Essential Research: 53-47 to Labor

Essential Research finds the Greens gaining a point for the second week in a row, this time carrying Labor with it on two-party preferred.

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).

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.

653 comments on “Essential Research: 53-47 to Labor”

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  2. I remember David and Margaret left SBS once they saw it heading down the tabloid path — who can forget the respected Mary Kostakitos having to suddenly co-anchor with the disgraced Stan Grant and her being forced to read out tabloid stories (like the colour of tennis player Anna Kournkova’s underwear)?

    Once again, I imagine they are jumping off another tabloid vessel…

  6. That ABC bias deniers can keep a straight face when referring to the absence of At Home with Tony or an Abbott word cloud is beyond me.

    These people enable the ABC’s appalling double standards and cheap tabloidism.

  7. DLaver

    [Because of the crass and offensive At Home with Julia?]

    I can forgive crass and offensive. The worst thing about ‘At Home with Julia’ is that is just wasn’t funny.

  9. [Four sailors are on trial for raping a colleague with a rubber chicken during a brutal bastardisation ritual aboard a naval ship.

    Able seamen Rohan Angre, Mitchell Summers, Michael Thompson and Jonathan Walter are accused of holding the man down, smearing him with the liniment Deep Heat and Vegemite before assaulting him with the object.]

    Seriously, WTF is wrong with some people!

    I just hope that Smith’s time as Defence Minister won’t be in vain and this appalling conduct is now a thing firmly in the past.

  12. While I have nothing at all against David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz — they both seem like they’d be stimulating company at a dinner party — it’s hard to work up any enthusiasm for protesting the deletion of their program, other than that bad stuff shouldn’t happen to apparently nice folk.

  13. [citizen
    Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2014 at 2:03 pm | Permalink

    Boerwar

    From the Absurdistan Files:

    Al-Sadr has been a considerable killer of Coalition troops.
    It must have been a death cult thing, right?

    Al-Sadr has been a key supporter of Al-Maliki who ensured:

    (a) that the Iraqi Army was a corruption-riddled, incompetent crock, and
    (b) that the Sunni side of the street was ripe for the ISIS picking.

    Anyhoo, he is now on our side. Go figure.

    I must admit that I cannot keep up with the list of people, movements, terrorist groups, governments, would-be governments, baddies, goodies, former baddies now goodies, former goodies now baddies and whoever else in that part of the world.

    It doesn’t matter if I personally am a bit dumb on the subject but it would be most concerning if Abbott failed to totally comprehend who’s who and the consequences of supporting one group over another.]

    I know of no reason why Abbott, Sheridan and the warmongers should start bothering their heads with any of that nuanced history bullshit now.

    After all, everything they have tried since 1991 has worked, right?

  14. sceptic

    No that would be repeats of repeats of repeats of repeats of QI series 1-6 , repeated in the afternoon incase anyone missed it the first 5 times

    Followed by repeats of Spicks & Specks, but only those ones with Hamish Fucking Blake guffawing about how little he knows

  15. Re Victoria @54: That Word Cloud was presumably formed from a review of media reports, with a large chunk controlled by Murdoch. With Murdoch now boosting the current PM I expect that a Word Cloud generated now would appear much more friendly to Abbott.

    I had a look at the Word Cloud linked above and in my opinion much of it would apply to Abbott, particularly the four most prominent words: ‘disappointing’, ‘dishonest’, ‘liar’, ‘incompetent’.

    Anyway, here’s a Word Cloud generator I found on the web. Copy and paste the text to be analysed into the box and hit ‘word it out’: http://worditout.com/word-cloud/make-a-new-one

  16. Intellectuals will get this one.

    The computer programmer’s wife tells him, “Run down to the shop and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”
    The programmer came back with 12 loaves of bread.

  17. steve777

    Perhaps we should ask the ABC when they were going to generate a word cloud for the Abbott. After all he has been in power for one year now

  18. It would be quite good for the chinese to ban Australian dirty coal for two main reasons:

    (1) They will be using their higher cost domestic coal instead which will de facto send a carbon price signal.

