Nielsen: 57-43 to Coalition

GhostWhoVotes relates the final Nielsen poll for the year has landed well above the market average for the Coalition, whose two-party lead has gone from 55-45 in the previous month’s poll to 57-43. This has come off the back of a four-point gain on the primary vote to 49 per cent, with Labor down one to 29 per cent and the Greens down three to 11 per cent. Julia Gillard is on 35 per cent approval and 58 per cent disapproval, which are down four and up one on last time, but nonetheless similar to Newspoll’s 36 per cent and 56 per cent. Tony Abbott is steady on approval at 41 per cent and down one on disapproval to 53 per cent, which is far more favourable than Newspoll’s 33 per cent and 57 per cent. Whereas Newspoll has shown Julia Gillard opening a solid lead over Tony Abbott as preferred prime minister, Nielsen finds the 45-45 draw in the last poll turning into a 46-42 lead for Abbott. Support for gay marriage is down five points on last month’s poll to 57 per cent. Uranium sales to India has 32 per cent support and 57 per cent opposition.

UPDATE: Essential Research has the Coalition lead nudging up from 54-46 to 55-45, the result of a one point gain on the primary vote to 48 per cent with Labor and the Greens steady on 34 per cent and 10 per cent. On the monthly personal ratings, Tony Abbott has scored what is comfortably his worst ever result from Essential, with his approval down four to a new low of 32 per cent, disapproval upon to a new high of 53 per cent. Julia Gillard has dropped three points on approval to 34 per cent with disapproval steady on 54 per cent, and her lead as preferred prime minister has narrowed slightly from 41-36 to 39-35. Respondents were also asked for which industries, parties and leaders it had been a good or bad year; which government decisions have been most important for Australia’s future; which media are most trusted; and whether the Press Council is doing a good job of regulating the press. Read all about it here.

You can also view full tables from the Nielsen poll here, complete with state breakdowns and such. These show the Coalition’s two-party vote in New South Wales four points higher than last month’s polls, but little change in Victoria.

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.

6,890 comments on “Nielsen: 57-43 to Coalition”

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  1. confessions

    As usual, Elder hits the spot, and BB deservedly gets noted for his excellent contributions. He does a far superior job than any journo going around atm.

  2. Buried in the “News” section of the OO…

    [Qantas, engineers to settle dispute
    QANTAS and its engineers will jointly present a proposed agreement to Fair Work Australia this afternoon to end the most damaging of the three industrial disputes that have cost the airline almost $200 million.

    The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association, the union that threatened to “slow-bake” the airline, is set to become the first to strike a deal after a three-year package was approved by nationwide meetings of union members.]

    So FWA did work after all.

  3. [I noticed, as Katharine Murphy and the rest of the journosphere didn’t, that Shorten’s shadow minister Eric Abetz has been very, very quiet. If Abetz had the genuine assuredness his cocksure manner is designed to hide then he’d be all over Shorten this week, forcing the new boy to dance to his tune. Abetz has no tune to dance to and when Shorten is done with his swotting and the preliminaries, you can bet that one of the biggest guns in the Coalition front line is about to be taken out. Shorten’s teeth-cutting will be on Abetz’s hide. With the O’Farrell-like ascendancy of Will Hodgman in Tasmanian state politics, 2012 is shaping up as a year for Eric Abetz to forget before it’s even begun. Eric’s super is maxed out, his links to the far right and lack of links to business large or small will be no help at all, as is his record of failing to stop a single piece of Labor legislation in a hung parliament: bye bye Eric.]

    Yes, Abetz has been very quiet.

  4. [dave
    Posted Monday, December 19, 2011 at 9:00 am | Permalink
    Kezza – can you please post the link for the above.

    Its a great link to have at ones fingers tips.]

    Assume you mean the $334 billion stuff.

    It’s a comment on the following article – and I should have attributed it to a Michele Johnston who posted it. I didn’t C&P it property, so sorry Michele – and I’ve just found the link again. Here t’is:

    http://theconversation.edu.au/golden-treasurer-is-wayne-swan-really-the-worlds-best-3482

    Cheers

  5. [confessions

    Posted Monday, December 19, 2011 at 7:58 am | Permalink

    Jennifer Hewett’s OO piece this morning reveals the gulf between the business community and the coalition.

    That ambivalence is reflected in the last survey by the Australian Institute of Company Directors in August. About half of those directors surveyed said that assuming the carbon tax had been in operation for a year or two, it would be a good thing to keep.

    That will certainly not be the position adopted by Tony Abbott as prime minister. It’s another reason so many in business – as opposed to those in the Liberal Party – still hold out forlorn hope for a return of former leader Malcolm Turnbull.]

