After three new polls this week – from Newspoll, Morgan and Essential Research – the BludgerTrack poll aggregate comes in at 53.6-46.4 to Labor, with Labor picking up one each on the seat projection in Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania. However, the movement is partly down to a methodological tweak involving Morgan, for which bias adjustments are now based only on the pollster’s track record within a year of the poll in question, and not as before over the entirety of the term. The same change was made for ReachTEL a couple of weeks ago. Over the long term, the effect of these changes is neutral – but in the short term they’re favourable to Labor, as both these poll series appear to have leaned less to Labor lately than they did earlier in the term. Newspoll and Essential also reported leadership ratings this week, which have had the effect of furthering Tony Abbott’s decline, while also stymieing Bill Shorten’s gains over the previous fortnight.
Two further snippets of recent attitudinal polling:
• The Guardian relates a Lonergan Research poll had a 57-43 split in favour of taking in more refugees in response to the Syria crisis, although there was a 54-46 split in favour of “Operation Sovereign Borders”, namely boat tow-backs and related policies. The results suggest these were “forced choice” questions, in which the only alternative to jumping off the fence was to hang up on the call – which Kevin Bonham has his doubts about. The poll encompassed 1109 respondents and was conducted on Tuesday night.
• The Australia Institute has conducted online polling (note the self-selecting kind) on extra funding for ABC regional news services, which was found to have 59% nationally and 64% in rural and remote areas. Further polling on the same question specifically targeted the electorates of Eden-Monaro, New England, Wide Bay, Sturt, North Sydney and Wentworth.
Also:
• The loudest of hosannas are in order for David Barry’s election results resource, which features – in the most streamlined, intuitive and accessible fashion imaginable – aggregate and seat-level results for all House of Representatives elections since federation, including preference distributions and preference flow data; facilities to explore data as bar charts, line charts and scatterplots; and interactive results maps which, on top of anything else, mark the first time all historical federal electoral boundaries have been brought together in one place.
• A Liberal National Party preselection process is under way to choose a successor to Bruce Scott in the remote Queensland seat of Maranoa. The Chronicle reports that David Littleproud, a manager of a Suncorp bank branch in Warwick, and Cameron O’Neil, a Maranoa councillor who works for the Queensland Disaster Management Committee, are “joint favourites”, while the Warwick Daily News narrows it down to just Littleproud as favourite. Other nominees are Lachlan Douglas, southern Queensland regional manager for Rabobank; Alison Krieg, a grazier from Blackall; and Rick Gurnett, a grazier from Charleville. Maranoa mayor Robert Loughnan was named earlier, but would seem to have dropped out of contention. The preselection will be conducted by a postal ballot, with the winner to be announced on October 23.
• Liberal MP Andrew Southcott last week announced he would bow out at the next election, after 19 years as member for the Adelaide seat of Boothby. Labor came close to toppling Southcott at its high-water marks of 2007 and 2010, but the 2013 landslide boosted his margin from 0.6% to 7.1%. Southcott is 47 years old, and speculation about his motives in pulling the plug have rested on two factors: his recent failure to win the Speakership, and the threat posed to his seat by the Nick Xenophon Team, notwithstanding that it is yet to announce a candidate. It is expected that the Liberals will be keen to field a female candidate. Sources quoted by The Advertiser suggest potential contenders include Carolyn Habib, a youth worker and former Marion councillor who ran unsuccessfully in the marginal seat of Elder at the March 2014 state election; and Nicolle Flint, a columnist for The Advertiser; and Caitlin Keage, a staffer to Senator Simon Birmingham. Labor has already preselected Mark Ward, a teacher at Urrbrae Agricultural High School, Mitcham councillor and narrowly unsuccessful candidate at the Davenport state by-election in January.
• Mark Kenny of Fairfax reports numbers from the Tasmanian Labor Senate preselection that has seen incumbent Lisa Singh dumped from third position in favour of John Short, state secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union. Singh outpolled Short in the rank-and-file half of the vote, which respectively gave 221, 123 and 110 to the incumbents, Ann Urquhart, Helen Polley and Lisa Singh, with Short on 74 and another 14 voters scattered among various also-rans. However, Short closed the gap when the half of the vote determined by unions and conference delegates was added to the total, by 158 votes to 154.
Hows Anna 2.0 going reigning in bikie violence?
