UPDATE (9/7): The latest weekly Essential Research poll has the two-party vote steady at 56-44, from primary votes of 31% for Labor (down a point for the second week in a row), 49% for the Coalition (steady) and 11% for the Greens (up one). There are further questions in asylum seekers, of which the most illuminating is the findings that 60% believe the government is too soft, the carbon tax (31% say they have noticed an increase in costs, 54% say they haven’t) and the European economic crisis.
UPDATE 2: Roy Morgan has published poll results from its last two weekends of regular face-to-face surveying. This has both parties down on the previous fortnight, Labor by 3% to 29.5% and the Coalition 2.5% to 45.5%, with the Greens up 4.5% to 14.5%, their best result since February and equal best result ever. The Coalition’s two-party lead is down from 54.5-45.5 to 54-46 on previous election preferences, but up from 56.5-43.5 to 57.5-42.5 on respondent-allocated preferences.
Before we proceed, two automated polls from ReachTEL which were published earlier in the week:
• A poll of 646 voters in Dobell points to a crushing victory for the Liberals, regardless of whether Craig Thomson remains as Labor candidate (which would not appear likely, as the party is proceeding with the preselection process while Thomson’s membership is suspended). Without Thomson, the primary votes after exclusion of the undecided are Liberal 61%, Labor 30% and Greens 6%. With Thomson, the results are 64%, 21% and 13%. The former set of figures suggests a two-party split of about 64-36 and a swing against Labor of around 20%, which seems a bit much. Imre Salusinszky of The Australian reports Labor sources have “confirmed the party hoped to finalise its candidate by the end of the year, which would make it impossible for Mr Thomson to clear the legal issues surrounding him in time to resume his party membership and nominate”.
• A 1051-sample poll of state voting intention in Queensland had the primary vote at 56.5% for the LNP, 21.8% for Labor, 9.4% for the Greens and 7.4% for Katter’s Australian Party. This compares with election results of 49.6%, 26.7%, 7.5% and 11.5%.
Now then.
Created when South Australia was first divided into electorates in 1903, Hindmarsh was traditionally a safe Labor seat covering Adelaide’s working class north-western suburbs. The creation of Port Adelaide as a separate electorate in 1949 made it somewhat less secure, pushing it southwards into more conservative Henley Beach, but only in 1966 was long-term Labor member Clyde Cameron seriously threatened. The watershed moment in its progress from safe Labor to marginal came in 1993, when the abolition of Hawker drew the election further south into Liberal-voting Glenelg. It currently extends along the coast from Glenelg South north to Semaphore Park, from which it extends inland to mostly Labor-voting suburbs south of Grange Road, from Kidman Park to Torrensville south to Morphettville and Ascot Park. The redistribution to take effect at the next election has effected two minor gains, both to Labor’s slight advantage: 3300 voters at Seaton in the north from Port Adelaide, and 1500 voters at Edwardstown in the south from Boothby. Labor’s notional margin is now 6.1%, compared with 5.7% at the election.
The Liberals’ first win in the seat followed the aforementioned redistribution at the 1993 election, at which a cut in the notional margin to 1.2% coincided with the retirement of sitting Labor’s John Scott, who had been the member since 1980. The Liberal candidate was Christine Gallus, who had become the first Liberal ever to win Hawker in 1990. She duly followed by becoming the first Liberal to win Hindmarsh, defeating future state government minister John Rau with a 2.8% swing. Party hard-heads rated Gallus’s vote-pulling power very highly, and they were duly dismayed when she decided to retire at the 2004 election. The Liberals were also damaged by a redistribution that added a northern coastal spur through Grange to Labor-voting Semaphore, which cut the margin from 1.9% to 1.1%.
It was thus widely expected that the seat would fall to Labor candidate Steve Georganas, a former taxi driver backed by the “soft Left” faction in a deal that saw the Right’s Kate Ellis take Adelaide. So it proved, but Georganas was given a run for his money by Liberal candidate Simon Birmingham, who limited the swing to 1.2% and came within 108 votes of victory (and went on to become a Senator in 2007). Georganas’s margins were increased by 5.0% and 0.7% at the elections of 2007 and 2010, which represented modest growth by the standards of other South Australians, such that the margin is now substantially lower than in three seats (Makin, Kingston and Wakefield) which Labor had been unable to win in 2004. This partly represented the party’s lack of mortgage-paying areas, and their attendant electoral volatility.
Nonetheless, Mark Kenny of The Advertiser reported in May that Liberal internal polling showed Hindmarsh to be the party’s most likely gain in South Australia. Their candidate is Matthew Williams, national business development manager with law firm Piper Alderman.
[It’s time you went your own way.]
You are assuming, clearly, that I have some affiliation with the Greens. This is the type of thinking which is killing the Labor Party (anyone who criticises us must be a Liberal/Green).
[Is Patrick just another manifestation of Showson/GreenTard?]
And there it is again.
Maybe the reason people are criticising Labor is because Labor is a complete and utter f##k up at the moment, and not because they are crazed communist idealogues. Does that even occur to you people?
[If you don’t want them back, you have to move further to the right which will obviously lead to the Greens getting more votes.]
Why? We don’t want them back. It’s as simple as that. We don’t have to change anything.
[And on the right you will have to compete with Abbott and you lot will never be able to out-conservative him. You lot just aren’t that good at that kind of stuff.]
Agree. But many who have drifted to the Libs have done so, not because the ALP is not conservative enough, but because among other things, it is perceived as being too close to the Greens.
ML
[What is fair about a dolt who thinks that CO2 is weightless because some Tea Party spin lines about AGW were put into his mouth?
That is perfectly fair.
You disagree with it, but it is perfectly fair.]
Get yourself a high school science book.
Howes and Dastyari have effectively put the PM in an impossible position however she should have made her position clear on July 1st when the Greens became no longer necessary in the hung parliament. The signs were right in front of her and she failed to sufficiently act (she gave the speech last year, but things are different now)
A strong leader would have put their foot down. Instead the PM has been undermined by a couple of young, trigger happy hooligans who don’t understand the meaning of the word tact
Dio @ 3168
That was exactly my point. Bashing the Greens as extremists etc is not the way to go. There are many who left Labor and will not come back by attacking the Greens so hysterically.
Let’s all face facts. Labor needs the Greens as much as the Greens need Labor when it comes to elections.
Sometimes I get the urge to have my wife dress up as a tree…..then…I want to…… hug her… Does this make me a Greenie?
Then sometimes I think about other Greenies…..
[We don’t want them back.]
Said the increasingly irrelevant soon-to-be-minor-party member…
[Maybe the reason people are criticising Labor is because Labor is a complete and utter f##k up at the moment, and not because they are crazed communist idealogues. Does that even occur to you people?]
No.
The concept that there is anything wrong with the ALP is not considered as an option here.
Move along please…
‘Ahhhh, Turnbull doing the Fiberal line of dysfunctional govt….much surprisement.
Trolli letting him make a speech on QANDA.’
It’s just unfuckinbelievable.
I can’t watch.
It’s like the ABC is now the media arm of the Australian Liberal Party.
Poor Chris Bowen sitting there looking like a pork chop Synagogue.
Turnbull is an absolute fucker.
Turnbull talks and the audience is silent and listening.
Just golden!
[There are many who left Labor and will not come back by attacking the Greens so hysterically.]
Apart from anything else, this communicates to people that Labor regards the Greens as a legitimate threat to it. Which actually adds to their credibility. Great plan, geniuses.
If Labor really wanted to hurt the Greens it would adopt some moderate pro-environment policies with a mainstream twist to them. Let people who care about the Greens’ key issue feel good about voting Labor. Instead of, you know, supporting brown coal and logging and so on. The recent marine parks thing was the right idea.
Troy Bramston is back releasing the Newspoll at 11pm AEST on Sky News
Let’s see if GhostWhoVotes beats him to the punch
[3199
Scrutineer
Posted Monday, July 9, 2012 at 9:42 pm | Permalink
Hey Rummel, whats with your new avatar?]
Abbott
Get that stupid woman with the signs off!!
[Get yourself a high school science book.]
I write stuff myself now……don’t have a lot of time to read other peoples stuff!
PB
Cf the one world government, we have had a Greens Party supporter arguing just that quite earnestly on Bludger. Perhaps they were misrepresenting Greens Party policy?
I hear you Mod Lib.
But seriously, I didn’t think Turnbull was this cheap.
[A strong leader would have put their foot down. Instead the PM has been undermined by a couple of young, trigger happy hooligans who don’t understand the meaning of the word tact]
She still has the option of kicking their heads in now. You know, leadership. Of course she won’t.
[Perhaps they were misrepresenting Greens Party policy?]
So your source is seriously “some anonymous person on an internet forum said so”?
[And there it is again.]
ShowsOn/Greentard is not a Greens supporter – just another angry individual.
rummel
😀
For a lib you aren’t half bad!
[it was early 2010 when Rudd adopted Gillard’s masterstroke tactic of saying the ALP would put everything on hold for 3 years!]
It was mid 2012 that:
– Hockey made himself look a fool trying to argue Sen Wong’s family is somehow less than his.
– Mal Washer turns his back on supposedly everything he believes about AS in order to toe the Abbott line on harshness.
– Malcolm Turnbull’s aspirations for same sex unions and equality for gay couples are cut down by today’s Liberal party because the leader says so.
At least the ALP tolerates diversity. The Liberal party, with which you affiliate does not.
ML
Get yourself a high school science book and stop wasting all our time with drivel about whether Mr Abbott’s various statements about AGW science are ‘fair’.
It is shameful stuff and, as a thinking Australian, you should be ashamed of it.
Trolli running this like an interview show. Oh she’s a star!! Pathetic.
[spur212
Posted Monday, July 9, 2012 at 9:47 pm | Permalink
Troy Bramston is back releasing the Newspoll at 11pm AEST on Sky News
Let’s see if GhostWhoVotes beats him to the punch]
…or James J!
[just another angry individual]
Anyone who isn’t angry about the current state of Australian politics and the two major parties in particular is doing a disserve to the country, IMHO.
disservice
Trioli is letting Turnbull walk all over her.
Ah, she cant actually shut Malcolm up. LOL!
James has been the go to source recently.
Criticism of this move on the Greens is coming from the Greens themselves and conservatives – a perfect sign of its potential danger to both of them.
Rummel,
You are an entertainer.
Triloi – the white door mat.
PB
[Perhaps they were misrepresenting Greens Party policy?
So your source is seriously “some anonymous person on an internet forum said so”?]
Who knows? Greens Party policy, as interpreted when the rubber hits the road, is plastic. There are various policy statements in relation to the UN that might mean anything or nothing. The stuff on the Greens Party web site is loose enough to drive trucks through.
A coalition government in 12 months.
Get used to it folks.
Unless the ALP can find someone who does ‘politics’ they’re are fucked with a capital F for Fucked.
Oakeshott country.
You asked a question about eleventy thousand posts again about the crown viz Qld’s challenge to MRRT.
I am going to take it on notice because it is a difficult one.
PB
[Anyone who isn’t angry about the current state of Australian politics and the two major parties in particular is doing a disserve to the country, IMHO.]
100% agree.
Bring back Jones!
PB
[If Labor really wanted to hurt the Greens it would adopt some moderate pro-environment policies with a mainstream twist to them. Let people who care about the Greens’ key issue feel good about voting Labor. Instead of, you know, supporting brown coal and logging and so on. The recent marine parks thing was the right idea.]
Agree. Labor has had a shockingly bad history when it comes to triple bottom line sustainability. It fart arses around with iconic, one-off stuff by way of deals, but it does not do systemic reform. This is one area that need major reform in the Labor Party. Ironically, it was a Liberal Government that delivered the key systemic environmental reforms.
What a hysterical bunch of nongs on here tonight!
Rooted.
I wouldn’t be surprised if PJK voted Liberal in disgust.
In utter complete fucking disgust at the idiot incompetent hjalfarsed way the ALP are cocking everything up they touch these days it just shits me.
This is about the worst QANDA i can remember. Its not a discussion, minimal audience involvement, its just people pontificating and Trolli looking a prat.
[3231
Jake
Posted Monday, July 9, 2012 at 9:51 pm | Permalink
Criticism of this move on the Greens is coming from the Greens themselves and conservatives – a perfect sign of its potential danger to both of them.]
Yes and no… I prefer a left government to have a few less pips then what the greens have on display. So I fully support labor kicking green ass now and into the future.
The greens on the other hand are screaming because the game is up and Labor is showing back bone.
Both Turnball and Bowen are looking terrible on QANDA, Ms Chu is looking like the voice of reason…
Turnball in particular looks very uncomfortable and so he should…
Strangely, I know two people who were in camps as children and came to Australia as refugees. One supports the Liberal Party policy and the other The Greens…Thankfully they are both here to contribute their unique contributions to Oz society.
Fulvio Sammut.
Filed it away.
I’ll remind you you saud that next year when we’re consigned to a decade or more of opposition.
But you know, keep up the happy slappy trolling…it all helps the cause…sheesh.
Let them all in… Lol
We will decide who comes to this country And the circumstances in which they come.
A bit too much self-flaggelation on here tonight. Lighten up people.
DISUNITY IS DEATH!!!!!!!
UNITE THE NON-RED GREENS AND A NEWLY-REFORMED LABOR PARTY INTO A NEW CENTRE-LEFT PARTY
File away, Chicken Little.
Why can’t anyone just ask a simple question?