ReachTEL: ABC, republicanism, Cosgrove v Bryce

ReachTEL gives both sides of the argument something to go on in relation to ABC bias, and finds evidence of conservatism on matters vice-regal and republican.

The Fairfax papers today offer three attitudinal findings from a ReachTEL automated phone poll, which was conducted on Thursday evening from a sample of 2146 respondents:

• After Tony Abbott’s efforts to place the matter on the agenda earlier this week, a question on ABC bias finds 59.6% of respondents saying there is none. However, conservative critics of the public broadcaster can at least point to the fact that many more think it biased to Labor (32.2%) than the Coalition (8.2%). While the result at both ends may have been influenced by Abbott’s activism, it nonetheless offers an interesting supplement to the yearly ABC-commissioned Newspoll surveys, which consistently find overwhelming majorities considering its reporting to be “balanced and even-handed” without probing into respondents’ partisanship. The Sydney Morning Herald’s graphic features breakdowns by age and gender.

• Support for republicanism appears to be at a low ebb, with 39.4% in favour and 41.6% opposed. Tellingly, the 18-34 cohort joins 65-plus in recording a net negative rating (though by a considerably smaller margin), with those in between recording majorities in favour. Age and gender breakdowns here.

• There’s also a question on who is preferred out of the incumbent Governor-General and her designated successor, with 57.1% favouring Peter Cosgrove versus 42.9% for Quentin Bryce. I do wonder though about a method which requires a definite answer from all respondents to such a question, given the number that wouldn’t have an opinion.

UPDATE: And now a further finding from the poll that 52.5% agree that Labor should distance itself from the union movement”, compared with 25.6% who disagree.

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.

1,716 comments on “ReachTEL: ABC, republicanism, Cosgrove v Bryce”

Comments Page 31 of 35
1 30 31 32 35
  1. guytaur I am not sure it’s an excuse but rather a rational economic decision. Logic says more interest in the political climate means more polling and less interest means less polling.

  2. Geoff

    SPC’s parent company has spent $400 million in the last two years underwriting SPC’s losses.

    You can understand their reluctance to throw more money in that direction.

  3. Geoff@1495

    A day or two ago Google blocked Abbott for being a liar until they realised he had the job of PM


    that was because spammers flooded the account with spam reports triggering a failsafe. Was unlocked when an employee actually reviewed the spam reports and content.
    That is akin to a DDos attack.
    The spammers accounts should be suspended for abusing a valid and needed tool.

    Well Tone might be a tool, but he is not valid or needed. 😛

  4. Bemused

    When my son worked for Coles the attitude was if you had a docket and a complaint you got your money back, even if the dodgy product had been eaten or binned or otherwise disposed of. Of course this opened the door for anyone to come in and say “I had rump steak last night and it was crap” and get a refund.

  5. [It was not suspended due to a DDOS attack.]

    I never said it was. I said it was like a ddos attack. A coordinated use of many computers/accounts in a directed attack.

  6. Guytaur history shows the first Newspoll of 2011, the year following the election, was released on 8th February. It’s still only 4th February in this year following the election.

  7. bemused

    I don’t want to make a big deal of this, but I had said
    [I don’t feel emotionally strong enough to go the complaint routine at the moment.]
    That seemed to me to say everything that was needed.

  8. rossmcg@1505

    Bemused

    When my son worked for Coles the attitude was if you had a docket and a complaint you got your money back, even if the dodgy product had been eaten or binned or otherwise disposed of. Of course this opened the door for anyone to come in and say “I had rump steak last night and it was crap” and get a refund.

    Such an attitude has been around for a long while.
    When I was in high school (now that’s a long time ago!) I had a Saturday morning job at a Coles variety store and we refunded anything, even without a docket. Some of the complaints were quite outrageous and when I baulked at one, I was quickly bought back into line.

  9. Geoff

    Cannot be like. Google has to handle complaints in thousands when something like Superbowl on. Australia does not have the numbers to bring down an account.

    Therefore any attack to do that would cause headline news especially in the Daily Telegraph so I call BS on your spin.

