two Australian Capital Territory seats. Canberra will be contested by Giulia Jones, a former party staffer who was narrowly unsuccessfully in her run for Molonglo at the 2008 Australian Capital Territory, and sought Tasmanian Senate preselection for the 2007 federal election. Jones had been the only nominee at the time the party suspended the preselection process in late 2009 in the hopes of finding a higher profile, but it would appear none was forthcoming. In Fraser the Liberals have nominated James Milligan, a small business owner from Gungahlin.

• Amid claims from LNP member Michael Johnson that party president Bruce McIver threatened to refer him to police if he did not resign as member, the party is preparing to preselect a successor in his seat of Ryan next week. Brisbane councillor Jane Prentice is rated the front-runner, but other possible starters are said to include Seb Monsour, manager with catering and cleaning firm Spotless and brother-in-law or Brisbane lord mayor Campbell Newman, and Senator Russell Trood, who holds an unwinnable position on the party’s Senate ticket.

• The Daily Advertiser reports the paper’s former editor, Michael McCormack, has won preselection to succeed retiring Kay Hull as Nationals candidate for Riverina. Other nominees were Wesley Fang, a Child Flight helicopter pilot from Wagga Wagga, John Minogue, a farmer from Barmedman, Bill Maslin, a Gundagai councillor, and Mark Hoskinson, a farmer from Kikoira. The Liberal candidate is thought likely to be Charles Morton, described by a Poll Bludger commenter as “lawyer turned businessman/film financier/mate of Mel Gibson”.

• The Liberal candidate for the Melbourne seat of Isaacs, Peter Angelico, has withdrawn after his Dandenong metal fabrication business was fined $25,000 over a workplace accident that resulted in a 16-year-old losing part of three fingers.

• The Nationals have nominated Tamworth Chamber of Commerce president Tim Coates to run against independent Tony Windsor in New England.

• Farmborough Heights business consultant Michelle Blicavs has been unanimously endorsed by local members as Liberal candidate for the NSW state seat of Wollongong.

UMR Research has published results on attitudes towards banning wearing of the burkha, producing intuitively correct findings of generally high support that wanes among the younger and university educated.

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.

584 comments on “Morgan: 52.5-47.5”

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  1. Oh dear! Looks like you can get away with almost anything these days.

    [Six former AWB chiefs escape criminal charges over kickbacks ]
    [ The corporate regulator will now try to revive civil cases against those accused of breaching sanctions against Saddam Hussein, writes Leonie Wood.

    Key figures in one of Australia’s most notorious business scandals, the AWB kickbacks affair, are set to avoid criminal charges after another backdown by the nation’s corporate regulator.

    Lawyers for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission revealed yesterday that the criminal aspects of the long-running AWB investigation had been abandoned.

    Five former AWB officers, including the former chairman Trevor Flugge, were told this week the regulator would not prepare a criminal brief for the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.

    But the end of the criminal investigation, revealed in the Victorian Supreme Court, has cleared the way for ASIC to revive civil penalty cases that it initiated against the five in late 2007.

    ASIC was the last local authority still examining possible criminal charges over AWB’s systematic payment of more than $US225 million in illicit fees and commissions to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime between 1999 and 2004 in pursuit of contracts to sell Australian wheat.

    The Australian Federal Police and Victoria Police both dumped their criminal investigations in August after the federal DPP determined there was no chance of success.]
    http://www.watoday.com.au/business/six-former-awb-chiefs-escape-criminal-charges-over-kickbacks-20100603-x765.html

  2. The thing about ‘ABC bias’ is like that old chestnut about paranoia – just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

  3. I blame Kevvie’s RSPT for this!

    [BP shares have plunged 34 per cent since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig leased by the company exploded on April 20, wiping more than £40 billion ($A70.3 billion) from the company’s value. Investors said that might make BP cheap enough to attract acquisition interest.

    ”The market value of BP has eroded substantially, so it could be a takeover target,” said Dirk Hoozemans, from Robeco Group in Rotterdam, which sold its BP holding last year.

    What mattered now was how forceful BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, was in tackling the disaster and the aftermath, Mr Hoozemans said.

