The latest result from Roy Morgan combines its last two weekends of face-to-face polling from a sample of 1776, and finds the Labor primary vote recovering slightly to 35 per cent (up 1.5 per cent on the weekend of June 4-5), the Coalition steady on 46.5 per cent and the Greens down half a point to 11.5 per cent. On the two-party preferred measure that allocates preferences as per the result of the previous election (my favourite), the Coalition’s lead has gone from 54-46 to 53.5-46.5; it’s down more substantially on the respondent-allocated measure favoured by Morgan (lately), from 56.5-43.5 to 54.5-45.5.
Now it’s time for PB Chart of the Week, a feature that may or may not live up to its name over the long term. With Labor polling disastrously in every jurisdiction, I thought it might be instructive to plot the party’s federal and state voting performance since the inception of Newspoll in late 1985 (I’ve started at the beginning of 1986 for the sake of neatness). The chart below shows combined quarterly measures for Labor’s two-party vote, both federally (which is quite straightforward) and at state level (a population-weighted result with the larger states accounting for proportionally greater shares of the result, and Tasmania excluded because Newspoll doesn’t do them regularly).
What we see is that the party’s federal and state fortunes do seem to be quite closely related. While Labor was travelling better at federal than state level from 1986 to 1990 and again since 2008, they tended to move up and down (actually just down more recently) in tandem within those periods. However, this may be because the respondents for Newspoll’s federal and state surveys are usually the same people. The two lines sat very closely together throughout the 1990s, but decoupled as Labor achieved state-level dominance in the Howard years. The impression more recently is of the federal line chasing the tail of the states, although recent form suggests the downward federal trend wouldn’t have bottomed out yet.
If the results don’t quite bear out talk of Labor being in record-breaking dire straits at present – at least to the extent that they do not appear in a worse position than in the twilight of the Keating years – it should be noted that the picture would look worse for them if I was using the primary vote rather than two-party preferred.
UPDATE (27/6/11): Essential Research: 55-45 (steady). Coalition 48% (+1), Labor 32% (-1), Greens 11% (-1). “If Kevin Rudd was Labor leader”, 45 per cent say they would vote Labor against 42 per cent for the Coalition, with Labor leading 53-47 on two-party. Similarly, the Coalition leads 59-41 if Malcolm Turnbull was leader. In both cases I suggest you have to account for mischief-making by supporters of the other party.
Trust me, I’m not having a go at the Public Service. I’ve seen how productivity dividends has made them do more with less every year.
It’s just a common misconception that people have. One the Libs are always happy to play on.
[So sacking 12,000 lazy public servants can fund Abbott’s $10.5 billion promises, ]
yep, they make $875,000 each annually, dontcha know?
Unfortunatley PS jobs are not the same as ‘normal’ jobs imagine if one of the parties were promising to axe 12,000 coal industry jobs, or manufacturing jobs….
night all
Gaffhook I did, got the Q with Doriemus and the tri with Markham with 7 other runners for third from memory. 😉
If the bloke who ran across the track had caused any disruptions to the placings I would have killed the little sh!te 🙂
I reckon 12000 extra votes for Labor would be a fitting tribute to Sloppy’s arseheadedness.
Hell, even 12000 for the Greens or Indies would do the job just as well.
Night Boerwar
[latikambourke Latika Bourke
Parliament wants to review the way the media operates inside the building.]
Interesting to see the direction the review takes…
The sadness of it is the big impact of expected PS job cuts are in the ACT are electorates that are already ALP…
Parliament wants to review the way the media operates inside the News Ltd and ABC buildings.
There Latika, that’s fixed it for ya.
Dan,
The problem is that no-one thinks it will be their job that goes. So, if you are a Coalition voting public servant, you won’t believe it will be you that goes.
Thus, it might be worth a few % points to the ALP within the public service, it won’t be all that many.
The PM announcing that she was a little in love with Houston was a stupid thing to say.
Who on earth is advising the govt?!
It’s not only the 12000 that they’ve just lost, it’s the shopkeepers who sell them their daily goods, it’s hairdressers, clothing shop workers, banks who have to write off bad debts, teachers, whole communities that are going to be affected.