  10. lizzie@1510

    bemused

    I don’t want to make a big deal of this, but I had said

    I don’t feel emotionally strong enough to go the complaint routine at the moment.


    That seemed to me to say everything that was needed.

    It told me you regarded complaining as a stressful experience and I tried to dispel that. But it seemed from your later post we had similar ideas on complaining.

  11. davidwh

    History shows increased publishing of polls. Other polls out and about.
    I think therefore its an excuse as Murdoch knows the results will be bad. He has seen Morgan and Reachtel.

  12. citizen@1454

    I love the idea of turning SPC into a tourist attraction, along with Cadburys. And why not the Holden and Ford plants, some of the larger sheep stations, Myers in Melbourne, a BHP steel mill, the Blundstone shoe factory in Hobart, etc., etc.? We could have a sort of pilgrimage circuit of such sites. Culminating, perhaps, in a shrine to economic rationalism at the Uni of Melbourne or the ANU at which people of my intellectual persuasion could go to worship idols of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman.

    Peter Carey’s novel Illywhacker has a wonderfully written, rather cryptic conclusionin which (if I’ve understood it correctly) various of the novel’s characters become transmogrified into a sort of tableau of Australian history for the delectation of Asian tourists. (Not really worth struggling all the way through the rest of the novel to get to, IMO, but I digress).

    Carey’s image reminded me of a rather magnificent, celebrated line from HG Wells’s novel Tono Bungay: “To run down the Thames so is to run one’s hand over the pages in the book of England from end to end.”

    I’m ruminating about these things because the Abbott Government, for better or for worse, seems to have chosen to try to draw a line in the sand in relation to government subsidies for “iconic” (terribly overused word, but I can’t think of a better) Australian industries.

    All this tough talk about self-reliance and ending the age of entitlement! The economic rationalist in me rather likes it, but there is a bit of a contradiction underpinning it all because most Australians are, in a sense, operating with a sense of entitlement to endlessly-growing wealth (especially property wealth) on the back of the income generated by the mining sector (which, in itself, is not a major employer).

    One future economic scenario for Australia – one towards which the Abbott government seems to be somewhat drawn – is based on ever-burgeoning property, construction and service sectors (particular in seaside areas) financed almost solely by digging up and exporting mineral wealth. One might say that it posits a future Australia which is sort of a pre-1990 Nauru on an incredibly grand scale.

    This potential future economic model has been on the table for the best part of 40 years: being first articulated as being possibly desirable back in the 1970s by Malcolm Fraser and Phillip Lynch. Since then, the Hawke-Keating, Howard, and Rudd-Gillard governments have all raged against this scenario, trying hard to protect and promote agriculture and other forms of primary production, as well as manufacturing and export-oriented service industries.

    Abbott and Hockey seem to be saying that they want more or less to abandon this struggle (except in propping up specialised areas such as logging native forests, irresistable due to the opportunity it provides to get up the noses of the greenies). What I think this shows is that we have reached the end of a longstanding process through which the traditional forces driving the right side of politics in Australia – in short, squatters and industrialists – have been completely supplanted by barons of the mining, property, construction, finance, retail and other service sectors.

    In one sense, it’s a great development, and one which – given the continuing power of unions like the AMWU – could never have occurred under Labor. There is no point whatsoever in continuing to throw taxpayer dollars at the old manufacturing businesses to try to keep them alive.

    But there is a potential downside: and I go back to my point that the mining sector is not a huge employer.

    Millions of Australians with various levels of skill are going to continue to need to get some form of employment. I do resile from my comments yesterday (questioned by some) that there is a segment in the labour force that is not capable of being skilled up to work in any sector. Many of these are former factory workers, or – more accurately – the children of former factory workers. Their skills and level of motivation were barely adequate to perform ok on a relatively slow production line. But they typically don’t have the work ethic to perform well in the more demanding service sector.

    But their children are still capable of being trained to do better: and that’s where the critical next step is to invest our minerals wealth far more heavily in educating the kids born in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. Most of those with unemployable parents and grandparents could readily be made employable themselves: the brightest can finish school and go to uni, with the others directed towards trades or, failing that, to become productive members of the service economy.

