Three new polls this week provide an early indications of a slight revival in the Coalition’s fortunes after the MH17 disaster and, some might claim, the carbon tax repeal. However, this week’s BludgerTrack poll aggregate result differs only slightly from the one I published a week ago, for two reasons. The first is that a data entry error led an undercooked Labor lead last week of 53.5-46.5, which should have been 54.1-45.9. The second is that this week’s polls only imperfectly capture the effect of a news event which Australia woke up to on Friday morning. The earliest of the three was Nielsen, conducted from Thursday to Saturday, which showed no change to the recent trend in having Labor leading 54-46. Then came this week’s Essential Research sample which was surveyed from Friday to Monday, and caused the fortnightly rolling average to move a point in the Coalition’s favour. Most timely of the three was Monday night’s ReachTEL poll, which was the Coalition’s best result from the pollster since late March. After a fairly flat period since the budget, this makes next week’s Newspoll of particular interest.
Going off a corrected result for last week, this week’s seat projection has the Coalition up one in New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania, but down one in Queensland. The last federal poll we will ever get from Nielsen provides this week’s only new contribution on leadership ratings, and it’s enough to produce an upward tick for Tony Abbott for the first time since the budget, and also to narrow the gap on preferred prime minister. Bill Shorten meanwhile maintains a slow descent that has been evident since a spike in the wake of the budget. Full results as always on the sidebar.
Meher Baba
[astrobleme@744. What does the Palestinian mandate have to do with the actions of an Islamic extremist group?]
Are you seriously asking that question?
You don’t think they are a creation of what happened from the 1920’s to 1948 and beyond?
The history of the area did not start in 1948.
If Abbott and Bishop can get 50 Oz police into the crash area AND have them protected by Oz troops on the ground, with or without being part of some more universal group, I dips me lid to them here and now.
Such a coup – getting your home grown cops and soldiers on the ground so far from home – would be a real first.
And the simple answer to the question posed by Aly is…yes.
This theme about how much a particular life is work kind of goes 1 US life worth tens of thousands of others at any one time.
An earthquake in San Franciso with the loss of say 5 lives is a disaster while 20000 lives somewhere a long way away due to some distance earthquake is worth much less attention.
Regularly dozens of people killed by bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq. Barely rates a mention these days.
Oz lives of course, not worth quite as much as US lives but a lot more than others.
All to do with kith and kin??
Feeny
There have been MANY long periods of ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and the PLO. EXACTLY NOTHING HAPPENED.
Why would Hamas having a ceasefire now make anything different.
The Elephant in the room is that neither side wants the other to exist. So there simply can be no peace. Obviously Hamas are vocal in this. Israel uses more measured language but their actions show they have no intention of allowing a Palestinian State to exist.
We have seen footage of Ukrainian “Rebels” using BM-30 Smerch rockets. Has Abbott?
Rex Douglas
“Shrug your shoulders at chemical/biological weapons on the kids… ?”
Yeah, that’s what he meant! Derp.
feeney@724
Blame the victim?
The Palestinians have been getting the rough end of the pineapple since at least 1948.
Why do you seem surprised that they rebel and resist the oppressor?
If you are looking for extremists, try the Prime Minister of Israel.
[ Palestinians are not rich Westerners, and so their lives simply don’t matter. ]
Yup, i’d say that’s a pretty fair summation. I remember when there was civil war in what was Yugoslavia and the siege of Sarajevo. A lot of the “shock horror” was that these people looked just like us. Sarajevo was a place everyone had heard about since they had the Winter Olympics there. Refugees from Kosovo being welcomed for months and staying in the Leeuwin Barracks after they had to flee.
Atrocity seems lot more common now and with the news cycle being so rapid and media so ubiquitous people are i think somewhat inoculated to stuff happening even to those who are not obviously “outside” their “tribe”. Probably the only way to not be in a constant state of grief and sadness.
It really does get to the point with things like MH17 where the reporting and exposure is too over the top saturation and there is a loss of perspective.
Astrobleme
“There have been MANY long periods of ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and the PLO. EXACTLY NOTHING HAPPENED.
Why would Hamas having a ceasefire now make anything different.”
Well for one it would be a start in showing that Hamas isn’t the crazed, death-worshipping Jihadist cult that Israel largely successfully portrays them as.
absolutetwaddle
Just investigating the mindset…
Assuming that Israel completely withdrew from the West Bank and Gaza, then what?
Exports: $720 million (2011)
Imports: $4.2 billion (2011)
Public debt: $4.2 billion (June 2013)
Budget deficit: 1.3 billion (13% of GDP; 2012 est.)
Revenues $2.2 billion (2012 est.)
Expenses $3.54 billion (2012)
That does not justify the bombing of a UN school.
Astrobleme
Appreciate the response re Palmer and Citic
Abbott happy: doing a presser standing next to a uniform talking about ‘mission’ and ‘operations’.
Pity he can’t cobble together a budget that he can get through the Senate.
