Courtesy of The Australian comes the quarterly Newspoll breakdowns for July-September, providing big-sample results state-by-state and my gender and metropolitan/non-metropolitan. This suggests Labor’s recent Newspoll recovery has been driven entirely by Queensland, where the Coalition’s lead shrunk to 58-42 from 65-35 in April-June. Elsewhere, the position is stable at 56-44 in New South Wales, Labor is up a point in both Victoria and South Australia to respectively lead 52-48 and trail 52-48, and they have actually gone backwards in Western Australia to 58-42, from what was probably an overly generous 55-45 last time. In aggregate, the result shows the Coalition’s lead down to 54-46 from 56-44 in the previous quarter, with little change in the leaders’ personal ratings, the survey period having mostly preceded the recent improvement in Julia Gillard’s ratings and decline in Tony Abbott’s. The results show the standing of each essentially stable across all demographics.
UPDATE (8/10/12): Cathy Alexander at Crikey reports Essential Research has Labor gaining a further point on the primary vote to 37%, with the Coalition steady at 47%. Essential has shown Labor gaining five points on the primary vote over six weeks, to reach a level not seen since March last year. The Coalition’s two-party preferred lead is unchanged at 53-47. Essential has smartly chosen this week to repeat an exercise from a year ago concerning trust in media personalities, finding Alan Jones among the most famous but least trusted (22% trust against 67% do not trust). The others best recognised were Laurie Oakes and George Negus, with the former slightly edging out the latter on trust (72% compared with 69%). Only 17% registered support for funding cuts to the ABC, with around a third each wanting funding maintained or increased. Opinion on government regulation of the media was fairly evenly spread between wanting more, less and the same.
UPDATE (6/10/12): The table below compares quarterly state-level figures for both Newspoll and Nielsen for both the July-September and April-June quarters. In the case of Newspoll, sample sizes range from 700 for South Australia to 1700 for NSW, while Nielsen’s range from about 1300 for NSW to fewer than 400 for Western Australia and South Australia/Northern Territory. The two pollsters agree in showing Labor recovering by six or seven points in Queensland, which is corroborated by Galaxy – their polls conducted in Queensland roughly in the middle of the two polling periods had the Coalition lead shrinking from 64-36 to 57-43. Both Newspoll and Nielsen have produced steady results of around 50-50 in Victoria, but a disparity emerges in the case of NSW, where Labor shot from 40% to 46% in Nielsen while remaining steady on 44% in Newspoll. Caution should be taken in comparing the smaller states given Nielsen’s small samples.
Newspoll Nielsen Newspoll Nielsen Jul-Sep Jul-Sep Apr-Jun Apr-Jun Total 46 46 44 42 NSW 44 46 44 40 Victoria 52 49 51 50 Queensland 42 40 35 34 SA/NT 48 50 47 47 WA 42 42 45 39
UPDATE 2 (7/10/12): Not forgetting …
Seat of the week: O’Connor
Covering rural and remote areas in the south of Western Australia, O’Connor delivered the WA Nationals a House of Representatives seat at the last election for the first time since 1974, with their candidate Tony Crook unseating Liberal veteran Wilson Tuckey. Crook’s win followed a redistribution which fundamentally rearranged the state’s remote areas, abolishing the vast seat of Kalgoorlie and dividing its territory between O’Connor and the new seat of Durack. This saw O’Connor absorb a vast swathe of the state’s south-east, including Esperance and the Goldfields. Whereas the whole of the state’s “Wheatbelt” had previously been in O’Connor, a transfer of 38,000 voters in its northern half (including Merredin) to Durack was required to balance its gains elsewhere. O’Connor continued to encompass Albany, the southern Wheatbelt towns of Narrogin, Wagin and Katanning, and the South West region forestry towns of Bridgetown and Manjimup.
O’Connor was created at the 1980 election, its territory having previously been covered by Moore and Canning. It was gained for the Liberals in 1980 by parliamentary newcomer Wilson Tuckey, who owed his “Ironbar” nickname to an assault conviction over a 1967 incident involving a length of steel cable and an Aboriginal patron of his Carnarvon hotel. Tuckey’s win was assisted by a schism in the state National Party, which resulted in two separate organisations fielding rival candidates. Emnity with the Nationals was to emerge as a theme of Tuckey’s career, with the Nationals repeatedly placing him behind various minor candidates in their preference recommendations. The Nationals caused Tuckey little trouble electorally over the years, consistently finishing third behind Labor on occasions when they fielded a candidate. That nearly changed in 2007, but Tuckey’s primary vote remained strong enough that he would have comfortably prevailed even if the Nationals had managed to edge ahead of Labor and absorb their preferences.
Tuckey was 75 at the time of the 2010 election, and regarded in Canberra as an increasingly erratic presence. While the redistribution had in one sense done him a good turn by dividing the Nationals heartland between two electorates, this was largely negated by the Nationals’ successful 2008 state election strategy of appealing more broadly to regional areas. Among the areas where inroads were made for for the first time was the Goldfields, which Tuckey had never represented. It was in the Goldfields that Tuckey suffered the most damage, the Kalgoorlie-Boulder booths collectively going against him 63-37. However, he was also outpolled in Albany, and the split elsewhere was roughly even. Crook had no trouble overtaking the Labor candidate, with the Nationals vote up 19.7% to 28.9% and Labor down 9.2% to 17.1%. Tuckey easily led on the primary vote with 38.4%, down 10.4% on 2007, but an 80% share of Labor and Greens preferences saw Crook prevail at the final count with a margin of 3.6%.
Tuckey reacted to his defeat by saying he did “not intend to be gracious at all”, and proclaimed Crook to be a “nobody”. Crook had in fact been the chairman of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and was the state election candidate for Kalgoorlie in 2008. His status as a nobody was addressed soon enough by the circumstances of the election result, which placed him as a non-aligned member in a hung parliament, the WA Nationals having campaigned as an independent party that would not “report, answer and take direction from Warren Truss”. However, few were surprised when Crook, after a fortnight of prevarication, announced he would support a Coalition government on confidence and supply. He nonetheless sat on the cross-benches until May 2012, when he joined the Nationals party room while remaining absent from joint Coalition meetings.
The complexities of rural politics in Western Australia have come to the fore recently as a result of the federal government’s move to wind up the Wheat Export Authority, the culmination of a process of wheat exporting deregulation which began after the Cole Royal Commission into wheat sales to Iraq. The more protectionist eastern states Nationals, who had split from the Liberals to vote against deregulation of the industry in 2006, persuaded Tony Abbott to back an amendment to sustain the authority for a further two years, incurring the intense displeasure of agricultural interests in Western Australia. The state party organisation was very keen that its members should cross the floor over the issue, and it took the exercise of Julie Bishop’s authority to determine their support for Abbott’s position. As the Liberal members had feared, they were duly snookered when Crook announced that he would split from his party colleagues to vote down any such amendment.
There had been hope in the Liberal camp that Crook might be tarred at the next election by the brush of Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, but this has presumably been negated by the wheat export issue. Their candidate is Katanning farmer Rick Wilson, who won an April 2011 preselection vote over Cranbrook Shire president Doug Forrest and Kalgoorlie pastoralist Ross Wood.
Lizzie @ 4079,
I have visions of the
“>
” alt=”” width=”” height=”” />&w=400&h=331&ei=5pdyUOKTI-mjiAehi4DoDw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=408&vpy=294&dur=4188&hovh=204&hovw=247&tx=202&ty=32&sig=109770893145029322013&page=2&tbnh=143&tbnw=192&start=20&ndsp=22&ved=1t:429,r:8,s:20,i:164″ rel=”nofollow”>monstrous regiment of women advancing silently upon pore Mr Jones …
lizzie
[Kiera Gorden @KieraGorden
Now James Ashby is claiming he lives in fear of being, get this, ASSASSINATED! http://bit.ly/R64RMW #AusPol]
Just a little prepositioning. If it all goes wrong for him then “M’lud have mercy upon him for he really does not know what he is doing” .
[Just a little prepositioning. If it all goes wrong for him then “M’lud have mercy upon him for he really does not know what he is doing” .]
… and will pay costs.
Has anyone thought that perhaps Tony just enjoys dressing up?
http://t.co/GEEWYo1N
Ducky:
Kerrie Tucker always struck me as decidedly immature, and while she may have been well liked, I believe Antony Green posted in the wake of the last election how difficult it is to wrest Humphries from the Senate given the electoral system we have.
That said, surely someone with maturity, gravitas, and without that fervent Green needling whites-of-the-eyes we see from most Greens MPs these days would be a chance to pip Humphries?
Then again, such a person would probably stand for Labor, not the Greens.
TLBD
[… and will pay costs.]
I hope.
fiona,
Now, that is what I call a Hit Squad. Handbags would be an unnecessary accoutrement.
Graeme
Are you a constitutional lawyer?
I imagine that while so ever Assange remains an Australian citizen then he can stand. Applying for asylum does not make you a non citizen. If you are granted citizenship then you would not be eligible.
It is actually a VERY important free speech protection.
Let us imagine that Australia is somehow taken over by a government run by Tony Abbott, Cory Bernadi, Alan Jones, Jeff Kennet, Campbell Newman and Sophie Murabella, with control of the Senate. They behave like themselves with no checks and balances and REAL trouble arises. Unions are banned and lots of people led by Bill Shorten (who is banned from sitting on some trumped up charge) flee to say the USA and seek asylum. Some cronies in NZ have challenged him on a sex charge – say a drunken group sex with a minor offence (get the whole union team opn charges etc). But they vow to seek to stand for re-election in the Senate or HoR.
Think they should be allowed to stand? I do. This is known as principle. thinking about the actual implications of decisions.
fess,
I have met Kerrie Tucker a couple of times. She was softly spoken and didn’t put herself forward.
Lizzie,
[… perhaps Tony just enjoys dressing up?]
😀
Can’t you just see him, as a little boy, delving into the dressup box and coming out looking
&w=320&h=225&ei=BZxyUOTvFuWdiAfnoYCYCw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=321&vpy=344&dur=2016&hovh=180&hovw=256&tx=80&ty=154&sig=109770893145029322013&page=1&tbnh=131&tbnw=179&start=0&ndsp=20&ved=1t:429,r:16,s:0,i:121″ rel=”nofollow”>like this?
You want immature? Try Sarah Way Too Young.
Fran Barlow@4100
He has offered to do so, in Sweden at the time and then later in the UK. For reasons best known to the Swedes, they’ve declined. They could interview him in the embassy.
and where has he said that ?
All available data that we know on this case is that Assange left Sweden soon after these two Women made their complaint, hence Sweden subsequently laying charges and then applying to the UK for extradition.
[One can assume that the charges are a ruse to get him into the hands of the US who has declared him an enemy of the state and is, planning the Bradley Manning routine for him.]
Or one can assume, that simply the Swedes would like Assange to answer to the allegations that have been made against him.
From reports that I have read, the Swedes seem rather offended at what they see flagrant contempt of their Laws on Assanges part. I can’t recall the Americans applying to Sweden to have Assange on-extradited to the States either.
I’m very concerned that Assange seems to consider his girlfriends as chattels (and all those who have sought to aid him btw), what about you ?
I got the impression from Assange that Wikileaks would be the litigant vs Gillard, rather than Assange himself.
I thought organisations of more than 50 cannot sue for defamation in Australia (according to John Safran)
fiona
From what I am reading on Twitter and other places, I am getting a narrative of women banding together for strength against the Joneses etc. And make no mistake, women will prevail. 😉
fiona,
WWMD?
OMG Sky have dredged up Niki Savva from nowheresville to tell us all about how much women love Tony Abbott!
I thought she’d migrated to Siberia such has been her absence from he msm in the last year or so.
dtt
I’m not a constitutional lawyer, but I do know that the ALP was incredibly concerned that I might be considered to have cause to be considered to be a citizen of a country I have never visited in my life (that is, my father’s place of birth, which he left when he was 17) and that in that case I would be ineligible to stand — even in the very very non marginal seat I was contesting.
By seeking political asylum with Ecuador, Assange is allying himself very positively with another country – which is precisely what the Constitution is trying to avoid.
I thought Assange had in fact committed a crime under American law?
Apparently some media commentators think that in a few weeks this Jones thing will blow over and advertisers will resume normal activities on 2GB.
Wrong. Businesses will no longer want to associate themselves with Alan Jones.
There is far more for them to lose than gain.
confessions
And Nikki Savva speaks for WOMEN?
[I thought organisations of more than 50 cannot sue for defamation in Australia (according to John Safran)]
I should add that this is only true if libel doesn’t identify an individual or a small group of people.
Let us start with the hypothesis that AssangeJ is a self-aggrandizing clueless fuckwit.
Any care to argue that?
z
[By seeking political asylum with Ecuador, Assange is allying himself very positively with another country – which is precisely what the Constitution is trying to avoid.]
Can you have dual citizenship and still run for parlt?
[You want immature? Try Sarah Way Too Young.]
She’s also immature.
But so was Nettle.
Yep, women vertainly love Tony Abbott.
Especially when he throws punches on a wall around their heads in a threatening manner.
Ducky
He’s definitely not clueless.
TLBD,
[Now, that is what I call a Hit Squad. Handbags would be an unnecessary accoutrement.]
Indeed. The basilisk glares (are they Ms Bishop the younger’s great grand-aunties, perchance) would have been more than sufficient. Besides, a bit earlier than that photograph the handbag was more generally called a reticule (or ridicule).
The reticulated Alan Jones. Now, there’s a thought.
[I thought Assange had in fact committed a crime under American law?]
I think that Assange has committed a crime under UK law by jumping bail.
BK:
Savva speaks for nobody I can discern from my social circle.
As I said, I thought she’d been consigned to Siberia. Who knew she was still hanging around.
Then again, Sky managed to dredge up Ian Campbell earlier today. Remember him? I had to Google him to remind myself of who he was!
fiona @ 4110
That was the one his mummy dressed him in. As he grew up, he abandoned skirts and went for the more masculine outfits!!
Pending views from any better qualified constitutional lawyers:
DTT # 4108 is correct. Application for or receipt of asylum from a foreign power does not amount to allegiance to said foreign power and nor does it involve renunciation of Australian citizenship.
For the record i think Assange is a narcissistic dickead.
But lets face it that can hardly be a disqualification for Australian elected or other public office.
Dio # 4122, no. But thats not what assange has done.
Diogenes,
I concede the point, Sir. A veritable hit.
Will “self-aggrandizing opportunistic and cowardly fuckwit” do?
[Ben Cubby @bencubby
This interview with @JennaPrice on 2GB is an extraordinary piece of radio. Podcast here: http://bit.ly/Pj14wA #destroythejoint ]
I wonder if The Family Guys ‘Peter Griffen’ and Alan Jones are related ?
They both have gotten tasteless comments down to an art form.
l
[From what I am reading on Twitter and other places, I am getting a narrative of women banding together for strength against the Joneses etc. And make no mistake, women will prevail.]
I found this (and similar statements elsewhere) somehwat annoying when I first read it. ‘Why?’ I asked myself.
Reflecting about it, I felt a small sense of exclusion, and with the exclusion, resentment. Weren’t we all in this together, decent women and decent men, to expose Mr Jones, to focus on the advertisers, etc, etc?
If the decent women are over there, should we decent men ‘band together for strength against the Joneses?’ Should we bodgie up a narrative about how wonderful we decent men are? And should we decent men say, something like, ‘Make no mistake, men will prevail?’
I don’t think so.
MM
[Dio # 4122, no. But thats not what assange has done.]
So Assange doesn’t have Ecuadorian citizenship?
Lizzie @ 4114,
[I am getting a narrative of women banding together for strength against the Joneses etc.]
Lizzie, I think it is not just women, but also all the men that you and I know whom we love/like and respect and who love/like and respect us. Together, I think we are in far greater numbers than those who support the Joneses etc. (and what a delicious way of describing the latter).
I’m certainly up for the fight. I don’t want us heading in the direction of The Handmaid’s Tale
Assange – what a Y A W N!
OK I am going to be bold. Newspoll 51/49 to Labor.
I just saw Mesma on Agenda with Gilbert. Gee she looked good. Immaculately dressed, well spoken (full of crap but that’s beside the point 🙂 ) assertive and strong.
Go Mes, I’m sure she’s hoping for a good Labor lead in the poll as well 😉
Dio
[Can you have dual citizenship and still run for parlt?]
This issue has been raised repeatedly in relation to Senator Abetz. If I recall Psephos’ discussion about it accurately (it was years and several hundred thousand posts ago) Mr Abetz had abjured and done whatever he could but the home country still counted him as a citizen. If my memory is correct, therefore, the answer to your question is yes, as long as you have made it clear that you have done what you reasonably can to rid yourself of the other nationality.
Boerwar,
I wish I had read your last comment before I posted. Please read my last uses of “we” and “us” as including all decent people, irrespective of gender. That is certainly how I was using both pronouns: exclusiveness was never in my mind.
lizzie,
Just started listening and, 1:40 in, Chris is talking about “the hate mail directed towards Alan Jones.” This, is going to be a beauty bottler.
Confessions: let’s just say I’m close to a bloke who gets to advise all sorts of jokers on electoral law. Assange wasn’t joking about standing. And he had several rational reasons to do so, however Quixotic it may seem now.
fiona
Hey, sister, we are on the same page.
[And Nikki Savva speaks for WOMEN?]
Nikki did almost get married to a man she had never met – arranged by her parents. (True Story).
Boerwar:
FWIW the men in my social circle with whom I’ve raised this issue are with you – utterly appalled at Jones, and refusing to cede his view of women/the PM/the PM’s father that Jones has been espousing for ages now.
Someone commented before that decent PEOPLE have been touched by this affair and have made their views known. Hence Jones has no advertisers, no flash car, and only the rusted on unquestioning audience of people of similar ignorance to himself.
It isn’t just women who have reacted to what Jones and his ilk represent, but men like yourself, and thank heavens you’re out there!
confessions
Yes. Decent people. I like it.
fiona and boerwar
Obviously I’m not expressing myself well. The “Jones thing” has horrified good men and good women and helped to stir up resistance against such nastiness. Many people are standing behind the PM in this.
But there are so many indications that a revival of “feminism” is necessary because women still don’t have full equality. That “battle” has not been won.
lizzie @4133
Oh dear “Innocent frontline staff going home in tears.”
A question. I’ve seen it written here a couple of times over the last 2 years that Newspoll and/or Neilsen supposedly inform the Party Leaders (PM & LOTO) in advance what their poll results will be. For example, they may have been told earlier this evening about Newspoll.
However, I’ve never heard anyone in politics say that, nor any journo, nor heard it around the traps.
Does anyone for-sure know if its true or not?
Jenna: “Chris, stop talking over me!” bis.