The latest fortnightly rolling average from Essential Research has the Coalition down a point on the primary vote to 38%, but is in all other respects unchanged on last week with Labor on 40%, the Greens on 9%, Palmer United on 6% and two-party preferred at 53-47 in favour of Labor. Other questions:
• Thirty-seven per cent of respondents said they trusted financial planners to provide independent and appropriate advice versus 49% with little or no trust, and 73% a royal commission into banks and financial planning with only 11% opposed.
• On coal seam gas mining, 22% want a complete ban, 32% want restrictions on farm land, and only 12% think current regulation sufficient.
• The existing renewable energy target is supported by 36% of respondents, with 29% thinking it too low and only 13% too high.
• Fifty-two per cent approve of Australia having closer defence links with Japan, versus 18% who disapprove. Five per cent rate relations with Japan more important than China versus 15% for vice-versa, while 62% rate them as equally important.
A quick run through the other polling of the past few days:
• Newspoll in The Australian had Labor leading 54-46, down from 55-45 a fortnight ago, from primary votes of 36% for the Coalition (up one), 37% for Labor (steady) and 11% for the Greens (down two).
• Roy Morgan’s fortnightly result had the Coalition down one to 34%, Labor up two to 38.5%, the Greens down half a point to 11.5%, and Palmer United up half a point to 7.5%. Labor’s lead is up from 54.5-45.5 to 56-44 using preference flows from the previous election, but the Coalition gains slightly on respondent-allocated two-party preferred, with Labor’s lead down from 57.5-42.5 to 56.5-43.5.
• The National Tertiary Education Union published UMR Research robo-polling of 23 marginal electorates showing Labor set to clean up in the lot, including Christopher Pyne’s seat of Sturt. Kevin Bonham has his doubts.
Sam Dastyari opening up in the Senate on the FoFA debate.
Clive seems to have done another deal with the LNP. New FoFA amendments in the dunny time.
‘Appeasement never works’
“That if once you have paid him the Danegeld,
You never get rid of the Dane.”
Rudyard Kipling.
Bemused @41. I think Labor has been afraid to say to the Australian public that reducing carbon emissions is going to cost something, but I think they underestimate the maturity and realism of the electorate. We all know that time and time again Australians have said they want services over tax cuts. Why would it be any different on CC? Because Labor has always been afraid to say that it will cost, but it’s worth doing.
William
re your article “What’s the AEC got to hide?” in the latest edition of Crikey
As you know I have been on about this issue for years. The AEC has to come clean and ensure that the electoral process is open and transparent. Whilst open access to the source code is desirable it is not essential. What is essential is for the AEC to provide in full and in a timely fashion access to the raw data files used to calculate the results of the election. At present the AEC only provides copies of this data in limited format after the declaration of the poll. Without access to the preference data it is impossible to properly scrutinize the validity of an electronic count.
The AEC need to provide copies of not just formal votes but also copies of informal vote data, (Something it does not do)
The main issue is not so much the data quality but the methods used in calculating the results of the Senate election.
The system that is in place was designed to facilitate a manual count and as such has a number of built in distortions that should be removed as they are no longer justified or necessary,
1. The method of calculating the Surplus Transfer Value need to be weighted to the value of the vote. The current system of dividing a candidates surplus by the number of ballot papers as opposed to the value of the vote seriously distorts the proportionality of the vote with some vote increasing in value as the cont progresses. This was the case in the original 2013 WA Senate count.
2, The method of redistributing votes from an excluded candidate also needs review. Currently votes skip voters order of preference and and at a higher value then should be the case on minor candidates. A preferred method would be to reset and restart the count afresh on every exclusion with the vote allowed to the first available continuing candidate in accordance with the voters nominated order of preference. A reiterative counting system on each exclusion ensures that the votes are properly and fully proportionally allocated without sight of hand, skipping or jumping candidates. Each transaction and distribution is undertaken in a single transfer without segmentation. One transaction per candidate. This issue again played a significant role in determining the outcome of the original 2013 WA Senate count and elected the wrong Senator in QLD in 2007.
3. The other issue of concern is the use of the Droop Quote where a quota is determined by dividing the total number of votes with the (number of vacancies plus one)
The Droop quota (X/(y+1) should be abandoned in favor of a full preferential count the number of total votes divided by the number of vacancies. (X/Y)
These three changes alone would make a significant difference to the conduct of the Australian Senate election. make it easier to scrutinise the count and go a long way towards restoring confidence and accuracy into our electoral system.
With the use of computer based counting there is no excuse or justification to not fix the way the vote is counted. the time required to do a full distribution of preferences is no longer prohibitive and the results with the time now required being less then one hour to process
If we are not prepared to fix the system and removed these flaws then we might as well adopt a Party List system and abandon preferential voting. The preferred option being to fix the flaws in the way we count the vote as outlined above.
