Full results available from Peter Brent at Mumble. Labor’s 52-48 lead is a slight improvement on 51-49 from three weeks ago, and under the circumstances will come as an enormous relief for the Prime Minister. One sting in the tail is that Labor’s primary vote remains steady on a parlous 35 per cent. The Coalition is down one point to 40 per cent and the Greens are on 15 per cent, one point off their record-breaking effort from three weeks ago. The two-point slack has been taken up by “others” on 10 per cent.
Another sting in the tail is that the preferred prime minister rating has swung to Abbott: Rudd is down three points to 46 per cent and Abbott is up four to 37 per cent, which is respectively a personal worst and the best result achieved by a Liberal leader on Rudd’s watch. This is despite the fact that the leaders’ approval ratings are basically unchanged. Kevin Rudd’s approval is steady on 36 per cent and his disapproval is up a point to 55 per cent, while Tony Abbott is respectively up a point to 38 per cent and steady on 49 per cent.
A further question on prospective standard of living produces a neutral result: “improve” and “get worse” are both on 17 per cent, with 65 per cent nominating “stay the same”.
Next cab off the rank: Essential Research, which should be through at about 1pm EST.
UPDATE: Hats off to Dennis Shanahan, who shows he’s not scared of a renewed round of opprobrium from the Laborsphere.
UPDATE 2: Essential Research joins the party by also showing Labor’s lead up from 51-49 to 52-48, although it gets there by showing a primary vote recovery for Labor (up three to 38 per cent) at the expense of the Greens (down three to 11 per cent), with the Coalition down one to 40 per cent. Again, there’s a sting in the tail for Kevin Rudd – 40 per cent say Labor would have a better chance of winning if they changed leaders, against only 37 per cent who say he is the best person to lead the party to the election. However, the results on this measure are substantially worse for Tony Abbott – 29 per cent and 47 per cent. Kevin Rudd remains preferred prime minister over Abbott by 47 per cent to 30 per cent, and also over Julia Gillard by 36 per cent to 33 per cent. There’s also a very interesting finding on troops in Afghanistan, with 61 per cent saying out troops should withdraw.
Truthy,
That is so old that Nelson was Oppo Leader. When was that?
[The home insulation would have made no difference to Australia’s emissions if Rudd’s CPRS was passed.]
Michael, you are grasping at straws.
Insulation reduces energy consumption to provide a comfortable thermal environment. Irrespective of a CPRS or carbon tax, there is a reduction in energy consumption and reduction of CO2 consumption; and that is the whole point of the exercise.
SNIP: See article 2 of comment moderation guidelines – The Management.
[Chairman Rudd was at a conference with high ranking Chinese officials today.]
And Twiglet Forrest who signed a deal to use a Chinese Engineering firm to build infrastructure for Twiglet Mining.
Repeat “Chinese Engineering firm”. Wot no decent Aussie firms?
Julia Gillard interview video… HILARIOUS!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XHUpwyjMcs&feature=related
More of the same across all media outlets tonight, with the ‘Rudd is gone’ narrative leading all news broadcasts and shadowy references to the ‘bad polls’ without any detail of the underlying figures.
All this despite the loss of the central plank of the whole shaky edifice on which News Ltd built this house of cards – the impending horror Newspoll for Rudd that did not materialise!
How sad it is for the News Ltd hacks and their echo within the ABC to have created this Frankenstein’s monster with which to scare the electorate (and supposedly jittery Labor MPs) and to find the creature turned into a damp squib, stillborn and DOA on Dennis Shanahan’s desk.
Undeterred, what do the Murdoch media jackals and their surrogates do? Ignore the supporting data for your pre-written story, and go with the news reports as written yesterday without alteration – that is what passes for journalism in Australia in 2010.
One wonders why they bother to conduct the Newspoll at all when they ignore the results in favour of the narrative pre written in New York by their US proprietor?
MWH@861,
It is easy for a political party to demand actions when it is not in government. While I hope that greenhouse gas emission in Australia be cut as much as possible, it is also important to realise:
1. Cutting emission is going to hurt financially in the short-term, cutting a lot of emission is going to hurt a lot financially. I am sure you are aware of the response of the mining industry to the supertax, and I will leave you to imagine the fallout should an ambitious target of greenhouse emission cut be set by the government. The government wants to stay in power instead of becoming political martyrs for a (worthy) cause.
