BludgerTrack: 53.2-46.8 to Labor

The publication of Newspoll’s quarterly aggregates have caused a few adjustments at state level, but it’s otherwise a very quiet week for the BludgerTrack poll aggregate.

A pretty dull week for the BludgerTrack poll aggregate, with the only new data point on national voting intention being the weekly Essential Research result, and that being bang on the existing trend and hence of negligible consequence for the total result. However, we did get the quarterly state breakdowns from Newspoll, which is always a big deal as far as BludgerTrack is concerned as it fills a major missing piece in the overall polling puzzle. This results in Labor gaining two seats on the seat projection in Queensland plus one in Western Australia, while losing one apiece in Victoria and South Australia (the shift in Victoria reflecting an ongoing moderation after a quirky result in the state breakdown from Nielsen a few weeks ago). There will be a lot more to come on the innards of BludgerTrack’s state breakdowns over coming days, particularly if you’re a Crikey subscriber. Essential Research published its monthly leadership ratings this week, so Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten’s numbers on the sidebar are updated accordingly. As you can see, nothing too radical happened here either, although Abbott’s and Shorten’s approval ratings were both slightly above par.

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.

1,240 comments on “BludgerTrack: 53.2-46.8 to Labor”

Comments Page 16 of 25
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  2. Rossmore @ 749: One of the government’s problems is that so few of its Ministers appear to be basically likeable at the personal level. They badly need a few avuncular types, instead of all their slit-eyed ideologues. The first government Senate leader I ever saw in action was Sir Kenneth Anderson, who was a low-key character who performed well. He’d been a prisoner in Changi and on the Burma Railway, and was someone you could respect even if you disagreed with him.

  3. pedant
    [Posted Thursday, July 10, 2014 at 10:55 pm | PERMALINK
    Victoria @ 746: I very much like both Japan and the Japanese whom I have known; but to suggest that the Japanese soldiers of the WWII generation in some general sense behaved with honour is simply off the planet.]

    Indeed

  4. Jaeger

    Where was that group?

    It would have been either Canberra Ornithologists Group, or PENBOCA (Mornington Peninsula.) I have a terrible memory for dates, so won’t try and guess when it was.

  8. victoria @ 753: The other possibility, I suppose, is that Mr Abbott has exactly the same understanding of “honour” as General Tojo.

  9. [CW

    I saw far out from the 2007 election that Work Choices was the death knock of the Howard Government.

    The Abbott entirety is far worse. Positions are hardened, to many people are dismayed and disadvantaged.

    There is simply no way that the momentum will change.]

    Given his nature and the way he got the job, PM Abbott only ever had one slim chance after the election to settle the electorate and take them along with him. But he immediately started confirming the electorate’s worst fears, with an extra surprise or two thrown in. (Did anybody seriously expect Tones to appoint himself minister for women?)

    Now, less than one year in, and yet to fully pass his first budget, he seems to have comprehensively blown it.

    Very difficult to see him and his ‘program’ recovering from here.

    Which doesn’t mean the Libs can’t win the next election, just not with Abbott anywhere in sight.

    Plus what pedant said @ 747

  13. Just Me.

    I sometimes wonder about Meher Baba and Confessions.

    Are they perennial gloomsters? Ostensibly Labor but would make one question it.

    Rex and his like throw in their poofy little ineffective IEDs.

    Avoided by a simple duck of the head.

    But you know Rex is chucking them from the safety of his cubby house.

    The others?

    Dunno.

  15. Another wildcard element of the last few days was the comment made by Mr Palmer at the Press Club that he had assembled a team of ten lawyers to work for ten days at his own expense on the drafting of amendments to the various Bills that everyone has been talking about.

    This is an area where the government normally has a natural advantage, especially when it comes to the drafting of complex amendments. The drafters in the Office of Parliamentary Counsel are the best in the business. Rarely will an opposition or crossbench party be in a position to put forward massive, well-drafted amendments. If this becomes a pattern, lots of public servants in Canberra will have their hands full advising Ministers on what to do about the 100 pages of amendments just moved by Senator whoever from the PUP, on which a vote is expected in a few hours. Assessing complex legislative amendments isn’t for amateurs or the faint-hearted, and it’s really no wonder that the government seemed to be in disarray this afternoon.

