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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  2. your little dig

    was way of base

    you may think it smart, but

    the fact is during Thatcherism

    a lot of people had very hard times

    exactly as would happen with abbott
    u included

    but I have better things to do than point you at history
    if you chose not to learn that s up to you.

    I bet you did not even watch the u tube

  4. To remove any irony confusion, the point Thatcher proves is that a female Westminster PM can be criticised for actions in the position without the need for supporters to attempt to convert that criticism into misogyny. It isn’t automatic.

  6. In reference to Adam’s list at 889.

    Bahrain cannot be counted as a ‘traditional Arab monarchy’. It has a very different social dynamic to the other Gulf states. For a start a local population that is 70% Shia is ruled by a Sunni monarchy. The Sunni minority also monopolise economic and poltical power. There have been regular demonstrations over the last two years which have ended in bloodshed. In 2011, the Saudis sent tanks across the causeway to maintain order. Bahrain is the relations flashpoint between the Arab states and Iran. The US also use it as a staging base which of course they would be reluctant to use. In the other Gulf states -Saudi Arabia excepted, it can probably be said that the monarchies have the support of their populations – and because of small populations they are fairly closely interwoven with the local population.

  10. Just got robo polled by Reachtel

    Q1 If an election held today who would you vote for.

    Q2 Does the introduction of the carbon tax legislation lean you to vote Labor

    Q3 Do you support the superanuation proposals being put forward by the ALP

    Q$ Which of the NBN proposals do you support, The more expensive FTTP of the ALP or the cheaper slower version proposed by LNP.

  11. It’s probably only temporary MB. Still recovering from the shock of a Coalition policy release.

    Next week is a Newspoll week so they’ll be back,

  13. Since when did it become accepted behaviour to abuse people of another race on public transport systems?

    At least some objected or ignored.

    What a disgrace!

  16. MTBW

    [
    Since when did it become accepted behaviour to abuse people of another race on public transport systems?]
    It has probably always been happening but now phone cameras are everywhere. That said I cannot understand what sort of mindset is required to behave like that.

  17. Why are reachtel still asking about the ‘introduction’ of the carbon tax legislation. It is beyond legislation – it is now law and has been in operation for 9 months.

    Unless, it is some sort of filtering question.

  20. poroti

    [That said I cannot understand what sort of mindset is required to behave like that.]

    Nor can I! Just terrible behaviour.

  22. I laughed when Turnbll called Alcatel-Lucent a vendor. The man is really sad.

    Does the company that has as a subsidiary the research labs that invented among other things:

    [Bell Laboratories was the premier facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language and the C++ programming language. Seven Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.[7]
    1937: Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.
    1956: John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the first transistors.
    1977: Philip W. Anderson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing an improved understanding of the electronic structure of glass and magnetic materials.
    1978: Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias and Wilson were cited for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, a nearly uniform glow that fills the Universe in the microwave band of the radio spectrum.
    1997: Steven Chu shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.
    1998: Horst Stormer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect.
    2009: Willard S. Boyle, George E. Smith shared the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Charles K. Kao. Boyle and Smith were cited for the invention of charge-coupled device (CCD) semiconductor imaging sensors.

    The Turing Award has twice been won by Bell Labs researchers:
    1968: Richard Hamming for his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes.
    1983: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for their work on operating systems theory, and their development of Unix.]

    Yep Turnbull you dork. Alcatel-Lucent is a bit more than a vendor.

  23. mtbw and poroti

    I posted that because I am glad to see commuters acting. It means that a regard for good and standing up for what is right still exists in the population

  24. Kinkajou

    “All you do is fuck one goat and ……….!!!”

    And as any Sheepin Shaggen would say, “what’s wrong with that!”

    No wonder scaffolding companies now proliferate.

  25. [To remove any irony confusion, the point Thatcher proves is that a female Westminster PM can be criticised for actions in the position without the need for supporters to attempt to convert that criticism into misogyny.]
    Which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the disgraceful gender war which has been waged against Julia Gillard since she has been Prime Minister.

