James J reports a somewhat interesting result from Newspoll, with the two parties locked together at 50-50, from primary votes of 36% for Labor (up three on a fortnight ago), 41% for the Coalition (down five) and 12% for the Greens (up four from an anomalous and over-hyped result last time). The Labor two-party and Coalition primary and two-party figures were all last seen at this level in the poll of 18-20 February 2011, while Labor was last at 36% on the primary vote in the poll of 18-20 March 2011. Julia Gillard has shot to a resounding 46-32 lead as preferred prime minister, up from 39-38, and she is also up five on approval to 36% and down five on disapproval to 52%. This 10-point improvement in her net rating follows a 7% improvement in the previous poll. Tony Abbott meanwhile is down one on approval to 30% and up one on disapproval to 60%.
UPDATE: Troy Bramston on Twitter reports Nielsen has the Coalition leading 53-47 (down from 54-46 last month), from primary votes of 34% for Labor (up two), 45% for the Coalition (steady) and 10% for the Greens (down one). Julia Gillard is in the unfamiliar position of having a personal approval rating with a four in front of it, although this is partly to do with the unusually low uncommitted results Nielsen gets on its personal ratings. Her approval is at 42%, up three, and her disapproval is at 53%, down four. Tony Abbott meanwhile is down three to 36% and up two to 59%, which is five points worse than what was previously his weakest net rating from Nielsen. Gillard’s lead as preferred prime minister has widened from 46-45 to 47-44.
UPDATE 2: Full tables from GhostWhoVotes. In brief:
• The poll finds 44% saying they would vote Labor against 41% for the Coalition if Kevin Rudd was leader, for a two-party lead to Labor of 53-47, though I personally take these sorts of questions with a grain of salt.
• Kevin Rudd continues to lead Julia Gillard as preferred Labor leader, but his lead is down from 60-31 to 55-37. Gillard leads 52-47 among Labor supporters.
• Malcolm Turnbull on the other hand has a commanding 63-30 lead over Tony Abbott, including a 53-45 lead among Coalition supporters.
• On the state breakdowns, Labor’s two-party vote is at 47% in New South Wales (up two), 49% in Victoria (down one), 42% in Queensland (up one), 44% in Western Australia (down two) and 54% in South Australia/Northern Territory (up seven), remembering the sample sizes on the smaller states in particular are extremely small.
• Support for the carbon price is essentially unchanged on a month ago, with support up one to 37% and opposition steady at 59%, and 3% thinking themselves better off (steady), 38% worse off (down two) and 54% unchanged (steady).
UPDATES 3 & 4: It’s Monday madness in polldom, with Roy Morgan also bringing its publication forward a day to join with the regular Essential Research. The latter deflates the Labor balloon a little, showing two-party preferred steady at 55-45 and the Coalition actually gaining a point on the primary vote, to 48%, with Labor and the Greens steady on 34% and 9%. However, Julia Gillard is found to have done a lot better on leader attribute measures than when the questions were posed in the April 2 poll, which was also a 55-45 result.
The biggest movers for Gillard are “out of touch with ordinary people”, down nine to 56%, and “superficial”, down eight to 46%, while her smallest improvement is on “understands the problems facing Australia”, which is up two to 43%. Tony Abbott meanwhile rates over 50% on every negative measure, ranging for 51% for erratic to 63% for arrogant. On positive attributes, both leaders score strongest on “hard-working” (Gillard 69%, Abbott 67%) and “intelligent” (68% and 62%), and weakest on “trustworthy” (30% each), “visionary” (31% and 29%) and “more honest than other politicians” (31% and 27%).
Essential offers further interesting reading in the shape of an exercise on drug laws, in which propositions about policy responses were worded slightly differently for two separate sub-samples. The results were found to be all but identical, with across-the-board support for the hardest available line. The most liberal finding was of 38% support for cannabis decriminalisation, with 49% opposed. Elsewhere, a startling 83% said they were willing to sign on for “government legislation to prevent people from using social media to attack and bully individuals”, against 9% opposed.
