Post-budget polling has emphatically confirmed a second major shift in public opinion since the election, the first being a strikingly early dip in the new government’s fortunes in November, leaving the opposition with a narrow lead when the dust had settled. With every pollster but ReachTEL having produced results in the wake of last Tuesday’s budget, the latest landslip looks even bigger than the first, and it sends the Coalition into territory that was all too familiar to Labor during its tumultuous second term in office. The damage was done by Newspoll, Nielsen and Morgan, with a small amount of the edge taken off by more moderate results from Galaxy and Essential Research. Even so, Labor now has a lead on the primary vote for the first time since BludgerTrack opened for business in late 2012, even taking into account that the Greens have retained a healthy share of the vote, perhaps finding a new equilibrium with their head just above double figures. Also continuing to make hay out of the exodus from the Coalition is the Palmer United Party, which this week reaches a new high of 7.0%.
No less spectacular is the latest update on leadership ratings, for which near-identical sets of data have emerged this week courtesy of Newspoll and Nielsen. The slump in Tony Abbott’s standing which had become evident over the previous fortnight has continued apace, to the extent that I have had to increase the range of the y-axis on the net satisfaction chart to accommodate it. This puts Abbott at a level Julia Gillard would only have known in a particularly bad week. Even more encouragingly for Labor, Bill Shorten’s ratings are on an upward swing, putting him back into net positive territory after three months below par. What had previously been a steady narrowing trend in Tony Abbott’s lead on preferred prime minister has sharply accelerated, to the extent of putting Shorten substantially ahead – an uncommon achievement for an Opposition Leader.
The state projections this week see the distinction in state swings even out, most notably in the case of Queensland where the swing to Labor got out of hand for a few weeks there. A considerable influence here was the latest Nielsen breakdown, which provided the first presentable set of figures I had seen for the Coalition in Queensland for some time. This may suggest that the budget backlash in that state was muted by the fact that Labor had less slack to take up, although there is no doubt also a large element of the statistical noise to which state breakdowns are inevitably prone. The upshot is that the Coalition’s position on the Queensland seat projection actually improves by four seats this week, testament in part to the state’s super-abundance of marginal seats. Offsetting this are bumper gains for Labor in other states – four seats in New South Wales, putting Bennelong, Gilmore and Macquarie on the table in addition to all the seats lost in September; three in marginals-starved Victoria, adding Casey and Dunkley to the more familiar targets of Corangamite, Deakin and La Trobe; and one each in Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania.
In other BludgerTrack news, you now have the chance to put Labor’s poll surge in somewhat broader perspective thanks to the retrospective poll tracking displayed on the sidebar, which at present encompasses the previous three terms, with plans to go back to the start of the Howard era in due course. For this you can think the sleuth work of Kevin Bonham, who has provided me with Nielsen data going back to 1996. Taking into account the more readily accessible archives of Newspoll and Morgan, this should eventually give me three pollsters to play with over the totality of the intended period. For the time being, the display encompasses the familiar poll aggregate from the previous term; the first term of the Rudd-Gillard government, which also includes Essential Research and a smattering of Galaxy to supplement the three aforementioned pollsters; and the Howard government’s final term in office.
Abbott was being his creepy arrogant self on breakfast tv this morning. He must be feeling comforted by the daily terror descent into the gutter
sceptic
We are also told there are more on DSP than there are people in Vanuatu !!
Briefly (end of last thread)
Thanks for the post on hours worked.
Are those aggregate hours hours ‘worked’ or hours ‘paid’? How is unpaid overtime death with by the ABS?
Briefly (end of last thread)
Thanks for the post on hours worked.
Are those aggregate hours hours ‘worked’ or hours ‘paid’? How is unpaid overtime death with by the ABS?
Apparently the grains of sand in the Sahara have have a higher collective intelligence than the Abbott Government. The DT must’ve missed that.
Mind you, to be fair to the LNP, it has to be said that there are more grains of sand than there are members of the government.
@abcnews: GP co-payment proposal causing a drop in visits to the doctor, AMA says
http://t.co/D5elF36LLR
Sydney’s Daily Telecrap is actively campaigning for the Liberal Party, not only with an article painting disability pensioners as bludgers but a supporting editorial.
The article contains the following bizarre line “The size of the number of DSP recipients in NSW is double that of Ukraine’s active army personnel and exceeds the population of Pacific Island states, including Vanuatu and New Caledonia.” WTF?
There is a set of statistics which I imagine the Daily Telegraph would ignore when the conflate irrelevant issues. They use army brigade numbers as some sort of spurious threshold test or benchmark test.
They throw around some statistics but have engaged in some significant double counting by ignoring the fact that many military people are on disability support.