  27. Abusive commuter- in any other state the abusive commuter may have had majority support. Yay for Victorian cosmopolitanism

  28. psy

    that was Pierre the bridge builder nes pa?….do they call me Pierre the bridge builder …BUT YOU S…..(good taste dictates discontinuation- you either know the joke or you have to google it

  32. guytaur
    [I posted that because I am glad to see commuters acting. ]
    It was good to see. It would seem that after recent similar videos sparked a widespread debate over what people would/should do if they witnessed such an event there has been an effect. More people have decided not to do nothing.
    .
    MTBW
    If they are like that in public imagine what they would be like in private !!

  35. [Indonesian search and rescue authorities are scrambling to locate the spot where an asylum seeker boat is feared to have sunk in the Sunda Strait while en route to Australia.

    The Indonesian national search and rescue agency, BASARNAS, confirmed on Friday that reports had been received that some people had been rescued after a boat sunk in the Sunda Strait at about midnight (1am WST).

    “We received information from Australia from AMSA that around 12am a ship carrying immigrants has sunk in south of Sunda Strait. It’s said that it carried around 73 people,” a BASARNAS spokesman said.

    He said BASARNAS was still trying to find the exact location.]

    http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/newshome/16700218/report-asylum-boat-sunk-off-indonesia/

    And still the Coalition and the Greens refuse to countenance any moves towards a regional approach for dealing with boat arrivals.

  36. BK
    [Those Reachtel questions were structured in a less than neutral way in my opinion.]
    BK that’s not the exact wording of the questions i was trying to shorthand them as i was listening and pressing the required number to answer. It was a very short poll and i think the questions were worded pretty fair and easy to make the choice.
    A brain dead Liberal supporter would probably have got confused though as there were multiple choices of numbers to press.

    BillBo

    [What electorate are you in, Gaffhook?]

    Federal Herbert, the ex real estate rip off merchant Ewan Jones.

  38. I love the logic: ‘This woman was criticised for actions which had nothing to do with her gender. Therefore criticisms of another woman have nothing to do with her gender.”

    Or indeed: “This criticism of this woman has nothing to do with her gender. Therefore all criticisms of this woman have nothing to do with her gender.”

    It’s along the same lines of: “This party says it’s not sexist. It did not preselect a woman for X seat. Therefore is is sexist.”

  39. confessions

    The Greens do want a regional solution. They think they can get it while having onshore processing.

    Its only the LNP that seems to be against regional.

  40. I can’t remember Ewan Jones ever poking his head up, in parl or elsewhere. Is he one of the drones?

  41. [Mr Denmore ‏@MrDenmore 16m
    Tory mate, over beers, tells me he’s worried about Abbott. ‘A flake.’ Super changes quite reasonable & NBN the better option. Unprompted.]

    Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey…

  42. Kinkajou

    Yep, i know about bridge building. As i am not of “good taste” inclination I did not restrain myself.

    That joke and Two Dogs are worldwide classics. It’s interesting and amazing that their global spread preceded the www and the power of social media.

    BTW i’ve not yet stumbled on your reply …….. Are you too in Hunter n have to vote for the rat prick Fitzgibbon?

  43. zoomster

    [
    I love the logic: ]
    It certainly needs the dexterity of Olga Korbut to make some of the required leaps of logic.

  44. It’s beautifully ironic that the Liberals making a major policy announcement has been a big plus for the government.

  48. [I can’t remember Ewan Jones ever poking his head up, in parl or elsewhere. Is he one of the drones?]

    Ducky the Member for Herbert never misses being yellow carded every Q time and has been out for the compulsory 94A on at least one occasion.

    He has been promoted in the local rag as wearig his deliberate bad behaviour as a badge of honor.

  50. Known her personally for years. Not a rat or a prick but never Forman material IMHO.

    Are u a worker or have u like me now “matured” out of that part of your life.

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