Morgan: 58.5-41.5 to Coalition

The latest Morgan face-to-face poll, combining the results of the last two weekends’ polling, adds to a picture of Labor’s slight gains over the previous month or two being reversed. The Coalition has picked up two points on the primary vote directly at Labor’s expense, with the Coalition on 49.5 per cent and Labor on 32.5 per cent. The Greens are down a point to 12 per cent. On respondent-allocated preferences, the Coalition lead is up from 56.5-43.5 to 58.5-41.5; on the previous election measure it’s up from 53.5-46.5 to 55.5-44.5.

I’ve had quite a lot to say about the persistent gap between Morgan’s two two-party preferred measure, which is a fairly recent phenomenon. The chart below shows how Labor’s share of respondent-allocated preferences has tracked in the three poll series that publish results for both measures, namely Morgan’s frequent face-to-face polls, their less frequent phone polls, and the monthly Nielsen results. All three began the year more or less in the territory of the 2010 election result, which delivered Labor 65.8 per cent of all non-major party preferences.

Up to a month ago, all three seemed to agree that this had declined by about 10 per cent. Since then, we’ve seen individual Nielsen and Morgan phone poll results (which may prove to be aberrations) showing a revesal of that trend, while Morgan face-to-face has the Labor share lower than ever. Morgan face-to-face has also been consistent in giving Labor the lowest share of the three series throughout this year. I should note as always that the previous election measure has a better track record for predicting the election result in any case.

In other poll news, a fortnightly Port Macquarie-based publication called The Port Paper has published results from an automated phone poll conducted by ReachTEL in Rob Oakeshott’s electorate of Lyne showing support for Rob Oakeshott at just 14.8 per cent, against 55.3 per cent for the Coalition and 17 per cent for Labor. This has raised eyebrows on a number of counts. Firstly, the question on voting intention was the last of three put to respondents, after attitudinal questions on carbon tax and pokies reforms (both of which were strongly opposed), which is commonly recognised in the polling caper as the wrong way to get an accurate response. Secondly, the principals behind The Port Paper are very strongly associated with the Nationals. And thirdly, Bernard Keane in Crikey today relates that ReachTEL “proudly announced it was an associate member of Clubs Qld, which has this year been campaigning aggressively against the Andrew Wilkie-led poker machine reform push. The Port Paper story fails to disclose that.”

The Port Paper also published a poll from the corresponding state electorate of Port Macquarie before the election in March, and while it was not brilliantly accurate, its errors were not in a direction that would inspire doubts about its motives. The vote for soon-to-be-defeated independent incumbent Peter Besseling was about right (34 per cent, compared with 36.5 per cent at the election), but the Nationals were too low (40 per cent against 52.2 per cent) and Labor too high (14 per cent against 5.7 per cent).

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.

2,840 comments on “Morgan: 58.5-41.5 to Coalition”

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  1. [shows

    what about his attempt at the worlds longest poem]
    It was interesting for a while, but he got stuck on the first stanza titled: “Rudd is thy God, Gillard not so much”.

  6. [Is it appropriate for a motorsport commentator to say:

    He gets up his inside and pushes him a bit wider?

    Discuss…]

    Sounds a bit like something Abbott would say?? 🙂

  7. Gary when I first visited this site about a month out from the last federal election I dont recall many posts predicting a close election, the general consensus was the betting markets were spot on and it would be a “put in take out job”.

    A few nervous types such as myself begged to differ, but we were dismissed as either nutters, Rudd sycophants, or closet Tories – seems that nothing much has changed.

  9. […the general consensus was the betting markets were spot on and it would be a “put in take out job”.]
    Thank you for using that phrase.

    It reminds me if Roy & H.G.’s “Gilded Knights of Balaclava” society where people honour horses that “put in so you could take out”.

  17. Immaca – no Labor are carting to much lead in their saddlebags to pull out of this one.
    Its not just the big ticket items like the carbon tax, and the anti Victorian thing up here in Queensland, it is also all sorts of sleeper grass roots campaigns that do not grab headlines but do matter.

