BludgerTrack: 52.0-48.0 to Labor

The BludgerTrack poll aggregate records a slight shift to the Coalition, without offering too much to support the favoured media narrative of the past few weeks.

The latest reading of the BludgerTrack poll aggregate records a modest move to the Coalition on the back of slightly stronger results this week from ReachTEL and Roy Morgan, reversing a movement in Labor’s favour last week. It’s also worth noting that the Greens primary vote is up further on what was already a historic high. The quarterly aggregate from Newspoll is among the newly added state-level data, together with unpublished breakdowns from ReachTEL and Essential Research and published ones from Roy Morgan, the combined effect of which is to add one seat to the Coalition tally in each of Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania. The only new leadership result this week was the preferred prime minister reading from ReachTEL, which BludgerTrack doesn’t use because its exclusion of an uncommitted result means it isn’t comparable with other pollsters.

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.

1,845 comments on “BludgerTrack: 52.0-48.0 to Labor”

Comments Page 35 of 37
1 … 34 35 36 37

  2. guytaur

    Fixed it for you.
    [I have no doubt several Royal Commissions need to be set up by Labor when it regains office]

  3. A good line that could apply to syrizas as well.

    @DrCraigEmerson: @TheKouk @joybelle46 “Stop the debt!

    Labor will win on this.

    Syriza could win on this. The reality is debt relief is the name of the game for Greece. In or out of the Eurozone.
    No debt relief and the crisis will roll on for years

  4. TPOF

    Obviously.
    No, that wasn’t sarky.

    Have a read of the Elder article on Katharine Murphy and you will see the similarities with the younger Murphy.

    Thomas’ essay would be considered critical of the media by most, and along with the elder Murphy efforts it is critical.
    But in a half arsed, theory free [Thomas is a free marketeer], superficial way without explaining why it is so.

    Anyway we’ve probably done this topic and don’t want to bore our colleagues like some other topics that get overcooked.
    You can have a final say if you wish.

  5. Just Sayin’ @ 1173

    Wow … that’s pretty full on. You did well surviving an upbringing like that.

    It sounds like support is the most important thing children in those situations need. It must be really hard for children in that situation. I know things were different in the past. That problems like that were left alone. I know police were often unwilling to interfere with DV situations. Its kind of hard to contemplate actually.

    My daughter is at preschool, the primary concern of the staff is the well being of the kids. They keep their eyes open for anything they may feel is an issue. Not over zealous tho. Its a not for profit thing built and run by the community. I’m fairly confident the local primary school has the same attitude, as psyclaw mentioned suspected child abuse requires mandatory reporting. I think children in your situation should be able to get far more support today than you did.

    For what that’s worth.

    Thanks for being so open about something that must be really, really painful.

  7. shea @ 1704

    Katharine Murphy is one disappointing journalist to me because she gives glimmers of being capable of better. The only difference between her and many of her colleagues is that occasionally she tries to work out what she missing but never can quite get it.

    I will never forget the fact that she really tried to work out why the rest of the world outside the press gallery saw the ‘misogyny speech’ in a different light to her and her colleagues before giving up and deciding that the rest of the world didn’t know the cynical workings of Australian politics like she and her colleagues did. Almost to a man and woman, her time-pressed colleagues simply applied Ockham’s razor and concluded that the rest of the world was dog-shit dumb and why bother thinking any further.

  8. lizzie

    On the AS issue. To me it is paramount that Labor gets a circuit breaker to reset the narrative. The LNP are not going to do it and they are going to keep moving further to the right to get to a point where Labor cannot follow. Then they are going to yell Labor soft on terror.

    So Labor needs that circuit breaker to change that narrative because nothing else will. Then Labor can reset the policy on Labor principles instead of being pushed to the right by the LNP.

    This is they only way that the “wedge” will stop working.

    As someone said earlier Labor does this well on things like medicare. To start with maybe point out how much cheaper ankle bracelets with gps tracking are compared to offshore detention centres.