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/10/woman-dies-in-hospital-after-being-beaten-while-trapped-in-crashed-car
Key symptoms of TD…
Involuntary movements of the face, including frowning, blinking, smiling, lip licking, mouth puckering, biting or chewing, clenching the jaw, sticking out the tongue, or rolling the tongue around in the mouth
ABC radio is reporting that the jobless rate is expected to fall
[Is there a medical reason for him not being able to keep his tongue inside his mouth?]
Could also be that he can’t concentrate on more than one thing at a time.
The italics problem seems to have started with my post. I hope I am not the culprit.
I have never really understood what causes it.
Victoria
Yet several financial analyst are claiming that the government’s changes to Newstart will result in an unemployment rise.
TBA 101
It was a murder by a partner, not ‘bikie violence’ as such.
TBA
And what is Anna doing about a man shooting his partner dead af McDonalds this morning. Sheesh….
lizzie,
There was another murder on the Gold Coast today.
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/woman-shot-at-helensvale-on-gold-coast/story-fnihsrf2-1227520612196
Do you wanna do bets on the killer being a bikie?
“@TonyAbbottMHR says the Syrian #refugees Aus will take are different to those in detention because they did not use people smugglers #auspol”
He knows this how, exactly? Or does he think people smugglers only operate to direct people towards Australia? Fool.
Vic
Yes, the participation rate (the number of people in or looking for work) was abnormally high last month.
Most likely that will fall back to more normal levels this month. (It’s a random sample so it should). That means the most likely outcome is that there is very few jobs created but the unemployment rate falls anyway.
TBA
Fmd I didnt know only bikies killed their partners
Jace,
we are taking them from real refugee camps from Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.
If they paid a people smuggler they didn’t get a very good deal to end up in an overcrowded UNHCR camp
[Do you wanna do bets on the killer being a bikie?]
I will have $50 it was
JW
Tardive Dyskinesia – Sounds a bit grim but plausible.
http://shayneneumann.com.au/media-releases.php?id=131
[The Abbott Government’s failures have left older Australians languishing without vital aged care services due to the shambolic implementation of My Aged Care.
The system has been plagued with long delays, inaccurate and often incorrect information and inadequate referral systems.
The Abbott Government has not resourced the system appropriately, nor consulted the key users of the system – GPs and aged care providers.
There is a clear disconnect between ageing and health issues since the Abbott Government ripped the $15 billion a year portfolio out of Health and dumped it on an Assistant Minister for Social Services.
The aged care gateway was supposed to provide a single entry point to aged care services in Australia, and was a key element of Labor’s Living Longer Living Better aged care reforms.
Two years of Tony Abbott’s leadership failures have undermined those reforms.]
[.@GMegalogenis · 2h2 hours ago
Cost of bringing 12,000 Syrian refugees to Oz $1 billion per year.]
Yeah, a bit dubious of extrapolating out Senate polling into HoR seats. The Dems did well in the Senate but could never win in the Lower House.
(Also I’m a bit chary about predictions re non existent parties – remember when posters here were predicting Assange would win a swag of Senate seats?)
Player One
TotallyBoringArsehat
People in our processing camps are not real refugees.
UNHCR says differently … but hey, what would they know?
Your pet troll is Gold folks.
You should do stand up TBA,
been getting a laugh out of your commentary here, as a lurker, for ages, I had to register to say thanks.
Go figure
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Qld Police: A motor cycle officer was the 1st response, he commenced CPR and did an excellent job]
Nart Man
TBA is most definitely good for a laugh
@118 – no doubt X would be a perfect Senate party. But it would certainly play well where there’s no real appetite to vote Labor in opposition to the Liberals.
my 117 came out wrongly.
George Megalogenis @GMegalogenis · 2h2 hours ago
Cost of bringing 12,000 Syrian refugees to Oz $1 billion per year.
Unemployment 6.2%
There’s something wrong from Twitter – still didn’t work. Sorry.
Should be:
Cost of bringing 12,000 Syrian refugees to Oz $250m per year.
Locking up 1577 asylum seekers on Manus & Nauru $1billion per year.
UE rate ticks down to 6.2, mostly becuase of hte fall in participation as widely predicted.
There were +17.4K jobs created, which is basically only enough to keep pace with population growth. The fall in the UE rate is because fewer people were looking this month (as I said above, last month’s number for participation was oddly high).
That’s actually quite a boring Labour Force result
I’ve noticed you all take him as a given victoria, like that bloody dog across the street that barks at night, eventually you don’t let it bother you.
But I will say since the ‘good government starts today’ hilarity and the static slightly widening polls, he has excelled himself.
Bless you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceWKrsJX9N4
I have to stand with hand on heart now, so excuse me, it’s the 21st Anniversary Version
Well, I was wrong once again re the unemployment rate.
Hockey must have been concerned though or else the ol under promise over achieve was at work.
Anyway, still too high.
Cheers.
[Scott Morrison says savings will have to be found in the budget for the intake of 12,000 refugees. ]
How about they make Tony live in The Lodge and take away his travelling allowance? And Joe’s scam on rent?
RA
Why were economists predicting 6.5%
They weren’t. At least none of the good ones.
The Government has changed the rules for Newstart and made Newstart harder to get.
However, the ABS survey is completely independent from Newstart. There’s no linkage.
@129 – despite what Finance has said, the Lodge isn’t ready yet.
I love the way they are now explicitly punishing those using the people smugglers and justifying abuse torture and rape because the victims used people smugglers rather than dying in unresourced camps while the record of the Abbott government has been to effectively give the actual people smugglers free boats.
TBA should be worried if they’ve changing the rules for NewStart.
J341983
What a shame. He could have shown his ‘generous heart’ by taking a couple of refugee families to live with him.
[ @129 – despite what Finance has said, the Lodge isn’t ready yet. ]
They’re still installing Tone’s “panic room”. Also, the AFP bunkhouse is not complete yet – it currently only sleeps 350.
mate,
I run my own small business and am a lifter not a leaner on the Aussie economy.
I haven’t even seen the inside of a Centrelink office unlike others here
KEVIN-ONE-SEVEN
TBA should be worried if they’ve changing the rules for NewStart.
Snork 😉
@137 – see what I mean about Libs believing their own bullshit?
[I run my own small business and am a lifter not a leaner on the Aussie economy.
I haven’t even seen the inside of a Centrelink office unlike others here]
Yeah, but when you started it was a big business…
I take it you do all your Centrelink business online then.
“”Locking up 1577 asylum seekers on Manus & Nauru $1billion per year.””
So stopping the boats is goog for the Economy?.
We could have housed them for less!.
goog= good!.
“”Why were economists predicting 6.5%””
Don’t worry that is next months.
The share markets have taken a drubbing
So what was the actual jobless rate?
Forget that – ABC just said
Jenauthor
6.2%
[I run my own small business and am a lifter not a leaner on the Aussie economy.]
So you might be paying a little bit of income tax each year, there are many who probably lift more monthly than you do annually mate, regardless of visits to the social security net
I can only speak for my firm but in 12 months we have increased staff numbers by 50% and will increase staff between now and January by another 20%.
In 12 months we have gone from 58 to 84 and will top 100 early next year.
We are working hard for Tony and Joe 🙂
Good day all. The PM’s performance on 7.30 last night was clearly that of a man under a lot of pressure. Actually, he started pretty well with the refugee issue, but it all came unstuck once Sales moved on to other topics.
I’d say he’s got a lot on his mind at the moment: the stuff about the ABC should be talking up the economy was definitely not in the script, and Sales’s comeback (some might say put down) was pretty devastating for mine.
Talking to people I know who are connected to the big ends of town in Melbourne and Sydney, I get the sense that the rich and powerful have just about had enough of the current state of affairs and are increasingly convinced that Turnbull should be made PM. That preference is limited to Turnbull: they aren’t interested in JBish and don’t believe that ScoMo is ready.
This certainly doesn’t mean it’s a done deal: in the strange hybrid beast that is the modern Liberal Party, the views of the rich and powerful don’t necessarily prevail.
People are always telling me that Liberal backbenchers so want to hang onto their seats that they would support just about anyone as leader: even Karl Marx himself, if he was doing well enough with the focus groups. But, these days there are quite a lot of people in the current parliamentary party who I think would rather lose government and perhaps even their own seat than to see a pro-SSM believer in climate change become a Liberal PM.
Anyway, I reckon things will start to hot up – if they’re going to – from the second week of October.