    (2) The reduction in the use of dirty Australian coal will result in less acid rain by way of sulphate aerosols being rained back to earth.

    BUT

    These same aerosols, while they are in the air, are held by some to be a key slower-downer of in the rate of AGW.

  20. and THIS is what the sabre rattling and time in an indigenous community is really all about

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/the-battle-for-the-budget/story-e6frg6z6-1227058276762#

    cue abbott doing speeches about the need to sacrifice in times of war (what slogan will he use? “Save for Soldiers”; “Operation belt tightening”; “Bombs not bludgers”?) and claiming the less well urban whites off need to realise that are far wealthier than remote first australians, and then claim to allocate savings from attacks on welfare to address indigenous disadvantages (slogan? Operations “Bludgers Give-Black” and “White-off Welfare”?).

    abbott will do many speeches about being humbled to see how indigenous people live (and he – and the media – will ignore that his overnight and other claimed expenses for the week will exceed several months on the dole).

  21. [Perhaps we should ask the ABC when they were going to generate a word cloud for the Abbott. After all he has been in power for one year now]

    As Fess said, we’ll see that word cloud not long after they commission At Home with Tony.

    Let’s not hold our breath.

    Unethical bastards.

  22. BW

    [These same aerosols, while they are in the air, are held by some to be a key slower-downer of in the rate of AGW.]

    The price is too high, and as these aerosols must eventually be removed, the trade is not feasible. You want aerosols used in active geoengineering to be relatively innocuous and short lived and independent of FHC use.

  23. Boerwar

    Not only did Sadr’s militias several times fight US forces to a standstill he is, to say the least, “friendly” with those eeeeeevil Eye Ranians. Iran looked after him when he scarpered from Baghdad after he appeared to be on a US hit list.

  24. There are some other strands to the coal thingie:

    (1) credit is being tightened
    (2) quite a few steel mills are integrated with coal mines and iron ore mines

    Thus there is, for some unknown proportion of the Chinese steel industry, a quintuple whammy going on:

    (1) coping with increased costs having to do with environmental regulation
    (2) coping with increased costs of credit because of the credit squeeze
    (3) coping with relatively expensive iron ore (vis-a-vis foreign steel manufacturers)
    (4) coping with relatively expensive coal (ditto)
    (5) coping with slowing demand for steel product as the construction industry also faces tightening credit and what (some) say is around 50,000,000 empty units.

    Fortunately, China has $4 trillion in foreign reserves so the Government has some levers which, when pulled, will do stuff.

  27. Of course it is unclear why the programmer’s wife made the number of loaves required contingent upon whether or not the shop had eggs.

  28. [Fran Barlow
    Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2014 at 5:06 pm | Permalink

    BW

    These same aerosols, while they are in the air, are held by some to be a key slower-downer of in the rate of AGW.

    The price is too high, and as these aerosols must eventually be removed, the trade is not feasible. You want aerosols used in active geoengineering to be relatively innocuous and short lived and independent of FHC use.]

    I agree.

    What I left out was that the aerosols have acted (temporarily) to blunt the AGW impact and hence the message.

    If China (and, less likely, India) were to move seriously on their airborne pollution messes, the removal of the AGW masking effect of the aerosols would make a significant and rapid difference to global temperature anomalies.

  29. poroti

    Not to worry.

    Those self-same Death Cult Iranians are fighting in Iraq alongside the non-Death Cult Pashmerga.

    As recently as last year we were hearing that the whole of Islam was a Death Cult. Now we are really getting sophisticated about it. If muslims are killing the bad guys they are not Death Cult but it is axiomatic that muslims they are killing are Death Cult.

    The Iranians, al-Sadr have been been moved from the Death Cult to the non-Death Cult column. The PPK has been moved from the terrorist column to being the good guys.

    Saw another sign of mission creep today. Calls for the US to bomb ‘along’ the Syrian border with Iraq. Slippery slope, that one.

  30. where I come from,the abbott word cloud would have PRICK in 70 point font slightly over-shadowed by an 90pt anglo saxon term for the female equivalent right in the middle. When will the ABC put up his word cloud? we might learn some new terms of abuse.

  31. So, he comes home with 12 loaves of bread and 12 eggs … possibly even 144 eggs. If he had any sense he would have stopped off at the pub for a pissup with his mates before going home to some inevitable grief.

    She complains.

    He understands that it is his fault that she uses human languague rather than computor language.

    So, he whips up an app which gives her a database of items which might be purchased, and series of binary queries with contingent supplementaries with which to communicate her shopping orders clearly and without ambiguity.

    Problem fixed.

  36. [The computer programmer’s wife tells him, “Run down to the shop and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”
    The programmer came back with 12 loaves of bread.]

    Ah if … then humor made my day.

  37. [Login to Colesworth online and order it yourself. Problem more fixded. 😆 ]

    Or alternatively, she could find herself a man who didn’t have his head up his ass.

    Problem well and truly fixed. 😀

  38. Isn’t it interesting that despite the pettiness, recklessness, and ineptitude of the Liberal and National parties, there is still a combined 39 or 40 percent of the electorate prepared to give their primary vote to these parties? I think there’s great scope for the Greens to put together a compelling economic message and raise the level of debate in this country. So many people park their vote with the Liberal party because they have such low expectations of political parties and assume that “Liberals are better at money stuff”. There are millions of voters who are operationally Green yet do not cast their vote for the Greens. These are people whose priorities and views align more closely with the Greens than with any other party. They can’t bring themselves to vote for the Greens because they don’t hear the reasons why a Green government would be better for jobs, per capita incomes, and quality of life.

  39. Nicholas

    [There are millions of voters who are operationally Green yet do not cast their vote for the Greens. These are people whose priorities and views align more closely with the Greens than with any other party.]

    Maybe so, but I don’t accept that the majority of them are currently voting for the Coalition.

  40. ER
    Ignoring “IR” and “Support Oz jobs” we have:
    COALition and “manage economy’

    Good 30%
    Poor 365
    Improved slightly [3%] since Feb.

  44. [The computer programmer’s wife tells him, “Run down to the shop and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”
    The programmer came back with 12 loaves of bread.]
    Of course the bigger laugh is a programmer having a wife. 😉

  45. [Last week at the Independent Commission Against Corruption there was one man in particular happy with the outcome, although nobody really understands why.

    Arthur Sinodinos came out of ICAC with a big dumb grin on his face, he seemed to think he had been vindicated. No such luck Arthur…

    ICAC is yet to hand down its findings so Sinodinos still has an anxious wait ahead of him, but the dumb grin he wore was an indication of his defence.]

    http://wixxyleaks.com/dumb-arthur-sinodinos-and-the-icac-dumb-defence/

  46. Re Nicholas @88: I think that there are many voters who want Labor to determine health, education and welfare policies, Green policies for their own neighborhood, Liberal for social conservatism and far right for immigration and multiculturalism.

  48. Excerpts
    [The Coalition is in net negative territory on almost every indicator, and each decision that costs jobs and local industries adds to that sense of alienation and disengagement, write Peter Lewis and Jackie Woods.

    Politics regularly serves up ideas too bizarre for any scriptwriter to imagine. The notion that on the 75th anniversary of World War II, Australia would be buying bargain submarines from the Japanese fits this category.]

    [Away from the balance-sheets, the decision smacks of tunnel vision, with thousands more manufacturing jobs to leave a state already reeling from the Government’s wilful destruction of the car manufacturing industry at a time when unemployment is heading to decade-high levels.

    And while Labor leader Bill Shorten may have over-egged it on the stump, the concept of outsourcing our subs to a nation that once attacked our territories with the same hardware is diabolical – especially for older voters.]

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-16/lewis-and-woods-that-sinking-feeling/5747858

  49. Second term: Bring in a far harsher version of Work Choices.

    He’s already doing that.

    Check the legislation going before the HoR on 22 September

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