    With a permanent end to the leak depending on so-called relief wells that are two months from completion, Mr Hayward faced costs that could reach $US37 billion ($A44.3 billion), absorbing three years of cash flow, Credit Suisse analyst Kim Fustier said in a note.]
    http://www.watoday.com.au/business/bp-takeover-risk-as-shares-plunge-20100603-x6zx.html

  4. Tomorrow’s OO:

    # australian

    Future Fund joins attack on mine tax: THE head of the Rudd government’s $61 billion Future Fund has called for the… http://bit.ly/94DV3L less than 10 seconds ago via twitterfeed

    # The Australian australian

    Jobs lost to Wild Rivers: A MINING project has hit the wall after the Queensland government locked up another expa… http://bit.ly/cDlfcK less than 10 seconds ago via twitterfeed

  5. scorpio@554

    With a permanent end to the leak depending on so-called relief wells that are two months from completion, Mr Hayward faced costs that could reach $US37 billion ($A44.3 billion), absorbing three years of cash flow, Credit Suisse analyst Kim Fustier said in a note.

    http://www.watoday.com.au/business/bp-takeover-risk-as-shares-plunge-20100603-x6zx.html

    Just look at those numbers, and they still might survive as a company.

    That’s the amazing thing. These companies – like the US financial outfits leading up the the GFC, are so big that they lose sight of their place in the world, and so do the government regulators.

    With the risks so high, how is it that an oil company drilling 1.5 km below the surface of the ocean can be completely unaware – as BP has admitted – of how to contain a stuff-up should it happen? And, worse, then defend their inability to do anything about the stuff-up by relying on the fact that it is so deep down there?

    The next question is: how can government regulators, who are supposed to ensure environmental safety, allow big oil to drill in the ocean when the risks are so high without absolute confidence that things are under control?

    The third question is: have world’s biggest businesses in areas such as finance and oil become too big for a mere single national government to handle?

    The last question is also relevant to big multinational mining in this country at present.

  6. [Farmborough Heights business consultant Michelle Blicavs has been unanimously endorsed by local members as Liberal candidate for the NSW state seat of Wollongong.]

    I would just like to commemorate the first (and probably only time) my tiny suburb has been mentioned on PB.

  7. At last, some acknowledgement in the MSN about the economic and social benefits of keeping unemployment in check…

    http://www.smh.com.au/business/await-boom-but-keep-spending-20100604-xkkl.html

    It would be useful to hear Labour argue this point more persuasively – namely that a rapid increase in unemployment, say 200,000 has great costs and it would take about six years to get all those people back into work.

    The decisive action taken by the government really deserves proper recognition by the press.

  8. [With the risks so high, how is it that an oil company drilling 1.5 km below the surface of the ocean can be completely unaware – as BP has admitted – of how to contain a stuff-up should it happen?]
    Yes, I stupidly assumed that the big oil companies had the skills and tools to deal with a problem of this sort. But now they have demonstrated they can’t fix a problem like this in a reasonable time (i.e. a few days at he absolute most) I now am completely opposed to all offshore drilling.

    This just makes me feel more than ever that the only real answer to our energy problems is nuclear. We should have a goal of converting all cars and trucks to electricity in 15 years.

  9. From the Gittens piece…

    “It’s all very well banging on about the waste of taxpayers’ money but unemployment is also a waste. It’s a waste of the time idle workers could have contributed to the nation’s production.

    Though the principal loss is borne by the jobless workers (who gives a stuff about them?), there’s a cost to all of us – plus, of course, a cost to the budget in unemployment benefits and tax revenue forgone.

    When workers are jobless for long periods they suffer a lasting loss of skills, confidence and motivation, which is also a loss to the community. And when high unemployment scares consumers into cutting their spending and causing yet more unemployment, otherwise-sound businesses go bankrupt and are broken up, destroying capital at a direct cost to the businesses’ owners and an indirect cost to all of us.

    So the next time you read another allegation of wastefulness (with no mention of the great majority of successful projects), think of all the costs and waste that would have occurred had the money not been spent. (It remains an inconvenient truth that even wasteful spending stimulates activity and helps avoid unemployment.)”

    Be good to see more of this sort of writing – where it is based on some sort of reality.

  10. DaveM

    Yes, in any seat with a reasonable margin a candidate as demonstrably alien as Hay wouldn’t stand a chance, but for Farmborough Heights to be represented I think Michelle might need a strong independent candidate to stand in the seat as well – someone of the calibre of a John Hatton, say:

    Ms Blicavs will stand against the sitting Labor Member Noreen Hay who has held the seat since 2003 and currently has a 25 per cent margin.

