GhostWhoVotes reports Newspoll has the Coalition’s lead at 55-45, down from 58-42 last fortnight. The primary votes are 32% for Labor (up two), 48% for the Coalition (down two) and 11% for the Greens (up one). Last fortnight’s spike has also come off in the personal ratings, with Julia Gillard up two on approval to 28% and down three on disapproval to 62%, Tony Abbott down four to 35% and up four 54%, and Abbott’s lead as preferred prime minister down from 43-35 to 40-37.
The weekly Essential Research has Labor up a point to 32%, the Coalition steady on 49% and the Greens down two to 9%, with two-party preferred steady on 56-44. Perceptions of the economy have improved (good up 10 points since a year ago to 45% and poor down three to 26%). Those who answered good or poor were respectively asked why the government wasn’t popular, and what it was that made them think that given low unemployment and inflation. Strong support was also found for taxing superannuation earnings and contributions of high-income earners, at 55% compared with 35% opposed.
Morgan has also come in earlier than usual with its weekly multi-mode poll result, which has Labor up a point on the primary vote to 31%, the Coalition down 2.5% to 46.5% and the Greens down one to 10%. That pans out to 56.5-43.5 on respondent-allocated preferences and 56-44 on previous election preferences.
http://www.afr.com/p/opinion/gillard_right_in_rejecting_labor_ncDOev5kQ8G9J86Oy4N3BN
Hmmm…scarcely a balanced article, three nay sayers against one positive…
http://www.bordermail.com.au/story/1423843/mps-say-cheaper-nbn-all-we-need/?cs=11
Loved this bit, though —
[He said he wouldn’t fully enjoy high-speed internet until he updated his desktop computer to match internet speed.]
What’s he using, an Apple II?
On Thatcher…: She did the easy part..she tore society and institutions down…that, as we here have witnessed with Tabbott, is dead easy to do…But she did not have anything to replace them with save conservative anarchy!…The Sultans of greed did the damage!
Ok, she lived and died..best put her to rest…after all, even the most beloved deceased start to smell after a while.
And we’ve got work to do.
[Howard had his good moments like gun control but after 2001 i cannot think of one positive in all of his last six years.]
I strongly disagree – he became only the second Australian PM in history to lose his seat at an election. Best Thing He Ever Did.
Modlib’s pleas for ‘class’ (class warfare?) are funny considering Abbott’s lack thereof regarding the PM’s dad, Margaret Whitlam, Bernie Banton, getting out of bed each day and breathing, etc. People are happy Thatcher is dead in the same way they were happy to see Hussain and Gadaffi dead, and how the US reacted over Chavez and will react when Castro dies. She was a megalomaniac dictatorial sociopath without empathy for those she hurt.
Hawke and Keating showed it was possible to restructure an economy while looking after people, but for Thatcher it was class warfare and she enjoyed causing suffering. She was a horrible person. Her legacy is the far right loons running the Fibs now – with their sociopathic agenda based on her dogma that ‘there is no society’ and antipathy towards any collective action by those otherwise disempowered against ‘The Economy’ (i.e. the mega-rich and powerful should be unencumbered by any social or civic responsibility.
The conservatives are now far right radicals, driven by people who do not understand empathy for others or the idea that the collective/communities can build a better society (i.e. people like John Howard who grew up as an odd child with few/no friends; and people who do not like other people because other people don’t like them because of their selfishness and egomania). They take comfort in the simplistic text book explanations of society understood through neo-classical economic theory because they do not understand altruism. It is probably abbott’s greatest strength in that he is a people person – I don’t think he is by nature a neo-conservative, but he’s not the brains (or financial backer) behind the outfit. The ranks of the libs and the Big Money that now owns them is full of thatcher-like sociopaths. Anybody who has joined or supported the libs since 2002 is similarly tainted.
All the criticism of Margaret Thatcher by various commentators (including highly-regarded political observers – not – such as Russell Brand) and some posters on here is all way off track IMO.
There seems to be a concept in these people’s minds that the UK could have blithely plodded along from the 1970s until now with its expensive welfare state system and its unsustainable raft of public enterprises with highly-unionised workforces delivering declining productivity while enjoying a quite remarkable degree of featherbedding in terms of employment conditions.
This scenario was unsustainable. If the British Government had tried to keep going in this direction, the nation as a whole would have been far less wealthy as a whole than it is now – with many of the gains of the North Sea oil and the financial sector boom from the 1990s having been dissipated through wasteful public expenditure. Britain would have gone the way of some of the poorer-performing continental European countries like Spain and Italy, which are now in so much trouble.
In the end, everyone in Britain – including the poor and indigent – would have been worse off.
Sadly, the initial efforts that Thatcher made to get people off welfare and into work (particularly the “on your bike” initiative, which quite reasonably expected people to look for work in areas only a short train journey away) have not been followed through by subsequent governments and the extent of welfare dependency across Britain remains at quite alarming levels.
It really isn’t clear what the long-term solution to this problem will be: like the relatively smaller group of Australian counterparts, these multigenerational welfare recipient families are uneducated, unmotivated and wish to continue living in regions with low levels of employment. These people are becoming steadily less and less competitive in the British labour market, in light of the growing influx of motivated and productive continental workers into Britain in recent years (bringing, for the first time, the concept of “service” into the British service economy).
So there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out of this morass (“no future in England’s dreaming” as the Sex Pistols once put it). But Thatcher’s reforms prevented Britain from sinking as quickly as it might otherwise would have done, and created some prospect for eventually finding a way out.
You can quite fairly criticise Thatcher for being far too aggressive, too ruthless and for projecting a nasty, mean-spirited Tory image. But the socio-economic system of Britain really did need a big shake up in the 1970s and I don’t think a mild-mannered approach would have achieved as much.
But blaming Thatcherism for continuing poverty, or for the economic decline of manufacturing towns in the midlands and northern rust-belt, or for the lack of funding for government services (when she did so much to make them more efficient) is just plain wrong in my opinion, and is based on a strange, dreamy nostalgia for a wartime and post-war era of greyness, deprivation and long queues for everything which is enormously widespread among the left-wing segment of the British intelligentsia (most of whom appear seem to have harboured a lifelong envy that they weren’t born as George Orwell).