I think we witnessed a turning point tonight, when Sloppy let his mouth blurt out what the Libs have in store for Australia. He should’ve stuck to cramming KFC into it instead.
[So sacking 12,000 lazy public servants can fund Abbott’s $10.5 billion promises, subsidise pollurters, deliver tax cuts and bring the budget back to surplus 1 year ahead of Labor.]
actually, no it can’t. one little hidden fact is that the ALP has moved thousands of public service workers off contract and temp arrangements onto staff, which is cheaper overall but has the downside of bumping up the permanent headcount.
the libs on the other hand, reduce permanent headcount, and lo and behold, employ just as many if not more on contract or as consultants from mate companies at a higher cost to the taxpayer. Hockey knows this, and is totally shameless in his “12,000 jobs to go” statement.
Lol
JOHN_HANNA | 3 minutes ago
[Att @JoeHockey, it’s The Canberra division of the Liberal Party on the phone. Would appreciate a chat.]
Dan,
Mosy of whom think public servants are bludgers, not real workers like them.
Trust me, it’s the way a heck of a lot of people think.
There is plenty of evidence that people consistently vote against their own economic interests.
BigBob,
We’ll see. It all depends on how the media report it. I’ve noticed they are slowly starting to turn, even Tony Jones mentioned it, so this might be the point when things start to turn around.
One of the questioners asked about when Abbott is going to come up with some actual policies, so it’s not just us on PB, or even our own Twitter cliques that think and feel this way.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I live in hope, but I feel that the shark was well and truly jumped tonight.
@sprocket
Well, yes and no, a boss is a boss no matter if they are liberal or ALP. The PS employers are the Departments or the Agencies and each has its own arrangements, EFT quotas and hiring policies. The global targets, especially wages and productivity targets are set by the Govts, coincidentaly almost the same as the last Govt, it is up to the agencies to meet those targets. One outcome of productivity gains and EFT targets is reducing staff headcounts and increasing consultants, you have to if the same work is to be done.
The real way to reduce the PS by 12000 is to cut some resource intensive programmes, after all anything outside core business needs funding.
Night
confessions @ 3812
Are you kidding? Did she really say that?
Even if she was advised to say that, she ultimately said it and must bear responsibility. As with all the other more bizarre ideas she has expressed… ‘citizens assembly’… ‘cash for clunkers’…’real Julia’…. I despair. 😥
[The PM announcing that she was a little in love with Houston was a stupid thing to say.]
Was this the ‘real julia’???
Who is Houston?
BigBob (again) 😆
They might beleive that PubServs are “bludgers” but when they suddenly find these bludgers stop coming into their shops, and they find themselves having to retrench staff and start looking down the barrels of recievership and bankruptcy, the penny will finally start to drop.
Centre @ 3822
Angus Houston, retiring Chief of Defence.
Who advised Julia on speech to Houston?
Probably same person who suggested Menzies should
address that poem to the Queen.
[The PM announcing that she was a little in love with Houston was a stupid thing to say.]
Heaven forbid that a PM makes a joke.
Well, we know that Joe has too many staff with nothing useful to do, for starters.
OK, thanks Bemused.
I don’t think it’s a big deal.
Dan,
That will be after the election.
My guess is they will blame the ALP anyway for making Abbott have to slash the public service to pay for the wasteful policies.
Trust me, logic and fact doesn’t exist anymore.
Houston, Julia’s got a problem…
Sacking public servants is actually quite an expensive exercise and not the money saver Sloppy would have us think.
In 1996, The Rodent got rid of 16,000 of my colleagues in the Commonwealth Employment Service, 450 CES offices throughout metro and regional Australia. And nobody turned a hair!
The CES, of course, was replaced by Job Network, which not only costs the taxpayer more, but provides a diminished service to the unemployed, while creating a few millionaires like Therese Rein. This was overseen by Vanstone/Abbott.
Anyway, within a few years, Howard’s public service was bigger than ever, and was at record levels on that joyous day in 2007 when he got the arse. Since Labor got in, the public service has been gradually decreasing in size.
