With just about every pollster in the game taking the field last week to gauge budget reaction, there is a corresponding lull this week, the trusty weekly Essential Research being the only new data point nationally. Since this of itself doesn’t bear much weight in the model, the change since last week is more to do with pre-budget polling fading from the system than any recorded shift from last week to this. The trendlines instead move a little further along the trajectories set for them last week, with Labor up a further half a point on the primary vote, the Liberals down correspondingly, and a lift for the Greens boosting the two-party preferred shift to 0.8%.
There has been one substantial new poll result this weak, and that’s been a relatively mild result for the Coalition in Galaxy’s Queensland-only poll (which, interestingly enough, was exactly replicated in the small-sample Queensland component of this week’s Essential poll). However, the BludgerTrack model only uses state-level polling to determine the manner in which the national vote is apportioned between the states, so the effect of this result has been to soften Labor’s numbers in Queensland while fractionally improving them everywhere else. Since Queensland’s is the mother lode when it comes to marginal seats, the swing in the national result has yielded Labor little gain on the total seat projection, as gains of one seat each in New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia have been counter-balanced by a loss of three in Queensland.
The other BludgerTrack news for the week is that the retrospective poll tracking charts have as promised been extended to the start of the Howard era, the results of which you can see on the sidebar. There is no new data this week on leadership ratings, so the results on the sidebar remain as they were a week ago.
BB,
The ABC balanced? No evidence yet. It does appear, however, that News 24 is Cormann’s Crack Suicide Squad: “If the pig gets it, we’ll disembowel ourselves”.
[ Malcolm Turnbull, Treasury head Martin Parkinson (boned by Abbott) and The Professor himself. ]
An attempt to have Martin Parkinson talk the economics of passing the tories budget along with Turnbull to spin it ?
I wouldn’t have thought Clive as likely dinner companions to either of the other two.
dave
Think in terms of Turnbull leadership challenge. Just as likely as negotiating budget. Not that Newscorp would say that.
Yeah, why would Turnbull and Parkinson be acting on behalf of Abbott-Hockey? Like Rudd negotiating for Gillard with Windsor and co.
Abbott sid to the Minerals Council last night “the doctor co-payment sends message that while doctor visits might be free to the patient, they are not free to the taxpayer”.
Of course patients aren’t taxpayers, and the medicare levy is not “paying”, in Abbott’s funny world.
This multiple choice question came to my mind:-
1) Is he a snake
2) Is he a liar
3) Is dumb
4) Is he a dumb liar
5) Is he a dumb snake
6) Is he a lying snake
7) Is he a dumb lying snake
For sure he’s some or all of these.
@strom_m: Well, this is depressing … Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 pings ‘may have come from searching ship’ http://t.co/MrEb2W68K4 via @smh
BB
I agree with the meme that Abbott always lies.
So whenever he says anything at all, the response should be “Gee, is he telling the truth this time?”
Is Tony Abbott ’embattled’ yet? A google search of “Tony Abbott” embattled doesn’t yield much. Yet. http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/553551/20140526/budget-2014-pm-tony-abbott-avoids-student.htm#.U4ZsvvmSySo
Re chasing HECS debts beyond the grave. This would not be much of an issue on current levels but certainly would be a signficant issue if HECS debts were to greatly escalate. Labor should remind us of this at every opportunity.
So, Pyne says, ‘maybe’, Hockey says, ‘definitely’, and Abbott says, No!’
They must be smoking more than cigars.
“@political_alert: Opposition Leader Bill Shorten will hold a brief doorstop from 10.45am at Northside Community Services in Canberra this morning #auspol”
sprocket_
In the clip @28 he gave a virtuoso lying performance. Only the GST lie remains a work in progress.
[“No cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS.”]
sohar@54
For the simply reason Turnbull, is and will always be a tory.
Some other tories may think he can spin a smoother story then pyne – which wouldn’t be hard.
