Essential Research: 53-47 to Labor

Only incremental change this week from Essential Research, which also produces relatively encouraging news for both leaders on their standing against leadership alternatives from their own parties.

The latest reading of the fortnightly rolling average from Essential Research has Labor’s lead steady at 53-47, with the Coalition down a point on the primary vote to 39%, Labor steady on 38% and the Greens up one to a three-year high of 12%. Also:

• The highlight of the supplementary questions relates to favoured leaders of the major parties, a question last run at Tony Abbott’s low-point in February. He’s improved since then from 11% to 18%, and in doing so moved past Julie Bishop, who is down from 21% and 17% – a result that was reflected in a recent Morgan poll, and had some of us wondering if there was a name recognition issue with Bronwyn Bishop. Malcolm Turnbull maintains his lead at a steady 24%, but Abbott leads 41-21 among Coalition voters. The Labor results are a lot better for Bill Shorten than Morgan’s, putting him narrowly in front with 16% compared with 13% for Tanya Plibersek and 12% for Anthony Albanese. However, the uncommitted ratings for the Labor question are particularly high – 18% “someone else” and 36% “don’t know”, compared with 13% and 22% for the Liberals.

• A “biggest threats to the world” question has terrorism, global economic stability and climate change leading a field of seven on 61%, 51% and 38%. With the question changed to “biggest threats to the Australia”, the respective numbers are 47%, 55% and 38%.

• A question on the importance of the asylum seeker issue has 37% rating it “quite important but not as important as other stories”, 29% as “one of the most important issues” and 7% as “the most important issue”, without too much variation by voting intention or in comparison with the last such result from June 2013. Ten per cent think it not very important, and 9% not at all important. The Liberals are rated the best party to handle it by 37% with Labor on 12% and the Greens on 8%, which again is much the same as the June 2013 result.

• Labor’s policy for a 50% renewable energy target by 2030 has 65% approval and 16% disapproval, although 51% expect it will lead to higher costs, compared with 18% for lower costs.

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.

937 comments on “Essential Research: 53-47 to Labor”

Comments Page 1 of 19
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  1. As we’ve been saying for 18 months, the cement has set & its better to be in Shorten’s shoes than Abbott’s shoes. The Coalition are will soon be in the position of having to rely on things out of their control to help them retain government.

  2. Leroy

    Libs want Turnbull, Labor want anyone but Bill: Essential
    Bernard Keane | Aug 04, 2015 1:01PM

    I tend to agree with the anyone but Bill message.

    Bring on Dreyfuss for me!

  3. David Rawlinson on the previous thread:

    [If #Newspoll now has a policy of filtering polls with poor results for one party, that bias needs to be reflected in the BludgerTrack model right?]

    Newspoll doesn’t poll fortnightly – it polls six times per quarter. That means there’s the occasional gap. It always polls the week parliament resumes, so there was never going to be a poll this week.

  4. CTar1

    From last thread …

    [ Abbott has his list of IPA ‘things to do’.

    So I guess he just one-by-one runs them up the flagpole to show he’s trying. ]

    I believe there were 75 items on that list … which explains why he needs so many flagpoles these days!

  5. [As we’ve been saying for 18 months, the cement has set & its better to be in Shorten’s shoes than Abbott’s shoes.]

    Um.. which one of these is wearing cement shoes?

    I need a concrete example.

  7. CT

    [When it’s ascertained that it can only come from a 777 then MH370 as its origin is also certain.

    Four 777′s lost. The other 3 on the ground in Europe.]

    There is an Indian company which recycles parts of airplanes and occasionally dumps parts in the Indian Ocean. It could have come from a dead plane.

  9. Taking into account Essential’s flat lining tendency, it does add a little evidence that Bronwyn was only a minor vote changer, not the massive hit that Sir Prince Duke was.

    My supposition is that Liberal voters know for sure and certain that their man is a joke, but he’s their joke so they’re sticking to him and any further evidence of him being a joke is greeted with a ‘meh, when know but we’re not voting for your joke’.

    The anti-Abbott forces aren’t inspired by Bill at all but if he’s the one they need to get over the line to rid us of Abbott then they’ll do it.

    Abbott’s ‘recovery’ has run it’s course and fallen back a couple of points from it’s peak and Shorten’s slump has run it’s course and perhaps picked up a couple of points from it’s base. But essentially not much movement at the station even with Bishop doing her best to kill the careers of a couple of dozen backbenchers. Samey-same around 52.5 to Labor with most of that pretty well locked in unless we get a black swan to shake things up.

  11. [Newspoll doesn’t poll fortnightly – it polls six times per quarter. That means there’s the occasional gap. It always polls the week parliament resumes, so there was never going to be a poll this week.]

    bit of a blow to the bludgers who had gotten used to Morgan and Newspoll out of sync to enable enhanced bludging each week.

  13. Australian have voted default (hate the incumbent, don’t even care who opponent is) before.

    That’s how Abbott go into office in 2013.

    Anyone who thinks that cant happen to Abbott in 2016 is on drugs.

  16. I believe the last big gap in Parliamentary sittings saw something of a recovery for the LNP’s numbers, so it may be that Chopper Bron has kept reminding people of what they don’t like about Abbott over the winter recess.

    Those leader numbers are just awful all round. No help for Shorten from a reasonably strong Labour conference, apparently.

  17. [No help for Shorten from a reasonably strong Labour conference, apparently.]

    Given the way most of the headlines went – and the fact that most Australians were not paying attention or, at best, reading or listening to potted results – anything that was not negative out of the Conference was a positive.

  18. Charlie Edwards@1

    As we’ve been saying for 18 months, the cement has set & its better to be in Shorten’s shoes than Abbott’s shoes. The Coalition are will soon be in the position of having to rely on things out of their control to help them retain government.

    As long as the cement does set with the shoes stuck in it.

  23. MTBW #2

    Bring on Dreyfuss for me!

    Reminder that the admirable Mark Dreyfus QC MP spells his name with one “s”

  25. BW wrote:

    [My view is that the flaperon increases the likelihood that the plane went down in the Indian Ocean and is not now in some hidden location on land.]

    I only posited the “hidden location on land” idea for completeness, as if Diego Garcia had anythng to do with it, you’d have to factor a hangared MH-370 in, no matter how unlikely.

    By far (99.99%) my preferred option, given some connection between DG and MH-370, was that it was shot down by the US military, either accidentally or deliberately.

    Deliberate shoot downs of commercial aircraft can happen either way. MH-17 was accidental, most ikely, in that I don’t think whoever shot it down was aware it was just a passenger flight (althought they had to take aim deliberately enough). As was the Korean Airliner the Russians shot down, and the Iran Air plane the Yanks shot down. All were cases of mistaken identity in one form or another.

    It is US policy to shoot down unidentified planes. This is difficult in built-up areas due to many reasons: collateral damage, uncertainty over intentions of the pilot etc.

    But it’s vastly more practical to do so, and easier to make the decision, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, if the plane is approaching a top secret base that is bristling with covert intelligence hardware, quite possibly rendition centers and other classified stuff we don’t even know about (the NSA had an installation there until relatively recently, or it may have been relocated to another part of the island and camouflaged, which is also pretty normal for secret military/intelligence facilities). What would be the plane’s excuse for approaching the base? Hard to think of one, other than distress.

    But we do know the pilot had DG on his flight simulator program disk. And it wasn’t just any FS. It was a “professional” rig, more than just a joystick and some speakers.

    No planes fly to DG on commercial routes. Any plane heading that way would automatically be suspect. DG is an emergency landing spot, but as far as I know has never been used for that purpose.

    If the plane was shot down at sea, say a few hundred kilometers from DG by a fighter on picket duty, then only the pilot and the controllers would know anything about it. Considering that these people have been running covert missions from DG for years, there would be well-thought out protocols for keeping incidents like this a secret. In fact almost anything they would do is containable to just a few people in the know. That’s the way they work.

    Once a shoot down had been denied, it would be hard to confess to it. So much is invested in “honesty” and trust” by the Americans, to admit they’d lied, especially when so many Chinese citizens were on the plane, would be highly embarrassing, and could lead to a serious international incident. There are plenty of reasons for a cover up.