2. Because Labor is actually trying to win government it must appear middle of the road. No matter what your personal belief is, no matter how concrete the scientific evidence is, you must also acknowledge that a significant proportion of the Australians does not share your belief, a significant proportion of the Australians is not convinced that the scientific evidence is concrete (rightly or wrongly), and the saga of EMail hacking that happened arround the time of the Copenhagen Conference, which was widely reported, did not help either. Again, it is easy to appear to a small but significant group of people, and the Greens is doing very well with this strategy. However, the strategy at the same time also restricts the potential of the party, so much so that barring a momumental f$#%up by both Labor and the Coalition, the Greens has virtually no chance of forming a government. I will leave you to ponder why. Labor and the Greens have different voter bases, and they must appease these different groups of people who have different expectations.
3. Negotiation is a two-way street. At the same time you accuse labor of failure to negotiate, the Greens must also shoulder some blame. Let’s not kid ourselves, the Coalition would rather eat dirt than negotiating with the Greens about climate actions. What is the chance of of an agreement of any kind if the Green and Labor cannot find some common ground? If Labor loses the coming federal election, how many year does the Greens have to wait for any action on the climate?
Oh please. The groupthink alone proves there’s a conspiracy. That’s practically bread-and-butter for this blog, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Carney gave the “The Gallery Dislikes Rudd” story the Big Tick. They’re out to get him and they talk among themselves about it, ergo “conspiracy”. Of that there’s no doubt.
The question is whether Newspoll is rigged. I predicted this one would be and I admit it seems I was wRONg on that. Although the way it’s being spun you’d think it showed Rudd and Labor were less popular than your average ratf**ker or choir boy molester. OK, but that’s just nobbling the results, not the actual poll itself. On that you got me… this time.
But common sense dictates that a corrupt organization such as News Ltd., which rigs just about everything it comes into contact with (or do you dispute that too?), has in its hands the power to rig a poll it owns. We’d never know. By the time cries of “Outlier!” or “Rigged!” were addressed, the damage would have been done.
This week’s Newspoll was supposed to be The Decider. Rudd was due to be usurped by Gillard on Wednesday. Big reputations were at stake on its results. It was a prime candidate for rigging, if ever there was one. And if it had been, say, rigged to show 48-52 (instead of the other way around) with Labor on 33 and Abbott more popular as PPM, could it have possibly been debunked – in this atmosphere of groupthink inthe media – by Wednesday when the Big Vote came up? All the Possum columns in the world, all the bloggers crying foul wouldn’t have made a whit of difference, not in two days.
So my points, at least in a general sense, still stand, although they are as yet untested.
1. News Ltd. are putting up Newspoll as a better poll than others, a predictive poll, that foretells political earthquakes, not merely reports them.
2. As Possum put it, building up on this hype, Shanahan argued that even a poll that was out by standard margin of error should be enough to get rid of Rudd. It was to be sudden death. Shanahan’s little lectures on margin of error would have been out the window. It would have been on.
3. If it is accepted that Newspoll is not only infallible, but predictive and prescriptive, then the privately owned, confidentially managed poll metrics that it collects are susceptible to nobbling.
4. If you don’t believe News Ltd hasn’t thought of ways to do do this, even in an emergency, then you’re naive in my opinion. Every business, yours, mine, big minin companies, and News Ltd (especially) has worked out ways to nobble its own books if the need arises. It’s just a matter of when the reward overpowers the risk of getting caught.
But once again I do restate this one doesn’t seem to have been nobbled. I have one caveat on that score though. The Primary seems too low for the 2PP. The Primary is now being touted as the latest metric that decides the fate of governments (we’ve seen 2PP and PPM occupy this honoured position in the past, and argued for just as vehemently, but Primary is now flavour of the month). If you wanted to preserve a headline 2PP figure (which of course would never make it to the headlines… there’s an irony for you), but wish to make Rudd look as bad as possible you might be tempted to dilute the Primary but keep the 2PP to make things look sort of kosher, while going in guns blazing on the “Rudd Is A Dudd” theme, which is, at least on the surface, exactly what has happened, incidentally: “Rudd In Trouble” (Paul Bongiorno excepted) is just about the only game in town, despite the buried “Headline” 2PP figures.
I did get 2 consolation prizes, though. With a few keystrokes I was able to nobble Psephy’s esteemed author on the JFK assassination as a renowned plagiarist (we heard no more about him and his “must read” book for the rest of the night), and Frank and I both predicted the Tuckey Brainfart, right down to the details, which wasn’t a bad effort.
