The Courier-Mail reveals a Galaxy poll of 800 Queensland respondents conducted on Wednesday and Thursday evenings shows a result for federal Labor which is better than their recent form, with Labor holding its ground from 2010 (not that that’s saying much) with 33% of the primary vote and a two-party preferred deficit of 55-45. This is the first time in a while that Labor has been able to enjoy a poll pointing to a status quo result. However, the headline-grabber is a supplementary question on how people would vote if Kevin Rudd was leader, which suggests Labor would be at 47% on the primary vote and lead 53-47. I have all sorts of problems with this kind of exercise, but you can nonetheless expect to hear a great deal of these results in the coming days. The full figures will be published in the Courier-Mail tomorrow.
UPDATE: Full results courtesy of GhostWhoVotes here. The primary vote figures are remarkably similar to the last such Galaxy poll in late November, back when Labor were thought to be on the upswing: 33% for Labor (steady), 46% for the Coalition (steady), 9% for the Greens (up one).
UPDATE 2 (25/2/13): A dire result for Labor in the latest Essential Research poll, which has the Coalition up two points to a epic 49%, Labor down one to 34% and the Greens steady on 9%, with the Coalition two-party lead blowing out from 54-46 to 56-44. Despite that, extensive questions on expectations of a Coalition government are not all that rosy, despite a net positive 10% rating for the economy: workers rights, job security, public services, and even interest rates, the cost of living and personal financial situation are all solidly in the negative. The kicker is that 57% say the government does not deserve to be re-elected, against only 26% who say it does. Thirty-six per cent said the Liberal Party was ready to govern against 45% who thought otherwise. Further questions gauge responses to policies on flexible work hours, industry and supplying mining projects, which party best represents blue-collar workers, and trust in various types of information sources.
Seat of the week: Port Adelaide
Since we already have a new thread going courtesy of Galaxy, Seat of the Week will attend to an electorate of marginal importance for which I was never planning on going to the effort of making a map.
The electorate of Port Adelaide includes Port Adelaide itself and the adjacent Le Fevre Peninsula, including the suburbs around Sempahore and Largs Bay, along with Woodville and its surrounds to the north of the city and, some distance to the north-east, a stretch of suburbs from Parfield Gardens north to Salisbury North, which are separated from the rest of the electorate by the Dry Creek industrial area. Over-quota enrolment required that the seat be pared back with the redistribution to take effect at the coming election, which has added 8000 voters around Salisbury North while removing 700 in the badlands west of Princes Highway. A little further south again, a projected 7,200 voters in a rapidly growing area from the University of South Australia campus at Mawson Lakes north to Salisbury Park have been transferred to Makin. At the southern end of the electorate, 3,300 voters around Seaton have been transferred to Hindmarsh. The changes have boosted the already handsome Labor margin from 20.0% to 21.4%.
Port Adelaide was created with the expansion of parliament in 1949 from an area that had previously made Hindmarsh a safe seat for Labor. Labor’s strength was such that the Liberals did not field candidates in 1954 and 1955, when it was opposed only by the Communist Party. Rod Sawford assumed the seat at a by-election in 1988 upon the resignation of the rather more high-profile Mick Young, member since 1974, and held it until his retirement in 2007. His successor has been Mark Butler, previously state secretary of the Left faction Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union and a descendant of two conservative state premiers: his great- and great-great-grandfathers, both of whom were called Sir Richard Butler.
Butler has quietly established himself as a rising star over his two terms in parliament, winning promotion to parliamentary secretary in June 2009 and then in the junior ministry portfolios of mental health and ageing after the 2010 election, despite his hesitancy in jumping aboard the Julia Gillard bandwagon for the June 2010 leadership coup. He was elevated to cabinet in December 2011 when social inclusion was added to his existing responsibilities, and was solidly behind Gillard when Kevin Rudd challenged her leadership two months later. Housing and homelessness were further added to his workload in the reshuffle which followed Nicola Roxon and Chris Evans’s departure in February 2013.