  11. [ Yes, I stupidly assumed that the big oil companies had the skills and tools to deal with a problem of this sort. ]

    Offshore is a challenge, 1.5 kms of water overhead is an engineering nightmare. Drilling at this depth is right on the edge of the technically feasible,and effecting any kind of fine repair work….well as we have seen. The issue is that there seems to have been a single point of failiure, that in combination with human factors and its a recipie for problems…. but do you think nuclear is safer from human factor “swiss cheese” accidents?

  12. Oh, the other line Michael Kroger tried out tonight was wtte that ‘Kevin Rudd didn’t mention a super profits tax before the 2007 election, so where’s his mandate’. Given the legislation hasn’t been drafted and certainly isn’t going to be put to parliament before the next election, there will most definitely be a general election with the mining tax front and centre prior to it being legislated. Painting it as an affront to democracy is absurd.

  13. The global deceleration is definitely here, being lead by falling commodity prices. Even, so it appears, the steel price is coming down in China.

    [ June 4 (Bloomberg) — U.S. and European stocks and commodities slid, while Treasuries rallied, as slower-than- estimated American job growth and a worsening government debt crisis fueled concern the global economic recovery will slow. Hungary’s forint sank 2.3 percent.

    The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index tumbled 1.6 percent, erasing its weekly gain, and the Stoxx Europe 600 Index lost 1.3 percent at 9:42 a.m. in New York. Oil fell 1.8 percent, while copper, nickel and tin sank at least 2.5 percent. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note decreased 11 basis points to 3.26 percent and the Dollar Index, which gauges the currency against six major trading partners, jumped to the highest level since March 2009 on demand for safer assets.

    The MSCI World Index of stocks in 24 developed nations fell 1.8 percent. Most shares in Asia fell before the U.S. jobs data, sending the MSCI Asia Pacific Index down 0.2 percent. Mining companies declined in Asia after the world’s two largest copper producers, Codelco and Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold Inc., said China’s plans to curb growth will lower demand for the metal. Baoshan Iron & Steel Co. fell 1.1 percent after Shanghai Securities News said the company will cut prices. Hynix Semiconductor Inc. rallied 6 percent in Seoul on a credit-rating upgrade and higher memory-chip prices. ]

  14. Psephos@567

    I hadn’t heard that Noreen Hay is an alien. Does she have retractable antennae like My Favourite Martian?

    😆

    All I can say is that, in the words of Nathan Rees, she doesn’t have a fresh face:
    http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/premier-dumps-noreen-hay/2008/09/12/1220857812247.html

    And her antennae were a little askew when it came to understanding that not everyone should behave like Eddie and Joe:
    http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/news/local/news/general/hay-embroiled-in-new-controversy/1226031.aspx

  15. And the AUD follows the commodity swoon……now down nearly 2 cents since Thursday afternoon. The market is selling risk, selling commodities, selling exposure to China & Eat Asia and buying US Treasuries.

  16. This is a convincing decline……

    [WLI Growth Drops Again

    Reuters
    June 04, 2010

    (Reuters) – A measure of future U.S. economic growth fell to a 43-week low in the latest week, indicating that the pace of economic growth is about to slow, a research group said on Friday.

    The Economic Cycle Research Institute, a New York-based independent forecasting group, said its Weekly Leading Index fell to 124.1 for the week ended May 28, down from 125.6 in the prior week. The index’s annualized growth rate slid to a 50-week low of 0.4 percent from 5.1 percent a week ago.]

  17. I know you’re just reflecting on the stormy global economic signals Briefly, but I just wanted to say what a glorious thing for us it is that the Aussie dollar is now treated as a risk barometer – if things look dicey, the Aussie plummets and our exporters can make hay. It’ll be a sad day if Australia ever becomes a safe haven in international terms to have our currency appreciating when the brown stuff hits the fan.

  18. BP knows how to drill holes. Thats their profession.

    Fixing leaking Oil wells in the middle of the ocean? My guess is they have no clue.

  19. Trubbell at Mill@575

    Queensland Galaxy Poll out William;

    http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/queenslanders-turn-against-kevin-rudd-according-to-galaxy-poll/story-e6freoof-1225875677553

    Courier Mail’s incessant anti-Labor posture and Abbott-boosting seems to be really biting now.