    For eg the licensed clubs are running an anti Labor campaign and clubs are big in marginal outer suburban electorates.

    Owner drivers from semi trailers down to small couriers are telling their one or two employees that once the carbon tax arrives their out of a job.

    The building game in Queensland has slowed, quoting is very tight, and all those workers and sub contractors in that industry are looking for someone to blame.

    Labor only has a very small rusted on vote up here, in 96 we were reduced to two seats in Queensland, in 77 one, the next election will see something similar take place and that will simply make it impossible for Labor to win.

  18. [2817

    PEDRO

    Posted Monday, August 29, 2011 at 1:56 am | Permalink

    Immaca – no Labor are carting to much lead in their saddlebags to pull out of this one.
    Its not just the big ticket items like the carbon tax, and the anti Victorian thing up here in Queensland, it is also all sorts of sleeper grass roots campaigns that do not grab headlines but do matter.

    For eg the licensed clubs are running an anti Labor campaign and clubs are big in marginal outer suburban electorates.

    Owner drivers from semi trailers down to small couriers are telling their one or two employees that once the carbon tax arrives their out of a job.

    The building game in Queensland has slowed, quoting is very tight, and all those workers and sub contractors in that industry are looking for someone to blame.

    Labor only has a very small rusted on vote up here, in 96 we were reduced to two seats in Queensland, in 77 one, the next election will see something similar take place and that will simply make it impossible for Labor to win.
    ]

    Wrong 🙂

  19. We’ll see Pedro. Two weeks is a long time in politics at the moment, two years an eternity.

    ALP has their strategy in place and are getting on with it regardless of the polling and “bumps in the road” which is pretty much all they can do.

    Fib/Nats are squawking and giving us theater which under Abbott seems to be all they can do. 🙁

    I acknowledge the ALP is not very popular at the moment, but beginning 2013 will be when to really watch the polls i think.

    Night all.

  21. Pedro 2807
    ____________
    Re warnings
    I had the same experience here re last years Vic elections.
    I warned for weeks before that Labor was in steep decline here.. but was howled down by several Vic. posters…GG..and several others
    I warned re rail problems/emeters/and other policies but was described in harsh terms
    …then suddenly warnings turned out to be spot on ..and Labor lost…despite the Cheer Squad here

  22. Re Q’land politics
    _____________
    We usually spend some weeks each winter in Far NQ…we love Cairns…but the political climate is weird.
    Many Q’Landers are in self praise mode.!!
    They talk of good weather as if they make it themselves.

    Sometimes when they speak of” down south” they really mean Brisbane….Melbourne might be on another planet

    I am also struck too by the number who have never travelled out of FNQ
    I have noticed that too in W.A on a recent visit there,

    Oddly… but the further you go from Melbourne the more unrealistic the local political climate seems to be

  23. Haha, deblonay @2822,

    Maybe it’s just me because it’s so late, but do you realise how smug that comment reads? Especially the last paragraph.

  25. [Diogenes
    Posted Sunday, August 28, 2011 at 9:59 pm | Permalink

    Another great code I’m seeing increasingly is Opportunities for Service Improvement (OSI).

    Organisations include it in their auditing, and say something like

    In 2010 we received 266 Opportunities for Service Improvement (OSI), an increase of 33% on last year.

    What they are actually reporting is an increase in the number of complaints they have received, but they can’t call them complaints. They are OSI.]

    I’ve lost touch with corporate-speak since my semi-retirement. That gem seems to be reaching new depths. Have you sent it to Don Watson?

  26. [Fiz
    Posted Sunday, August 28, 2011 at 10:34 pm | Permalink

    Ugly in Qld.

    GhostWhoVotes GhostWhoVotes
    #Galaxy Poll Federal 2 Party Preferred in QLD: ALP 37 L/NP 63 #auspol

    GhostWhoVotes GhostWhoVotes
    #Galaxy Poll Federal Primary Votes in QLD: ALP 23 L/NP 55 #auspol ]

    The frequency and selectivity of these type of polls (not doubting their reliability; just a question of who, how, when, where and why they are commissioned).

