Today’s Courier-Mail brings a Galaxy poll of federal voting intention in Queensland, encompassing 800 respondents and presumably conducted over the past few days. The primary vote numbers are 44% for the Coalition, 36% for Labor, 10% for the Greens and 2% for Palmer United, compared with respective results at the 2013 election of 45.7%, 29.8%, 6.2% and 11.0%. This converts into a Coalition two-party lead of 51-49, a swing to Labor of 6% from the 2013 result.
A fair bit happening lately on the federal preselection front:
• Joanna Lindgren will fill the Queensland Senate vacancy created by Brett Mason’s appointment as ambassador to the Netherlands, after prevailing in a preselection ballot over seven rival candidates. Her win was achieved despite Tony Abbott, John Howard and Julie Bishop having backed Bill Glasson, an opthamologist, former Australian Medical Association president and twice-unsuccessful candidate for Griffith, firstly against Kevin Rudd in 2013 and again at the by-election held to replace him the following February. Lindgren has been described as a “project officer”, and is apparently the great-niece of former Liberal Senator Neville Bonner, Australia’s first indigenous parliamentarian.
• The Queensland ALP wrapped up preselection in nearly every seat that matters on Wednesday. Cameron Atfield of the Sydney Morning Herald reports the candidate for Forde in Brisbane’s outer south is Des Hardman, who made way for Peter Beattie’s unsuccessful bid for the seat in 2013. Laura Fraser Hardy, a lawyer, will make her second successive run against Liberal incumbent Ross Vasta in the bayside marginal seat of Bonner. The preselection of five out of Labor’s six lower house incumbents was also confirmed, including that of Wayne Swan in Lilley. The exception is Bernie Ripoll in Oxley, who will make way for Brisbane City Council opposition leader Milton Dick.
• A Liberal National Party preselection held this morning for Clive Palmer’s seat of Fairfax was won by Ted O’Brien, managing director of government relations firm Barton Deakin and the unsuccessful candidate in 2013. Others in the field were Peter Duffy, a construction manager; Don Jamieson, a banking manager; Chloe Kopilovic, a solicitor; Adrian McCallum, an engineering lecturer at the University of Sunshine Coast; and Mark Somlyay, an accountant and son of former member Alex Somlyay. Labor has preselected Scott Anderson, an IT consultant.
• Heath Aston of the Sydney Morning Herald reports that NSW Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon’s bid for another term is meeting resistance from no fewer than 16 rival preselection nominees. Among them are several colleagues of Rhiannon’s in the “hard left” faction, including Jim Casey, the state secretary of the Fire Brigade Employees Union, together with “James Ryan, Amanda Findley, Jane Oakley and Ben Hammond”. Also in the field are Cate Faerhrmann, who filled Rhiannon’s state upper house vacancy when she moved to the Senate in 2010, before abandoning it for an unsuccessful Senate bid in 2013; and Arthur Chesterfield-Evans, who held a state upper house seat for the Australian Democrats from 1998 to 2007.
• Sean Ford of the Burnie Advocate reports that Labor’s preselection candidates for the north-western Tasmanian seat of Braddon include Justine Keay, a Devonport alderman and electorate officer to Tasmanian Opposition Leader Bryan Green, and Themba Bulle, a Burnie general practitioner. The current Liberal member, Brett Whiteley, won the seat from Labor’s Sid Sidebottom in 2013.
• Labor’s candidate to run against Adam Bandt in Melbourne is Sophie Ismail, a Victorian Education Department lawyer and member of the Socialist Left faction.
[SA is not Labor’s best state – see Bludgertrack.]
No, but it’s one of its best states – see Bludgertrack.
As I said, be sceptical of that poll. It goes against what most other things have been saying about the state and its attitude towards Abbott – as well as recent state by-elections under a 4th term Labor Government.
Also, I’d probably consider the thing more if I got full information i.e. 2PP or at least a numerical value of what the Greens’ vote is (not “soaked up some votes”)
[
We’ll have to wait and see if Musrum turns up to fix it.
