Newspoll: 55-45 to Labor

After a surprisingly solid bounce back to the Coalition a fortnight ago, the latest Newspoll splits the difference of the previous two results.

James J in comments has the goods on Newspoll, brought to you by tomorrow’s Australian. After contracting from 57-43 to 53-47 in last fortnight’s poll, this one splits the difference at 55-45. The primary votes are 38% for the Coalition (steady), 39% for Labor (up one) and 12% for the Greens (steady), so I think it’s fair to say that rounding has a fair bit to do with the two-point shift on two-party preferred. There is slight improvement for Tony Abbott on personal ratings after two successive diabolical results, with his approval up three to 28% and disapproval down five to 63%. However, Bill Shorten is also back up after a series of weak results, with approval up four to 39% and disapproval down seven to 42%. His lead as preferred prime minister widens from 43-35 to 44-33. The poll was conducted from Friday to Sunday, from a sample of 1161.

UPDATE: The Australian’s report here.

UPDATE 2 (Essential Research): Another stable result for Essential’s fortnightly rolling average, which has Labor down a point on the primary vote to 40% and everything else unchanged – the Coalition on 40%, Greens on 9%, Palmer United on 2% and two-party preferred on 53-47. We also get Essential’s monthly personal ratings, recording the change since Tony Abbott’s post-Australia Day nadir. His approval is up two to 31% with disapproval down six to 56%, which is still solidly worse than where he was in January. Bill Shorten is up one on both approval and disapproval to 34% and 39%, and likewise rating solidly lower than two months ago. Shorten’s lead as preferred prime minister is pared back from 39-31 to 37-33.

Further questions find 50% opposed to sending troops to Iraq, with only 36% in support. Questions on tax find respondents believing companies and individuals on high incomes pay too little of it and everyone else pays too much, and that higher tax rates for multinational corporations would be good for the economy.

Still to come this afternoon: the fortnightly face-to-face plus SMS result from Morgan.

UPDATE 3 (Morgan): Contra Newspoll, Morgan shifts to the Coalition since last fortnight’s result, their primary vote up 1.5% to 39%, with Labor down 2.5% to 38% and the Greens up 1.5% to 11.5%. Labor’s two-party preferred lead is 53.5-46.5 on both respondent-allocated and previous election measures, respectively compared with 56-44 and 55-45 last time. The result is unusual for Morgan both in failing to record Labor above the overall trend, and in not having Labor higher on respondent-allocated than previous election preferences. The poll was conducted over the past two weekends from a sample of 3182.

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.

1,045 comments on “Newspoll: 55-45 to Labor”

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  1. oh, and i’d say that for 12 subs, over the WHOLE life of the project, your looking at $40 Billion easy. But spread over 30 years.

  2. Barney in Saigon

    Except in passing on that knowledge, the university is generating an income for the community, I think both of your points are equally important, we really don’t need 39 research focused places, but they can do that injunction with teaching the future workforce to hopefully think more or think better.

  3. mexicanbeemer

    One easy prediction for iron ore prices was that when all those mega projects started producing the price would go off the high boar dive platform.

  4. Frednk

    As a bit of an election night tragic I would love to be watching when Abbott gives a concession speech.

    But I am not sure we can wait 18 months. Things need to be done now to try and retrieve a couple of situations and a year of inaction could be costly.

  5. bug1

    I understand the strategy but from a shareholders perceptive, last year the iron ore was being sold at about $129 a tonne, its now being sold for as little as $65 a tonne.

    This is a similar situation to what we are seeing with the Saudis and oil.

  6. 902
    Arrnea Stormbringer

    Try to imagine what money supply is. There are various forms of currency, deposits and securities and their varying rates of circulation, the changeable liquidity of markets…and then there is everything that has been or could be issued, created, produced, commodified, exchanged and discounted…and all the contingent values derived from contracts to exchange and discount uncertain values in the future, values that can be infinitely replicated.

    What is money supply in this situation? How can it be measured? If you can’t measure it, can it both exist and not exist simultaneously – that is, it can be created and liquidated continuously. And what is demand? What is the difference between supply and demand when they are the obverse sides of the same balance sheets?

    How do these things relate to the real economy? That is, how does the infinitely fungible relate to the purely tangible? And how does the present relate to the future? What are the factors that determine behaviours? Where does the velocity of exchange fit into concepts of supply and demand?

