It’s been a disappointing week for poll junkies, with the phone pollsters including Newspoll evidently waiting until after the Australia Day long weekend before ending their New Year hibernation. Since this is an off-week in Morgan’s fortnightly cycle, that just leaves Essential Research. All told, there have only been three poll results published so far this year – two from Essential and one from Morgan – so you’re more than welcome to take BludgerTrack with a bigger-than-usual grain of salt for the time being. For what it’s worth though, the one new data point has driven the Coalition to a new low of 39.3% on the primary vote, and pushed Labor’s two-party lead to a new high of 52.5-47.5.
That might seem counter-intuitive given that the one new poll had the Coalition leading 51-49, but there are three factors which have made it otherwise. First, in adjusting the pollsters for their house biases, a unique approach has been adopted for Essential Research to acknowledge that its bias is in favour of stability, rather than one party or the other. For example, Essential overshot on the Labor vote during the election campaign as momentum swung towards the Coalition, but it’s been doing the opposite since the Coalition started heading south in November. So rather than the usual method of determining bias with reference to past performance in late-campaign polls, I’m plotting a trend of Essential’s deviation from BludgerTrack so its bias adjustments change dynamically over time. With Essential stuck at 51-49 to the Coalition while other pollsters are being fairly unanimous in having Labor leading 52-48, you can pretty much work out for yourself what the Essential bias adjustment currently looks like.
The second point is to do with rounding. While Essential’s two-party result was unchanged this week, the primary vote had the Coalition down two points, Labor down one and the Greens up one. Most of the time that would mean a one-point shift to Labor on two-party preferred, but this is one of those occasions where the shift went missing after the remainders were pared away. However, BludgerTrack doesn’t actually use pollsters’ published two-party results, instead determining primary vote totals and deriving a two-party result from them using 2013 election preferences. So the Essential result looks like a slight shift to Labor compared with last week, so far as BludgerTrack is concerned. The third point is that Essential’s numbers are a two-week rolling average (though last week’s result, being the first from the year, was a sample for that week only), so any change that occurs in a given week is a bigger deal than the published numbers suggest.
So it is that BludgerTrack gives Labor a 0.5% gain on the two-party preferred projection and a boost of three on its seat tally. The state relativities haven’t changed much since last week, so the Labor seat gains are evenly spread, with one each provided by Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. Full results as always on the sidebar.
davidwh:
Chest hair on men is seriously over-rated. Trust me.
daretotread@2395
What is your browser and do you use cccp?
confessions@2398
Actually, I wasn’t talking about Caucus – I was talking about the kind of ossified party members we routinely get posting here on PB … the ones too busy re-fighting old battles to contribute anything new or useful.
Present company excepted, of course! 🙂
Chest hair Abbott – the guy is still evolving from monkey to human..
frednk@2400
I agree entirely except that smart business attire can still show a small amount of cleavage and does not detract.
Re 2) she actually had a chance to shine on that occasion.
All she needed to do was have a staffer go out and speak to the crowd and tell them if they calmed down the PM would come out and talk to them. Then go out and charm them.
Recall Albo confronting the convoy of no consequence outside his electoral office?
[confessions
Posted Sunday, January 26, 2014 at 1:52 pm | Permalink
davidwh:
Chest hair on men is seriously over-rated. Trust me.
]
And so is cleavage. If you want to see a womens tits you marry her.
Confessions
Yes there is. He is KNOWN to have been amongst those who opposed work choices. His PPS is also quite progressive in LNP terms.
For crying out bloody loud, Abbott is the LNP PM. if he fell off his bike tomorrow another, probably worse would take his place. Abbott is an incompetent lazy right wing ideologue, with a lizard brain. Problem: is is Prissy Pyne, Erica Betz, Mesma, Shrek, Andrews, Barnyard, any better.
I fear the extreme RW ideologues far MORE than Abbott. Even Sh
Davidwh,
You can have some of mine. I have little need for it.
DTT
Do your drafting in a separate text file using your favourite word processing program, not in the forum comments box.
Then just copy and paste the finished comment into the forum box and hit enter.