  16. On the honour of Japan’s WWII soldiers: I am looking forward to seeing Senators Wong and Rhiannon competing to see which of them can draw the stupidest comment on the subject from Senator Brandeis.

  17. Another MIA. Just watching on The Drum.

    Warren Mundine laments the non release of the incredibly apparently world shaking report on the future of Aboriginal employment. Show it to Holden or Ford or Toyota, I reckon.

    I imagine that under Abbott it will go the way of his promise to visit country and the disappearance of most funding for First People’s programs.

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-10/release-game-changing-indigenous-report/5587830

  18. Pedant.

    All crowded head here.

    But I love your observations here and always read and appreciate your insight.

  21. GhostWhoVotes @GhostWhoVotes · 29s

    #Newspoll WA State Primary Votes: L/NP 40 (-4) ALP 27 (-6) GRN 17 (+4) #wapol #auspol

  24. GhostWhoVotes ‏@GhostWhoVotes 22s

    #Newspoll WA Preferred Premier: Barnett LIB 36 (-1) McGowan ALP 43 (0) #wapol #auspol

  25. Zoidlord.

    Clive did soar. Here and there and then to NZ.

    I expect to see his provocative check shirt and RM Williams moleskins featured in tomorrow’s cartoons.

    Sooooo despised by Tony Wright.

    Hockey in his biz suits wouldn’t cut it.

    How would he keep his cigar alight?

    And his tummy bands intact.

  27. Mari,

    Interesting that it took the RSL 24 hours. They must have been in apoplexy.

    Vox pop from my 79yo mothers’ recent interactions with people at the 2 or 3 clubs that she frequents is that her contempories are already commenting on politics more than normal and none of it positive for Abbott. Conservative elderly people expressing alarm regarding various policies.

    She told me tonight that when aged nine a neighbour of hers who had been a guest of the WWII Japanese had his photo taken as he got off the boat in Melbourne after the war. He was skeletal. She remembered her mother telling her that the newspaper shouldn’t have printed the picture as it was far too horrible.

    This is an age group that had personal experience of the atrocities. Those who suffered directly are mostly gone. But there remain many that were deeply touched by those events. This in an age demographic that has traditionally favoured the Libs more than any other.

  28. The infamous Rape opf Nanking 1937
    ________________
    In 2010, a remarkable film was made in China called
    “The City of Life and Death” was made depicting the immense genocide of the Japanese army against the great Chinese city of Nanking
    I viewed it last year in the USA ,where my Chinese daughter-in-law obtained a DVD ,and I guess such are available here
    A Chinese film it is horrifying and shattering in every respect
    Odd that the hero is a German(Nazi) diplomat who ran the German Consulate in Nanking when the Japs captured the city,and set up a security zone for those Chinese lucky enough to know of it..so appalled was here by these events

    Everywhere there were endless massacres…it takes a lot of hard work to kill more than a million people…bullets.petrol.clubs..whatever weapon you choose takes time..even drowing of kids and oldies takes time and kids were thrown from upper windows of apartments … young .women were given the option of death r a career in the military brothels as”comfort women”

    I found the film so confronting that I would have left the room ,but my daughter-in-law and her parents who were there on a visit from China watched it all..so I stayed
    They shared that universal Chinese hatred ( they wouldn’t even go to a Japanese restaurant.)

