UPDATE (Saturday evening): GhostWhoVotes reports the Sunday News Limited tabloids have a Galaxy poll showing the Coalition leading 55-45, compared with 54-46 in Galaxy’s previous poll. Primary votes are 32% for Labor (down two), 47% for the Coalition (up one) and 11% for the Greens (up one). Under a Kevin Rudd leadership scenario, the primary votes are 38% for Labor, 43% for the Coalition and 11% for the Greens, with two-party preferred at 50-50. Nonetheless, only 34% said Gillard should make way for Rudd with 52% opposed (32-60 among Labor and 33-51 among Coalition supporters). Full results here.
Some bonus late-week polling to keep you going over the weekend:
• ReachTEL polling conducted for the Hobart Mercury points to a Labor wipeout in Tasmania and a comfortable win for Andrew Wilkie in Denison. After exclusion of the 6.8% undecided, the statewide primary votes are 48.8% for the Liberals, 28.2% for Labor and 11.3% for the Greens, suggesting a Liberal two-party lead of around 56-44 and a swing of 16% compared with the last election. The poll was conducted on Thursday night from samples of around 550 respondents per electorate for a statewide total of 2620, which probably makes it the most comprehensive Tasmanian poll ever conducted. Results by electorate (I have allocated the undecided components listed in the published primary votes in each case):
Denison: Andrew Wilkie 38.8%; Liberal 27.9%; Labor 21.3%; Greens 9.6%. The respective results at the 2010 election were 21.3%, 22.6%, 35.8% and 19.0%. Wilkie defeated Labor by 1.2% after preferences, but the published results suggest Labor would finish third behind the Liberals with their preferences securing a very easy win for Wilkie.
Franklin: Labor 38.4%; Liberal 47.1%; Greens 10.7%. The Liberals lead 51.0-49.0 after preferences, a swing of 11.8%.
Bass: Labor 25.5%; Liberal 56.9%; Greens 14.1%. The Liberals lead 61-39 after preferences, a swing of 17.7%.
Braddon: Labor 28.5%; Liberal 57.6%; Greens 7.6%. The Liberals lead 62.2-37.8 after preferences, a swing of 19.7%.
Lyons: Labor 27.5%; Liberal 54.1%; Greens 14.1%. The Liberals lead 59.0-41.0 after preferences, a swing of 22.5%.
• Another ReachTEL poll, this time targeting 1600 respondents in 11 seats in western Sydney on behalf of the Seven Network, inquired about Kevin Rudd’s popularity relative to Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. Abbott led 64-36 over Gillard and 51-48 over Rudd, with enthusiasm for Rudd appearing to have cooled a little since ReachTEL conducted the same exercise three months ago. On that occasion, 42% said the return of Rudd would make them more likely to vote Labor against 25% for less likely. This time, the results were 36% and 31%.
• Roy Morgan has published a phone poll from a small sample of 475 respondents dealing mostly with party leadership, but also including voting intention results. The poll has the Coalition leading 59-41 on two-party preferred from primary votes of 26% for Labor, 50.5% for the Coalition and 12% for the Greens, remembering that the margin of error here is 4.5%. Further evidence of a Coalition-skewed sample came with a 47-35 lead for Tony Abbott over Julia Gillard as preferred prime minister, and a 27-65 approval/disapproval split for Gillard against 41-51 for Abbott. The poll also offered detailed material on preferred Labor and Liberal leader. Kevin Rudd led for Labor with 33% support against 14% for Julia Gillard, 11% for Bill Shorten and 10% for Stephen Smith. Tony Abbott did similarly poorly for preferred Liberal leader, finishing third with 18% behind Malcolm Turnbull on 47% and Joe Hockey on 19%.
• Roy Morgan has also scoured through two years of its polling to provide the “top 10 professions more likely to vote for each party”. This shows Labor’s base remains resolutely blue-collar, with the “new class” professions dominating the Greens list. Defence force members topped the Liberal list with police in sixth place, managers and finance industry types also featuring prominently.
