Essential Research: 54-46 to Coalition

Essential Research records next to no change on voting intention, and a general lack of sympathy for the view that unemployment benefits haven’t kept up over the years.

The latest weekly Essential Research result maintains the outfit’s record of consistency with the major parties unchanged on last week – the Coalition leads 48% to 36% on the primary vote and 54-46 on two-party preferred – and the Greens up a point from last week’s unusually poor result to 9%.

Whereas attitudinal questions often point to a social democratic bent among the population at large, questions posed this week on Newstart indicate that this particular buck stops with unemployment benefits. Fifty-three per cent agreed with the proposition that the current welfare system created a “culture of dependency”, with only 30% opting for the alternative proposition that current benefits are “the least a civilised society should provide”. In relation to Newstart benefits specifically, 33% said they were not high enough, 30% about right, and 25% too high. As Bernard Keane notes in Crikey today, variation by party support was not as pronounced as it often is in relation to such questions.

Further questions dealt with trust in various industries, with good rankings for agriculture (72%), tourism (68%) and manufacturing (56%) and poor ones for banking (33%), mining (32%), media (30%) and, tellingly, power companies (18%). Crikey will tomorrow publish Essential’s biannual “trust in media” results, which always makes for fun reading for critics of the fourth estate.

UPDATE (25/1/13): An automated phone poll for the Tasmanian seat of Bass, conducted by ReachTEL for the Launceston Examiner, has produced a dire result for Labor, with incumbent Geoff Lyons trailing Liberal candidate Andrew Nikolic 60.3-39.7 on two-party preferred. The primary votes are 54.7% for Nikolic, 26.7% for Lyons and 8.7% for the Greens. The sample size for the poll is 543.

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.

3,884 comments on “Essential Research: 54-46 to Coalition”

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  2. I tried to recruit Rummel however the timing was all rong as he received some very sad news about a friend. So I thought it best to wait. The Fellowship remains strong.

  5. OC

    I was Secretary of the Banks FEC for years. John Mountford the Member who proceeded him stacked the branches a la the Seat of Sydney see Peter Baldwin to try and protect himself against a challenge.

    From memory the local branches has a membership of around five hundred and suddenly the Right were signing up hundreds of members and the membership increased to over fifteen hundred within a few months.

    Daryl wanted to be the Member and we fought back. It got completely out of hand and was very vicious. We kept getting ordered into Head Office do that Loosely could keep issuing edicts about what we should and should not do. I was once told by him that I should speak only when spoken to.

    We ended up winning the preselection and the rest is history. We had some really good members one now a District Court Judge and another a leading Lawyer. In hindsight maybe one of them would have been a better choice of candidate but neither of them wanted it.

    I can’t disagree with your comments above but you win some you lose some. This time it may be the public who decides.

  9. ML:

    As Mumble said, given the length of time Hawke and Keating have been out of office, perhaps the real issue raised by that poll is why more people didn’t vote for Howard.

  11. In the UK, PM Cameron is heading in a dangerous direction, according to business sources:

    [David Cameron’s pledge to hold a referendum on Britain leaving the European Union by the end of 2017 may damage business investment and jeopardize an already fragile recovery, economists and executives said.

    “The prospect of an EU in-out referendum will have a chilling effect on investment in the U.K.,” Adam Posen, a former Bank of England policy maker, said by e-mail from Davos. “If people thought Greek risk hung uncertainty on the euro area or the fiscal cliff risk clouded the U.S. investment climate, this will be every bit as bad for the U.K. To stretch it out until 2017 is madness.”

    Confidence in the U.K. economy is being damaged by a fiscal squeeze that’s denting demand at home while exports are suffering from the crisis in the euro area, Britain’s main trading partner. The fragile recovery is also under question as a predicted contraction in the fourth quarter could pave the way for its first ever triple-dip recession.]

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-25/cameron-gamble-on-eu-seen-threatening-u-k-recovery.html

  12. [Not the smartest thing ,]

    I agree.

    Please refer to my previous assessment of Abbott (for the last 3 years consistently): Schmuck

  13. The story in the Telecrap doesn’t make it clear how the poll was conducted, nor does it clearly set out the results. It seems that the result among those polled was: Gillard 5%; Rudd 16%; Howard 35%; Keating 9%; Hawke 16%. The Margin of error for a well-conducted poll of sample size 1,000 is about 3%.

