Only very slight movements on BludgerTrack this week, Labor’s strong showing in Newspoll having been dampened a little by a relatively weak result from Morgan. The seat projection is unchanged in aggregate, although the Coalition is up a seat in Victoria and down one in Tasmania. Palmer United has once again reached a new low. There’s quite a bit more movement on the personal ratings on the back of this week’s Newspoll numbers, which continue to show Tony Abbott’s net approval heading south with some velocity, and Bill Shorten’s lead as preferred prime minister solidifying.
Neither of my two very small dogs pay any attention to thunder and lightning. However they howl like wolves whenever a fire, ambulance or police siren sounds in the distance. They have startling hearing, being able to tell which type of car door is slamming; those from next door or me, my partner or my sister. Former are ignored, others greeted with joyous surge to the front door. I have two very different vehicles. They know them both.
fess,
If there are no boats and there are no AS in detention, what is there to whip up.
People will move on to the usual issues of jobs and the economy.
The Libs have implemented there policy this year. Yet, they remain 10 points behind in the polls. People aren’t factoring it in atm because it’s not on the front pages.
[And then watch all the old white male social conservatives fall over with massive heart attacks]
Or the Big Swinging Dicks try to take her out more like. Remember he last time she was deputy leader to MT?
Its Time
That makes perfect sense to me. However we know Murdoch press have been promoting Bishop. See Peter Van Onselen tweets as one example.
We now have Sauron’s mouth sorry Murdoch’s editor running attacks on Hockey.
I am not saying it will happen just that there are signs it might. I do not see any other candidate in Cabinet having Turnbull as Treasurer
GG:
For the sake of the issue and our sanity, I hope you’re right. But given boats represents a very rare policy win by the Abbott govt, I wouldn’t be surprised if they ramp it up for all it’s worth. Even more so if Morrison the obviously anointed is reshuffled and promoted into a super ministry within the broader defence portfolio.
jules
[if what Morrison is doing is the closest we can come to preventing hundreds drowning perhaps it isn’t worth it.]
Well, it isn’t. There are other possible approaches.
[Regional processing won’t stop boats..]
Yes, I’ve said that.
There needs to be a stick still – as I said, there’s no way you can stop boats AND not be nasty to AS, it depends on the kind of nastiness.
The Malaysian solution was a regional solution. It had the potential to stop the boats, because no one would want to be one of the first 800, and if no one wants to be in the first 800, there obviously won’t be a first 800.
The stick was the threat that, if you were one of the first 800, you’d be sent to Malaysia. Potentially, nobody would be.
Probably there would be a couple of hundred refugees sent to Malaysia, before the message did get home. I don’t think that’s a fate worse than death, though.
But yes, we need to get something serious sorted now, because if we do have climate change refugees, the numbers we’re dealing with now will look like a joke.
The asylum seeker issue is a key part of conservative politics.
Tory economic policies screw working people, so to keep 50% + 1 of the populace voting Tory they need to play the race card – appeal to downward envy etc.
A terrifying picture from Counterpunch
______________________
Mexico…where the corrupt Govt,under endless presure from US capitalism, and a police force which uses the war on drugs to supress and murder all sorts of dissidents…a good example is the disappearance(murder!) of 43 young student demonstrators ,taken by the police with the approval of a local mayor and then murdered by a drug gang on the police payroll
,,and that’s just for starters
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/04/mexicos-youth-under-siege/
fess,
People will be more focussed on bread and butter issues at the next election like jobs, jobs and jobs. If the Libs are driving us over a cliff in to recession, then AS won’t save them.
Alberici just referred to the Abbott government suffering RUdd Gillard stye leaks.
It must be worse for them than I thought
[But given boats represents a very rare policy win by the Abbott govt,…]
How do we know?
They say they have stopped the boats.
1256
It is not correct to say that the only way to stop the boats is to be mean to those who use them. That is the only way to stop the people who use boats from trying to get to Australia (apart from making Australia a worse place, in general, than they are fleeing from) but they would not be coming by boat dangerous and expensive boat if they could just catch normal commercial air services.
Being mean to asylum seekers is not about stopping drownings, it is about stopping them coming here.
[How do we know?]
Because the media isn’t dominated by stories of boats like it was under the previous two govts, or nations arking up like it was under the first few months of this current govt.
On the issue of boats, perception is everything it would seem.
Tom the first and best@1262
Back to immigration without limits are we Tom?
Trainwreck interview for Ciobo the look on Burke’s face was priceless.
I recommend watching for those of you in later timezones.
