GhostWhoVotes reports Galaxy has plugged a hole in the Newspoll and Nielsen schedules with a federal poll conducted from 1015 respondents on Wednesday and Thursday (UPDATE: Make that Thursday and Friday – The Management). The result is at the low end of Labor’s recent form, with the Coalition leading 48% to 34% on the primary vote and 54-46 on two-party preferred, compared with 47% to 35% and 53-47 in the Galaxy poll of a month ago. The Greens vote is steady on 11%.
Galaxy also grapples with the AWU matter, with what to my mind are problematic results. Poll questions are most effective when gauging basic affective responses, namely positive or negative feelings towards a person or thing, and mutually exclusive choices, such as preferences out of political parties or election candidates. On this score, the best question to emerge so far has been Morgan’s effort on approval or disapproval of the Prime Minister’s handling of the controversy. Difficulties emerge where the range of potential opinions is open-ended, as too much depends on the choices offered by the pollster.
A case in point is Galaxy’s question on whether Gillard had “lied” (31%), been “open and honest” (21%) or, as a middle course, been “economical with the truth” (31%). Particularly where complex or half-understood issues are involved, choices like this are known to activate the strategy of “satisficing” (“choosing the easiest response because it requires less thinking”, according one of the pithier definitions available). This results in a bias towards intermediate responses, in this case the “economical with the truth” option.
I have similar doubts about Galaxy’s question as to whether respondents believed Gillard “should provide a full account of her involvement through a statement in parliament”, an over-elaborate proposition that feels tailored towards eliciting a positive response. Sixty per cent of respondents duly gave it one, although it is clear the thought would have occurred to few of them before being put to them by the interviewer. Only 26% offered that such a statement was unnecessary, with 14% undecided.
Then there is the finding that 26% of respondents said the issue had made them less likely to vote Labor. Like any such question, this would have attracted many positive responses from those whose pre-existing chance of voting Labor was zero. However, the question at least allows us to compare the results to those of similarly framed questions in the past. In July, a Galaxy poll found that 33% were less likely to vote Labor because of the budget. In January, 39% of respondents to a Westpoll survey said power price hikes had made them less likely to vote for the Barnett government. In July of last year, The Australian reported polling by UMR Research (commissioned, it must be noted, by Clubs Australia) had 23% of voters less likely to vote Labor due to mandatory pre-commitment for poker machines. And a month after Kevin Rudd was deposed as Prime Minister in June 2010, Nielsen found the proportion saying they were less likely to vote Labor as a result was similar to today’s finding: 25%.
UPDATE: GhostWhoVotes reports News Limited has published a further result from the Galaxy poll, a four-way preferred prime minister question which has Kevin Rudd on 27%, Malcolm Turnbull on 23%, Julia Gillard on 18% and Tony Abbott on 17%.
fiona
(sneaky naughty) 😀
CTar1@1583
If you think so, you can do it that way. 😉
bemused
The reason I think your solution might get past the High Court is you are not taking from one country and putting into another. Instead you are returning to the camp, they were in before they contacted a people smuggler.
So you can argue that you are not denying entry but are insisting on a queue.
guytaur@1585
Daamn.. now I am worried. Greens agreeing with me… what did I do wrong?
[Stephen Spencer @GenGusface Tele switched attack on Gillard from AWU to Israel and Boats when it worked out readers didn’t care about AWU.]
2:03pm – 3 Dec 12
From the APH website
[Under the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees of 28 July 1951 and the Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees of 31 January 1967 Australia is obliged not to expel or return persons who have a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion to a place in which their life or freedom would be threatened on account of these reasons.]
Bushfire Bill@1587
OK, I get it.
I agree with you so you repudiate your own argument.
bemused – “even da Greens’.
You’re deep in.
Wasn’t the convention largely a response to issues during and following WWIi?
Serious question – I remember a museum in Eastern France had a lot about it , but can’t remember the detail
Diogenes@1593
It becomes highly ideological with arguments constructed to justify ideological positions which fundamentally get back to the distribution of wealth and income.