The Morgan face-to-face poll combines results for the last two weekend’s surveying, and nudges further in favour of Labor to give them another best-result-since-March. On the primary vote, Labor is up a point to 35%, the Coalition is down one to 40.5%, and the Greens are up half a point to 12%. That comes out as a 50.5-49.5 lead to the Coalition if allocating preferences as per the previous election result, as is done by all the pollsters measured above, or at 53.5-46.5 according to the curiously pro-Coalition preference allocations nominated by its respondents.
Other news:
• The Queensland Greens have selected Adam Stone, who ran in Mount Coot-tha at the state election and was touted during the campaign as the party’s “senior candidate”, to lead their Senate ticket at the next election. Stone has “worked in policy roles within the State and Commonwealth public services and as an advisor in the Federal Parliament”. Other candidates for the preselection were Libby Connors, a history lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland, and Jim McDonald, a former union official and industrial relations lecturer, who respectively ran in Yeerongpilly and Noosa at the state election.
• Leslie White of the Weekly Times reports on polling for an unspecified party showing underwhelming support for the Nationals in Hume, where they were said to be running by the Greens on a voting intention question that didn’t specify candidates. The Nationals are hoping to gain the seat from the Liberals with the retirement of Alby Schultz, with Senator Fiona Nash and state MPs Katrina Hodgkinson and Niall Blair discussed as possible candidates to run against the Liberals’ Angus Taylor.
• Katherine Feeney of Fairfax reports Jane Prentice, the LNP member for the Brisbane seat of Ryan, has seen off preselection challenges from Jonathon Flegg, son of state government minister Bruce Flegg, and pharmacist John Caris.
Kids, do not try this at home with Mr Boswell:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa3M4ou3kvw
Abbott really is on the nose
Gawd Turnbull is the most popular leader choice 🙂
mari
[poroti
Did you see my reply to your comment last night? Want to know how many we have” to go and get” before we reach and catch Big Dadda himself]
Missed it but the layers are peeling away quite nicely. However I am sure Rupes will have installed in his company structure a myriad of firewalls between him and any merde. One of these days mari the choir will strike up at volume 11.
[Roy Morgan, sample of 668:
Preferred Labor leader: Rudd 34 (+1 since Jan), Gillard 22 (+3), Smith 9 (-1), Swan 7 (-1), Combet 4 (-), Shorten 4 (-4).
Preferred Liberal leader: Turnbull 42 (+5), Abbott 19 (-3), Hockey 18 (-1), Bishop 7 (+1).]
The form of the question is interesting:
“If you were a Labor Party voter and helping to choose the Labor leader for the next Federal Election, who would you prefer?”
“If you were a Liberal or National Party voter and helping to choose the Coalition leader for the next Federal Election, who would you prefer?”
It is rather different to a straight “who do you think should be leader?”
[poroti
Posted Friday]
Yes know that but as you say evenually even firewalls can be cracked and our respective renditions will soar to the skies and meet in one huge outpouring of “Joy” Wow I am waxing lyrical
I loved the last couple of lines in the Lisa Wilkinson/Tony Abbott interview this morning:
Tony Abbott: “I’m just being honest, Lisa.”
Lisa W. : “It’s always nice when you’re honest, Mr Abbott.” (Sweet smile) 🙂
Tony Abbott: (Rictus grin) 😀
QUT has its own act.
Queensland University of Technology Act 1998.
Shellbell is correct an authorised person can ask someone to leave if they are deemed to be a public nuisance. The person can refuse if they have a reasonable excuse.
Could be lawyers at 20 paces.
Socrates, Victoria, others reporting on the case:
[An excellent result from the Federal Court with Lehman Brthers being found guilty on the sale of CDOs to Councils and charities in Australia. This is a test case with wide implications, as well as being worth up to $250 million in itself:]
Have those of you with a copy of the judgment emailed it to the US (Huff Post, Bloomberg & all those sites BK & others link us during the day) and UK (Guardian, Independent)?
It’s a ground breaking decision with huge implications, especially in nations brought to their knees by Lehman and others of their ilk. So please send those emails!
I assume Lehman will go to the HCA, although the Tobacco Case might give them cause to think. Bring it on! Bring it on!