My prediction on that, incidentally, is that the bit about the Mbala mine in the Congo (or wherever it is) being an asylum from the RSPT will be allowed to fester. It’s not an RSPT-avoiding project, of course. It’s a mature project of several years’ standing, nothing to do with the RSPT. But watching the tele tonight, every news bulletin played the Tuckey doorstop without mentioning he was talking through his hat on the facts of the case.
Tuckey said they were looking for iron ore. In fact it was found decades ago, and Sundance Resources have been in residence as the preferred hole digger there for at least four years. The poor chaps who look like they have been killed are being held up as heros who were taming the jungle. The taste in the mouth is that they died because Rudd forced them into an inhospitable environment with his RSPT, which is precisely the point Tuckey made, and which has not been corrected by our stenographers of the media, who prefer the “he said, she said” route.
Thus is a meme buried and festered. Saying Tuckey’s remarks were “tasteless” (as Heather Ewart has just done on 7.30) doesn’t correct the underlying image in some people’s minds that Rudd killed these men, at least indirectly.
Score 1, Wilson Tuckey… whose party, Ewart tells us, has not in any way refuted his claims. Are they letting them fester?
I said “The home insulation would have made no difference to Australia’s emissions if Rudd’s CPRS was passed.”
It’s Time relied:
[Michael, you are grasping at straws.
Insulation reduces energy consumption to provide a comfortable thermal environment. Irrespective of a CPRS or carbon tax, there is a reduction in energy consumption and reduction of CO2 consumption; and that is the whole point of the exercise.]
Then you have no understanding of how an ETS works.
An ETS requires permits for all emissions, and sells (or gives away) permits for emissions. So if an ETS is set to reduce Australian’s emissions by 5%, that defines how many permits will be issued.
If someone insulates their house they will use less energy, and thus their energy provider will not need to buy as many permits.
But the permits STAY IN THE MARKET. Someone else will buy them and emit the emissions instead.
Under Rudd’s ETS, any individual, business, council, state government, or federal scheme to reduce emissions (apart from changing the number of permits) thus makes ZERO difference.
The above is one of the reason I very much prefer a carbon tax to an ETS.
See, with Rudd it is all spin. Who cares what difference it makes to climate change as long as people think that it makes a difference.
[For the information of those bludgers who are viewers of the ABC 2 Breakfast show, I’ll be appearing on Wednesday at 8.30.]
Ari – Haven’t watched for a few days and didn’t intend to again but will definitely have a date with you on Wednesday am.
jenauthor – there’s a lovely little island off the coast of Oz called ‘Christmas’. Perhaps we could send them all there until the psychosis has left them. Enjoyed that post.
“It was 40 years ago, get over it. He owned the pub, no doubt it was some trouble makers getting a bit of just deserts.”
Because a crime was a long time ago it means it wasn’t bad, does it?
SNIP: See article 2 of comment moderation guidelines – The Management.
Oh wait, that’s right, this isn’t Mad Max, beating the shit out of people is ILLEGAL.
I would say you should be ashamed of yourself, but you don’t know the meaning of shame, or else you wouldn’t change your argument every post, you reactionary, racist throwback.
The Finnigans@880
LOL, it has been a while since I last heard someone say something like that.
God help us from Steve Fielding orating about fish.
[So my points, at least in a general sense, still stand, although they are as yet untested.]
Except that you were wrong.
[See, with Rudd it is all spin. ]
Ahh, but you are the Spin Master.
“My boyfriend has never given me a haircut, just the occassional blow job!”
LOL Hilarious.
[If someone insulates their house they will use less energy, and thus their energy provider will not need to buy as many permits. ]
We don’t have an ETS you droob. But we have over a million houses insulated. Waffle all you like about non-existent permits. No wonder the good Greens of Higgins voted for someone else.
MWH, being a past candidate did you ever see the greens economic modelling on the effect of an Australian go-it-alone 25-40% carbon reduction scheme? How did it stack up against the resulting 0.4% reduction in global carbon emissions?
BB – this newspoll and the nonsense surrounding it is a good one for MediaWatch. How about nutting something out and sending it it to Holmes or better still, ring him and talk about it.
Every outlet has been complicit in this and only Sky mentioned Essential because it has always been a SkyAgenda poll. I don’t know whether they showed it in their ordinary news bulletins but it was mentioned on Agenda with David Spiers looking most unhappy at the figures for Abbott.
Truthy,
You’re wasting everyone’s time.
You really are a clocksucker.
robot,
A brief answer.
1 – Stern and Garnaut have both shown that the economic cost of action is not unreasonable and that the economic cost of inaction is much greater.
