Morgan phone poll: 50.5-49.5 to Coalition; Seat of the week: Bonner

A new phone poll corroborates Newspoll. Or does it?

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Roy Morgan has published a poll which, so far as the headline figure goes, is extremely interesting in that it a) is consistent with the Newspoll result, and b) was conducted by phone, and thus cannot be anticipated to suffer the pro-Labor bias typical of Morgan’s face-to-face polling. However, the headline figure to which I refer is from respondent-allocated preferences, which for so long have been flowing to Labor in confoundingly weak proportions in Morgan’s face-to-face polls. In this poll however they have flowed to Labor inordinately strongly. If using the measure which allocates preferences according to how they flowed at the previous election, which I and all other pollsters recommended, the Coalition has a somewhat more comfortable lead of 52.5-47.5. The primary vote results are striking in being high for both major parties: 39.5% for Labor and 47% for the Coalition, against 8% for the Greens and a very low 5.5% for others.

The poll was evidently conducted from Monday to Thursday (despite some confusion in Morgan’s heading) from a sample of 668, with a margin of error of about 3.8%. Other questions were also posed by this poll, so stay tuned for more detail.

NOTE: As you may have noticed, Crikey has a new look and its implementation is characteristically being accompanied by teething problems – most seriously the failure of comments thread pagination, which has caused the previous 5000-plus comments thread to not work terribly well. Presumably this one should be okay though, for at least as long as it remains fairly short.

UPDATE: Further findings from the Morgan poll are that Julia Gillard recorded a fairly solid approval rating of 40%, with disapproval of 51%, which represents changes of 3% and 6% since Morgan last posed the question in January. Tony Abbott meanwhile is respectively down four to 32% and up four to 60%. On the question of better prime minister, Gillard has remained steady on 45% while Abbott has dropped four points to 37%. Abbott has also lost further ground to Malcolm Turnbull on the question of best leader for the Liberal Party, the former down three to 19% and the latter up five to 42%. That leaves Abbott nearly level with Joe Hockey, who is down one to 18%. Julia Gillard continues to trail Kevin Rudd as preferred Labor leader, with Gillard up three to 22% and Rudd up one to 34%.

And not forgetting …

Seat of the week: Bonner

To commemorate Labor’s improved position in the polls, Seat of the Week takes its first excursion to the Coalition side of the electoral pendulum.

The Brisbane electorate of Bonner extends south-westwards from the bayside Wynnum-Manly area to Mount Gravatt. It was created at the 2004 election, and has remarkably been left unchanged by the two redistributions conducted since. The seat is also remarkable for having changed hands with each election, starting with the Liberals’ success in overhauling a 1.9% notional margin in 2004. The defeated Labor candidate was Con Sciacca, a Keating government minister who held Bowman from 1987 to 1996 and again from 1998 to 2004. Sciacca took the safer option when the transfer of Wynnum-Manly to the new seat left Bowman with a notional Liberal margin of 3.1%, but he was unable to withstand an adverse swing of 2.4%. Labor appeared to be especially hampered by the loss of Kevin Rudd’s personal vote in those areas of the electorate which had previously been in Griffith.

The inaugural member for Bonner thus became Ross Vasta, a staffer to Senator Brett Mason, former restaurant owner, and the son of noted Brisbane barrister and Bjelke-Petersen era Supreme Court justice Angelo Vasta. Vasta’s main source of publicity in his one term in parliament was his involvement in the scandal surrounding misuse of electoral printing allowances, for which he was cleared by the Director of Public Prosecutions shortly before the 2007 election. He was always going to have his work cut out defending the Coalition’s most marginal Queensland seat at the 2007 election, and duly fell victim to a 5.2% swing which compared favourably with a statewide swing of 7.5%.

Bonner was then held for a term by Kerry Rea, previously a Brisbane councillor representing a ward that included the area around Mount Gravatt. Vasta meanwhile returned to his old job with Brett Mason and unsuccessfully contested the Wynnum-Manly ward for the Liberals at the 2008 Brisbane council election. The newly constituted Liberal National Party then gave him the chance to recover his old seat, which did not seem a likely proposition in the political climate of the time. While that had certainly changed by the time of the 2010 election, Vasta’s victory on the back of an emphatic 7.4% swing was a serious disappointment for Labor, making Bonner the “safest” of its nine notionally held Queensland seats to fall to the LNP.

Labor’s preselected candidate for the next election is Laura Fraser Hardy, an associate with Hall Payne Lawyers.

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.

1,563 comments on “Morgan phone poll: 50.5-49.5 to Coalition; Seat of the week: Bonner”

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  1. More generally on worst LOTO net satisfaction Newspoll ratings:
    [- Abbott’s -31% (his worst; to date)
    – Turnbull -33% (Gretch)
    – Nelson -17%
    – Rudd “worst” was +35% 😀
    – Beazley II -30%
    – Latham -16%
    – Crean -38%
    – Beazley I -13%
    – Howard II -12%
    – Downer -49% (will this record ever be batteredbroken?)
    – Hewson -42%
    – Peacock -44%
    – Howard I -35%]

  4. Joe6pack,

    I’d reckon that Labor would be anticipating that at the least.

    Except for the fact that the stupid LNP who should have walked in an election victory this time, decided to buy a little insurance by taking on board a dubious, totally untested leader in absentia who had never even been a backbencher in a State Parliament because of his high level of recognition in the south eastern region.

    It’s the LNP that has the hollow feeling in the stomach regarding its chances at the next election.

    Stock up on the popcorn for it.

  5. Aaaarrrggghhh!!! The only way I could get into this place was by busting in through the back door of Google Chrome. Every time I tried to access the new format in Mozilla Firefox, my preferred browser, the Comment Box would appear for a nanosecond and then disappear off the face of the earth! Ugh!

    Oh well, better late than never! And where are our automatic emoticon buttons? Every other blog, just about, has them?

  10. William Bowe

    [Yes, it was in pre-Crikey days. I haven’t heard too many complaints about the 50-per-page regime though.]
    Sez you at comment 103 🙂

  11. Quite like the 50 posts per page but not that important to me.

    One can kind of take in 50 posts as a current time span.

    At certain times of the day, 100 posts will seem like and eternity.

  13. [Zuvele Leschen ‏@ZuveleLeschen

    Could someone with access to Pollbludger pls post that I’ll be down in Melb Sunday/Monday? Planning to go to NGV Monday ]

  18. William at your 103. No new page.

    On the other point, maybe few realise that it was 100 per page.

    At 100, it was much more contextual and flowing. With the 50, unrelated stuff or casual interjection tends to swamp the immediate topic, as well as swamp an equally interesting other topic.

    And you can see that for example, links are reposted, numerous times, often with apology in case.

  19. I Like it apart from the comment box at the top.
    Easy to read, William.

    I’m loving the Swannies score too but who knows how I’ll feel in about an hour or so.

  20. Mick

    Show him 2 graphs.

    21 years of US economy
    21 years of Australia economy.

    Say there is you there is us. Follow us follow success

  23. Hey whingers: instead of showing a disgraceful sense of entitlement, how about saying thanks to PollBludger for the wonderful service he provides? He isn’t obliged to provide all this analysis for you, so if you don’t like it or the layout of the site, then bugger off. The rest of us who are grateful for what he does say thanks WB for keeping us updated!

  26. Yup, just checked Poll Bludger on firefox again, and the comment box disappears like the Chesire Cat as soon as you see it pop up. 🙁

  28. To my knowledge, the worst net satisfaction polled (by a reputable pollster) for any Opposition Leader who became PM was a -24 by Fraser in a Morgan/Gallup one-week sample in October 1975 (followed by -23 and -21 in subsequent weeks, his last in the position of Leader of the Opposition). But Fraser’s unpopularity as opposition leader was only very short-lived at the height of a crisis that swiftly resolved itself in his favour. Generally he had been a popular Opposition Leader until then.

    The simple answer to the question of whether anyone who has been nearly as unpopular for so long as Abbott has ever won government from opposition is that this certainly has not happened in the last 60 years. Before that we don’t know, because there was so little polling. Perhaps Menzies would have had some pretty bad ratings as LOpp in his time.

    This doesn’t mean it cannot happen.

  33. Its. Very mondern loooking william
    But middle finger repetive straini jury, islikley

    Go ing back up the page

    This is designed for reading a newspaper commentary
    Where ond does not interact withany one

  35. Okay – so using the page indicator – 1, 2, 3 there appears to be 50 posts per page but scroll through and there is no apparent cut off from 50 into 51 and 100 into 101 – just a continuous flow of items.

    As I write this the indication is 131 comments yet I have just left the the final comment at over 160.

    Not quite back to “normal” – well, not back to the old ways of doing business.

    However, I do like working with a bigger font.

  36. Oh. Conclusion. I for one would prefer 100 comments per page, as the techies are going to have to do a page fix anyway.

    Maybe others would offer their opinion.

    Scorpio, lyne lady, Bushfire, Dio, Socrates, to name a few jump immediately to mind.

  37. [Giovanni Torre ‏@GiovanniTorre

    But without Boswell in the Senate, who will take the little male senators to the footy or fishing? ]

  38. PTMD,
    It might have to do with the fact I have AdBlock on my firefox pages, which is my right, *cough*, Crikey, and that may be what is causing the comment box not to open. On Chrome I have one of those WSPA ads(that have never really changed a thing for the poor animals in the ads, I might add 😉 ), on my page.

  40. Its. Very mondern loooking william

    Yep, that’s the idea.

    But middle finger repetive straini jury, islikley

    Do bear in mind that you’re having to scroll through three times as many comments to get there as you’re supposed to, on account of comments pagination not working. Though even allowing for that, I will try to get the comments box put back where it was.

  41. SK, thanks for the link. It is, of course, extremely frustrating arguing with Economic illiterates, especially when they are Tea-partyistas and that any article that you use that proves they are arguing nonsense will be completely disregarded, as they turn the argument back on to you.
    It reminds me of Mark Twains warning not to argument with Idiots.

  42. Hi there, Paddy2

    Yep, still here. Now the Secretary of the Resident’s Association.

    Sorry to read a time ago of whatever Can Do Without Everything has done to your project.

    BK recently did field work on native grasses, incidentally. Might be worth an exchange.

  43. Rats deserting ship
    [A top officer in the Mitt Romney presidential team abruptly abandoned ship yesterday offering fresh embarrassment for the Republican candidate and capping an awful 10 days of below-decks pandemonium and chaos.

    With less than 50 days left in the race, Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota Governor who, as co-chairman of Mr Romney’s campaign, had been one of his most visible spokesmen at the recent convention and on the trail, announced that he was bowing out to head a financial industry lobbying group in Washington.]
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mitt-romneys-team-rocked-as-key-player-tim-pawlenty-walks-8160852.html

    Sounds like a bit of, what shall we call this, hypocrisy, perhaps?
    [When former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty was campaigning to be the Republican presidential nominee, he told reporters that his “truth message to Wall Street is going to be, ‘Get your snout out of the trough.’” Which, maybe that’s still his truth message? But instead of delivering it as co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s campaign, Governor Pawlenty will be speaking it as head of the Financial Services Roundtable, a banking industry lobby.]
    http://observer.com/2012/09/former-gov-pawlenty-puts-snout-in-wall-street-trough-senate-holds-hft-hearings-roundup/

  44. MBOX 123 RE WILLAM’S EFORTS
    __________
    RE MR BOWE
    YES I AGREE WE OWE WILLIAM A VOTE OF THANKS FOR ALL HIS EFFORTS
    THANKS WILLIAM

  45. mbox@223 – I think

    Not whineging sport.

    PB has been Rolls Royce and currently we are making do with a Trabi.

    One man’s whinge is another’s feedback.

  47. WB
    How come I have a comments box on Firefox (at the top)and no comment box on Chrome when other bludgers have it the other way round?Also is it possible for links to open in a new tab instead of the current page instead of having to remember to click the scroll wheel to open in a new tab?

  48. [box
    Posted Friday, September 21, 2012 at 9:11 pm | PERMALINK
    Hey whingers: instead of showing a disgraceful sense of entitlement, how about saying thanks to PollBludger for the wonderful service he provides? He isn’t obliged to provide all this analysis for you, so if you don’t like it or the layout of the site, then bugger off. The rest of us who are grateful for what he does say thanks WB for keeping us updated!]

    Good whingebut without us crickey and wb would be a blip on the internet radar. So WB does not provide a free service now he is handsomely paid to do this

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