Seat of the week: Blaxland
The western Sydney seat of Blaxland has been held by Labor without interruption since its creation in 1949, and provided Paul Keating with a seat throughout a parliamentary career lasting from 1969 to 1996. The electorate currently extends from Bankstown in the south through Bass Hill and Regents Park to Guildford in the north. The area is marked by a strong Arabic presence, especially around Guildford, together with a large Turkish community around Auburn and concentrations of Chinese and Vietnamese at Fairfield East and Regents Park. The two strongest areas for the Liberals, Woodpark and Guildford West in the electorate’s north-western corner and Bass Hill and Georges Hall in the south, are middle-income and contain the highest proportion of English speakers. The abolition of a neighbouring electorate to the north caused the electorate to be substantially redrawn at the 2010 election, adding 24,000 of the abolished electorate’s voters around Auburn South together with 14,000 at Bankstown in the south (which had been removed from the electorate in the 2007 redistribution). Transferred out of the electorate were 20,000 voters around Cabramatta to the west and 18,000 around Greenacre to the south.
Blaxland’s greatest moment of electoral interest came with its inauguration at the 1949 election, when Jack Lang attempted to move to the new seat after winning Reid as a Labor renegade in 1946. He failed, and the seat has since been won for Labor by margins of never less than 8.8%. James Harrison held the seat for the 20 years before the arrival of Paul Keating, who was succeeded at a 1996 by-election by Michael Hatton. Hatton’s career proved rather less illustrious than his predecessor’s, and he was dumped by the party’s national executive ahead of the 2007 election. The ensuing preselection was won by the Right-backed Jason Clare, a Transburban executive and former advisor to NSW Premier Bob Carr, who prevailed over constitutional law expert George Williams and Bankstown mayor Tania Mihailuk. Clare suffered what by Sydney standards was a modest 4.4% swing at the 2010 election, reducing the margin to 12.2%, but the electorate’s five corresponding state seats swung by between 13.8% and 20.3% at the state election the following March, with Granville and East Hills falling to the Liberals and Bankstown, Auburn and Fairfield remaining with Labor.
Jason Clare won promotion to parliamentary secretary in 2009, and then to the outer ministry after the 2010 election in the defence materiel portfolio. He shifted to home affairs and justice in December 2011, further recovering defence materiel after Kevin Rudd’s failed leadership bid the following February. He was promoted to cabinet as cabinet secretary in the February 2013 reshuffle which followed the retirement announcements of Nicola Roxon and Chris Evans, again trading in defence materiel while maintaining home affairs and justice. His Liberal opponent is Anthony Khouri, a local businessman of Lebanese extraction who together with his brothers founded custom-made luxury car manufacturer Bufori. ReachTEL has twice conducted automated phone polls showing Khouri in the lead, by 54-46 in March and 52-48 in June.
[AussieAchmed
Posted Saturday, June 15, 2013 at 11:48 am | Permalink
ALP achievements/bills since they came to office in 2007.
• Established NAPLAN]
*Bitter laugh*
Let’s just say Bushfire Bill has an interest in not believing anything related to opinion polls or political research …
Dio
[I am not surprised at all by zoomsters story.
It is very common in SA.]
And worse in QLD, esp after Howard’s Health Minister (Guess who that was!) slashed a huge chunk of promised funding from Qld’s health grants: probably revenge on us for (shock, horror) having a female Premier. Even worse now since Newman took the machete to Qld Health, esp hospitals, cancer clinics, hospital-based hospice services etc.
I’m outraged that wonderful hospital-based services which saw us through OH’s cancer treatment, and support personnel who helped us through the journey, have just GONE, with one swing of the machete!
[ Remember a 52-48 (to Labor) Newspoll was supposed to have saved Rudd, until he was rolled immediately afterwards. These days governments do know about things like multi-poll aggregates; Labor insiders would have a fair idea that if the next Newspoll is 54-46 that they don’t really have it that close, and that a bounce up from 58 to say 56 just means the last one was excessive. A given major poll is just part of the picture. ]
Sounds a bit like you also are preparing excuses in advance just in case the next poll is slightly more favorable to the ALP!
BB
The way the conservatives put it political correctness in the case of sexism is following behind the woman carrying her bags with your balls around her neck.
In reality its just doing exactly what you described. Another example is getting people to stop say gay as slang to mean something bad because it equated being gay as being bad. Understanding that and not doing it because you want to respect people is political correctness.
Nemspy
Strawman. Who said that was the situation? Did Gillard?
THE former Howard government minister Mal Brough appears to have changed his story about what he knew of claims of sexual harassment and misuse of travel entitlements by Peter Slipper.
Mr Brough confirmed yesterday he had met the former aide James Ashby three times and had sought legal advice on his behalf in relation to his claims against his then boss, Mr Slipper.
However, Mr Brough was quoted last weekend as saying any suggestion he had known of Mr Ashby’s legal action before it was launched was ”nonsense”.
Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/opinion/political-news/broughs-new-story-on-slipper-20120505-1y5lb.html#ixzz2WIyi1V00
BB
Good on you.
Kevin,
Sawford’s Poll has been around for years and used for years. So your aim of post hoc correlation is a post hoc crock. It’s accuracy is far more reliable than the plethora of polls we have endured over the last few years.
For me polls are only interesting for the trends. As I pointed out, last week had polls going in all directions and standing still at the same time. That tells me the elctorate are running around like headless chooks and are not particularly engaged atm.
When it comes to an actual ballot box, people will vote for their own interests as informed by the politicians and the election campaign.
The MP for Fisher, Peter Slipper, as speaker of the House of Representatives, compared a shellfish to a vagina in private text messages entered as evidence during a tacky sexual harassment case.
”They look like a mussel removed from its shell. Look at a bottle of mussel meat! Salty C**** in brine!”
The judge dismissed the case last December, saying Brough and others ”conspired” to ”cause Slipper as much political and public damage as they could inflict upon him”.
The Gillard insult was part of a banquet, a public occasion in March to raise funds for Brough’s tilt at Fisher.
Slipper lost his job partly due to the texts. Brough looks like replacing him in Fisher, despite having insulted the person holding Australia’s highest elected post
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/men-behaving-badly-20130614-2o9mt.html#ixzz2WIzTgDWt
Steve Clements
I nominate Lt-Gen David Morrison for Australian of the Year. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him by a long shot.
Angus Houston showed what a fine man he is by standing up to Howard/Reith during the Children Overboard disgrace.
PMJG Presser soon according to 24
GG
This may have a bearing on the outcome?.
What is surprising is the extent to which Coalition policies will result in a significant redistribution of wealth upwards rather than downwards. Consider the following Coalition policies:
■ Lower the tax-free threshold from $18,200 to $6000. This will drag more than one million low-income earners back into the tax system. It will also increase the taxes for 6 million Australians earning less than $80,000.
■ Abolish the low-income superannuation contribution. This will reimpose a 15 per cent tax on superannuation contributions for people earning less than $37,000.
■ Abolish the proposed 15 per cent tax on income from superannuation above $100,000 a year. The combined effect of these two superannuation changes is that 16,000 high-income earners with superannuation savings in excess of $2 million will get a tax cut while 3.6 million workers earning less than $37,000 will pay more than $4 billion extra in tax on their super over the next four years.
■ Abolish the means test on the private health insurance rebate. This will deliver a $2.4 billion tax cut over three years for individuals earning more than $84,001 a year, or couples earning more than $168,001. People on lower incomes will receive no benefit.
■ Introduce a paid parental leave scheme that replaces a mother’s salary up to $150,000. To put it crudely, this means a low-income mum gets about $600 per week while a high-income mum gets close to $3000.
■ Abolish the means-tested Schoolkids Bonus that benefits 1.3 million families by providing up to $410 for each primary school child and up to $820 for each high school child.
How Murdoch media is treating (or trying to ignore) the upcoming divorce:
[The filing put his company’s publications in a tough spot — here is how they reported it
(quotes Wall Street Journal, New York Post and then):
The Sun in the U.K. was the briefest of all. This is what the tabloid published on Thursday:
Mr Murdoch, 82, the head of The Sun’s parent company News Corporation, filed a petition with the New York Supreme Court stating their 14-year marriage had “broken down irretrievably”. They have two daughters.
A News Corp spokesman said the divorce will have ‘zero impact’ on the firm.]
http://www.thewrap.com/media/article/news-corp-publications-report-news-murdoch-divorce-97511
One rule for Murdoch, another rule for those he tries to destroy.
Glad to hear all that OPT (141). Thanks for taking the time to share it with us.
[Hmmm…looks like the US is so over losing land wars in islamic countries. Except, that is, for the Republicans who are baying for some US blood and treasure to be pissed away in Syria.]
Given the massive debt, incurred by Bush’s hopeless “War on Terrorism” (when will USA realise its troops can’t & don’t actually win wars?) and that China “owns” most of that debt, are Republican “Hawks” trying to hand the USA on a platter to China – or more scary?
After all, the Big Financial Powers which could fund further US Big Debt are the (Islamic) Middle East, Russia, China & (probably) India; all by the last with HUGE scores to settle with the USA.
A significant reminder of just which financial powers, owned by whom, funded Louis XV’s regime-changing wars, then bankrupted the realm when they called in debts & refused to extend more loans! Hello French Revolution!
It never pays to turn your nasty, name-calling aggression on people & institutions – esp of specific races & religions – which hold your country’s financial future in their hands.
[ Slipper lost his job partly due to the texts. Brough looks like replacing him in Fisher, despite having insulted the person holding Australia’s highest elected post ]
The difference is that Slipper was sending a private text, never intended to be seen by anyone else. I mean … just how goddam sneaky is that?
Whereas Abbott and Brough are both completely open about their sexism. I mean … standing in fron of a 10 foot high sign calling Gillard a bitch? Ummm … hello? Who could misunderstand that? Or a menu at a public party fundraiser? FFS! These men have real balls standing up to the PM like that!
And just don’t get me started about Howard Sattler! … I mean, he’s only one letter removed from being a” Howard Battler”! Coincidence? I think not! I just hope he wins his lawsuit against the PM for having him dismissed so outrageously!
“@ABCNews24: Expecting PM @JuliaGillard to speak at the University of South Australia at approx 1pm AEST. #ABCNews24 will bring you this live #auspol”
[ One rule for Murdoch, another rule for those he tries to destroy … ]
… one rule to bring them all and in the darkness bind them?
Here’s another consideration I hope any pantywaists in the ALP giving serious consideration to doing the dirty on The Prime Minister pay careful attention to: if the excerpt on The Drum website is any indication, Kerry Ann Walsh’s book is going to destroy Rudd’s image of Poor Put Upon Little Victim.
Overnight, if they give him back the reins, I anticipate Murdoch$s and Gina’s minions will have him transformed from the Love of the People to Sneaky, Conniving Gutter Snake, prepared to sacrifice the party and all he supposedly believes in for the sake of sating his own lust for power. Expect to see them running endless extracts from the book, all to portray him in the worst possible light. Poor Julia, now so cruelly sidelined, was really a fine example of Prime Ministership, they’ll suddenly realize in retrospect, cruelly undone by the king rat in the ranks.
Angus Houston was a great and courageous Helicopter Pilot, too !
[guytaur
Posted Saturday, June 15, 2013 at 12:22 pm | Permalink
“@ABCNews24: Expecting PM @JuliaGillard to speak at the University of South Australia at approx 1pm AEST. #ABCNews24 will bring you this live #auspol”]
Seems like an odd place to resign 😉
izatso – Houston looked like he’d been indulging his ‘hippie’ side when I saw him yesterday.
I bet he looked a bit more couth when the barber finished with him!
Greens about to be eaten!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/14/australia-green-party-polls?CMP=twt_gu
1934pc #163
thanks for this list I have added some comment
Consider the following Coalition policies:
■ Lower the tax-free threshold from $18,200 to $6000. This will drag more than one million low-income earners back into the tax system. It will also increase the taxes for 6 million Australians earning less than $80,000.
– Abbott has stated he will not touch the tax cuts and compensation that are a part of the carbon price compensation.
– He will remove the legislation that provides the revenue to fund the compensation and how he continue to fund this is a major concern that he has not addressed
■ Abolish the low-income superannuation contribution. This will reimpose a 15 per cent tax on superannuation contributions for people earning less than $37,000.
-most of whom are women and part-time workers, the most disadvantaged
■ Abolish the proposed 15 per cent tax on income from superannuation above $100,000 a year. The combined effect of these two superannuation changes is that 16,000 high-income earners with superannuation savings in excess of $2 million will get a tax cut while 3.6 million workers earning less than $37,000 will pay more than $4 billion extra in tax on their super over the next four years.
-with this he maintains a tax disparity. Low income workers will be paying more tax on their superannuation than they pay earning wages, while high income workers will benefit by paying a lower tax on super than on the salary
■ Abolish the means test on the private health insurance rebate. This will deliver a $2.4 billion tax cut over three years for individuals earning more than $84,001 a year, or couples earning more than $168,001. People on lower incomes will receive no benefit.
■ Introduce a paid parental leave scheme that replaces a mother’s salary up to $150,000. To put it crudely, this means a low-income mum gets about $600 per week while a high-income mum gets close to $3000.
– The Abbott PPL will cost business more than the current carbon price. Banks have predicted a 0.5% rise in interest rates and one major retailer has estimated it will cost them $40 million and that this will be passed on to consumers.
Abbott has not provided a business case that explains the effect on cost of living and inflation.
■ Abolish the means-tested Schoolkids Bonus that benefits 1.3 million families by providing up to $410 for each primary school child and up to $820 for each high school child.
– there is also his unfunded $2billion (it was originally $3.2 billion) for is carbon reduction plan)
This along with the maintaining of tax cuts will cost around $17billion over 3 years without any explanation as to where the money will come from in the budget.
I’m very confident that reducing the public service by 20,000 will not equate to $17 billion.
BB
probably election night rather than eve
pedantic moi?
[Let’s just say Bushfire Bill has an interest in not believing anything related to opinion polls or political research …]
It’s a big subject to argue, but it’s clear to e there’s an attitude at Murdoch HQ that Newspoll alone can make and break governments.
Even Newspoll Futures – talking about Newspolls that haven’t even been completed – can influence public perceptions, or at least caucus perceptions.
This country is one where 70% of the newspapers are in the control of an admitted, avowed, resourceful, rich, relentless opponent of the government.
He controls, indeed owns, the polling company that is claimed to produce a definitive snapshot not of a nations intentions at the moment of polling, but weeks, months and sometimes years out into the future.
Statistics aficianados like Kevin Bonham think they can smooth out the obvious bumps, the noise, in Newspoll and otehr polling results with mathematical techniques, in order to provide a true answer about events likely to occur in the relatively distant future.
If they get it right they’re heroes. If they don’t we only hear excuses. IT’s what all experts do.
But ultimately, the polls taken this weekend are pump-primed snapshots, fuelled with political speculation laid on with a trowel bythe same company that owns the polling organization.
If you can’t see the potential for error in that, then good luck to you. I suppose you believe every prediction (usually wrong) of the unemployment figures, or every prediction (usually wrong) of the interest rate announcements.
When they are wrong we hear, from the same prophets, the actual figures were “a suprise uptick” or a “blip on the way to oblivion” (take your pick), excusing the error by invoking an Act Of God in the process. And who can guess what God is going to do?
Australia is in probably a unique position in the entire free word where the means of production of polling figures is in the hands of the same companies that both feed these polls with opinionation and analyse them with more opinionation. It’s a closed loop.
Sure, the public participates in polls, but the more suggestible of them have little choice in what is suggested to them, and in turn little choice what they end up thinking as a result.
We’re talking about 5% to 8% of the “market” out there that swings with the breeze. That’s 1/20th to 1/12th of the population, not a large proportion when you zoom out on the nation and look at it as a forest, not just a collection of trees.
In the hothouse, boiler-room climate that the media here have perpetrated – with sinister reasons, in my opinion (but that’s just my opinion) – it’s not surprising that the polls do not go well for anyone who comes into the media’s antagonistic sights, especially when the Groupthink kicks in.
You can convolve and average and weight all the figures in the world 84 days out from an election for all you like, but if Peter van Onselen is right, a simple thing like a perceived good week for the government (in that the PM’s sexism agenda got a good run in several various formats) can not only alter polls results, but can actually save, destroy or change chances and perceptions at the national level.
If possible good results in a poll can be dismissed as a blip, why doesn’t PvO make the complementary case that bad results can be blips too? Because they can actually! He just doesn’t want us to believe that a poll which has been all over the shop over the past three years can not decide the fate of nations.
It’s in his and his employers interests to play down the connection between the opinion providers and the polls they own and operate, which then (as Mr. Denmore in his pre-reconstructed days) provide laundered, superficially “independent” verification – amazing! – of exactly the line the news organizations have been plugging when they have their “journalism” hats on.
Soldier on, smoothing, averageing and convolving, but those polls rely on numbers heavily influenced by the people conducting them and cannot be verified until election day.
And then we’ll know the real result anyway.
The means tested schoolkids bonus is badly targetted middle class welfare. You get the lot if you have an income of 120k. If you applaud the scrapping of the babybonus, you should applaud the proposed scrapping of the schoolkids bonus – after all it is an approx 9k payout over 13 years. If one is indefensible, the other is also.
With Poss saying Palmer has 15% on the Sunshine coast before he’s even campaigned, and then of course Katter – thats lots of opportunity for the ALP to take advantage of a split LNP primary vote and pref leakage.
If their primary vote was higher in QLD, that is.
Just sayin’.
Of course, the bad news there is a solid chance of 4 senators from the Right in QLD.
Great post, BB. Agree 100%
This also helps explain why LNP supporters are now so desperate for a leadership change and a snap election as soon as possible.
I think they’ve realized they’ve shot their bolt, and the perception of the government is now as low as they are going to be able to drag it. They also probably realize they cannot keep this hysteria up for another 3 months.
If this is the case, then it’s all downhill from here for the LNP, and all upside for the ALP.
AussieAchmed,
[The MP for Fisher, Peter Slipper, as speaker of the House of Representatives, compared a shellfish to a vagina in private text messages entered as evidence during a tacky sexual harassment case.]
I’m not sure, but do you know if Peter Slipper, in his reference to the shellfish/vagina, mentioned it in relation to a particular female who was identified by name?
If it was a generic, albeit tasteless, reference, that is a far cry from the restaurant’s actual naming of the PM in the menu.
On radio national the other night bob ellis was spouting that labor was heading for a massive landslide win – his “polling” showed a 10% swing to the ALP in Dobell of all places. Unless he was having a lend, he was just spouting garbage. The polls are the best guide we have. We have more than one pollster and there are a range of methods so it can,t all come down to newspoll setting the agenda.
So did the pm have the polling in mind when she gave the gender war speech last week?
Bob Ellis’ polling was two men he met in the pub.
Even the fonts are now leaning to the right.
CTar1,
aye, saw you post that…. I think he is allowed to let his hair go a tad, now ! Earned it many times over.
Just Saying,
glad you said that, it is fair warning !
Bushfire Bill and AussieAchmed/1934pc,
goin’ great guns, much appreciated.
[ So did the pm have the polling in mind when she gave the gender war speech last week? ]
Did Abbott, when he stood in front of signs saying “Ditch the Witch” and “Bob Brown’s Bitch”?
Stand by, at ABCNews24 we are about to show you how to lose feed from a live presser through either a technical glitch or a cross to the LOTO. Tune in at 1200 to watch.
BB, Helvetia !
Ita
1
2
hurry to the end of page
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10116331/Italian-showdown-with-Germany-over-euro-looms-closer.html
[Italian showdown with Germany over euro looms closer…
Italy’s simmering revolt against Germany, austerity and its own ultra-European elites is coming to a head again, in a reminder that the deep clash of interests between the euro’s north and south remains as bitter as ever.
The EU’s prescriptions have been self-defeating even on their own terms, leaving aside the “hysteresis” damage of a youth jobless rate near 41pc. He said fiscal overkill that was intended to bring debt under control has instead caused the debt-to-GDP ratio to soar under Mario Monti from 117pc to 127pc, and 132pc this year.
A game theory study by Bank of America found that Italy would benefit most among big EMU states from a euro exit. It has a primary surplus, so it would not face an instant funding crisis. It has fat gold reserves, providing bond collateral that could be used to raise €400bn in a crisis. Italian household wealth is €275,200, compared with €195,200 for Germany.
A basket case it is not, and Italy’s industrial barons know it. The country has one great structural problem: it is in the wrong currency with an intra-EMU exchange rate overvalued by 20pc to 25pc.
Whether Italy should call it a day and take back its sovereign policy levers is a deeply complex matter for Italians alone to decide. But the issue is no longer one of sacred destiny. The charisma of the Project is draining away. It is all coming down to brass tacks now.]
Quickly now
Who left the Itas on
What Labor MUST do is:
[1. Dis-endorse Rudd.
This has nothing to do with who is better it is simply that Labor cannot win with a continuation of this ridiculous melodrama. Going with Rudd does NOT end speculation of a complete cluster-fuck it merely opens another episode on the old theme. Keeping him in the wings is fools gold. He cannot stay.
2. Endorse Gillard 100%
Julia is the PM they went with. To not back her in now makes a mockery of everything the party has said and done and gives weight to everything the media has suggested. The public know she has not had clean air and is being undermined… they can’t miss it. The choice for the Executive is do they cave in and reward self interest or give unwavering commitment (and much needed authority) to the leader of choice by stamping it out? You cannot expect the public to be decisive if you are not.
Julia’s greatest asset is her resilience and fight. She is respected for it and gets things done. Endorse it and it will be worth a whole lot more.
3. Attack media.
The public need to see some good old Hawke/Keating fight. Take it up to them and hold them to account. Slap recalcitrant journalists publicly and refuse to budge from the point until it is brought home. Do not tolerate Coalition slogans being fed back and call them out. In other words GROW SOME and let the voter see you’re worthy of their vote.
4. All guns on the Opposition.
If it’s racist, say so. If it’s a lie, say so. If it’s bullshit, call it what it is. Stop apologizing for refugees and point the finger where it belongs. They didn’t vote for your solution that would’ve worked so the cost blowout is not your fault but theirs, use it, every day, every interview. Start defending BER and Insulation, they worked and silence just gives the Opposition b/s credence. Start defending your shift away from surplus, it was in the national interest, SAY SO. Start defending THE LIE, if the opposition didn’t want a set price they should’ve been on the committee and exercised their vote, TELL PEOPLE. Make the public doubt what they’re being told. Policy. Policy. Policy. Future. Future. Future. Economy. Economy. Economy. Ramp up the FEAR of recession! Ramp up FEAR of their Commission of Audit. Get into them for talking the economy down. Make them accountable… every day, every interview. Use question time not to puff yourselves up but to get answers… turn the tide!]
Only with Rudd gone can this be possible. It needs to happen and you know I’m right.
Five to go
three to go
One topic of conversation that has come up socially and at work over the last few days is the kevin rudd parallel campaign. It seems to have people just mystified – one of my work colleagues – here on a 457 visa and not happy with the jg campaign on them – was remarkably strident in his belief that kevin rudd should be expelled from the alp and that no party anywhere else would put up with all the nonsense.
Are we there yet?