Psephy fact
Voters are statistically more likely to vote for increased school funding if their local polling booth is a school, as opposed to a church, community hall etc.
[But yes, we need to get something serious sorted now, because if we do have climate change refugees, the numbers we’re dealing with now will look like a joke.]
I’m glad we can agree on something.
Laurie Oakes fills in a lot of gaps.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/liberal-leaks-hint-at-eroded-trust/story-fni0fha6-1227146470132?nk=6ff4d0ee1f2dcbfadb57bb3ae28b2ecf
Australia was pretty happy with Rudd relaxing our asylum seeker policy until the numbers increased dramatically and hundreds of people were drowning every year.
It wasn’t the relaxed rules that killed Labor; it was the outcome of the rule change.
Dio 1267 – interesting. It is hard to do real scientific trials of anything to do with elections. I think in Africa a few years ago someone got some leader to give different speeches in different towns. One version of the speech was “motherhood/apple pie” type and the other was “security/crime” type I think. Then they compared voting aptterns, and maybe gender differences (not quite sure how you’d do that unless exit polling). Will look it up.
Jimmy D
Yeah, I know. That didn’t come out the way I meant it. The thing is that “boats” is a damned if you do and damned if you don’t thing.
Fraser was right to nip it in the bud before it got out of hand. Unfortunately Hanson started the ball rolling, and Howard gave it it’s head.
Now that the genie is out of the bottle, it’s going to take a hell of a lot to get it back in again. That’s if it actually can be put back in.
I’m not sure a regional processing centre is ever going to get off the ground either considering how badly Abbott et al have handled diplomacy in the region.
Immigration really is a poisoned chalice.
Diogenes
[Australia was pretty happy with Rudd relaxing our asylum seeker policy until the numbers increased dramatically and hundreds of people were drowning every year.
It wasn’t the relaxed rules that killed Labor; it was the outcome of the rule change.]
That was Rudd’s biggest failure with this.
Instead of increasing intake from the refugee camps and flying those in, he decided make sudden moves which gave the signal the smugglers took advantage of.
I’ll include the reference for those interested.
[Can Polling Location Influence How Voters Vote?
A study says the location of where voting takes place “would be more than enough to change the outcome of a close election.”]
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/can-polling-location-influence-how-voters-vote
I think maybe this was it – not quite as I remembered.
http://www.3ieimpact.org/evidence/impact-evaluations/details/35/
Diogs,
Are the ubiquitous Sausage sizzles the sauce of this research!
Dan @ 1271 – it is definitely a vexed issue, but only for Labor. The Coalition seems to have abandoned any pretence of ‘conserving’ civilised society, as conservatives once said they did.
guytaur @ 1248 – it seems as though my call was wrong and that Labor will fall just short of winning Prahran. I don’t see how the Greens can win if Labor can’t.
Dio – maybe Campbell Newman might now try to direct the Electoral Commission of Queensland to favour churches and sports halls for the 2015 election!
JD
When the votes are that close all three could win.
[Laurie Oakes fills in a lot of gaps.]
Oakes seems to be simply recycling a lot of what his colleague Benson had to say during the week, while protecting Abbott by referencing Credlin and PMO instead of the ‘buck stops here’ Abbott.
I suppose Credlin won’t be the first CoS to take the hit for her charge’s incompetence. But damned if she didn’t do a good job given the material she had to work with.
guytaur – but there’s no votes left to count?
JD
Last I saw it was 87% counted
GG @ 1268
I’d be more than happy for this government to fall apart and do itself in all by itself and have everything I said earlier today be proven needless ;).
guytaur – this was posted by William @ 225 over at the Vic Legislative Assembly count thread –
[“The VEC advises that the Prahran preference count will be conducted on Monday. The only new votes that might be added are postals arriving from overseas, of which there would certainly be very few and perhaps none at all.”]
Or even wrong. I don’t mind being wrong if I’m arguing that the Coalition shouldn’t be written off.
JD
Counting of votes is what I was referring to sorry.
guytaur – also don’t we have to add the % of informals to the % of votes counted – that would bring it up to to 92% which would be very near all votes counted.
DN,
But, you were advised today that you’re really a Lib supporter.
Please show the suitable depression.
JD
I do not know how its going to end up. I suspect the Liberals will win but I hope Labor or the Greens will.
Preferences will change things and the advantage of first place in primary may not be decisive on preferences
guytaur – I think the Libs will win :/
I’ve been wrong before and I’d be very happy to be wrong now.
Good.night
I think if you’re trying to predict who might lead the Liberal Part, simply figuring out the most rational choice may not be terribly predictive.
For all we know, Morrison wants the top job. And its even possible his colleagues might support him.
Wouldn’t that be fun.
I think if Abbott stays, the Libs have less than a 1 in 3 chance of winning. That’s why I want them to keep Abbott.
[1195
Nicholas]
Latham lost because of perceptions that he was personally unreliable.
Howard very shrewdly couched this as a question of “trust”, which was a coded appeal to popular desire for security or predictability – a preference for certainty.
Even inside the ALP, Latham was regarded as a misfit – a talented but self-aggrandising, jealous, ill-disciplined, bullying, personally-aggressive stuntman. He had very little respect for his peers or for anything else for that matter – a trait he still exhibits.
Latham basically failed to understand the difference between courage and disdain.
My own view is that, much as I dislike Howard, the country is very fortunate that Latham was never elected. For arrogance, he is surpassed only by the current PM.
[My own view is that, much as I dislike Howard, the country is very fortunate that Latham was never elected. For arrogance, he is surpassed only by the current PM.]
That election offered me such a shitty choice, that for only the 2nd time in my life I voted informal. Didn’t make a sod of difference in my electorate. I just felt slightly less dirty.
Becoming as violent and repressive as Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka would stop asylum seekers from coming to Australia. Should we do that?
There are things a civilized people cannot do. Inflicting mental illnesses on people through indefinite detention and limbo is one thing. Resettling people in corrupt, impoverished nations like Cambodia is another. Malaysia is unsuitable too because it’s a developing country with massive problems of corruption and non-existent rule of law. If the main opposition leader spends years in prison on a trumped up sodomy conviction, gets released, is barred from politics, and then gets charged with another bogus sodomy wrap so he cannot pose a threat to the government, that is not a country ready to accommodate refugees. Malaysia’s ethnic politics are extremely complex and fraught. Where would Afghans and Sri Lankans have fit into that picture? The “Malaysia Solution” was an idle thought bubble with no real humanity or geopolitical understanding behind it. Let’s face it: the gold standard on asylum seeker policy is Malcolm Fraser. The rot started when Paul Keating, great though he was on indigenous affairs, introduced mandatory indefinite detention for asylum seekers.
We should not accept the Coalition’s lie that Labor was responsible for the increase in boat numbers from 2009 onwards. The brutal repression of the uprising in Iran in 2009 made a difference. The bloody end game of Sri Lanka’s civil war in May 2009, and the internment camps for Tamils in the north which followed, made a difference. Push factors determine global refugee flows. It wasn’t the Rudd Government letting applicants stay in the community which motivated all those people to come. Push factors, people. It is conceited in the extreme to think that Australian immigration policy is any kind of factor compared with massive violence and mayhem in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other failed or fragile states.
The world does not revolve around Australia. We cannot stop the repression of people in Iran. But we do have a choice about how we treat people when they arrive in our territory in search of protection.
So let’s just focus on the things we can control and stop letting conservatives get away with murder (literally and figuratively).
The deaths at sea argument is bogus. I’m sorry, but it is. I know a lot of well-meaning people have been sucked in by it. But the reality is that when there are tens of millions of people at risk of murder, torture, and systematic discrimination around the world, there are going to be boats and there’s not a damn thing we can do in the short term to stop that. But we can refrain from compounding the tragedy by inflicting mental illness on people and sticking them in a slum in Cambodia because we can’t be arsed to fulfil our duty as a rich country.
Re Prahran__________Gaytuar
In the final days of the count the ALP leads the Greens (who polled a remarkable 25% )by about 400 votes
Then the Green prefs go out and the ALP is now just 42 votes behind the Lib…who will surely win as there are few if any votes to comes.all booth and postal/absents having been counted,,,no way the Greens can win
sorry …. but that looks like it
the closes result I think in the whole poll,
http://www.vec.vic.gov.au/Results/State2014/PrahranDistrict.html
Prahran count from Friday’s Vic Electoral Commission website
[1298
deblonay
Posted Saturday, December 6, 2014 at 12:18 am | Permalink
http://www.vec.vic.gov.au/Results/State2014/PrahranDistrict.html%5D
This is almost certainly a 3-cornered contest in which the LNP has won because of competition between Labor and the Greens.
1299
We do not know the Green versus Liberal 2CP. If the ALP preferences the Greens slightly more strongly than the other way around, with the Greens passing the ALP on preferences (could definitely still happen but it will be close either way), the Greens could win it.
Do you have any evidence that having ALP versus Green competition helped the Libs?