32,000 Australians on the disability pension are Vietnam War vets. I assume that significant numbers of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are also on the disability pension but the Vietnam stats took about forty years to see the light of day* and I imagine that the war mongers will try to sit on the Iraq and Afghanistan war statistics for just as long.
Just to help the Ignoranti who specialize in writing Daily Teledrivel, 32,000 is the equivalent of ten army brigades who have been disabled by war service.
*bearing in mind that many vets hung on for as long as they possibly could, battling their demons, before acknowledging that they, more than anyone, are ENTITLED to go on the disability support if that is what they need.
Abbott certainly is an excellent civil engineer …. he has no peers when it comes to digging holes to bury himself deeper in.
The overnight story is that Faine asked by an eyebrow raise “do you want to talk to this sex worker?”. Abbott replied “yes’ by the use of wink and a smirk, (where most would just nod assent).
Why then does he say today to massager Karl “I shouldn’t have done it”?
Why did he not just say to Karl WTTE “my nonverbal communication has been widely mis-read ….. it’s something I’m going to have to work on”.
The answer is clear…. guilty mind / “I’m in a bit of trouble here” / “so I’ll retreat to my usual response” …. obfuscate , and if that doesn’t work, lie.
There’s another aspect of this too.
Much has been written about Abbott’s great skills as LOTO, and the difficulty of translating that to PM skills. But the same may be said of Credlin.
Has the puppeteer also excelled at spoiling, but is out of her depth when positive leadership advice and string pulling is needed.
The fact that Faine was not in camera shot is helpful to Abbott’s story.
And to add to the perception the Coalition has not really thought the Budget through is as follows……
As a one liner, the budget summary noted $1.3 billion to be chopped from support to States for pensioners and Commonwealth HC card holders for utilities such as rates and other discounts.
Attention this morning on early AM was directed to this item with the comment that “The Federal government only contributes 10% of the cost of this programme to the States – a relatively small amount.”
It would seem, if this is the case, that the Coalition has shot itself needlessly in the foot and further alienated one of is strong supporter groups by not making it clear, if in fact this is the case, that the kind of support this money goes to is reduced rather than stopped.
Then again, who really knows for sure? The Seniors Supplement is gone from July 1 this year.
What is puzzling is why the Coalition just put this item in without a word of explanation (and this is still to come) and then wonder why the oldies are confused, hurt and angry.
The media keeps talking about “a cut of up to $1200 a year” when if it is indeed 10% then it will be nowhere near $1200.
To complicate this issue still further, the Victorian Premier says his government will absorb this cost, Barnett says he won’t while each of the States vary in the amount they put in for this programme.
What strikes me is the sheer carelessness of Hockey and Abbot for not factoring an explanation of the cut.
Mind you we still don’t know if it is 10% or 100%.
Poroti
[he Devine Miranda in the Daily Toilet puts her Manolo Blahniks into the disabled as well. Won’t bother linking .
Left would rather wreck than work
THE truth is that we are now at the tipping point at which we switch from a nation of lifters to a nation of leaners……There is no equivalence between money that a government takes from a lifter’s pocket and the benefits it pays to a leaner]
The final posts by briefly in the last string are sobering. Total numbers of hours worked is falling.
Beyond that, it is not the left who sacked thousands of people from the mining industry by mechanising it further and further. It was not the left which destroyed the Australian car industry.
Steve777
Abbott of course knows that the DT is actively campaigning for him and his party. Add the sydney shock jocks and Abbott feels somewhat comforted and confident that things will get better for him.
Brieflys post from previous thread
1392
briefly
Posted Thursday, May 22, 2014 at 5:22 am | PERMALINK
I woke up. Bugger.
Anyway, restless, curious about something, I’m not sure why, I turned to the ABS.
In particular, I turned to the data…ABS Labour Force, Australia. Here is a little to enjoy with breakfast.
Aggregate Monthly Hours Worked ; Persons ; Series ID A3346490L, 000′s of hours, monthly, trend FLOW
Month & Hours
Jul 2011 1591083.0
Aug 2011 1596695.5
Sep 2011 1599874.7
Oct 2011 1599848.5
Nov 2011 1597806.1
Dec 2011 1596260.8
Jan 2012 1595999.7
Feb 2012 1597118.8
Mar 2012 1598786.1
Apr 2012 1600089.3
May 2012 1599731.6
Jun 2012 1597046.4
Jul 2012 1593568.0
Aug 2012 1590745.5
Sep 2012 1590075.4
Oct 2012 1590505.4
Nov 2012 1591429.6
Dec 2012 1592205.2
Jan 2013 1592879.2
Feb 2013 1594161.1
Mar 2013 1596399.0
Apr 2013 1599436.6
May 2013 1602746.3
Jun 2013 1605695.7
Jul 2013 1606857.8
Aug 2013 1606460.4
Sep 2013 1605238.2
Oct 2013 1604801.1
Nov 2103 1605115.5
Dec 2013 1605333.5
Jan 2014 1604947.2
Feb 2014 1603077.0
Mar 2014 1599898.6
Apr 2014 1595710.2
Looking back, we can see the month in which the most hours were worked was July 2013 when 1,606,857,800 hours were recorded. Essentially, labour demand has been gradually ebbing since then and in April this year 1,595,710,200. This is a reduction of 0.7% over the period.