    There’s no doubt the idea is to flush out any nervous nellies in Labor. Hasn’t worked so far, unless you count Evan, but maybe they’re hoping for the constant drip effect.

  27. [Goshome
    Posted Monday, August 29, 2011 at 12:38 am | Permalink

    Apparently Glenn Milne knows that the dirt covered shovel as left at exactly 3.30am. Unfortunately he does not say how as he is then too busy putting himself at the centre of a story in which he makes it clear JG did nothing wrong.]

    He was there, or invited to the shovel-laying ceremony?

    I hope he wasn’t have another ‘night-on-the-turps’ moment. Was Stephen Mayne in the vicinity?

  28. Good morning, Bludgers.

    Oooh, Gorgeous D. You’re a wee bit cynical. I, on the other hand, wondered whether he’d recall anything that went on at 3.30am – never mind what morning. 😉

    But don’t despair, GD. One gets more cynical with age! 🙂

  29. Oh, FFS!

    Coorey…

    [In a speech to the Sydney Institute in June, senior minister Anthony Albanese lamented that one of Labor’s failures was to romanticise its past rather than accentuate the present.

    “Fundamental reforms implemented by Labor have been entrenched in a way that it is easy to forget how hard they were fought,” he said.

    “Universal pensions, the Snowy Mountains scheme, Medicare, native title rights, protection of the Daintree, Kakadu and the Franklin River, universal superannuation and the apology to indigenous Australians to name but a few. Because we are committed to reform, we are tempted to keep moving forward from issue to issue, without properly embedding in the national consciousness what we have achieved.”

    It is not for want of trying that Labor is now attempting to reverse this trend. It just lacks the clear air and political capital needed. In spades.]

    Four major policy announcements last week and all Coorey could write about yesterday was Thomson. He even got a junior assistant to co-write it with him, he had sooooo much to say about this terrible scandal.

    It was all the Insiders talked about too, even getting down to the fine detail of how they shouldn’t press too hard, maybe just back off a little in the waterboarding (and this included the usually sane Megalogenis, who actually brought the subject up!), or else Thomson might try to top himself (would want another “Hello Possum!” episode).

    Bolt has “stat decs on the way” that will bring down the government forthwith.

    Abbott’s calling a spade a shovel gets front page.

    200 protestors and their trucks are treated as the voice of the people.

    A Channel 9 news reader mocks the government, actually accusing them of desperation in trying to talk about policy and governance.

    It’s been SSOs and a full media Inquisition with wall to wall tits and bums.

    The media just reports all this from one side, then swings the camera and the microphone around to the government crying, “Top that! Whaddaya reckon?”

    They’re not players, no, no, no… they’re meek monitors, just doing their job.

    And now Coorey blames the government for not being able to get its message out? Worse actually, he blithely writes “it just lacks clear air”… oh really?

    There is nothing the government can do about Thomson. They’re stuck with him. they’re not going to sack him, or ban him from the party, or pressure him to resign. They’re not going to throw away government over a minor incident that happens to have major implications if they stuff it up.

    The government is a tethered goat, and the media knows it. Easy meat. Irresistable!

    It’s no good raving on about what might have happened, or what they could have done when we have Episode #497 of Destroyed In Seconds available for constant replay and slo-mo analysis: Reality TV on endless loop. Find a minor infraction and beat up the hell out of it, turning it into the greatest moral crisis of our times.

    The sickening sight yesterday of the Insiders trying to turn Thomson’s “crime” into something that would have made Ted Bundy blush just about took the cake for me. Ordinary rorting of credit cards – and let’s face it, rorting expenses is just about a wholly owned brand of the journalism profession, isn’t it? – wasn’t enough to match the relentless moralizing and sniggering, much less the front page acreage wasted on Thomson.

    So they made Thommo into a metaphor for class warfare, Animal Farm-style: pigs, snouts in the trough, versus honest farm animals, slaving away for $10 an hour, wiping shitty bums in nursing homes while their masters wallowed in escort ladies, frivolous law suits and lavish cash advances.

    It wouldn’t have mattered if Thomson had had a car accident and injured someone while DUI. Or whether he had fiddled some trust money in a tax return. Or even – God forbid – done a little shoplifting and then bashed the store security guard for good measure. There must be a million things that carry a theoretical sentence of 12 months if you’re convicted. It’s not the seriousness of the crime, its the seriousness of the consequences that matter.

    But our moralizing media can’t help themselves.

    They lament, crying rivers of crocodile tears, that the government “lacks clear air”. “How could things have possibly come to this?” they write.

    This whole circus is spinning out of control. The media feeds a scandal-starved public, used to a diet of salacious gossip and confected outrage, but the public wants more and more. Usually some foul-mouthed chef, a boorish footy player, a bikini model or a radio personality’s pecadilloes will do, but when you’ve got a member of the government in the spotlight, it’s just too juicy to ignore. The mill must be fed grist to grind into its constituent elements.

    Jay Rosen, the visiting American journalism professor who humiliated Tony Jone the other night, was oh so polite trying to point this out, but Jones smirked all over him, even told him at one stage that he was asking the questions, not Rosen. Rosen merely smiled politely at that.

    I suggest then that Rosen abandons his prepared lectures and interviews that don’t seem to go the way the interviewer likes. All Rosen really needs to do is mount the stage, hold up the front page of any of our major newspapers… and point.

    http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/labor-needs-some-marketing-lessons-20110828-1jgav.html#ixzz1WMMbeNpC

  30. With due credit to the sports commentary offerings (@2804), here’s a different kind of random grab.

    I was flicking through my old Oxford Companion to English Literature and noticed a short write-up on ‘Poetaster’, which was a comedy written by Jonson in 1601.

    [Set in the court of the Emperor Augustus, the main plot concerns the conspiracy of the poetaster Crispinus and his friend Demetrius (who represent Jonson’s contemporaries Marston and Dekker) and a swaggering captain, Pantilius Tucca, to defame Horace, who represents Jonson. The matter is tried before Augustus, with Virgil as judge. Horace is acquitted, the ‘dresser of plays’ Demetrius is made to wear a fool’s coat and cap, and Crispinus is given a purge of hellebore and made to vomit up his windy rhetoric. A secondary plot covers Ovid’s love for the daughter of Augustus, and his subsequent banishment]

    The Shakespearean era seems to have been a bit prophetic in terms of the early 21st century, with the ‘folly in power/egoism’ aspect. The use of the Classics shows that we’re witnessing the same kind of thing that’s dogged politics for thousands of years.

    Funny, but after a career over decades in the corporate sector I find my old school subjects (and what they lead to) much more compelling than something like corporate finance, inventory just-in-time studies, cost-benefit analyses, project timeline development, and systems study and support. Must be the human element I guess 🙂

  31. [Owner drivers from semi trailers down to small couriers are telling their one or two employees that once the carbon tax arrives their out of a job.]

    I desperately hope that this isn’t true.

  33. [#Galaxy Poll Federal 2 Party Preferred in QLD: ALP 37 L/NP 63 #auspol

    The frequency and selectivity of these type of polls]

    GD … and others worried about Q OpPoll results. Some factors – besides the one we get Groundhog Day’d with monotonous regularity:

    1. Q Election12 – due in the first half of next year, at a date of Premier Bligh’s choosing (also canvassed too often so I won’t add to comments)

    2. State-wide post-traumata stress behaviour

    I’m coping (I hope) as it isn’t the first disaster to damage the house. After the first I did some psych on it; so I can assure you that, after Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 identification of what became known as the “five stages of grief.” there developed a huge canon of literature on it at personal, group and mass level: some “group” with Vietnam War vets, some “mass” after 9/11 & Hurricane Katrina.

    Reactions to catastrophic loss follow a fairly predictable pattern, whether the loss is known in advance (eg terminal degeneration/ disease) or not (accident, damage to property). Though the number of identified stages differ, reactions areconsistent. If you don’t know them Coping with Grief and Loss is a good intro:

    [The five stages of grief:
    * Denial: “This can’t be happening to me.”
    * Anger: “Why is this happening? Who is to blame?”
    * Bargaining: “Make this not happen, and in return I will ____.”
    * Depression: “I’m too sad to do anything.”
    *Acceptance: “I’m at peace with what happened.”]

    (BTW, knowing what to expect can assist through both personal and wider levels: doesn’t eliminate reactions, but at least you can explain them.)

    Q’s drought-breaking horror began in early March 2010 with massive storms over the southern Great Divide which flooded westward – Barnaby Joyce was trapped on his St George property – and eased only after Easter 2011 when, as some might recall, Toowoomba’s EasterFest was washed out (our soil still hasn’t dried). Areas from the Range westward, across the top of the Darling and Lake Eyre basin, creeks & rivers were inundated – up to 6 times.

    IOW, given the devastation’s length, scale and intensity – and literature of personal and mass loss – expect most QLanders to be living through the grief scales – whether E K-R’s famous 5 or longer more complex scales.

    Some people get trapped in various stages:

    * Q Victoria spent years after HRH Alfred’s death trapped in overwhelming grief; so do many others (you might know some)

    * Some never progress past anger (Vietnam Veterans were frequently trapped at this stage); wanting to blame god, government, other people and places (family members, doctors, places and structures – eg Brisbane’s dams, Greens for stopping Traverston dam etc)

    * Many stay trapped in depression, often because the type of trauma offers no answers; the reason there’s such emphasis now on closure, an essential step to acceptance. Currently, Daniel Morcomb’s Family are moving through closure

    * Acceptance is the true moving on with life stage. Doesn’t mean grief and loss “go away”; they don’t; some never do, but people learn to live with them. In most cases, working through grief & loss takes about a year.

    You should expect Qlanders to be moving through those stages:

    Devastation’s extent and types mean
    (a) those who lost family and/or property not covered by insurance may never recover;
    (b) rebuilding personal property will (say loss assessors) take another 2 years;
    (c) repairs to state infrastructure will take at least as long, even longer;
    (d) impact on the state budget includes cessation of work on planned infrastructure until damage is repaired and finances recover.

    Q elections are won/ lost primarily in heavily-populated, worst-affected SEQ. If that’s line-ball, the next most important are coastal cities – all affected, some badly.

    Before election12, I expect flood recovery to be highlighted, email groups (key in 09) to be ready, L-NP’s opposition to Gillard gov’s flood levy to play a prominent part – and for people to recall how well Bligh managed disasters and recovery.

  34. OPT

    Are you able to post your comments on the Qld federal thread. Bludgers are on that thread at the moment. Your post should not be missed by them. 🙂

  36. [WA, QLD, NT, NSW vs TAS, VIC, SA, ACT??]

    IOW: The states & territory which, up till now, have “owned” the revenue their natural resources returned, and in Q & NSW (so far, until there are demands to dam and pipe tropical waters south) their inland water resources – and which, because of their positions in the cyclone belt, are most affected by natural disasters and the massive cost of infrastructure repairs
    V
    The states & territory which, because they lack (or have only small quantities of) those mineral and water resources, want the Federal (ALP) government to force WA, QLD, NT, NSW to share their wealth equally with Vic, SA, Tas, ACT – while their citizens constantly whinge and/ or constantly snark about how unfair and/or politically stupid minerals- and inland water-rich states & NT are.

    And you wonder why WA, QLD, NT, NSW are thoroughly pi6sed off?

    Use you brain! A little less whinging and derision, and a lot more gratitude for sharing money and resources to which Vic, SA, Tas, ACT are not constitutionally entitled would be a smart start.

    Remember, if Gillard’s government is rolled before the MRRT is firmly in place, all that lovely revenue – and probably a lot of the GAB, MAB & LEB water, given the pressure Q & NSW can exert on an LNP government under Abbott – will stay in WA, QLD, NT, NSW!

    Wouldn’t that just (& justly) serve ACT, Vic, Tas, SA right!

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