2 – Most OECD countries are already doing much more than Australia. Action is possible. Australia is not middle of the road. Under Howard and now Rudd we are about the worst.
As I’ve posted before several times today, one of Rudd’s great failures is that he has made no attempt to convince the Australian people that action was needed. (He and Wong wasted all their energies defending the worse than nothing CRPS.)
3 – Negotiation is a two way street. It is Labor that has refused to negotiate. (Rudd has not even met with Bob Brown for over a year).
The Greens are not going to form government after the next election. But I believe it is only if the Greens get a large vote that both Rudd and Abbott will feel the need to take some action.
[The question is whether Newspoll is rigged. I predicted this one would be and I admit it seems I was wRONg on that. Although the way it’s being spun you’d think it showed Rudd and Labor were less popular than your average ratf**ker or choir boy molester. OK, but that’s just nobbling the results, not the actual poll itself. On that you got me… this time.
But common sense dictates that a corrupt organization such as News Ltd., which rigs just about everything it comes into contact with (or do you dispute that too?), has in its hands the power to rig a poll it owns. We’d never know. By the time cries of “Outlier!” or “Rigged!” were addressed, the damage would have been done.]
Come off it BB. Your cries of corrupt Newspoll still lack evidence. And the presence of other pollsters operating independently helps to keep each pollster honest.
As I have said previously, there will always be some figure or trend in a poll which can be used to support a theme by a media commentator out of any reliable poll.
If you want to keep your tinfoil hat on then so be it, but you then don’t focus on the real villainy in the situation – the dodgy interpretation of the polls to support a partisan campaign.
Glen,
[I fear the party who is the most dirty during the campaign will win the election.
Hurray for Democracy!]
That’s exactly what cost your mob government in at least three elections in Queensland.
I remember being so concerned about the direction they were taking one election, that I rang Vince Lester, a long-standing Minister in the last Nat Govt in Qld and in a lengthy discussion, he agreed totally with my observations and said that the powers above had decided the direction of the campaign and had refused to listen to him.
I didn’t want them to win of course, but I didn’t think it would be good for democracy if they did badly because of it. As it turned out they got “smashed” and because the Libs went along with it, they copped it even worse. I think they were only left with two Members.
So if your mob want to go down the “gutter” path, then good luck. It’s going to end badly. Your national Director is the best thing Labor has going for it now!
Truthy is going to love this. 🙂
After the NBN / Telstra announcement:
“Telstra shares rose 11 cents, or 3.4 per cent, to close at $3.34, after earlier jumping more than 7 per cent.”
“Should we call you Baronesque Gillard like Baronesque Thatcher?”
“Most people just call me Baron”
LOLZ!
imacca,
All we need now is an Asylum seeker refugee to become Australian of the Year or richest Australian and Truthy will disappear up his own nether regions.
Agreed, on this specific case. But the principle still applies.
Haven’t seen your retraction re. Gerald Posner, Psephy.
Did I miss it?
Buried back in the thread somewhere, is it?
[“Most people just call me Baron”]
Meanwhile most people call Truthy ???
There’s been a lot of fun on here lately predicting the spin deliveries from the Oz, how about a different challenge?
I was wondering what the political scores would look like for this year if all the reporting we’ve been seeing were an accurate representation of the facts. That is, what figures would be a true reflection of all the reporting we’ve seen?
Would it go something like, Dec 52-48, Jan 51-49, Feb 49-51, Mar 48-52, April 46-54, May 45-55, June 44-56?
That’s the way it looks from where I’m sitting. Anyone disagree?
[Cripes! That was back in the day when white men very rarely got had up for assault]
And if they were convicted they got off lightly. Tuckey was convicted (assault) and fined … fifty dollars.
Actually, that’s not a bad point.
Many of Australia’s finest have been ex-crims and low-lifes of other varieties.
…Francis Greenway, architect. Chopper Read, architect (of the human body)…
BB,
“Actually, that’s not a bad point”.
Sorry, I won’t do it again.
@MWH
Labor has no need to negotiate with the Greens. The Greens have nothing they can give Labor.
I’m not going to get into it, but a ETS is better because it provides an upper limit on emissions, while a the rich, and multinationals, can easily buy their way out of a tax. People will pay more for things under a carbon tax, but they’ll still pay.
[But the principle still applies.]
No it doesn’t. Your conspiracy theory was bunkum, it has been proved wrong by events, just as I said it would, and if you don’t have the good grace to admit that then you should have at least have the sense to shut up about it.
Meglogenis made an interesting comment in a reply to a blogger.
Something along the lines of ‘all you News Ltd haters’.
News Limited is an inanimate construction. It feels nothing.
Dee 933
First AG, now Mega. Boy is our mud starting to stick. Flash the light on the media and they don’t like it (well at least the better ones don’t like to be connected with the bad ones).
And another thing – has anyone used the term ‘honeymoon’ to refer to Tony Abbott in the last month or so? It became a household term for the fortunes of Opposition Leaders Rudd and Latham back in the day.
$50 was a lot of money back in the 1960’s.
Thanks for playing though.
I thought it was labor who were going to launch the mother of all smear campaigns against abbott it appears the libs have jumped out of the blocks on that front with two attack ads on rudd perhaps they were trying to release a coded message on their campaign but I guess they have no positive agenda to sell
@Psephos,
The Newspoll is valid, but the ‘analysis’ of it by News Ltd. ‘experts’ is just embarrassingly poor.
ruawake said:
[We don’t have an ETS you droob. But we have over a million houses insulated. Waffle all you like about non-existent permits.]
You are right. Without an ETS home insulation can reduce emissions (the word ‘can’ can be justified if anyone is curious).
So from this do I take it that you think that from the time the roof insulation scheme was introduced that Rudd never intended to pass his CPRS?
A little bit of logic and consistency please.
PAAPTSEF – Probably the best modeling for Australia is Garnaut.
The science is clear that one day we will need to move towards zero emissions. Whether we do this starting very soon and in an orderly fashion or in a very disruptive and expensive panic in many years time is up to our politicians.
I think the economic modeling shows that we are best of doing this ahead of everyone else.
One of the reasons I’m in favor of a carbon tax is that enables our imports to be taxed and our exports to be tax free, and thus we can move faster than the rest of the world without this effecting our exports.
MWH,
Yer a mug, mate.
BB
It struck me today that the media pack is behaving just the same as wholesale funds managers who are “index huggers” who are paranoid about being different to the rest with respect to portfolio performance. They are concerned less with substance and company sustainability than not being seen to deviate from the immediate norm of their competitors.
To the Greenie on this blog that likes to argue in concentric circles.
Pull up Ken Henry’s speech from today.
He said for economists etc. throw up other forms of policy, carbon tax etc. as being more perfect.. is to guarantee non-action.
There are always claims of a more perfect policy, a better way. . History has shown that this just prevents consensus, muddies the water so to speak, causes confusion and an unwillingness to co-operate.
Whilst one is pursuing the perfect policy the opportunity to hit the road running has long past.
These are my words but the giste of his speech.
Kevin 0Lemon is the most hilarious campaign tag I’ve heard so.
Brilliant! Sums up his entire term really.
You might be able to barnstorm some around here, Psephy, but not me. Calls for apologies and retractions only work when there’s a need. Pandering to your “authority” on this blog isn’t one of the trigger conditions.
I’ve admitted my principle didn’t apply in this particular case. It doesn’t disprove the principle that a malignant organization in charge of an Oracular poll (in their own and many others’ estimation at least) can do a great deal of damage if they choose to walk down the dark side with it. Its workings are completely confidential, so we’d never know, or never be able to prove the fix was in, in time. This is a dangerous situation, avoided on this occasion, or so it seems.
However, pn the bright side, you cherished JFK assassination author has been proved to be a plagiarist and a faker. You could at least have the good grace to either defend him and his “must read before I’ll talk to you” book, or admit you got this one wrong.
Producing a crackpot book written by a plagiaristic quack as proof in itself of your position (i.e. without reference to its argument, merely to its existence) is not a good look, even for you.
So the Green vote has gone up at the last 5 federal elections, they got 7.8% in the lower and 9% in the upper in 2007, prior to the election they polled 7%, post-election they have polled ~10%, with the last two polls spiking from 12% to 16% and 15%. The fact there is such a large bloc from the left not voting Labor must be rather scary for Labor, especially when it comes to increasing the Green and decreasing the Labor vote in the Senate. We constantly see baseless unfounded libel – why? Out of fear. They say the vote is about to crash, yet it just keeps going up and up and up.
Labor being attacked from a significant left and right. Labor really needs to start putting good policy first and image second.
MWH is the new Truthy.
Stuck on one issue to the exclusion of all other discussion.
john (931),
If Rudd proposed a carbon tax tomorrow I’m sure that you would be in favor.
Unless that happens I doubt that anything I write could change your mind.