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.
Sorry disability not dusability
Internodes Simon Hackett quoted on business section News 24 slamming LNP #fraudband. Will only last ten years
Regardless of all the statements made in the past about the budget and the surplus, export income has been falling and company tax receipts have fallen too.
The issue is always the same – what to do next.
The LNP can argue and protest about the past. Big deal. That might make them feel good but will not change anything. But what voters will focus on is not the past, but the future. And they will have a choice:
The LNP and recession
Labor and stability
This is not a fictional choice. It is the reality. Labor should get the message out – left to themselves, the LNP will induce recession. Hardly any family or any business will be untouched if the LNP come to power.
Gauss, I’m sure you remember the wrecking ball imagery. The only wrecking ball is the LNP’s plan for the budget and employment. They will smash the joint.
http://nbnmyths.wordpress.com/
nbn
myths
What will be redundant in 4 years wil be 60,000 fridge sized cabinets in our streets connected to copper wires.
Roger Miller
Fwiw i believe the govt need to emphasis this point in advertising during the campaign. These cabinets are going to have to be put somewhere in each suburb in hubs. Where will they be erected. How big are they. How much maintenance is required. What about security and safety issues? So many questions for the coalition to answer
When Telecom upgraded from pulse dialing to tone dialing they had to retrofit all the exchanges and give everyone a new phone. upgrading FTTP works the same way. Upgrading FTTN is a crock.
Roger Miller
I am convinced that the coalition are going along with this farce to appease their Master, Murdoch.
[185
spur212
Briefly
We aren’t dealing with rationality here….They don’t care about the policy argument. They’ve made up their minds!]
The only one here who seems to have made up their mind is you. I think it is too early to know what the voters will do. They have not been presented with the facts and information they need to exercise their choice.
You know, there is an old saying: the voters are never wrong. This being so, how is it possible for Tony Abbott to win an election? He is a shameless con-artist. He has no policies. He offers second- and third-best “solutions” to the very real and enduring policy challenges the country faces. He does not deserve to win.
You are under-estimating the electorate if you imagine they cannot choose wisely between the party of stability and the avoidable recession of the LNP.
Just further on the WiFi discussion, as noted most people’s existing routers will provide 100Mbs if cabled (if old) and 54Mbs over WiFi unless really old and 802.11b only (ie really old WiFi modems are already way faster than Abbott’s Fraudband).
Anything bought in the last couple of years will be Gigabit connection if plugged in and possibly 802.11n which will theoretically give you up to 600Mbs but practically about a quarter than that (ie any modem on the market today takes Fraudband out the back and kicks the shit out of it).
New 802.11ad (Wireless Gigabit Alliance or WiGig) equipment is expected to start coming onto the market next year. It’s theoretical limit is 7Gbs. Again even if in practice it only achieves a quarter of that your new 1Gbs NBN connection will be the limiting factor, not what you plug in at home.
It’s hard to know if the person making the comment about the modems not being able to keep up with the connection is a smartarse trying to delude dupes, or one of the dupes taken in, but either way their opinions and comments can be safely treated with derision and contempt.
I think they are doing it because they have no idea what a real policy looks like, and think they can make up there own facts, and with the MSM boosting them, they can. See for instance their climate change “policy”.
briefly @ 203
Surely you don’t mean this but rather that they are growing but not as fast as forecast. Perhaps you have been listening too much to Swan & Wong using this terminology. Also now taxes have been redefined as savings to the budget.
“@ABCNews24: For some analysis of Govt’s high-speed rail report, we’re joined by urban design expert Dr Julian Bolleter http://t.co/3YXdj8bPNi”
Victoria,
60,000 useless Cabinets on street corners.The same as Tony’s Cabinet – useless.
“@beneltham: My full copy of the High Speed Rail report is still downloading. If only it was optimised for copper”
[What will be redundant in 4 years wil be 60,000 fridge sized cabinets in our streets connected to copper wires.]
Beautifully and succinctly put Roger.
briefly @203
1. The Coalition blames and will continue to blame that on Labor and it works because Swan never established the ground work with the electorate or the business community in the first place.
2. People judge future performance based on what they have seen in the past
3. Yes. What the Liberal Party says makes people feel good! It also makes people feel bad about the ALP. The ALP don’t seem to get that it’s easier to persuade people with feelings as opposed to facts and the feeling they hit on again and again is the disempowerment of the average voter and how that relates to the “broken democratic process.” The ALP’s never countered it once.
4. The ALP = debt and deficit. The L/NP = Howard and Costello i.e stability. It’s not true, but the L/NP have gotten away with it again thanks to Wayne Swan (also thanks to Gillard in relation to industrial relations, but that’s a longer story)
5. Labor can’t get the message out because the leadership team crowds out everything they say. If they try to say the Coalition will induce a recession, it looks like a weak attack because they’ve framed everything as returning back to the Howard “golden” years of stability.
[Labor seems to be afflicted with bad timing when it comes to winning office – 1972, 1983 and 2007.]
David @ 159
In 1983, Labor caught the economy on an upswing which lasted through to about 1989 – even after the stock market crash of 1987. If Fraser had resisted going to the polls early in 1983, his loss may not have been so bad as the economy was improving by the end of the year.
Nodes and the problems; due to the distance between the Telstra exchange and the next village, Telstra put in a fiber optic cable and a ‘node’ box at that end. The regular high rate of expensive vandalism this node box has had, it now has alarms on the doors and a video link back to base when the doors are opened. Still has not fixed the vandalism. I understand the camera was damaged/removed at Easter.
Briefly
I have made up my mind: solidly Labor!
You’re misreading the stability thing. Abbott = stability, Howard, strong economic management. Gillard = instability, distrust, anti-democratic, liar etc etc etc
Labor is back in control
with spur212, anti gillard supporters and the coalition supporters trying to convince themselves coalition will win
al palster
Touche’
Tone has guaranteed us that he will solve the boats problem. No ifs or buts. Talk about setting yourself up for a fall. This will be a broken promise and an end to this BS.
you can always tell when its bad news for those who do not support labor
they have to try to rely on the hypothetical polls to make them make them reality
spur212
Posted Thursday, April 11, 2013 at 1:12 pm | Permalink
Briefly
I have made up my mind: solidly Labor!
You’re misreading the stability thing. Abbott = stability, Howard, strong economic management. Gillard = instability, distrust, anti-democratic, liar etc etc etc
——————–
that proves my point
spur212
has to lie and try ot claim abbott and the coalition are stable
as do pro coalition media hypothetical polls
If anyone’s interested in bookies’ election markets, sportingbet has now firmed ALP into 6.20 and eased LNP to 1.11. Previous markets were 6.50,1.10 and 2 weeks back 7.30,1.08. I did a bit of mathematics and using a few assumptions about how the bookies apply their margins I’ve concluded that these markets translate roughly to bookies estimated probabilities of LNP/ALP wins: 86%/14%; 87%/13%; 89%/11%. The bookies are nearly always right, not about the final result but about the current situation.
Here’s your big chance Meguire Bob – get laid while you can! If Gillard had stayed in China we could’ve been looking at 80%/20%!
[213…Gauss]
The budget cannot be brought into balance while the economy is at full employment. Weak company tax receipts are a manifestation of this. The choice for voters will be very clear:
Vote for the LNP’s budget plan and the first recession in a generation, or
Vote for Labor and stability, gradual adjustment, low inflation, low interest rates and full employment
when in reality the coalition are stuggling
without the media helping abbott
labor will win easily
The last time this economy adjusted to the end of a mining boom Howard and Fraser provoked a recession. Their political offspring will do the same thing, given the chance.
Whichever party wins office in September is going to have a major fiscal issue within the 2013-16 term. There are going to be ongoing high spending commitments – NDIS, NBN, Gonski – as well as the end of the fixed carbon tax period when it goes into full market mode – that could get seriously nasty as there is a huge disparity now between the fixed price and the floating euro price – the government has already written $9.4 billion off the forward estimates. We have had a situation for several years where monetray policy has done the heavy lifting and fiscal policy has not done its part. By about 2015, the chickens are likely to come home to roost.
