The Australian reports the latest Newspoll has the Coalition leading 55-45 on two-party preferred, down from 56-44 at the previous poll three weeks ago, with both Labor and the Coalition down a point on the primary vote to 31% and 47% respectively and the Greens up two to 11%. Tony Abbott has apparently hit the lead as preferred prime minister; more to follow.
UPDATE: GhostWhoVotes relates that Julia Gillard’s ratings have plunged yet further, her approval down six points to 30% and disapproval up six to 58%. Tony Abbott is effectively unchanged at 33% (steady) and 55% (down one), but his 41-39 deficit on preferred prime minister is now a lead of 40-36.
UPDATE 2: The latest Morgan face-to-face result combines the last two weekends of polling, and it shows the Coalition sustaining a commanding primary vote lead of 44% (down one) to 33.5% (steady), with the Greens up a point to 10%. On respondent-allocated preferences the Coalition lead has narrowed from 56-44 to 54.5-45.5, while on previous election preferences it’s down from 54.5-45.5 to 53.5-46.5.
Other news:
• The Australian Electoral Commission has accepted Julian Assange’s enrolment in the Melbourne seat of Isaacs, which clears him to proceed with his Senate bid unless someone cares to mount a legal challenge. I had expected that Assange might fall foul of the requirement that a person enrolling overseas must intend to resume residing in Australia within six years of having left. To the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, Assange was last here furtively in 2007. Another legal grey area is his political asylum status, and what it might mean for the constitutional injunction that parliamentarians not be “under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or … a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or citizen of a foreign power”.
• Gary Humphries, who has held the Liberals’ ACT Senate seat since 2003 and was the territory’s Chief Minister from October 2000 to November 2001, has lost preselection to Zed Seselja, leader of the ACT opposition through five years and two election defeats. Seselja prevailed in the contentious party ballot on Saturday by margin of 114 to 84. Humphries says he will abide by the result, but even before the vote his supporters had petitioned for it to be referred to a divisional council meeting on the grounds that the process had been rushed to Seselja’s advantage. That would throw the vote open to around 400 extra party members who were denied a vote because they hadn’t attended a branch meeting in six months.
• With Seselja standing aside from the leadership to contest the Senate preselection, the ACT Liberals have chosen Molonglo MP Jeremy Hanson as their new leader ahead of former leader Brendan Smyth. This was despite Gary Humphries’ claim that a deal had been reached between Seselja and another MP, Alistair Coe, in which Seselja would decisively throw his weight behind Coe in exchange for Coe’s support for his Senate preselection bid (which was nonetheless forthcoming, along with that of the remainder of the Liberal party room). Humphries claimed his decision to reveal the deal to the public caused it to come undone, although Coe denied it had ever been made. Coe won the party room ballot for the deputy leadership, unseating Smyth.
• Natasha Griggs, the Country Liberal Party member for the Darwin-based seat of Solomon since she unseated Labor’s Damian Hale in 2010, has seen off a preselection challenge from Peter Bourke, a clinical immunologist at Royal Darwin Hospital. In January the Northern Territory News reported a party source saying Bourke was likely to prevail, as Griggs was “not cut out to be a politician”.
• A rank-and-file Labor preselection vote for the south-western Sydney seat of Werriwa will be held on March 5, pitting Labor veteran Laurie Ferguson against union and party activist Damien Ogden, who had been an aspirant for the seat when Ferguson moved there after his existing seat of Reid was merged with neighbouring Lowe at the 2010 election. Anna Patty of the Sydney Morning Herald reports Ogden has some support from both the “hard” and “soft” left, respectively associated with Anthony Albanese and the United Voice union, although it appears to be generally expected that Ferguson will see off the threat. A report by Samantha Maiden in the Sunday Telegraph suggests that might not avail him in the long run, with union polling conducted late last year said to point to a decisive swing against Labor of 13%.
• Ben McClellan of the Blacktown Advertiser reports the Liberal preselection for Greenway has been set for March 9, with 12 shortlisted candidates including 2010 candidate Jayme Diaz, Rose Tattoo singer Gary “Angry” Anderson, Hills councillor Yvonne Keane and “anti-bullying campaigner and motivational speaker” Brett Murray. Also in the field are business coach Robert Borg, gym owner Rowan Dickens, senior financial analyst Mathew Marasigan, marketing manager Ben Jackson, Hills councillor Mark Owen Taylor, accountant Mark Jackson, security supervisor Renata Lusica and, curiously, Josephina Diaz, mother of Jayme. The choice will be made from a panel of delegates from the electorate’s five branches and head office.
[FEDERAL Labor faces electoral annihilation, losing seats previously considered ultra-safe, unless the party switches back to Kevin Rudd, a new poll has found.
]
Well it is a sizable poll so cannot be discarded.
Pretty clearly the public is not going to let Labor escape its sins, and demands that it meet its due punishment.
I guess those faceless men had arrogance so high they thought they could knife a PM for no reason AT ALL, anytime they like to install whomever they felt like.
The public are making it clear that they intend to punish Labor through the representative of that vile pointless act of treachery on the Australian people, Gillard.
Rudd needs to think if Labor is so rotten at its core if saving it in any way would be the best thing to do. Maybe the best thing would be to let the public get its closure on Labor.
Mod Lib@3944
Not a bad comeback.
But unless you make merit you may well come back as a horses arse.
Sorry that was this time.
[ horses arse.]
…its horse’s arse.
I do insist on insults being put correctly at the very least.
:devil:
[Rudd needs to think if Labor is so rotten at its core if saving it in any way would be the best thing to do. Maybe the best thing would be to let the public get its closure on Labor.]
TP
I dont think he does. Why else would the Leadership stop cold this week?
@TP/3951
The voters obviously would rather see Tony at the lodge rather than who’s got the top job that may or may not be there in 5 years time.
If they make Pell the Pope, he can take Anglican Archbishop Jensen with him. They can sit together in Oz House and whine about how gay priests and women bishops are rooning the world.
We would be rid of two blights and the MSM would not have these two right-wing reactionaries to run to every time a reporter wants a quote from “the church”.
Bugler@3948
You need your PB dictionary. Troll = I disagree with you. 😉
My attitude is that I joined the ALP to help elect Labor governments and I do what I can in the party to that end.
I have a different perspective to zoomster partly because she operates in a country electorate and I am in the city where anonymity is easier.
I also like a challenge and was instrumental over the last few years in rebuilding a branch that was almost dead. Alas, I had to leave it due to a boundary change but it was going strong.
Its probably not a bad idea to let Gillard take the ALP over the cliff and then come back to bring the survivors after the next election back up to the promise land…..cleaning out all the folk who insulted him (the “true deceivers” who damaged the party by insulting their former leader mercilessly to benefit their own political interests), and starting afresh with the “true believers” on the other side.
Mod Lib@3953
Quite so.
:devil:
Puff, the Magic Dragon.@3956
I believe the ‘House of Jensen’ are to retire soon, if they haven’t already.
@Mod Lib/3958
Or Malcolm Challenges Tony at near election say 1-2 months before election ?
BK, bemused
We already have an Australian Pope: here
TTF&B @ 3927 – agree. Failure to call a Double Dissolution in the wake of the Coalition’s reneging on the ETS was Kevin Rudd’s greatest mistake. He’d have romped in a March 2010 election and Tony Abbott reduced to an embarrassing footnote for the Libs. What might have happened next is for an alternative universe. Probably Rudd PM going into an election around now, or possibly Julia Gillard may have taken over in 2011 or 2012. Who knows? Probably no hung Parliament. I think that Labour would have been in a much better position now in early 2013 if Rudd had taken the plunge.
Dan Gulberry@3962
😆 😆 😆
[Or Malcolm Challenges Tony at near election say 1-2 months before election ?]
A year or two in is fine with me. Take the honeymoon and win an even bigger margin for Term 2!!!!
Bemused,
[I also like a challenge and was instrumental over the last few years in rebuilding a branch that was almost dead. Alas, I had to leave it due to a boundary change but it was going strong.]
That’s what you get for living in a growth corridor, you are required to share your talents 😀 . I’m not entirely confident about the branches in my electorate, though the redistribution has probably fired them up. The Vic ALP site did have a list of branches, with contact info, but they seem to have taken it down. I might leave it at that, before William starts getting annoyed at my constant not discussing federal politics on federal politics threads. My thoughts on the ALP are already rather clear 😛
Why should a broadsheet be of greater intrinsic journalistic value than a tabloid?
@Steve777/3963
Agreed I remember alot of the discussion about DD and Kevin Refusing to do so.
@Mod Lib/3965
Honeymoon only lasts about 2 weeks, so if it’s 1-2 months out, then sorry it will not increase just because a change of leadership means lack of stabilizability in the party.
Bugler@3966
You should be able to locate some local branches by inquiring at State Office. Give them a call.
[Could DLP type voters convince themselves that voting liberal is not really voting tory ?? I am betting a heap of them do.]
It’s a simple matter of arithmetic to see that the bulk of those who used to vote DLP, or at least their descendants, have returned to voting Labor. The Liberals and the DLP used to poll a large combined majority in Victoria – even in 1969, a fairly good year for Labor, the Lib + DLP vote in Victoria was 56%. Now Victoria consistently votes Labor at both federal and state levels. That could not happen unless most of the DLP vote had returned. I would think a substantial majority of Catholics in Victoria vote Labor, helped of course by the fact that the Catholic population is now very multi-cultural and not just Irish as it was until the 1960s. But even many of the old Irish-Catholic working class must have returned to Labor, or Labor would not be winning seats like Ballarat and Bendigo.
[A year or two in is fine with me. Take the honeymoon and win an even bigger margin for Term 2!!!!]
That’s assuming the Libs haven’t stuffed the place in the meantime. Big assumption.
Steve777@3963
Its all fine and dandy with 20/20 hindsight, but life just doesn’t have that advantage or work that way.
A whole lot of assumptions going on there as well.
The goddess of battle comes but once and is either grasp or lost.
History records what happened.
Hell I’ve been trying to convince everyone I know if they don’t like to vote both Major parties I tell them to vote the other parties/independents!
Especially those torn between projects like NBN etc.
Psephos@3971
Then we have Catholics taking control of the liberal party at the National level in recent times?
More information please?
Draft speech notes for a Gillard abdication:
“When I agreed to become Labor leader, and thereby your Prime Minister in June 2009, I believed it was in the best interests of Australia, in the best interests of my fellow Australians and in the best interests of our great Labor Party.
“I said then that a good government had lost its way.
“Today, I’m announcing that a good government, the one I
have led, is going to become even better, by addressing
some of the unresolved damage that was caused by that change in leadership.
“I now accept that many Australians felt uncomfortable at the way I was installed as the leader. I know too that many still feel uncomfortable to this day. While Labor retained power in 2010, I accept of course that the result of that election was far from decisive.
“I have underestimated the ongoing difficulties the unprecedented leadership transition in 2009 would cause.
“And that is why I am announcing that I will stand aside, effective today. I have spoken to Kevin Rudd and appealed to him to put his name forward at a leadership ballot for the position of leader of the Labor Party. Mr Rudd has agreed. He has also agreed that his style of leadership will be markedly different than the way he governed prior to June 2009. We all learn from difficult experiences. I have learnt much from this great privilege of leading Australia, and Kevin Rudd has assured me he has learnt much too from his earlier period as leader.
“Much will be made, no doubt, by our opponents about some of the comments that were made about Kevin Rudd by myself and my Cabinet colleagues about 12 months ago during a leadership challenge.
“Frankly, we have all moved on from those comments, which were made in the hurly burly of a difficult leadership tussle. If our opponents want to dwell on them; if that is the best they have to offer in providing a vision for the future of Australia, then so be it.
“Meantime, we in the Government will be proving that we have moved on, and that despite the greatest of difficulties between people who all want the best for Australia, we can rise above these difficulties to put Australians first.
“Kevin Rudd has urged me to consider taking back a role about which I have always felt passionate, that of Education Minister, should he be elected as leader.”
[alias
Posted Friday, March 1, 2013 at 11:26 pm | PERMALINK
Draft speech notes for a Gillard abdication:]
hahahahahaha
Try…… Shorten made me do it!
[Then we have Catholics taking control of the liberal party at the National level in recent times?
More information please?]
Catholics used to be effectively barred from the Liberal Party, which was dominated by Protestant Freemasons. (Every non-Labor PM from Barton to McMahon was a Freemason.) Menzies always had one token Catholic in his ministry, first Neil O’Sullivan, then Shane Paltridge. That began to break down under Fraser, but even Phil Lynch in the 70s faced considerable anti-Catholic prejudice in the Liberal Party. With the end of the DLP, the Catholic conservative intelligentsia (Gerard Henderson, for example) went over to the Liberals, and the elite Catholic schools have turned out a squad of Catholic Liberal politicians like Abbott, Hockey, Andrews etc. But that doesn’t alter the fact that the majority of Australian Catholics are working-class, or non-Anglo, or both, and tend to vote Labor.
alias@3976
Another nonsense thought bubble that we have seen most months for the last two years or so.
All based on a previously arrived at conclusion with a ‘case’ built around such.
Please make it more interesting by dating this hypothetical ‘abdication’.
The accuracy of the thought bubble can then be independently measured.
Name the date!
Alias
[When I agreed to become Labor leader, and thereby your Prime Minister in June
2009, {2010} ]In 2009, Rudd was still very popualr and Turnbull was LotO.