The Liberal candidate for the second successive election will be Nigel McKenna, a self-employed painter and decorator.
For those interested:
Australia 2/114 (31st ov)Warner 51* Watson 23*
Cowan stumped Dhoni off Ashwin for 29 and Hughes bowled by Ashwin for 6 on the 15th delivery. I don’t see Hughes scoring heavily in India, but would like to be proved wrong.
Diogenes
From previous blog. They also drank lots of Red Bull.All that caffeine fighting the sleeping pills is supposed to give people a bit of a high.
How to make your own headline story!
[ I don’t see Hughes scoring heavily in India, but would like to be proved wrong.]
Fran he asked how do you play the spinners in India. Use your feet idiot, use your feet.
[{The poll} would see Labor achieve a swing of 8 points since the last federal election and win back all of the seats it lost in Queensland in 2010 except for Leichhardt.
A switch back to Mr Rudd would see the Liberal National Party’s support drop by 5 points.
Almost half the supporters of the Greens and Katter’s Australian Party would also switch their vote to Labor.]
A tad too convenient for my nostrils.
Libs and Nats badly wounded. Katter cut in half. Labor wins in landslide.
These are the same people who voted for Campbell Newman with baseball bats, and who gave Bligh a 55:45 rating for three weeks until they took it all away again.
Slower and steadier seems MUCH more sensible to me.
It will be interesting to see when they say the poll was conducted tomorrow.
From prior thread:
It seems to me that the whole view of a party as a movement pressing for specific goals within a broader ethical and intellectual paradigm no longer has any relevance to the parties that traditionally form governments in most English-speaking countries.
Certainly, in Australia, I see no real evidence that the branches of the ALP and Liberals have any role to play in developing either overarching ideas or even policy initiatives that could form the basis of any campaign. In effect, they are merely cheerleaders and foot soldiers for the parliamentary wings of the parties that can occasionally can serve to endorse some aspirant for office.
So really, having a bunch of semi-engaged cheerleaders go through the motions of selecting someone amenable to head office doesn’t seem like an exceptionally productive exercise. And being a cheerleader is pretty boring in between elections — which is why, one suspects, hardly anyone turns up. I read somewhere that there are about 178,000 nominal members of all political parties in Australia, which simple maths tells us is a bit over 1% of people who vote. I doubt the majority of that 1%+ would even turn up to meetings more than three times per year. People work a great many hours these days and giving up a night to pretend you’re doing something with others also pretending isn’t that appealing.
From the ALP’s POV, whether the power is with the branches or the ‘unions’ (the term is misleading because it really describes the official apparatchiks of the unions) is probably neither here nor there. In effect, a narrow caste of people is offering a service to a much wider public with which it is not actively engaged — the service being “producing candidates for office”. The party itself operates as a kind of career management vehicle for those associated with its activities in a more direct sense. Ideas — in the sense that those who are not career politicians think of them, have almost nothing to do with the party.
A very long time ago, the ALP really was organically connected to actual union activity. The local union official would actually be an organiser living in a district active in local branches and the party activity was connected with his advocacy for union matters. Those days have long passed.
It seems to me that it would be better to put parties at arm’s length from elections. Today we have administratively cheap and timely ways for individuals to make their views known on matters of broad public policy. We probably would be better with a process in which people were selected to run for office the way juries are selected for trials — let’s call it #sortition#. People could put their names forward — a short list could be generated at random — these people (if they accepted) could be provided with support in drafting their ideas, undergoing training in the skills required, research assistants to assist them in refining their ideas and so forth. They could then go through a deliberative voting process where electors could evaluate their ideas, their significance for them in policy terms and their confidence in the person and then be given a score which would then determine their chances in a weighted first draw. Candidates could then modify their positions if they saw fit and then at a subsequent draw much closer to the time when the successful candidates would have to take up their seats, a second deliberative vote would occur and this would be added to the first mix and a final selection made.
