Essential Research: 52-48 to Labor

Only minor changes on voting intention in Essential Research this week, but monthly personal ratings add to an impression of solid improvement for Tony Abbott.

No change on two-party preferred this week on Essential Research’s fortnightly rolling average, with Labor remaining 52-48 ahead, but the Coalition has gained a point on the primary vote, to 41%, at the expense of the steady decline of Palmer United, down one to 3%. Labor and the Greens are steady on 39% and 10%. Essential also features its monthly personal ratings, adding to a picture of improvement for Tony Abbott who is up five on approval to 40% and down four on disapproval to 48%, while Bill Shorten is steady on both measures at 35% and 36%. Abbott has also opened up a fairly solid 38-32 lead as preferred prime minister after trailing 35-36 last time.

Other questions find an impressive 72-2 split on the question of whether the gap between the rich and poor has increased over the past decade, and a series of further questions address what respondents feel should be done about it. A question on mining finds no view to the effect that it has become more or less important to Australia since five years ago, but there is a very strong view that mining exports principally benefit company executives and shareholders. In dealing with budgetary problems, there is a 68-22 split in favour of higher corporate tax and 56-31 in favour of abandoning the parental leave scheme, but 67-21 against “cuts to tax concessions in areas like superannuation”, 69-21 against for higher income taxes and 81-12 against for cuts to social services, health and education.

Newspoll has had another week off, presumably so its return can be timed to coincide with the resumption of parliament next Tuesday.

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.

708 comments on “Essential Research: 52-48 to Labor”

Comments Page 13 of 15
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  3. vic,

    My bullshit detector is twitching. That’s all.

    If there is independant verification, then I’ll take it more seriously.

  7. I know it’s not the same group of police or law enforcers, but we have railway ‘guards’ using unnecessary force on a schoolboy, ditto on protesters on Swan Island who were ‘saved’ by police presence, yet police unable to assist a family being bullied in their own home.

    I can’t see much consistency.

  8. Re. the Ebola outbreak in the US…

    If my experience (as the spouse of a Health administrator) with NSW Health is anything to go by, God help us if ebola gets into our hospital system.

    The administrators I have come across solve all problems by sending emails and blaming junior staff for their mistakes.

    You have BAs from dodgy American universities, trumped up nurses that are living textbooks of the Peter Principle and failed accountants unable to find a job anywhere else running acute care wings of hospitals as if they were the back office of a car dealership.

    The nurses disdain the doctors so, as administrators, take every opportunity to send the medicos castigating emails for minor offences like being away from a phone for more than 2 minutes, or not signing off on a roster by the appointed hour.

    The accountant administrator has a mind like a steel trap, a photographic memory and a fine eye for detail. She expects everyone else to perform to her superhuman standards or else the dreaded nasty email is sent. She seems to spend more time looking for fault and writing nitpicking memorandums than doing her job.

    The one with the dodgy degree from America chairs meeting after meeting, forcing doctors and ward nurses off wards to attend these mind-numbing gabfests where it seems listing the various degrees and positions held by attendees is more important than whatever the meeting is about.

    These three write furiously to each other, hourly, listing faults and episodes of misconduct that magically leave them (in their own eyes and in the eyes of a more senior manager) blameless, at least on paper.

    Healing the sick?

    You never hear about it. These people can manage an email trail, but they can’t run a hospital.

    If anything really nasty happens, writing memos won’t cut it.

    NSW Health public servants are so worried about the coming cuts to the Health budget, imposed from Canberra, and the looming privatizations about to take effect in NSW, that all they seem to have time to do is cover their arses in order to preserve their jobs. It’s a matter of who goes first.

    Vacant positions are not being filled, especially in the medical staff area. But, by God, their fire drill training has been signed off properly, and their stationery supply inventory is in top shape.

  9. BB

    I have had some experience working in the NSW health system and have to agree with you. I almost cheekily excluded NSW when I wrote my ebola stuff.

    Now here are my horror stories:

    1. Heritage building EATEN by white ants despite staff alerting maintenance that they could HEAR the white ants eating the desk.

    2. Rain water pouting down light switch – same building

    3. Staff wearing scrubs in cafeteria – not sure if before or after treating patients or cleaning trolleys.

    4. Floor and carpets in entrance and near intensive care visibly filthy.

  10. Abbott looking bad Labor looking good on Ebola.

    Boys war toys Abbott gets. Abbott sees no votes in joining the US and UK in West Africa.

  11. [Oliver Milman 1 minute ago
    Tony Abbott says Richard Flanagan is a “stimulating” author but says Australia’s environment policies are “second to none” ]

  13. [ 1. Heritage building EATEN by white ants despite staff alerting maintenance that they could HEAR the white ants eating the desk.