Turnbull remains in the Parliament for 1 reason – to try his little heart out to become PM – and before he gets too old.
If he can deliver passage of chunks of the budget that abbott and hockey can not, then its a feather in his cap.
I wonder if abbott/ hockey asked him to try or if he did so off his own bat.
And clive of course has his own agenda, which must always have himself as the shining star.
And people are so called *warming* to clive.
FFS!
Sad for Parkinson who will still apparently be sacked.
“@gabriellechan: Soutphommasane and Wilson w Brandis before senate estimates. #politicslive http://t.co/X3OatKTCg6 via @guardian”
[ The iron ore price has fallen further as fears over weakened steel demand in China continue to weigh on the commodity.
Benchmark iron ore for immediate delivery to the port of Tianjin in China is trading at $US96.80 a tonne, down from $US98.10 in the previous session. ]
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/news/2014/5/29/resources-and-energy/iron-ore-price-slips-further
The government does appear to be in considerable disarray this morning over Peppa Pig and death taxes on HECS loans.
Abbott is now spending much of his time trying to hose down spot fires while the budget bushfire rages in the background.
SA Bludgers
You will be pleased to know that I saw MHS this morning at school drop-off and told him I thought he’d made a good decision.
guytaur 63
Chan has a way with words. Enjoyed the Duck story.
[Just down the road, at a Chinese restaurant called Wild Duck, Malcolm Turnbull was wrapping his Peking duck pancakes with the head of treasury Martin Parkinson. Somewhere along the way, Turnbull decided it would be a good idea to text Clive Palmer – holder of the senate crossbench votes – and see if he wanted to pull up a pancake. Clive, who readily admits that he is good on the tooth, winged his way to Wild Duck and they ordered a few more dishes.]
Diog
Did you get a response?
The more important question is why was Turnbull allowing himself to be seen dining with Martin Parkinson?
And vice versa …
Something is afoot, methinks
Diog, you didnt pat him on the back did you? That part of his anatomy would be on edge.
[ Abbott is now spending much of his time trying to hose down spot fires while the budget bushfire rages in the background. ]
His mask of staying out of the media as much as possible has been blown away as well.
He is in the media for all the wrong reason and looking worse and worse – political capital spent.
Roll on the polls – Newspoll early next week hopefully – while the rotting carcass of the budget is still around the collective necks of the tories.
@59 BW,
I wonder if anyone has carved this version of the statue of “see no evil hear no evil speak no evil”.
@10
I wonder if this will result in a hung parliament with the Libs or Labor having to rely on Palmer and the other crossbenches.
Abbott has slapped down Pyne’s brainfart about collecting HECS debts from the estates of the deceased.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbott-scotches-idea-of-collecting-hecs-debt-from-dead-students-20140529-395ch.html
BUT
That is because Abbott wants to flog off the entire HECS debt to private business and they will do the dirty work – for their own profit. Think about it. This government floats the idea of higher HECS/HELP interest rates, and compound interest at that, while telling us that they are ‘helping’ students. The higher interest rates and deregulated fees make the debts more attractive to business who will then make more money when they recover the debts – either while you live or after you die. It’s all so transparent. Blind Freddy would have no problem seeing what is going on here.
I know Abbott said early this year he would not sell off HECS debts, so that is pretty much a guaranteee it will happen. Not in this budget, of course, this budget is just the preparatory work, but keep an eye on the next budget.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-28/pyne-wont-rule-out-privatising-hecs-debt/5051194
[ How Abbott’s asking CEOs to share the pain
It’s something of an understatement to say that the reforming zeal of the Abbott government is being greeted with a lot more hostility than the equally reform-minded Hawke government.
…boardroom alarm bells will ring when many CEOs realise how much their businesses relied on a ‘money-go-round’ of tax, benefits and spending among lower socio-economic status groups – the groups who have the highest propensity to consume (rather than invest) income.