    There are global shortages of nurses, electricians, mechanics and many other types of skilled trades and professions in which you don’t you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to perform well. We really have no excuse whatsoever for allowing younger people in our society to grow up to become unemployable: we are wealthy enough to invest in them, so we bloody well should.

    I am pleased to see that the Government is undertaking a radical review of the education system, but am dismayed to see that the statements made so far by Pyne, Donnelly and others seem to be focused mainly on the academic curriculum – what history gets taught, etc. – rather than on the critical question of how we can establish a process through which every child who isn’t capable of moving forward in the academic stream is identified early and directed towards vocational education. This means having a very hard and critical look at what kids are currently taught in years 7-10 and also a major overhaul of the antiquated apprenticeship system.

    Due to their being free of entanglements with either the teaching or the industrial unions, a Coalition Government is far better placed to have a major crack at these sorts of educational and training reforms. But I fear that they are too enamoured of non-issues like the culture wars.

    Time will tell.

  13. bemused

    in the end, of course, it’s better for a retailer to take goods back, no questions asked, than risk insulting a genuine customer.

    We bought my son a pair of ‘surfie’ thongs once, when we were on holiday, paying extra because we wanted something long wearing. Within a week, they’d fallen apart. When we took them back, although the retailer gave us our money back, she basically accused us of fraud.

    We holiday in that area quite frequently. Previous to that, we’d always bought something at that shop. Now we don’t go near it.

  14. [1489
    Geoff

    Bottom line is SPC’s parent company has the money and position to retool SPC if they cared.

    I for one will be avoiding buying their products where possible until they do something.]

    The SPCA case would make an interesting study in how changes in consumer preferences drive changes in production systems and product selections. Fruit preserving is a very old-style business. Essentially, there is one primary reason for preserving foods at all. That is because they cannot be consumed as quickly as they can be produced. This certainly applied in the good old days when markets were widely dispersed, located far away from producing areas, and when transport and communication times were greater and costs much higher.

    But given the preferences consumers have for fresh products – for the most part – and the ease with which they can be packed, delivered, stored and sold in fresh condition, it is very doubtful that so much product needs to be preserved these days. Considering that consumers are willing to pay a lot more for fresh products than for preserved ones, there is probably a good case for doing a lot less bulk preserving and more fresh marketing or specialty preserving/value-adding.

    This case also illustrates the power that retailers have over the total supply chain, even where the players include those who run global brands, such as Coca Cola. Because access to market is absolutely THE first issue for any seller, and because retailing is so highly concentrated, policies to tackle the monopolisation of consumer markets would probably have a far bigger impact on incomes in Shepparton than any subsidies will ever have.

    Unfortunately, the LNP appear likely to do nothing to improve competition in consumer markets, but will permit ongoing consolidation and monopolisation to continue.

  15. Oops – in my 1517, I meant to say that I do NOT resile from my comments yesterday about people at the bottom of the labour market.

  16. Guytaur you do realise that not all videos loaded onto youtube is viewed by a person don’t you?

    They rely on the community to flag inappropriate content via the “report” feature. There is a threshold on how many reports a video can receive. When it does it gets automaticly taken down and a notification gets sent off to an employee who then reviews the content.
    A coordinated attack on the video via the report feature was conducted hitting the threshold and taking down the video.
    So while amusing for some it is still an attack.

  17. Marrickville Mauler@1481

    I’m reading an enormous amount of praise on here lately by you and others about enormous intellectual capacity and depth of economic understanding on the part of Sharman Stone, based seemingly on the good old principle of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”.

    I wonder if any of you have ever actually had dealings with Sharman on any issues? I have done so, as has Chris Kenny (in his case, I would assume, quite extensively).

  18. Geoff

    Now you prove my point.

    A) Its only an attack if the complaints were made up.

    B) We have confirmation from Abbott a while back and from Stone today that he lies.

    Therefore the complaints were not made up. Therefore it was not an attack

  19. There is a useful article by Sue Neale in today’s ‘The Australian’ about the rural debt problem.

    The vital statistics are something like this:

    The rural debt is $70 billion.

    The total value of rural land is $120 billion.