    The US has the technology. It has a long-standing policy to shoot down planes that violate its airspace. It has something to hide. There would be few witnesses, bar those authorized to know, and they would be well-schooled in the Official Secrets Act, and the consequences of leaking. They might not even have the to leak. Quite the opposite. It might have been a blunder on their part. They might WANT to keep a shoot-down a secret. There are a thousand reasons for potential secrecy, and very few against it. “Openness” and “Honesty” are not typical traits of US covert operations, even under the sainted Obama.

    I simply find it passing strange that such a large aircraft, most likely in the air for so long, travelling so (relatively) slowly could be missed by one of the biggest, most important surveillance bases in the world which would have much more than just ground-based radar to detect threats further than the horizon.

    Yet, any DG involvement or even knowledge of the whereabouts of MH-370 were instantly dismissed. These assurances seem to have been accepted without demur by most. Paul Barry used the US denials, from memory, in combination with Maldives Defence Forces denials (I didn’t know they even hada Defence Force!) to heckle Hedley Thomas. It was a circular argument:”We know DG had nothing to do with MH-370 because DG denied they did.” Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

    The plain fact is that almost everyone who touches MH-370 who has been involved in the search has tried to self-aggrandize over it. From the oceanographer looking for work who said it had likely been found, to Abbott’s pathetic efforts to be a hero to the Chinese, to the Professor from UWA and his ocean currents, to TBI’s weak attempt to avoid talkng about Choppergate (he said the flaperone was far more important than discussing a corrupt Speaker), there’s a prize for the first person to be proved right. Except they’ve been mostly wrong, and the Professor’s theory about Reunion was only one of several alternatives he offered, apparently. And TBI is an idiot.

    There wasa bit of scoffing about co-opting mollusc scientists into the conspiracy. But if you were going to fake the finding of a piece of genuine wreckage in a misleading location, you actually WOULD need a scientist or two on hand to promote the fake. Anyone who wants to claim that the US Navy, for example, doesn’t have marine biologists, even ones who specialize in barnacles, on tap, has rocks in his head. This would be a discipline – with lots of research money available – that would be essential for, say, studying the effects of molluscs on the performance of submarines or other ships. It would be important work. No problem, I’d suggest, to corrupt one of them, and that’s if they didn’t volunteer to help. The US Navy’s relationships with marine biologists and other scientists go back right to the days of John Paul Jones.

    It just seems too pat to me that DG didn’t even know about MH-370. Surely at least one of their military satellites (possibly in geostationary orbit) would have picked it up?

  27. So Boerwar, I’ve looked at Tony Burke’s Register. None of the additions (which generally occurred within a month of the travel etc.) was provided by the public purse.

    So what is your beef with his register?

  30. Dio 7

    The 777 flaperons are actually made in India.

    http://www.boeing.co.in/boeing-in-india/about-boeing-in-india.page

    “Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) became the single-source producer of 757 overwing exit doors in 1991. HAL has manufactured the 777 uplock boxes, 777 flaperons, F/A-18 gun bay doors, F/A-18 wire harnesses, P-8I weapons bay doors, P-8I tailcones and P-8I identification friend-or-foe transponders.”

    Easy for rejects, being taken away by garbage/recycling ships, to end up in the sea.

    We will find out tomorrow.

  32. cog

    [We will find out tomorrow.]

    I think the French examination starts tomorrow.

    I guess they’re been waiting for the Malaysians and Australians to arrive in Toulouse.

  33. Jolyon Wagg@28

    RaaRaa

    “No, he’s dead.”


    True, but I still think he would be better than Bronnie.

    For that matter, are we sure Bronnie was alive?

    Could we have just been seeing an example of good taxidermy combined with the latest in robotics?

  34. [Tony’s next move will be to promise one sub per Liberal voter in SA. That should get his numbers up]

    The subs are gone. The frigate announcement is a desperate attempt by Abbott to save 3 seats…. or maybe more likely to keep himself safe as leader for a bit longer. There are some influential Libs in SA he wouldnt want actively undermining him.