    I disagree with Psephos on a lot of AS policy and still do. However he was right on one point which Mr Rudd took up.
    No visa no entry no business model for a people smuggler.

    To get that in though you have to decide to not have refugees. Until then not even Abbott’s offshore punitive measures are working.

    Boats are still coming which we know because AS are still being transferred to Manus and Nauru and admission by Dutton that yes it was a people smugglers boat even if he is denying the crew were paid by Australia illegally.

    When this reality is expose it will be another way that Labor will have a chance to reset the conversation. It does not work so how can we keep track of AS in the community as cheaply as possible until they are a) accepted or b) rejected and sent back.

    Another good question is what is cheaper? Sending to Manus or paying ASIO to follow every AS with security questions to be resolved.

  9. [I think children in your situation should be able to get far more support today than you did.]

    The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to child sexual abuse will make a huge permanent difference by flipping the instinctive response of those institutions of ‘we will avoid trouble if we cover up’ to ‘we will be in massive trouble if we cover it up’.

    I know that JS’s experiences were not directly on this issue, but they are deeply connected, especially in regard to institutional responses (especially those whose duty it is to be involved but just don’t want to get involved).

    I don’t think any serious institution will again think that the safer course of action is to ignore or sweep the problem under the carpet.

  10. When Murphy and Taylor were at Fairfax they were terrible.

    They wrote right wing propaganda, Murphy a bit more so than Taylor but really the margin was minimal.
    So when it was announced they were going to the Guardian I shuddered with disappointment.
    And their first few offerings weren’t real flash.
    But gradually Taylor metamorphosed into a better journalist, maybe all the way up to almost getting a pass grade as someone who educates rather than repeats memes.
    A bare pass.
    Murphy also improved to the point where I suspect she has a vague unrest as to the crap she writes but can’t put her finger on it so blames either ‘the media’ in a generic sense or wallows in pessimism.

    But I must say I find the improvement in both since they left Fairfax for what seems to be the relatively fresher fields of the Guardian – soft right liberal? – a symptom of the real problem we have with our MSM.
    An extreme right mob, guess who, and a usually far right mob.
    That’s our choice [sic].
    Blimey, even Crikey had an IPA authored piece a day or so ago and has a couple of ‘bash ALP/Shorten’ pieces up at the moment.

    We need a new media, this one is broken.

  12. Further to my 1711

    The best line was this one from the actual movie:

    ACTOR PLAYING PRINCIPAL: These kids, when you get old, they’re gonna be running the country.

  15. Keane has brought out the blowtorch against Joyce

    @BernardKeane: When Keating noted that having a monarchy looked weird to our Asian neighbours, the Coalition mocked him. “Who cares what Asia thinks?

  20. DisplayName at 1719

    [Probably the company they kept.]

    Heh, heh.
    I like that, it’s clever, it works an a couple of levels.

  24. I had first hand experience with Border Protection and Security this morning at Sydney Airport and can report that it was a seething, massive, shambles.

    We were issued a form to fill in with spaces in it which would alert the alert officer that the bearer was a possible Ebola carrier. It also contained details which would enable, for example, an alert investigator to figure out who might have been seated NEAR an Ebola carrier on the aircraft.

    The forms were not collected.

    When you e passport you get a ticket.

    One of the e ticket machines was broken. The others were scattered in and about queues for different categories of passports. People joined the wrong queues, waited for half an hour before being told to get into the RIGHT queue.

    You pop the eticket you get when you stick your passport into a machine into a second machine and this triggers the face recogniser machine to study your visage. It then lets you in to collect your baggage.

    When you have collected your baggage (But not in our case. Bloody QANTAS managed to lose it between the plane on the tarmac and the conveyor)… but anyway supposing QANTAS has not buggered up, you collect your baggage. You are then faced with interweaving queues for declaration and nothing to declare, people who are queuing to collect baggage, queues of people whose baggage has been lost by QANTAS, and spontaneous queues apparently formed by people who hope that a queue might lead to something useful. There are possibly a thousand people in queues.