    Rudd has only himself to blame for this slump. All promises and no delivery.

    What I have yet to grasp is why Rudd has decided to go hard on this one bit of the Henry review; to make a stand; to lead and to fight; to make this issue pivotal; to advertise; to send his ministers out onto the media stump; to leave no chance untaken to change people’s opinion;to get the message out.

    Except no-one cared until he mentioned it.

    And yet he dumped the popular and infinitely larger and crucially important legislation for a CPRS, which had broad support, with none of the above being attempted; all without a whimper. It is incomprehensible. Who are Rudd’s advisor’s? I suspect they should all go, forthwith.

  20. [Courier Mail’s incessant anti-Labor posture and Abbott-boosting seems to be really biting now.]

    Silly silly fool.

    Read the article slowly. Rinse and Repeat until you understand. Absorb data and reflect.

    I’ve been saying for weeks now exactly what this poll says… Rudd’s GBNT is pissing the punters off here in Queensland much as it is in WA.

    Blame Courier Mail, Blame Santa Clause, Blame the Easter Bunny… this was RUDD’S TAX, so the only one responsible is Rudd and Labor. Don’t deflect and blame media bias, they didn’t invent this GBNT on miners, the Rudd Government did.

    If you want to pieve off the punters… attack their jobs.

  21. [What I have yet to grasp is why Rudd has decided to go hard on this one bit of the Henry review; to make a stand; to lead and to fight; to make this issue pivotal; to advertise; to send his ministers out onto the media stump; to leave no chance untaken to change people’s opinion;to get the message out.]

    Because he’s up to his kaboose in debt.

    This GBNT is his one saviour. He can backflip on the ETS no probs… that saved him money. Child Care centres? Yep scrap them too, why not, more money in the bank. But a Great Big New Tax on Miners, $12 Billion in fact to pay off Labors debt? Thats worth fighting for.

    He can’t give this one up… sure he’s monumentally stuffed up and even the Labor supporters now realise this but won’t admit it, but what can he do? He’s in a great big debt hole, and he’s desperately trying to shovel his way out. A real Whitlam of our times, he managed to send the place broke in a few years and he’s still spending like a drunken sailor. Tax and spend, tax and spend… thats all this government seems to know. No reform. No restraint. Shit, even value for money went out the window(BER rates for Labor mates anyone?). He knows how to blow the money no problem, but it’s the deficit thats going to bite and he knows it.

  22. Rudd has unnecessarily painted himself into his current corner in lieu of showing leadership on a global issue people were expecting him to act on. If he had gone hard on that; ‘wheeled and dealed’, gone out like he been forced to on the mining tax, he would have won the election very easily.

    So now if Rudd is even perceived, however perversely, to have also ‘caved in’ on his manufactured new issue of principle – the mining tax – then that could well be the death knell for him. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  23. No TTH, I reject your analysis. It’s not about finances. The economy is fine. It’s just an attempted electoral small target strategy – renamed lately on PB “clearing the decks” driven by focus groups that has satisfied no-one and pissed off many. As Napoleon said:
    Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.

  24. [So now if Rudd is even perceived, however perversely, to have also ‘caved in’ on his manufactured new issue of principle – the mining tax – then that could well be the death knell for him. Stupid, stupid, stupid.]

    And yet if he doesn’t cave he will get a hiding in QLD and WA.

    I’ve come to the conclusion that Rudd was so desperate for new tax revenue that he decided to bring in a tax he knew was ridiculously too high and that no reasonable investor, economist or miner would accept. So instead of negotiate which would mean making consesions, he said stuff it and simply announced how much he wanted in the budget without any negotiating at all.

    And now we see the mess he is in. He can’t make consessions on his tax otherwise he’ll be in a debt whole and be made to look like a backflipper again, and he can’t stand by it because it’s untenable and unacceptable by the punters in mining seats.

    Ahhh how the wheels do turn.

  25. [No TTH, I reject your analysis. It’s not about finances. The economy is fine.]

    Look at the debt. The economy isn’t fine, Labor have just posted a massive budget deficit and won’t have us out of it for 4 years.

    Labor will know this will hurt them, Howard had 10 budget surpluses and thats going to hurt them politically unless they change to a surplus and quickly.

    Remember it’s the economy, stupid.

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