[“Regional solution,” episode 390. Yawn. There is no regional solution. Indonesia doesn’t give a stuff about out boaties problems, as they’ve made clear repteadly over 20 years. SBY nods and smiles, but that’s just Javanese for “no.” And even if he meant “yes”, the Indonesian state is too weak and too corrupt actually to stop the flow-through of people. Consider: nearly every one of our boaties has passed through Jakarta airport on their way to their boat. It would be fairly simple to stop them there. Is Indonesia willing even to try? No. This is our problem and no-one else’s.]
Malaysia. The refugees are currently in Malaysia in huge numbers.
Given that why do you think Malaysia is not interested in a regional solution? And they have already accepted a deal with the Australian government.
[OK, I get it.
I agree with you so you repudiate your own argument.]
I do not.
I understood your position to be repatriation BEFORE they leave Malaysia.
If you mean AFTER they’ve arrived here and then been SENT to Malaysia, I agree with you.
ctar
No it means that bemused is closer to getting the Greens to agree with Labor policy than most.
The sticking point for the Greens is it would still be called off shore processing because of flying people back.
However the Greens do want processing in Indonesia and Malaysia.
So would the Greens cave on the flying back part. I know I agree with it as it just cuts out people smugglers. No advantage is gained and no disadvantage is gained either.
This as you agree that as soon as processed if proved genuine acceptance is being flown to Australia.
My mentor is really a closet Greenie OMG
CTar1
To go with your earlier “Bad Aussie” here is a “Waay Bad Kiwi”.
[Kiwi steps down as head of News International
The New Zealand-born head of UK newspaper giant News International is stepping down.
Tom Mockridge, who has been chief executive of News International…]
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10851670
CTar1@1553
You’re not a joiner?
Some members of the Greens may care to consider this quote by Gelett Burgess….
If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.
[Under the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees of 28 July 1951 and the Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees of 31 January 1967 Australia is obliged not to expel or return persons who have a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion to a place in which their life or freedom would be threatened on account of these reasons.]
That’s not what the Convention says. It refers to non-refoulement of “refugees.” It doesn’t say that signatories are obliged to accept any person’s claim to be a refugee, not that signatories are obliged to admit any person to its territory because they claim to be a refugee. A refugee is a person whom a signatory has decided to accept as a refugee. Once they are so accepted, they acquire the protection of the Convention.
guytaur@1602
Simply rescue at sea and put them on a boat run by a civilian contractor to return them to their exact point of embarkation.
Just like would happen if someone arrived on a flight without a visa. Back they go.
When unemployment was around the 4% mark there was pressure on infation which is consistent with the theory. Swan was busy blaming the previous government for the inflation and interest rates being totally unaware of the doom that was about to decend on us all.
poroti – The Herald is full of scandal today (other than the headline standard car prang).
(Perving on the next door neighbors is fun).
CTar1@1607
A scary place where I have never been before. 👿
Fran Barlow
May I say, what Pegasus said at 1512.
Love your gear. (and a little jealous of your writing skills 🙂 )
For me it is very sad to see Labor do this – to lose it’s backbone and pander to racism when Howard let it out of the box. When Labor does realise, and I think it will come about, that trying to out bastard LNP on boat people is not only miserable, poisoning to the polity, financially crazy (so expensive to be a bastard), but also a vote loser.
If you haven’t heard it before – Julian Burnside being rational on this subject on LNL
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/asylum-seeker-policy/4395528
[non-refoulement]
Now, there’s a word of obfuscation!
bemused
[That is why, if I was running AS policy, I would move heaven and earth to negotiate with Indonesia and Malaysia for the return of AS to their point of embarkation and be prepared to offer financial incentives for them to do it.]
What if we were able to convince Malaysia and Indonesia to permanently settle genuine refugees? That would be much better than putting them back in the camps.
Recall the reasons the Malaysian deal fell over in the High Cought. It did include rights for those sent to Malaysia, but the High Court didn’t think the Malaysian government’s promise was strong enough evidence that Bowen was protecting these rights adequately.
TLBD,
[You’re not a joiner?]
It might be an instance where size really does matter.
CTar1,
[sneaky naughty]
Petite minette moi?
Bushfire Bill@1611
Yes, that’s what I mean.