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/corporate-leaders-worried-about-abbotts-economic-credibility/story-e6frg9px-1226225249242

    Before we stop posting on this blog, the thing that pleased me about this article which was paywalled, was the heading all about Tony Abbott, unless you copied and pasted in Google(thank you to whoever worked that out) you would think it was business against the Coalition only

  6. [BK are you sure the words “tortoise” and “broke out” should be used in the same sentence ?]
    pproti
    Yes, an unfortunate choice of words.

  7. Another cliche’ for the msm – Jennifer Hewett talks of the “reshuffle fiasco”.
    I must be a bear of little brain because I didn’t recognise it as a fiasco.

  8. mari

    [you would think it was business against the Coalition only]
    The big end of town has been on board putting a price on carbon for years,accepting that a price on carbon is inevitable. Labor’s legislation provides the certainty they need to allow many billions of dollars of investment to now proceed. Tony Abbotts erratic positions on the carbon issue represents a change from current Labor certainty to Coalition uncertainty for those investments. I doubt he will find any favour with the people involved. Unless of course he promises to them behind closed doors that his promises to the electorate are just lies. Not that he would do that of course………. cough, cough.

  9. lizzie

    [Another cliche’ for the msm – Jennifer Hewett talks of the “reshuffle fiasco”.
    I must be a bear of little brain because I didn’t recognise it as a fiasco.]
    No lizzie, fairs fair. Jennifer Hewitt is quite right “reshuffle fiasco” is just how one would describe the standard of press reportage over the issue 🙂

  10. BK
    We seem to have a “floating population” 😉 of tortoises in our dam. Can be up to five adults and this year we were delighted to see 3 tiny ones. Now it’s down to 2 babies, so we worry – do herons eat tortoises.

  11. lizzie

    Of course, it is the msm narrative to view the reshuffle as a “fiasco”. It has worked for the msm so far. The govt is struggling in the court of public opinion. Not hard to figure out why

  12. Jason Clare (have I got that right?) was very good on 3RN this morning – insisted on getting his message out before he would answer the “opinion/political” questions.

  13. kezza – good find on Costello. Do you have a link, please?

    confessions – thanks for the Elder piece. Now if only the journos would read that and take heed we might get to hear more about policy next year.

    I’ve sadly given up AM – breaks me ‘art cos I was listening from the very first morning way back when .. too long ago to want to remember. I just loved it but it’s no longer as informative as it was with far too many tries for ‘gotchas’.

  14. [poroti

    Posted Monday, December 19, 2011 at 9:33 am | Permalink

    mari

    you would think it was business against the Coalition only

    The big end of town has been on board putting a price on carbon for years,accepting that a price on carbon is inevitable. Labor’s legislation provides the certainty they need to allow many billions of dollars of investment to now proceed. Tony Abbotts erratic positions on the carbon issue represents a change from current Labor certainty to Coalition uncertainty for those investments. I doubt he will find any favour with the people involved. Unless of course he promises to them behind closed doors that his promises to the electorate are just lies. Not that he would do that of course………. cough, cough.]

    Very true.
    Off for a swim as storms are predicted later on

  15. The Tea Party attracts such adorable people.
    http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/tea-party-leader-flees-cbs-cameras-after-han
    Paul Krugman –
    [One lesson that the world has learned since the financial crisis of 2008 is that a contractionary fiscal policy means what it says: contraction. Since 2010, a Europe-wide experiment has conclusively falsified the idea that fiscal contractions are expansionary. August 2011 saw the largest monthly decrease in eurozone industrial production since September 2009, German exports fell sharply in October, and now-casting.com is predicting declines in eurozone GDP for late 2011 and early 2012.
    A second, related lesson is that it is difficult to cut nominal wages, and that they are certainly not flexible enough to eliminate unemployment.]
    Did you get that, Tone?

  16. lizzie & BK – Jason Clare he’s been excellent everywhere yesterday and today. The PM made a really good choice on that portfolio.

    I started to watch Agenda but fool Gilbert was giving dorothy dixers to Fifield and ignoring Andrew Leigh so I switched off. Sorry AL but I can’t hack Gilbert and Fifield.

  17. confessions

    The msm is not going to inform the public. I daresay before the carbon pricing system is implemented, the govt will be advertising. I guess we can expect advertising to start in May?

  18. [OakeyMP Robert Oakeshott MP
    Tim Blair in DT 2day has made up my words in his quotable quotes for 2011.Seems that words in quotations are even under threat today.]

    Remember: the msm is not there to inform us, but to push their own agenda.

  19. vic and fess – I think Gilbert is OK when he is one on one with a strong Labor pollie who brooks none of his constant interruptions but he’s a total waste of time once he gets to the Lab/Oppn part of the program.

  20. [sspencer_63 Stephen Spencer
    200 people die and you run a poll “Is Julia Gillard’s border protection policy to blame for the boat people tragedy?” Stay classy Daily Tele]

    More agenda pushing rather than informing.

  21. The DT shows it is all class with today’s poll.The question……

    [Is Julia Gillard’s border protection policy to blame for the boat people tragedy?]

  22. [Another cliche’ for the msm – Jennifer Hewett talks of the “reshuffle fiasco”.
    I must be a bear of little brain because I didn’t recognise it as a fiasco.]

    Reshuffle “fiasco”, “disaster”, “debacle”, “botched” has been the hastily cobbled-together bootstrap of the past week.

    A visiting Martian could be forgiven for thinking the government had fallen and that sporadic gunfire had been heard coming from the Cabinet room.

    The New Guineans know how to do “botched” Cabinet reshuffles. The police and the Army, plus all the one-toks get stuck in. The G-G intervenes along with the Supreme Court making rulings that are immediately usurped with weapons cocked.

    That’s a botched Cabinet rearrangement. Julia’s reshuffle was The Wiggles compared to it.

    On the Reshuffle Down Under, mostly the journos were forced to agree things weren’t too bad, indeed volunteered that the vast majority of the placements showed good sense and were on merit.

    But it had been decided it was botched anyway. Reads better, suits the bootstrap. There wasn’t really enough time to set it up properly, but hey, it’s the Silly Season after all. Tally ho!

    One thing I would like the Disgruntleds to do, though, is to give up the easy habit of going crying to Sky News every time they feel the need for a tummy-up tantrum. That is, if they want to keep their jobs.

    You’d have though Kim Carr might have got the message that whingers are so passe nowadays wouldn’t you? And if McClellend had done a better job running A-G’s, he might have had something to moan about. The next time Julia cuts the deck for a reshuffle they might find themselves on the discard pile altogether.

    Sky has a studio right inside Parliament House. They have an open-door policy, with a plate above the entrance that reads:

    [“Klagen Macht Frei”]

    “Come into my studio”, said the funnel web to the minister. “Sit down. Feel free to complain about, well, anything really. Cue VTR. Roll tape…

    They have only a tiny audience, miniscule actually, but they have all the best equipment, lots of journos running around, posh looking studios and they love to listen to government whingers letting off some steam.

    Like all Murdoch’s creations, Sky is itself was born of a bootstrap.

    It was based on the Fox News model. Fox News came out of nowhere. The bouncing Fox baby was dropped fully formed and already talking in complete sentences. Admittedly gibberish, but in a recognizable form of the English language.

    Rupert threw some money at it for all the gear so that it looked like a proper TV station. Lots of swish graphics and some “gravitas” intro music and there you have it: an apparently mature news service with a wide reach, just not quite the audience to merit all the hoo-ha.

    Never mind. “Build it and they will come,” seems to be the strategy.

    Well, it sure roped the Ruddster in. I still shake my head at just what he could possibly have been thinking when he sent the tender papers to Sky for the Australia TV network. Maybe it was revenge on Chris Uhlmann? Doesn’t Tin-Tin know that Uhlman would have quit the ABC and gone to work for Sky in a trice? I’m sure the offer’s already there.

    There is something about Labor politicians that makes them ready to go to their enemies, organizations – especially those run by Rupert Murdoch – and people who have vilified, mocked and betrayed them in the past, and then to spill their guts to them live, on air. You wouldn’t piss in Sky’s throat if it was dying of thirst, yet minister after minister fronts the cameras Murdoch has provided to publicly humiliate themselves, time and time again.

    McClelland and Carr’s dummy spits have given some sort of vague cover to the bootstrap that Gillard’s Cabinet is “in crisis”. Only vague, of course, but Sky is a rat for whom no drainpipe is too narrow to crawl up, all the better to poop over its listeners and its guests from a greater height.

    If I was her (Australia breathes a sigh of relief that I’m not) I’d be making it plain that the next moan will be their last, more akin to a political death rattle, including double demerit points if it’s done on Sky, and their balls swinging in the breeze from the nearest boom mike for afters.

  23. http://theconversation.edu.au/lost-about-health-care-reform-heres-where-we-got-to-in-2011-2997

    [19 December 2011, 6.32am AEST
    Lost about health-care reform? Here’s where we got to in 2011

    AUTHORS

    Jane Hall
    Professor of Health Economics and Director, Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation at University of Technology, Sydney

    Jonathan Karnon
    Professor of Health Economics at University of Adelaide

    Health-care reform was one of the policy areas where much had been promised but little delivered by the start of 2011. Prime Minister Julia Gillard promised that 2011 would be a year of implementation and sure enough, 2012 will start with a different picture.]

    Worth a read. Try finding this in a newspaper.

  24. [The DT shows it is all class with today’s poll.The question……

    Is Julia Gillard’s border protection policy to blame for the boat people tragedy?]