Also protects you against losing a draft because of any forum software gremlins.
This morning, quite by chance, I talked to a total stranger, a woman today who had been a child in the Japanese civilian internment camps in Java in WW2. Her uncle survived the Burma railroad. Her father died of starvation in Japan.
We talked about whether we could bear to see the movie called ‘The Rail Man’. Amongst other things, the movie is a real story about a POW who forgives a camp guard. I won’t be seeing it. She wants to see it but she cannot figure out how to get herself ready to see it.
We talked about the notion of forgiveness. Was it possible to forgive if the Japanese do not acknowledge their history, if they celebrate C5631, and if the prime minister of Japan visits the Yasukuni Shrine which, inter alia, venerates the memory of convicted Japanese war criminals? Is it possible to forgive criminals if they continue to deny their crimes, and to honour each other? Not really, we thought.
As we shared our stories about the direct and indirect impacts of that war through generations of our families, she told of how at the age of five she learned to smile in order, as she thought at the time, to prevent the camp guards from killing her. It was at about that point in our conversation that she began to weep.
We have agreed to meet again.
When war mongers nominate a date at which a war ends, ‘1945’ for World War Two, just keep in mind that they are making stuff up. All that 1945 means is that the shooting stopped. But that War is still causing suffering. It is still shortening lives. That War is alive in many, many people today. As are all the other wars since then.
Without a 😛 emoticon, the last comment seems quite creepy.
frednk@2406
Rather an old fashioned point of view.
Haven’t been to a beach in the last 5 decades or so?
PO:
Okay, that’s what I thought you meant, but wasn’t sure. 🙂
Just Me@2409
Good idea.
I have toyed with doing it on occasions when PB was playing up, but it always came good before I got around to it.
[When war mongers nominate a date at which a war ends, ’1945′ for World War Two, just keep in mind that they are making stuff up. All that 1945 means is that the shooting stopped. But that War is still causing suffering. It is still shortening lives. That War is alive in many, many people today. As are all the other wars since then.]
The consequences of WW2 still echo loudly and painfully through the living in my family.
[Yes there is. He is KNOWN to have been amongst those who opposed work choices.]
His opposition to workchoices only became ‘known’ once he was leader and needed to downplay his connection to the Howard years. This ‘fact’ was presented to us by a Murdoch journalist.
If there are any public statements by Abbott at the time of Workchoices stating his opposition to WC, I imagine we’d have learned about it all long before we did.
Boerwar @ 2410,
Thank you for your story. Much food for thought there.
Fred
I appreciate your comments because they are a rational look at some things that went wrong for Julia Gillard and which were not the fault of the devil from Qld.
It seems to me that there was something missing in the media room in her office. Something or someone just hit the notes slightly off key. It was not by much but it still mattered. The two WW articles were the most clear evidence of this, along with “Moving Forward” etc
Now I really DO think it is time to move on so the ONLY relevant question is:
Are any of the same people now in Shorten’s Office and if so what can be done to make sure that similar wrong keys are not struck.
Final intended spam post for:
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/andrews-phantom-welfare-spending-crisis.html
Andrews’ Phantom Welfare Spending Crisis
This article examines Kevin Andrews’ claims of an unsustainable level of welfare spending as an argument for crackdowns on Disability Support Pension and dole payments and finds them generally wanting.
[
bemused
Posted Sunday, January 26, 2014 at 2:03 pm | Permalink
frednk@2406
confessions
Posted Sunday, January 26, 2014 at 1:52 pm | Permalink
davidwh:
Chest hair on men is seriously over-rated. Trust me.
And so is cleavage. If you want to see a womens tits you marry her.
Rather an old fashioned point of view.
Haven’t been to a beach in the last 5 decades or so?
]
Fare enough, but I don’t expect, and to date havn’t seen swim gear in the office.
Just me
I will try your idea but I rather suspect it is a laptop issue, as it happens when I am using word. – Actually have not been using word recently, just heaps of excel so will test it out.
