Galaxy: Gillard versus Rudd in Queensland

A question of dubious value on how respondents would vote if Kevin Rudd were leader will hog all the headlines, but a Galaxy poll of federal voting intention in Queensland gives Labor one of their better results of recent times.

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.

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.

3,311 comments on “Galaxy: Gillard versus Rudd in Queensland”

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  1. Z

    [I bet they don’t come here to be told yet again that Gillard is Doomed, either.
    ]

    They come here for many reasons and taking the political temperature is certainly one of them.

    Lots don’t want to hear people say Gillard is Doomed but it is a very common idea when you talk to people, so it’s going to come up frequently on an psephological site.

    Personally, I don’t think she is definitely doomed but she is the underdog.

  2. Don’t forget Gillard’s first Newspoll was a 55-45 lead.

    A fair bit happened between then and Rudd’s campaign leak.

    Rudd ain’t no saint, and he was undoubtedly blindsiding Gillard in the campaign which is unforgivable, but with a half-decent campaign she would have even a slim majority.

    It was an embarrassing disaster.

  3. guytaur

    [

    poroti

    Yay!! ]
    Initially we had three interested parties. One meant input was pig shite another chicken shite and the third was winery waste.For me the biggest Yaaay was the winery project was the one that went ahead 😆

  4. TP 3032

    Pretty sure she was polling okay before the leaks.

    And even if she was the evil rancid bitch you think she is, Rudd still should have kept his leaking to his own pants, assuming he was genuinely interested in returning a functional Labor government and keeping the Abbott malignancy at bay.

    Rudd was deposed because he couldn’t do the job, so at some point the responsible adults had to step in and remove him. It is that brutally simple.

    Did factions and their interests play a role in how it was done, the timing, etc? Of course. It could never be otherwise, in any party.

    So effing what?

  5. [ To be accurate, sabotaged by Tanner, probably on Rudd’s orders, although perhaps on his own initiative, since his hatred of Gillard goes back to some obscure sexual-political intrigue in the Socialist Left. ]

    Hmmm. Just speculating here … has anyone ever seen bemused and Tanner in the same room?

  6. Psephos

    Peak oil (crude oil) may have been passed in about 2008ish… Crude oil production has been flattish since around 2006.

    Hubbert was writing about crude oil. And discoveries of crude oil have not increased in line with the decline in borefield production. What has happened is substitutes have been found. The tar sands are not ‘oil’, but you can make oil out of them.

    What has increased is production of other substitute fuels. That have come on line as oil has gone up.

    Remember oil spiked upwards in about late 2007 -2008, which is what peak oil was supposed to do. It may have contributed to a few countries going down the gurgler as well, with Egypt, Yemen, Libya unable to maintain their exports.

    It may not be as catastrophic as he said it could be, but he was writing it as a warning and he said we needed to find substitutes, which we did.

  7. Diog is right about peak oil. We have not run out but we have used up the cheap stuff. We can forget about cheap oil from now on. The peak in conventional oil supply did actually pass in about 2007. Since then declining demand due to recession has tended to hide the fact that conventional oil supply is in decline. The new sources (tar sands, biodiesel, shale oil) are all expensive to produce. New deep sea oil reserves also take a lot more energy to extract and, as BP proved in the Gulf of Mexico, have risks.

    Take claims of new oil reserves with a grain of salt. Speculators make money exaggerating them. They are worth nothing till it is proven they can be economically extracted. Some never will be. There were some ridiculous claims about a recent SA find. We still don’t even know how much is in a recoverable state.

    In fact, Hubbard did predict that we would find more oil but it would be hard to get out. He didn’t predict the new alternative sources, but he was right about the geology.

    Also we shouldn’t exaggerate the alternatives. If Australia converted ALL its crops to biofuel crops (I.e. we had no food or grain feed) we would make about one third of our fuel oil.

  8. [Psephos
    Posted Monday, February 25, 2013 at 9:32 pm | Permalink

    ..
    since his hatred of Gillard goes back to some obscure sexual-political intrigue in the Socialist Left.]

    The hatred is obvious “sexual-political intrigue”, where is that littel dirt sheet called “the australian” when you need it.

  9. I have to say, the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Rudd wasn’t the one behind the 2010 campaign leaks. If nothing else, I just don’t think he’s that stupid.

    A bit of lateral thinking, taking into account the varying motives and vested interests of each of the prominent figures involved in all that drama, has led me to draw some, well, interesting conclusions.

  10. bemused

    “Mumble did a good analysis of the effect of the ‘leaks’ and concluded about zero effect.”

    Even if that was conclusively established you’ve still got a Labor ex-PM doing his darnedest to willfully sabotage a Labor election victory.

    The idea he even failed at that (again, if it was established in the first place) should make you think twice about your unwavering support for the guy. I would think.

  11. You can’t talk about the 2010 election campaign leaks and not mention the repeated whiteanting and destablising by Rudd and his camp in the period since.

    Just sayin’.

  12. [As I’ve said before, it’s rank hypocrisy to argue on one hand that the party needs to stand for something (which your party of preference certainly doesn’t, ML) on one hand and that it should bring back Rudd (regardless of the consequences) because he’s popular.]

    I think it is rank hypocrisy to say you needed to kill off a PM because the “government had lost its way” and then pretend the government is “back on track” when there has been disaster after disaster under Gillard’s rule and yet apparently this can never be mentioned.

    I have no problem with you saying the ALP is not going to die. I thoroughly enjoyed watching people say the exact same thing before NSW and then Qld and then NT. Just remember you need to cop it sweet when the results flow in!

  13. absolutetwaddle@3029


    Bemused

    All of those announcements were forgotten before votes were even cast. They were dull and uninspiring but not exactly gaffes of any notable scale. Also more than matched by Tony “Believe What I Write Not What I Say” Abbott’s dismal performance.

    The leaks on the other hand gave Abbott the best chance he’s had to date of becoming PM. They were hugely damaging.

    As someone who is a Rudd supporter could you elaborate on any kind of justification he may have had in doing this? Or do you believe it was out of character?

    The things I cited are what I remember.
    I don’t remember what the ‘leaks’ were apart from the one about dropping the ETS. I don’t think they had much effect at all, unlike the own goals.

    Tehre were plenty of mighty pissed off people around after 23rd Jun 2010 and I would think it highly probable that there was some loose talk in front of a few journalists over copious beers. Such things happen.

  14. maybe a tax on the profits of mining boom might be an idea to create a legacy???

    [Queensland Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce said there was no use pointing out the “bleeding obvious” to farmers who just want to know what legacy the mining boom will leave them.

    “I think people would accept the mining boom if, when it left, they saw new dams, new railway lines, inland rail, ports,” he told AAP.

    “If all they see is holes in the ground and wrecked roads, they’ll say `there’s nothing in that for us.'”]

  15. [ I come to PB for entertainment…compulsive and gripping ‘must read’ of comedic and soap operatic proportions ]

    Look! A unicorn!

  16. @senthorun: We cannot give “security concerns” an unlimited scope so that it effectively erases the need for transparency and accountability. #qanda

  17. [Gillard was travelling quite well in that election campaign, before the internal sabotage started.]

    The problems I had with the election campaign were the same as I had with Rudd, overmanaged and lacking in substance. It was a terrible, disheartening campaign driven by know-it-alls clustering around focus-groups. I think the media was right to decry it at the time, though it wouldn’t have hurt to point out that is precisely what drives Tony Abbott’s campaign.

    Tony Abbott and the Liberal party’s greatest asset is not Gillard, or any ALP policy. It is the total management and control of the Parliamentary party by a handful of people who don’t even have representation in Parliament. It’s shit, and allows them to get away with all kinds of hypocrisy and deceit, but unfortunately I have learnt that that isn’t what matters.

    Tony Abbott has almost completely disabled the Government’s ability to get anything positive out, because the press is lazy and broke. This lends them to the never ending cycle of polling where a narrative is re-inforced. (Who exactly decided that polling was worth funding, but resources for policy discussion and analysis wasn’t, is someone I would like to meet…)

    The ALP needs to be similarly disciplined. This doesn’t mean shutting down debate, or cutting down paths of communication. That’s been done, and found wanting. All it needs is for unnecessary spreading of dubious information and claims of internal strife to cease, and for faux moral panics to be analysed more meaningfully by MPs talking to the media, and for MPs watch what they say a little more carefully with journalists known to go for the more sensational angle.

    That is my assessment of the worst case scenario. The Government does have social media, and can cut through the gellatinous wall of bad reporting, but it takes and some momentum. I believe the question is whether the Parliamentary party, not just its leader, are willing to provide that.

  18. “@senthorun: We must remember that here in Australia sedition and security laws give ASIO wide ranging powers to hold people in secret detention. #qanda”

  19. Q+A thinks showing tweets is cool. No doubt by grace of the ABC management. The Italian lady had it right: Basta!

  20. WB,

    Thanks for your insight.

    Says a lot that you think you can assume what I think.

    But it’s all sweet. Your cutting admonishment has been taken on board.

  21. [I have no problem with you saying the ALP is not going to die. I thoroughly enjoyed watching people say the exact same thing before NSW and then Qld and then NT. Just remember you need to cop it sweet when the results flow in!]

    Modlib

    It will be declared 1830 on election night.

  22. “@peterlloydau: ..been in an anti-suicide cell (in Singapore) and can assure you that they are suicide proof. & Singapore’s model for nat’l security? Israel”

  23. [OK, it’s all clear to me now.
    Kevin Rudd was behind ‘cash for clunkers’.
    Kevin Rudd inspired the ‘citizens assembly’.
    Kevin Rudd forced the ‘moving forward’ mantra on her.
    Kevin Rudd insisted on the ‘Real Julia’.

    Yes, it was all Kev.]

    Yep: Just cos someone was leaking doesnt mean you didnt also screw the pooch.

    But no, its ‘Teh leaks made me screw the pooch!’

    You forgot that brilliant moment when Federal Labor got into bed publicly with the stinking corpse of the NSW labor govt, for some rumpy over some Sydney urban train policy. A week before poll day.

    I nearly wept – the Sussex St embrace of death.

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