The value of this procedure is that it would be pretty much impossible for any party to rig the vote or trade as a career vehicle for office aspirants. The parliament would come to resemble the populace and the populace itself would be far better informed and inured to media trolling — since what was happening on the ground would be far too heterogenous and fragmented to be subject to the media dark arts. Power would be torn from the grasp of the media and the apparatchiks and the contest would be about policy substance.
The parliament itself could be guided by a national plan devised by the parliament and subjected to a vote — like a referendum. Their job would be to implement it. Everyone would have ownership of it.
The role of parties in this system would be to suggest policy ideas and campaign for them in between elections — in an attempt to influence the context in which candidates for office formed their ideas. This of course is the proper role for political parties. They might well use the media to perform this function which, rather than being focused on how popular the PM was or was not, would be focused on what needed to be done or resisted. Over time we would get a far more educated and outcomes focused electorate — and one immune to the vacuous nonsense one hears and reads today. Each of us could entertain the thought that with the right arguments and the right pitch, some idea of ours might come to pass. That alone would make civic engagement something worthwhile for many who are not engaged at all.
So I guess support for the LNP is “soft” in Qld.
fran
Once was enough thanks. 😛
The finnegans:
[Fran he asked how do you play the spinners in India. Use your feet idiot, use your feet.]
That, and watch the ball, play with soft hands.
ruawake:
[Once was enough thanks]
The second was a freebie anyway. No charge.
poroti
Who ever would have thought taking a banned mix of Stilnox and caffeine before your Olympic swim was a bad idea?
Why are we paying good taxpayer dollars to these dickheads?
What is Stilnox?
…and dont forget to actually make contact or look like real dill as it goes between the gate….the tinkle of the bails…the long walk back…
Half Century to Warner.
Wow … 34 overs before lunch!
That has to be close to a post war record in a non-extended session, surely? Will we get over 100 overs in a day?
126-2 at lunch. Session tied.
Stilnox is zolpidem – a pseudo benzodiazepine. It has had some interesting reports of bizarre side effects like sleep driving and nude lawnmowing…
Okay Labor’s primary is unchanged since the election, but what about the LNP? We can’t see the Katter effect until the full tables are out.
“@ABCNews24: On #TheDrum tonight @ 6, tell us: who’s to blame for athletes misbehaving before London Olympics? The athletes themselves or team officials?”
BB
Stilnox is a very short acting drug that puts you to sleep. It’s not actually a benzodiazepine (like almost all other sleeping drugs) but it acts in a similar way.
It has lots of side-effects the weirdest being sleep-walking.
Because its so quick acting, it’s the date rape drug of choice.
Even the best
http://ts2.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4686196781024705&pid=15.1
The Z drugs are supposed to be an improvement on benzodiazepines ( like valium, xanax, serepax etc..) they probably arent….a bit like heroin was supposed to be an addiction-free morphine in the earliy 1900s
guytaur@20
Julia Gillard.
snap doc!
I’ve tried Stilnox with beneficial results, I think, but maybe it’s affected my brain. That may be why, when I see a poll putting Labor in front, I like it a lot more than all the polls where we’re trailing.
Diogenes
Heath Ledger was into the stuff. I remember Hackett saying this so it is not as if they were not warned.
[This week Australian Olympic Committee chiefs banned athletes from using Stilnox after former Olympian Grant Hackett admitted to overusing it, and not remembering what he was doing while medicated…………
THE sleeping drug Stilnox should no longer be considered the safe alternative to other drugs because of its links to deaths and bizarre behaviour, a review has found.]
http://www.smh.com.au/national/stilnox-sleeping-drug-considered-unsafe-by-review-20120705-21k8n.html#ixzz2Lbadwwxu
ruawake:
[126-2 at lunch. Session tied.]
I give that session to Australia (just). One expects 2 wickets from the new ball and about 3 runs per over for an even session. That the improbable Hughes and the out-of-form Cowan were the casualties is not surprising.
