BludgerTrack: 52.1-47.9 to Labor

A quiet week for polling yields next to no change in this week’s BludgerTrack poll aggregate.

Only one new poll this week, that being the reliable weekly result from Essential Research, and it’s a similarly dull tale from the BludgerTrack poll aggregate. Things are exactly as they were last week on both two-party preferred and the seat projection, and there are no new figures this week for leadership ratings. The only changes worth observing are a Coalition seat gain in New South Wales that’s cancelled out by a loss in South Australia, and an ongoing descent for Palmer United since a peak three weeks ago. However, it should be noted that Labor’s two-party lead would have been down slightly if not for a methodological adjustment relating to Galaxy’s polls. The last three polls from Galaxy have been conducted according to a new methodology which includes an online panel component in addition to phone polling, but I had hitherto been applying bias adjustments based on the historical record of the old phone-only polling. It appeared that this was causing the Coalition vote to be over-adjusted upwards, so Galaxy’s bias adjustments will henceforth be calculated according to the pollster’s deviation from the results produced by the model – which so far at least is essentially no deviation at all.

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.

1,753 comments on “BludgerTrack: 52.1-47.9 to Labor”

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  3. Gross government debt according to the Australian Office of Financial Management, has increased to $333.5 billion which is $53.2 billion above the level of gross debt at the September 2013 election.

    The government has, to date, done nothing to suggest this $2 billion a week gross debt binge is going to end as it promised when in opposition.

    Losing the revenue from the abolition of the carbon and mining taxes, the cut to company tax, the $8.8 billion spending on the RBA reserves in addition to the paid parental leave scheme, roads, defence and the medical research future fund are all big ticket items that have to be covered.

  8. Apologies in adavnce for a long comment, but hang in there, there’s an animal story!

    “In his fine Australian poem Sheep Killer, Ernest G. Moll tells of a rogue sheep dog driven by a destructive secret agenda. While it is under the watchful eye of its owner, it controls its natural instincts and conceals its real intentions. When he trusts it off the chain one night, it runs amok among his flock and creates deadly havoc.
    When the carnage is over, the owner reprimands himself that he should have seen all the indications of what would happen if the dog was given its chance. We are given a striking portrait of an animal whose behaviour had betrayed all the warning signs – the shifty ‘glint that sprang/Into his eyes’, the way he stands ‘stiffly’ when under close observation ‘as though he kept/His body back from where his thoughts leapt/Ahead’.

    But the owner carelessly ignored all the indicators — with disastrous consequences.

    At that stage, it becomes painfully obvious that the animal had cleverly cloaked its actual motives:

    ‘cunning (had been) the muzzle on desire.’

    There are disturbing parallels to be seen in Tony Abbott concealing his dark side in the run up to the September election.”

    This is an except from the prophetic “The Polishing of Tony Abbott” by Clint Howitt on 25th May 2013.

    http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-polishing-of-tony-abbott,5355

    (I had a border collie once that was a sheep killer. He really had the eye, total focus, tireless, a great worker, but he was mad, and you could never take your eye off him when around livestock.
    Ended up he hung himself from his chain before I got around to shooting him.)

    Abbott, government and negotiation

    The government is disfunctional, has failed to get it’s budget passed, and is unlikely to do so because of it lacks the requisite political capital and a culture of negotiation.

    This is because Abbott’s sheep killer style of leadership doesn’t include negotiation.

    It’s worth examining why this is the case.

    Lenore Taylor’s piece http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/08/everyone-has-a-piece-of-advice-for-tony-abbott-some-of-it-could-even-help is instructive here:

    In the final sitting weeks of the winter session, Tony Abbott held an unusual meeting of his full ministry during which he was asked by a junior minister how the government was intending to deal with the widespread view that it had broken election promises. The prime minister’s response was forceful and absolute. The government had not broken a single promise, he insisted. There was nothing to deal with, no case to answer.

    This is a profound insight into Abbott’s personality, revealing an absolute faith in his own rightness and an incapacity to acknowledge reality. The scary thing is that he actually believes this himself, and it lies at the root of the madness that was identified by Keating and others in describing the Mad Monk,
    and is directly relevant to his negotiating skills or lack thereof.

    The art of negotiation lies in understanding the the situation of the other party, but if we deny the reality of our own situation, have no self awareness, how can we possibly understand others at a level necessary for successsful negotiation?

