BludgerTrack: 53.1-46.9 to Labor

Further improvement for Bill Shorten in this week’s aggregated poll readings, but some of the gloss has come off the sizeable lead Labor opened up last week on voting intention.

Another bad Newspoll this week has kept the pressure on Tony Abbott, but the latest reading of the BludgerTrack poll aggregate has taken some of the edge off the formidable lead Labor opened up last week, thanks to softer results from Roy Morgan and Essential Research. The 0.7% shift on two-party preferred results in five seats changing hands on the seat projection, including one in every state except Western Australia. Despite that, the leadership ratings record further improvement for Bill Shorten, since Newspoll is the only one of the three to have provided a new result. Shorten has now opened up a small but clear lead over Tony Abbott as preferred prime minister, and there has been a solid uptick in his net approval rating while Tony Abbott continues to flounder.

Further:

• Keep an eye on this post for all your Canning by-election news needs, including a fresh batch of snippets posted just now, and a fairly intensive account of yesterday’s slightly perplexing ReachTEL result.

• Tasmanian Labor Senator Lisa Singh has been dumped to a theoretically unwinnable fourth position on the party’s Senate ticket, behind incumbents Anne Urquhart of the Left and Helen Polley of the Right, and – most contentiously – non-incumbent John Short, state secretary of the Left faction Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, who is set to take third place. The elevation of Short ahead of a factionally unaligned woman front-bencher (Singh is shadow parliamentary secretary for the environment, climate change and water) has not been well-received, but Bill Shorten says he will not seek to have the decision overturned by the party’s national executive. It’s worth noting, albeit just barely, that Tasmania is the state where it is least implausible that below-the-line voters might trump the order of the party-mandated Senate ticket, owing to the smaller number of candidates and voters’ familiarity with choosing between party candidates under the Hare-Clark system in state elections. This was known to happen in Tasmania in the decade after the present Senate electoral system was introduced in 1949, but it hasn’t come anywhere near occurring since the above-the-line voting option was introduced in 1984. The below-the-line voting rate was 10.34% in Tasmania at the 2013 election, compared with 3.51% nationally.

• The Greens in South Australia have suffered the embarrassment of having candidate interview reports for its Senate preselection leaked to the media. The contents suggest that the front-runner for a preselection to be determined on September 6 is Robert Simms, an Adelaide City councillor who was rated as “highly recommended” owing to a “combination of experience, vision and political skills”. Bension Siebert of InDaily reports that the remaining contenders were ranked into two categories, the more flattering of which was headed “competent”. This included “former Greens state parliamentary candidate Matthew Carey, state Hindmarsh Greens branch convenor Rebecca Galdies, and former federal Greens candidate and environmental lawyer Ruth Beach”. Then came “needs further development”, which applied to Sam Taylor, media adviser to state upper house MP Mark Parnell, and Adelaide Hills councillor Lynton Vonow. The report was the work of a panel including Mark Parnell and three other figures in the state party.

• Tom Richardson of InDaily reports that Jo Chapley, in-house legal counsel for Foodland supermarkets, has “firmed as a Labor frontrunner to take on Christopher Pyne in Sturt”. However, the report also says that “other party figures are reluctant to push her for the Sturt pre-selection unless they can guarantee a lavish warchest from Labor’s national head office to run a genuine ‘marginal-seat-style’ campaign”.

• Steve Georganas has been confirmed as Labor candidate for the Adelaide seat of Hindmarsh, which he held from 2004 until his defeat at the hands of current Liberal member Matt Williams in 2013, after the withdrawal of his sole preselection rival, Delia Brennan.

• My recent paywalled contributions to Crikey offer an account of the recent recovery in Bill Shorten’s personal ratings, and early impressions of the Western Australian federal redistribution (despite what the headline says).

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.

1,385 comments on “BludgerTrack: 53.1-46.9 to Labor”

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  1. briefly

    Reading that quote, does that push the likely hood of a recession to over a 50% probability, if it isn’t already over that.

  2. [@scotty_49: Peter Dutton – head like a Brussels sprout & intelligence to match. Meanwhile, Australia gets another day of bad publicity. #BorderForce]

  3. The Drum has Brendan O’Neil. Don’t go there. He can’t see that there’s a problem with Dyson, Melbourne is a dull place and what’s with all the stupid twitterati anyway.

  5. Interesting that there could be Victorian state by-elections in the nearish future. Both SW Coast and Polwarth are fairly safe Liberal seats, but the Andrews government is polling strongly. Polwarth in particular will be interesting, as it overlaps with key marginal Federal seat of Corangamite

  7. 1301
    mexicanbeemer

    There is an expectation that “nominal” GDP will show a contraction even if “real” GDP does not. In other words, the economy at market prices is likely to be contracting, though probably not by much. The prospects are for things to tighten progressively, driven by terrible investment numbers and lousy income performance.

  8. Segment on ABC Radio Melbourne with editors of Age and Herald Sun. Both said that the Border Farce debacle is an embarrassment

  9. briefly

    As we have seen with the recent earnings season, many big falls in revenue.

    Yet as we have discussed many times this government just doesn’t have a clue.

  13. On GDP

    I wouldn’t have though the print was likely to be negative. The economic consensus is currently for +0.4% in the quarter and 2.2% on the year.