In most months since July 2011 hours worked were greater than in April 2014, the exceptions being the period from July 2012 to February 2013. But the attrition in hours worked since the peak now means that absolute labour demand (expressed as hours worked) has hardly grown in the nearly-three years since July 2011.
At the beginning of the period, the labour force totaled 11,818,100 persons. In April 2014 it totaled 12,285,200, an increase of 3.8%. This increase in the workforce has been accompanied by a decline in the participation rate and in the employment to population ratio.
The intensity of labour demand – the availability of work for each worker in the market – has been slowly eroding, a trend that corresponds with the decline in real wages published by the ABS on Wednesday.
This also corresponds with job vacancy survey published by the Department of Employment yesterday which shows continued muted demand for workers.
http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2014/05/official-job-vacancies-stabilise/
Doubtless this goes at least part of the way towards accounting for the visceral reaction of voters to the abominable fiscal apostasy of the LNP.
1393
briefly
Posted Thursday, May 22, 2014 at 5:37 am | PERMALINK
I might well add that the expanded availability of work since the 1990′s, including part-time and casual work, is considered to be the single most important factor in raising the welfare of low-medium income households. The tax-and-transfer system by itself is not enough to support low income households.
We have an economy that is not generating as much demand for labour as there are workers available and real wages have been falling as a result. The cuts to social incomes proposed by the LNP have to be considered in the context of persistent labour market softness and against the very high cost of housing.
psyclaw
Jon faine has categorically denied winking to Abbott first. He knows this story is doing the rounds, but it is untrue
The $70 safety net for co-payments applies only to pensioners, health care card holders, kids under 16 and for treatment according to a person’s “Chronic Illness Management Plan”.
Abbott was shown on ABC PM last night not to know this …. he has been stating that we all have the $70 safety net.
Ditto for hew HECs obligations, which commence for every HECS application after budget day. Abbott’s claim that commencement is in 2017 is wrong.
mikehilliard
Too right I have!
And tucked away in a mini, mini paragraph in the West, is the fact that real wages in WA (and one assumes Oz wide) have fallen in the last few months.
I wonder when the Coalition will turn its attention to the rapacious unions?
The West did, however, alert all to the fact that consumer confidence had dropped to its lowest level in three years.
Not mentioned with quite the same triumphant note it did just after Abbott came to power when the West, within 3 days of the election put on its front page in screaming headlines, that consumer confidence was up ….join the dots…because you lot all voted for Tony Abbott.
I wonder when we will hear wails of unhappiness from the likes of Harvey Norman if and when people no longer are in a hurry to buy the next minor update to their TV?
Re Daily Telegraph
@sspencer_63: Exclusive! (3 years ago) @latingle ah yes. thought so! http://t.co/X5esw8U0Dn …
I thought i’d post a comment on the Daily Telecrap article about the ‘welfare Crisis’ pointing out that the number of disability pensioners in NSW was about one and one eighth times the the distance to the Moon in miles. They might publish that one, unlike my comment that the Daily Telegraph loses credibility as a journal of record and will lose readers when it actively campaigns for one side of politics.
Peter Fitz –
[ Yesterday 2GB broadcaster Alan Jones was on Sunrise – settle Petal, my hotel in the Northern Territory wasn’t picking up Today – attacking the whole idea promoted by former AFL great Andrew McLeod that the AFL should have a No Racism round.
“Certainly not. It is almost reverse apartheid.” Jones said. “It is the new game in town. If you think you’ve been racially abused, apparently you have been.”
A pause. I know what you’re thinking. Jones couldn’t possibly think that calling a black man a “gorilla” is not racist could he? COULD he?
But no, Jones went on to vociferously defend the 13-year-old Collingwood supporter who last year called Goodes an “ape.”
“She had no idea,” he said, “and I had no idea, that it was a form of {racial} abuse.”
Alan, bring it in tight.
If calling a black man a “gorilla” and an “ape” is not racial abuse, what the hell does it take?
On previous occasions when black men have been called “black c—ts” by opponents, you’ve also defended that.
I repeat, Alan, if that is not racism, what DOES it take? ]
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/congratulations-essendon-for-using-the-power-of-sport-to-change-things-for-the-better-20140521-zrjy2.html#ixzz32OcbykmA
I like what one tweeter called the news coming out from Abbott’s team.
Days of our Lies
I hope the DT has pointed out that those on Disability support get about 200 x more to live on than someone in a Sudanese refugee camp.