  7. MB, i am overweight in BHP (and happy about it), i think its a good long term strategy
    In a few years when they have driven out their competitors i guess they could manipulate supply to drive up prices, but harder to do with a lot of suppliers.
    I always feel smarted having read the details of their plans.

  8. Apparently Oil is different because demand is more flexible, and supply is more limited. It will turn around quicker than iron ore.

  9. Barnaby seems to have had a barney with the Agriculture Department Secretary last week before a Senate Estimates Committee meeting.

    It seems that all questions in the hearing were taken on notice.

    After that the Departmental Secretary went back to his office, packed his briefcase and disappeared without a word to anyone. And not been seen since.

  10. lizzie

    [Mrs Rinehart, who is estimated by BRW to have a $20 billion fortune, said it was high costs, rather than low iron ore prices that affected her Roy Hill project.]

    Oooooooooooooooh Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.

  11. Boerwar

    Why do you think it took her so many years to get finance for her mega project ? The money came pretty late in the boom. The reason all the time reported as being it was such a high cost mine.

    So any price plunge was always going to burn baby burn.

  12. @ briefly, 959

    Obviously, a Government cannot reasonably be expected to control these things unless it legislates to restrict the authority of bodies other than the government to issue credit (ie. currency).

    However, the Government can still use it in a reactionary sense – if the currency is appreciating or depreciating, it can figure out why this is happening and throw the appropriate levers of fiscal and monetary policy in order to get the currency to around where the Government would like it to be for the betterment of the economy.

  13. Poroti

    gina’s mine may have been high cost but if I was in the money lending business for mega mines my biggest worry would be Gina.

    She doesn’t come across as a sensible well rounded individual.

    I would be asking myself “if she can do what she has done to her kids, what might she do to me” if there was some sort of dispute

  14. [Apparently Oil is different because demand is more flexible, and supply is more limited. It will turn around quicker than iron ore.]

    That is what some are saying. But these same people had failed to see this over supply coming so I don’t have a lot of faith in them.

  15. Surely, when your people have lived in the same place for 40,000 years, it’s a lifestyle choice. What’s the big issue.

  16. Abbott writes to the Victorian Premier claiming ten plagues will descend on Victoria and Australia over cancellation of the East-West tunnel contract. Andrews pulls no punches in his reply. Both letters are reproduced in full, no doubt released by Andrews.

    [

    “Be assured we will take more care getting Victorians out of the disastrous East West deal than the former Liberal state government took getting us into it,” Mr Andrews wrote.

    “I look forward to working with you on important infrastructure projects, but no amount of hysteria or attempted bullying or blatant politicking will change the result of the 2014 Victorian election.”

    Mr Andrews also referred to the fact the Prime Minister had described last year’s state election as a “referendum” on the East West Link.

    “While I note you have broken significant election promises, including savage cuts to health and education and changes to the aged pension, my government will be one that honours its election commitments in full,” Mr Andrews wrote.]

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-11/pm-and-vic-premier-heading-for-a-showdown-over-ewl-contract/6304796

  17. BHP/RIO are aiming at costs of $25 per tonne, if it drops to $50 they still have a good profit margin.

    I am not sure this is correct. The $25/tonne is the cost to mine the ore and get it to Port. It may even cover shipping. But the other $25 is not all profit. Many businesses need a multiplier of at least 2.1 times the cost of the resource to break even. In the case of BHP etc, they also need to cover the cost of exploration, research, admin, head office etc. $50/tonne may well be close to break even, and below this they are losing

  18. Bw

    [Anyway I hope that Grimes is OK.]

    Me too.

    He’s very introverted so won’t, I guess, spit the dummy unless he’s been really provoked.

  19. Malcolm has his say ( sorry if already posted)……

    Malcolm Turnbull has condemned Joe Hockey’s proposal that first-home buyers be able to dip into their superannuation as a “thoroughly bad idea”, contradicting Tony Abbott, who called it a “perfectly good and respectable” one.

    In an address to the Brisbane Club, Turnbull also declared that the 2014 budget had been the Abbott government’s “biggest misstep”, that the time for political “spin and slogans” or “exaggeration and oversimplification” was over and that governments got voted out if they were not seen as competent economic managers

  20. Mines recover all of their exploration and set up costs within 10 years of operation.

    Yes, but that’s not all of the costs to the business, and depends on the price.

  21. “@ABCNews24: Just in: Australia’s most senior Islamic cleric Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohamed has arrived in Indonesia to plead mercy for #bali9 duo on death row”

  22. This “lifestyle” comment is a precise reading of how desperate Abbott is feeling; how badly he needs to make inflammatory comments on an issue like this to try to firm up what little support he has left within his party.

    Perhaps the end is closer than we had imagined, if this serves as any guide.

    Every now and again, I need to pinch myself and understand afresh that it is a measure of what an utter liability of a PM Abbott has become that the Libs would even contemplate ditching him, given the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd recent history.

    And yet he really is that awful, and more and more Liberal MPs are quietly realising that is the case. They have resolved to do one thing differently to Labor: to replace Abbott with a little more afore-thought and care than was the case for both episodes in R-G-R.

  23. citizen rossmcg – far from my Victoian home up here in NW NSW those letters have made my day!

    I saw recently that there was a (very sparsely attended) “rally” held by the Federal Liberal members for Deakin and Aston and maybe one other. They were pleading for Daniel Andrews to break his promise and instead build the cemetery tunnel – there was not a State Liberal within coo-ee! They would have died of embarrassment!

  24. evening all.

    One powerful motivation our PM has is stirring the left, which coincidentally plays to the base.
    I’ll always remember Howard’s election announcement speech after he left the GG. It was all about ‘trust’ and more specifically ‘who do you trust to keep interest rates low’
    This was after the Iraq war and WMD.
    Abbott is minster for Women and Aboriginal affairs. He purposely picked Women to stir the left.

    The comments yesterday were part of that, in addition to playing to the base.

  25. Rocket

    You can’t help wondering why Abbott would write to Andrews in those terms.

    Maybe he had a chat to Credlin that went like this.

    “Hey Peta, I am right in it over the aboriginal lifestyle thing, the media is all over me, Mundine and Pearson have even given me a spray. Good mates they turned out to be. how can I get out of this?”

    “Simple tones, you are in Victoria tomorrow, just get out that letter we drafted a few months ago about the east west link. That will distract them”

    “You are a genius Peta, just pick a new fight, worked every time back in my Sydney uni days. Just keep me away from the walls, keep me away from the walls …”

  26. Guytaur

    Hockey said that about the GST early in the week, it was so obviously ridiculous that nobody reacted and the story disappeared without trace

    So he probably thought that seeing nobody attacked one of his ideas as they usually do he would give it another run.

    He is a tragic figure. His best hope is justice white puts him out of his misery in the Fairfax case.

  27. Jack Waterford stinging rebuke of Abbott’s lifestyle brain fart:

    http://www.theage.com.au/comment/bigger-is-not-necessarily-better-for-indigenous-communities-20150311-140tel.html

    Could this just be the straw that finally breaks the camels back …coupled with Turnbull going in hard against Jo Ho and Abbott’s spin and Jo Ho’s disastrous days in court … it aint getting better, just day after day of unnecessary self inflicted wounds. I suspect it will end soon.

  28. Our governments fund all kinds of western cultural artifacts. Sport, arts, services in western communities, etc. What we choose to fund tells us what it is we – or those in government, rather – value.

    It’s fair enough for Abbott to tell us that he sees little value in the Aboriginal way of life, and that admission shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that Abbott has demonstrated time and time again that he doesn’t value the thoughts of anyone who doesn’t simply echo his own ideology back to him.

    Abbott’s genuine and sincere commitment to improving Aboriginal affairs needs to be seen in that light. It is not a commitment to finding ways to enable them to build a viable Aboriginal culture and way of life in a modern context, but a genuine and sincere commitment to enabling them in changing into more Tony Abbotts.

  29. “@afneil: Greek Justice Min “ready to approve” Greek Supreme Court that German property in Greece cld be seized as compensation for wartime atrocities”

  30. Rossmore @ 996

    The really awful thing about this issue is that it is a difficult one for the various indigenous communities and quite complex, involving issues such as education, domestic violence, connection to the land and dispossession.

    To reduce the whole discussion to one of money and ‘lifestyle’ is utterly ignorant and demeaning, whether you consider some or all of these communities viable or not.

    That is the problem with this PM and why he is the worst we have ever had. Whether it is shirtfronting Putin or refusing to fund the ‘lifestyle’ of indigenous people ,while pouring a fortune into making the lifestyle of politicians more pleasant, he reduces complexity to, in the words of H. L. Mencken, an answer that is neat, plausible and wrong.

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