Tasmanian and federal leadership polling

Polling on federal voting intention in Tasmania is, once again, not good for Labor. Also featured: Seat of the Week, starring the once-safe Labor western Sydney electorate of Blaxland.

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.

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.

1,824 comments on “Tasmanian and federal leadership polling”

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  1. [So did the pm have the polling in mind when she gave the gender war speech last week?]

    I doubt it, bbp.

    Like myself, she is a long time member of Emily’s List, and from all reports, the address she gave is a pretty standard one from an Emily’s Lister.

    The same speech – or variants of it – has been delivered on hundreds of occasions over the past decade.

    Strange how they’ve gone unreported, up until now.

  5. 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.

  6. [all guns on the opposition]

    This has been a problem with the Labor government fron day 1. It has not concenrated enough on communicating its own message and spent too much time saying ‘tony abbott this, tony abbott that..’ They have played like an opposition whilst in government, too late now probably.

  9. someone asks this ….

    I’ve been wondering if anyone really clever will come up with a calculator that shows people what the financial effects of Lib/ALP will have on their finances – since this is apparently of greater concern to some voters than the kind of country we live in. Any coding gurus out there? I don’t think it would be a simple thing to do, given variables like the extra cost of goods & services from the LNP PPLS etc – but given the amazingly complex creative things people are capable of I’m sure it’s possible.
    Briefly, if I throw this to you to direct …. ?

  12. Zoomster

    Strange that ‘women for gillard’ is an organisation that does seem to exist. It seems to have no website – nothing comes up on google – and all those pictured with the pm seem to have come from young labor. It seems to be as credible as ‘turkeys for christmas’ and just as concocted.

    Emilys list has been around for years however so why not use them as the vehicle.

  14. blackburn

    and when they ignore the Opposition, we have a stream of posts here about how they should be targetting Abbott or criticising Coalition policies.

  16. BBS,

    Don’t know where Gillard and her Government got time to introduce Carbon Pricing, a mining tax, NDIS, Aged Care reform,Gonski, keep the economy humming along, organised for us to be out of Afghanistan……….

    What’s a Tony Abbott?

  18. Zoomster

    Selling policy is like selling anything else, you don’t give oxygen to your opponent. You don’t get coles and woolies mentioning the other in their ads do you?

  19. bbp

    probably because they wanted to make the event a bit more general – Emily’s is definitely recognised as a ‘Labor only’ movement.

  21. Afternoon Bludgers!

    A few random thoughts on a miserable sort of day in southern Tassie (not made any less miserable by the latest polling results).

    As in the US, there is a stupid, ugly, vicious element of the die hard right-wing side of politics in this country which comes out when it senses a major victory. We saw in in 1975 and 1996.

    It’s the element that someone (Abbott, wasn’t it?) once described as being locked in a debate about whether to bring back hanging or flogging. It’s also profoundly sexist: even the women are sexist (“she used to be a homewrecker and now’s she’s resorted to pretending to be in a relationship with a gay hairdresser because she’s too fat and ugly to get a real man. Anyway, why didn’t she ever get married and have kids like the rest of us?” etc.)

    It’s awful stuff. And there’s more to come. I would think that people like Shorten are wondering whether or not they want to be seen to be pandering to it by turning on Gillard now. I reckon they still don’t want to.

    Anyway, I’m confident that these vile emanations from the infernal city of Pandemonium do not reflect the views of the average swinging voter, who will find them quite off-putting.

    I think it’s a good time for the Caucus to stand firm. This sort of evil nonsense should be resisted at all costs. Politics doesn’t always have to be about ” whatever it takes”.

  24. bbp

    well, as someone who actually has run campaigns, you absolutely do need to spend time focussing on your opposition.

    I pointed out to the media that Sophie Mirabella was referring to me as the ‘Labor candidate’ rather than using my name, and that that meant she either didn’t know what was going on or she was being deliberately rude.

    I’ve run campaigns where we focussed heavily on the performance of the sitting member and got an 8% swing. And I’ve been on campaigns where the candidate refused to attack the sitting member ‘because we’re better than that’ and ‘we’re just giving them publicity’ and seen our vote go backwards.

  26. BBP

    The government is not only going to attack Abbott they are right to do so.

    The MSM is not doing its job so Labor has to. Otherwise how will the voters know about the black hole that is LNP policy area.

  27. Zoomster

    Persistently negative is never a good look – even the libs realised this and have pulled back from wall to wall negativity.

  28. A WARNING TO ALL POSTERS:

    UNLESS YOUSE ALL AGREE WITH ME EVERY TIME I POST AND APPOINT ME MODERATOR I’LL SEND THE PAGE INTO ITALICS AGAIN AND WRECK THE JOINT UNTIL YOUSE DO.

    SIGNED: KEVIN RUDD (per B. Bill).

  31. YOU’LL BE FIRST UP AGAINST WALL BLACKBURNPSEPH (IF THAT IS YOUR REAL NAME, WHICH I DOUBT).

    FOR EXAMPLE, WHERE’S YOUR WEB SITE, EH? EH?

    I THOUGHT NOT.

  33. blackburnpseph

    Women for Gillard is on Facebook, set up on May 16, 2013 (2251 likes)

    https://www.facebook.com/WomenForGillard?ref=nf

    The speech (cherrypicked by the msm to ‘blue ties’ and ‘abortion’) that caused all the “trouble” is here:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IUtOzlz-AZo

    And, you may like to join Men For Gillard, set up a couple of days ago (858 likes)

    https://www.facebook.com/MenForGillard

    or perhaps I HATE JULIA GILLARD is more to your taste (37,539 likes) set up on June 24, 2010.

    https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-HATE-JULIA-GILLARD/136704529674794

  37. [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.]

    It was obvious from the moment of his selection for the by-election that Hatton was a log and a waste of a safe seat, yet the NSW ALP went right ahead and selected him, passing over Mary Easson, a very talented woman who had lost Lowe at the 1996 election. He duly sat on his arse for 10 years until he was finally dumped. This was one of many indications around that time that the NSW Right was losing its marbles. Frank Mossfield in Greenway, Kelly Hoare in Charlton and Julia Irwin in Fowler were other outstanding choices. The seeds of the NSW ALP’s collapse were sown in the 1990.

  38. bbp@206: I couldn’t disagree more. The Gillard Government has persistently failed to take the attack up to Abbott and the Libs. There’s been far too much carrying on about vote-neutral stuff like the NDIS, Gonski and even the NBN (I don’t share the faith of most PBers about the vote-catching propensities of the NBN).

    Abbott, Hockey and most of their team are a bunch of galahs who talk a load of crap. I found Whyalla Wipeout a bit cringe-inducing, but at least Emmo was having a crack.

    I have little doubt that, soon after the Coalition is elected (and it now looks like “when” rather than “if”), the swinging voters of Australia are going to wonder what they were thinking. Not because the Coalition are going to do lots of dreadful stuff (I doubt they will) but because they will be embarassing. There won’t be a Howard to keep them in line and some of the more looney among them (including their so-called leader) will be running crazy freewheeling agendas all over the place.

    Labor has done little to point this out to voters, nor has it learnt from Howard’s approach (which he borrowed from Disraeli): basically, when your opponents are a rabble who are trying very hard to avoid looking like one, you try to drive in some wedges. Instead, we get policies like NDIS and Gonski which pose no threat whatsoever to the Coalition.

    It’s piss-poor politics. Rudd, who unlike the WYSIWYG Gillard is naturally a tricky character, would undoubtedly have done better at this stuff. But, unlike Howard, he’s a dickhead who is unable to lead his own troops.

    One despairs really.

  40. Acerbic Conehead

    Posted Saturday, June 15, 2013 at 12:45 pm | Permalink

    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.
    ==========================================

    it was a generalisation – no names used

  41. DavidWH

    [Kevin17 if Newspoll comes in at say 53/47 attitudes will change. Also I think only a minority question the polling. A bigger group question their relevance this far from an election.]

    Market Research 101: A poll, of whatever kind, for whatever purpose, is only as good as its sampling, methodology, and choice & structure of questions allow. We started analysis with Levi’s (of Jeans fame) efforts, decades ago, to move into middle-class menswear; with such abysmal results the disaster still rates as one of THE classic case studies in the effects of bad market research.

    Also part of Market Research 101 were the use of/ failure to use Focus groups; how they contributed to the choice of polling topics, & the ways they were turned into specific questions.

    So, when analysing any Polling – political, market, attitudinal etc – Rule 1 is Take the sampling, methodology and question construction apart. Then try to rate the poll’s validity.

    Nate Silver (USA: Election12) highlighted (among others) a problem with landline-only polling in an era of mobile phones, Internet etc; inc groups/ demographics such polling failed to access. I’d guess his work & analyses will (or already has) become part of Market research/ pseph standard case studies.

    Yet Newspoll is landline-only.

    Ruddstoration questions are selected to achieve, and aimed at, a specific skewed impact (esp those which do not differentiate results based on political preference: when that’s been done in the past for Rudd & Turnbull, Libs tend to claim to support Rudd, ALPers to support Turnbull – yet results are extrapolated to impacts on specific parties without that being taken into account. My Market Research lecturer would have done his block about it & rightly so. So did I any time such questions appeared in any research assignment that crossed my desk.

    There is evidence that, when a polling outcome isn’t close to affecting the final result, people use polls, both electoral & OpPolls, to “punish”/ “send a message to” the government of the day (the “By-election” factor).

    One polling aspect we didn’t study was the influence, on polls, of a company’s beating up a storm to achieve a particular result, when that company also owns the Polling company. Nor is there any way of judging how many of those polled were aware of the link between “beating up” & the poll’s timing- eg the now infamous It’s Newspoll Week expectation that beatups about only one political party (out of 3), often without a shred of evidence, inevitably occur in the week in which the poll, owned by the same company, is taken.

    BTW, I was advised to choose Market Research rather than more generic one, because polling companies have a much bigger survival stake in ensuring their Market Research is as near perfect as possible, than they have in getting political & other attitudinal research right.

    Nor did we consider the effects of falling exposure (due to falling sales/distribution of the organ/s beating-up the storm) on polls’ results.

    These are but a few of the factors, influencing (in my case Market Research) polling, I consider when assessing OpPolls for what I can evaluate from the given data/ methodology. And I’m also aware my courses didn’t go much past demographics, environmental & policy scanning and Market research.

    End of sermon!

  42. blackburn

    well, just as well noone was talking about persistent negativity, then.

    I certainly wasn’t, and the government certainly isn’t.

  43. blackburnpseph

    Posted Saturday, June 15, 2013 at 12:53 pm | Permalink

    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.
    —————————————————–

    I find it amazing how people have twisted the Govt reviewing EMPLOYERS applications for 457 visas as an attack on the workers.

    This shows the depth of desperation of lies, misinformation and mistruth that those opposing the Govt have sunk to.

  46. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10119553/World-Bank-warns-on-Fed-tightening-shock-for-emerging-markets.html

    [World Bank warns on Fed tightening shock for emerging markets

    Emerging markets risk an interest rate shock once the US Federal Reserve and other Western authorities start to withdraw global liquidity, the World Bank has warned.

    The institution cut its growth forecast for the global economy to 2.2pc this year, a world recession under the bank’s traditional definition, chiefly due to faltering momentum in China and the rest of Asia.

    The World Bank said real interest rates were likely to jump by up to 270 points in the more heavily indebted BRICS states and other emerging markets as the West unwinds quantitative easing, and the tightening cycle starts in earnest.

    The Chinese bank Everbright defaulted on an interbank loan last week, one of several instances of lending stress in China over recent days and a sign that bad debts are emerging from the shadows of the banking system.

    The World Bank said private credit in China was now the highest of all emerging markets at 160pc of GDP. “Private debt can rapidly become a public sector problem,” it said, citing the East Asia crisis in the mid-1990s.

    The World Bank said the “commodity supercycle” may be over entirely as fresh energy supplies come on stream and a rash of investment in mines boosts metal supply, adding to extra misery for raw material producers.]

    If markets are right, the multi-decade long bull market in bonds peaked at the end of April. We can already see significant declines in bond prices in many markets – that is, global interest rates are rising. In China, they have surged very steeply, with overnight inter-bank rates climbing over the last month to exceed 7% in recent days.

    It is not at all obvious how the global economy can escape renewed recession as monetary conditions tighten. In this context, the volatility in bond and equity markets of the last few weeks looks likely to get a lot worse. We should not think ourselves exempt from this volatility. Far from it. The gyrations in the currency market show how vulnerable Australia is to international financial flows.

    In any case, renewed global recession would intensify pressure on incomes in this economy. Since it is pressure on incomes that has been retarding consumption, credit expansion, labour demand, business investment and fiscal collections, we should expect all these things to deteriorate this year and next.

    All the signs are that the decline in the growth rate of labour demand – which is now negative on an annual basis – will become more pronounced in the months ahead. We will see further declines in hours worked, fewer new jobs being added, more job shedding, rising unemployment, more intense declines in hours worked per employee, and further pressure on incomes and consumption.

  47. Finally actually watched the video of Sattler’s “Is Tim gay” interview with Gillard. I’m no fan of Gillard, but it sure was cringeworthy. I thought she handled it very well. Probably the most impressed I’ve ever been by her.

    At the same time, I still think Sattler is clearly not himself – he just looks odd perched there on the chair and hammering on and on about the irrelevant and offensive line of questioning. If he’s got all his faculties intact then he deserves what happens to him. If not, I’m deeply sorry for this inglorious end to his long and distinguished career.

  49. [If he’s got all his faculties intact then he deserves what happens to him. If not, I’m deeply sorry for this inglorious end to his long and distinguished career.]

    Sorry his long and distinguished career … long yes, but really what he said isn’t even surprising he is just another, mediocre right wing shock jock who’d never let a fact or common decency get in his way …

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