BludgerTrack: 56.0-44.0 to Coalition

Three slightly less bad polls for Labor have softened the post-leadership crisis slump in the BludgerTrack poll aggregate. Also featured: preselection news and some minor changes to electoral law.

The latest weekly BludgerTrack update accommodates results from Newspoll, Essential Research and Morgan’s multi-mode poll, with the latter looking like it will be a regularly weekly occurrence in contrast to the unpredictable schedule of the face-to-face series it has replaced. This is a somewhat better batch of polling for Labor than the previous week or two, gaining them 0.5% on two-party preferred and two extra on the seat projection. My latest bias adjustments for the Morgan multi-mode polling, based on comparison of its results with the overall poll trend, are +1.7% for Labor, +0.4% for the Coalition and -1.5% for the Greens, compared with +1.4%, +0.9% and -1.5% as I calculated them a week ago.

In other news, I have a raft of preselection action and a review of some minor electoral law changes:

• A bitterly contested preselection to replace Nicola Roxon in the rock solid Labor seat of Gellibrand in western Melbourne has been won by Telstra executive Tim Watts, running with the backing of Stephen Conroy, for whom he once worked as a staffer. His opponents were Katie Hall, a former adviser to Roxon who ran with her backing; Kimberley Kitching, former Melbourne councillor and current acting general manager of the Health Services Union No. 1 branch; Julia Mason and Daniel McKinnon. The 50% of the preselection vote determined by a local party ballot conducted on Monday saw 126 votes go to Watts, 105 to Kitching, 87 to Hall, 42 to McKinnon and four to Mason. Despite a preference deal between Kitching and Hall, that gave Watts a decisive lead going into Tuesday’s vote of the party’s Public Office Selection Committee, where the “stability pact” between the Shorten-Conroy Right forces and the Socialist Left reportedly assured him of about 70% of the vote. Andrew Crook of Crikey reports that Kitching, who had hoped to prevail with support from Turkish community leaders, was thwarted when the “Suleyman clan” (referring to an influential family in western suburbs politics) defected to Watts in exchange for support for Natalie Suleyman to take the number three position on the upper house ticket for Western Metropolitan at the next state election. A dirt sheet targeting Hall over her sexual history and involvement in the HSU was disseminated in the week before the vote, which has led to Kitching complaining to an ALP tribunal that Roxon had falsely accused her of being involved.

• Steve McMahon, chief executive of the NSW Trainers Association (as in thoroughbred horses) and former mayor of Hurstville, has won Labor preselection for the southern Sydney seat of Barton, to be vacated at the election by Robert McClelland. Much more on that in the next episode of Seat of the Week.

• Barnaby Joyce faces opposition at the April 13 Nationals preselection for New England in the shape of David Gregory, owner of an agricultural software business in Tamworth. Another mooted nominee, National Farmers Federation president Jock Laurie, is instead seeking preselection for the by-election to replace Richard Torbay in his Armidale-based state seat of Northern Tablelands.

• Tony Crook, who won the southern regional WA seat of O’Connor for the Nationals from Liberal veteran Wilson Tuckey in 2010, has announced he will not seek another term. The seat was already looming as a spirited three-cornered contest to match the several which had unfolded at the state election (including in the corresponding local seats of Kalgoorlie and Eyre), with the Liberals running hard and early behind their candidate, Katanning farmer Rick Wilson.

• Jason Tin of the Courier-Mail reports Chris Trevor will again be Labor’s candidate for the central Queensland seat of Flynn, having won the seat when it was created in 2007 before joining the Queensland Labor casualty list in 2010. Nicole Hodgson, a teacher, and Leanne Donaldson, a former public servant in child protection, were reportedly set to take on the thankless tasks of Hinkler and Fadden.

A package of electoral law changes made it through parliament last month in the shape of the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Improving Electoral Administration) Act 2013, despite opposition to some measures from the Coalition and Senate cross-benchers Nick Xenophon and John Madigan:

• If a ballot box is unlawfully opened before the authorised time, as occurred at two pre-poll booths in Boothby and Flynn at the 2010 election, the act now requires that the votes be admitted to the count if it is established that “official error” was responsible. The AEC requested the law be clarified after it acted on contestable legal advice in excluding the relevant votes in Boothby and Flynn from the count, which were too few to affect the result. In its original form the bill directed that the affected votes should be excluded, but Bronwyn Bishop successfully advocated for the savings provision when it was referred to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters.

• The Australian Taxation Office has been added to the list of agencies which can provide the Australian Electoral Commission with data relevant to enrolment. As usual with matters that touch on automatic enrolment, this was opposed by the Coalition, Xenophon and Madigan, but supported by all lower house independents and the Greens.

• Pre-polling will in all circumstances begin four days after the close of nominations, giving the AEC two more days to print and disseminate material to the voting centres. The Coalition took the opportunity to move for the pre-poll period to be cut from 19 days before polling day to 12, again with the support of Xenophon and Madigan. The change also eliminates a discrepancy where the date came forward a day if there was no election for the Senate, in which case the election timetable did not have to provide an extra day for lodgement of Senate preference tickets.

• Those casting pre-poll votes will no longer have to sign declaration certificates. A change in the status of pre-poll votes from declaration to ordinary votes was implemented at the 2010 election, allowing them to be counted on election night, but voters still had to sign a certificate. The AEC advised this was unnecessary, but the measure was nonetheless opposed by the Coalition, Xenophon and Madigan.

• The cut-off for receiving postal vote applications has been moved back a day from Thursday to Wednesday, acknowledging the near certainty that voting material posted to those who apply on the Thursday will not be received in time.

• The timetable for conducting electoral redistributions has been amended to allow more time for considering objections raised in public submissions.

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.

1,173 comments on “BludgerTrack: 56.0-44.0 to Coalition”

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  9. “@InsidersABC: On #Insiders : Barrie Cassidy interviews @PGarrettMP ahead of COAG talks on #gonski next week. Panel @markgkenny David Marr and Niki Savva”

  10. [I’ve never had any doubt that if Labor had been in office in 2003, we would have supported and joined in the invasion of Iraq, just as we joined in the Kuwait war in 1991. ]

    Our involvement in the Kuwait war was just to help enforce the UN sanction blockade.

  11. MTBW@799. If you mean she is simply going to vote 1 Green 2 ALP then I’m not critical. Even I’ve done that (at the State level: the Federal Greens are predominantly a communist party rather than an environmental party and will never get my vote. And that’s even though I quite like Christine at an unsocial level: it’s some of her friends I can’t stand. But, then, I’m not sure she can stsnd them much either!

  13. I tried to write “personal” and it came out as “unsocial” (a la Hawthorn football). Autocorrect is an amazing thing!!

  14. Diogenes

    Yes, total difference when under UN. This armed posse stuff by self-interested oil-hungry belligerents like the US & UK invading Iraq was something for Aus to stay well clear of.

  17. Psephos, the number of German deaths from allied bombing may have been just 300,000. But the total numbers were far higher in all. It is said that in the closing months of the war, the Red Army killed as many as 50,000 Germans a week. Very many of these would have been civilians or the young, old and incapable who were finally conscripted and sent to their ends.

    Of course, I’m sure you would agree, even these numbers pale when compared to the losses among Russians, Poles and others in the East.

  18. MTBW
    No. I suppose I thought the only decent protest would be to vote for the other side. Please don’t tell me your daughter is thinking of voting for the Greens. Too many people think that’s a good way to protest against a Labor policy they don’t like. They see it as a Claytons Labor vote and it most definitely is no such thing.

    I wish someone would explain to me why it is so terrible to expect single parents to find work after six or eight years of being paid to stay at home. That is more than enough time to study and get some work experience. And believe me,I know all about how hard it can be to raise kids while you are on welfare. I could write a book about my own experiences.

  19. It’s always funny when neocons talk about needing the Iraq War to get rid of a dictator given that about half the worlds dictators are there with the active blessing and support of the US.

  20. Psephos @777, re ‘dovish’:

    Have you ever read “Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization” by Nicholas Baker. Very interesting and controversial book. Fits in with ‘dovish’, if you mean by that hawkish.

  21. On Iraq, had Beazley still been leader I’ve no doubt Labor would have been in, but far less enthusiastically. With Crean I’m not so sure. Certainly a good chance, but I suspect he may have simply said we’re committed fully in Afghanistan and don’t possess the capability to satisfactorially operate in two theatres. We’ll stick it out with full commitment there thanks very much.

    I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have spoken out as he did against Iraq because yes opposition has it’s own equations, but equally with a 100% Afghanistan position the US would have had zero reason to not continue to hold Australia in the highest regard as backing it up after it was attacked, and equally that position would have been widely popular in Australia.

  22. @sortius: oh, awesome, @TurnbullMalcolm is now using Google+ (maybe too much hate on Twitter), he hasn’t blocked me there… yet #NBN

  25. Excellent question

    [dear @TurnbullMalcolm, if I pay your $5k for FTTH and you then privatize @NBNCo, what return will I get on my investment? #NBN #auspol]

  28. 819

    And many of the other half are there as a reaction to a previous USA backed tyrant. The most notable of these being Iran because of the 1953 coup to stop the oil nationalisation because the newly back in office Churchill wanted it, using quid pro quo for British involvement in Korea as the persuader.

  30. victoria @ 825
    Yes, it’s a capital cost, effectively like a small capital raising to pay for each connection, and the more homes that are connected by fibre the higher the value of the company.

  36. It’s always funny when neocons talk about needing the Iraq War to get rid of a dictator given that about half the worlds dictators are there with the active blessing and support of the US.

    I always thought the Iraq invasion in 2003 was a hare-brained attempt by the neocons to take advantage of the political environment (9/11 & it’s aftermath; no other superpower) to rearrange the political geography of the Middle East into a more congenial configuration. Even in the 1990s the Neocons were talking about ‘finishing the job’ they believed George Busg senior left unfinished in 1991. In any case I believe Australia shouldn’t have gone anywhere near it. As an earlier poster said, we should have said we were fully committed to Afghanistan. And as an ally of the USA we should have told them that invading Iraq was a really bad idea.

  37. Getting users to pay for FTTP is a huge benefit for the company rolling out FTTN. it allows higher data speeds that can be charged at a higher rate, a massive increase in up load speeds that can be charged for and a massive saving on maintenance and power costs. Maybe they would be willing to subsidise the cost either partialy or completely.

  39. [“Even in the 1990s the Neocons were talking about ‘finishing the job”]
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

    http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

    [“Further, the process of transformation,
    even if it brings revolutionary change, is
    likely to be a long one, absent some
    catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a
    new Pearl Harbor”]

    The Neocons got their Pearl Harbour with 9/11 and then sidelined the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
    They CIA would have gone with the old school method of overthrowing unfriendly governments and dictators.

  40. [It’s always funny when neocons talk about needing the Iraq War to get rid of a dictator given that about half the worlds dictators are there with the active blessing and support of the US.]

    I do get sick of this stupid line. By my count, there are 13 genuine dictatorships in the world. China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba are communist regimes. Belarus, Turmenistan and Uzbekistan are Soviet leftover regimes. Syria, Sudan, Yemen and Eritrea are leftist regimes, all former Soviet satellites. Iran is a clerical regime. The US can’t in any way be held to blame for creating or sustaining any of these regimes. That leaves Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies. They are not “dictatorships” in the European sense, but traditional Arab monarchies which largely rule by consent, although they are repressive in dealing with dissidents. The US certainly does support these regimes, for very good economic and strategic reasons. I agree this is morally dubious, and I think they should stop (and some of the “neocons” in the US agree). But this comes nowhere near the statement that “half the worlds dictators are there with the active blessing and support of the US.”

  43. Meher

    [I tried to write “personal” and it came out as “unsocial” (a la Hawthorn football). Autocorrect is an amazing thing!!]

    Does this explain the crap the Press write?

  44. William@842: all this cutting and pasting from Twitter on PB is really annoying. Especially people who cut and paste something they have tweeted themselves that they think is clever (but more often than not is just abusive).

    If I want to read things that are on Twitter I go to Twitter and read them.

  48. [And if they could subsidise a whole street then they would save on putting in a node. massive win for them.]

    Now if only there were an option like that for every street in the country…

  50. jaundiced view

    “The article is damning. Who are the 7%?”

    People like myself who think he wasn’t lying?

    I’m sure he honestly believed there was WMD there, as did pretty much everyone else (including the anti-war/pro-personality cult ‘left’) at the time.

    Just because he turned out to be wrong in hindsight doesn’t make him a liar. Happy to be in the minority on this one, even though I consistently voted against him throughout his term.

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