That is not to argue that such a money-go-round is desirable, only that the drying up of billions of dollars of ‘social wages’ in the years ahead will be at least a short-term hit on the bottom line of many firms. We will get our first clear indicators of this in the next reporting season in mid-August.
…Comparing 1983 to 2014, it becomes clear how different these two reform eras will turn out to be.
The first involved asking voters to freeze their wages, and receive a social wage top-up as compensation.
The second involves asking voters to take a social-wage cut, with the abstraction of ‘growth’ and ‘efficiency’ as compensation.
The selling of that second proposition, it has to be said, is not going at all well.]
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2014/5/29/national-affairs/how-abbotts-asking-ceos-share-pain
Abbott’s starting to make lying a habit. Can we take his word for not trying to take the debt off the dead?
“@joeobrien24: Labor’s Kim Carr coming up soon on @abcnews24 interviewed by @lyndalcurtis .”
[I heard Some of Clive’s interview this morning. Whilst i do not trust him for one second, he is doing his bit to disrupt Abbott and his agenda. There is still much to play out]
Victoria,
Spot on.
As for trust, don’t reckon Clive is any more untrustworthy than the Greens and other Indy Senators. Who knows what measures of budget Sen X would support if they promised him a $1 limit on pokie machines?
As a NSW state govt party whip told me: “We have no friends here. Only common enemies.”
Re Raaraa @76. I think Abbott’s lying is a long-established habit. Can we take his word for anything at all? No, we should assume that any commitment he makes will be ditched as soon as it suits him, even if he actually intended to keep it in the first place.
Labor should run hard on the trust issue.
What other promises are left to break?
Funnily enough, this post IS ultimately about politics, but you have to bear with me for a while…
[@strom_m: Well, this is depressing … Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 pings ‘may have come from searching ship’ http://t.co/MrEb2W68K4 via @smh ]
I got up early on Saturday last to accept grovelling apologies from those who criticised my “Diego Garcia” hypothesis as wild “tinfoil hat” “conspiracy theories” because (my critics said):
* It was clear the plane was in the designated search area,
* How could I explain the pings, which were clearly from a black box,
* Only nutters thought the CIA/US Armed forces (et al) were doing things like shooting down planes, kidnapping hostages, renditioning terrorists to secret ocean bases (and so on),
* (unsaid, but implied) The media coverage evidenced a gradual narrowing-down of the search until, inevitably, the plane would be found where they’ve been telling us it is.
Alas, I was disappointed. There was no grovelling.
All of the above reasonings as to why we’re just about to find MH-370 are very neat, but now all very much in doubt if this article linked above is accurate. One by one, the foundations stones of what is potentially the Mh-370 myth are being pulled from underneath a media and spin edifice that has set itself up as unchallengable.
My original point was, I think, an important one: we have been conditioned to think outrageous or fantastical things are automatically “conspiracy theories” until they actually happen, and then they become mainstream, shrug-of-the-shoulder stuff.
I gave multiple examples of hijackings of aircraft to rescue terrorists held in jails, detention centers etc. in exchange for the passengers’ lives. I gave at least two examples of civilian aircraft full of passengers being shot down by trigger-happy miitary types. I cited a possible sighting in the Maldives, witnessed by dozens of people and reported as such.
I argued logically that the “official version” – the pilot went mad, killed all his crew and passengers and then ditched thousands of kilometres from nowhere to make some obscure political “point” – was even crazier than my own scenario.
My scenario saw rational acts – hijacking (by whom we CAN speculate), flying the aircraft to a destination (the only destination in the entire fuel range of the plane that provided both a runway long enough and a sufficient level of deniability or secrecy), which were followed by a perhaps irrational act, the shooting down of the plane as it may have been viewed as some kind of threat.
I gave explanations as to why this would be something that the US defence forces might not want made public: the plane was full of Chinese nationals, they might not want to admit they were holding terrorists on the island, it could have been an accidental or unauthorised downing of the plane by a relatively junior officer (as was the Vincennes incident).