Abbott announcing that we will have ADF on the ground in the Eastern Ukraine ‘if the mission goes ahead’.
Warmonger?
I’m sure it’s been mentioned earlier, but that article from Simon Benson today was beyond the pale.
ruawake
The “smerch” are serious pieces . Do the rebels have them ?
Hmmmm….
‘Taxation
Main article: Taxation in the Palestinian territories
Taxation is a complex system which may involve payment to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and/or Israel in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In 2005 the Palestinian Authority collected approximately $34 million per month from taxes and other charges, and Israel collected about $75 million per month in tariffs on foreign imports and value added taxes (VAT) on Israeli goods and services and on average kept about $15 million for the payment of water and power bills of Palestinians, while forwarding the other $60 million to the PA.[28] Israeli collected funds account for about two-thirds of the authority’s self-generated revenue,[29] which Reuters put at $100 million in December 2012.[30] Since the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, Israel has regularly withheld the taxes it owes the Palestinian Authority.[28][31][32][30]’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Palestinian_territories
Madness.
AbsoluteTwaddle
[Well for one it would be a start in showing that Hamas isn’t the crazed, death-worshipping Jihadist cult that Israel largely successfully portrays them as.]
I am not sure that Israel is so far wrong… However, they helped foster the conditions that led to their creation.
It’s a tangled and terrible situation, like other ethnic/religious struggles around the world… We shouldn’t be supporting either side. We should be condemning both.
Hard to know what to make of Abbott’s boots on the ground promise.
This from BBC World on line:
“A BBC team visiting the site on Thursday morning found it to be deserted with no sign of guards or investigators.”
Seems to me the Abbott thing is purely for domestic consumption as there is no reference to anything, at present, about all this from BBC.
BBC has reported Abbott has offered the 50 cops “if and when” but nothing else.
Abbott now on AS
Tricot
There looks to be ‘a site’ where a largish bit of the plane crashed and burned. But the ‘The Site’ has now grown to the latet estimates of 50sqk.
feeney @ 735
[Hamas has been carrying out these terrorists acts against Israel for a long time before the crime against the Israeli teenagers.]
The Zionists began this on Dec. 21, 1947 when the Haganah attacked Qazaza. In the months between then and when the British ran away, they attacked and ethnically cleansed much of the what would have been the territory of a Palestinian state. Not one Jewish settlement was attacked by the Palestinians. “Until the British left, no Jewish settlement, however remote, was entered or seized by the Arabs, while the Haganah, under severe and frequent attack, captured many Arab positions and liberated Tiberias and Haifa, Jaffa and Safad” [which were all to be part of Arab Palestine] (David Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (N.Y., Philosophical Library, 1954, p. 530).
Since then Israel it has started every one of its wars except that of 1973, including the 1967 land grab which created the current situation in Gaza (and the West Bank).
Astrobleme@751: It is my understanding that Hamas is an Islamist movement founded in the 1980s, inspired not so much by the Palestinian mandate but by the examples of Muslim Brotherhood, the Mujahadeen, etc., etc. You can find their charter online. While they are certainly committed to a struggle to free “Palestine” from “the Jews” (as I believe they put it), their main goals are Islamist ones about imposing a hard line version of Sunni Islam and Sharia law over as broad a spread of territory as possible, restoring the Caliphate, etc, etc.
Over the years Hamas have promoted their cause through strategies such as indiscriminate rocket attacks and suicide bombings of innocent people: eg, the Sbarro restaurant suicide in Jerusalem which killed and maimed family groups including children and young babies.
Perhaps you are confusing Hamas with the moderate, secular PLO, which is an organisation which could be said to have come into existence as a direct result of the post-WWII history of Palestine.
As I have posted before, the only correct way of thinking about extremist Sunni organisations such as Hamas is as cults which exercise brainwashing mind control over their members, recruiting them for obscene acts of indiscriminate terrorism in aid of the cause of imposing a medieval, woman-hating set of moralities throughout the modern world.
Support them all you want, I certainly never will.
Bemused
And they will surely continue to get “the rough end of the pineapple” until there is recognition of Israel’s right to exist.
Likewise, Israel has to support the fact of an independent Palestinian State.
baba
There you go. Assume that saying Israel is doing wrong means you must support Hanas.
How about its someone being agains warcrimes.
It is Israel doing the warcrimes at the moment.
Astrobleme
Israel did more than “helped foster the conditions that led to their creation.” they helped finance and encouraged them. Part of a cunning plan to nobble the secular Fatah and left wing groups.
If we are going to have soldiers on the ground, I trust that they will have an appropriate level of support including tanks, armoured personnel carriers, aircraft etc etc.
So, if Israel withdrew completely from the West Bank and Gaza, leaving the area to its own devices entirely:
(1) You would have a bankrupt state with huge debts, huge deficits and huge unemployment.
(2) You would have importss running at around three times exports.
(3) Your main tax collector would be gone.
(4) You would have a state with a population growth rate of around 3.5%.
