The BludgerTrack poll aggregate continues to trend the Coalition’s way, to the extent that it reaches two milestones this week: parity with Labor on two-party preferred, and an absolute majority on the seat projection, albeit by the barest of margins. Three new polls were added to the national figures, those being Galaxy, the regular weekly Essential Research, and the fortnightly Morgan (fortnightly in the sense of publication, although the poll is conducted on a weekly basis). Also out this week was the Newspoll quarterly aggregates, which have been factored into the state breakdowns, along with the regular state breakdowns from Morgan (published) and Essential (unpublished). The combined effect is to add seat each to the Coalition tally in New South Wales, Western Australia and South Australia, while removing one in Victoria and Tasmania.
The quarterly Newspoll is a big deal for BludgerTrack, which is never better serviced for state data than it is immediately after being fed with three months’ worth of state-level Newspoll results. To this end, later today I will get around to publishing my own detailed quarterly state breakdowns for BludgerTrack, the previous instalment of which can be seen here.
BludgerTrack is still in the position of being slightly more favourable to the Coalition than any single published poll result, due to a variety of factors. Perhaps this could be best explained if I run through each of the pollsters:
Nielsen of course closed up shop a few months ago, which was significant in that BludgerTrack deemed it to be the most Coalition-friendly pollster, and the only one which adjusted for any substantial bias to that effect. Now that it’s gone, the model has a clear tendency to skew to the right of what a straight polling average would tell you.
Newspoll is rated as neutral by the model, but it hasn’t reported for a fortnight. When it did report, it gave Labor a 51-49 lead when the primary vote numbers looked a lot more like 50-50. It’s the primary votes that BludgerTrack goes off, so this was a 50-50 poll as far as the model was concerned. Clearly Labor got rounded up in the Newspoll result – it follows that they also got rounded down in BludgerTrack.
Galaxy is taken very seriously by BludgerTrack, and receives next to no bias adjustment at all. This week it gave Labor a lead of 51-49, although putting its rounded primary votes into the model produces a result of 50.6-49.4 going off 2013 preferences (as BludgerTrack does). If not for this poll, the Coalition would have moved into the lead.
ReachTEL’s last poll a fortnight ago had Labor leading 51-49, and BludgerTrack adjusts this pollster slightly in favour of the Coalition.
Morgan is reckoned to have the biggest bias in the game, that being in favour of Labor. Its result on respondent-allocated preferences this week was 51.5-48.5 in favour of Labor, but the more telling point so far as BludgerTrack is concerned is that it was the Coalition’s best result since February.
Essential is noted for being slow to respond to changes, and for this reason, BludgerTrack treats its bias in a unique way, by dynamically adjusting it according to how its deviates from the model over time. Since it’s stayed stuck with Labor on the cusp of leading 52-48 or 53-47, while the other pollsters have moved to the Coalition, a Labor bias adjustment is increasingly being factored into its results.
The other development in BludgerTrack this week is that Morgan published a set of phone poll numbers on leadership ratings, and they were relatively very rosy for Tony Abbott, who wasn’t too far off parity on net approval and had a pretty solid lead on preferred prime minister. This has a pretty sharp effect on the BludgerTrack leadership ratings, which aren’t exactly spoiled for data and are always pretty sensitive to the most recent result, even if the poll in question was from a rather small sample, as was the case here.
UPDATE: As promised, here are the detailed state-level breakdowns featuring primary vote numbers and charts tracking the progress of the primary and two-party votes in each state. Crikey subscribers may enjoy my analysis of these results in today’s email, assuming it gets published.