    They will try to delay the subs announcement until after the next election. For now there will be a lame attempt to convince people that there are still jobs in it.

  37. Thanks. Greasemonkey and CCCP now installed and both have the ‘tick’ for enabled.

    Several restarts later not working.

    Very frustrated!

  38. bemused@33

    Jolyon Wagg@28

    RaaRaa


    “No, he’s dead.”



    True, but I still think he would be better than Bronnie.

    For that matter, are we sure Bronnie was alive?

    Could we have just been seeing an example of good taxidermy combined with the latest in robotics?

    Now that really reminds me of the series of which I watched an episode of last night, Humans.

  39. BB

    [”We know DG had nothing to do with MH-370 because DG denied they did.” Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?]

    They would – if indeed they had nothing to do with it.

    [There was a bit of scoffing about co-opting mollusc scientists into the conspiracy. ]

    No shit. As a scientist myself, I think I’d be quite offended if a conspiracy theorist accused me of outright fabrication.

  40. SK – I see the Prairie Hotel has Quandongs.

    We had a couple of thin lines of them nearby (well in country terms).

    When they were ripe the school bus used to stop for 10 minutes so we could indulge.

  41. Raaraa

    [Now that really reminds me of the series of which I watched an episode of last night, Humans.]

    What’d you think? I thought it was not too bad, but I lost interest toward the end. I doubt I’ll tune in next week.

    My philosophy is: if it was any good, it’d be on ABC1.

  42. kakaru

    [My philosophy is: if it was any good, it’d be on ABC1.]

    ABC1 & 24 are to busy replaying One on One, Landline, The Business and Lateline to fit anything else in.

  43. MTBW @ 2

    I agree with you about Dreyfus. He is an excellent speaker and presents well, no doubt assisted by his many years as a lawyer.

  45. [It just seems too pat to me that DG didn’t even know about MH-370]

    Possibly because it didn’t get within 1500 kilometres of DG based on the BTO analysis of the Inmarsat Satellite Communications. But of course they would say that wouldn’t they 🙂

  46. Ben Sandilands in today’s Crikey:

    […The list of objects retrieved from the coastline of La Reunion — those associated with missing flight MH370 — is growing, but so are doubts about their relevance.

    No photos have emerged to validate a report that an aircraft door has washed ashore on the Indian Ocean island near Mauritius, nor has there been any confirmation of such a find by La Reunion police, who have been happy for people to watch on and record their work on mobile phones.

    And it has now been clarified that a list of found objects included two suitcases that were burnt by a worker on a beach clean-up squad in the last three months. During the beach clean-up an object that might have been a plane seat was also put to the flames.

    The 777 flaperon wing part that has now been taken for examination to a laboratory in Toulouse, in southern France, might even have been used as a table on a beach on the island as far back as May this year.

    The burnt objects might not be in a recoverable state, and it might not be possible to determine if they were from MH370.

    In short, there is more detail but less excitement coming through from today’s coastal searching for potential items from MH370.

    The new debris adds to one previously found, partly rusted suitcase now considered less likely to have come from the Malaysia Airlines jet, and some small water bottles that might match those that were made available to passengers on the flight, which vanished on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board on March 8, 2014.

    The initial talk on the island that an aircraft door has been found in another coastal location isn’t measuring up on the available information. There are six main passenger doors on a 777 as well as below-cabin hatches that ought to be unmistakeable as coming off a large, wide-body jet.

    Of crucial interest would be if a door showed signs of major structural damage from a high-energy impact or appeared to have been opened from within, as part of an evacuation, together with any signs of the emergency slide mechanisms attached to the structure.

    If these unconfirmed reports of additional debris possibly from MH370 are true, these objects should provide crucial evidence as to the circumstances of the crash as being violent or more a controlled ditching.

    Passenger luggage, if retrieved, should lead to its being identified as belonging to individual passengers or family groups.
    …]

  50. Ctar1

    [ABC1 & 24 are to busy replaying One on One, Landline, The Business and Lateline to fit anything else in.]

    Prime time is usually much better on ABC1. Beyond that, it’s what you said plus reruns of Midsomer Murders.

    ABC24 is a waste of time and resources.

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