All of this was met with derision and (at best) plonking patronization by the glitterati, who continued to expect that any day the plane would be found, right where Angus Houston (and Tony Abbott) said it would be, and the mystery would be solved.
It’s instructive to note that this is how the story was presented in the media: as a simple caper movie, with a beginning, middle and an end where all the loose ends were tied up.
There were dozens of reports of debris found. These served to bolster the idea in many people’s minds that it was “just a matter of time”. That these reports of debris were totally and utterly unfounded did not dislodge the thought in many that the search was on the cusp of success.
In short, the way the media treated this story was a classic case of repeatedly misrepresenting the truth in order to establish a cover story. Whether this was deliberate or not is another discussion.
It has parallels in the “Budget Emergency” story.
Rational people, shown the facts of Australia’s economic performance – youse all know the relevant, positive bullet points – STILL insist “Yeah, but we had to do something about the Budget disaster.”
Even if they think Abbott is a liar, a goodly majority has accepted his “Budget Emergency” story, hook, line and sinker.
Why?
Because it’s everywhere you look, in the media. Even when its existence is denied it’s still referred to as “the Budget Emergency that doesn’t exist”. The words “Budget Emergency” are self-reinforcing, even in denial.
Many stare incredulously at you when you challenge the common wisdom that the economy was in “dire straits”, requiring immediate, draconian, radical, life-saving surgery.
It’s become so accepted (not by all, but by a comfortable majority) that Australia is in trouble that to get some to even listen to you about the Budget, you have to concede the Budget is indeed in “emergency” mode, but that the measures themselves are unfair. Suddeenly you find yourself discussing “the Trees” of Budget details and not “the forest” of Budget “Emergency”. You’re bogged down in details, which can be more easily refuted piecemeal, one-by-one (cf. Joe Hockey on Q&A the other day).
It is the same with MH-370. Debris, pings, satellite data, lots of warships, summit meetinbg with Chinese Premiers, even the gravitas of Angus Houston have all been details that served to make the search for the plane look plausible and inevitably successful, when in fact not one single scintilla of physical evidence has been found of the plane’s whereabouts, and now even the secondary data – satellite tracks, pings and so on – are heavily in doubt.
The moral of the story?
Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers. They could be wrong, very wrong.
Trust your own logic and analysis. Don’t just accept the “official version”. It’s very often wrong.
The impossible is only impossible because it’s never happened before. Once it does happen, then it’s all a bit of a yawn, really.
Don’t dismiss anti-official versions as automatically “crazy”.
They may, just may, turn out to be correct in the end. And that’s NOT a conspiracy theory.
Who knows what measures of budget Sen X would support if they promised him a $1 limit on pokie machines?
X would need to see the final draft legislation in the Senate first, ready to pass, before he agrees to anything.
I wonder when is the Governmemnt going to reverse its commitment to Plain Packaging? Big Tobacco are among the Coalition’s backers. Maybe they are waiting for the various challenges from Ukraine, Hong Kong etc. to work their way through the system.
BB
[The moral of the story…]
What ever the theory of where the plane is, I look forward to Tony Abbott getting up in parliament and giving this bit of bad news (ping not from the plane) about the search.
BB
You would have thought this sighting would have been looked at in more detail.
[Mike McKay, who is working on a rig operating in the Gulf of Thailand, was so certain he saw the ill-fated flight on fire that he emailed his employers, urging them to pass the information onto authorities.
“Gentlemen. I believe I saw the Malaysian Airlines flight come down. The timing is right,” he wrote.
“I tried to contact Malaysian and Vietnamese officials days ago. But I do not know if the message has been received.
“I am on the oil ring Songa-Mercur off the coast of Vung Tau.
“The surface location of the observation is Lat 08 22′ 30.20″ N Lat 108 42.22.26” E.