@ABCNews24: Opposition Leader @billshortenmp to speak in Melbourne shortly on school funding. #abcnews24 will bring you this live #gonski #auspol
JBishop lets the cat out of the bag on which asylum seekers will be sent to Cambodia (hint: you need to be able-bodied and presumably do as you’re told to be paid a pittance):
[FOREIGN Minister Julie Bishop says Cambodia wants able-bodied refugees from Australia to help rebuild the nation.
Australia is on the verge of signing a new resettlement deal that would allow refugees processed on Nauru to resettle in Cambodia.
Ms Bishop said Cambodia was seeking people who would be able to help rebuild Cambodia.
“They’re very keen to have people working,” Ms Bishop told ABC radio.
“They’re looking for people who are able-bodied who would be able to contribute to Cambodian society.”]
http://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/refugees-to-rebuild-cambodia-bishop-says/story-e6frfku9-1226926555882
I thought Alan Jones belonged to the generation where one shouldn’t call someone more senior than them an animal?
Shorten Presser now
“@AustralianLabor: “we need to embrace the Gonski reforms, not throw them aside like this Government has done.” @KateEllisMP #auspol #Budget2014”
“@ABCNews24: Bill Shorten: Labor’s not going to compromise on our children’s future #auspol #gonski #budget2014”
You would have to think the “Abbott’s a winker” tag could be a popular one. Combines the obvious underlying meaning with the misogyny and smirking. Add to Hockey dancing, Hockey and sidekick cigars, general amusement at people raising budget concerns.
“@ABCNews24: Bill Shorten: Tony Abbott’s wink shows how out of touch he is, I don’t know what was going through his mind #auspol #budget2014”
Fran kelly did her political wrap with jon faine this morning. She was asked about the scholarship. She said it is not a good look and it has come at such a bad time for the PM.
Bill in his presser making same poorly thought out repetitive boring sloganeering comments, right out of Abbott handbook
He should have watched Bowens intelligent address at the Press Club yesterday.
Bill asked 3 times about funding Q, all he had to say was Cut the PPL… Bowen said it yesterday.
Fran kelly said fhat whether The scholarship was given on merit or because she was the daughter of the aspiring PM, perhaps the Abbott family could have used better judgment under the circumstances and declined the scholarship
Ah remember the good old days when all those journos were gushing about Tones have his best week EVA as PM. 🙂
[ …perhaps the Abbott family could have used better judgment under the circumstances… ]
Now THERE’S yer problem!
Murdoch is trying his best today with front page spreads in his tabloids (front page images are shown on the websites). However his websites also carry stories about the winker and how Abbott & Hockey lied about the $7 GP tax.
Unfortunately for Murdoch, the TV news coverage currently is fairly anti-Abbott.
victoria@81
Vic,
A quote right out of the grattan school of understatement – all thats missing is a “on the other hand”.
BB
Indeed.
Has the Daily Telegraph told us how many Olympic swimming pools would it take to hold all the DSP recipients in NSW?
[Ah remember the good old days when all those journos were gushing about Tones have his best week EVA as PM. :)]
Kenny said it was his best week ever, which was amazing, seeing as it came after his worst week ever.
There were quite a few “… Week Evers” being bounced around at the time.
victoria
even simpler – all they had to do was declare it on the register of interests.
dave
There was no one the other hand from fran today. The tide is too strong!
zoomster
True
Was that it? Fran thought it was just “not a good look”?
The PM’s daughter is given an almost unprecedented scholarship by a Liberal donor and rent-seeker as plans for gutting HECS are being laid, and it’s merely “not a good look”?
Jon faine made the observation with fran kelly that Abbott was particularly nervous yesterday morning during the interview
[zoomster
Posted Thursday, May 22, 2014 at 10:15 am | PERMALINK
victoria
even simpler – all they had to do was declare it on the register of interests.]
By declaring it, he might even have looked like a dad who was proud that his daughter had qualified for a scholarship!
BB
In a nutshell, fran says fhe govt is in trouble with this unfair budget and winkgate and Abbott and hockey not even understanding the details of their own budget. The timely disclosure of this scholarship is bad for Abbott.
I should have said that winkgate, the cigar smoking Hockey and fhe scholarship disclosure feed into the meme of a govt out of touch
From leon
[Has the Daily Telegraph told us how many Olympic swimming pools would it take to hold all the DSP recipients in NSW?]
Look, we should be able to start a meme here.
“There are more DSP recipients than ….”
– caring politicians in the Liberal Party
women in the Abbott Cabinet
– bottles of 1959 Penfold’s Grange
– penguins in the Arctic
See what you can come up with.
On twitter. So bloody true
Anyone else noticed that now that the Abbott Govt is so on the nose, ABCNews24 no longer seem to have tech probs when ALP do pressers?