Meanwhile, celebrate another Big Tick for the small nation that continues to fight well above its weight.
mari,
As you’re here, I just thought I’d say that I am seriously considering making the journey up to Port Macquarie in November. I might just tie it in with a visit to my parent’s house for my kids, who haven’t seen them in a while. The folks live in Hallidays Point.
If you want you can get William, or Bushfire Bill, to give you my e-mail address. 🙂
Interesting to note that Abbott and Hockey are only 1% apart in Preferred Liberal Leader rating.
[I assume Lehman will go to the HCA, although the Tobacco Case might give them cause to think. Bring it on! Bring it on!]
Lehmans willl need a point of law to appeal that on though; they can’t recontest the facts of this case. So this decision is big.
[C@tmomma
Posted Friday, September 21, 2012 at 5:56 pm | Permalink
mari,
As you’re here, I just thought I’d say that I am seriously considering making the journey up to Port Macquarie in November. I might just tie it in with a visit to my parent’s house for my kids, who haven’t seen them in a while. The folks live in Hallidays Point.]
That would be great, you can be assured of a warm welcome on 16th November,
I will ask William to give you my email address and take it from there
If you want you can get William, or Bushfire Bill, to give you my e-mail address
[C@tmomma
Posted Friday, September 21, 2012 at 5:56 pm | Permalink
mari,
As you’re here, I just thought I’d say that I am seriously considering making the journey up to Port Macquarie in November. I might just tie it in with a visit to my parent’s house for my kids, who haven’t seen them in a while. The folks live in Hallidays Point.]
That would be great, you can be assured of a warm welcome on 16th November,
I will ask William to give you my email address and take it from there
If you want you can get William, or Bushfire Bill, to give you my e-mail address
Treasurer Swan’s foray into US politics was not in any way, shape or form comparable to Howard’s comments about Obama in 2007.
Swan has made the entirely reasonable, and totally truthful point that the Republican Party has been partly taken over by the so-called Tea Party hard right faction whom he describes as ‘cranks and crazies,’ and this rump of Ayn Rand-ites is, indeed, manifestly a pack of economic and social loonies. These are the same crackpots who have supported the rabid ‘birther’ conspiracy, regularly accuse President Obama of being either a Socialist, or a secret Muslim, and who, with the active partisanship their own TV news network in the form of FoxNews, have hijacked the agenda of the US Congress to the extent that the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ looms in January as an automatic trigger to dump the US economy back into recession – how can any reasonable person not be convinced that those who have brought the US political process to such an impasse are anything other than ‘cranks and crazies?’
Contrast Swan’s comments with Howard’s ill-advised intervention where he stated in late 2007 (when Obama was still just a candidate in the Democratic primaries) that March 2008 should be a red letter date for Osama bin Laden to be celebrating, if Obama won the Democratic Super Tuesday set of primaries and thus clinched the nomination. Even then this was errant nonsense, as Obama was already on the public record as stating he would make the search for Osama bin Laden one of his top priorities if he became President, and, of course, we now that that this is exactly what he did, culminating in the killing of bin Laden by US special forces in May 2011.
The two sets of comments are qualitatively and quantitatively different – Swan has merely stated what is obvious to all fair observers – the Tea Party are seriously dangerous and deleterious as a political force in the US and by extension to the world economic outlook, whereas Howard’s comments were not only factually wrong (and have been proven so by subsequent events) but were politically inept.
The analysis by the media during today has been the usual gragbag of superficial analogies and Menzies House press releases, with no attempt to make any real substantive historical comparisons of the context, or the validity of the two sets of circumstances.
ABC have linked to teh summary LEhmans judgement here:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-09-21/lehmann-brothers-test-case/4273896#lehmanruling
This bit is the core of it:
[This showed that not only were the SCDOs risky, illiquid, and, if sold, might realise far less than their face value, but also that Grange was conscious that the trust its uninformed Council clients had placed in it was being used to Grange’s advantage.
For those reasons, Grange is liable to compensate the Councils for their losses incurred as a result of their investments. I have concluded that damages should be assessed on the basis that the Councils are entitled to:
(1) the amount lost in investments in SCDOs that have either been wiped out or paid less than 100 cents in the dollar on maturity or which the Councils sold at a loss in an effort to avert further loss (being $3 million for Swan, over $4.1million for Parkes and $8.80 million for Wingecarribee);
(2) the difference between the par values and the values that I have assessed of unmatured SCDOs;
(3) in respect of the Dante notes, net present values essentially based on averaging the two possible outcomes of the current conflicting UK and US court decisions and the substantial delay that is likely before any sum is repaid to theinvestors]
Sounds like a pretty clear win to me.