I also promised two weeks ago that I was going to start tracking betting odds in these mid-week BludgerTrack posts, then forgot about it last week. Now that I’ve remembered again, I can inform you that there has been movement to the Coalition over the part fortnight in Centrebet’s federal election odds, with the Coalition in from $1.50 to $1.45 and Labor out from $2.55 to $2.70. Centrebet’s price on Campbell Newman being re-elected in Queensland has also shortened from $1.36 to $1.28, with Labor out from $3.15 to $3.65. There has been a very slight move to Labor for the Victorian election, with Labor in from $1.23 to $1.22 and the Coalition out from $4.00 and $4.10 – which sounds a bit generous to Labor for mine. The Betfair market evidently thinks so, as it has the Coalition in from $4.10 to $3.40 and Labor out from $1.48 to $1.59.
I can believe that 75% consider that the threat of a terrorist attack is “real”. The question is, “Is it realistic?”.
I’m sure you could get a 75% response to anything ike that.
Q. “Do you believe you could get struck by lightning some day?”
Q. “Do you believe you could be involved in a fatal accident some day?”
Q. “Do you believe you could be the victim of domestic violence some day?”
Q. “Ever worried about a vicious dog biting you?”
You’d have to answer yes to all of the above. Doesn’t mean they’re going to happen.
The government’s trick is to peddle the illusion that sending FA-18s to Iraq is in some way going to lessen the chances of a Wooftah going mad with a knife (plastic or otherwise) and beheading someone with it in Martin Plaza.
Of all the miserable ways to die or be seriously injured the illusion that we just may be able to gain some control over it by taking action is almost irresistable.
Our planes are contributing 0.000001% to the “war” effort in the Middle East. This is similar to the contribution our “troops” made in whatever God-forsaken province of Iraq that they were inflicted upon. They fought no battles. They trained no local troops (in any way that would make them stay and fight). They suffered no casualties (except by suicide). They did little else but stomp around local marketplaces with slouch hats stuffed with ostrich feathers on, spreading good will (and according to Abbott the Muzzies STILL hate our freedoms).
We are involved in a sham war that we cannot explain and cannot win. We engage in almost no meaningful combat. At home, our police stage show raids that reap 1 arrest and 1 plastic sword purchased originally at a flea market. Riots by “Jihadis”and “secret terror plots” are reported to have occurred in our most secure jails, invasions of our nuclear facilities are spread all over the front page.
Every day we cross or drive on busy roads that stand a hundred times better chance of killing us instantly in highly unpleasant, painful ways. Women are regularly murdered by the men in their lives. Kids are regularly raped and otherwise sexually molested. Businesses, indeed whole industries are going broke for purely ideological reasons. People commit suicide as a result. Kids are king hit in the streets and break their skulls on pavements.
Yet all we see are fanciful beat-ups about terrorists in our midst.
Abbott’s government creates the fear and simultaneously offers to rescue us. It’s the oldest advertising trick in the book.
Nicholas,
Unfortunately for you, the thinking majority supports the bi-partisan policy.
Having had your “facts” dismantled, you resort to the usual lefty blah, blah of barking at the moon.
That’s about all you’ve got left really.
GG
[Sorry, but the facts don’t seem to support your assertions:
From the recent Galaxy poll:]
One poll doesn’t test his assertions. We would have to run a parallel world for each different Labor action we wished to test, each with a poll both before and after.
DN,
Go with the most recent information I say.
Just because you don’t agree with the majority opinion doesn’t mean the poll is wrong.
GG
I didn’t say the poll was wrong.
I’m saying that it, by itself, doesn’t prove whether or not different actions by Labor would have produced a difference in public opinion. You can’t calculate a difference with one point. In this case we need 4 points because we also want to the difference between two actions. A difference of a difference, so to speak.
The possibility of some kind of terrorist attack in Australia may be real afterall individuals have been identified as talking about it at least. So 75% of people are likely making a logical call.
The possibility of any individual being harmed from a terrorist attack is very small which is why we should just go about life as normal and say “up yours”.
Re BB @191: TREASURER Joe Hockey says Labor should prove its bipartisanship on the deployment of troops to Iraq by passing the government’s budget measures.
I’m flabbergasted. The man’s an idiot.
BB,
So what! When the voters eventually see through the scam, Labor can shift it’s ground. In the mean time, they’ll have what the majority are having.