    On the entry form, I declared visiting wildnerness areas where there were domestic stock. I do this despite knowing that it will cost us time while they decontaminate my boots. It is my small gesture to the common weal. Even though I pressure hose my boots before leaving, I know that they might just be carrying spores of anthrax, foot and mouth, banana freckle disease or anything, and so on and so forth. I aim to do my bit.

    IDIOT!

    I struggle around and find the end of the declarations queue. It is many hundreds of people long. Haggard people. Tired people. People with screaming children. People who literally have not got a clue what they are supposed to do and who do not have a word of English. Because, almost uniquely amongst the airports I visit, Sydney is an English-only airport.

    Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

    I get to the first queue sorter.

    Frazzled. Gruffly, ‘Hand in your ticket!’
    ‘What ticket?’
    ‘The e-ticket, of course. Hand it over!’
    (This is the first indication that one is supposed to hang onto the eticket AND hand it in.)

    I dig around, find it, and hand it over.

    I am waved along.

    I join another queue.

    Second frazzled sorter.

    ‘Hand me the country entry form!’
    I expect this. It is ready. The box with the wilderness is marked.
    ‘What did you do?’
    ‘I walked along a trail much frequented by horses and with much horse droppings amongst farmland. And I went on a Lake. (This matters, apparently).’

    ‘Oh! Go there.’ Points. No explanation. I go.

    Another queue.

    Eventually, I am herded along with five other people into a sort of human corral. I am ordered to put down my bags. I do so.
    A sniffer dog arrives and starts sniffing enthusiastically.
    ‘Does it specialize in horse shit?’ I wonder. But I do not ask. I know how all this works if you beard the dragon lady dog handler. You get extra sniffs and extra delays. My connection is just about timed out. I fume with anger. But do so with a dead pan face.

    The dog shows a remarkable amount of sniffery interest in the bag of the lady behind me.

    We all wait while the bag is emptied of its contents and the dog is rewarded for finding an apple. We wait while the apple lady and the dog sniffer lady congratulate each other on hiding the apple for the dog to sniff. And while the sniffer dog lady coos with her sniffer dog and scratches its back. It wags its tail. We wait.

    Finally, we are ordered to pick up our bags, and told to go, wearing disease-ridden horse shit on our boots as we might but free of apples.

    Some of the staff were rude. Some were really, really rude. Some were gruff. Some were just stuffed. Some were pleasant. Some were helpful. Most had the air and the care of stockyard dogs moving stock around sale yards

    I catch my connection by 1 minute and 30 seconds, having spent two hours in Dutton’s disaster. I may be carrying a disease that damages our agricultural exports. I may have infected a plane load of passengers with Ebola. Who knows? Who cares? My luggage is not with me. But the uniforms are snappy and the signs warning me not to carry firearms ‘airside’ are oh, so spiffy.

    I am safe!

    I have travelled to all South-east Asian countries – many several times, excepting only Burma, and Australia gives its visiting businessmen, its tourists, and its returnees by far and away the worst treatment.

    It is atrocious.

    Oh, and I do give my boots an extra wash in soap when I get home.

  25. bw

    Thank you for your post. Which country do you think does the best and do you think Australia could emulate that countries customs?

  29. Boerwar

    Please, please report this shambles to someone who cares. All this money and no real safety from diseases at all.

  32. Boerwar:

    What a saga! And it sounds like we are no safer from the threat of disease importation than without all Dutton’s intervention.

  33. [I am not saying I support the comments, or even condone them.

    I am just saying that you have to be a twat to think the politicians were actually recommending murder when using this language.]

    ML @ 1459 it appears rates of violence against women are increasing. Not just reporting rates, actual instances.

    Comments by Liberal party members and supporters that used graphically violent language about and directed at Julia Gillard were never disavowed by the leadership of their party. This is leadership, bad leadership to be sure, but none the less it is political leadership. That leaderrship says such attitudes are ok.