Bugler
[Not particularly accurate ATM. If Daft Punk doesn’t get a song in the top 10 I’d be extremely surprised. If Vance Joy get no. 1 for Rip Tide I quit. (Not that I think they’ll pull off a “Thrift Shop” (an alright song played to death by commercial stations))]
They got Thrift Shop as the number 1 last year.
Right, as I thought – dtt can’t provide a single example (except the usual stuff about hearing it somewhere) to support her contention.
They now do a welcome to country ahead of the national anthems for the cricket. Entirely appropriate in my view, and nice to see.
KB
don’t know if you caught my post yesterday thanking you for that piece, which I’ve distributed widely.
Pspehs are getting to be a dime a dozen (sorry, William)– good analysis of policy in plain language is a rare beast indeed.
So thank you.
frednk@2420
But I am prepared to bet you have seen cleavage in the office. 😀
frednk
Posted Sunday, January 26, 2014 at 1:59 pm | Permalink
confessions
Posted Sunday, January 26, 2014 at 1:52 pm | Permalink
davidwh:
Chest hair on men is seriously over-rated. Trust me.
And so is cleavage. If you want to see a womens tits you marry her.
=============================================
But isn’t Tone already married?
From twitter:
[If only Senator FierravantiWells’ desired policy had been in place 50 years ago, we might never have heard of/from her.]
daretotread@2421
You mean a hardware issue?
Or do you mean software problems?
Adobe Flash used to cause me a lot of grief with my browser. Until I got rid of it.
This article examines Kevin Andrews’ claims of an unsustainable level of welfare spending as an argument for crackdowns on Disability Support Pension and dole payments and finds them generally wanting.
==================================================
But $4 billion a year to mainly foreign owned mining companies is?
zoomster@2423
Or maybe, like others, she can’t be bothered playing your silly games. 😐
Diogenes,
I read the preamble/description and because you can’t share your votes this time it’s harder for them to get the votes to collate them, so have a smaller sample size. Rip Tide may get it, I’m just not mad keen on the song as it’s been played so much on the commercial station which I often have to listen to at work.
[If only Senator FierravantiWells’ desired policy had been in place 50 years ago, we might never have heard of/from her.]
She has a point, look how distressed Howard was from the number of asian faces he saw in the streets of Oz.
The LNP could probably go that one extra step for Howie and offer subsidised rebates under medicare for whitening of the skin and de-asianisation of the eyes.
So we are down to critising our first female PM because she showed too much/not enough tit?
Wow. Classy.
bemused
yes, I know – it’s silly to ask dtt to back up anything she says with actual proof.
[
daretotread
Posted Sunday, January 26, 2014 at 2:09 pm | Permalink
…
Are any of the same people now in Shorten’s Office and if so what can be done to make sure that similar wrong keys are not struck.
]
It’s as if the Gillard men went and joined Abbott’s office. It’s Abbott that is running around in togs. But at least he does it at the beach.
The problem was that Gillard was the first female prime minister. Like it or not, men dress for their different roles. Suits have a purpose. People, male and female are used to the different roles, used to the suit.
I think the issue I am talking about is a staff that didn’t realise she was taking on a man’s role and like it or not she had to adopt the conventions men do when taking on that sort of role. Sexless dressing.
Laughing at Tory women wearing polar neck jumpers and pearls is the same as laughing at suits. They serve a purpose.
Take a look an Penny Wong, always immaculately dressed and dressed for the role.
frednk
That is a valid point about dressing for the role, although Gillard did for the most part dress professionally.
zoomster@2435
You would probably just reject any proof offered and it would resolve into an endless quest to satisfy you.
Most people have better things to do.
[
AussieAchmed
Posted Sunday, January 26, 2014 at 2:18 pm | Permalink
…
But isn’t Tone already married?
]
Be honest, don’t you feel a little bit sorry for the guy; it’s so dam hard not to look when the opportunity presents itself.
That is why I absolutely hold the view, if you want to be taken seriously don’t present yourself with you lungs hanging out. If you want to dress like that, go to the beach, not the office.
The issue of clothing is one area where women are at a serious disadvantage compared with men.
Now for a guy if he has had a late night, been sick, had a row with the wife,had a sleep over with a “friend”, or is stressed about a matter of state, he gets out of bed, showers, drags a suit from the cupboard and one of his 15 blue or white shirt and a tie any tie, will do. Finds his black shoes, runs a combe through his hair and hey presto, no one will notice he is not 100%. He will look professional, serious and in control.
Women get a much rougher deal. It is an iron law that you never, ever, ever wear the same clothes you wore the day before, so you must find a fresh suit or skirt jacket set. You must find the right shirt which is not just one of 14 collared blue/white shirts, No you meed to think of the exact colour to match or not clash with the suit/jacket, you need to think about neckline (the shape of the jacket determines the neckline), Too colourful or neckline too low says fast, too glamourous says bimbo, not glamourous enough says dork.
You need to find appropriate jewellery and select from shoes, thinking about the colour, the style and the day’s activities ie comfort versus fashion. Do you or do you not wear “f**k me” heels.
Then there is the hair and makeup. If it is not up to scratch it screams tired sick or spent last night with a “friend.” A man has hair. A woman has a hairstyle. Does she go short “I am tough”, does she go “dress like a Tory”, does she go long and pretty and sexy. Do I look feminine or more like a man.
So here I do feel for Gillard in her first weeks in office. It was bloody hard to get it right. However I get a sense of a bevvy of advisors pushing her in all sorts of directions and just not quite getting it right.
Now Anna Bligh did get it right pretty much always. It took Gillard until January 2013 to get it right. It was a bit too late by then
Abbott at the beach – is result of his long time volunteer work as a surf life saver. All the surf lifesavers I’ve ever seen wear speedos. ie Abbott is being authentic.
Julia’s image problem was that it was entirely inauthentic – Julia Gillard admiring John Howard? Pulease.
Julia’s staff was mainly women at the time, or so I understand, and had been with her right through government and some of them back in opposition.
It would have been the culture. Unfortunately it went backwards after McTernan as brought out on that 457.
frednk@2436
If Merit Andrews is serious about reducing welfare spending he first needs an economic policy.
There is nothing wrong with reviewing the welfare sector as long as it is fair-dinkum.
Australia currently has a soft employment market which indicates the focus needs to be on the economic policy.
If the economy was booming and full-employment had been achieved then you could look further into increasing workforce capacity.
Clearly Merit Andrews has no recruitment or hiring experience.
[daretotread
Posted Sunday, January 26, 2014 at 2:35 pm | Permalink
..
Now Anna Bligh did get it right pretty much always. It took Gillard until January 2013 to get it right. It was a bit too late by then]
That is why there is a lot to be said for polar neck jumpers and pearls.
Your allowed to wear the same pearls. A collection of plain polar neck jumer serves the same purpose as a colleciton of ties.
frednk@2445
Perhaps plain pants suits with plain blouses (much like men’s suits and shirts) with a colourful scarf to add a bit of colour like men’s ties.
My wife likes the colourful scarfs and I do think they look good.
bemused
Posted Sunday, January 26, 2014 at 2:44 pm | Permalink
frednk@2445
daretotread
Posted Sunday, January 26, 2014 at 2:35 pm | Permalink
..
Now Anna Bligh did get it right pretty much always. It took Gillard until January 2013 to get it right. It was a bit too late by then
That is why there is a lot to be said for polar neck jumpers and pearls.
Your allowed to wear the same pearls. A collection of plain polar neck jumer serves the same purpose as a colleciton of ties.
Perhaps plain pants suits with plain blouses (much like men’s suits and shirts) with a colourful scarf to add a bit of colour like men’s ties.
My wife likes the colourful scarfs and I do think they look good.
Both Anna Blight and Tanya P always dress very well, i suspect they wear what they are comfortable in, clothing needs to suit the person’s personality.
New thread.
P1
[When more of your life is behind you than ahead of you, it naturally seems more important to rewrite history than to change the future.
Best just leave them to it – time is both a necessary and sufficient remedy for such nonsense.]
True. It’s also that the more time and effort people have spent on something, the more it is their identity. Anything that criticises that persons party/cult/faction etc is perceived as a personal assault and so there is endless repairs to and defence of the fantasy castle the person lives in.