Essential Research has the Coalition’s lead up slightly on a weak showing last week, from 51-49 to 52-48, with primary votes of 43% for the Coalition (steady), 36% for Labor (down one) and 9% for the Greens (steady). Findings of further questions:
• “Direct action” is favoured over carbon pricing 35-31, reversing a 39-29 lead for carbon pricing in May. Support for carbon pricing is down from 43% to 39% with opposition up to 43% to 47%.
• Support for the government’s decision to cease issuing statements when asylum boats arrive is at 39% – surprisingly high, to my mind – with opposition at 48%.
• The re-establishment of the Australian Building and Construction Commission is supported by 29% and opposed by 22%, with the rest down for either no view or don’t know.
• There are also questions on manufacturing which suggest respondents to be broadly supportive of protectionism.
Meanwhile, buttons have been pressed today for Senate contests in Victoria, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory, which you can read about in the Senate counting thread a few posts below.
davidwh
…and the lack of a Science Minister.
Honestly, give us credit – we thought there must be at least three women of merit in the Liberal party. We didn’t think they’d miss one.
Carey Moore@135
Wow, I touched a nerve there!
OK, if success in SA is measured by failing to get even 2 Senate quotas then enjoy your success.
I haven’t heard the Vic Branch running around making excuses. This used to be routine under the old administration.
I think a failure here is met with an acceptance and determination to do better next time.
markjs
I think Gillard is like Gollum losing My Precious.
Look at Labor’s last three leaders; Rudd, Gillard and Latham.
They are all very bitter people with something not quite right about them.
[my say
Posted Tuesday, October 1, 2013 at 5:07 pm | Permalink
FREDEX
SIMPLE DO WHAT I DID VOLUNTEER
STOOD OUT SIDE ONE 4 5 HOURS
as I have severe arthritis in my feet spent the next day in bed
….]
That’s what I was doing – working the booth, all day – as I have [well we actually] for all of the past many elections for decades.
And I too have arthritis in both knees and suffered accordingly.
The point is that the ALP needs to generate grass roots membership and activists, one local M Bridge ALP member was worried about the dramatic decline in local membership.
The ALP need to find out why and the inclusion of the current membership in decision making may be, maybe, a step but a lot more needs to be done.
This lack of involvement at booths etc is not just a recent development, its been building for years.
Time for a series of wide ranging internal changes.
Past time actually.
Evidently if you listen closely to Abbott, he has been forced to stop using the phrase “turn back the boats” by the Indonesians.
Doing my handing outering at various elections, people do seek out the HTV of their preferred candidate.
The “Greens” at Coolum pre poll were sneaky though, they dumped their HTV preferencing Clive and told people to vote 1 Green and the rest how they felt.
Oh they weren’t members of the Green political Party, they worked for the Sunshine Coast Environment Council, so I guess they had no reason to give out a HTV or something bizarre.
[What on earth is going on with the ALP in SA when they cannot even get 2 quotas (28.57%) in the Senate poll?
Had Don Farrell not swapped with Penny Wong, she would have been gone.]
Labor had to keep their Chinese Lesbians quota up
I’ll pay that zoomster 🙂
I’ll pay that zoomster 🙂
WWP
[ There are a lot of embittered people here.
We will get worse with each week of Abbott just like we did with each week of Howard. ]
I don’t agree. I thought the first six years were the worst. After a while, I was just numb.
zoomster@145
I was surprised to find on my booth that we had a couple of people from a safe northern suburbs seat. I don’t know how we got them.
State Office used to have people they could get to help out in the past. Trade Unions were one source.
Of course underlying all of this is the low level of party membership generally. If we had a respectable membership we would have much less of a problem.
I wonder what would be said about Rudd if he said he had “murderous rage” against Gillard for knifing him.
Diogs
I suppose there was plenty right about past LNP leaders like Turnbull, Howard, Downer oh and of course, the Monkey himself.
Turn it up!
[I wonder what would be said about Rudd if he said he had “murderous rage” against Gillard for knifing him.]
Idiot verballing warning. 😛
Diogenes
[ I thought the first six years were the worst. After a while, I was just numb.]
Ah Diogenes , PB’s very own brain the size of a planet Marvin. 🙂
[“The first ten million years were the worst, and the second first ten million they were the worst too…” ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4P3pvKmbsg
Dio –
I don’t think that’s quite correct.