    This is way beyond Mallah’s comments – its why the language used by Ciobo, Morris and others is worse than what ZM said, by miles. Because they represent political parties. They are speaking on behalf of potential national leadership. In no way am I condoning what ZM said either. It was offensive, nasty and completely unacceptable but it lacked the added weight that unchallenged comments by representatives of a political entity carried.

    Those people hold some responsibility for ongoing domestic violence and they need to own up about it. They need to apologise, repudiate their language and act like decent men instead of pond scum. It is their example that paves the way for idiot attitudes like the one Mallah expressed in that tweet.

  34. It does not matter which way the vote goes, IMHO.

    The huge problem is this: ‘How does a nation of individuals learn to trust each other again?’

    Trust each other to pay income tax. Trust each other not to bribe. Trust each other to do the work they are paid to do. Trust each other to actually turn up for the job they are paid to do. Greece has four times as many teachers as Finland. But Greek parents hire tutors to actually do the teaching. Trust companies to pay company tax. Trust land owners to pay property tax. Trust each other to repay debts. Trust each other not to steal goods from the company. Trust a handshake deal. Trust each others’ word.

    That done, they can get to the second task: persuade other nations to trust Greece.

    So far, SYRIZA has been a case study in how to build mistrust and distrust.

    We are supposed to believe that a No vote will provide a firm basis for a negotiation between Greece and the rest of the EU, but a Yes vote will provide no such thing.

    Greece has to reconstruct itself as a nation and as a society and not just as an economy.

    My view is that this cannot happen while they are arguing about how to divvy up free money they have scagged off someone else.

    The euro cannot fix Greece.

    Only the Greeks can.

    And they can only do it, IMHO, through the drachma.

    SYRIZA’s greatest contribution may well be to construct the inevitable nadir. It may not have meant so to do. But it is nearly there.

  35. James Hird won’t resign – he may soon be sacked. Pity to hear Tracy Holmes engaging in a lovefest with Essendon apologist Chip Le Grand this morning on ‘The Ticket’.

  36. BW

    You cannot blame Syriza for what went before. You might as well blame Swan for Howard’s middle class tax handouts.

    Only Debt Relief can help Greece. Only that.

    Even going to the Drachma is not going to solve anything much with what the IMF calls an impossible to pay off debt

  37. hairy nose

    james Hird has to date, been a protected species. But a thrashing such as this is going to make it very difficult for him.

  38. Not sure if others noted that Abetz (during the week) & Joyce (today) not only referred to the importance of children having a mother & father but also to them having biological parents. This seems an interesting distinction, once may have been a mistake but twice……..?

  39. Australia has a disease-free status for some crops and for some stock diseases that it is worth a lot of export money.

    IMHO, it is worth investing a lot of money in minimising the risk of these diseases entering Australia. (It is, of course, blindingly easy for terrorists to carry a few spores in their trouser cuffs… and some believe that is how apple fire blight made its way to Australia… those Kiwi apple-farming terrorists!)

    This is not the case of many SE Asian countries. The diseases travel easily and often across porous land and maritime borders.

    Therefore there is not a whole lot of point delaying people at many SE Asian airports other than registering their arrivals and departures. It takes minutes, not hours. Right now there are MERS controls and these, while not perfect, make coherent sense – unlike our Ebola forms.

    The worst bureaucracy entering is South Vietnam. But it is clean, directed, spare, and polite – compared with Australia. Phnom Penh was a bit of a shuffle here and shuffle there and a bribe to get the taxi past the police road block, but even that was blindingly fast compared with Oz.

    My view is that if we are going to do quarantine we should do it properly and we should do it politely, and we should do it with expedition. ALL the time and EVERY time.

    It is the first face of Australia.

  40. [Thank you for your post. Which country do you think does the best and do you think Australia could emulate that countries customs?]

    Last time I flew into Paris I just followed the signs and ended up at the taxi rank: no passport inspection, no bag inspection, no-one took my form (maybe there wasn’t a form?) and no questions asked. It was the quickest exit from an airport (Charles De Gaulle) in my flying history. 5 minutes in and out.