The proposition is fanciful That speech, if delivered by Gillard, would be a political suicide note. The ALP would be a laughing stock. They’d have abandoned government and all their claims, merely to go on bended knee to Murdoch and his harpies and a man whom the vast majority of the caucus could not abide. In such circumstances, I cannot imagine many ALP MPs even wanting to win. Who would want to serve under him? How many of them could feel even a shred of self-respect? The Rudd supporters maybe but surely nobody else.
Can I have a go at the Gillard concession as well?
“It appears we have been moooovvvviiinnggg bbaaaaccckkkkkwwwaaarrrrdddssss,
It was me that suggested a lurch to the right on asylum seekers, Kevin was right
It was me that suggested watering down the Mining tax till we got nothing, Kevin was right
It was me that suggested freezing the CPRS, Kevin was right, he shouldn’t have listened
It was me that hitched the ALP economic management horse to the surplus wagon
I take the blame and I have decided to give myself the political chop.
Now gotta zip, over to you Kev baby….
yawnage.
Alias 3976 In your dreams maybe, but I see zero chance of such a prospect.
@Mod Lib/3981
As long as we can have a go at Malcolm…
“Missed it by that much”.
What will Obama and Hagel do”
Re zionist demand for war with Iran
____________________
This weekend..AIPAC..the top zionist group in the US will debate a motion at it’s conference ,which has the support of 2 Repub senators…that the Senate pass a motion declaring that if Israeli feels it must attack Iran the US would automatically follow suit and join in the attack
This amazing call will meet oppositon from Obama and Hagel even if passed by the Senate
One of it’s proponents Sen Lindsay has just been outed in that he received $343.000 as a donation from AIPAC to his election campaign
that’s buying politicians on a grand scale
A list shows many Republicans and some Dems received many hundreds of thousands of Dollars..from the zionist lobby……
…which spends up big on politicians
Thanks Fran. Got my dates mixed up a bit. Was out of the country for much of this.
Or
“Abbott is wiping the floor with me, time to give the ALP a chance with another leader”
Amusing ML, and more than a grain of truth in there, but I think a speech of this type may well, in fact, be given. JG is a realist, at her core.
http://mondoweiss.net/2013/02/request-israeli-senators.html
The article from NY left -jewish site “Mondoweiss” re the AIPAC plan for a war with Iran backed by the USA
@Mod Lib/3987
Or Tony Abbott looses by default because he fails his election campaign in between August/September.
Wow.. A LOT of mileage last night from the pondering about PM tenure that I have been having a look at…
Someone got a bit ‘interested’ here 😉
What I find hilarious is the amount of time (and obvious mental strain with pretty simple maths) spent picking tiny (apparent) holes in the work I used to support my case.
What is more hilarious is that these same people NEVER EVER seem to support ANYTHING they say with analysis.. can’t manage it I guess. It is always a lot easier to criticise those that do.. thus all the monuments to critics etc etc.
So.. let’s have a look at all your nonsense, shall we?
[I didn’t use 6 because of the number of PMs, I used 6 because of the ratio:
42 versus 26
And finding a common denominator.
And I was trying to find out how bluepill came up with the ratio
7 : 3.5]
Why not just ask, dickhead? It is not rocket science. I was curious about the average tenure of ALP vs non-ALP PMs after a lop-sided discussion on factions and their influence in the ALP.
I chose WW2 as a starting point because it is a) one of two often used convenient placemarkers in Australian democracy in PB, I guess it is only OK to do this to support ALP arguments? However, I am not frequent enough to know that as a centrist, I am not allowed to do that. Sorry. The second, by the way, is the establishment of parliament.
I wanted to count the years quickly, so I used this methodology:
a) round off years to the nearest whole year (more than 183 the full year, less than, cut it off.. sorry if this is sinister and sneaky and partisan but it’s just what we actually do in Maths and Science)
b) terms which were less than a year were taken as tenths of a year to the nearest tenth
c) the number of years for each was rounded.
I counted 6 ALP Prime Ministers, you petty gits. You know why?? There IS no consensus on the end of WW2. What is there ALP policy on this too?? On April 29th the Riechstag was captured (first of the common points used) and September 2 with the signing of surrender on USS Missouri( the last generally accepted date). For ease, I chose the midpoint between these you stupid idiots. That made in mid July, so I started with Chifley.. oh, the conspiracy, eh?? How could I DO such a sinister thing???
[To get 7 on the Lib side, then obviously 42 was divided by 6. The ratio then was 7 : 26/6 = 7 : 4.33 recurring
Which meant for every seven years of Coalition govt, there was a corresponding 4.33 years of Labor govt.
bluepill tried to make out that the ratio “since WW2″ was 7 : 3.5]
No making out here. Unlike you, I have no partisan axe to grind. You have a need to manipulate facts you don’t like, misrepresent people like me and lie when it suits because above all, the ALP must ALWAYS come out better than conservatives.
I have no such need. You can say all you like about any bloody party in Australia and I just don’t care enough. Rant about Abbott like a babboon (which you usually do) and I don’t feel any need to respond, I just don’t care. I am interested in Psychology and politics. My interest is psephological and ethnographical.
[That was wrong. If in fact it was correct, he should have said the ratio was 2 : 1 i.e. twice as many, but he couldn’t say that outright because it was wRONg – and worse, he knew it was wrong.]
This is perhaps the clearest difference between us both. You just need the ALP win, or if that won’t work, the conservatives mustn’t, so some ludicrous ‘hole’ must be found to discredit the whole notion.
There is a very good reason why I didn’t manufacture an empirical ratio for this data set. I was not trying to prove how much the conservatives “won by” in same lame ratio. Instead, I was showing the actual period of time served. For conservatives, PMs survived the equivalent of two full terms, the ALP a bit over one. This goes to re-election and the role of factions as discussed previously.
[If as you say, there were 7 PMs each, then the ratio is
42/7 : 26/7
= 6 : 3.7]
What is ironic about this is the nit-picking to ignore the glaring difference here. Who had longer terms you fool. It is like complaining that the waiter got your change wrong whilst you are sinking on the titanic. Look at the boat, fool.
[But, bluepill was trying to come up with a calculation for “Stability of Leadership” not the number of PMs in a given time.]
No, I was interested to see the average tenure of leadership for conservatives and non-conservatives, which I did. But WW2 was apparently cherry picking. so I had fun counting every single day (ignoring the irrelevant impact of the couple of dozen leap days.. is that also deceptive, partisan and evil?).
What I found was that over the entire history of our Federal Parliament in this country that the ALP PMs have been in power an average of 1219 days and non-ALP PMs 1723 days.
[And, he failed dismally.]
Uh, no, I didn’t. It was not hard work and the conclusion is pretty straightforward difference of 504 days or 41.35% more time in power for non ALP vs ALP PMs.
The ALP is the oldest political party in Australia and has had the most time to develop clear and entrenched factions. Given enough time I would expect the coalition to perhaps do the same.
Any other lame discussion about “oooh, the leadership in conservatives is more unstable, they have worse politics, they are nasty, we are nice, we get rid of dross, they don’t” is a) opinion and b) irrelevant both to this discussion and the voting population in Australia. They know little about internal strife in the parties and care not at all. They don’t even LIKE voting, but do it because they have to.
So, as everyone is so fond of saying, “there is only one poll that counts”. The only thing in this room that party tragic from either side can absolutely agree on is who became PM after each election.
To the average punter, if you see a PM from one party in the job longer, I suspect there is a perception that perhaps that party is a little more stable in government.. A wild, crazy, nasty right-wing, labor-hating idea, I guess you’ll say.
Well Kezza, should we then look at how often labor governments gets re-elected as opposed to non-labor governments. Would you accept that data set or pick bloody ridiculous holes in that too to avoid support for an argument you don’t happen to like.
You, like much of the furniture here have always been teflon when it comes to seeing your party objectively.
Though you look like a fool when you carry on the way you do.
3978
Lyons was a Catholic and a non-ALP PM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lyons
Psephos@3978
[Or Tony Abbott looses by default because he fails his election campaign in between August/September.]
Sure, the last 1 month might be completely different to the preceding 48 months
alias@3986
Not all you mixed up sunshine.
Have another go later.
Try Alt > Control > Delete
“My congrats to PM Abbott, i now realise that the real Julia left me along with the majority of voters some time ago”
This is fun.
Re discussion of Catholics’ support for this or that party: I think that churchgoing people, whether Catholic or other Christian, these days tend to have more in common with each other than with their less devout ‘lapsed’, ‘nominal’ or ‘cultural’ brethren, and that they are by and large more likely to be politically conservative. It’s not an absolute rule of course, and they each make up their own minds how they will vote. But religious belief of any (Christian) flavour, especially conventional or fundamentalist religious belief and practice, does seem to be correlated with conservatism.
How about “The ALP appears to be reeling from the effects of “real” Julia”
[Lyons was a Catholic and a non-ALP PM]
Lyons was a Labor rat so I don’t count him. He was a dim little man, only ever a puppet for the Protestant leaders, first John Latham, then Menzies, and behind them Keith Murdoch and the Collins House business group who funded the UAP.
@Mod Lib/3998
How about The effects of the peak abbott” coming to play.