    I have no doubt that Abbott praise for Japanese military “skill and honour ” will make him unacceptable in China,and a mong the large Chinese communitiies here,,and moreover I would suspect that even now in Beijing they are debating what they can do to inflict harm of some kind on he and his government

    Tonight Bob Carr .like Malcolm Fraser warned of the dangers of a military alliance with Japan,against the real possibility of a major war in the region,
    In that case I have no doubt that China would act with great force against the Japanese…so to ensure that they never again became a military power
    …and after all China has nucleur weapons
    I am told by my Chinese friends that the visceral hatred for the Japenese is still red-hot
    If you can steel your self … watch that film”The City of Life and Death “…though I must say it is the most harrowing thing I have ever witnessed

    I will post soon a very good review of the film from 2010 by Bob Ellis at the time of it’s showing here

  31. for The Ellis review of”The City of Life and Death”….
    scroll down to “Homage to Nanjing 1937”

    BTW ,1937 in Australia saw the start of the Watersiders great struggle against Menzies sending Pig Iron to Japan for their war machine
    from that came the phrase “Pig Iron Bob”

    http://www.ellistabletalk.com/

  32. Mari re anti-inflamatories like Voltaren/Orodis

    be care not to take it for a long-term
    I took Oradis for a similar condition….for a fairly long term and suffered some kidney damge
    Take it with something like Panadol Osteo…and discontinue it as soon as possible…when the pain subsides

  33. Crikey Whitey re Psephos
    _____________
    Your very accurate comments several nights ago on PB about the above,conincided exactly with mine

    great minds think alike as they say

  34. Norwester.

    One could have more than one mother. Figuratively at least.

    More severely. Simply ‘apoplectic’ would do.

    And they would have been.

    I suspect in the first instance it kind of took the RSL time to sink in.

    One I know is very (possibly unreasonably) anti Jap.

    But he has not mentioned this matter.

    It may have been just political clap trap to such persons.

    Until certain of the media got into it.

    I am pretty surprised that Tony Wright has not produced an article.

    I think that his father was exposed in war.

  36. Crikey

    When I first stumbled on PB about 3 years ago, Confessions stood out as a doomster. Always the first to pick up any slightly negative nuance about Labor in the ethersphere, and jump right in to say the end is nigh.

    Just 48 hours ago I had a series of interactions with her and in an hour she went from opposing my view, then supporting Zoom’s restatement of my view.

    Yes, and it was about 2016. She started with the view that Abbott is likely to be re-elected, as tonight, but then went 180degrees.

  38. I read that exchange, Psyclaw.

    It was confusing. But shored up my gloomster or as you have it, doomster.

    But Meher Baba is perhaps more troubling, more reasoned.

    More ostensibly Labor.

    Are they WRexes in clever garb?

  39. Deblonay.

    Pig Iron Bob! Our fortune and our potential death knell.

    How terribly ironic, under all of today’s circumstance.

    I had until now never seen a green dog, but stranger things have happened.

  40. Where is Hockey? Has he been disappeared? Did he plan a surprise trip to the troops on that Customs vessel and get mistaken for a reffo? Treasurer – LOL – his budget in tatters.

    Meanwhile the WA newspoll results suggest a 16% vote for others that would include PUP. I’ll be interested to see what William, Kevin Bonham and others estimate for the PUP out of that. My guess 10-11% range.

    The 2PP suggests that Labor is getting a decent share of preferences from the would-be PUP voters now. Quite amazing to see the 2PP neck and neck despite WA Labor stuck on 27% primary.

  42. Well, Psyclaw, if Confessions opined that “the end is nigh” for federal Labor’s chances in the 2013 election about three years ago, subsequent events proved her right, did they not?

  44. FS

    “subsequent events proved her right, did they not?”

    Certainly not.

    Those were the days of “election now” every day, everywhere, with the Gillard government on a numbers knife edge day in day out.

    For Confessions, the end was nigh, now, tomorrow, or perhaps the day after. As Crikey points out, Confessions perennially sees dark clouds for Labor.

    As the record shows, the government lasted its full term.

  45. Crikey

    ‘I never saw a purple cow.

    I never hope to see one.

    but I can tell you anyhow

    I’d rather see than be one.”

    Gelett Burgess

    Hilair Billock

  46. Likewise, Psyclaw!

    Night all.

    Love to chat, Fammut, but a little too late on this day.

    Come back earlier.

    Oh, I forget. You are in the barely awake State!

  48. I always love the purple cow.

    As I do the man upon the stairs.

    I will have a think about green pups and poetry.

    See if I am able to in that sense if I can conjure up a smallish poop.

    Doing my best Yoda there!

    xxx

    Goodnight.

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