In his presser today Abbott was trying to make the distinction between “tow back the boats” to Indonesia, which he claims was never Coalition policy, and “turn back the boats” from Australian waters, which he says is Coalition policy.
And along the way while trying to make this distinction he accused people of misrepresenting or misinterpreting Coalition policy. lmao.
It doesn’t make “turn back the boats” any more feasible, but I think he will claim they will still attempt to do this where safe.
162
Everybody would take him literally and believe him.
fredex@154
I agree with what you say.
I was up at 4am to set up the booth and finished the day about 8:pm when scrutineering finished.
I have an arthritic right knee and a crook left ankle… I don’t have a good leg to stand on. 😀
Too few to do too much.
How can a bloody football club have more members than the ALP? Some serious soul searching is required.
Shorten did talk about this and suggested we need to make it a lot easier and cheaper to join. I agree and it is long overdue.
fredex
Love to be proved wrong, but I’m not sure it’s an ALP exclusive problem. (The Libs get around it by paying people to hand out).
Volunteers are stretched pretty thinly everywhere. (We had over 150 families (so probably around 500 people)registered at our local soccer club, but were always scratching to get quorums for meetings, let alone enough people to pitch in and help out.
In the end, we put a levy on each family. If they turned up and helped out for a certain number of hours, they got it refunded. If they didn’t, we used the money to pay people to do the work.
And, of course, we weren’t the only club in this situation. In fact, we stole the idea from other local clubs who were facing the same problems – plenty of members, no volunteers.
Tisme
I hope Abbott showed a little ticker and provided an explanation to the Indonesians of his intentions to turn back the boats.
Did you hear the latest?
Three more spotted just off the coast of Xmas Island.
I would note that some of the older members of our FEA talk of the good old days when we had seven hundred members. Didn’t seem to lead to better results, and the booths still weren’t covered.
I’ve always said that I’d prefer one supporter who actually did something to several members who do nothing (always exempting the more elderly, who’ve done their bit already).
Jackol
How do you “turn back the boats” if the boats won’t voluntarily turn around? If they can’t force them back, surely they will continue on or disable the boat?
The policy is unravelling at a rate of knots.
We all know what Abbott campaigned on, the imbecile wouldn’t shut up on boats for the last 4 years.
The funny thing about today’s capitulation on all the tough rhetoric from Abbott and friends is that this is the worst possible thing that could have happened for them.
If they’d kept their heads in and stuck to the PNG solution, and kept talking up the fact that people coming to Australia won’t get settled here but will instead go to PNG to be assessed and settled, the boats would probably have stopped in short order.
Since they stopped talking about PNG and the narrative has been sidetracked to the Indonesia nonsense, the message getting out there is “oh Tony Abbott is going to have talks about a regional solution as part of the Bali process!”, which has no deterrent value at all.
This little flight of fancy may well have screwed up the message they were trying to send, and they will have to start from scratch.
If it wasn’t such a serious issue with bad consequences for asylum seekers it would be hysterically funny.
bemused
[How can a bloody football club have more members than the ALP? Some serious soul searching is required.]
You get more benefit from being a member of a footy club than a political club. It’s pretty obvious.
[Shorten did talk about this and suggested we need to make it a lot easier and cheaper to join. I agree and it is long overdue.]
Yep, make it easier to join (it is possible to join via the web at last) but Shorten makes the point about making it easier to attend branch meetings by video conferencing.
Make people feel involved and build local groups again.
zoomster@171
Agree with you there.
I really don’t understand those who are just ‘book members’ and just can’t make any effort at all. And I am not talking about stacked members either.
Jackol@142
When Hanson was big, big parties had an incentive to deal with One Nation but did not do so because of voter blowback caused by media storms about Hanson’s policies. The blowback meant it was better pragmatically to not deal with One Nation than to try to deal with them.
Now we have Labor dealing with, and the Greens seemingly giving their preferences away to, Family First candidates who are as bad in their own way as Hanson if not worse. It wouldn’t happen if there was a similar public outcry against those candidates as there was against Hanson.
Instead of dealing with homophobes (like the lead Tas FF Senate candidate) for political advantage, Labor and the Greens should have removed the advantage of dealing with them by creating public awareness of what such candidates were like, and refusing to deal with them, and criticising any party who did.
Political pragmatism is all very well but there must be lines drawn somewhere and in my view the line is that racists and homophobes must always go last. If a party does not put racists and homophobes last then its preference strategy should be exposed with an aim of convincing its followers to switch to different non-right parties.
