BludgerTrack: 52.8-47.2 to Coalition

For the third week in a row, the BludgerTrack poll aggregate detects movement away from the Coalition.

The BludgerTrack poll aggregate this week mostly splits the difference between a strong result for the government from ReachTEL and a weak one from Ipsos, translating into a 0.3% shift to Labor on two-party preferred and a two-point change on the seat projection, with Labor picking up one each in New South Wales and Victoria. The Ipsos poll also furnished one set of leadership ratings for the week, the impact of which on the trend measures is fairly minor.

On top of that, I’ve got an avalanche of new material to treat you with this week, most of which has been hived off to a separate post dealing with preselection news. There are two further poll results I’ve so far neglected to cover:

• This week’s Essential Research moves a point in favour of the Coalition on two-party preferred, who now lead 52-48. The primary votes are Coalition 43% (steady), Labor 33% (down two) and Greens 11% (steady). Further questions find 28% reporting the Malcolm Turnbull prime ministership has been better than expected, 22% worse than expected, and 41% as expected; a very even divide on the issue of babies born to asylum seekers in Australia, with 39% wanting them sent to Nauru and 40% believing they should remain in Australia; 34% believing conditions for asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island are good, versus 40% for poor; and 64% disapproving of suggestions the administration and payment of Medicare, pharmaceutical and aged care benefits should be outsourced, with only 17% approving.

• The Galaxy Queensland poll that provided state results for the Courier-Mail on the weekend also had a federal voting intention component, which had the Coalition’s lead in Queensland at 57-43 (unchanged from the 2013 election), from primary votes of Coalition 49% (up 3.3% since the election), Labor 30% (up 0.2%), Greens 10% (up 3.8%) and Palmer United 1% (down 10.0%). The poll was conducted last Wednesday and Thursday from a sample of 869.

Other notable news:

• The federal redistribution process for the Australian Capital Territory was finalised last month, leaving undisturbed the draft proposal from September. The Fraser electorate, which covers the northern part of Canberra, is to be renamed Fenner, with the Canberra electorate continuing to account for the capital’s centre and south, along with the unpopulated areas of the territory’s south. The two seats are respectively held for Labor by Gai Brodtmann and Andrew Leigh. Around 10,000 voters are to be transferred from Fraser to Canberra, leaving Labor’s two-party margin in Fraser unchanged at 12.6%, while increasing the Canberra margin from 7.0% to 7.4%.

• The process for a redistribution of the Northern Territory and its two federal electorates has commenced, but with a final resolution for the process being scheduled for early next year, the new boundaries will not take effect at the next election.

• The Northern Territory parliament has voted to change the electoral system from compulsory to optional preferential voting, so that voters will be required to do no more than number a single box, as is the case at state elections in New South Wales and Queensland. The bill was passed with the support of cross-bench independents in the face of opposition from Labor.

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.

2,149 comments on “BludgerTrack: 52.8-47.2 to Coalition”

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  1. Asha, 1977

    With Seeney’s tilt at getting preselection for Wide Bay, I doubt he’s got the support to go into any LNP leadership position in QLD

  2. Steve777@1999

    The record of ‘star’ candidates is not particularly encouraging. Some have done reasonably well (e.g. I would put Glen Lazarus in that category), some were failures (Cheryl Kernot as a Labor candidate), others didn’t do badly but went nowhere (Maxine McKew, John Alexander), while some good people were just not cut out for politics (Phil Koperberg, well respected head of NSW Emergency Services during the 1994 Bushfire emergency).

    A little harsh with some.

    Kernot was OK but then unravelled and did a big dummy spit when defeated by … Dutton 😮

    McKew was good and it was always going to be difficult to hang on to Bennelong.

    Alexander? Who?

    Koperberg went well as far as I recall and had the good sense to quit.

  3. Fulvio Sammut@2000

    Any way, lets play the mugs’ game.

    Tips for Newspoll tonight. Labor 50.01 – Coalition 49.99 TPP.

    Just to drive ’em crazy.

    Quoting to 2 decimal places when there is a 3% MOE reminds me of a course I did where one of the topics was estimating.

    The instructor explained the difference between a WAG and a SWAG.