At the moment, opposing the Government’s actions would be seen as supporting the terrorists of ISIS and would be a sure vote loser.
david, the current argument is about the 62% support for taking action in the ME.
DN,
I’m going to go way out on a limb and assert that all Labor’s internal polling would be telling them to get on board this escapade.
Actually, I guess we only need 2 points because our parallel worlds are going to start from the same state :P.
We have been at war for half a week.
We have dropped two bombs.
The cost per week is around $10 million.
Half a week = $5 million.
OR
$2.5 million per bomb.
I do hope the bombs decapitated a decapitator or two.
Incidentally, War Manager Binnie is right. The bombing campaign has already caused ISIL to change its behaviour.
Or perhaps it might be more correct to say that the prospect of bombing caused ISIL to change its behaviour.
It is not as if a couple of decades of bombing along with Deus ex machina drone strikes have not taught the surviving lads a thing or two. We keep killing leaders from the air and new leaders keep popping up.
ISIL’s logistics and command and control have been degraded beacuse they will have been dispersed and because instead of convoys you will now have civilian cars, driven by civilians, with bootloads of munitions.
The destruction of the refineries will make fuel more challenging (for all the farmers as well, but hey, war can be tough). I imagine that ISIL will ensure that priority will go to the war effort. They are, after all, the ones who are doing Total War while we are fart-arsing around at the edges.
Provided Bagdhad survives, the next step will be to winkle ISIL out of Fallujah and doG forbid, Mosul.
The reality is that determined fighters hunkered and bunkered in urban wreckage take an awful lot of killing – as the numerically inferior Kurds armed with light weapons are (or were, perhaps) demonstrating in Kobane…
The civilians amongst whom ISIL is embedded in places like Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, will not be quite as hardy.
Before Howard, Blair and Bush began their handiwork, Mosul had a population of 1.8 million. I dare say it is a fair bit less these days and that it will be less again before ISIL has been degraded and destroyed.
Some of you will recall that there is a view around that Howard was Australia’s greatest prime minister.
Why do we use two terms when one would do? Because the mission crept to ‘destroyed’ from ‘degraded’ and someone forgot to delete ‘degraded’.
Unless someone meant ‘degradation’ as part of the package?
DN my post was in response to this …
[I can believe that 75% consider that the threat of a terrorist attack is “real”. ]
GG sure, we could substitute for our second point across dimensions with an earlier point in time from which we extrapolate, though that obviously is not as direct and requires a bit more work (some assumptions, maybe) to be usable as a test for Nicholas’ assertions.
You cited one poll showing 63 percent support for Australia’s involvement in air strikes in Iraq. I recall an earlier poll where the figure was low 50s. The number depends on how the question is framed and how long bipartisan support for the war has been in effect.
My more important point is that this figure is heavily influenced by what the major political parties are saying about the policy. If Labor had withheld its support and made a persuasive case for doing so, this war would be unpopular.
Do you remember how in 2009 a majority of Coalition voters accepted the science of climate change, but since 2010 strong majorities have rejected it? The only thing that changed was the leadership. What the leader says makes a big difference to public opinion on most issues. Most voters do not have strong views on issues which are outside their work experience and daily lives. They take their cues from leaders. Labor voters and Labor leaners are very open to persuasion by a Labor leader.
Bill Shorten has failed to exercise his persuasive powers for the public good. There is no higher responsibility for our elected representatives than deciding whether Australia uses armed force. I think it’s abhorrent to say “me too” to a war which you know to be misguided just because you want to play it safe electorally. Labor often succumbs to that tactic and it never works. Voters who want dumb kneejerk foreign policy will vote for the real deal (the Coalition). They won’t vote for Liberal Lite. Labor should use its voice to shape public opinion and question the government’s reasoning and evidence. It shouldn’t be passive when the government commits our defence force to a dumb war.
david
Ooooh. Let’s put it down to post blindness from being too busy arguing ;).
So, what I predicted a few months ago (and was viciously heckled over) is happening. If I was an insecure bore I might even do an “I told you so!” or demand apologies but I’m not.
GG is right that the public are on the side of this war. It’s different from last time for several reasons:
1) The threat that IS poses has been clearly communicated.
2) Obama is leading the American charge, not Bush. Australians like Obama; they didn’t like Bush.
3) This time most of the international community (including all of the P5) is on on side, rather than it being a small group of countries acting unilaterally.
So, the assertion that voters are punishing Labor for not opposing the war is BS (with the exception of some Labor voters who’ve moved to the Greens.)
HOWEVER, to say “Shut up and support the effort!” is wrong. As a democracy (we are; shut up with your pedantic definitions), it is always important to have healthy and vocal dissent – especially on issues of security, as the chance of mismanagement and abuse of power is higher, so healthy criticism – from inside and outside the ALP base is absolutely important and the Opposition certainly shouldn’t just sit back and say “We’re behind you on every decision made, regarding Iraq, 110%!” because it’s not healthy and Abbott will just exploit that.
Now, as for long-term trends, don’t panic too much. If the election was in three months, I’d be concerned but, as it stands, it’s still two years away and a security bump can be very hollow – and can fall as quickly as it rises. A couple of months ago, we were talking about a possibly terminal government, now we’re talking up their rebound, who knows what the conversation will be on next year? (Remembering, there’s still budget issues that Hockey, rather desperately, is trying to resolve under the veil of this current bump.)
The current situation is what it is and pretending that if Labor had opposed the war or if Albo was in the leader’s seat, this bump wouldn’t have happened is naive. While I certainly have plenty of criticisms of Shorten’s leadership, this isn’t his fault. What he can and will get judged on though, is whether or not he can steer the narrative back against the government after the initial hype of the security bump is over.
No worries DN that happens a lot here 🙂
In practical terms:
The chance of you or me being topped by a terrorist is zip. The chance of someone we know being topped by a terrorist is zip.
The chance of someone in our street being topped by a terrorist is zip.
The chance of someone in our extended family of being topped by a terrorist is zip.
Will a terrorist incident happen in Australia?
IMHO, after twenty years of dishing it out overseas we will reap what we sow on home soil and there is a near certainty that there will be a terrorist incident in Australia.
But, even if a terrorist manages to kill 23 people in one go… not impossible, IMHO… that still gives a million to one chance of surviving.
Shakespeare had it right:
‘Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.’
It is Abbott’s main achievement. He has turned us into a nation of craven cowards.
People who have sold our democracy, our civil liberties and our free media (such as it is) down the drain on the basis of their terror of terrorism should buy a ticket in Tatts.
BB at 182:
[A VERY poor performance. A proper interviewer would have handled the whole thing in a much more skilful and respectful manner, and would have thus elicited more information from the guest.
Which is the point, isn’t it? Who knows the bloke might have had something interesting to say. If Alberici refuses to let the interview proceeed past her obsession with getting him to admit he approves of people being beheaded, then don’t have the interview.]
As to your first point, one will never know. The guest seemed very well prepared in terms of what he wanted to say, what he was not going to say, and what “lines” he would run to avoid saying what he was not going to say. Dishonest lines like “I answered your question. You just don’t like the answer.”
If the chap actually thinks that IS beheadings are justified I want to hear what he has to say. [Since all this talk of beheadings I admit to having mentally placed plenty of heads on pikes, so I would like to think I am amenable to persuasion.] but I can’t know where he is coming from if I do not know the answer to that pretty fundamental question.
You go on to say the bloke, uninterrupted, might have had something interesting to say. Again, to be fair, we can never know. My suspicion is that we would have heard a whole pile of crap levelled at Western democracies (this much did indeed squeeze out in the interruptions), and I do not for a moment suggest Western democracies are entirely innocent, without anything genuinely considered being heard.