I did a small amount of that this election but it is nothing compared to what I will do next time if this ATL system survives and the same mistakes are repeated.
[Did you hear the latest?
Three more spotted just off the coast of Xmas Island.]
Shush it.
You will get the facts next Monday
How can a footy club attract more members than a political party?
LOL
ru
How much does it cost to join the ALP?
Evening all.
Doesn’t look as though Gillard’s interview is being shown on ABC24.
Instead they’re going to bore us with talking heads talking about each other.
[How much does it cost to join the ALP?]
It depends on how much you earn, and if you are a union member.
Tisme
Yep, by next Monday they would have shipped the boats into space and sent the people on board to the moon.
[How much does it cost to join the ALP?]
You have to sell your soul…
[Quell surprise. Martin Ferguson, former nominal ‘regulator’ of #CSG as Resources Minister, joins CSG representative body lobby group APPEA.]
😡
DIOGENES
if you saw bitterness in Jg s conversation,, you where not watching the same conversation as our entire family
where do you get your odd points of view from
I never known such a cynical person
the only reason I am replying
as it really makes me angry the medical profession and health area
in particular do very nicely with labor gov.
as I said before how do u get the time to be here
my niece in Melbourne who is specialist dr
tell us and we can see she has not time to her self what so ever
but then she is female for 4 youngsters to look after as well
[Sky News Australia @SkyNewsAust 1m
LIVE NOW Ch 601: @JuliaGillard chatting with @SummersAnne LIVE and EXCLUSIVE on @SkyNewsAust #auspol]
A Sky exclusive tonight. Typical.
Tisme
You’d be ineligible.
I think you need a soul first 😉
lizzie
Back when the first CPRS was being negotiated it was damn obvious that Marn was the coal producers and burners man in the cabinet. He sold out to them long ago. Now he collects his pension plan.
Diog
Find out here
http://www.sa.alp.org.au/index.php?option=com_rsform&formId=7
lizzie:
Yes, how unsurprisement.
Remember M’arn was Andrew Bolt’s choice for Labor leader.
poroti
Yes. I’ve never liked him for that reason, quite apart from his linguistic idiosyncrasies.
Kevin Bonham –
Bravo. I applaud this sentiment – I certainly wasn’t condoning what the ALP and Greens did that got Day elected, I was simply trying to explain what people otherwise seem to find inexplicable.
As far as it goes, to play the preference harvesting game, the incentive is to deal with as many fringe parties as you can, and the primary tool at your disposal is putting them higher up your preference list. When the parties are making these deals they’re really trying to play off the likelihood of these fringe parties winning the jackpot and snowballing to the point of being elected against the desire to get the fringe parties’ preferences to get your 2nd or 3rd candidate over the line.
I’m sure there were a whole bunch of fringe parties higher up the ALP’s or Green’s ticket that ended up having no chance and no one even thinks about whether it was “principled” to rank them above another X or what have you. We only talk about the Steve Fieldings or Bob Days because they manage to get elected because the ALP guessed badly, rather than the dozens of other flakes who don’t make it.
Let’s just agitate for fixing Senate voting and hope it doesn’t come down to any more of this nonsense in future.
Diogenes@175
How about that!
Well that is something that needs to be redressed.
Centre
He has a magnificent soul of the arse kind 😉
[Prime Minister Tony Abbott says he remains committed to “stopping the boats”, but appears to be wavering on key points in the asylum-seeker policy he took to the election.]
Sounds like he’s been well and truly told by the Indonesian govt to get back in his box.
Sean Tisme
Posted Tuesday, October 1, 2013 at 6:30 pm | Permalink
How much does it cost to join the ALP?
You have to sell your soul…
=============================================
To join the Liberals, like Abbott did, you have sell all your morals and ethics to an American citizen
[Stephanie Philbrick @Steph_Philbrick 1m
People (ie ticketholders who paid $45 to be here) are standing in the aisles. SUCH poor form, event people. #Gillard]
Dio
There was no way Julia presented as a victim.
Quite the contrary in fact, a fact which can be substantiated, as some here have done, with exact quotes.
One of the pleasing themes of her advice, as requested, to some of the questioners was the need for self respect and not ‘let the bastards grind you down’ [expressed in more diplomatic language as it was addressed to an 11 y.o.