Fairfax-Ipsos: 52-48 to Coalition

The first Ipsos poll in three months provides more evidence of a slippage in support for Malcolm Turnbull and the Coalition government.

The latest Ipsos poll for the Fairfax papers is another weaker result for the Coalition, whose two-party lead of 52-48 compares with 56-44 at the previous such poll in mid-November. On the primary vote, the Coalition is down four points to 44%, Labor is up three to 32% and the Greens are up two to 15%. Malcolm Turnbull takes a solid hit on his still very strong personal ratings, with approval down seven to 62% and disapproval up eight to 24%. Bill Shorten is little changed on 30% approval (up one) and 55% disapproval (down two), and his deficit on preferred prime minister has narrowed slightly, from 69-18 to 64-19. The poll was conducted Thursday to Saturday from a sample of 1403.

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.

1,969 comments on “Fairfax-Ipsos: 52-48 to Coalition”

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  1. Hey guys, I tried to access Laura Tingle’s article in the AFR about Morrison’s NPC speech but ended up in Room 404. 🙁

    Has anyone got a link that goes to it? 🙂

  2. Scott Morrison’s performance today was a perfect example of ‘so many words, so few answers’. He again mouthed slogans & platitudes whilst producing no solutions whatsoever. He was Hockeyesque in so many ways.

    Laura Tingle doesn’t muck around & she, like so many others, has lost confidence in the Coalitions economic performance. Their credibility, especially after apparently wasting $70b with very little to show for it has been shredded.

    Conversely, Paul Kelly spoke almost glowingly today in the Oz of Shorten’s tax policies & his political gumption & even advised that Turnbull copy a number of them.

  3. Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison spent 45 minutes addressing the National Press Club today delivering a speech that contained no policy proposals, no ideas for government spending, no discussion on infrastructure and no policy commitments on the reform for the tax system.

    Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen said “2 1/2 years in government, five months as treasurer and we get 46 minutes of waffle, slogans and platitudes. No plans, no policy.”

    The Treasury did however, said in his speech that there will be no help coming for the state governments when it comes to the funding of health and schools. State governments have been suffering from funding cuts to health and education from the Federal​ government after the Abbott government cut funding from 9% per year to 4.5%.

    The Treasurer also hinted that more cuts were to be expected from the federal government as he said he wanted to reduce expenditure below revenue and not increase taxes.

    Didn’t Morrison get the memo? Austerity only works to make the wealthy, wealthier!

    Then again, maybe he did.

  6. Personally there’s not a problem in itself of the ALP and the Coalition (or the Libs) voting together – generally it’s the topic that they’re voting on together that I’m unimpressed about.

  7. Anyway, I hope Morrison does attempt another 2014esque Budget in May. It worked very well for the Labor Party then and will do again. 🙂

  8. Is the decision to cut funds for health and education the greatest rupture in Federal-State relations since Federation? Has the Federal Government ever walked away from the States like that?

  9. [“Morrison promises tax cuts for all.”]

    I have no idea how they got that. The best possible semi-truthful spin you could put on it was

    “Morrison promises to consider tax cuts for all, sometime in the future. Perhaps. Definitely maybe.”

  10. Thank you kindly, victoria.

    Love the photo accompanying the article. It makes Scotty the Dog of a Treasurer look absolutely gormless! 😀

  11. zoomster:

    I don’t really see the issue with exhausted votes, to be honest. If the reforms do get up, I seriously doubt I will bother to preference beyond the vaguely left-leaning/centrist parties. Once it gets to the point where I’m choosing between Rise Up Australia, the Christian Democrats, No Carbon Tax Climate Change Sceptics or a Coalition Senator, I’m quite happy for my vote to be “wasted.”

    And I find it a little odd to see people on one hand saying “well, if people want to vote above the line and use GTVs, that’s their choice!” but then fretting about people choosing to have their vote exhaust instead of directing preferencing. (Not saying that you made such comments btw, zoomster, but others certainly have.)

    IMO, Group Voting Tickets are a far greater subversion of democracy than people being able to exhaust instead of preference.

  12. K-17 @ 1858,
    I honestly don’t think the general public have realised the enormity of that decision, it’s yet to hit them where it hurts.

    Plus, at one and the same time keeping the funding levels up to the palatial Private Schools.

  13. zoomster, 1849

    Would you think, then, that it’s a good idea to encourage voters to mark as many boxes as possible (through something along the lines of that being written on the ballot paper itself, etc?)

    [My only objection otherwise have been to the arguments – the assumption that the election of minor party Senators was not the intention of the voters, and that thus their vote was wasted.]

    It depends what you mean by this – in cases where progressive parties preference conservative ones or vice versa, (Labor preferencing FF, One Nation preferencing Greens, for example), chances are that the majority of the voters of said parties did not want this to happen. If it’s something more ideologically in line, such as, say, the Australian Christians preferencing Family First, then I’d consider it more believable.

  14. Cotmomma – They’ll certainly be told all about it during the next election campaign – during which the State Premiers will be bleating loudly.!

  18. Laura Tingle has identified a salient point about the Coalition’s overblown rhetoric wrt Labor wanting to be ‘a tax and spend government’.

    It’s what the Coalition government are as well!

  19. Morrison claimed today that the Liberals had saved $80 billion but had spent $70 billion of the $80 billion.

    He implied that the Government was $10 billion ahead as a result of their endeavours.

    But the Coalition has added around $150 billion to the Commonwealth debt.

    Abbott/Hockey added $111 billion to the debt.
    Morrison has added around $40 billion to the debt.

    Here is my question to the MSM: Why wasn’t there a single journalist in the PC who challenged Morrison on the debt load the Liberals have added to the Commonwealth gross debt?

    Why did they let him get away with the $10 billion?

  20. K-17,
    I wonder if the word will go out to the Coalition Premiers to keep it under their hats for the duration of the federal election campaign while ‘Flash Harry’ Turnbull bamboozles the electorate?

  21. The highest ever peace time take of GDP by a Commonwealth Government is now: 26% of GDP.

    Morrison is pollywaffling about needing to get it down but he forgot to say that the Coalition has increased it since Rudd, Gillard, Rudd.

  23. Another Morrison record is that the household debt to GDP ratio reached the zenith of being the highest in the OECD under this Coalition Government.

    Remember Hammock urging people to borrow?

  24. I suppose in this PB audience where actual suspected criminals are not expected to travel to justice, but people who at worst failed to stop others committing crimes must travel to Australia to give evidence A THIRD time, that the pathetic juvenile song of Minchin is a bit hit?

  25. CatMomma@1799
    [ The Greens like to differentiate themselves by describing the major parties as obsolescent, but their push for Senate voting changes show they too have become part of the mouldering establishment

    Just doing my bit for balance. 🙂

    Perhaps the issue is more that while the Greens rely on leaching the disenfranchised progressive vote from Labor, they are unhappy that a similar splintering of the right-wing vote away from the Coalition has delivered the balance of power to arch conservatives on a number of occasions. ]

    My concern with the Greens is that they are very happy to leach the the *somewhat* disenfranchised progressive vote from Labor, but in no way feel that they should put the progressive vote they gain into supporting progressive political outcomes.

    At the end of the day, only Labor federal governments, in the tiny 25% of time they have been in government since federation, have produced progressive policy. And this was as true under RGR as it was during the Whitlam (Medibank, Free Tertiary Education, furthering equal pay for women after it had stalled, support for all schools on a needs-based socioeconomic basis, rather than the dollar for dollar of the Menzies era) and Hawke/Keating (Medicare, anti-discrimination legislation, universal super, loads of extra support for families with children, Paul Keating’s Redfern Speech, and access to tertiary education for all, by expansion of the sector) Years. Remember Gonski, NBN and NDIS in the RGR years?

    As Bob Brown said around 2010, we are not here to keep the bastards honest, we are here to replace them, but it will take until about 2050. By replace them, I do not think he was talking about the Libs.

    So, can the Greens work with Labor from now until 2050, or does the “replace them” agenda require treating Labor as the enemy?

  26. Personally, if I were Labor I’d tell them to take the voting reforms to a plebiscite. If the people want it, they’ll vote for it, and if there’s anything that should go to a plebiscite it’s changes to the voting system.

  27. I haven’t had a chance to watch the Morrison speech in full, but the snippets I saw on Ten News during my lunch break looked pretty appalling. At one point, he seems to almost say outright that he has no idea what he’s going to be doing yet come budget-time!

    The coverage was surprisingly critical too, with mentions of the poor getting hit the worst and the speech being pretty devoid of content, and Bowen got fairly lengthy airtime.

  31. I know the election of Fielding is always raised in these debates – but it was a major news item during the last few days of the election campaign (when voters were paying the most attention) that that was where the ALP preferences were going (and thus I numbered 1 through to 70…). Arguably, anyone who voted above the line for the ALP either (i) knew their preferences were going to Fielding and didn’t care or (ii) didn’t care where their preferences were going, full stop.

    (ii) is actually the scenario I usually encounter. Voters know who they want to get up, and if that person doesn’t get up, they don’t particularly care (a bit like watching a grand final your team hasn’t made it to; you might still have a preference, but it’s nowhere near as important as if your team was a contender).

    Every election, I get approached by people wanting to be told how to vote. I used to try and go through the ticket with them and explain the decision, but they’re never interested – they just want to make sure they’re doing what the party (or candidate) wants them to do. (After all, they’re trusting them enough to give them their first preference).

    Also in my experience, minor party voters are just that. They’re not major party or Green voters who have lost their way. Basically, the majority of them simply hate politicians, full stop (and really, really hate the Greens). As far as I’m concerned, it is entirely appropriate that they get to elect a minor party person – someone has to represent the disgruntled, anti politics people, and there are enough of them to justify at least four or five Senators.

  32. c@t

    This is one description

    [Tim Jones
    Tim Jones – ‏@Forthleft2

    Morrison thrashing about like a landed halibut.
    #abc730
    12:40 AM – 17 Feb 2016
    14 RETWEETS21 LIKES]

  33. zoomster, 1881

    Then give the parties the opportunity to issue HTV cards. No harm done.

    I haven’t been referring to minor party voters as major party voters that have lost their way, they have an ideology just like everyone else and preferrably want to stick to it, that’s why they would prefer their vote to stay in their niche and not jump around from the Socialist Alliance to Rise Up Australia.

  34. Portland Aluminum Smelter

    “The smelter is responsible for almost 10 per cent of Victoria’s electricity demand. Its exit would exacerbate the massive oversupply of power in the national electricity market and could put further pressure on coal-fired electricity generators to shut.”

    I hope the Govt – Federal or State do not go down the corporate welfare path and provide hundreds of millions of taxpayers dollars to large multi national who also happens to be one of our largest polluters.

  35. Douglas and Milko,
    Hear! Hear!

    Though I think that, if the sort of Anti Labor agit prop that I see shoveled out by Pegasus, day in, day out, is any guide, then I think we will be waiting for a cold day in hell before you get your wish.

    Because, when you get down to it, what else have The Greens got? A few rinky-tink, pie-in-the-sky policies that would break the Budget and wouldn’t even give us the warm fuzzies quite frankly as their highly ideological positions, such as wrt asylum seekers, would rend the social fabric disastrously and actually damage the environment, which I thought was their raison d’etre?

    I predict that, especially if they get into bed with the Coalition too often that their support base will start crumbling, and people will start going back to supporting one or other of the major parties, such as happened to the Democrats.

    You can almost see the cracks appearing already. Studying the Essential Report this week I was amazed to see that almost 20% of people who vote Green support the sending back of asylum seeker babies to Nauru and Manus Island!

    I mean, what is the point of The Greens anymore? Sanding off the rough edges of the major parties’ policy? Any Opposition could do that job. Probably better for the electorate if the Opposition they support actually has a shot at becoming the next government. Which, even in 2050 I don’t think The Greens will be.

    Though you never know. 🙂

  36. victoria @ 1878,

    ‘ I saw a few comments on twitter suggesting that Morrison was defensive.’

    Situation normal then? 😀

    I’ve got a great new ‘On Water Matters’ line for him if he wants it:

    ‘ That’s a matter for the Budget deliberations.’ 😉

  37. [WeWantPaul

    Posted Wednesday, February 17, 2016 at 9:30 pm | Permalink

    I suppose in this PB audience where actual suspected criminals are not expected to travel to justice, but people who at worst failed to stop others committing crimes must travel to Australia to give evidence A THIRD time, that the pathetic juvenile song of Minchin is a bit hit?]

    Pell should trust in his dog and get on a bloody plane. If dog strikes him dead on the way over, he gets to heaven pronto, right?

    I was listening to the Minchin song and thinking how very little of that sort of upwards humbug the high and mighty of this land actually get. Tim dared Pell to sue him.

    I was also thinking of the time that Pell went live with (Flannery?) to debate global warming.

    Pell made a grade A scientific dick of himself but he was too arrogant to realize it.

    Meanwhile the nest of vipers in the Vatican is doing some Byzantine internal roiling over child sex abuse. You and I both know that the Vatican archives contain enough information to jail thousands of clergy worldwide, including in the Vatican itself.

    But Pell just rides above it all, counting the pieces of silver for il Papa.

  39. Airlines

    [that’s why they would prefer their vote to stay in their niche and not jump around from the Socialist Alliance to Rise Up Australia.]

    That’s an assumption. (I admit I’m making some, too, but at least mine are based on actual experiences with voters). My assumption is that they’re (or at least a reasonable proportion of them) perfectly happy with someone who isn’t one of the majors getting up, and they’re not fussed who as long as it isn’t Labor, Liberal or the Greens.

  41. zoomster, 1889

    Then, now, they have the ability to preference every single minor in whatever fashion they want (and they can completely avoid the possibility of parties preferencing majors on their GTVs before other minor parties).

  42. Peg@1838,

    [Re-posting link from #1783 – Why Wong, Conroy, Dastyari and other like-minded people within the ALP don’t support senate voting reforms.

    http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/angry-minor-parties-to-target-marginal-liberal-seats-retaliation-to-senate-vote-reforms-20160217-gmwlm1.html#ixzz40PJN7jaK

    Such a cynical political strategy.]

    No, this time it is not a cynical strategy. It is a way of trying to stop the Libs being reelected.

    Australia will be unrecognizable in three years if the Libs are reelected.

    Just from the point of view of climate change – grrrrr. The trashing of climate change science at CSIRO will cause Australia, which is extraordinarily sensitive to climate change (see e.g Jarod Diamond’s Collapse) to become a disaster area. The Libs are all about, “Yeah, sure, the climate is changing, but we will do mitigation”. Again Grrrrr. How can you do mitigation when you do not know what to mitigate against. I am unaligned Labor, because I work for reform, and very supportive of Green’s policies in general. But, Green’s policy will get nowhere unless they can work with Labor.

    If the Green’s are going to hold out for policy nirvana, and insist that Labor are as bad as the Libs, they will become the equivalent of the DLP – there from 1954 to stop Labor gaining power, and giving us 23 years of Liberal Govt, meaning that the great social democracy built by the Labor party by 1949 was actually reversed, and stalled until 1972 (Dec!!).

    See e.g. http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/malcolm-turnbulls-attacks-on-public-health-are-impoverishing-and-killing-me-20160214-gmtn80.html Thanks BK for providing this link on 15th Feb. Without your excellent of relevant news items, I would never be able to keep up with what is going on.

    Am I grumpy, yes I am. If the Greens and Labor cannot work together, and YES!!!! there are faults on both sides, Australia will become the model neo-liberal experimental society that Rupert has planned for us.

  43. I noted that once again today Morrison used the ‘tax and spend’ line against Labor.

    I think the choice of the word ‘spend’ is quite deliberately chosen to imply Labor is wasteful.

    I think Labor should correct the Libs by using the term ‘tax and fund’.
    We fund schools
    We fund hospitals
    We fund roads
    We fund public transport
    We fund all the services taxpayers rely on.

  44. Douglas and Milko:

    [As Bob Brown said around 2010, we are not here to keep the bastards honest, we are here to replace them, but it will take until about 2050. By replace them, I do not think he was talking about the Libs.]

    I don’t pretend to know what Bob Brown was thinking there, but considering that he was riffing on an old Don Chipp quote that definitely was referring to both majors, I don’t think its a leap to assume that Brown was as well. Especially since the context of his comment (I’m assuming – this was a while ago) was about comparisons between the Democrats and the Greens and whether they had higher electoral ambition than just a BoP force in the Senate.

  46. Anything that stops any party from having to negotiate preferences with the strangest of bedfellows and leaves it purely in the hands of voters gets the vote from me.

  48. Sad to see the Labor WA MHR’s vote with their feet. If only Labor had acted to remove Shorten and install Burkie when there was still time. Shame on Conroy for the dereliction of duty.

  50. C@tmomma

    24 possibly broadcasts it an hour later.

    ‘The Dumb’ is not my normal viewing choice.

    Freaky that you saying ‘not covered’ was immediately followed doing just that.

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