]
I don’t use the plugin / extension Musrum developed. This is a Crikey problem that they need to fix.
“@shanebazzi: Pezzullo refers to children in detention as “stock” #estimates”
“@shanebazzi: Pezzullo says he hates to use that term #estimates”
@shanebazzi: Pezzullo again refers to human beings as “stock” #estimates”
I have no words
For the third time I will state: I don’t use the cccp stuff and Preview is not working. So Crikey program?
markjs@1141
Right.
I know it’s a matter of personal taste, but to me, Win 7 > Win 8.1 > Win Vista.
The classic menu addon makes Windows 8.1 tolerable and actually shine above all else.
So AFP drops the Brandis incident, but goes after mythical terrorists.
lizzie 1154
Looks that way.
Cormann suffers (no, his audience suffers) from verbal diarrhoea.
Every time Cormann goes off the subject with time-wasting detail, Corey insists the Minister be heard in full.
[ “@shanebazzi: Pezzullo refers to children in detention as “stock” #estimates”
“@shanebazzi: Pezzullo says he hates to use that term #estimates”
@shanebazzi: Pezzullo again refers to human beings as “stock” ]
Only a step from there to herding them into cattle trucks.
Hate to sound like an apologist for the AFP But hard for them to go after Brandis if Trigg won’t take part.
And while we all know what happened it was never going to fly regardless. Unless they could find the missing notes.
markjs / Raaraa
I’m sticking with Win 7 for now.
tom tf&b:
[Most of the money spent on upgrades of power systems in recent years has been for air-conditioning related peaks.]
This is true, but it’s not the full story.
It’s the range of loads from peak to trough, or specifically, the voltage differences they induce, that’s driven the need for upgrades. The load peaks have increased as you say, but the load troughs have come from PV inducing reverse power flows and voltage spikes in the last mile of the networks. The way around this to lower the resistance of the conductor (bigger or more wires) or install active voltage management kit, such as capacitor banks and OLTC transformers, all of which are expensive.
[End user location PV reduces air-conditioning related peaks on the grid.]
Over the system yes, but this only reduces the generation costs. This is a simplification that both Parkinson and Hartcher glide over.
[Therefore PV reduces the need for grid spending.]
The problem is that location matters an awful lot. On some residential feeders there is very little load during the day, but lots of PV generation. So now you need to move that energy from where it’s generated to where its consumed during the day – industrial and commercial centres. These are usually on different branches of the network. However, the networks were built to distribute energy radially, not collect it from one feeder and move it to the next. To add this capacity costs $$$.
[Much of the grid spending was due to a lack of anticipation of solar and other electricity demand reduction.]
The first is simply not the case. The network companies operate in a highly-regulated environment and when they get a report that a voltage is out of bounds, they are legally compelled to take steps remedy it, or face substantial fines. Sometimes it’s fixed by a manual tap change on a transformer or switching the phase of a particular load. Other times, it’s the installation of a pile of very expensive plant.
The point is the network businesses are obliged by regulation to do this, and the same people who oversee the regulations are the same people who put in place the incentive to invest in PV – the State Govts. Aka, self-administered clustefwrk.
Your second point is true. I do have to wonder what AEMO were thinking when they forecast continually increasing demand, but didn’t take into account the effects of first CFL and then LED lighting, efficient heat-pumps and reverse-cycle airconditioning, efficiency gains in TVs and other electronics, and most glaringly, a huge ramp-up in home insulation. They dropped the ball, big time.
So poroti, what happened to the chaps playing Cricket?
[So poroti, what happened to the chaps playing Cricket?]
Yeah poroti, what’s the go? It looks like your mob are playing the Poms into some form? Is this all part of some diabolical conspiracy?
The usual Septic entertainment industry stuff starts:
[B.B. King was ‘poisoned’ by his business manager and personal assistant, say blues star’s daughters ]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bb-king-was-poisoned-say-daughters-10275075.html
Just Me at 1093
Have to admit the same thought had occurred to me.