Dastyari: “The PUP that wags the tail that wags the dog”. ‘The government has lost control”.
[4:45pm: Palmer himself is now in the chamber. Talking to Greens Senator Scott Ludlam up the back.]
More chaos in The Senate.
The Guardian is going on about a deal done between the Government and PUP to save the government’s windback of FOFA.
But doesn’t the government need PUP+Muir+2 others? Getting PUP onside is one thing, but what about X and Madigan and Leyonhjelm?
And if this is the pattern of PUP’s behaviour it’s going to be an ugly next 2 years – government proposes to do something, PUP says “no, but”, the government does whatever crazy-arse thing PUP demands, and we get the government crap plus the PUP crap.
BK.
Sam, play it again!
He is really good.
Poroti re El Nino
_________________
…….and telling the farmers and others …”Sorfry..we have a financiual emergency…so no financial aid is available to you”
I wonder ???
crikey
Sam D has come on in leaps and bounds.
Leyonhjelm doesn’t want FOFA regulation.
bemused
Baden-Clay switched connected his mobile phone to his charger at 2am (evidently your phone records that), four hours after he said he went to sleep.
It is fair dinkum freezing out there 😯
They better not wait a single extra minute to repeal the carbon tax, global warming needs all the help it can get.
I’ve got to go out again, I’ll have to put on a jacket.
I don’t like clothes 🙁 bring on budgie season!
WeWantPaul@47
Victoria, if it’s rules were to be followed, without factional alignments intruding, would do fairly well.
Despite the above, it often does seem to get things fairly right. We also sometimes have more than one worthy candidate contesting a pre-selection.
We also have some disasters like the Macedon pre-selection where a candidate getting about 90+% of the local support was defeated, courtesy of a rotten deal between factions.
Jackol
Not all “happy days” for the FoFA shonks . Laura Tingle said one of Clive’s amendments involves “a legal iou about the advice given” . Not sure what that means but she went on about more red tape and confusion. All of which brings us back to the two IPA loon senators and their horror of regulation” .Perhaps they will vote against it.
BK. Was it Sam involved (helpfully) in Gonski and NSW?
I just googled sam dastyari+gonski. An impressive list of good stuff came up.
Looks a REAL Labor man.
bemused
Additional arguments and angles are good. 🙂
poroti – I’m also confused by the sequence of events here – this is disallowance of the regulations already put in place by the government. Cormann is promising to introduce additional PUP regulation, but presumably that has to be done separately. So, if current regulations are allowed to stand the PUP regulations are potentially up for disallowance separately?
Bleh.
JimmyDoyle@49
I wasn’t meaning the Feds should bankroll WA.
They should intervene to put the WA State Branch back on track and prune away a bit of dead wood.
Letter from Corrman to Clive re FOFA
http://www.scribd.com/doc/233933667/Letter-to-Clive-Palmer
Jackol
The LNP are rolling over to PUP with such vigour and rapidity it is hard to keep tabs on which way up they are at any given moment.
FoFA disallowance goes down.
Ready set go! Spivs, you now have the green light.
poroti
Bernard Keane reckons Palmers amendments amount to zip.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/07/15/palmers-pointless-red-tape-hands-banks-a-big-win-on-fofa/
we have a PUP-LNP Government …. woof!
Clive is no champion of anything.
All he’s trying to do is assert his dominance over the LNP, which he is demonstrating admirably. He doesn’t give a shit about what PUP achieves, as long as it’s boosting Clive’s profile.
Jackol
The additional regulations will be tabled within 90 days, and yes they can be disallowed.
Diogenes@63
And I have woken up in the middle of the night and done things like realised I hadn’t set my alarm and then done so. He could have done similar.
There are innocent explanations, not like the tracking information they had on Jill Meagher’s killer. That was absolutely damning.
Jackol
[Clive is no champion of anything…….He doesn’t give a shit about what PUP achieves, as long as it’s boosting Clive’s profile.]
Looks like an increasingly accurate assessment.
[43
crikey whitey
Yeah, Just Me.
I think the voters are already disgusted and when the earth doesn’t move for them on repeal of the carbon tax, they will be even more so.]
A main defence for prey in dealing with predators is to spot them and expose them to other prey around, before the predator can get close enough, to remove the element of surprise,… to rumble them, you might say.
Seems to me that predator Abbott has been well and truly rumbled.
I am all in favor of holding a double dissolution of both houses. ad it will reduce the Greens representation and most likely the number of independents.
But i would prefer that they fix the flaws in the way the vote is counted first. Given the state of the polls I doubt that Abbott will call an early election but I am confident that the next election will be a double.
[ poroti
Posted Tuesday, July 15, 2014 at 5:10 pm | Permalink
Jackol
Clive is no champion of anything…….He doesn’t give a shit about what PUP achieves, as long as it’s boosting Clive’s profile.
Looks like an increasingly accurate assessment.
]
————————————————–
SNAFU = its all ABOUT Clive …..
Jackol, yes Palmer, with today’s requirement of NATIONAL (emphasis) ETS schemes by all our trading partners, has much diminished his credibility on this issue.
Just Me.
I reckon Palmer is as predatory as Abbott.
Just that he is smarter and wears a cuddly pelt.
Rex #71
The letter from Cormann to Clive appears to me to be exactly what Clive was demanding …… a total roll over by the rabble government.
JD.
Clive’s ETS requirements are simply unattainable.
His street cred will take a bit of a hammering on this and potentially future issues.
63 diogenes
[Baden-Clay switched connected his mobile phone to his charger at 2am (evidently your phone records that), four hours after he said he went to sleep.]
I’ve done that in my sleep before. (In no way defending Baden-Clay though.)
53 fredex
[‘Appeasement never works’
“That if once you have paid him the Danegeld,
You never get rid of the Dane.”
Rudyard Kipling.]
Beautiful!
Wouldn’t the Senate quota be lower in a DD as all Senators face the election.
Thus the Greens and others would have some advantage quota-wise.
bemused
[And I have woken up in the middle of the night and done things like realised I hadn’t set my alarm and then done so. He could have done similar.]
The phone wasn’t next to his bed.
Perhaps he was sleepwalking and scratched his face after plugging his phone in and then had a false memory implanted of cutting himself shaving.
[I reckon Palmer is as predatory as Abbott.]
Strong competition.
Raaraa@87
Yes, I don’t wish to be seen defending Baden-Clay either. But the case just seems to have a lot of bits and pieces that don’t provide truly conclusive evidence of guilt I am entirely comfortable with.
I am glad I was not on the jury.
feeney@88
feeney, where have you been?
Quota = (100 / (x+1)) + 1
where x = number of senators to be elected.
Re Ruawake @24: history also suggests that the swing back won’t be enough, but this time might be different.
In the instances cited, the new governments were pretty much what the voters expected. They were also reasonably competent. There were broken promises and stuffups, but by and large, while some of the sheen had worn off the new governments, not that many voters were convinced that they’d got it wrong when it was time to vote again.
However, the Abbott Liberals kept their real agenda hidden from the voters before the election and in fact hid most of it until the budget. People voted to end the leadership instability, lower power prices and to stop asylum boats. They also thought that there was some sort of budget emergency that Abbott would fix without causing any pain to nice, respectable, hard working people like themselves.
But the Abbott Liberals said nothing about a neoliberal reworking of the country. The sense of having been dudded will be exacerbated when the promised benefits of abolishing the carbon price fail to materialise. On top of this, they are not even passably competent.
I am hopeful if not confident. Murdoch will shift a critical one ir two percent at the margins come the next election, going into overdrive to keep their lot in control. Maybe there’s about a 40% chance of Abbott’s being a one term government.
[The government has circulated another motion to change the “routine of business” in the Senate.
It proposes that adjournment tonight is at 9.50pm instead of 7.20pm.
That the Senate sits until 11pm on Thursday.
And that the upper house has the option of sitting from 9am to 11pm on Friday.]
Useless Govt, couldn’t organize a joint in Colorado
Diogenes@89
Resorting to straw men?
Well fancy that, an email arrives today telling me about the new public transport timetables with more train, tram and bus services.
The cynic in me sees a link to the coming State Election.
bemused
[Resorting to straw men?]
Not at all.
I’m wondering how else you can explain Baden-Clay plugging his phone in another room and having scratches on his face while having no memory of either.
Labor has to win the next election, then call a DD and get rid of all these right-wing swine in the Senate.
[Wouldn’t the Senate quota be lower in a DD as all Senators face the election.
Thus the Greens and others would have some advantage quota-wise.]
Yes, but since all Senators would be up for re-election, the Greens would need to make it to second quotas in four states out of six to maintain the status quo. Whereas the Greens can get two seats in a state by achieving 14.3% quotas at consecutive half-Senate elections, two quotas at a DD is 15.4%.
On current polling numbers, I could see the Greens winning maybe nine seats instead of their current 10, although Xenophon makes SA hard to call – at least under the present electoral system. Speaking of which, it seems the government is getting cold feet on reform:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-14/senate-election-reforms-quietly-shelved-by-government/5594436
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-15/barwon-prison-boss-david-prideaux-disappearance-not-suspicious/5597378
The high level coverups in Victoria continue with no sign of a whistleblower anywhere to be seen…