    Between $5 billion and $10 billion is ‘distressed debt’

    The average debt for a Queensland cattle station has gone from $700,000 to $2 million in the past 12 years.

    The net annual value of production is around $10 billion.

    Around one third of family-owned farms in Queensland are judged by the banks to be ‘unviable’.

    The four reasons given for the parlous state of affairs are:

    (1) Banks’ credit was too easy
    (2) Farmers were too ambitious in their borrowing and were bad judges of their capacity to repay
    (3) The drought
    (4) The above have created a downward spiral in which property values crash and causing more and more foreclosures as debt/equity ratios keep being breached. (The corresponding upwards spiral [rural property bubble] where landowners gained tremendous paper profits through falsely-inflated property values is not mentioned).

    Not canvassed are:

    (1) inept drought mangement practices by farmers
    (2) climate change
    (3) the breakdown between corporate and family enterprises
    (4) the banks profits that accrued in the good years.

    There is a spike in suicides as foreclosure notices are issued.

    The rough outline of the rural reconstruction bank is that it would spend around $3.5 billion to buy $7 billion of the worst debt. The banks would then renegotiate loans with farmers. This would prevent fire sales, undeprinning rural property values. The Government would then own around 10% of Australia’s worst-performing farmland. There is no mention of what interest rates, if any, that would accrue to Government. Minor detail?

    Joyce would have you think that this is cost-free.

    If true, the Government will not have to allocate $3.5 billion in taxpayers funds. Private investors would invest.

    Of course, Joyce is lying.

    What would the costs be? The first is that buying the most distressed debt is also buying the highest risk debt. There is no guarantee that any or all of the $3.5 billion would ever make its way back to the Government’s coffers. Secondly, priced in the market, such debt would normally accrue interest rates of 15% plus. That is around $500,000,000 a year that the Government should be earning but will not earn.

    There are other costs. All farmers who are successful and paying taxes would be subsidising the stupidest, unluckiest and least successful farmers and the banks.

    But the real cost, IMHO, is something that I have been aware of since my farming days: Australian’s farmland is often valued at a speculative values rather than production value.

    The $3.5 billion of taxpayers’ money would reinforce the notion that the land can be valued at speculative values, virtually ensuring that ROI from simiple farm production is simply not there.

    Make no mistake about it. Joyce and the Nationals are trying to play a massive national con game.

    The bottom line is that farm values should be allowed to drop until a farmer buying the land and running the farm efficiently and effectively can make a reasonale ROI quid.

    Joyce is trying to engineer the reverse.

  20. Geoff

    Also any evidence NewsCorpse could find of any such attack would be screaming headlines to generate sympathy for Abbott and thus improve his polling.

    So by all logical deduction you are spinning a line of BS

  21. [1495
    Geoff
    Posted Tuesday, February 4, 2014 at 11:53 am | PERMALINK
    A day or two ago Google blocked Abbott for being a liar until they realised he had the job of PM

    that was because spammers flooded the account with spam reports triggering a failsafe. Was unlocked when an employee actually reviewed the spam reports and content.
    That is akin to a DDos attack.
    The spammers accounts should be suspended for abusing a valid and needed tool.]

    Indeed! It is a classic play out of the Anti Vaxination play book. Facebook are reviewing their rules for this after the anti vaxer’s get everyone suspended for so called harassment and spam.

  22. For years I’ve been asking what the difference is between Pyne’s proposal for ‘independent schools’ and what has happened in Victoria. Finally, there is actually analysis linking the two —

    [performance on national and international assessments in Victoria – which led the world in increasing autonomy over the past 20 years – was not significantly different from New South Wales, which until recently had a centralised school system.]

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/04/independent-schools-better-results-analysis

    As I’ve said, it seems strange that Pyne has never used Victoria to advance his argument — probably because he can’t.

  23. Normally you don’t get complaints on YouTube, unless it’s copyright complaints, and Google just did bring in new system recently for copyright complaints.

    The fact that Tony Abbott’s video got hit shows that most of the content is indeed false.

  24. meher

    I haven’t had direct dealings with Sharman – apart from a couple of radio debates — but I’ve got friends who live in her electorate, have met ex constituents of her’s out doorknocking, and move in much the same circles politically.