    There was something funny happening with mining exports last time, it was to do with Q1 being high because there is normally days lost to rain in Queensland, and this year there wasn’t.

    But I don’t think a negative is terribly likely.

    Construction work done was very high, as was CAPEX.

  15. 1310 and 1314

    Indeed. What do these guys do when not racially profiling people who cross their path.

    Are they the new customs-style police at airports or do they do more on-water boat-turnbacks? Or both?

  16. [Ben Eltham ‏@beneltham · 5h5 hours ago
    Australia, 2015: border guards with dogs can stop you on the streets.

    The identity of tax avoiders is kept secret to prevent “kidnapping”]

  18. Goosh Goosh – South-West Coast could be interesting too as it contains Portland and Warrnambool, where Labor does relatively well at the federal level. If Labor is sufficiently popular then I could see Labor having a good shot at being competitive in South-West Coast.

  19. Reading the online responses from the Liberal supporters basically can be summed up by a few quotes

    It didn’t happen
    Nothing happened
    Its a media beat up
    Its a poorly written press release

  22. @1313 – don’t forget that the Budget’s numbers are based on economic growth of over 2.75% for 15-16 and over 3% for 16-17. I mean, those numbers were clearly VERY optimistic to try to make the 16-17 Budget look better at election time… but a 0.5% drop in growth this year will a) wreak havoc on the bottom line b) will make it less likely that Abbott is prepared to go to another Budget before the election.

  23. JimmyDoyle

    Yep, if I remember correctly Portland had a narrow Labor majority after the 2007 federal election. Taking into account the loss of Napthine’s personal vote, it could be a properly interesting contest

  24. JimmyDoyle

    Yep, if I remember correctly Portland had a narrow Labor majority after the 2007 federal election. Taking into account the loss of Napthine’s personal vote, it could be a properly interesting contest

  27. RA:

    Haven’t travelled overseas since the advent of ABF, but if the comments here from those who have, and the militaristic ABF uniforms and branding of their social media and website are any indication, you’d have to conclude they take a jackboot approach to their job.

  28. J341983

    I basically saw those numbers and dismissed them out of hand, why governments need to be overoptimistic with forecasts is part of the reason they get themselves caught out by falling commodity prices or major trading partners changing their policies.

  29. J341983

    Those numbers for GDP aren’t terribly silly.

    The difficulty is that the GDP numbers will rise due to increased volumes of iron ore exports and to LNG exports coming on line.

    GDP will very likely rise by that amount. The question is, does that form of a GDP increase have the same impact on revenue collection, for example, as a “normal” GDP increase.

    I’m guessing not. There will be extra levies collected and royalties, which does help, but the real kicker is in teh multipliers . And that just won’t be there.

  30. Constable Plodvlieg says the first ABF press release was “misunderstood”.

    Maybe it was misunderstood by this Don Smith person who cleared it: maybe he has a problem with basic English.

    But it wasn’t misunderstood by the press and the public.

    Nothing infuriates me more than when somebody stuffs up and then says to us: it’s your fault, it’s your misunderstanding.

  32. So Newman had a secret branch within the goverment to secretly sell Assets for NOTHING.

    And Peter Dutton/Immigration has kidnapped a 21 year old, and put in prison.

  34. Rates Analyst

    On face value, they look okay but when I look at the economy, I don’t see any momentum that would generate those GDP growth numbers although considering how cheap money is and the fact that on a whole the Asian region plus the U.S is growing responsible well I can’t fathom a reason for the lack of growth besides a lack of direction from Canberra.

  35. I have just read that something similar has happened in Darwin, where local police backed up by BF targeted brothels with the view to catching a) illegal operations and b) residents/businessmen without visas. Some success.

    However, Darwin is not very like Melbourne. I wonder whose bright idea it was to try on a bigger stage. And is the idea to pick out a capital city every month?

  40. GhostWhoVotes ‏@GhostWhoVotes 1m1 minute ago

    #ReachTEL Poll Federal 2 Party Preferred: L/NP 47 (0) ALP 53 (0) #auspol
    0 retweets 0 favorites

  41. Goosh Goosh – even at the 2013 federal election the swing to the Coalition was remarkably weak in Portland and Warrnambool. Without an incumbent Liberal member, an unpopular federal Liberal government, and a fairly popular state Labor government, I think South-West Coast would be a seat to watch if Victorian Labor decided to invest resources in the seat in order to boost its majority.

  42. [Constable Plodvlieg says the first ABF press release was “misunderstood”.]

    Their second press release accused the reporting for creating the misunderstanding, even though reporters and others were simply using the very words ABF used in its original press release!

  44. Was it 1999 or 2002 that the ALP nearly defeated Napthine in Portland.

    The ALP have in the distance past won seats or have been competitive in the western district.

  46. [But what are they actually supposed to be doing? Other than satiated rabid right-wingers?]

    No clue, sorry. Looking at their tweets their jobs seem to be somewhat…flexible.

  49. mexicanbeemer @ 1334 – I see a small potential for growth in Victoria given the state government is moving toward debt-financing in order to fund large-scale infrastructure projects.

  50. Patrick at 1233

    Most welcome and you’ll be comforted to note also that a not-insignificant proportion are lefty voters too.

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