    Of course, that was in pre Charlie Hebdo days…

  41. guytaur
    [ When Keating noted that having a monarchy looked weird to our Asian neighbours, the Coalition mocked him. “Who cares what Asia thinks?]
    Ah , who can forget the LNP hysteria that greeted Bob Hawke saying Australia is part of Asia ? White Australia-R-Us Inc. went into overdrive.

  42. http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2015/07/your-greek-primer/

    Whatever happens next in Greece, their economy and their Parliamentary system have had the legs kicked out from beneath them. Considering the margin one way or the other will likely be very narrow, we can say the referendum will have resolved nothing; rather, it will have made a merely difficult situation almost catastrophic.

    If the No case wins, Greece will be stuck with an incompetent and dishonest Government who, unable to deal with the EU, will have no viable program for economic and national revival they can take to the Parliament.

    If the Yes case wins, Syriza will have to resign. In this case, there will be no party able to command a secure majority in the Parliament, resulting in a core political instability at time of profound economic and social stress.

    At the time when Greece will most need a capable and united Government, it will be left high and dry by this misconceived and duplicitous referendum. Most likely, whatever happens, fresh elections will have to be called at a time of enormous economic destruction and heightened political and social division. This is a direct consequence of Syriza’s unbelievable dereliction. My Greek friends can see all this happening…and are filling with despair.

  43. [The worst bureaucracy entering is South Vietnam.]

    Maybe it’s changed since I travelled there, but I don’t recall having many problems with entering Vietnam at all. Just the usual queues at passport checking.

  46. g
    I blame all the greeks for what went before. They voted in PASOK for ten years while it doubled the budget spent on government spending and reduced the retirement age to 55 for men and 50 for women provided their occupations were arduous or wtte. Everyone from hairdressers to waiters managed to wangle retirement at 55.
    I blame the oligarchs. I blame the military for a grossly distorted military spend. I blame all the greek governments who fiddled the books. I blame all the greeks who bribed other greeks. I blame all the greeks who avoided paying tax. I blame all the greeks who did not turn up for their jobs but who collected their wages. I blame the supermarket checkout chick greeks who collect their pay in coupons so that neither they nor their employers had to pay tax. I blame the slackarse teachers who did not teach the kids. I blame the shipping magnates who flag their vessals in Liberia.

    I blame the dickheads who took Greece to war against Turkey in the early twenties.

    I blame the military junta and its capitalist crony pals.

    I blame the wretched communists who trashed the joint.

    I blame the greeks who believe that they can lend and spend but not pay because it is against their human rights.

    I blame SYRIZA for promising that which it could not possibly deliver.

    But all that is in the past…

    If there is a future for Greece it has to be one in which the greeks learn to trust each other.

    The EU nor the IMF nor the ECB can make the greeks do that. The euro is more hindrance than help.

    The Greeks have to figure it out for themselves. With each other.

  47. Boerwar

    […..those Kiwi apple-farming terrorists!]

    Oi ! Leave those fire blight chaps alone. There is sfa danger . That said, NZ is just as paranoid , if not more, about introduced stuff. So just you keep your European foulbrood disease on ‘your’ side of the Tasman Sea ! 😆

  48. lizzie and victoria

    That appeal of biological parents has been tried and failed in the US UK other countries. Especially in the Ireland Referendum.

  49. confessions
    I am sure that things can change. This was about three years ago. There were, literally, more bureaucrats than passengers and the passengers ended up sitting on the floor while forms were processed and so on and so forth.

    I got the general impression that they had a particular interest in sorting out potentially counter-revolutionaries returning from exile.

  50. Charlie Edwards@1737

    Not sure if others noted that Abetz (during the week) & Joyce (today) not only referred to the importance of children having a mother & father but also to them having biological parents. This seems an interesting distinction, once may have been a mistake but twice……..?

    Ahh – so much for abbotts pre election *pledge* to keep his religion out of politics and policy.

    But after breaking so many pledges/ promises – Its something nothing to break a few more.

Comments Page 35 of 37
1 … 34 35 36 37

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *