Newspoll quarterly breakdowns

Newspoll published its quarterly geographic and demographic breakdowns on December 29 (full tables from GhostWhoVotes), aggregating all its polling from October to December to produce credible sub-samples by state, gender and age. This period neatly coincided with Labor’s mild late-year recovery, with the overall two-party lead recorded for the Coalition at 55-45 compared with 57-43 for July-September. The shifts proved fairly consistent across all states, such that the relativities are much as they have been since the election: Labor holding up relatively well in Victoria and South Australia (two-party preferred in both now 50-50), hardest hit in New South Wales (6.5 per cent lower on two-party than at the election), still in dire straits in Queensland (41 per cent two-party against an election result of 44.9 per cent) and not appreciably weakened from a disastrous election performance in Western Australia (43 per cent against 43.6 per cent).

The weakening in support recorded for the Coalition was, to a statistically significant extent, greater among women than men. The current gender gap on the Labor primary vote is 6 per cent – equal to the April-June quarter and the final poll before the 2010 election, but otherwise without precedent since Newspoll began publishing quarterly breakdowns in 1996. Of borderline statistical significance is the distinction between the capital cities and non-capitals: the Coalition’s lead is only down from 54-46 to 53-47 in the capitals, but from 61-39 to 57-43 elsewhere.

Newspoll also offered us an abundance of state polling during my fortnight off, which you can read about in the posts below.

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.

1,830 comments on “Newspoll quarterly breakdowns”

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  1. Thanks zoomster for linking Grog’s piece.

    I loved this comment that was posted

    [“So don’t lose any sleep worrying about journalists being on the dole queue because they get a Rudd challenge wrong – it is in their interests to write those stories, and the earlier the better”. I have long ago written off the prattle of the chronically fact impaired journalistic class as worthy of any serious attention.

    Here is my prediction, as good as any of the partisan or gah gah journalists making up their stories for a headline, and it is that Abbott’s leadership will be challenged 2012. Why? His former journalistic skills in setting up media events to spray the Government have produced no tangible results in forcing an early election, and are getting very tired as the Government moves on with passing legisltaion and implementing change.

    You won’t hear this from any socalled insider journo, but the Slipper factor must have been seen by some Liberals as Abbott failing to manage the politics. He and his party machine put Slipper in a position of having nothing to lose by being bullied and denied future preselection, and everything to gain to go Independent. The price of this failure is significant as the prospect of an early election has fallen off the radar. Not happy, Tony.

    Meanwhile, our infantile journalistic corps will focuss on their endless polling and every word and nuance uttered by Rudd as a sign of yet another challenge to Gillard. I mean, how many challenge speculations got the journalistic class chatterring last year? I count about 10 occasions. What a bunch of morons!]

  2. BK,

    I’ve been listening to Mike Malloy every day for about 18 months. Not all that long when compared to how long he’s been on the air. Wish I had discovered him years ago! I’ve heard him say tons of controversial things, but never anything like this. The guy literally has no fear! He speaks the truth to the most powerful forces and individuals on the planet without trepidation. I wish we had radio talkers one tenth as good here in Australia. Heck, even one progressive radio talk show host would be a one hundred per cent improvement over what’s currently offered.

  3. http://www.afr.com/p/opinion/age_of_media_mediocrity_rJS67aMY0vsQV3INhBoNVI

    [Age of media mediocrity
    PUBLISHED: 9 HOURS 39 MINUTES AGO | UPDATE: 4 HOURS 6 MINUTES AGO
    Mark Latham

    One of Tony Abbott’s mantras is to return Australia to the glory days of the Howard government. Last Thursday the Channel Seven-Yahoo! news service took him seriously.

    Under a timeline of January 5, 2012, 2.44pm, it reported that “Prime Minister John Howard has again warned the Solomon Islands and other troubled Pacific nations that they must lift their standards of governance if they want Australia’s help”. Providing succour to Abbott’s back-to-the-future policy, it said “Mr Howard made the comments after holding talks with his New Zealand counterpart, Helen Clark”.]

    More in the (free online) article. He names a few names.

  4. zoom
    [Brown has a level of adulation amongst Greens that I haven’t observed in any other party.]
    Where were you in 1983?

    Labor folk were on their hands and knees before the messiah.

    Even die-hard Libs and Nats were swooooooning over Hawkie.

    I don’t think BB would ever coax that sort of adulation.

    Actually, I’m beginning to feel sorry for him.
    He’s a polite man. A natural listener and tries to give considered answers. The edgy, let’s move on in a hurry msm has no time to listen.

    Listening to the interview yesterday, he was in the middle of giving an answer, was interrupted, then when he realised what the i/viewer was up to, tried to answer that.

    I fear he’s too slow for the media frenzy these days.

    btw, I’ve never seen the like of unionists cheering a Lib leader as we saw in 2004. Howard blindsided Latham in Tassie. I don’t think it was all BB’s fault. Then again, I wasn’t as involved then – looking after very sick olds – so I don’t know all the ins and outs.

  5. [UPDATE 9.20am: MORE than 11,000 Victorian jobs could be lost in the next six months, but it may lead to an interest rate cut.

    Figures released yesterday showed job vacancies in Australia hit an 18-month low in November.]

    Economists warned Victoria’s unemployment rate – already above the national average – could rise from 5.4 per cent to 5.75 per cent by mid-year.

    http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/victorian-workers-in-the-gun-as-pressure-grows-for-interest-rate-cuts/story-fn7x8me2-1226242136626

  6. http://www.afr.com/p/national/car_handouts_split_libs_fPCH30bcIHzubqYvAX5APM

    [Car handouts split Libs
    PUBLISHED: 9 HOURS 55 MINUTES AGO | UPDATE: 5 HOURS 31 MINUTES AGO
    MATHEW DUNCKLEY, DAVID CROWE, PETER ROBERTS AND MARK SKULLEY

    The Gillard government’s job-saving handouts to car makers have prompted Coalition backbenchers and influential conservative businessmen to ramp up pressure on Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to reject subsidies for the car industry and other vulnerable manufacturers.]

    Front page story in the paper edition

  7. BK,

    Australian talk radio is so … insipid. (And that’s praising it up.) All these voices, all spruiking the same lines. If you listened only to the content and not the voices you wouldn’t be able to tell then apart because the content/political leaning is identical across the board. What a mob of sheep! I’d be ashamed to be in their shoes; the ultimate in compliant groupthinkers without the courage to breathe a word that doesn’t conform to the same script that every other idiot is using.

  8. Cuppa and vic
    Last week my dear old mother – who listens to talkback radio – asked me to keep my champagne corks for her.
    Why?
    Because if you put them in bed with you they relieve arthritis!
    Guess where she got that from!

  9. BK

    Says it all.

    What really upsets me with talkback radio, is that anyone with a remotely intelligent argument or statement to make is cut off straight away, or told that we need to move the discussion along. It is infuriating. It feels like a conspiracy sometimes.

  10. Victoria,

    [I hav given up on all talkback radio. It is insipid and condescending.]

    Mike Malloy would banish your boredom. He’s not at all condescending, speaks to you as if you actually have a brain. Unlike the locksteppers of Australian talk radio who don’t even have an original thought between the lot of them. While he is full-on with American issues (understandably), much of what he talks about can be related to rising/coming political trends here.

  11. [BB

    so if people at the NBN are so over renumerated, why doesn’t your friend work for them?

    Or did she try and get rejected?]

    No, she didn’t try. She is a 61 year old person working in a predominately Gen-Y (or X or somethig) environment on a fixed salary, and glad to have the opportunity. She is not a telco professional, but is a professional recruitment agency administrator. My original post about her wasn’t designed as a slag-off. She’s a good friend, even though we don’t always agree on politics (and almost as often do).

    She is firmly of the opinion that NBN middle management – Business Managers, team members of same etc. – are being offered far too much for the job descriptions and, further, that if offered less, they would still leave their current positions at other telcos and come over to NBN.

    In other words, she is saying that the NBN is paying too much for IT/Business Management middle management staff, and could pay a lot less. They are either being swindled or are feathering nests for “the boys”, in her opinion.

    As I wrote before, I can think of reason why the NBN would want to “seal the deal” by paying premium salaries. Sometimes whole departments resign enmasse from Telstra or Optus and come to NBN as basically turnkey business units, ready to function in the new firm. That wouldn’t come cheap, I’d think.

    Also there’s the perceived short shelf-life of NBN if Abbott takes over the governent and starts to demolish it,, as he has promised. Staff who left telcos previously would be out looking for jobs and their previous employers might not take too kindly to their begging bowls. That would argue for a higher salary level, too, at least at first.

    Thirdly the government – politics – is pushing for a catch-up, to narrow the gap between NBN rollout projections and reality. It’s a seller’s market if you’re experienced in this area. Again, the result would be higher salaries.

    She rejects all of these in favour of the “jobs for the boys” explanation: that NBN is a big Labor rort, typically wasteful of public money. Although I pointed out to her that it’s “off-budget” she doesn’t believe a word of it. She reckons government money is government money, and that’s that.

    She’s not an “insider” in any area, other than IT Recruitment, and she seems to be enjoying the feeling of being “in on the know, and in on the rort”. There’s a conundrum in her mind: she’s making extra money from the “rort”, but hates her taxes funding it (as she sees it).

  12. [Last week my dear old mother – who listens to talkback radio – asked me to keep my champagne corks for her.
    Why?
    Because if you put them in bed with you they relieve arthritis!]

    Good grief! Do crank theories like this get advocated by Australia’s media today?

    The media inquiry can’t finish soon enough.

  13. kezza2
    Posted Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 9:23 am | Permalink

    NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley, for example, earned $1.9 million in 2011,

    My understanding is that Mike Quigley is not actually taking a salary – he is donating it to a cancer charity – he successfully overcame cancer himself some years ago.

    He just wants to provide current and future Australians with a first class NBN.

    No wonder the libs have been creative as usual in trying to character assassinate him – unsuccessfully.

  14. [Last week my dear old mother – who listens to talkback radio – asked me to keep my champagne corks for her.
    Why?
    Because if you put them in bed with you they relieve arthritis!]

    I’d heard about a cream called “Pain Away” on 2GB. It was (and may still be) advertised a lot. Blanket coverage.

    When my back was particularly bad for over two months recently, I was desperate. I was talking to a customer about it and he said his wife had the same problem. She used “Pain Away” as a topical, temporary relief, in order to get off to sleep.

    So, telling myself that it was not because of 2GB, but because of my customer’s recommendation, I tried it.

    It worked. It does allow you to get off to slee by taking the edge off the pain. Maybe a placebo effect, I don’t know, but it definitely made things a little easier when the pain was at its worst.

    Apart from that, I’ve never knowingly purchased ANYTHING that 2GB advertises, including a Candelori’s “fine wine and dinner” combo. There ARE limits, youse know.

  15. I have come to the conclusion that here in Oz we confuse cost of living with cost of lifestyle.

    Friend of ours who runs a small mechanical business in our area, decided recently to buy an acreage just outside the burbs. They felt that their young children would benefit from the rural setting with horses etc. They sold the suburban home which is centrally located and not far from the business, and bought a lovely sprawling property. Of course, they needed to put in extra funds, so they borrowed etc. Anyhow, now wife has decided that it is inconvenient and isolated. They just moved in this week. She does not want to live there anymore. Mind you she Was the one who oushed oh to make the move. He was more than happy to stay put, as it was very convenient for him. Because she is not hapoy now, they are going to sell and re purchase another home back in the burbs. I guess Mr Ballieu will be happy with the extra 100,000 stamp duty the state has made!!

  16. Does anyone find it slightly club-footed in that “too smart by half” way of certain media scribes who sniggeringly criticised the elevation of Emergency Management into a Cabinet-level ministry, when one of the top national news stories of the last day or so has been a cyclone that has hit the Pilbara, the supposed epicenter of our national minerals boom?

  17. BB

    It will never dawn on the media scribes that they have been club footed. They have got their collective heads so far up their proverbial backsides!!

  18. Bushfire
    They have to keep up the narrative that there will be no more “weather effects” than before, because the globe is not warming.

  19. [Gordon Graham
    @gordongraham
    ever notice how whenever Abbott has a choice between siding with the Liberals or Nationals, he ALWAYS chooses the Nationals … #auspol]

  20. [Brigadier Slog
    @BrigadierSlog
    @gordongraham the so called split between the ALP and the greens makes the Libs and Nats look like the Hatfields and McCoys #auspol]

  21. awkward!

    [VETERAN rocker Bryan Ferry has married for the second time in a private wedding in the Caribbean.

    The 66-year-old singer married Amanda Sheppard, 29, in a ceremony at the luxury beach resort of Amanyara on the Turks and Caicos Islands on January 4.

    Sheppard is Ferry’s son Isaac’s ex-girlfriend.]

    http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/confidential/bryan-ferry-weds-son-isaacs-ex-girlfriend-amanda-sheppard/story-e6frf96o-1226242378726

  22. [my say
    Posted Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 8:50 am | Permalink

    mercurcuis, who is this ]

    My Say,

    Mercurius is a regular at LP and does some scholarly and witty posts at times, a bit like OPT at PB. In his day job he is a teacher.

    He was dismayed at the dumping of Rudd by the Right-wing power leaders and feared that the turmoil might mean the end of various big reform programs.

    He posted an excellent piece on the brilliant success of a language laboratory set up under BER, and hugely enabled by the NBN program. This occurred in a fairly impoverished region of country NSW. From memory, I think he said that the students were enthusiatic to have such a facility and were keen to work in it. It was that type of impact which he feared might be doomed.

    Instead, of course, Gillard enabled that and other programs to come into action. I think Mercurius has come to realize that, and he has gradually felt some sympathy and support for Gillard.

    That is what I meant by it being a good thing that he is a reluctant but convinced convert to the Gillard cause. In addition to winning majority support, Labor must try to win back the idealists. So Mercurius coming around is a good thing.

    Now if only we could win over Bemused … – just joking! Bemused is a Labor loyalist even if a Gillard sceptic.

  23. [Gordon Graham
    @gordongraham
    ever notice how whenever Abbott has a choice between siding with the Liberals or Nationals, he ALWAYS chooses the Nationals … #auspol]

    This misconception about Tony is due to a false notion of his real political allegiance. He chooses National ONLY because they are closer to his truest love….the DLP.

  24. Hi PBers,

    A Happy NY to you all, especially Bilbo, and a big thanks to the latter for all his great work making sure this site is as good as it gets.

    I have been keeping an eye on an interesting Oz based site called Watching the Deniers and thought this post put up there today would receive a great deal of empathy from more than a few PBers;

    [Thanks to the wonders of the Kindle for iPad I’ve been able to download a plethora of books and materials otherwise too expensive or unavailble in Australia.

    For the researcher, such technology is a real boon. Texts that would be prohibitively expensive can be brought for a fraction of the price and delivered to my iPad in seconds.

    OK, I admit I’m a little addicted.

    Recently I bought Sam Harris’s brilliant little easy “Lying” of the Amazon store.

    One quote struck me as particularly memorable:

    “Most of us are now painfully aware that our trustin government, corporations, and other public institiions has been undermined by lies.

    Lying has precipitated or prolonged wars: The Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam and false reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in which lying (at some level) led to armed conflict that might otherwise not have occured. When the truth finally emerged, vast numbers of people grew more cynical about US foreign policy – and many have come to doubt the legitimacy of any miliatry intervention, whatever the stated motive.

    Big lies have led many people to relexively distrust those in positions of authority. As a consequence, it is now impossible to say anything of substance on climate change, environmental pollution, human nutrition, economic policy, foreign conflicts, pharmaceuticals, and dozens of other subjects without a significant percentage of one’s audience expressing paralyszing doubts about even tghe most reputable sources of informatinon. Our public discourse appears permanently riven by conspiracy theories…”

    Harris neatly summeries the dilemna we face: public discouse on climate change effectively “broken”. Several factors have contributed to this:

    *The mistrust of elites has been growing for several decades, and we can perhaps trace this back to the Watergate era.
    *The electorates cynicism of the political process and elites has been powefully co-opted by the deneirs
    * News Limited newspapers have also thrown their weight behind the deneirs , while actively campaigning against the carbon “tax” (and by extenstion the science supporting cliamte change).

    This three factors alone have been a reciepe for disaster, and has almost fatally killed off sensible discussion and action on climate change.]

    http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/

  25. [Gordon Graham
    @gordongraham
    ever notice how whenever Abbott has a choice between siding with the Liberals or Nationals, he ALWAYS chooses the Nationals … #auspol]

    Warren Truss is the real Prime Minister In Exile of Australia.

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