The Essential Research fortnightly rolling average has ticked a point in Labor, their two-party lead now at 53-47 after a long stretch at 52-48. The major parties are in fact stable on the primary vote, at 39% for the Coalition and 38% for Labor, but the Greens are up a point for the second week in a row to 11%, a gain that has been well in line with other polling.
The poll also includes Essential’s occasional results on the government’s handling of various issue areas, and given the last such results were published in February, they find the government taking a considerable knock – with the telling exception of “relations with other countries”, for which the net rating has gone from minus 3% to plus 15%. However, the government is off 15 points on education and schools, 14 on social welfare and health services, 12 on climate change and nine on managing the economy.
Further questions find strong opposition to buying submarines from Japan (28% support, 51% oppose), a slight majority against providing military aid to the Ukraine (36% support, 42% oppose) and opposition to the deferral of superannuation increases (29% approve, 49% disapprove).
[In case anyone’s interested: my contacts in Suva tell me Fiji First is on 48% before the sub-5% threshold candidates are eliminated, which means a clear majority for Bainimarama. SODELPA on 42%.
(Caveat: I dont know how far into the count they are…)]
OK.. Ive just learned they are all smaller counts in Fiji at this point, no big urban centres yet – so the real news will come tomorrow….
Rossmore@599
Poor chap! 🙁
guytaur@600
Please don’t be any sillier than normal.
bemused
So having babies. Having children now refers only to woman and not to men does it?
guytaur@604
OK, so you are going to be sillier than normal.
zoid:
It’s telling though that when one speaks publicly the other invariably follows.
bemused
No you are. That last sentence of BB’s post could just as easily apply to a father as to a mother.
guytaur@607
Didn’t your mummy and daddy ever tell you the facts of life?
Women have babies and become mummies! Got it?
Fed MP Bob Baldwin linked with developer Buildev: He sold a block of land to company executive’s wife http://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/federal-mp-bob-baldwin-linked-with-developer-buildev-he-sold-a-block-of-land-to-company-executives-wife/story-fnii5s3x-1227060877793 … #auspol #ICAC
[Bob Baldwin, the federal Parliamentary Secretary to the Industry Minister, sold a block of land to the wife of an executive at controversial developer Buildev for $750,000, which was then sold at a $50,000 loss a year later.]
http://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/federal-mp-bob-baldwin-linked-with-developer-buildev-he-sold-a-block-of-land-to-company-executives-wife/story-fnii5s3x-1227060877793
Dismissive comments along the lines of “stick to having babies” are certainly not used as a put down of men, and there isn’t a history of men being excluded from professional life on the basis of a belief that their role should be confined to having and raising children.
Bemused
Parents have babies. Mothers go through pregnancy and childbirth. Two different things.
caf
The post comes close to that but does not say that.
So I cannot rate it as a put down based on gender,
guytaur@611
Refer to caf @610
On the White Ribbon stand up campaign, another man to join it is none other than Kevin Rudd. Sporting the phrase ‘Kevin Rudd has got your back’ is hilarious after his 3 year undermining and whiteanting campaign against a woman.
After that why any woman would want that man at her back is beyond me.
guytaur@612
You aren’t very bright are you?
bemused
You have just proved you do not see fathers having children or babies. You are in denial of this simple use of the english language
594
Also if Abbott lost his seat and/or faced criminal charges over signing a false declaration at up to eight elections (depending on statutes of limitations, timing of giving up citizenship and decisions around clarifying court cases (the invalidations of the elections of Kelly in 1996 and Hill in 1998)) it could cause renewed debate about the rules in section 44.
guytaur@616
Hmmmm you had better get your dad to give you that talk again.
bemused
When you can show me how you can say a man does not have a baby then you will have a point.
Fathers have babies.
Put a male name to that last sentence its just as valid.
bemused
😆 @ you
Tom the first and best@617
Would he have to pay back all the entitlements he had got under false pretences? 👿
guytaur@619
guytaur, I am sorry to disappoint you, but if you are male you will never give birth and that is what is commonly referred to as ‘having a baby’.
[BB made a critique of the ability of Leigh Sales to do her Job. In just the same way he and many others have done with Chris Uhlmann.]
Yeah and fair enough until he added the bit about having babies and writing about it in New weekly. Which has sweet fuck all to do with being shithouse on 7.30.
Ironically I’d come back here to defend Brent Harvey and say the AFL had gone soft and people are too precious about their heads and contact and it was a tougher game when I played and other assorted rubbish. That’ll have to wait.
Guytaur @ 611
[Parents have babies. Mothers go through pregnancy and child birth.]
Spot on!
Agreed 😉
bemused
The phrase have a baby refers to parents and means males to. It does not always mean childbirth.
It doesn’t really have anything to do with the specific meaning of “having a baby” anyway.
The comment doesn’t exist in isolation; it must be considered within the historical and cultural context, and that’s what makes “stick to having babies” a gendered put-down, despite the fact that it doesn’t explicitly mention gender.
It would be much like telling a female doctor she should “stick to nursing”, despite the fact that there are both male and female nurses.
guytaur@625
Whatever you say…
Goodnight
jules
Women should be barefoot and spend most of their time in the kitchen.
jules
I would not have made the comment because I agree. However many comments are made about people should stick to this or that when people see others being bad at their job.
I unreservedly withdraw @ 628
😆
BB’s ‘stick to having babies’ comment was sexist crap.
His point could and should have been made without resorting to that old nonsense.
caf
The bit about doing Woman’s Weekly interviews means career and shows its not the barefoot and pregnant in another way put down.
I hear Abbott awarded all his Ministers Aor A+. Or was that Murdoch?
For my money, Bishop the younger might get a C-. The rest are D’s and F’s.
steve
Sinodinos Assistant Treasurer (suspended) has to be an F
Steve777:
Nope, that’s all Abbott.
I’m a father.
I may have a child, but I didn’t have a baby. That was a physical process my wife went thru. I didn’t go thru it but I was there. That is why it’s unreasonable to say men have babies. We don’t go thru the suffering where new life begins.
Its a process that deserves more respect than the phrase “stick to having babies and write about it in New Weekly” conveys.
jules
The went to the hospital to have a baby directly refers to childbirth. Otherwise we have a baby applies to the whole family gender being irrelevant.
Oops sorry. That should be: The mother went …….
Oh. My. God.
[Joe Hockey believes Australia has a bright future, despite a less than rosy forecast by his Liberal predecessor Peter Costello.]
*bug eyes* What a difference a year or so makes!
[But the man currently in charge of the nation’s finances has a different view.
“I’m fundamentally an optimist. I think Australia is on the threshold of its greatest ever era,” Treasurer Joe Hockey told ABC TV on Wednesday.]
https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/national/a/25027065/hockey-an-optimist-despite-costello-gloom/
Tomorrow is the actual first anniversary if the Abbott Government – one year since they were sworn in. One year of regression, hopefully no more than two to go.
Night
[The went to the hospital to have a baby directly refers to childbirth.]
Yes and that is what BB was referring to.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/16/media-shafted-people-scotland-journalists?CMP
George Monbiot in The Guardian looks at the way most of the UK media ran a campaign ofdistortion and .lies against the Yes cause in Scotland
Nothing was beyonf them…descrbin Nat leader Salmond as a kind of Scottish Robert Mugabe…down to an endless diet of elite politicians in Westminister and a host of bankers and nrokers to say Scotland will be ruined
[571
Bushfire Bill
7.30 Report
Well that interview of Joe by Leigh Sales shows things haven’t improved , just as weak & shallow as it was before Sales took time off.
Just another bunch of attempted gotchas.
We had it on in the background, and that was almost unbearable.]
while Sales does not have the pugnacity of Ferguson, I thought her exchange with Hockey was ok. She prefaced her questions by observing the Government had lost a lot of support with the announcement of the budget. Hockey tried to skate past this, but he could not evade the point: the Government and he in particular have squandered their capital. Hockey then went on to make some frothy claims which just show how out of touch he is.
Hockey managed to remember his lines but won’t have convinced anyone that he knows what he’s doing.
http://aofm.gov.au/cgs-monthly/august-2014/
Face Value of Commonwealth Government Securities Outstanding:
End July 2014 ($,000)
325,886,733
End August 2014 ($,000)
331,486,592
End August 2013 ($,000)
269,978,109
Joe borrowed $5.5 billion in August bringing the annual increase to $61.5 billion.
There we are…recessed personal income tax collections, rising outlays, the abolition of taxes, rising cost of -ve gearing.
The outlook must be for the deficit to increase too, as stagnant per capita income growth, weak nominal GDP growth, declining terms of trade, declining tax collections from the miners all hurt the fiscal position.
Joe Hockey claims we are at the threshold of “our greatest ever” era of prosperity. No-one looking at the fiscal position and falling real wages could believe Hockey.
The historical series is available here:
http://aofm.gov.au/statistics/historical-data/commonwealth-government-securities-on-issue/#2012-13
@Briefly/645
Could have built TWO PROPER LABOR NBNs.
Nett_NEWS++™ by @Otiose94 http://bit.ly/1nAtjp1 #Iraq, #abbott, Mission Creep by David Rowe © http://bit.ly/YSHe1I
Ipsos MORI: 51% no, 49% yes.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2014/09/17/scottish-independence-referendum-september-18/
New thread.