Meguire Bob
Oh please! You only need to look at the party and leader attributes figures from EMC a few weeks ago and listen to the way the debate is going to realise what’s happening
http://essentialvision.com.au/documents/essential_report_130402.pdf
[when in reality the coalition are stuggling
without the media helping abbott
labor will win easily]
Look, I can cut and paste too!!
Can I just add with respect to routers and modems…it is not so much the port speed of your router that matters (this is simply the maximum potential speed of the negotiated connection) it is the device’s throughput. Particularly from the WAN (Internet port) to the LAN (local or wireless ports). Most common domestic routers struggle to achieve better than 30 or 40 Mbps of sustained throughput. Remember a router is basically a computer doing firewall and inspection of every packet of data. I upgraded my router when I had fibre connected to ensure it could do at least 96mbps WAN->LAN. Of course upgrading is not prohibitively expensive and the argument that devices in the home can only do 25mbps is utterly b@llocks.
Caroline Wilson is just awful. Why anyone associated with AFL feeds her anything is beyond me.
Very perceptive, MB.
PMJG was on the radio today, talking G20, trade liberalisation/protection. A few days ago she was in Beijing making further advances on trade and economic relations with China.
The best Tony Abbott can do is visit China and tell them to keep their money. Joyce has done the same thing. They are batty.
The war-cry for Labor is pretty straight-forward. The LNP have no real policies. They have no policy for BB. They have no policy on boats. They have no policy on the climate. They have no budget policy. They have no economic policy. They are a sham.
[Excellent work of Albo and team. Also impressed with dusability transport review right next to this high profile High Speed Train report]
There is a lot of infrastructure that I can think of that would give a much better and faster return on $114 billion
– a second sydney airport
– vastly improved urban public transport
– improvements to the existing rail network that would provide faster trains and more capacity without them being high speed.
Boinzo I thought I must be going crazy because my PC and TV tell me I am getting speeds of around 40-50Mbps from my Wifi at home. Perhaps my devices tell me porkies.
We certainly don’t have much problem downloading video streaming on our TV.
Briefly
Apparently the Coalition to are going use semi-intelligent drones to monitor the coastline. Dont know if these “semi intelligent” drones will also be able to turn the boats back. 😀
Oops are going to
Only if they come with air-surface missiles victoria. However they do substantially increase the coverage of area being monitored.
spur212
you just have to look how the media protects abbott, because the longer he is exposed the less chance the coalition has
[al palster
Posted Thursday, April 11, 2013 at 1:04 pm | PERMALINK
Victoria,
60,000 useless Cabinets on street corners.The same as Tony’s Cabinet – useless.]
Came back and found your great comment edited it to Shadow Cabinet and tweeted other people seem to like it too 😀
DavidWH, your devices will happily report that speed. It’s the speed they have successfully negotiated with your router. Whether they achieve it in real terms from Internet is questionable. I’m saying they are reporting a potential maximum rather than an actual, if that makes sense.
Depending where and what you’re streaming from you won’t need much better than 8-10mbps actual to get SD or even 720p video if its compressed.
So nope. Not crazy.
[“semi intelligent” drones]
So they’ve found a use for the Coalition front bench?
Thanks Boinzo yes that makes perfect sense.
ratsak
Touche’
[241
victoria
Briefly
Apparently the Coalition to are going use semi-intelligent drones to monitor the coastline. Dont know if these “semi intelligent” drones will also be able to turn the boats back. :D]
Hi victoria, I heard their shadow, David Johnstone talking about this on the radio this morning. He is arguably a semi-intelligent drone, but couldn’t turn himself around without assistance, let alone a boatload of asylum-seekers.
He talked about the “north west frontier”…as if there is a line on the sea surface. Very amusing for a Lib.
😀