    Constitutional implications
    If the Abbott government fails in budget and other legislative negotiations, for cultural or whatever reasons, then the government fails as a functional entity and it seems to me there is a constitutional issue.
    Options include a double dissolution, blocking of supply or whatever, or the Governor General could step in and make certain demands of the government.

    Now Governor General General Sir Peter Cosgrove doesn’t strike me as the Sir John Kerr type, but if he received a forceful request from the Australian people maybe he couldn’t ignore it. he would at least have to ask for advice.

    Maybe – and I’m not a constitutional lawyer – the people could petition the GGSSP to request the Government to frame a Mini Budget, or get the Queen to give Abbott a smack or something.

    e.g. Circulate a Getup style petition to the Governor to the effect that “We the people are alarmed at the rejection of the goverment’s budget, the resulting political and economic gridlock etc etc and would like the government to have another go at getting the budget right.”

    Should put the cat amongst the pigeons, or the unsupervised collie amongst the sheep!

  9. Clive Palmer ‏@CliveFPalmer 3m

    Comments by @JeffSeeney in News Ltd papers today are again untrue & fictitious. He’s desperately trying to save his bacon #auspol #polqld

  10. News from South Africa seems to indicate that ‘Blade Runner’ is going to be clipped and caged.

    Being South Africa I’ll be surprised if he gets anything less than 18 years.

  13. lizzie@1330

    Everything

    Why did Gillard’s father get a 10-pound Pom subsidised return journey to Australia in the 1960s?


    I thought you were more ethical than to make up stuff.

    Mad Lib has apparently finished her big cry and has returned in a rage, ready to spray false accusations everywhere.

  18. For all the faux hand wringing and wailing about the welfare disaster left by Labor, for all the demonization of the unemployed and people on DSP some facts emerge

    $131bn was spent last year on welfare and yes, it will grow. But that’s because both inflation and population growth inherently lead to inevitable ‘year by year’ growth in nominal government expenditure (and also that of private businesses).

    But welfare funding as a percentage of government expenditure has fallen over the past decade. And the overwhelming reason social security spending is expected to grow at all over the next four years (and beyond) is because of the increase in the age pension. Take those away and social security spending as a proportion of the total government expenditure remains quite flat

  20. GG

    [Now the real secret is out. Kind Kevin and I were once very close, bonding in a deeply emotional way. When I was crying on his shoulder, Kevvie, his mellow eyes overflowing with empathy, reached out to me. He cared for me in my moment of need and I answered his affections. A beautiful relationship was born, but then hidden – Gareth-and-Cheryl-style – by the macho veneer of Canberra politics.]

    Another 😆 .

  23. Great line in the new drama “Manhattan” about the making of the A-Bomb. A young scientist says he’s got qualms about making an atomic weapon. And his superior says: “But don’t you want to sit with Newton and watch the apple fall?”

  24. Abbott tells Putin to be “as good as his word” and I splutter into my coffee.

    Really? There’s that pot/kettle thing again

  25. EFA ‏@efa_oz 2m

    RT @Steve_Dalby iiNet has no business use for IP addresses. It is BS for LEAs to say we already keep them for our own purposes. We don’t.

  26. http://justsecurity.org/11520/eleventh-circuit-warrantless-cell-tracking-calls-metadata-programs-question/

    “Today, the Eleventh Circuit rejected the exceedingly common law enforcement practice of warrantlessly tracking suspects’ physical location using cell phone tower data. The opinion, United States v. Davis, is both welcome and overdue. Defendants who have and will be physically tracked without a warrant have new legal support to challenge that surveillance. Additionally, because the case involved stored cell site data, Davis undermines the government’s legal arguments that other warrantless “metadata” collection practices are constitutional.”

    So the dogs are trying their hand here in Australia.

  28. [One wonders with the Hedley Thomas/Gillard stuff whether Gillard is just waiting for the RC to be over to slap around a few defamation writs.]

    I wish, I wish. It’s a Newspoll weekend. Abbott and His Incompetents are having a bad week so Murdochia has a QC pre empt the Commission’s decision and gets its best smear merchant to write it up. We deserve better.

    lizzie My OH was a 10pnd Pom (make that Welsh kid travelling on parents’ passports). So many who came that way have made a great contribution and we needed them after WW2. It’s those who may have gone back at some stage and then returned on the same scheme that gets up people’s noses I think.

    Used our Bird Guide again this morning. Bless it. A lovely teal duck landed on the dam and then sat in the garden for ages. We thought they paired for life so it was strange to see one on its own.

  29. BH

    [A lovely teal duck landed on the dam and then sat in the garden for ages.]

    A couple of them make a very decent Sunday lunch.

    Get out your .410.

    👿

  33. Of course Tony Abbott was a beneficiary of Gough Whitlam’s reform to abolish University fees. His daughter is also a benificiary of fee-free tertiary education, but that’s another matter.

  34. The Blinkies were scared witless when Australia temporarily ran out of Uncle Sam’s Coatail Wars.

    This is because every time we stop fighting wars Australia starts cutting back on defence spending.

    But it turns out that killing all those muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan was worth it after all.

    Because, thanks be to Christ, the Blinkies now have a century’s worth of fighting islamist extremists up their sleeves. The subs should prove very useful.

    We appear to have done a seamless swap from reds under every bed to jihadis under every bed.

    Except for mine, as it turns out. I checked this morning.

  36. All this talk of “metadata” is just absurd. There is a huge gulf between a curcuit switched network, like the telephone system and a packet switched network, like the internet. The whole idea of a packet switched network is that the network is totaly agnostic about the data it is transmitting and has no need to keep any information about where packets of data come from or where they are going. ISPs keep “metadata” on how much data it sends and recieves from you and whether it is “free” or “charged”. They don’t care whether that data comes from a web browser an ipod or a fridge.

  37. Bw

    [I was just having a bit of a squizz to see what Bludger Treasures I had missed over the past week]

    Been far for your weeks ‘bludge’?

  38. Crikey, CTar & Lizzie

    You’ve destroyed me!! One tells me to eat him and the other says he faithless. Both of you are little :devil:

  41. [ In the final sitting weeks of the winter session, Tony Abbott held an unusual meeting of his full ministry during which he was asked by a junior minister how the government was intending to deal with the widespread view that it had broken election promises. The prime minister’s response was forceful and absolute. The government had not broken a single promise, he insisted. There was nothing to deal with, no case to answer.

    This is a profound insight into Abbott’s personality, revealing an absolute faith in his own rightness and an incapacity to acknowledge reality. The scary thing is that he actually believes this himself, and it lies at the root of the madness that was identified by Keating and others in describing the Mad Monk,
    and is directly relevant to his negotiating skills or lack thereof.]

    Trog

    That was disturbing to read. The Caucus must have been a bit demoralised to hear Abbott so resolute on the broken promises. Is it about time we start realising Abbott may actually be the sociopath that many suggest.

  42. [CTar1
    Posted Saturday, August 9, 2014 at 1:17 pm | Permalink

    Bw

    I was just having a bit of a squizz to see what Bludger Treasures I had missed over the past week

    Been far for your weeks ‘bludge’?]

    Grandparenting No 5, chez Melbun.

    Drizzling one day; grey the next.

  43. One rotten apple down; one to go.

    Then there are the governance systems that produce rotten apples.

    Reforming these is more challenging than your actual rotten apples, who are showing a useful tendency to self-destruct when they collide with reality.

  44. Oh, Pyne on the NPC trying to dismiss all criticisms as misinformation.

    I haven’t heard anything new yet but I can barely make out anything substantial from all that waffle.

  46. Bw

    [Drizzling one day; grey the next.]

    Bloody cold here but windless and clear and sunny.

    Classic Cbr winter weather. Driving around at two o’clock in the arvo with the Sun so strong you notice that the car is blowing cooled air rather than heat.

  47. boerwar
    There may be careers that are best served by sociopaths. Politics is not one of them. Yes, one down, one to go.

  49. [I would keep a close eye on that duck BK. All is not always as it seems.]

    BW Duck not happy here and just flown over to a larger dam so any thoughts of ‘dinner’ gone, thank goodness.

  50. At some stage, for the survival of the human species, sociopaths are going to have to be identified and dealt with by society. Beyond the destruction of our species and the environment we live in, when or if we regroup, this personality trait will be seen as a threat to the community. At the very least, the areas that sociopaths can operate in may proscribed, at the worst humans may decide to eliminate that personality type completely by, for example, refusing them the right to reproduce. We reward sociopaths in the Era, the next Era may be very different.

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