    Only thing missing is for Chris Smith to ask a multiple choice question as to the number of deaths in his daily quiz.

  25. Good one BB, and I agree. The next whinge should be the whingers last. In this precarious parliament, either your oar is in time with the rest of the crew or you are over the side for the sharks.

  26. This crap from the DT just builds into the meme that Labor is responsible for the boat people “mess’. It is damned hard to have a rational debate in such circumstances.

  27. CO

    This is the same media that was screaming about the inhumane Malaysia policy. How is such a complex matter dealt with sensibly in this country. It is a damn disgrace.

  28. lizzie
    Posted Monday, December 19, 2011 at 9:28 am | Permalink

    Another cliche’ for the msm – Jennifer Hewett talks of the “reshuffle fiasco”.
    I must be a bear of little brain because I didn’t recognise it as a fiasco.

    Cannot recall Jennifer Hewett ever writing anything even remotely balanced about Labor. On the other hand the conservatives can do no wrong.

    Says it all.

  29. BK
    [The Tea Party attracts such adorable people.]
    I was watching an old Star Trek Deep Spaec Nine episode on the weekend (via DVD). There was an obviously satirical scene where the alien (Ferengi) bartender despairs over the moral decay of his planet. It has become focused on justice. He dreams of a return to the blind pursuit of profit for its own sake, pure greed, no taxes, no social services, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the survivial of the fittest. It was modern Republicanism, delivered by suitably repulsive looking aliens.

    The funny/sad part is that in the ten years since the show was made, what was a laughable parody of a policy position has become somehow acceptable.

  30. [Only thing missing is for Chris Smith to ask a multiple choice question as to the number of deaths in his daily quiz.]

    Don’t joke about that. He could easily do so.

    It seems fairly obvious that the failure of the Malaysian Solution to pass muster from the High Court has been the cause of the recent upsurge in boat arrivals, and the overloading of some.

    I saw this morning that Julian Burnside argued people smugglers kept the day to day nuances of Australian refugee policy from their clients. I think the idea is that the people smugglers can keep their clients in complete isolation from Australian news media and feed them any old guff. His conclusion was that the boats would keep coming, no matter what we did here by way of amending legislation to stop them.

    Nice legs, Julian, shame about the face.

    Many of the clients have mobiles. Many receive funding from Australian relatives. The internet is ubiquitous. The asylum seekers who drowned had been in Dubai, then flew direct ot Jakarta, thence in buses to their point of embarkation. It’s inconceiveable that the recent upsurge has not been informed by Australian government policy.

    I can admit that some may be kept ignorant, or that those already on the ground in a provincial fishing village waiting for a good sailing day might not know the daily variations of the situation here in Australia.

    But it is drawing too long a bow to say that they are all kept in the dark, all the time. Once one knows, word will get around. Indeed, that’s why they come here: they think they can get away with it, when before they knew they couldn’t.

    If the Malaysian Solution was implemented tomorrow (by some legislative miracle) it would result in the boat traffic slowing down and eventually ceasing, for all but a few desperates and the grossly uninformed.

    The simple logic of the matter is that a successful application of the Malaysian Solution would ensure there is no safe haven in Australia for the well-heeled refugee. You could mortgage your house, sell the kids, or collect money from the rellies all you liked, but if you’re going to sacrifice all this simply to end up in Malaysia, it’d be “Thanks, but no thanks.”

    The first boat arrivals who found themselves in this predicament would be on the mobile blower to their loved ones back home faster than you can say “Offshore Processing”, asking them to have a whip around to get them back to wherever they came from.

    The news, therefore, would spread pretty fast: “Australia is out.”

    The people smugglers, by definition, couldn’t stop that bad news from spreading like wildfire. It’d be back to trying America or Canada.

    As long as the problem was sort-of manageable, the government put up with it, but Abbott’s disposition to say “No” to everything has made world-wide news, not on the front pages, but in the casbahs and back alleys of Iraq, to the boulevards full of chanting mullahs in Tehran, even the safe Tamil houses of Sri Lanka: “Be quick.” The system is thus abused.

    Abbott did what he did (or didn’t do what he didn’t do) to concentrate the embarrassment of the government over this issue. Now he and the sanctimonious, comic-book Christian, Morrison, are crying crocodile tears, arguing over how many refugees can be packed onto the head of a pin. Nauru is the world’s second smallest country after all. It’s a pretty good approximation of a pin to my mind.

    These drowned people are grist to Abbott’s grisly mill. By refusing to pass a law that would have stopped the trade in overloaded boats coming here, and brought some order back into the process, he has killed these people by being egregiously indifferent to their deaths, for cheap Newspoll metrics, as surely as if he had drilled a hole in the bottom of the boat himself.

    Pity the Daily Tele didn’t have an “Abbott” option as part of their on-line poll. I’d have voted for that.

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