Morgan: 58-42 to Coalition

Roy Morgan has published results from its last two weekends of face-to-face surveying, with one period before the High Court ruling on the Malaysia solution and the other after. The poll actually shows a slight improvement for Labor on the poll covering the two weeks previous: their primary vote is steady on 32.5 per cent, but the Coalition is down three to 46.5 per cent and the Greens up 1.5 per cent to 12.5 per cent. On the respondent-allocated preferences two-party preferred measure, this translates into a shift from 58.5-41.5 to 58-42; allocating preferences as per the result of the previous election, the shift is from 55.5-44.5 to 54.5-45.5. This is the biggest disparity yet recorded by Morgan between the two preference allocation methods, with Labor receiving just 45 per cent of minor party and independent preferences compared with 65.8 per cent at the election.

Also:

• I have been informed that an unpublished survey of 400 respondents in Western Australia, conducted six weeks ago by Patterson Market Research (which conducts, among other things, Westpoll for The West Australian), had federal voting intention at 57 per cent for the Coalition, 27 per cent for Labor and 9 per cent for the Greens, suggesting a two-party result of about 63-37. This points to a swing of about 6.5 per cent: Labor’s margins in the three Western Australian seats they still hold are 3.3 per cent in Brand, 5.7 per cent in Fremantle and 5.9 per cent in Perth. The margin of error on the poll is a bit under 5 per cent.

• Arthur Sinodinos, former chief-of-staff to John Howard, looks set to fill the NSW Liberal Senate vacancy created by the resignation of Helen Coonan after confirming his intention to nominate.

• In the Sunshine Coast seat of Fisher, Mal Brough’s election as Liberal National Party divisional branch chairman ahead of the preferred candidate of sitting member Peter Slipper is universally being interpreted as a portent of looming preselection defeat of the latter by the former. Slipper had said his position as an LNP member of parliament would become “untenable” if his candidate was defeated, but after the event claimed he had “never threatened to resign”.

• Jessica Wright of the Sydney Morning Herald reports that as well as Brough, Tony Abbott has approached former Lindsay MP Jackie Kelly and Parramatta MP Ross Cameron with a view to returning to parliament at the next election. Also on Abbott’s wish list is Tom Switzer, editor of The Spectator Australia and former opinion page editor for The Australian. Kelly at least has been unequivocal in denying any interest in a comeback, while Switzer appears to be holding out for a seat in Sydney after being discussed as a possible contender in Craig Thomson’s central coast seat of Dobell. It has further been reported that Gary Hardgrave and De-Anne Kelly, who lost their Queensland seats of Moreton and Dawson in 2007, have also “come in for attention”.

• Labor’s Bendigo MP Steve Gibbons has announced he will bow out at the next election. Gibbons won the seat from the Liberals on the retirement of Bruce Reid in 1998 and consolidated thereafter, winning last year by a margin of 9.5 per cent. There was speculation that Senator David Feeney might seek refuge in the seat, having been unable to advance up the batting order from his highly loseable third position on the party ticket. However, Andrew Crook of Crikey described such reports as “erroneous”, and quoted Gibbons saying he “wouldn’t support David Feeney or anyone else administrative people from Melbourne impose on us”. Also mentioned by The Australian was Ben Hubbard, local native and chief-of-staff to the Prime Minister.

• Christian Kerr of The Australian suggests WA Liberal Senator Matthias Cormann has his eyes on preselection for the lower house seats of Pearce and Moore, to be vacated at the election by the retirements of Judi Moylan and Mal Washer. This threatens to be factionally problematic, as Cormann is of the Right whereas Moylan and Washer are noted moderates. Kerr’s report also foreshadows yet another preselection challenge to Tangney MP Dennis Jensen, who has twice required intervention from higher up to save him from preselection defeat at the local branch level.

• Alex Sinnott of the Warrnambool Standard reviews Liberal preselection jockeying for Corangamite, where Sarah Henderson is hoping for another crack after narrowly failing to unseat Labor’s Darren Cheeseman last year. She may face competition in the shape of Rod Nockles, an internet security expert who also sought preselection last time. Robert Hardie, an adviser to Senator Michael Ronaldson, was identified as a potential starter but declined to comment.

• Victorian Liberal Senators Helen Kroger and Scott Ryan are shaping up for a preselection contest for the second position on the party’s ticket at the next election, to be determined early next year. Kroger was elected from number two and Ryan from number three in 2007, but Ryan has since attained a more senior parliamentary position and is thus by party convention entitled to the higher place.

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.

3,038 comments on “Morgan: 58-42 to Coalition”

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  2. ShowsOn @ 2496

    I certainly have never built my own computer.

    I have! And several other computers for friends and family.

    Built from component level or just screwdriver assembly? There is a huge difference.

    I built a modem from component level but by the time I was into computers the era of actually constructing from kits was just about over and I never bothered.

  3. Computer wizardry? My first computer had a 20 meg hard disk, and only took DOS commands. I could run that litle green curser like a Kaiser. I’ve forgotten the commands now though. They could be useful, those commands, in a domestic sutuation with a spouse or partner, because they got the job done with no fuss. Certainly a lot less fuss than Windows. 😀

  4. My first computer had 48K of RAM and 16K of ROM. It has a 128K diskette. It was an Apple-II.

    When you switched it on it went “beep” and just… worked.

