Two new polls out today from Queensland, one being another of Newspoll’s composite marginal seat jobs, the other a statewide Nielsen survey of 1014 respondents. Taken together, the two continue a confounding pattern throughout this campaign of localised polling from Queensland painting a grimmer picture for Labor than polling conducted statewide. The Newspoll survey targets 800 respondents in seven of the state’s eight Labor-held seats Moreton (1.1%), Petrie (2.5%), Lilley (3.2%), Capricornia (3.7%), Blair (4.2%), Rankin (5.4%) and Oxley (5.8%) the odd man out being Kevin Rudd’s seat of Griffith (8.5%). The combined primary vote results are 38% for Labor (down from 42.4% at the 2010 election), 42% for the Coalition (up from 39.8%), 8% for the Greens (down from 11.0%) and 12% for others (up substantially from 6.8% hold that thought). On two-party preferred, the result is 51-49 in favour of the Coalition, a swing of 4.7%. Importantly though, this has been determined based on preference flows from the 2010 election. Hold that thought as well.
The Nielsen poll as published in the Fairfax papers comes with a headline two-party preferred figure of 53-47, which is at least superficially encouraging for Labor in that it suggests a swing of 2% from 2010. Unlike the Newspoll result, this comes from respondent-allocated rather than previous-election preferences (hold that thought still further). However, the real story the poll has to tell lies in the primary vote figures. Labor is at just 31%, down from 34.6% in 2010, but the Coalition is also down slightly, from 46.5% to 45%. The Greens are on 8%, down on 10.9% at the 2010 election but at the high end of what they’ve been getting generally in Queensland in recent times (perhaps reflecting an improving trend nationally which is perceptible on the BludgerTrack charts). However, the really interesting result is that the Palmer United Party is on 8%, putting into the shade Katter’s Australian Party on 4%.
This cannot dismissed as one freak result, as it has been corroborated by other polling. Roy Morgan has twice had occasion over the last week to trumpet this phenomenon going on beneath the surface of its others result. The first poll, published on Friday, had the Palmer United Party at 4% nationally and 6.5% in Queensland. The second, published yesterday, maintained the 4% national result while finding the Queensland figure up to 7.5%. I’m advised that Essential Research also had the party at 4% nationally in its polling this week and at 9% in Queensland, after it barely registered in previous weeks. In fact, the three sets of Queensland polling I have seen over the past few days have all turned in remarkably similar results for Labor, Coalition, Greens and others alike.
A clearer picture emerges if the totality of polling from Queensland is plotted out since the return of Kevin Rudd. The chart below maps out the trend from 37 such polls from seven different pollsters, with the usual BludgerTrack accuracy weightings and bias adjustments applied. Black represents the combined others vote.
The starting point is a landslip in Labor’s favour after Gillard was deposed, which appeared to consolidate for a fortnight before entering a long and steady slide. Then came the announcement of the election date at the start of August and a two-week period where Queensland appeared to buck the national trend of the time by moving to Labor. This may very well have been a dividend from the recruitment of Peter Beattie, however much media reportage and individual seat polls might have suggested that there wasn’t one.
A new phase then appeared to begin a fortnight ago with the sharp rise of the others vote. This has coincided with an onslaught of television advertising from Clive Palmer which has seemed almost to rival that of the major parties. Whereas Palmer’s earlier advertising looked like it belonged on Vine rather than network television, his current efforts appear rehearsed and properly thought out perhaps even market-researched. Most importantly, the substance of their message tax cuts which pay for themselves and pension schemes that boost the economy by $70 billion may well be striking a chord in offering voters the ever more scarce political commodity of vision, hallucinogenic though it may be in this particular case.
The other point to be noted about the surge in the others vote over the past fortnight is that it looks to be coming more at Labor’s expense than the Coalition’s. For one thing, this has significant implications for the party’s prospects of actually converting votes into seats. Mark Kenny of Fairfax’s take on the Nielsen result is that while it is almost certain Mr Palmer’s party will not win a seat in the House of Representatives, it is in with a chance of gaining a spot in the Senate. However, I’m not so sure about this on either count.
Clive Palmer himself is running in the smartly chosen Sunshine Coast seat of Fairfax, where the retirement of Alex Somlyay relieves him of the burden of having to take on a sitting member. The first task facing Palmer is to outpoll Labor, who scored 27.3% in 2010. Gouging votes directly at their expense will make that task a lot easier, as presumably will the fact the Greens (who polled a weighty 18.0% last time) are directing their preferences to him. Palmer’s next hurdle (inappropriate as athletic metaphors might be in his case) would be to overcome Liberal National Party candidate Ted O’Brien, which might not be so easy given Alex Somlyay’s 49.5% vote in 2010. Some credible seat-level polling from Fairfax would be very interesting to see. As for the Senate, lead candidate Glenn Lazarus faces the complication that James Blundell of Katter’s Australian Party has done better out of preferences, standing to directly receive (among other things) Labor’s surplus after the election of its second candidate.
The other point to be made regarding a movement from Labor to the Palmer United Party relates to the issue of deriving two-party preferred results from primary votes in opinion polls. This is always a slightly vexed question, as for most voters the act of vote choice runs no deeper than simply deciding who to vote for, be it a party or its leader. If that choice is for a minor party, the question of preference allocation secondary though it may be for the voter concerned is the thing that really matters with respect to determining the result. Since the decision is often driven by a how-to-vote card the voter does not see until they arrive at the polling booth, and is in many cases entirely arbitrary, there is limited value in an opinion pollster asking the voter what they propose to do.
For this reason, it has become standard practice over the past decade for pollsters to instead allocate minor party preferences according to how they flowed at the previous election. Only Morgan persists in favouring respondent allocation, with Nielsen conducting both measures while normally using the previous election preferences for its top-line results. Not coincidentally, the primacy of this method has emerged over a period in which the minor party landscape has remained fairly stable, with the dominant Greens being supplemented by a shifting aggregation of smaller concerns, most of them being right-wing in one way or another. However, it was always clear that the utility of the method would be undermined if substantial new minor parties emerged, particularly on the right. For example, the result of the 1996 election would have offered no guidance in allocating votes for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation when it exploded on to the scene a year later.
So it is with the Palmer United Party, at least so far as Queensland is concerned. It might have been anticipated that the party’s conservative provenance would have caused its preferences to behave much as other right-wing minor parties to emerge out of Queensland have done over the years, but the Nielsen poll throws that into doubt by finding that 62% of Palmer United Party voters (together with 55% of Katter’s Australian Party voters) intend to give their preference to Labor. It should be borne in mind here that these sub-samples are extremely small, and consequently have double-digit error margins. Eighty-six per cent of Greens voters said they would preference Labor, which is well above what’s plausible. Even so, it’s perhaps telling that the most recent national Nielsen poll, published the weekend before last, had the Coalition’s lead in Queensland at 55-45 on previous election preferences, but only 52-48 on respondent-allocated preferences an enormous difference as these things go.
Taken together with the trends observable in the primary vote chart above, it would appear that the last fortnight has seen Labor lose votes in Queensland to the Palmer United Party, and that this pool of voters contains a much larger proportion of Labor identifiers than the non-Greens minor party vote in 2010. So while the recent rise of the Palmer United Party might not be good news for Labor in absolute terms, it may cause two-party preferred projections based on the normal pattern of minor party vote behaviour to be skewed against them. This certainly applies to the BludgerTrack model in its present form, for which I might look at adding a Queensland-specific fix (with the qualification that anything I come up with will of necessity be somewhat arbitrary).
UPDATE: AMR Research has published its third online poll of federal voting intention, conducted between Friday and Monday from a sample of 1101, and it has Labor at 34%, the Coalition at 44% and the Greens at 10%.
Howard holds the record as the only Treasurer to have double digit inflation, unemployment and interest rates.
Now that’s a record!!!!!
Memories June 9 2012
[Fran Barlow
……
I know quite a few people who are voting LNP — but none of them volunteer this claim. …. but most of these have voted LNP most of their lives.]
There must be one or two switching their votes as it was even stevens last time and the LNP is going to end up with something approaching a million more votes than the ALP this time!
[Iron fertilization is quite a popular way of geoengineering for climate change.]
Holy Rustbuckets Batman!! That must be what Direct Action is all about.
Clive builds the Titanic. No-one actually wants to ride on it so he converts it to a Iron Ore Dust carrier.
Gina then “value adds” her product (not bile) by collecting all the fine iron ore dust from her mine sites, loading it on Clive’s boat, and they toddle off to 45 degrees south to do a bit of iron fertilization together. Algae go WILD!!
(sounds a bit like an unsavory video i didn’t watch once??)
Anyhow. Tony pays them money direct out of our tax dollars based on how much dust they dump. No probs if commodity prices drop since Gina just ships more out and sinks it when those pesky Chinese wont pay more than she has told Tony to pay, and Clive gets Govt dosh to drive his new boat to where there may be ice bergs.
Murdoch Press reports on this example of tackling CO2 levels while stimulating deserving sectors of the economy in glowing terms.
Troglodytes over at Nuttertruckers scream and wail.
Whats not to love?? 🙂
ESJ
[Diogenes did the guy in the Atlantic achieve anything with his experiment ?]
It created a large phytoplankton bloom but didn’t sequester much CO2. Something about the ocean in that area not having much silica. I think they’re trying to fix it.
@Hash Convicts/1299
The same thing that has been going on for the last 10-20 years, video.
Your leader said something about 4XHD channels is enough, FTTN can’t even do one 4K channel which requires 30Mbps-40Mbps (compressed).
Your Communications Minister was promoting Cloud services the other week, he recently said that Upload speed is only going to be 4-6Mbps Upload.
Fibre can do both Video and Cloud services at same time.
Because bandwidth is not restricted, as it is separate channels.
No GFC, no cyclones and no 100 year floods.
[Australia’s net Government debt was $96 billion in June 1996. By June 2007, Australia had net financial assets (negative debt) of $29 billion. The Howard Government and the current Liberal Party point to this turn in the finances of the Government with pride and say it is a sign of good economic management.
To be sure, this is a significant turnaround but there are some interesting facts behind the issue of Government debt in the past 30 or so years.
The first point to note is that the $96 billion of debt inherited by the Howard Government from the Labor Party in 1996 comprised around $39.9 billion of debt accumulated by the Fraser Government under the Treasury-ship of Mr Howard and left to the Hawke Government in 1983! See Table 3 of Budget Paper 10 for more details.
As I discussed a while back, http://alturl.com/4o973 , when the Coalition talks of the $96 billion of Labor debt that it inherited, recall that just under half of it was in fact Liberal Party debt that was a hangover from the Fraser era.
That slightly embarrassing issue aside, let’s look at how else the Howard Government “got rid” of that debt.
Asset sales loom large in that discussion. The list of government assets sold by the Howard government is here: http://alturl.com/bjhqk . This table shows the asset, the time of sale and the price.
To get an accurate indication of the true dollar impact on debt of those asset sales, I have converted them into June 2007 dollar terms. Take the sale of DASFLEET, for example, which was sold for $408 million in July 1997. In June 2007 terms, this was worth $536.8 million. Or perhaps the first tranche of Telstra is interesting. Sold for $17.2 billion in November 1997, that converts to $22.6 billion in June 2007 terms.
The value of all asset sales under the Howard Government totalled a very hefty $71.8 billion in June 2007 dollar terms. This means that around three-quarters of the pay-down of the $96 billion of government debt was simply from selling assets to the private sector. Nothing more, nothing less.
To summarise the above facts:
The $96 billion “Labor debt” inherited by the Howard Government in 1996 comprised $39.9 billion of Fraser Government debt that carried through the Hawke/Keating period meaning that the true level of Labor debt in 1996 was $56 billion. To pay that $56 billion off, the Howard Government sold almost $72 billion of Government assets meaning the move to negative net debt was not really due to any miraculous and bold fiscal settings, but owed everything to a series of asset sales.
Footnote: The spreadsheet where is move the asset sales to constant June 2007 dollars is available on request.
This entry was posted in Stephen Koukoulas.]
Abbott to meddle with school curriculum.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/academics-accuse-abbott-of-politicising-curriculum-20130903-2t3fq.html
Bloody reactionaries. Always subservient to their own ideological obsessions.
zoidlord
Your making excuses.
Saying how it is now 2013, 5 years past, the last GFC lasted 10 years or so.
US is going to hit debt limit in October.
———-
I thought we were talking about Australia… apparently much like the clowns that are Labor, your making comparisons with other countries. You might believe that by pinning the economic inadequacies of the Labor government to a GFC that happened 5 years ago is acceptable, but when you reflect on Labors statement on more than 500 times it would return to surplus, then whats the excuse? Hmm? Sounds to me like you are making it up as you go along like Rudd. Your not suggesting the Gillard and Swan simply didn’t tell the truth, because under your theory, Gillard and Swan were still suffering from a GFC yet still confident enough to say they would deliver a surplus on more than 500 occasions. You see how its all falling to bits for you?
ESJ
[Diogenes did the guy in the Atlantic achieve anything with his experiment ?]
I think he did manage to annoy lots of people as well and breached a few conventions.
@Hash Convicts/1309
We are, US effects Australia.
Stop side stepping the issues.
I think the iron guy proved that iron is just one off many limiting factors in mid ocean productivity.
Confessions
I’m a little concerned about Rabbott’s ‘contract’ad stating communities will be in control of health and education.
zoidlord
We are, US effects Australia.
Stop side stepping the issues.
——
Wow nice way to pick out the bit that you can answer of doesn’t tear down your comment. Try reading the rest of it, be relevant to the bulk of the response, then get back to me.
[There must be one or two switching their votes as it was even stevens last time and the LNP is going to end up with something approaching a million more votes than the ALP this time!]
A 3% swing would mean that about 370,000 people had changed their votes in two-party terms. Primary votes are irrelevant.
[Iron fertilization is quite a popular way of geoengineering for climate change.]
unfortunately it has been found not to work very well – not ‘quite popular’ at all – can you name any example of being used?
geoengineering might buy some time and be needed, but at the end of the day we need to move to low carbon energy. this will happen – but only through international action and a combination of pricing and regulating pollution and investing in eco-efficiency and clean energy. Abbott is backed by interests determined to stop international cooperation and action. the fossil fuel lobby knows they are on borrowed time unless they can push things to the point where the only choice is adaptation to climate change and ultimately a very engineered environment (geo-engineering eventually giving way to ‘geo-dome’-type existence for those nations, communities, or individuals wealthy enough to do so).
[Australia’s commercial TV networks have banned an advertisement that criticises the anti-Labor coverage of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers..]
Indeed, one half Aussie media corrupt, the other half totally gutless.
That was a good Get Up ad.
It is hard to know who is more at fault and despicable.
A person who by their nature soulless, morally corrupt and thinks nothing of criminal corruption, or those he employs who see and know the corruption they are tasked to do and do it.
Murdoch’s Australian employees, editors and journalists, are worse and more culpable than him, they know what they do is wrong and shameful yet they do it over and over. They are people with no standards, no respect for democracy, or have they basic decencies, people who would happily lie and deceive and trade on the suffering of others to satisfy their boss. That’s the Australian contingent of Newscrap.
@Hash Convicts/1314
What, where the part you call Labor clowns, etc?
Sounds like you trying to blame, rather than making an argument.
How about, stop putting the blame game, and come back to me, when you put up a decent acceptable response.
Without your liberal bias showing.
WE NEED MEGUIRE BOB PLEASE !!!
Economists predicting another recession for the US,2014
On that miserable note, goodnight!
Dee
Posted Tuesday, September 3, 2013 at 10:26 pm | Permalink
No GFC, no cyclones and no 100 year floods.
———————————————————–
Costello sold off our gold bullion reserve at $298 an ounce.
Its now worth $1400+ per ounce
[unfortunately it has been found not to work very well – not ‘quite popular’ at all – can you name any example of being used?]
There have been about a dozen trials.
To do it on a large scale would need international agreement and things aren’t so bad that we are ready to do that yet.
AussieAchmed your party sold off our coal mines for free to your mates.
@Dee/1320
Czech out of recession:
http://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2013/09/03/czech-economy-out-of-recession
@ESJ/1323
And your party mates have shares in mines.
Dee:
I’m looking forward to my $500 each year, as promised by Hockey in their campaign ads and Abbott on Insiders. And I’m looking forward to my electricity bills going down by 10%.
Surely the coalition will deliver, because only Julia Gillard lies.
Edward StJohn
Posted Tuesday, September 3, 2013 at 10:38 pm | Permalink
AussieAchmed your party sold off our coal mines for free to your mates.
————————————————–
But didn’t claim selling off taxpayer assets was good economic management.
Jeez anyone can could be debt free if they sold everything….
The party of icac and Thommo has zero credibility on corruption and honesty issues.
zoidlord
The same thing that has been going on for the last 10-20 years, video.
Your leader said something about 4XHD channels is enough, FTTN can’t even do one 4K channel which requires 30Mbps-40Mbps (compressed).
Your Communications Minister was promoting Cloud services the other week, he recently said that Upload speed is only going to be 4-6Mbps Upload.
Fibre can do both Video and Cloud services at same time.
Because bandwidth is not restricted, as it is separate channels.
——–
Do you have any idea about what your talking about? OK lets clear this up, the Liberal NBN will be between 25-50MB/sec, this WILL be delivered with fiber to the node, then copper the last distance. So what does this mean? Under ever other circumstance, Liberal’s NBN will not only save our country 17 billion, with the ability to upgrade in future, but will cover every other aspect in down steam communications outside of Australia (given a servers output ability).
To put this in simple terms, you can only receive what a server is able to output to you. Will Labors NBN be faster? Within Australia of course, how many people do we know that download huge files from servers within Australia on a regular basis? I know quite a few tech heads and they all recieve from servers over seas that do not have the capacity to output at 100MB/sec, some times they cannot output 25MB/sec. You see this whole scam by Labor about ‘future proof’ is not considering that our country is broke, right now we can save money having fiber to the node, then we can upgrade when the next big thing comes out. What is the next big thing? Labor do not know, neither do Liberal, however Liberal are not committing the sizable expense to this one area.
So in short, on Labors NBN you will see a speed benifit if you are connecting outside of Aus from a server that is not under load, and faster within Aus (again server capacity).
Liberals NBN will give you the same speed, under almost every circumstance outside of Aus, but not within Aus (however server factors come into play here).
That is all.
I’m hoping that next week Alannah MacTiernan will be PM.
@Hash Convicts/1328
Yes, I do know what I am talking about.
To Archieve the speeds you mention, 25Mbps-50Mbps, is that you need to be very close to the NODE.
Trying to tell me otherwise, is fruitless exercise.
The difference will be when you are more than one person using the network.
FTTN has sever backhaul limitations.
[Roger Miller
Posted Tuesday, September 3, 2013 at 10:41 pm | PERMALINK
I’m hoping that next week Alannah MacTiernan will be PM.]
I am hoping the Queen is going to visit me to tell me I never have to pay tax again for the rest of my life (or till we become a Republic, whichever comes sooner), but neither event is going to happen…
[confessions
….Surely the coalition will deliver, because only Julia Gillard lies.]
Indeed she does, but she is not alone.
Sometimes election outcomes reflect a form of collective, mass self-delusion that history judges very poorly.
zoidlord
@Hash Convicts/1314
What, where the part you call Labor clowns, etc?
Sounds like you trying to blame, rather than making an argument.
How about, stop putting the blame game, and come back to me, when you put up a decent acceptable response.
Without your liberal bias showing.
——-
Ahh I see, so when you don’t have a response you look for every other angle to play other than directly answer the question. Reminds me a little of Gillard and shes irrelevant now mostly because of her inability to directly face questions head on and in turn adding to her already untrustworthy responses. Its also another indicator as to why Labor are going to lose on Saturday.
Roger Corbett speaking sense on Lateline…
zoidlord
Yes, I do know what I am talking about.
To Archieve the speeds you mention, 25Mbps-50Mbps, is that you need to be very close to the NODE.
Trying to tell me otherwise, is fruitless exercise.
The difference will be when you are more than one person using the network.
———
Yep as it is the same for Labors fibre which will under almost every circumstance not receive half of the speed it is offering outside of Aus, while Liberals speeds will be at capacity and likely match that of what Labor are offering.
Try telling me otherwise.
FTTN has sever backhaul limitations.
@Hash Convicts/1335
Oh I do know, but it’s not me that’s is trying to put every angle out to play – that is you.
Gillard isn’t the only Politician to not directly answer questions, and who doesn’t?
I see many times also that neither you or others critisise Coalition Party Members responses, and it’s quiet funny that you criticise Labor’s and then spam on this blog saying they will lose on Saturday.
Very amusing attitude.
Can you imagine how Tony’s head would explode, when confronted with PM Alannah?
@Hash Convicts/1337
FTTN does have limitations, because it’s exactly like ADSL and CMUX, and RIM, when compacity is oversubscribed, you slow down users.
This happens on Fibre, but you max out the speed more often than you loose (78Mbps if everyone uses 100Mbps plan).
So Fibre prevents alot of over-subscription issues by limiting the amount of connections per splitter.
Coalition NBN will be out of date by the time it’s built because of Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth.
Hash Convicts
Posted Tuesday, September 3, 2013 at 10:48 pm | Permalink
zoidlord
@Hash Convicts/1314
What, where the part you call Labor clowns, etc?
Sounds like you trying to blame, rather than making an argument.
How about, stop putting the blame game, and come back to me, when you put up a decent acceptable response.
Without your liberal bias showing.
——-
Ahh I see, so when you don’t have a response you look for every other angle to play other than directly answer the question. Reminds me a little of Gillard and shes irrelevant now mostly because of her inability to directly face questions head on and in turn adding to her already untrustworthy responses. Its also another indicator as to why Labor are going to lose on Saturday.
——————————————————-
Gillard was a lot of different things to different people depending on political preference
But she never stood staring at a reporter for 30 seconds just nodding her head not answering the question.
She never walked away from a ‘door stop’ while reporters were still asking questions.
She never said “shit happens” in relation to the death of a soldier.
she never refused to appear on programs like qandA
[Can you imagine how Tony’s head would explode, when confronted with PM Alannah?]
She certainly wouldn’t take any crap from him, or his reactionary colleagues.
Roger Corbett was talking sense until he slipped into the usual conservative nonsensical talking points.
Business apparently wont have a problem with the coalitions ludicrous PPL. 1.5% tax increase Wojer?
I don’t think he would ever call her a misogynist.
zoidlord
Oh I do know, but it’s not me that’s is trying to put every angle out to play – that is you.
Gillard isn’t the only Politician to not directly answer questions, and who doesn’t?
I see many times also that neither you or others critisise Coalition Party Members responses, and it’s quiet funny that you criticise Labor’s and then spam on this blog saying they will lose on Saturday.
Very amusing attitude.
——–
What is amusing is hearing you trying to call someone else attitude into line, then fail to adhere to the same standard yourself.
Why I mentioned Gillard? It was Gillard unseaworthiness that was eventually her undoing with the voters and in turn seen her thrown our by the Labor party, hence the reference to your own inability to stick to a question or pick the parts you want to answer.
You part about Liberal supports spamming the blog is hilarious, so where are the Labor supporters holding Labor accountable and being critical of Labor hmm? Why would that be? Perhaps because we are Liberal supporters and Labor supporters are Labor supporters? Geez I hope this doesn’t represent the quality of Labor debate here…
For those who think the carbon tax will save the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw5Lda06iK0#t=552
Who’s this goose Roger Corbett? why is a reserve bank member taking side publicly? He should be sacked.
Abbott’s threat today re a DD if the Senate is obstrutive is a idle threat
The present Senate wilklk last till mid-2014…and the new Senate my have a number of indies in it
As for a DD…the lowered quote when the State elects 12 Senators would produce a raft of minor party candidates and posibily an even more divided Senate
Wojer is a liberal man from way back.
Quite why the ABC would seek out his opinion is beyond me.
Maybe Emma could have asked him the Coles Woolies duopoly and petrol rorting. Of course not.
[Bloody reactionaries. Always subservient to their own ideological obsessions.]
Yep. I feel sorry for the mug punters on the right who think Abbott will cut waste and reduce spending.
LOL. Fat chance. What you *actually* going to get is a big spending ideological reorientation of the state, an orgy of middle class welfare, cuts to anything they see as potentially critical – fat handouts to their mates.