The chap was invited on because Abbott had defamed his organisation. It seems to me that the obvious subject-matter of the interview would be whether there was any truth or justification for the defamation. The chap was not, so far as I am aware, invited on because he was considered to be a ME scholar. As a result of the interview and the chap’s impressive performance I came away from it thinking Abbott was, probably, entitled to his opinion. I am glad Alberici didn’t, for once, allow LL to be a propaganda exercise for the guest.
[He has turned us into a nation of craven cowards.
]
Rubbish 🙂 no insult intended.
DN,
You sound like the sort of prevaricator who needs to check their ‘Feng Shui” chart in order to decide the colour of the sox, ties and undies each day.
I suppose you could be so poll driven like Rudd that you do a poll to find out what your core values are. But, I’m not a big fan of the Kevvie method.
The Labor leadership has made a decison that is supported by the majority of voters. All the polls I’ve seen and conversations I’ve had coalesce around this node of congruent opinion.
What could possibly go wrong?
Swing Required@165
It was a methods difference. Morgan has a long habit of using methods that include face-to-face between elections, and then dropping face-to-face a week or two out. Perhaps the rationale is they want bragging rights based on election results but they also want product differentiation between elections. Face-to-face skews to Labor. Morgan’s current method is partly face-to-face and skews less to Labor than the old purely face-to-face one, but it still skews quite a bit.
They were also lucky. Their final poll fluked a perfect 2PP off primaries that were far less accurate than Newspoll’s.
My detailed review of pollster performance at the last election is at:
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/2013-federal-election-best-and-worst.html
The Turks are right, IMHO.
Everyone is urging them to save Kobane.
But the Turks are saying something very, very important: before we go in we want it on the table what we ALL agree are ALL our enemies. (The Turks are using the term ‘terrorists’. The difficulty here is that the PKK are terrorists and it is the PKK that is holding out in Kobane.
The Turks are not joing any Coalition of the Confused
The Turks are holding out for clarity of mission objective.
Good on them, I say.
Unlike Abbott, the Turks fully understand that where ME wars start and where they finish are often two entirely different things.
GG, lol.
I’m not sure what you think I’m prevaricating about.
[I suppose you could be so poll driven like Rudd that you do a poll to find out what your core values are.]
I didn’t bring up polls. You did. You brought up a poll to reject Nicholas’ assertion. I have simply been pointing out that you need at least two polls to do so.
[The Labor leadership has made a decison that is supported by the majority of voters. All the polls I’ve seen and conversations I’ve had coalesce around this node of congruent opinion.
What could possibly go wrong?]
I’m not even debating this point. I think that politically, at least, Labor took a sensible course of action.
GG
[What could possibly go wrong?]
*laughs*
Kevin you gave the quinella to the dreaded NewsCorp. You had better hide 🙂
just want to say how outraged I am about Joe Hockey’s statements.
He is a dangerous fool, and Abbott is being duplicitous by saying he doesn’t support what Hockey says. This is the game they play… Scumbags and liars.
Really it’s just maths. If you want a difference, you need two points. Nicholas asserts a difference. You reject it, but only provide one point. You asserted this one point tests and finds wanting Nicholas’ assertion. This is quite obviously incorrect. You later postulate some other points (internal polling), that’s fair enough, perhaps there is.
On the actual topic of discussion, I have not provided my opinion, so quite frankly anything you have to say about my unstated opinion must be intended for laughs.
dwh
ASIO needs draconian laws? It can have them.
We are going to spend half a billion a year on a war that has, in one form or another been going for 23 years? No worries.
Australian muslims are being abused on buses, trains and public spaces? No worries.
800 police can raid houses and tip Australian families arse over tit for two arrests? No worries.
Press freedoms emasculated? Not a worry.
Police, firies, the ADF, and school cadets go to work without their uniforms on? Can’t take a chance there.
Want our metadata? Take it.
Parliament gets itself into a tizz about some hypothetical interjectors wearing burqas, niqabs or whatever, well that WAS a step too far.