  10. I remember upgrading to the Commodore 64. 😆
    I had barely any spare money, but I got the kids, and me 😉 , a computer for xmas.

  11. Re Jesuits and Opus Dei
    _____________________
    My understanding is that these days the Jesuits are very strong on Social Justice matters and far to the “left” of Abbott…. and of Opus Dei,who have a strange quasi-fascist world view….their founder Balaguer was a supporter of Franco in Spain…How more fascists do you want ???

    Opus Dei have strange ideas about the segregation of men and women in their official places.In their New York head office men an women use seperate entrances to the building..and never work together…sounds a bit like Saudi !!

    Abbott is a great mate of Cardinal Pell(His confessor!)..says it all I think ~

  17. Yeah, well,my kids were the ones who were building their own computers while the others in the neighbourhood were learning how to use coat-hangers to get into Commodores.

  19. [Puff, the Magic Dragon.
    Posted Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 10:38 pm | Permalink
    Yeah, well,my kids were the ones who were building their own computers while the others in the neighbourhood were learning how to use coat-hangers to get into Commodores.]

    Now that is a handy skill, always wondered how you do that.

  20. [I suppose that is what one would expect from an engineer with honers in computer science.]
    They gave you honers? They gave me Honours.

  21. Gus,
    You only worked 29 hrs a day? Looxoory! We had to work 29 hours between sunrise and sunset and twice that at night.

  25. Why does William give up his time for a forum based around polls, to which over 1 million posts have been contributed, if the polls are irrelevant? Surely they are the best guide we have to the likelihood as to how a future election may end up?

    I will make a prediction that the Nielsen Poll will result in the usual interest that follows each new poll result.

  26. > dir comes to mind with DOS, so you could find the programs, such as WordPerfect that I then had. Took about 0.5 seconds to load because there wasn’t any of the modern folderol weighing everything down, like a Feeney or a Farrell does with Labor. DOS was Labor under Whitlam.

  27. BW, William, Congratulations on the million poster number. Would love to catch up with other posters, but life has got in the way.

  28. Puff the first computer I purchased was a Tandy TRS80 which had 16k of RAM. In a very short time my 12 year old son had peeked and poked the RAM to it’s limit and was demanding the Commadore 64. I think he would win the nerd competition.

  31. I can also remember one of our branch managers who thought he was a computer guru except the first thing he did when he received his shiny new IBM PC was type in format C: enter

  32. [I remember upgrading to the Commodore 64]

    Puffffyyyyyyyyyyyyy, Looxoory!!!!!!!!!!!!

    i started with steam driven, then hand-crank, then AC before the battery 😛

  33. deblonay
    [Abbott is a great mate of Cardinal Pell(His confessor!)..says it all I think ~]
    Yes, and Opus Dei is alive and well in both parties. THe Libs are going hard right Catholic to rival Labor these days, but the shoppies and AWU and others have heaps of that cult amongst them. If Conroy for example isn’t a member I’ll be quite surprised. The most fervent and driven sub-cults take over our favourite political parties if we aren’t vigilant, which we clearly have not been with my old once worthy favourite that used to have a light on the hill. Now it’s a candle under a cassock.

  34. Space Kidette
    [the dos command that used to strike fear into my heart was format c: that was before they had the y/N check!]
    Oh yeah. I remember that long pause before hitting enter fot the ‘Y’. It was quick but unforgiving.

  37. [Why does William give up his time for a forum based around polls, to which over 1 million posts have been contributed, if the polls are irrelevant?]

    Beats me. This site hardly mentioned polls for the first three years of its existence. It kind of got driven that way by popular demand.

  38. Gusface
    [arent you more a morning type peep?]

    ‘perp’, not ‘peep’ – don’t get sloppy with singulars and plurals. It isn’t like you.
    😎

  40. William maybe demand is driving it back to the past, until the polls improve for Labor at least. To be fair a lot more than the polls does get covered.

  45. Fiiiiiiiineeeey,
    Whoo’t bluddy hell gave’t chu steam? Looxoory! We had’ta blow on’t windmill to run calculator.

  47. Gusface, the site didn’t even have comments for the first two years. Here’s the archive page for a randomly chosen month from the third. The posts have about a dozen comments on them, all (well, most) relevant to the topic of the post, and none of them about polls.

  49. DavidWH
    THe amazing thing to me about this site, being as it is ostensibly about polls, is that no-one deeply into the parties (and that means Labor here) ever says the party is wrong. If ever there has been a chance for real party supporters to express those views, the Gillard government (and most of the Rudd) has been the perfect opportunity.

    Here we are with a probably terminal polling situation for Labor, taking into account the potential for improvement; including the clear and demonstrated lack of leadership capacity of the current leader; the dimwits around her; and the lack of numbers of intelligent dissenters in and around the party who might drive change.

    But no, nothing on PB from some of the insiders but more spin to justify whatever this bankrupt leadership dishes up. Bankrupt in morality, philosophy, vision, and policy.

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