Given that Australia’s challenge was to find a method against the spinners and people doubted that Warner and Watson would score soundly against spin, the fact that they’ve managed 3.7 rpo and survived is a good start.
A chemist said on radio this morning that Stilnox had been banned in USA because it is the combination with alcohol that leads to sleepdriving and sleepeating.
People claim these opinion polls arent driven by the media
there is no defense for these opinion polls
why do the so socalled experts bother the opinion polls are exposing them as well
Fran
As Geoff Boycott wisely said, look at the score with an extra 2 wickets lost.
If Warner and Watson push on for an hour after lunch, we will hit the lead.
The conspiracy deniers owe people sorry
majority of people were right about these opinion polls particular from news ltd
MB
The Galaxy poll looked a good idea early in the week when it was commissioned. It looks like a joke today.
The question is why is it that either the Courier Mail did not trumpet or Galaxy polled the alternative leadership question? MT v Abbott.
(http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151514949891341&set=a.203147261340.171976.14193666340&type=1&relevant_count=1)
Gold plated guarantee?
Galaxy the trollpoll.
MTBW, I think you know who they are,don’t you? It is by their posts that you will know them.
Yes,I am a proud member of the Labor Party and I support the Party and I am particularly proud of our indefatigable leader.
I have just spoken to my excellent local state candidate Ian Radisich, who has just asked me do a little job for him on Saturday.
I have NO time for posers and the other poisonous prattlers squealing for another leader so close to the election. Shy Tories the lot of you!
[Denise @SpudBenBean
Are #Galaxy poll the people who arranged the #RootyHill audience that was stuffed full of LIB staffers?]
Is that true, or just a rumour?
yes ruawake @ 33
But now they are going to expose newspoll
[The question is why is it that either the Courier Mail did not trumpet or Galaxy polled the alternative leadership question? MT v Abbott.]
Cos they thought that leadershit could be kept going all week. The plan failed when everyone realised there was no challenge imminent, planned or likely.
I wonder how much News Corpse wasted?
Is that true, or just a rumour?
Its true that Galaxy selected the Rooty Hill audience.
[A chemist said on radio this morning that Stilnox had been banned in USA because it is the combination with alcohol that leads to sleepdriving and sleepeating.]
And sleep-sex.
surely the opinion polling trends will be under a cloud from now on
@IanCampbellABC: “@702sydney: HG Nelson’s take on the swimming press conference http://t.co/NY3IoYu8SF #swimming” @ABCSouthEastNSW
This poll is about as meaningful as the one of 800 women Oz wide who now said, “All is forgive Tony we we luvs ya!”
You can punch a wall at may place any time.
I’m starting to wonder if there is a bit of sleep-blogging going on here.
Psyclaw from the previous thread –
I’m not talking about union membership.
I’m talking about the fact that manufacturing jobs, as a proportion of total employment, is declining and will continue to do so.
I’m talking about the fact that low skilled jobs in the service sector are declining with the restructuring of the retail industry eg away from bricks and mortar.
I’m talking about the fact that tradies are now almost always working as independent contractors – self employed small business people – not as employees/blue collar workers of old.
Warfies are being replaced by machinery.
Mining labourers seem to be happy to be paid squillions and bugger the rest of the country.
These are serious ongoing structural shifts and to think that this doesn’t have implications for the ALP’s constituency is naive or that it’s just shifting people from one ALP column to another … nonsense.
[I’m starting to wonder if there is a bit of sleep-blogging going on here.]
Don’t worry you can always rely on getting sex in your sleep. 🙂
Tricot
It’s actually a good poll for Labor.
The Rudd thing is meaningless as Libs could pretend they’d vote for him but the 2PP of 55-45 is a lot better than the 59-41 Labor is travelling at in Qld on BludgerTrack.
@702sydney: Lex Marinos re shootings story: “get all those kids in the National Park, get them onto drugs and you’ve got you next gen of sports stars.