    The numbers quoted add up to 81%. It does not say whether the other 19% had no opinion, didn’t not want to nominate any PM as the best or favoured someone else, e.g. Billy McMahon or Gough Whitlam. So it’s another instance of sloppy reporting from the tabloid – as they say in the classics, “Is it true or did you read it in the Telegraph?”

    Assuming that the poll only asked about the 5 PMs mentioned and that the other 19% expressed no opinion, then the numbers can be recast as 35/81 = 43% thought that John Howard was the best of the five, while 57% thought it was someone else.

    Funny, the Telegraph could have used the following Headline: “57% of Australians want Labor PM”.

  14. [the real issue raised by that poll is why more people didn’t vote for Howard.]

    Why more people didn’t vote for Howard or why more ALP voters didn’t vote for Howard?

    That is the point you have missed in all of this, its not an issue of the total percentage voting for one individual but that ALP voters hardly prefer Gillard (the current ALP PM) to the last LNP PM.

    ….Oh, just in case you didn’t notice it. if recency should benefit someone, why is Gillard so low in the rankings?

    Hehe 🙂 This stuff writes (or should I say “rights”) itself!!!! 😀

  15. [Meguire Bob
    Posted Friday, January 25, 2013 at 5:52 pm | PERMALINK
    Mod Lib
    Posted Friday, January 25, 2013 at 5:46 pm | Permalink

    Huh?

    _______________________________________

    This

    http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/tony-abbott-im-too-much-of-a-grog-monster/story-e6frfmqi-1226561861824#ixzz2IxbMkCiz

    OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott warned breakfast radio listeners this morning that he’s a bit of a “grog-monster”.

    ———————————–

    Not the smartest thing ,]

    Especially as one of my twitter followers pointed out “He slept through an important bill in his electoral office as he recovered from a bad hangover” Mind you nothing from MSM about that!

  16. Stephen Loosley – i had almost forgotten that name. I guess there is such a thing as supressed memory syndrome.

  18. [if recency should benefit someone, why is Gillard so low in the rankings? ]

    Oh come on. You aren’t that obtuse, are you?

    You know as well as I do that her govt has been unpopular, with the hung parliament, Rudd whiteanting and trash-talking her by the opposition and its shills in the media robbing her of incumbency. She is slowly pulling it all back though, and will be remembered by history as a one of the country’s great reformers.

  21. OK confessions:

    The past ALP leaders were too far in the past and the current ALP leader is unpopular and so is unlikely to be popular.

    So the Lib PM wedged in between these extremes should have done better.

    I do understand your position.

    Please do not take my laughter as meaning a lack of understanding of your view 😀

  22. victoria

    [Did Abbott really suggest he was an alcoholic?]

    Nah. He was saying he was one real cool dude who knows his way around a shandy.

  24. zoomster@3338


    We have polling released for individual seats which shows Labor doing badly.

    We have the bludgertrack on the sidebar showing Labor behind, but nowhere nearly as dramatically as the polls released show (Swan’s arguably does fit into the trend for Queensland; but as KB has pointed out, the poll – even if totally accurate – does not equate to Swan being gone).

    There is a considerable gap between the kind of swings against Labor shown by the reputable polls and those for individual seats.

    This in itself raises a few questions —

    1. Are we seeing all the individual seat polls there are? Or are we only seeing those selected for publication, because they fit a particular ‘narrative’?

    A lot of individual seat polls are being done by ReachTEL off their own bat (some are commissioned) and I don’t think they would have anything to gain from doing a poll and not releasing results. Presumably by doing and releasing polls of interesting key seats they are keen to gain publicity and build themselves up as a company.

    However there are commissioned polls in the mix as well and not all commissioned polls are released. I would be surprised if there was not quite a lot of unreleased intelligence about individual seats floating around out there.

    We are not seeing much polling of Lib seats because at this stage there is not much reason to believe many are in danger. But, eg, Brisbane would be worth doing.

    The WS swinging 10% narrative should be treated with caution until there are public polls verifying it. It may turn out to be exaggerated.

  25. Partly explaining UK Conservatives’ push for a referendum on EC membership is the rapidly growing electoral threat for a far right anti-EU and anti-immigation party:

    [There is no getting away from Nigel Farage if you live in the U.K. Turn on the TV or radio, or open any British newspaper and there is, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party. One recent opinion poll showed UKIP scoring 16 percent support, making it the third-most-popular party in Britain.

    That isn’t bad for a group that Prime Minister David Cameron once derided as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.” If so, then Britons seem to be warming to fruitcakes. Trevor Kavanagh, the associate editor of the Sun, (the most widely read newspaper in the U.K. with a daily circulation of 2.3 million) writes correctly that: “UKIP are on a roll. They are the flavor of the month and support is growing by the day.”

    This is causing consternation across the political spectrum and especially for Cameron’s Conservative Party, which is steadily losing voters to Farage. Cameron is in the spotlight, as he prepares to make a long-heralded keynote speech on how to manage the U.K.’s relationship with the European Union, but Farage will be prominent in the background.

    In terms of message, Farage and his party are generally seen as focused on a single issue, namely getting the U.K. out of the EU. But new research from the London School of Economics shows that Europe only comes third on the list of issues that UKIP supporters are worried about, after immigration and the economy. The research shows them to be twice as concerned about immigration as the economy.]

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-14/u-k-s-fruitcake-anti-europe-party-is-marginal-no-more.html

    The Coalition in Australia must be worried about a similar growth in support for the Katter party. This probably explains the Scott Morrison speech in London:

    [THE opposition’s immigration spokesman, Scott Morrison, has reignited the debate over multiculturalism at the start of the election year, declaring a shift away from diversity to a more inclusive national identity is needed.

    The Liberal frontbencher used an address to the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London to outline the Coalition’s plan to reframe the debate around multiculturalism and “restore some balance” by emphasising what Australians have in common rather than social, ethnic or cultural differences.]

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/immigration/coalition-to-focus-on-common-values-ahead-of-diversity/story-fn9hm1gu-1226561353741

  30. The political chemistry of NSW is very odd. Everyone keeps saying Labor is heading for a thrashing there, and my subjective judgement is that that is correct, yet William’s tables, which are based on actual polls asking actual NSW people, only show a swing of 1.7% and the loss of three seats. They show a bigger anti-Labor swing in Victoria, where everyone expects Labor to do well. Puzzling.

  31. Oppositionsführer Grog-monster better hope stories like this are not dredged up or the wrong sort of questions may start to be asked.

    [TONY Abbott missed the key economic vote of the new Parliament – the $42 billion fiscal stimulus package – because he fell asleep after a night of drinking witnessed by MPs from both sides of Parliament. ]
    http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/archive/national-old/abbott-snoozed-through-key-vote/story-e6freuzr-1111119064644

  33. Re the call for twitter handles before: @kevinbonham .

    Please note that I am on there for information not socialising and hence neither feel obliged to follow people who follow me, nor expect people I follow to follow me back. I do however attempt to read everything that is tagged #politas, even the completely loopy right-wing trolls, except if it’s in Spanish or is posted by a homophobe-bot. I also follow #ausvotes via Tweetdeck (#auspol has far too much shite to read it all).

    poroti@3419


    OC

    Wow. This bit from your link should be rammed down the throat of every “She lied” twit.

    “I don’t rule out the possibility of legislating a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a market-based mechanism,” she said of the next parliament. “I rule out a carbon tax.”

    Yes, a poster on my site made the point that the so-called broken promise is technically not a broken promise at all, much less a lie. Which raises the question of how Labor have let the Coalition so totally own perception of the nature of the famous comment.

  34. Psephos;.

    I imagine the last Newspoll must have a large weighting in that NSW swing.

    If the Newspoll result comes out Mon night (I presume it is still on despite hol?) it might help to clarify if there is really a tightening or if the 51% was the lower end of the MOE of 53-54% (well that is my view)

  37. vicroria

    Oppositionsführer Grog-monster even has his own son.

    Grog Monster from the Sunny Cowgirls
    [Just a quiet young bloke from out near Hay
    With a well respected family name
    He didn’t drink or smoke never swore or fought
    Well at least that’s what his parents thought

    But that all changed on the day he headed off to school

    …….

    He’s a bit of a legend with all his mates
    When he ploughs the tractor right through the gates
    And he’ll drag the dirtbike through the door
    Do some doughnuts on the kitchen floor

    He’ll be spinning from the clothesline
    And fighting mates for fun
    The centre of attention when he’s wearing all his rum]

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TZONY5fhZA

  40. [OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott warned breakfast radio listeners this morning that he’s a bit of a “grog-monster”.]
    Is this the ‘real Tony’?

    3457
    davidwh
    [it will probably go down well in Western Sydney.]

    I’m sure battered wives and abused children across the nation will be ecstatic.

  42. pseph

    Yes, that meme puzzles me too.

    After all, if NSW Labor was really p*ing you off, then one would expect that peak indignation would have occured whilst the ALP state government was still in place, as they were during the 2010 election.

    Having got rid of them, you’d expect that at least some proportion of the electorate would have got it out of their system and would thus be more likely to vote Labor rather than less.

    Any revelations about past misdeeds in the NSW ALP should be greeted with ‘just what I expected’ rather than ‘the bastards! I’m not going to vote for them now!”

    So it’s counter intuitive that Labor in NSW federally should be travelling worse now than it was in 2010.

  43. Think my previous attempt to post vanished somewhere. For those collecting Twitter handles: @kevinbonham (https://twitter.com/kevinbonham) . By the way I attempt to read everything posted to #politas – even by loopy right wing trolls of which Tasmania has many – except if it’s in Spanish or posted by an anti-gay-marriage bot.

    Steve777@3463


    The story in the Telecrap doesn’t make it clear how the poll was conducted, nor does it clearly set out the results. It seems that the result among those polled was: Gillard 5%; Rudd 16%; Howard 35%; Keating 9%; Hawke 16%. The Margin of error for a well-conducted poll of sample size 1,000 is about 3%.

    The numbers quoted add up to 81%. It does not say whether the other 19% had no opinion, didn’t not want to nominate any PM as the best or favoured someone else, e.g. Billy McMahon or Gough Whitlam.

    The remainder were “uncommitted”. The full breakdown was again published in the Hobart Mercury – see http://twitpic.com/by14o3

    79% of Coalition supporters preferred Howard, 15% some Labor PM, 6% uncommitted.

    76% of Labor supporters preferred some Labor PM, 10% preferred Howard, 14% uncommitted.

    Overall 35% Howard, 45% some Labor PM, 20% uncommitted.

    With four Labor PMs fighting for the Labor vote the breakdown really isn’t surprising. The higher uncommitted figure for Labor supporters is probably those who couldn’t choose between the different Labor PMs.

    Much of the reporting of the poll has been complete wibble. If it was an election Howard would probably just get enough leakage off the Labor-PM supporters to beat Hawke or Rudd on preferences. Wouldn’t be much in it though.

    Interestingly, Green supporters go for Keating!

  45. [3485
    confessions
    Posted Friday, January 25, 2013 at 6:21 pm | PERMALINK
    sprocket:

    So the AFP has been asked to investigate Ashby stuff, and now Qld police.

    Wonder where all this will end up.]

    Probably nowhere.

    When was the last criminal investigation which arose from civil proceedings? Jeffrey Archer?

    If Rares J had referred the papers to the DPP, things might be different.

  46. 3239
    Fran Barlow
    [jenauthor:

    >Anybody could have looked good during the Howard years.

    Yet Howard managed not to. He was more responsible for the debauched character of contemporary politics in this country than any other single figure in the last 25 years.]

    Agree. A toxic legacy.

  47. [So it’s counter intuitive that Labor in NSW federally should be travelling worse now than it was in 2010.]

    When you have the likes of the Obeid family Ian Macdonald and Roozendaal et al before the Courts and in the press everyday what do you expect to happen.

    People lose faith!

  48. Citizen @ 6:12 PM. Maybe now David Cameron wishes he had supported preferential voting. Then he could harvest racist votes like our Libs & Nats.

  49. By strange coincidence on the 25th of January 2011 the title of Sam de Brito’s “All Men are Liars” blog was Grog Monster.

    [Grog monster

    I imagine the descent into alcoholism is incremental and somewhat pleasant – and it’s a condition more than a few of us might have glimpsed over the past couple of months as Christmas parties, catch-up drinks and family booze-fests blurred together.

    Having fought the urge for mid-morning beers many days of my life, I reckon admitting to yourself you’re an alcoholic feels a lot like farting in a tense work meeting; a massive sense of relief, almost cancelled out (but not quite) by the shame of everyone tut-tutting at your lack of self-restraint.]
    http://blogs.smh.com.au/executive-style/allmenareliars/2011/01/25/booze.html

  50. As I posted earlier, Julia Gillard doesn’t have to beat John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Paul Keating or Bob Hawke.

    She has to beat Tony Abbott.

    So why are we even discussing a poll published only for public entertainment by the Telecrap?

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