The Libs ‘small government’ mantra has absolutely no credibility. There is no way this approach will finance tax cuts, balance the budget and fund promises such as the super paid parental leave, while abolishing the carbon and mining taxes at the same time.
the 12000 public servants being cut was their policy before the last election – it didn’t cause them much pain then, it won’t cause them much pain now – unfortunately 🙁
On the other hand it is good to see the Liberals have changed the rhetoric from ‘stop the waste’….this rubbish wont last shirley
Centre @ 3828
On it’s own, I agree, but there have been other stupid statements, some of which I identified. Taken together, it is a pattern of indiscipline which is a luxury which cannot be sustained.
Glen,
Just for you, a sort of Greatest Hits from Bob Carter.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/global_warming/bobcarter/
BigBob,
Sigh. You’re probably right. Sad but true.
Anyway, it’s been a long day, and I’m not as young as I used to be.
So g’night to all.
bemused hopefully Julia would have learnt a lot after her rushed election campaign last start 😉
[GhostWhoVotes GhostWhoVotes
#Newspoll 2 Party Preferred: ALP 45 (0) L/NP 55 (0) #auspol
1 minute ago ]
No question. This is the peak Newspoll
[
GhostWhoVotesGhostWhoVotes
#Newspoll 2 Party Preferred: ALP 45 (0) L/NP 55 (0) #auspol
1 minute agoFavoriteRetweetReply]
I wuzz Right 🙂
Julia saying she had a little crush on someone makes her look human.
It’s a lot better than Abbott going round trying to make his dikc look bigger than what it is.
[On it’s own, I agree, but there have been other stupid statements, some of which I identified.]
I think there is a difference between silly statements and bad policy. Bad policy is hard to get away from but silly statements are quickly forgotten. I don’t think it is right to bunch them up.
Thefinnigans The Finnigans
@
@GhostWhoVotes Ghost, peak Newspoll. All downhill for Abbott from now on #auspol
11 seconds ago
Now that our federal politiicans are get a 4,000 dollar annual rise , what productivity savings are they making to acheive it?
Centre @ 3837
Maybe I am despondent after attending my ALP branch meeting tonight. But I am starting to lose confidence in JG.
However, while she is leader I will do my darndest to campaign for her.
Glen,
If you are still around and still feel Carter is worth listening to, this quote from Deltoid says all you need to know:
“Bob Ward on the Science Show says:
I looked at one example by Bob Carter, it was published in an Australian economics journal a couple of years ago called Economic Analysis and Policy. And I noted first of all that it had a quote in it, attributed to John Houghton who was a senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It includes a quote in there that John Houghton has never said, he’s never written and never said, yet it is in this paper by Carter. So that was wrong, I knew.
But the more I looked at the paper, almost on every sentence there was a question over its accuracy, and I went through one by one, and in the end I couldn’t write a paper short enough for publication that detailed all the problems, so I just had to identify the most serious. And he goes from making claims about a correlation between temperature and the Sun, he quotes a paper that’s been shown to have used inaccurate data but he forgets to mention that, it’s got dodgy statistics about the impact that carbon dioxide has on temperature, and he actually cites for his calculation a website about fossils of West Virginia. That is not science, that’s just desperately seeking bits of information to back up a theory.
So when I went through I found so many glaring errors in it, it seemed to me that it was probably the worst paper that had ever been published about climate change and it just goes to show that the sceptics if they really want to can usually find a place to get their views out.”
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/10/bob_ward_thinks_that_bob_carte.php
ALP branch meetings, did you learn anything?
marky marky @ 3846
It was more a case of having things I knew or suspected confirmed.
bemused things are getting done. That’s all that matters. Polls at this stage of the cycle are meaningless.
Labor will make their move to present their achievements to the electorate at the 800m mark which equates to 1/1/2013. There is plenty time 😉
Centre @ 3848
Yes, I share your belief in winning in 2013, but I really don’t think we can afford mistakes. The election will be in late 2013 so we have more time than you allowed.
No change in polls lol, There she blows (or he for Abbott).