    She’s generally quite well respected, although she suffers from ‘safe seat disease’ (I’ll fix your individual problem but I won’t bother taking it further to fix the policy settings causing it) and a touch of populism (I was very cross with her when she said suburban areas should be cut off from electricity during overload periods rather than dairies — ‘because no one’s ever died of heat’).

    People like Joan Kirner speak of her with respect and fondness.

  25. Geoff

    You missed what screaming headlines mean. As I said Google only changed because of his job.

    We know its a fact that Abbott lies. The man said so on national television.

  26. boer

    you could throw in recent antagonism to ‘foreignors’ ‘buying the family farm’ and the demise of MIS schemes.

    Regardless of people’s various opinions of both issues, if you restrict the market for a product by deterring certain kinds of buyers, then the price drops.

    Victorian farmers were able to borrow money to get through the long drought because their property prices were increased due to the presence of MIS (hope that’s the right acronym!) buyers in the market.

  27. Guytaur I think your rusted on arse is showing.

    If it was a shorten video that was attacked and taken down I would still call it a cyber attack. Cause that is what it is. It is an attack.

  28. .@SharmanStone Abbott could break promises to pay Murdoch Broncos’ and for stadium in his electorate to keep promise to save #SPC jobs?

  29. [zoomster
    Posted Tuesday, February 4, 2014 at 12:38 pm | Permalink

    boer

    you could throw in recent antagonism to ‘foreignors’ ‘buying the family farm’ and the demise of MIS schemes.

    Regardless of people’s various opinions of both issues, if you restrict the market for a product by deterring certain kinds of buyers, then the price drops.

    Victorian farmers were able to borrow money to get through the long drought because their property prices were increased due to the presence of MIS (hope that’s the right acronym!) buyers in the market.]

    Yep. The MIS distorted rural property markets something horrible and spawned a massive spiv industry to boot. The various messes are a long way from being sorted out.

    As for foreign ownership, I belong to the luddites who believe that Australia’s farmland should not be owned by foreigners. At all. The profit-shifting cum tax evasion is far too easy.

  30. Geoff

    BS. I know it you know it.

    You want to allege an attack you need to prove how Google failed.

    Start by asking Google they are fairly transparent.

  31. [I think I understand Liberal ‘ethics’.]

    It will do your head in mate.

    [Abbott lying all the time is not a step too far.]

    Its simply situation normal.

    [But actually telling the truth and calling Abbott a liar is a step too far.]

    Peta must be livid. 🙂

    Good on Stone for calling him out. I hope she sticks to her guns on this. The article in the Australian today seems to actually be a straight reporting of who has said what, and shows up as pretty damning for Hockey Abbott.

    The whole Cadbury Tourism thing Abbott and Abetz have been on about is obvious bullsh$t and spin. Whichever adviser came up with that needs a serious kicking i think.

    Will be interesting to see how Stone gets on into the future. She will definitely be marked off as “not a team player” and i wonder how the next pre-selections will go??
    She probably should not be expecting any committee positions in the near future i’d think.

  32. Destroying Shepparton and a few thousand families’ futures is one thing.

    Publicly dissing a sixty billion dollar business is an entirely other thing.

  33. Surprise No 98. Despite promising repeatedly to put downwards pressure on the COL before the election and despite promising repeatedly that it was not that the party that increases taxes, the Abbott Government has just quietly pocketed a suite of tax increases on alcohol products.

  34. Boerwar

    You point abt farmland bring overvalued is well made. My ex’s parents farmed in the SW and from the late 80s on it had been very attractive area to so called lifestyle farmers. When it came time for them to retire and sell the smallish home farm none of the neighbors could afford to buy it. They saw it as a farm and priced it according to its production potential. It was bought by a lifestyler and what was a good beef property is now given over to grapes and probably makes very little.

  35. Guytaur if you fail to see how it works you can not call BS on it.

    Google did not fail. Their failsafe system triggered as required.
    It was only triggered because it was attacked in a coordinated effort.

Comments Page 31 of 35
1 30 31 32 35

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *