Morgan opens the opinion polling account for 2016 with a result that’s only slightly less good for the government than the thumping lead recorded in its final poll of 2015. On the primary vote, the Coalition is down a point to 47%, Labor is up two to 29%, the Greens are down 1.5% to 13%, and Palmer United are steady on 1%. That pans out to a 56-44 lead to the Coalition on respondent-allocated preferences, down from 57.5-42.5, and a 55.5-44.5 lead on previous election preferences, down from 56-44. The poll was conducted by face-to-face and SMS over the past two weekends from a sample of 2839.
Morgan: 56-44 to Coalition
The first federal poll for the year provides no indication that the New Year break and its attendant political controversies have made much difference to voting intention.
[ Anyone from the ALP across the ABC/Malcolm/Ross/#NBN fiasco? Anyone? Is this thing on? ]
The reddit thing is still going on. Ross is putting the position that evidence will be coming out via other media, better protected than reddit.
I am thinking that we wont see much from pollies until that happens and Turnbull / ABC actually get to know what they have to answer and what they can be evasive on once they know what records are out there and what they are unable to suppress.
I reckon Conroy and Clare will have some fun with this. 🙂
uytaur – still haven’t admitted you were wrong on Shorten publicly and specifically calling for Clements to resign?
Yes, I made a math error – and I admitted it – 25,000 (That’s and Army Corps worth of Troops) is the correct number.
Come on then – The Australian has a very good summary of Shorten’s day yesterday: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/state-politics/jamie-clements-how-labors-slowmoving-train-crash-accelerated/news-story/c8a56b0aa2bc08ce64938e40486c07d4
Nick Ross has detailed how MediaWatch dismissed his ‘theories’ in a way that smeared him. Didn’t interview him because “no time, MW story already written”, and cherry-picked quotes from what he had written.
C@tmomma@1939
There are always elections in the offing.
Properly handled, a red hot poker up the arse of the corrupt NSW branch would be an electoral positive whenever it is done.
Vested interests will, of course, always claim otherwise.
Compact Crank,
Let me help you out. Here’s one taking head on the ABC who is ‘openly conservative’. Ask her conservative husband:
•Michael Stutchbury (editor-in-chief Australian Financial Review) and Ticky Fullerton (ABC’s The Business) 🙂
Crank
Wrong. Shorten called for action. Action happened. Sky news that Murdoch outlet even reported swearing directed to Shorten’s chief of staff
Airlines @1946
MORE than 40 per cent of ABC journalists who answered a survey question about their political attitudes are Greens supporters, four times the support the minor party enjoys in the wider population.
The journalism survey, the largest in 20 years, has found the profession is overwhelmingly left-leaning, with respondents from the ABC declaring double levels of support for the Greens compared with those from Fairfax Media and News Limited.
The survey of 605 journalists from around Australia found that just more than half described themselves as having left political views, while only 13 per cent said they were right of centre.
This tendency was most pronounced among the 34 ABC journalists who agreed to declare their voting intention, with 41 per cent of them saying they would vote for the Greens, 32 per cent declaring support for Labor and 14 per cent backing the Coalition.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/its-easy-being-green-at-the-abc-survey-finds/story-fn59niix-1226647246897
Crank
Agreed to disclose means its a self selecting poll. Real accurate it aint.
Crank
It was a decision of ABC management not to upset Malcolm before the 2013 election because they ‘knew’ he would be Comm. Minister afterwards. Therefore NBN couldn’t be criticised. Alberici’s piece was held over until after the election, too.
If the journos want to keep their jobs, they have to tow the line and the line is pro-Coalition.
Not to mention the former ABC reporter and openly conservative Member for Corangamite, Sarah Henderson.
guytaur @1948 One! – I see her on Sky News but haven’t seen here on the ABC’s key national Programs – rather surprising an Ex-LNP Minister would be considered conservative – how about a Journo or producer? Philip Adams?
Everyone says Barrie Cassidy is a Liberal these days! 😀
Crank
YOUR challenge was to name one. I did. Too bad challenge answered.
Compact Crank #1944
[Given the employees of the ABC are about 4 times more likely to be Greens Voters than the Australian Population, the vast majority are ALP Voters…]
That makes absolutely no sense. Even if the first part of your statement was true, 48% to 60% of ABC employees would be Green voters (since 12% to 15% of the Australian Population are Greens voters), so it is mathematically impossible for the remaining employees to be ‘a vast majority’ of ALP voters, even if there were no LNP or Independent Voters that were ABC employees.
Oopsie, Crank, you forgot Tony Abbott’s Press Secretary, (Tony Abbott’s a Conservative isn’t he?), Mark Simkin!
Or are you lamely going to suggest that Mark’s political sympathies lie elsewhere? 😀
Twitter is not going to be enough to put pressure on Truffles and Co. Perhaps Abbott can step in and help. 😀
[Jansant
Jansant – @Jansant
Now #ourABC (formerly public broadcaster) has morphed into state media, thank Christ for @twitter. #fraudband #malware #auspol #inditalks
8:37 PM – 14 Jan 2016]
I call bullshit on this discussion of ABC bias.
It does not matter who the front people vote for. It doesn’t even matter necessarily who the backroom people vote for – the people who decide what is ‘news’, who decide what is published or broadcast, who decide who will be interviewed and so forth.
The fact is that our public broadcaster has been intimidated from discussing the truth because it will upset the Liberals. That is scary for the nation. The Liberals have insisted that the public broadcaster become the Government broadcaster, as we have in guided democracies and democracies in name only.
That is the issue. So I am not trying to guess who the journos vote for. You should never know who really good journalists vote for anyway.
Airlines @1950 You left out the Lefty host – Mr Jones so it was 3 all – if you accept O’Neill as a conservative – which I’m pretty sure he would be apoplectic about being called conservative.
One show where it was even – with the vast remainder not reflecting Australia’s Political views but those of the Producers.
Name one QandA Program which caused post-broadcast controversy for it being biased against the ALP or Greens? You know with set up questions and guests and all that normally gets done to Conservatives like having the Comedian/foreigner sitting next to the Conservative making snide remarks.
What is the business with Comcare and Ross? Did he make some claim?
Re CC @1957: the sample sizes quoted are way too small for the results to be meaningful. 41% of 34 ABC journalists (i.e. 14), margin of error about 6 (18%).
In any case, so what? should the ABC ask peoples’ political views before it employs them? Isn’t stacking the board and management enough?
imacca @1951 – if it’s the truth it doesn’t need a different platform from reddit.
TPOF@1967
Exactly right.
Ticky Fullerton is a longstanding journalist at the ABC, currently Presenter for Lateline Business.
guytaur – yes – he called for “action” – he did not once publicly call for his resignation.
Crank
Only your sophistry says that is not calling for resignation. Even Canberra Press Gallery understood that.
TPOF
Thank you. The voice of reason. Crank is chasing the wrong rabbit.
catmomma @1955
Stuchbury is a Fairfax Employee – not a full-time ABC employee.
Does Fullerton report on politics? No.
CC, 1957
Thanks for the survey, but it is a survey and not a poll, and therefore not entirely accurate. Additionally, you referenced “employees” – the ABC does not solely employ journalists, they also employ presenters who wouldn’t be included in this sample and a variety of other people also work there who were not surveyed. You should refine the point that you’re making which is “there is a significant minority of ABC journalists who support the Greens”.
I also don’t think you can correlate voting intention with bias – I doubt Tom Switzer’s “Between the Lines” is conservative-biased just because he’s conservative, and from experience, the same mostly permeates throughout the system. All the information regarding the ABC that I have seen shows that it’s unbiased (unless you can show me investigations that have come up that it isn’t).
C@t
[Everyone says Barrie Cassidy is a Liberal these days!]
*laughing*
Compact Crank,
Obviously Stutch is the editor of the AFR, but he also appears on Insiders frequently, and Ticky Fullerton reports on government economic policy all the time.
shellbell
by Miryam Robin in Crikey
[The axing of the website, which came at a time of rapid change in the ABC digital offering more broadly, “reinforced everything I’d long suspected,” Ross said. “At that point, I talked to the union, got a lot of legal advice, and was told to go to Comcare”. Comcare is an agency that covers public servants who have workplace disputes.
Ross’ Comcare case, which is still ongoing, has so far been very difficult and emotionally draining, Ross says. “I was severely stressed and getting depressed as well. I’d gone through every internal system to say what was going on and get some help, and been let down.” Recently, he was offered a redundancy by the ABC, and took it.
“I love the idea of working for the ABC — the public duty aspect of it. But in reality I’m working for management … And my position was untenable.”]
CC, 1968
You asked about the panel, I gave you a panel. Brendan O’Neill is a libertarian which would be more aligned with rightwing politics than with leftwing politics, so therefore he’d be rightwing (as evidenced by his stances on marriage equality, climate change etc), no matter what he says.
C@tmomma@1955
What is your source for saying they are married? It doesn’t show up on either of their Wikipedia entries.
The problem of ABC bias can be easily fixed – sell it- then they can be as biased as they want – and the owners will work out what bias their consumers want.
I’m sure the owners of GreenLeft Weekly would want to stump up for the most widely distributed media organisation in Australia.
CC, 1984
No proof of that ABC bias then?
Crank
Selling the ABC is not the answer. Its why the alleged interference happened in the first place as the right does not want commercially free independent journalism.
Compact Crank@1984
So you are on a unity ticket with geniuses like Player One and Rex Douglas.
Poor Scott Morrison. 😉
[To be fair, the choice of Scott Morrison, a Liberal Party conservative stalwart, to replace the hapless Joe Hockey was motivated as much by a commitment to party stability as it was a political win in mugging Tony Abbott and further shrinking his rump of rusted-on supporters.
But the largely untold story is that Morrison’s very public early and ongoing struggles as the nation’s chief bean-counter go beyond his lack of fluency in the econo-speak and the arcane language of national accounts.
They are an unintended byproduct of ill-thought-out, professionally untenable removal of Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson. Not only did Australia lose a vastly experienced officer in what is traditionally the government’s go-to adviser on all things economic, but Abbott and Hockey, with the whiff of blood in their nostrils, proceeded to shove Blair Comley, the man seen as potentially Canberra’s greatest bureaucratic talent, out the door. That particular carelessness was neatly compounded into another own goal when Comley was almost immediately grabbed by NSW Premier Mike Baird as his own department head.
…Morrison is presently boxed in by his decisions on staffing his personal office; save for the appointment of former Costello adviser Phil Gaetjens as his chief of staff, his team has largely been retained from his previous portfolio, Immigration. Morrison’s former role is steeped in the more prosaic creation and enforcement of real-world rules rather than the vast complexities of economic policy — the behavioral science behind, and the fiscal and monetary levers that require, considered co-ordination as well as endless convincing and education of the electorate. Not to mention considered, quick responses to the stuttering global economy.]
It’s interesting that on Insiders – the major weekly political commentary program (discounting QandA) – they are unable to field at least half/half Lefty/Conservative panels let alone occasionally even having three conservatives.
[and cherry-picked quotes from what he had written.]
Even worse misrepresented parts of quotes in a way that changed their meaning.
MW has never had a lot of friends on the right it will now have no friends and no credibility.
Crank
Its interesting you have no answers for the legitimate questions raised by the Ross allegations.
lizzi – the Treasurer doesn’t run Monetary Policy. Hasn’t for decades.
Compact Crank@1989
Your problem seems to be more related to ‘facts’ being left wing.
But when you support a political party with an anti-science, irrational world view, that is hardly surprising.
guytaur @1991 – the fact that no other major reputable media outlets have run the story or that his Union or coworkers have done anything demonstrably public to support him clearly indicates he is most likely way off the mark.
The ALP has no candidate to challenge Christopher Pyne in Sturt.
Super candidate Jo Chapley, lawyer and a manager of the family supermarket chain, would have won Sturt if Tony Abbott was still PM but she and the ALP have correctly divined that it’s now a forlorn hope.
Chapley ran state opposition leader Steven Marshall close in Dunstan (formerly Norwood) at the last state election and she may have another crack at it next time.
Meanwhile, it’s up to the Nick Xenophon Party to put pressure on Pyne.
Crank
😆 @ you.
Money talks.
bemused @1993 – you claim that the LNP is anti-science and has an irrational world view is not even worthy of an Undergrad Uni dirt sheet.
Maybe you could roll out some facts – ones relevant to 2016, not 1972.
Got anything better?
Compact Crank@1997
Try their attitude to climate change and their ratbag direct-action policy.
SBS Australia @SBS 46s46 seconds ago
Australian MP @MehreenFaruqi ‘interrogated’ at LAX about how she got Australian passport: http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2016/01/15/australian-muslim-mp-interrogated-lax-about-how-she-got-australian-passport …
First time in how many years was it that there was no science minister, 30 I think.