Although if possible I would intercept (rescue) at sea and place them on a civilian contractor boat for return.
TLBD
[You’re not a joiner?]
I was out there ‘doing a fag’.
How much meaner do you want me to be!
davidwh@1613
AAAAHHHHHGGGGGHHHHH
Essential today LNP 47 Primary vote similar to Galaxy
Hard to lose an election with that number.
The AWU issue is biting in voterland.
Sorry bemused. 🙂
Letter today in the SMH
[Julia Gillard simply can’t win. If she attempts to defend herself against the continual bullying of the Abbott lynch mob, she’s accused of lowering the tone (Letters, December 1-2). If she remains silent she’s guilty.
Then there’s the question of policy. The entire nation howled in protest when Gillard introduced modest carbon pricing as a compromise between the staunch ideology of the Greens and the total climate-denial of the Coalition. Now everyone’s moaning that it didn’t go far enough. Similarly the nation went ballistic over the notion of the mining tax. Again Gillard negotiated a compromise. Apparently this tax is now too meagre. A modest surplus that observes fiscal prudence without slashing essential services? Outrageous! An asylum seeker policy that convenes an independent arbiter to answer the concerns of both sides of politics and strike a compromise? Ridiculous! National broadband? Aw, it’s taking too long. Disability insurance? Not enough. The Gonski report? Damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. And who got us through the global financial crisis with our baby bonuses intact? Peter Costello of course!
I know it’s trendy to say ”they’re all as bad as each other” but the truth is that they are not. It’s about time the Prime Minister got some credit for her dignified and professional handling of this hung parliament.]
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/letters/pm-imperfect-but-she-leaves-most-others-for-dead-20121202-2ap1i.html#ixzz2DxNELbAF
Another timely letter in th SMH
[Abbott has promised that he will conduct a judicial inquiry, if elected, to investigate matters regarding the AWU reform association and whether the Prime Minister misled the WA Commissioner for Corporate Affairs. This is in response to having failed to produce any verifiable substantive evidence to back the opposition’s defamatory allegations. Shall we ask if he would like to include his actions and public statements regarding his Australians for Honest Politics fund during the Howard government tenure? This could include Abbott’s dealings with the Australian Electoral Commission, his refusal to disclose donors and whether or not those dealings constituted an offence at the time by providing misleading information to a Commonwealth authority. Abbott says all this AWU attention is warranted because it goes to the Prime Minister’s character.
Perhaps media should focus more on Abbott’s character, motives and past conduct. He is, after all, Australia’s alternative prime minister.]
Judith Blake Isabella Plains (ACT)
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/letters/pm-imperfect-but-she-leaves-most-others-for-dead-20121202-2ap1i.html#ixzz2DxNW8lbJ
Can we have a new thread please?
I feel like I’m reading the Daily Disease under this heading!
mimhoff@1624
Both those countries have large populations and I think it would be an imposition on them.
We should fund UNHCR processing and re-settlement, and assist with the return of non-genuine AS from whence they came.
fiona
[Petite minette moi?]
I’m getting close to being able to catch up to quick and smart Canberra school girls.
Another five and I’ll be good.
davidwh@1630
A step too far comrade.
Psephos
I’ll go with the Parliament’s legal guy writing on Refugee Law-Recent Developments over a former party hack with no legal training.
http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Publications_Archive/CIB/cib0102/02CIB05#app4
[Wouldn’t it be nice to have at least one popular TV personality as prepared as Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert to really stand out and be known as a centre-left supporter?]
VonK – I think Clarke & Daw were brilliant last Thursday night. They cut through the issue so succinctly.
f they were younger they might have the energy to do a program like Stewart but would any TV station in the country be prepared to let them. We’ve got enough centre-right programs as it is.
Counterpoint on RN was started because of the supposed leftwing bias of the ABC. Now it’s just another RW rant to go with all the other ABC RW ranters.
BB
[The simple truth is that there is no valid reason for 99% of the people who come here by boat to come here by that method, except for the express purposes of jumping the queue.]
That’s not a simple truth. It’s a simplistic truth. The reality is that nearly 90% of IMAs are reckoned to have valid claims, whereas only 20% of those who come by aircraft do.
There is no queue and there never has been. The location of the Australian embassy in Kabul, is, according to DFAT, a secret. If you want to apply you must go to some territory where you can approach an Australian officials and seek asylum. Since this can be a dangerous and certainly expensive business, and your family will owe people money and you generally have to turn your possessions into a firesale, you are making a life-altering decision. Being penned up in Indonesia indefinitely and watching your kids grow up in a camp is not most people’s idea of acceptable.
Putting aside questions of human compassion, which seem to get short shrift here, one might make the case that people who are as committed as these people are to get themselves and often their kids out of danger, and have staked everything (including risking their lives in the passage) on a successful life in Australia are exactly the sort of people who ought to qualify as migrants. These are people who used their get up and go to get up and go. They cast aside their old life and sought a new life — our life. What’s not to like about that?
And how has this country responded? It has debated how to convince them that the price of coming here is more than they can pay — a fate worse than their own death and that of their families. On Nauru, some have finally figured that out and are acting accordingly.
The problem with Psephos’s plan — no visas if you come on a boat is that you probably can’t implement it unless Indonesia or Malaysia agrees to take them back — but since neither of them recognises the Refugee Convention and doesn’t want them — why should they? Would we accept them back if the movement were the other way? We could try return to sender — simply shipping them back to the country of origin. Providing we’re relaxed about what happens to them, that might work. Of course, having just rejected the notion that they deserved protection, we could scarcely complain.
The ALP could try “turning the boats around” — obliterating the last distinction between itself and the Libs on this policy. For reasons Gillard has outlined herself, I don’t see this as viable.
In all seriousness, if the ALP really wants to “stop the boats” it is going to have to denounce the Refugee Convention and move to declare that henceforth that henceforth there will be no humanitarian resettlement within our jurisdiction. Anyone arriving here who doesn;’t have or ceases to have a valid visa gets deported to their country of origin ASAP, at their risk. Anyone who comes here has to pay a deposit covering their return airfare and that of two AFP members who will accompany them back should it be needed. If children are born of visa compromised people then a hearing is held ex parte to determine if the child has a parent who can stay in the country, and if not, which country the child should be a citizen of. Unlawful non-citizens are deported.
To be consistent we should abolish business and skilled migration too. People in these categories only get temporary visas that have to be renewed every year. Tourism? Student visas? Forget it.
If there really is a fear of “creeping invasion” we obviously can’t be discriminatory, what with all those poor folks waiting patiently in those camps in Africa about which we have heard so much. Our robust measures against the entry of foreigners will obviously be much celebrated over there. Perhaps we could set aside some money to publicise our robust policies in slide shows in such places.
Now plainly, I would regard such policies as OTT, but if people are going to run the argument that we are going to be swamped by foreigners if we don’t harden up, and that you can’t discriminate in favour of folks who are better off than people who are at death’s door, then they need to be consistent.
[Under the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees of 28 July 1951 and the Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees of 31 January 1967 Australia is obliged not to expel or return persons who have a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion to a place in which their life or freedom would be threatened on account of these reasons.
That’s not what the Convention says. It refers to non-refoulement of “refugees.” It doesn’t say that signatories are obliged to accept any person’s claim to be a refugee, not that signatories are obliged to admit any person to its territory because they claim to be a refugee. A refugee is a person whom a signatory has decided to accept as a refugee. Once they are so accepted, they acquire the protection of the Convention.]
Well anyone who does have a well-founded fear of persecution is a genuine refugee and shouldn’t be sent back to the country where they are persecuted. This is a matter of international common law, so it applies to non-signatories as well. Malaysia can’t forcibly repatriate any of its refugees either.
But are these boat arrivals fleeing persecution in Indonesia or Malaysia? I do not see what it has to do with “turning back the boats” or settling refugees in a different country altogether. There are a number of other rights issues concerning those in Australian custody, and there are the political problems in convincing these countries to accept these deals, but I don’t see how it is illegal under the Refugee Convention.
New thread.
David McRae @1622
Absolutely bizarre to hear that should a Hazara in Afghanistan seek to apply for an Australian visa or refugee status in Afghanistan they cannot. Cannot because “for security reasons” the location of the Australian Embassy in Kabul is a secret !!
fran
BW:
Far left is never going to cut it in Australia. Centre left on a consistent basis is probably as good as it is going to get.
Never is a long time. Doubtless, people once believed there would always be slavery, or that humans would never reach the moon so I’m going to assume hyperbole and rewrite it to mean “not in my lifetime, or the lifetime of even younger people I know well, based on what is knowable now”.
With that in mind, you are probably correct. Of course, the Greens are not “far left” but centre-left, and I’d contend that somewhere between where we are and where the ALP is now, there is a position that the ALP could pitch that most Greens really would see as much the lesser harm.
Right now, the ALP is on the centre-right, scrapping for centre-right votes with a hardcore conservative populist party. That contest tars the ALP with the hardcore conservative populist brush. Ironically, surplus fetishism — which pervades both the major parties isn’t strictly speaking populist, but a pitch at a different kind of conservative. Why the ALp wants this constituency as well is hard to say, because if you were pitching at RW populists, saying you’re the friend of the big banks isn’t the best option.
Slavery? False analogy.
Honest Greens (We of the Never Never) admit that they will not form a Government in real time. Dishonest Greens pretend that there is a real prospect of forming a Government. Then we have the Greens who want to argue about the number of Greens on the head of a pin: they don’t care about government because they don’t want it.
That leaves only one practical impact for the Greens: life on the political margins. The far left loves life on the margins. It is their natural political habitat. It is the place for wringing your hands at the inability of the world to ‘get it’. It is the place for barracking for lost causes. It is the place where real world destruction you cause does not matter because you are pure and right and the others are all the same because they lack integrity.
The far left thrives on loss. It suits them for the centre left to be defeated. The lack of a centre left, after all, allows the true dialectic between the oppressed and the oppressor to see the light of day.
For the far left, logging, grazing and shooting in national parks is collateral damage to the real struggle which is to redistribute a wrecked environment more equitably.
Stanny
Primary Vote
LNP 44%
ALP 37%
Green 9%
2PP 51/49
CPVI (calculated potential voting improvement)
2PP ALP +3% LNP -3%
Projected 2PP at election
ALP 52% LNP 48
I do not understand Psepos argument argument concerning the issuing of visa to refugees.
When refugees/asylum seekers arrive on our shores via leaky boats our options are very limited.
If they are determined not to be refugees we can send them back to their country of origin but that is exactly what is happening now.
I they are found to be refugees our options are also limited. We could try and send them back to from the point of embarkation (ie Indonesia) and all that is likely to do is put great stress on out relationship with Indonesia which I believe would not be to Australia’s benefit. We could try and send them to a third country but can anyone name one country that would accept large numbers of refugees from Australia.
Of cause we could try and send them back to their country of origin but that would result in the High Court imposing the requirements of the Refurgee Convention on the situation which Australia has signed up to and is enforceable by the courts in this country. We could of cause pass a law that reneges on our commitment to the Referee Convention but this would not go down so well with the rest of the developed world.
So it would appear that we would have to accept either in places like Nauru or release them into the community
So what is the benefit of not issuing visas?
[The case could run into next year, prompting another round of headlines in an election year about what Abbott did or didn’t do to a woman in 1977.]
leroy – ‘prompting another round of headlines in an election year’
Piffle. The MSM will leave it alone apart from a few small paragraphs. The reaction will be similar to the Grattan story after MargoK ‘reminded’ her of something she had forgotten. Balderdash and bullsh.t – Grattan had forgotten nothing.
Pardon my disbelief that the Ramjan case will grow legs.
Last week’s kerfuffle by Abbott and Bishop covered up an amazingly good roll out of legislation. We can see now why they did it at year’s end otherwise Labor would be going into the break looking far too competent for their liking.
@William/1642
That link is errored.
Stephen Koukoulas @TheKouk
Looking at the run of data this year, the RBA has done a worse job that I 1st thought anticipating the slowdown. Cash rate shld be 2.5% now
1m Stephen Koukoulas Stephen Koukoulas @TheKouk
RBA need to take a lot of heat over its pig-headedness on inflation, optimism on global growth, misread of fiscal policy and AUD effects