[The “smerch” are serious pieces . Do the rebels have them ?]
They have rocket artillery, vision of the conflict pre MH17 shows them being fired. I doubt they are the latest Russian tech, so they must be some of the 100 units the Ukrainian army used to have.
feeney
Israel can prove it accepts Palestine as a State by accepting it has the right to a military.
Meher Baba
[Support them all you want, I certainly never will.]
You haven’t actually read what I wrote, did you?
Feeney
[And they will surely continue to get “the rough end of the pineapple” until there is recognition of Israel’s right to exist.]
Can you explain why they don’t accept Israel’s right to exist?
[Israel has every right to respond.]
Presumably then Palestine does too.
Though people positing the above statement appear to think otherwise – its just a one-sided platitude that offers nothing useful for understanding the current conflict.
We need to look for causes.
What you have is a highly armed modern state against an enclosed civilian population, with a small number of (largely ineffectual) rocket-firing militia among them.
There’s a reasonable case that perpetual IDF harassment is designed to ensure the armed struggle continues among Palestinians, because thats easier to handle, and supports the longer term objective of progressively dispossessing the Palestine population. The IDF wants them firing rockets: it would be much harder to justify 600+ civilian deaths if everyone was having a sit-in.
FWIW, Ive always thought the Palestinians should review that strategy, which might as well have been concocted in Tel Aviv.
The idea that the IDF is ‘responding’ to Hamas’ rockets is perhaps the most naive take Ive seen on a complex conflict anywhere in the world. Seems to be the PC one though.
Boerwar
I am sure that the Saudi’s or Chinese would assist them.
guytaur @ 782
Your point is valid.
And surely Israel has the right to expect recognition of their right to exist.
@RichardEngel: School hit was a designated shelter. UNRWA says it formally conveyed its location to Israeli forces 12 times, including at 10:56AM tdy.
feeney @ 776
[until there is recognition of Israel’s right to exist.]
Under which international laws and which chapter of the UN Charter was the taking of a peoples’ land and giving it to foreigners legal?
Abbott is hedging his bets, “if the operation goes ahead” is his latest position. Oh and another 100 AFP plod off to the UK (to do what, I have no idea).
Surely we don’t have a spare 150 plod to fly around the world “just in case”.
BOERWAR – So let me get this right. The Israelis crush the palestinian economy and that gives them an excuse for continuing to crush them.
Actually, the wealthy gulf states would be very happy to step in help the palestinians get back on their feet.
Feeney
[And surely Israel has the right to expect recognition of their right to exist.]
So why do the various organisations and Countries NOT recognise their right to exist?
feeney
Israel has to show good faith by allowing a military. A state without a military is not a State as it cannot protect its citizens.
[Astrobleme
Posted Friday, July 25, 2014 at 4:34 pm | Permalink
Boerwar
I am sure that the Saudi’s or Chinese would assist them.]
It beats me why the Greens, ostensibly secular, are so keen on deus ex machina ‘solutions’.
The problem of being more and more environmentally and economically unsustainable is manna from heaven.
Is Scott Morrison verballing his Indian counterpart? Consular assistance is not identifying people from my reading.
[Press Information Bureau
Government of India
Ministry of Home Affairs
22-July-2014 17:25 IST
Indo-Australian Meeting on Illegal Migration
Mr. Scott Morrison, Australian Minister for Immigration & Border Protection met the Union Home Minister Shri Rajnath Singh here today. The Union Minister for External Affairs Smt. Sushma Swaraj was also present. The meeting was mainly to discuss issues relating to illegal migration. In this context, the Australian Minister mentioned that a boat with 157 persons onboard was seized by the Australian authorities in the last week of June, 2014.
The Union Home Minister stated that India, as a matter of policy, does not support any kind of illegal migration either into its own territory or illegal migration of its citizens to foreign territories.
The Indian side sought Consular access and emphasized the importance of handling such cases in a legal and humanitarian manner ensuring that no harm befalls upon anyone, especially minor children.
***]
[guytaur
Posted Friday, July 25, 2014 at 4:40 pm | Permalink
feeney
Israel has to show good faith by allowing a military. A state without a military is not a State as it cannot protect its citizens.]
Sure.
Based on the current Palestinian territories economy, a Palestinian government would have to borrow 100% of everything it spent on its military and would then have to pay interest on the debt forever.
As if the Palestinian Territories are not already heavily in debt, in deficit, in unemployment and in trade deficit!
feeney
Why do Hamas use rockets that land randomly? Something to do with a blockade on military equipment.
A guided missile at least could target a military target so that civilians do not need to be at risk.
rua
If the Indians start conflating perceived bad treatment of Indians in places like Melbourne with bad treatment of Indians on board Australian Government ships, the kaka will hit the fan.
“@sommervillebbc: From Gaza health officials: Latest figures : 807 Palestinians killed. A leap of a hundred dead in 24 hours.”
Mr Abbott has stopped belting Mr Putin around the ears.
One wonders why.