    2. Rain water pouting down light switch – same building

    3. Staff wearing scrubs in cafeteria – not sure if before or after treating patients or cleaning trolleys.

    4. Floor and carpets in entrance and near intensive care visibly filthy. ]

    None of this matters if you can blame someone else.

    As long as Maintenance was informed according to the relevant Policy Directive, and there is an email trail to prove it, then “it’s not my problem”.

    Rain water pouring down a light switch is Infrastructure’s area. It will be dealt with at the next bi-monthly meeting. A memo has been sent. Unfortunately, the key engineer has an ADO that day, so we’ll have to wait until February.

    Staff wearing scrubs in the cafeteria? No problems. Get the trumped up nurse-turned-administrator to write a long, incomprehensible memo off to the head doctor. She’s been waiting years to get into a job where she can do that. Oh, and start a new compulsory training program on Hygeine In The Workplace. If anyone does not attend, write a bitchy email to the person you lumbered with the job of organizing the training. If they complain, cite them for a breach of the Code Of Conduct.

    Dirty floors? Sack the cleaners. And by the way… have they returned all keys issued to them? If they have, it’s not on the Key List. Someone’s made a mistake there. Write another email, the more poorly-written, misspelt and un-punctuated a rant it is, the better. If you repeat yourself eleven times in the same document, and use phrases like “absolutely appalled” they’ll eventually get the message.

    No money to hire new cleaners? Write a brief to the Minister, who will not read it, because he’s promised his mates in the private hospital sector they’ll get the gig anyway.

    Give me something DIFFICULT to sort out, Daretotread!

  14. So Dutton is about to front for a press conference.

    I can only assume that he will eventually talk about ebola and how it is all Labors fault.

  15. BB
    Do they ever treat patients, or are they aiming for that Yes Minister episode where the empty hospital ran perfectly?

  16. Bushfire

    Ah, memories. No, nightmares. Yesterday I learned that the manager who followed me caused three staff to resign with stress within a year, virtually bankrupted the place by giving contract to friend, encouraged a merger with a rival company. The Board luuuurved him. A true psychopath.

    Rumour has it that he’s now ‘managing’ a fish and chip shop in Queensland. Ordering dead fish about should suit him. 😀

  18. We really do have a little PM .Just heard ‘Bongo’ saying the AMA has called the PM’s reasons for not sending help with ebola as “mystifying”.

    Sending planes and troops to kill people before even getting permission from Iraq ? No wuckas. Sending help to save people ? Nah, too hard.

  19. There is an inordinate amount of air time being spent on 2GB, and web site space over Whatshisname being elected Leader of the NSW Nats.

    Does anyone really care WHO is Leader of the NSW Nats, besides the NSW Nats?

    What I don’t get is the way 2GB treats each new resignation and ICAC disaster as an opportunity to “renew” the NSW Coalition government. There is no mention of “disaster”, or “corruption” as there would have been just a couple of years ago.

    Speaking to a rather bitter ex-Minister the other night, freshly sacked when Baird took over from O’Farrell, it seems the Catholic Right and the Shooters have taken over government, with Hadley and the Tele as their megaphones. This person thought that it wouldn’t be too long until the NSW government became not much more than a subsidiary of the Catholic Church and Jamie Packer’s gambling empire.

  22. [BB
    Do they ever treat patients, or are they aiming for that Yes Minister episode where the empty hospital ran perfectly?]

    Ah, patients… doesn’t really matter if they have patients, as long as the paperwork is ship-shape and blame can be sheeted off to someone lower down the pecking order.

    I have been appalled to see, at both first and second hand, some of the incredible buck-passing and outright psychopathy that has been occurring in NSW Health. I’d like to tell you why the word “psychopathy” is particularly ironic, but don’t want to go into details.

    Double-dealing, outright lying, exaggeration, bastardization of their own policies, iconfected misconduct, hearsay, verballing, emotionalism, accusers turning around to judge their own complaints, small cliques writing letters to each other so that it all looks good on the record, levels of management all backing each other up as the ship slowly sinks.

    Yet you never hear about the actual healing of the sick. I genuinely believe that the senior administrators don’t care a fig whether a patient is cured or dies. As long as procedure has been followed, or if not followed, someone else can be blamed.

    Someone carks it? Who was responsible for filling the handwash dispensers? A patient runs amok? Had the doctor signed off on his Emergency Incident training? The place burns down? Well, they all did their fire drills.

    But miss a comma, or get an acronym wrong, and all Hell breaks loose. You find out your in trouble over a clerical matter because you receive a Formal Letter written by someone who can’t spell, can’t write and clearly can’t organize their thoughts in any way that a normal, adequately educated person would be able to.

    Get enough of these together and then they become “a pattern of misconduct”, greater than the sum of its parts. Individual incidents don’t really matter, but if you can present them as a pattern, then that’s a sacking offence. And when the person is sacked, then that’s one more salary you won’t have to pay, because they’re not re-hiring. When the place goes even further down the toilet as a result, then write more emails.

    We’re not talking high-falutin administrators a dozen levels removed from patient care here. At best there are only one or two levels between them and beds in wards. But it’s enough to insulate them from any particular duty of care, at least on paper.

  24. [Yesterday I learned that the manager who followed me caused three staff to resign with stress within a year]

    If you ever admit to “stress” they’ll get in a psychiatrists to “assess” you, deliver an adverse report, and then you can be sacked over OH&S concerns.

    To the shrinks who do this dirty work, it’s a nice little sinecure. They do not rock the boat. They know what to do and say in their reports.

    Simple solution is to keep chanting, “I love my job” at every opportunity.Keep smiling, and never say “stress”. If you don’t do all of these, give them half a chance, and they’ll have you “psyched-out” of the department quicker than it takes to type “cc:”.

  25. [Oliver Milman 1 minute ago
    Tony Abbott says Richard Flanagan is a “stimulating” author but says Australia’s environment policies are “second to none”]

    If this is an accurate quote I think Tony is finally learning to speak honestly. The Commonwealth Government’s environment policies (repeal of carbon pricing, destruction of Great Barrier Reef, windback of Tassie Forestry agreement, return control to the States etc, etc) are a long, long way second to no environment policy.

  26. Bushfire

    Of course “stress” was never mentioned. They all gave different reasons for leaving. I wonder how many Boards have been conned by smooth-talking psychopaths…

  27. Foreigners’ purchases of Australian housing have a negligible impact on house prices.

    Australia needs to remove tax deductibility for investment property losses (negative gearing) – at the very least for purchases of existing dwellings (the tax deduction could be retained for new housing to encourage additions to the housing stock).

    Australia needs a progressive and significant tax on unimproved land value. This tax should replace stamp duty on home purchases.

    The prudential regulator should restrict financial institutions to lending home buyers no more than ten times the annual rental of the property they are buying. The rest of the purchase price would come from the buyer’s savings. A key problem is that banks are lending excessively to home buyers. This inflates prices to a level that is disproportionate to economic fundamentals like economic and population growth, rents, real household income, and construction costs.

    Australia has a real estate bubble in which speculative investment rather than productive investment predominates. Buying and selling existing houses doesn’t add value to the economy or to society. People are buying property for tax breaks and windfall capital gains. The real estate bubble exposes the economy to systemic risk; it diverts capital from productive investment; it increases business costs because of the high wages which employers must pay so that employees can afford to live in over-valued houses; it makes housing unaffordable for a large and growing number of Australians. When high house prices are combined with weak tenants’ rights, as is the case in Australia, you get a housing affordability crisis.

    We need a significantly expanded supply of social housing – some owned and operated directly by government, others owned and operated by limited profit developers who receive concessional loans from governments in return for keeping rents down.

    We need to strengthen tenants’ rights so that tenants have greater security and longevity of tenure and can modify the property without the owner’s approval.

    The chief purpose of a housing market is to house people. The taxation system, prudential regulation, and tenancy legislation should reflect that principle.

  29. [Deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek has urged Tony Abbott to use more sober language after his shirtfront threat to Vladimir Putin, so that Russia can see how seriously Australia regards the MH17 crash investigation.

    It is the first time Labor has departed from the Coalition on the handling of the delicate negotiations around the investigation into the shooting down of the Malaysian plane which killed 298 people, including 38 Australian citizens and residents…

    Plibersek said while “it was a stretch to say she agreed with the Kremlin on anything”, MH17 was a “gravely serious matter”, not just for the families and friends of the Australian victims.]

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/16/tanya-plibersek-urges-abbott-more-sober-language-with-putin

  30. [Labor has stepped up its calls for the Australian government to send specialists to west Africa to prevent the spread of Ebola, arguing appropriate evacuation arrangements could be put in place.

    Tony Abbott has said it would be irresponsible “to order our personnel into harm’s way without all appropriate precautions being in place, and at this time, they simply aren’t and they can’t be”.

    But the prime minister is being urged to negotiate with other countries to ensure standby and evacuation management arrangements for any Australian personnel.

    Labor expressed its “grave concern” at the government’s response to the rapidly escalating Ebola crisis in a letter to the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, and the health minister, Peter Dutton.
    ]

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/16/ebola-crisis-labor-urges-coalition-send-australians-africa

  31. [We need to strengthen tenants’ rights so that tenants have greater security and longevity of tenure and can modify the property without the owner’s approval.]

    “Modify” can have many meanings. Very dangerous.

  33. #491 Based on what? Because I wouldn’t go into a pointless a retarded loop of debate on a page full of left supporters? I would love to hear how you are able to pin ones arguing ability on comments that have no basis for political debate? Interesting concept. That’s not your arguing point for the night is it?

    Why initiate a debate about why you won’t debate? Either state your arguments or hold your peace.

  35. Talking of turkeys:

    [ Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
    Follow

    President Obama has a personal responsibility to visit & embrace all people in the US who contract Ebola!
    1:32 AM – 16 Oct 2014]

  38. Weirdly this is correct.

    [Patricia karvelas
    The @theheraldsun and @australian on fire with @fergusonjw at the moment holding Napthine government to account #springst]

  40. Nicholas I tend to agree.

    Firstly with the removal of negative gearing – I’m not sure whether the best way is to quarantine payg wages from business losses or actually have a quarantine around loss making businesses generally. So if you run a deli profitably and have a negative geared property do you get to use your losses. equally should the massive losses at the Australian be offset against massive profits in a separate business – arguably not.

    Agree completely with the land tax although I lean toward an improved value and I don’t think the revenue should offset stamp duty.

    With the social housing you could cap rents and offer tax incentives to have it locked into social housing for x years.

    I’m not sure about the number of properties – when the baby boomers start falling off the perch at ever increasing rates are we going to need massive extra capacity?

    Not sure about tenants rights – happy for them to have a statutory right to ‘improve’ but improve is very subjective. I wouldn’t want a tenant to put in an evap airconditioner – I hate them.

  41. Briefly

    🙂

    Not really sure… But given they stocks have been going the last few weeks, might be good to bail out for a while entirely!

    I did!

    My comment was a little facetious 🙂

  43. [Research shows that about 75% of perpetrators of workplace #bullying are managers and supervisors http://theconversation.com/can-we-fix-the-damage-caused-by-workplace-bullying-7968 … ]

    It’s a neat rick.

    1. If you disagree with them they get you for insubordination.

    2. If you fight the allegation, they adjudicate on it themselves.

    3. If you whinge about that, they get one of their mates to issue the warning.

    4. If you whinge to the mate, they tell you to speak to your manager.

    5. Go back to 1. above.

    The aim is to get the three warnings in place (and thus termination) before the hapless employee susses out the process and takes the complaint out of the loop altogether.

    There’s no guarantee this will work, of course, as management mobbing is a pretty clubby affair. It has depth and breadth. The “circle” in “circle jerk” can go pretty wide and far.

    Very senior managers don’t want trouble with their more junior managers. And no-one wants trouble with Head Office (“The Minister” in the case of the NSW Public Service). So everyone above a certain level tends to scratch each others’ backs.

    When Manager A asks Manager B to issue the discipline (so that it has a sham appearance of independence and fairness), the favour is returned when Manager B gets into trouble. Manager A looks after him. There are truly circle-jerks within circle-jerks. The employee never knows who to trust.

    In the end it’s usually easier to just leave (which is what they want).

    If you fight them, they just go in harder on you.

  45. “Modify” can have many meanings. Very dangerous.

    The legal definition of modify would need to be limited in a way which didn’t damage or degrade the value of the property. The purpose of the law would be to expand the tenant’s power to turn a rented house into a genuine home – a place which is special and personal to them.

  47. BB

    I really hope Lockhead Martin get it worked out. A small and compact Fusion reactor like that would go a long way to solving a whole host of world problems…

    Sadly it may bankrupt a lot of the East Coast and possibly WA by making a lot of coal mining redundant and Gas redundant.

  48. [After nearly four years it seems fitting that the last day of the Baillieu-Napthine Parliament has been rocked by allegations of a Spring Street porn ring.

    Until this week just about the only thing missing from the chaotic 57th Parliament – during which a premier was forced to quit, a Speaker was rolled, and a rogue MP faced court – was a seedy scandal of this kind.

    The lurid claims of “granny porn” and bestiality videos in the Premier’s department come complete with claims of Coalition MPs involvement and have exposed voters to more scenes of chaos in government.]

    http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/victoria-state-election-2014/sex-scandal-and-chaos-at-final-curtain-20141016-116w0a.html

  49. Sadly I am having one of my last remaining US institutions that I could respect collaspe before me.

    I am not known for being very pro US but i did very highly regard the CDC. However it seems as if they have comprehensively failed in this Ebola outbreak. the first time they are called on to actually manage an infectious disease of real concern they fail completely.

    Firstly they could not be bothered sending a high level team to Dallas to guide the hospital. What the F!!!!!!!!!!. Whjy not.

    Now we are told that the nurse RANG them before getting on a plane and was given the OK. Jeepers.

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