[Giles seems to be arguing that the increase in network costs driven by PV don’t matter because when we all get (currently still bloody expensive) batteries, the problems in the networks will all be sorted.]
I’m not sure you’d describe the batteries as cheap but equally you would be off the mark if you were going to assume they are going to stay bloody expensive.
The leaders will start doing it now, but within 5 years surely PV, battery / storage is going to be standard and the question will be whether you go completely offgrid with some generation backup (in WA where we have gas a nice little gas generator to top up the batteries at times might be obvious) or whether you stay on the grid.
Surely the only way for the major grids to stay in the picture is ensure that the last decade of network waste and gold plating is moved entirely from the the electricity consumer to taxpayer as a bad debt. If this massive sunk cost stays in the network it is going to be impossible to justify staying on the grid. And Some nice little agreements with neighbors (share the costs of a more powerful backup generator and battery pack), perhaps neighborhoods facilitated by Local Government might help with backup and emergency supply.
Seems to me all but certain the networks have died and just don’t know it yet, all the fighting is over how to pay for the funeral and live afterwards.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150521143926.htm
[Sudden onset of ice loss in Antarctica so large it affects Earth’s gravity field
Around 2009, multiple glaciers along a vast coastal expanse, measuring some 750km in length, suddenly started to shed ice into the ocean at a nearly constant rate of 60 cubic km, or about 55 trillion litres of water, each year.]
Fiddling while Rome burns.
Gold plated electricity network?
Tell that to the 250,000 customers who lost power recently.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/25/the-benefits-of-solar-do-outweigh-its-costs-some-have-a-hard-time-accepting-it
Solar – as seen by groups that are not the Grattan Institute.
CTar1
Apparently police are investigating the possibility of homicide re BB King
lizzie@1070
Made the pain of listening to a whole hour of Joe worth it. 🙂
[The leaders will start doing it now, but within 5 years surely PV, battery / storage is going to be standard and the question will be whether you go completely offgrid with some generation backup (in WA where we have gas a nice little gas generator to top up the batteries at times might be obvious) or whether you stay on the grid.]
That depends how much you want to spend and how often you want to be without power, I guess.
Local storage will comes, yes, because the it can be used to obviate network expenditure. This is its greatest benefit. But you don’t need local generation too.
Rooftop PV is simply not efficient, due to poor alignment with the sun, shading, bad maintenance, less efficient power electronics, the list goes on. You can drip-feed your battery during the night (and day) when your load is low, from the existing grid, and draw on it to overcome your load spikes, and PV doesn’t come into the reasoning.
Even better than, you can share the power capacity of you and your neighbours’ batteries – but in order to do that, you need a network, and a way of coordinating the loads supplied by batteries and accounting for the transfers between power suppliers and loads. Also, the last km of network is the most costly – quite literally, the wires are thicker to minimise losses at low voltages (Loss = I^2*R).
[Surely the only way for the major grids to stay in the picture is ensure that the last decade of network waste and gold plating]
See my comment at 1162. They were compelled to do this. The state Govts took with one hand and gave with the other. It’s taxation by stealth.
[ is moved entirely from the the electricity consumer to taxpayer as a bad debt.]
I’ve seen this proposed and I think it’s a reasonable way to get around the impasse; but we still pay, just in proportion to our tax rather than energy use. The money has already been spent!
[If this massive sunk cost stays in the network it is going to be impossible to justify staying on the grid.]
I bet it won’t. How much will you pay in network costs to avoid being without power for 5 hours a year, or 50 hours a year? Or 500 hours a year, which is about what you have to endure even if you drop $30k on a PV-battery system now? Network connection fees of $2k seems like a cheap option to me.
[And Some nice little agreements with neighbors (share the costs of a more powerful backup generator and battery pack), perhaps neighborhoods facilitated by Local Government might help with backup and emergency supply.]
That sounds like the fifties!
Why did all the local energy generators amalgamate and building out transmission networks during the 60s and 70s?