    WAG – Wild Arsed Guess

    SWAG – a WAG expressed to 2 decimal places. 😀

  4. I had never filed in my long-term memory that Kernot was defeated by Dutton. I wonder what lies he told and who was promoting him.

  5. Fulvio Sammut @2000

    A 51-49 Newspoll to the Coalition sounds about right to me. They’ve lost some skin in the past few weeks, but I reckon the government will still be in an election winning position at this stage, despite Scott Morrison’s stellar efforts to completely ruin their economic credibility.

    If there are any leadership ratings tonight (tomorrow?), I would be rather surprised if we don’t see Turnbull receive a decent drop in net approval and Shorten make some strong gains on both approval and PPM. I daresay there will also be a few Morrison v Bowen questions being asked by the various polling outlets in the coming weeks.

  6. Yes, but I just love to hear Fran Kelly wax lyrical on RN about the significance of Margin of Error when the Libs are on the receiving end.

  7. Airlines:

    [With Seeney’s tilt at getting preselection for Wide Bay, I doubt he’s got the support to go into any LNP leadership position in QLD]

    Right, I had forgotten about that.

  8. lizzie @ 1973

    [Would it be awful of me to prefer Stan Grant?]

    Stan Grant has the political skills, the experience as a journalist and greater awareness of how brutal his opponents would be. I would worry about how Goodes would cope with savage and deliberately bullying racism.

    As people, either or both would be fine representatives.

  9. lizzie:

    There was a lot of personal stuff about Kernot made public at the time. My memory is hazy but some of it involved her family. Very nasty.

  10. C@tmomma @ 1972

    You may be on the money. It has long been rumoured that former Docker captain Peter Bell had an interest in politics and leant to the left.

  11. McKew was good and it was always going to be difficult to hang on to Bennelong.

    Clearly lacking in good sense and judgement given her rabid support for Rudd. Definitely no star.

  12. Rex Douglas@2020

    McKew was good and it was always going to be difficult to hang on to Bennelong.


    Clearly lacking in good sense and judgement given her rabid support for Rudd. Definitely no star.

    Actually, she exhibited good judgement and loyalty to the Prime Minister at the time.

    As a journalist, she had plenty of opportunities to observe the two protagonists before entering politics.

  13. Actually, she exhibited good judgement and loyalty to the Prime Minister at the time.

    As a journalist, she had plenty of opportunities to observe the two protagonists before entering politics.

    Obviously only being loyal to her own career by supporting a failed and incompetent leader in Rudd.
    She was delusional.

  14. Re the discussion earlier about the possibility that the government might go to a double dissolution without having reformed the Senate voting system.

    It’s not just a matter of how the numbers might work out in the Senate under such a scenario. The real problem is that the ballot papers (at least in NSW) were already getting unmanageable for voters by 2013, with 110 candidates. And that was BEFORE it became common knowledge that preference harvesting could work at Senate elections.

    A double dissolution, with twice as many vacancies as usual and a much smaller quota, tends to attract more candidates even without the pull factor of the 2013 experience. There has to be a real concern that if preference harvesting is permitted at the coming election, the system could come close to collapse.

  15. My recollections of Kernot were that she was a decent and good hearted politician who was chewed up and spat out by the big party machines and their media lobbyists.
    A potential star that was blown up.

  16. I just got around to reading this:

    http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2016/feb/16/thomas-piketty-bernie-sanders-us-election-2016?CMP=share_btn_tw

    Not sure if I got it from someone posting it here or came across it myself, but it is well worth reading.
    [Let’s glance back for an instant. From the 1930s until the 1970s, the US were at the forefront of an ambitious set of policies aiming to reduce social inequalities. Partly to avoid any resemblance with Old Europe, seen then as extremely unequal and contrary to the American democratic spirit, in the inter-war years the country invented a highly progressive income and estate tax and set up levels of fiscal progressiveness never used on our side of the Atlantic. From 1930 to 1980 – for half a century – the rate for the highest US income (over $1m per year) was on average 82%, with peaks of 91% from the 1940s to 1960s (from Roosevelt to Kennedy), and still as high as 70% during Reagan’s election in 1980.

    This policy in no way affected the strong growth of the post-war American economy, doubtless because there is not much point in paying super-managers $10m when $1m will do. The estate tax, which was equally progressive with rates applicable to the largest fortunes in the range of 70% to 80% for decades (the rate has almost never exceeded 30% to 40% in Germany or France), greatly reduced the concentration of American capital, without the destruction and wars which Europe had to face.

    A mythical capitalism
    In the 1930s, long before European countries followed through, the US also set up a federal minimum wage. In the late 1960s it was worth $10 an hour (in 2016 dollars), by far the highest of its time.

    All this was carried through almost without unemployment, since both the level of productivity and the education system allowed it. This is also the time when the US finally put an end to the undemocratic legal racial discrimination still in place in the south, and launched new social policies.

    All this change sparked a muscular opposition, particularly among the financial elites and the reactionary fringe of the white electorate. Humiliated in Vietnam, 1970s America was further concerned that the losers of the second world war (Germany and Japan in the lead) were catching up at top speed. The US also suffered from the oil crisis, inflation and under-indexation of tax schedules. Surfing the waves of all these frustrations, Reagan was elected in 1980 on a program aiming to restore a mythical capitalism said to have existed in the past.

    Sanders’ success today shows that much of America is tired of rising inequality and these so-called political changes, and intends to revive both a progressive agenda and the American tradition of egalitarianism. Hillary Clinton, who fought to the left of Barack Obama in 2008 on topics such as health insurance, appears today as if she is defending the status quo, just another heiress of the Reagan-Clinton-Obama political regime.

    Sanders makes clear he wants to restore progressive taxation and a higher minimum wage ($15 an hour). To this he adds free healthcare and higher education in a country where inequality in access to education has reached unprecedented heights, highlighting a gulf standing between the lives of most Americans, and the soothing meritocratic speeches pronounced by the winners of the system.]

  17. Jack A Randa

    There’s been no mention of PM Gillard.

    Just hi-lighting McKew as anything but a ‘star’ given her agenda at the time.

  18. Afghanistan update.

    Worth reading this piece by David Kilcullen ‘taliban regroups younger and stronger’.

    In the Australian so google it. I had to open it in an incognito window.

    Basically he is saying that if the Taliban don’t negotiate a peace now, they will be chewed up by Islamic State.

  19. Hey MTBW and others – rule 1 for civilsed bloggers – get other people’s remarks sorted out before you attack them. MTBW, I think Rex said Maxine was delusional and Cheryl was “chewed up”.

  20. On McKew, I didn’t like how she blamed everyone else when she was defeated. At the time there was a Bludger commenting who lived in that electorate and said she wasn’t exactly visible during the campaign.

  21. Rex

    [You can’t have it both ways was she delusional or chewed up by the big party machines?]

    I think that is a very easy to answer question as I said you can’t have it both ways.

  22. Actually Lizzie, srsly, there’s a bit of a double standard here. If I said “Cor I’d love to have it off with Liz Ellis” I’d be accused of all sorts of things including, oddly, misogyny. But you’re allowed to say you would have jumped at the chance of an affair with Gareth (handsome devil in hsi prime wasn’t he?) and nobody blinks an eyelid.

  23. On another matter, the discussion about whether a supply bill would be needed in the event of a double dissolution: quite apart from the broader question of keeping to government going, there would need to be a way of ensuring that the AEC would have enough money to cover expenditure in the next financial year. Some agencies may have big cash reserves, but I doubt that the AEC would have enough in cash reserves to pay for a general election. The budget papers suggest that the big lump of money going to the AEC would have been forecast for 2016-17.

    There’s money appropriated for unexpected expenditures in the “Advance to the Minister for Finance”, but that seems to be confined to expenditure in the current financial year, and has a ceiling on it anyway ($295 million according to this provision: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/num_act/aa120142015203/s10.html). Whether money could be moved around from other areas of the Finance Portfolio (if there are reserves there) or from other portfolios is outside my area of expertise.

  24. MTBW@2047

    Rex

    You can’t have it both ways was she delusional or chewed up by the big party machines?


    I think you should take the advice offered in 2043.
    You are confusing two remarks made about different people.
    I think that is a very easy to answer question as I said you can’t have it both ways.

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