“I observed (the plane?) burning at high altitude at a compass bearing of 265* to 275*”]
http://www.malaysia-chronicle.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=242731:sorry-guys-i-saw-mh370-burst-into-flames-nz-oil-rig-worker&Itemid=2#ixzz333kMXf00
Follow us: @MsiaChronicle on Twitter
BK
He replied with a friendly thank you.
He looked well and certainly didn’t look under undue strain.
BB
I do not know what the real story is, but I have never accepted 100% the official Twin Towers story. It is just one of many that could be right. Planes flew into those buildings. Anything that happened after impact is pure speculation, because the biggest crime scene in history was cleared before any forensic samples were taken.
poroti re Mike McKay
I remember that report was given a lot of consideration, but not for a couple of days after he emailed.
There was a story by an ex pilot (lost the link sorry) that factored this in as the event that wrecked the comms, and the pilot responded by flying the jet up to the higher altitude to put the fire out. The theory went on to say the pilot then made a course for a good but out of the way airstrip in Malaysia – hence the U turn – but then the crew were overcome by smoke and the plane cruised to who knows where.
Bushfire Bill@80
[ Funnily enough, this post IS ultimately about politics, but you have to bear with me for a while… ]
At first I thought you had a logical though probably untrue story. There were a lot of small probabilities involved, multiplying each other into something approaching zero.
Then other evidence piled up, and required evidence did not, and I asked here what had happened about the reports of a plane sighting in the Maldives, the authorities in the Maldives said “Nah, nothing to see here, move on” and there is a fire suppression cylinder that washed up on the northern beaches as well to account for.
Now we learn that the pings were from the searching ships. No debris whatsoever has washed up yet. However it may in time, if the plane was shot down before reaching Diego Garcia.
Bloody hell, you just might be right!
The government is running a lot of interference in this estimates.
Human Rights at issue
PMD:
[I do not know what the real story is, but I have never accepted 100% the official Twin Towers story. It is just one of many that could be right. Planes flew into those buildings. Anything that happened after impact is pure speculation, because the biggest crime scene in history was cleared before any forensic samples were taken.]
As if the tragedy of 9/11 wasn’t horrific enough, we have conspiracy buffs cooking up wild and unsupported theories. Now we get the same boilerplate with the disappearance of MH370.
chinda63
[The more important question is why was Turnbull allowing himself to be seen dining with Martin Parkinson?
And vice versa …
Something is afoot, methinks]
I was about to ask the same question. That appears to be massively out of order to me particularly since they also included Palmer.
Was the head of Treasury trying to exert pressure on a Member of Parliament?
If so wouldn’t that be completely out of order?
Palmer will have the Libs running in circles before long.
kakuru@89
I’d be interested to hear your version.
of the MH370.
Curse not being able to edit.
I don’t have a version. I don’t have access to enough information, so I can’t make a rational or well-informed judgement. That doesn’t automatically mean that dark forces were/are at play.
@smh: Groundbreaking survey reveals almost one in three Australians is obese. http://t.co/07Cx9ti0v2
Food safety label time?
kakuru@93
Then don’t ever consider being a research scientist.
A tragedy it was, but the speculation is purely the fault of Gulliani, the New York Mayor who ordered the crime scene cleared before any samples were taken. Nothing has ever been analysed which clears the field for all conspiracies and alternative explanations to be aired. The authorities cannot refute anything because they destroyed everything.
So do not blame the conspiracy theorists. Blame the people in charge of the non-existent investigation.
Mr Wilson being asked about the right to be bigots?
Wilson went to a Liberal Party event
[Then don’t ever consider being a research scientist.]
I am a research scientist. I deal with hard data, not wild-eyed speculation. The moment I start drawing conclusions based solely on intuition, I’ll hand back my PhD.
I do not have a version. I do not have a theory. I just refuse to accept a version that is not based on forensic evidence because that forensic evidence was cleared and destroyed. The haste to clear the site was against all crime scene protocols, put the OH&S of the clearers at risk, and even evidence was moved from site, it was unnecessarily destroyed.
So everyone just has to live with the alternative theories and like them or lump them.