Have a good weekend. Good luck Crows. You will need it.
The Big Ship
Agree – Swan will easily get away with saying ‘parts of the Republican Party’ are nutters.
Re Lehman, if the relevant company is in liquidation, the liquidator would need to agree to the appeal and in any event the leave of the court may be required.
If the appeal would dissipate in legal costs the money left for the Councils etc, the liquidator may be reluctant to appeal.
Sigh.
It’s funny how being told you can’t do something you know you can’t do can depress you.
Reapplied for Newstart allowance. Told them on the phone my chances of getting work were limited, given my hip. Got a letter from my doctor which – even to me – made me sound like a wreck.
So was told I was going to be ‘assessed’ by DHS. The assessment turned out to be a two minute phone call – “Do you want a year off? OK, then.”
Makes it so real, somehow. A year when I effectively can’t do anything (the painkillers i’m taking affect my concentration, so even my brain isn’t working properly…)
Sigh.
Is anyone else having looping cookie problems. 😆
Zoomster,
I am so sad to learn this – hugs and good vibes heading NE as I type.
If you prepare to pay $50K to come to my private dinner. I will say anything you want me to say. Including praising that dickhead Tony Abbott
zoomster
[
Told them on the phone my chances of getting work were limited, given my hip. Got a letter from my doctor which – even to me – made me sound like a wreck.]
All the best and I hope things improve.Your comment “I was going to be ‘assessed’ by DHS” gave me a jolt as I thought of this DHS http://www.dhs.gov/
zoomster
Lots of virtual hugs headng your way.
Zoomster – heaps of hugs going south to you as well. Hope you don’t have to wait much longer for the op.
zoomster
It is a shock to realise that we are not made of kryptonite – have a lazy year, get well and then get back into gear. :kiss:
Just saw PM on telly and she’s wearing red and white! We are on for a win now #goswans
I think comments should maybe go at the bottom?
Hilarious. Watch Jon Stewart faceoff’s with Bill O’Reilley. Stewart: “Bill, what did those Nuns do to you?” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4ur8-SXYgU
Stop the Hand-Bags ! QLD is to get new Police uniforms , Brown ones.
What is Crikey doing?
[What is Crikey doing?]
The lets confuse everyone by introducing a new format by surprise!!!
William Bowe , What have you done ? Comments at the TOP ??? I am lost , help !
WTF?
What’s happened to PB?
Ho ho ho.
Lets change a working system live – great idea.
Okay – so comment now leads the contributions I have to scroll to 5731 to find the comment!
Why isn’t the comment box below the last few contributions?
Not sure this is working so well dear Mr Crikey
5,700 comments per page is a novel idea.
WTF is this shit?
Comments at the top of 115 pages. or have i got a bug?
Small type hard to read
Whose bright idea was this?
Looks like a Liberal policy initiative. Lots of pretty colours and poorly functional!
Comment box wrong end.
Refreshing all posts instead of a single page takes eternity.
It also aligns right which is crap for left wingers.
😥
BILBO???
Sweaty palms
Hypo-ventilating
Sinking feeling in pit of stomach.
Good the noxious ads are now blocked – next move the comment block
115 pages?!!!!
I do have a download limit.
Not William’s fault unless he is trying his hand at IT maintenance.
I can comment in Chrome (no AdBlock) but not in Firefox (AdBlock).
Coincidence? I think not!
Preview is right-justified.
Correction: AdBlock enabled in Chrome as well but not working. Hmmm …
I take it Friday night speed-dating is out, then?
Test
Can’t take it.
If I stay I’ll jump – I will I’m telling you, I’ll jump.
Aaaaaargghhhh!
Oh ok, I can access the comment box if I am using chrome.
With Firefox, The comment box flashes up on the screen for about five seconds and then disappears.
William I have emailed on this.
Is there a reason why chrome is showing the comment box but not Firefox ?