Why not go all the way up to utility scale generation, we already have the network? Tranmission networks are really quite cheap to run, esp compared to distribution.
[Seems to me all but certain the networks have died and just don’t know it yet, all the fighting is over how to pay for the funeral and live afterwards.]
They’re not dead, just sleeping. Hit their return on WACC and they’ll come to life 🙂
lizzie
Yes, I think something went strange at Crikey. I now have to use Chrome to access it because I couldn’t log in – couldn’t even register a new user name.
It annoys me minorly because I had a System which involved pollbludger being on IE and other things being on Chrome and now it’s mucked up…
zoomster
Ooooh, that’s very annoying. I’m getting a few blank moments like the 8 am freeze, so I tend to save longer posts in case they get eaten.
[Why not go all the way up to utility scale generation, we already have the network? ]
Well if those networks were looking like they were going to be part of the future and competitive then obviously you would stay with them, if your network connection charge and tariffs made that option more effective than onsite generation and emergency backup you’d use that. If the connection charge and annual tariffs are going to compare more to a new set of batteries or even a second backup generator what are you going to chose? Even where it is not purely economic ‘independence’ is a powerful driver that should not be overlooked, particularly when you are comparing independence with a tariff that is treated like a tax.
There is also the issue of local generation and storage of renewables, I don’t know the physics and economics of transmission but if you can use wave and wind at a local level to create and store enough electricity for local needs, plus a bit more, why would you then also underwrite the massive distribution network for 50kms from your neighborhood to the coal fired power plant. Under old technology the case makes itself because you moved all the pollution from your lovely suburb to Collie, if you can generate it locally and clean why move it at all?
[I’ve seen this proposed and I think it’s a reasonable way to get around the impasse; but we still pay, just in proportion to our tax rather than energy use. The money has already been spent!]
I agree it is a disgrace and disaster, but it will be much worse if they try and recover it from electricity consumers. Much better to admit they monumentally f*cked up and deal with the problem. otherwise you are missing economically viable (possibly even advantageous) options because you analyse them all through what it will mean for your dinosaur network and the billions of dollars you still need to recover for it.
[Rooftop PV is simply not efficient, due to poor alignment with the sun, shading, bad maintenance, less efficient power electronics, the list goes on]
Surely the existing global market means this is and will be fixed over time. I’m not at all interested in the network, I have a very personal connection to my PV.
If in a couple of years I get the battery man out to quote me for batteries and he says ‘look mate they are facing the wrong way, you’ve obviously skipped the annual maintenance, and we are going need twice as many’ then they are maintained, moved to face the right way, doubled in size and I get new batteries. If he says ‘look mate for $2k we can get you a little gas generator, runs of the metered gas, all the smarts it only kicks in when you need it, it is pretty much silent, I tell him to put it in next weekend.
People have already made large personal investments in PV they aren’t going to just forget them.
And you will rightly say we have made much bigger investments in networks, but those aren’t personal investments and they look like very bad investments. The kind you never talk about at the bar when you are talking how well you did out of the x float last week.
lizzie@1175
Before I post something long, I tend to do a bit of Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, which keeps a backup of what I’m writing in the memory in case the submit fails. Of course, if the PC goes kaput, it’s all gone.
Re the AFP investigation into the alleged inducement offered to Gillian Triggs to step down:
[Mr Dreyfus said he accepted the outcome by the AFP.
“I can understand that the president would want to put this matter behind her. In choosing not to pursue this matter, she has demonstrated a professionalism and integrity sadly lacking in those who attacked her,” he said.]
I wonder whether the Liberals will do the natural but dumb thing by putting out that the complaint had no substance, rather than leaving well enough alone.
rossmcg at 1160
I wonder if perhaps Triggs is playing the long game here. She is after all far more trouble to Abbott if she stays & continues doing what she should be doing, protecting children, rather than raising the issue further & risking the whole issue detailing & her credibility in some way being sullied. As it stands, Abbott & Brandis are the bullies & Triggs has them right where she wants them & the issue of children in detention is not being overtaken by politics.