National moral panic abounds and only known driver is craven physical cowardice.
Carey Moore: You missed difference number 4, which is that this time the nominal Iraqi government have asked for assistance; and difference number 5, which is that this time the violence has already started (even we did have a hand in its genesis).
A lengthy quote from the GG on a sensational new insiders book by Adam Boland which lifts the lid on how the Sunrise program works. It has been subject to court orders to not publish.
In this example, poor old Rudd finds what it’s like to try to manipulate the media and fail. Despite discovering what arsewipes NewsLtd editors are like, this being from April 2007 when he was running for PM, he still got into bed with them later on.
[The Anzac Day war
Boland’s book also details what unfolded behind the scenes the week The Sunday Telegraph ran a front-page story on plans by the then Opposition leader, Kevin Rudd and Sunrise for a false Anzac Day dawn service.
He describes how Rudd went ballistic at then editor Neil Breen over the story he claimed was untrue.
Breen defended the story for four days, until Rudd rang former News Corp chairman and CEO John Hartigan on Thursday April 12 2007 demanding the company put out a statement apologising to both him and Sunrise by 1pm.
With 15 minutes to spare before the deadline, The Sunday Telegraph obtained emails confirming their story and version of events were correct.
“The News Limited boss was satisfied the story was solid,” Boland writes.
“At 1pm, he picked up the phone to Kevin Rudd. He wanted Breen to stay in his office to hear his opening line: ‘Kevin, I’m afraid you’ve just wasted five days of my time.’”
Breen took the emails confirming the story to his colleague, The Daily Telegraph editor David Penberthy while Breen met Rudd, who had been forced to admit he was wrong, for a coffee at Sydney’s Intercontinental Hotel.
“As Rudd and Breen were talking, David Penberthy was on the roof of News Limited’s Sydney headquarters, reading the email chain while having a cigarette,’’ Boland says.
“As soon as he was done, he sent Breen a text: ‘Hey mate, we are smashing (Rudd) on the front page tomorrow.’
“Penberthy sent that text to Rudd by mistake. Immediately realising what he’d done, he sent him another text addressed to journalist Kelvin Bissett, in the hope of creating the impression that both were meant for Kelvin and not Kevin.”
The following day, The Daily Telegraph’s front page published the headline “I’m with stupid” above a photo of Rudd pointing at Sunrise host David Koch.
“For the next forty-eight hours, we waged an unwinnable battle as every Murdoch paper opened fire,” Boland says.
“They accused Sunrise of stamping on the graves of diggers to satisfy our thirst for ratings.”]
davidwh
[Rubbish 🙂 no insult intended.]
I know you are a reasonable, rational person. How can you seriously consider we are threatened by terrorism?
[Carey Moore
Posted Thursday, October 9, 2014 at 3:17 pm | Permalink
So, what I predicted a few months ago (and was viciously heckled over) is happening. If I was an insecure bore I might even do an “I told you so!” or demand apologies but I’m not.
GG is right that the public are on the side of this war. It’s different from last time for several reasons:]
Give me a break. This iteration (Third Iraq War) of our war is only four days old. Give it another ten years and… oh, wait…
Or to put it another way.
I’m being a pedant. Please stop mistaking my pedantry for other things.
😉
BW at 199:
Your 7 questions are well asked although, IMO Q1 and Q6 are duplicates and I prefer the formulation of Q1, since “guarantees” in matters of this sort are inane.
I would add an additional double-barrelled question: By what achievements should we consider Australia’s involvement in the war to be a success and by what lack of achievement should we consider the war to be a failure?
To me it is the most ridiculous thing to be participating in a war when we have NFI who the real enemy is, who we are “saving” or what our efforts might plausibly achieve.
An intelligent analysis. The coalition hanging on by a thread. The LNP deserves to be in this position. Having said that, the ALP do not deserve a majority at this time with no clear image or policies evident.
I think it was the UK Prime Minister William Pitt who first explained how useful is a foreign war in building support for struggling governments.
Margaret Thatcher became quite popular from the Falklands War.
DN,
Well, alright, I’ll play your little game of “Pedantocpricko”. (patent pending)
Actually, Nicholas raised the (now) discredited point that only just over half of people supported the action against ISIS “according to polls”.
I simply pointed out that according to the most recent poll published in the most august journal of polling record, this was not the case.
You then waffled over some point of abtuse statistical methodology to assert some statistically unsound insignificance of a point.
I’m a hammer and nail person in these situations. “Near enough is good enough, for me”.
Not a bad one liner from Hockey, as far as these things go.
[
The time Hockey saved Rudd’s life. The pair were cooling down in a river after a day spent hiking the Kokoda trail when Rudd lost his footing and was sucked downstream. Hockey grabbed him, then yelled: “I’ve got money from Kim Beazley to let you go!” (Beazley, the then-opposition leader, had correctly predicted Rudd would challenge him for the job.)
]
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/adam-bolands-memoir-reveals-plot-to-remove-sunrises-passive-melissa-doyle-20141009-113iwq.html#ixzz3FcUGlz4T
[Re BB @191: TREASURER Joe Hockey says Labor should prove its bipartisanship on the deployment of troops to Iraq by passing the government’s budget measures.]
Obvious reply: we dont support Hockey’s war on the Australian public.
Astrobleme the rubbish comment was regarding the assertion we have become a cowardly group. I don’t believe that at all. I think different groups are using the current situation to achieve different aims totally unrelated to cowardism. There are political agendas at play and some are just using this as an excuse to act out personal prejudices.
Regarding the threat of some terrorist act. While I think it is possible I don’t believe it is a large threat and think we should all just get on with life. Something will probably happen some day but there is no point dwelling on it.
Who would have thought that Mr Kate Ellis would be such a nasty bloke?
Whilst I agree that Labor have little option at present other than supporting the war on ISIS, it would be good if they could also remind voters that ISIS is an indirect result of the Howard government’s ill-fated Iraq war – a government which Abbott himself was a part of.
The Coalition’s political advantage on national security issues needs to be wittled away over a long period of time if it’s to be eventually overcome. This sort of support-yet-criticise approach is something the Coalition is particularly good at (albeit with the help of a supportive media).
Does Joe Hockey still think he is Treasurer?
238
Thatcher gained enough lost popularity that the Tories only lost 1.5% of the vote compared to 1979 (Tory seat gain were due to vote slitting after the Social Democrats split from the Labour party and would not have occurred under either preferential voting or proportional representation). Prior to the war and economic recovery the Liberal/Social Democrat alliance was polling like it could win (which would have been even more likely under preferential voting) and before the Social Democrats split from the Labour Party the Labour Party was polling like it was going to win.
Had Labour called an election in October 1978, won gone into the Falklands in 1982 and achieved victory, then it would have been Labour benefiting.
GG
[Actually, Nicholas raised the (now) discredited point that only just over half of people supported the action against ISIS “according to polls”.]
Eh, that wasn’t even the main thrust of his post and you referred to his “assertions”, plural, his main proposition being that the number of people supporting action in the ME would have been different had Labor not supported the government.
If you are now claiming that you were referring to only his vague description of the polls and not all of his assertions (plural) then it seems that you started your pedantry before I started mine.
[You then waffled over some point of abtuse statistical methodology ]
I honestly don’t think subtraction counts as an “abtuse statistical methodology”.
[… to assert some statistically unsound insignificance of a point.]
Let’s give you that, but my point is still correct, however insignificant.
I’m amazed the conversation got this far. It’s probably because there are people too stubborn to concede any point, no matter how insignificant, what do you think? ;).
I don’t think I have seen a poll this year that had the coalition leading. How can the tracker possibly be 50/50?
Think Big,
Too much information and would confuse the message.
There are plenty of lefty screamers that can make those points until it becomes a relevant consideration.
davidwh
My thoughts as well @242!