“@9NewsAUS: Same-sex marriage likely ‘within a year’: Turnbull. #9News ”
It is, and Labor should get on the front foot.
Screw the SDA – Labor doesn’t need them. It does however need to look like the more progressive of the two majors.
If the outcome weren’t so tragic the evidence so far given at the Lindt siege inquiry would have high comedic value. Makes one wonder how many more psychotic individuals will be tipped over the edge by Abbott’s constant promotion of ISIS and death cults.
Afternoon all.
Adam Creighton’s article in the Australian is interesting.
The tag line (on the front page the article is on p2)
[The gonverment’s tenuous path to surplus relies on dangerous increases in income taxes]
Interesting use of the term dangerous.
If you understand the deficit is due or inadequate revenues, and that the level of debt is not excessive then I would think relying on bracket creep is a slow, relatively non distorting way to solve the problem, not fast, or equitable, but not dangerous.
Surely cutting needed government benefits would be more dangerous.
All I can assume is that he does not believe the deficit is cause by a revenue problem but a spending problem, this may not be anything new but I thought we were past his argument
Greens up 4 points to 19% in Tasmania.
Greens 19% (+4), Liberals 46% (+4), Labor 29% (-5).
PUP down from 1% to NIL.
http://www.emrs.com.au/pdfs/EMRS%20State%20Voting%20Intentions%20May%202015%20Report.pdf
[Makes one wonder how many more psychotic individuals will be tipped over the edge by Abbott’s constant promotion of ISIS and death cults.]
Abbott knows exactly what he is doing with this stuff. It is a deliberate calculated provocation to generate his very own Gulf of Tonkin incident.
The guy can barely restrain his anticipatory drooling over it. Everything is in place, he is just waiting for the right nutter to come along and give him the excuse he needs.
Cabinet revolt over abbott and dutton plan to strip Australians of citizenship. (I would like to know how it could legally be done)
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/cabinet-revolt-over-tony-abbott-and-peter-dutton-plan-to-strip-australians-of-citizenship-20150526-gh9q8y.html
Just me
If a terrorist act were to take place in this country. I would see it as a failure of govt
“Cabinet revolt” as Abbott and Dutton want to create a new cohort of refugees – the stateless ex-Australians.
Victoria
As cabinet leaks go, that is a cracker.
victoria
You and I are not the target audience for Abbott’s machinations. He is only shooting for an additional 2-3% of the voters. The remainder, those who vote against him, are traitors in his view.
rossmcg
Not sure what to make of it. I have become far too cynical these days
PhoenixGreen@1183
Wow, this is the first EMRS poll in how long?
Essential out
http://www.essentialvision.com.au/category/essentialreport
52ALP 48Coalition
Unchanged.
Labor needs to start actively campaigning for an early election.
Just me
i know what you say. But politically the point can be made that the govt failed to do its job properly
Victoria
What I make of it is that Abbott and Dutton came up with a hare-brained scheme and were put in their place.
Then someone picked up the phone and leaked it, with names and all.
That someone wants people to know that Abbott and Dutton were shouted down
Hardly a united team
lizzie@1187
I’m pretty sure as a signatory to the 1954 and 1961 UN conventions against stateless persons, Australia cannot make people stateless.
rossmcg
I also reckon Abbott targetted this harebrained scheme to rally his base
Raaraa
Sorry, I should have put a 😉 after that. It was a joke. But the two ironmen did try it on.
Note these names, bludgers. They may be the sensible ones in our future. A surprising collection. 🙁
[The cabinet members who spoke against the proposal were Defence Minister Kevin Andrews, Foreign Affairs Minister and deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop, Attorney-General George Brandis, Agriculture Minister and deputy Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, Education Minister Christopher Pyne and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, according to people present in the room.]
Victoria
Indeed, with Dutton as an ally. Anything dutton is involved in is fraught with danger.
Rossmcg @ 1198
Which is somewhat ironic as Dutton is extremely lazy and doesn’t know what actual policy work means… or involves for that matter.
Labor is Laborless.