The Coalition’s downward odyssey in the BludgerTrack poll aggregate enters its sixth week, although the movement on voting intention is slight this time, since all three pollsters this week (Newspoll, Roy Morgan and Essential) essentially repeated the results of their previous polls. Nonetheless, the 0.2% shift has been enough to bag Labor gains on the seat projection in New South Wales and Queensland. There is even more encouragement for Labor from the leadership ratings, on which Malcolm Turnbull is tanking rapidly, albeit that his head remains above the waterline in positive net approval. Bill Shorten’s trendlines are pointing northward, although he still has a very long way to go. Kevin Bonham had the following to say about the Newspoll leadership ratings, a day before they were corroborated by Essential Research:
Turnbull is still far more popular than Bill Shorten, but he’s dropped 35 points in the four polls taken since last November. This loss of 35 points in three and a half months is exceeded only by Paul Keating in 1993 (43 points in just over three months), John Howard in 1996 (36 points in six weeks) and Howard again in 2001 (38 points in six weeks). The 1996 Howard example comes with a big asterisk too, because Howard was falling from the career-high +53 netsat he had jumped 24 points to reach in the immediate aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre. It is not at all normal then for a PM to lose this much popularity this fast, but then again it is not that normal for them to have it in the first place.
Electoral matters:
• Phillip Coorey of the Financial Review sees the two possibilities as the much-touted July 2 double dissolution, or a normal election in mid-August, either of which would leave time for a same-sex marriage plebiscite to be held by the end of the year. He also relates that the government is “exploring the logistics” of bringing down the budget on May 3, rather than the scheduled date of May 10, which is one day before the deadline for calling a double dissolution expires. Among other things, this would allow the government time to attempt to get its legislation reinstating the powers of the Australian Building and Construction Commission through the Senate. Its reject would confirm its currently contestable status as a double dissolution trigger, which the Greens sought to retain by having the government agree not to reintroduce it during the current session as part of its deal to legislate for Senate electoral reform.
• Amid talk of a possible early state election, Queenslanders go to the polls next Saturday to vote on a referendum proposal that would render such a thing impossible, by introducing fixed four-year terms with elections set for the last week in October. The referendum has been timed to coincide with local government elections, which also means that the big partisan prize of the Brisbane lord mayoralty is up for grabs. According to a Galaxy poll of 540 voters conducted for the Nine Network, Liberal National Party incumbent Graham Quirk holds a 53-47 two-party lead over Labor’s Tim Harding. This compares with his winning margin of 68.3-31.7 at the 2012 election, which was held a few weeks after Anna Bligh’s government had been decimated at the polls. The Galaxy poll also found Brisbane voters favouring the referendum proposal by 48% to 35%, but Steven Wardill of the Courier-Mail, offers that “regional Queenslanders are expected to be much more sceptical towards the proposal”.
Preselection matters:
• The Liberal preselection to anoint a successor to Victorian Senator Michael Ronaldson has produced a surprise winner in James Paterson, the 28-year-old deputy executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs. Paterson will shortly fill the casual vacancy to be created by Ronaldson’s imminent retirement, and will head the party’s ticket in the event of a normal half-Senate election. It had been generally expected that the position would go to Jane Hume, a superannuation policy adviser who had the influential backing of Michael Kroger, president of the party’s state branch. Hume had earlier won preselection for the number three position on a Coalition ticket that allocates second place to the Nationals. Also in the race was Amanda Millar, who filled a casual vacancy for Northern Victoria region in the state upper house in August 2013 but failed to win re-election in November 2014; and Karina Okotel, a legal aid lawyer.
• Labor’s preselection in Fremantle will be conducted over two days on Sunday, when a ballot of local members determining 25% of the total result will be held, and Monday, when the rest is to be determined at a meeting of state executive. The two nominees are Josh Wilson, chief-of-staff to outgoing member Melissa Parke and the local deputy mayor, and Chris Brown, a Maritime Union of Australia organiser and former wharfie. Observers say that Wilson will dominate the local party ballot, but factional arrangements are likely to tip the balance in Brown’s favour at state executive. The winner will face recently preselected Greens candidate Kate Davis, solicitor for tenants’ rights organisation Tenancy WA.
• Tim Hammond has been preselected without opposition to succeed Alannah MacTiernan as Labor’s candidate in Perth. Hammond is a barrister specialising in representing asbestos disease victims, one of the party’s national vice-presidents, and a member of the Right. It appears that the Brand preselection will go the same way, with no other contenders standing in the way of Madeleine King, chief operating officer of the international policy think tank Perth USAsia Centre. Other confirmed Labor candidates in winnable seats are Matt Keogh in Burt, a commercial lawyer and president of the WA Law Society, who ran unsuccessfully at the Canning by-election in September; Anne Azza Aly in Cowan, a counter-terrorism expert at Curtin University and founder of People Against Violent Extremism (as seen here last week in Seat of the Week); Tammy Solonec in Swan, an indigenous lawyer; and Bill Leadbetter in Hasluck, executive director of an obstetric practice and occasional history academic. Aly and Solonec both have a past with the Greens, Aly having been endorsed as a candidate for the 2007 federal election before withdrawing from the race, and Solonec having held an unwinnable spot on an upper house ticket at the 2013 state election.
• The New South Wales Liberals are preparing to determine their Parramatta preselection through a trial plebiscite of local party members of more than two years’ standing. A push to make such ballots the norm was rejected at the party’s state conference in October, to the chagrin of the religious Right faction in particular, but a compromise deal backed by Mike Baird has allowed for trials to be held in a small number of federal and state electorates over the coming years. Kylie Adoranti of the Parramatta Advertiser reports 278 local members are eligible to participate, together with the members of the state executive and further representatives of the state council and the Prime Minister, collectively accounting for 28 votes. Nominees include current Parramatta councillor Jean Pierre Abood; former Parramatta councillor Andrew Bide; Charles Camenzuli, a structural engineer and building consultant who was the party’s candidate in 2010, and also sought preselection unsuccessfully in 2013; and Felicity Finlay, who also contested preselection in 2013, and appears to be a school teacher.
• Labor’s national executive has taken over the preselection process in the New South Wales seats of Barton and Hunter, initiating a process that will be resolved on Friday. The beneficiary in Barton will be the state’s outgoing Deputy Opposition Leader, Linda Burney. National executive will also determine her successor in the state seat of Canterbury, where a by-election now looms. In Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon is to be confirmed as candidate for a seat that effectively merges his existing seat of Hunter with Charlton, which has been decommissioned in the redistribution. The intervention enforces a deal in which Hunter remains secure for the Right, who have been frozen out in Barton by the endorsement of the Left-aligned Burney.
• Labor in New South Wales also has normal preselection processes in train for ten other seats, including two in the Hunter region: Shortland, where Jill Hall is retiring, and Paterson, which the redistribution has transformed from Liberal to marginal Labor. Shortland looks set to be the new home for Pat Conroy, whose existing seat of Charlton has, as noted above, been rolled together with Joel Fitzgibbon’s seat of Hunter. Conroy says he insisted on facing a rank-and-file ballot. Nominees in Paterson include Meryl Swanson, a local radio presenter, and Robert Roseworne, decribed by the ABC as a “Port Stephens community campaigner”. Both preselections are scheduled to be resolved the weekend after next.
• Nationals MP John Cobb has announced he will not contest the next election, having been member for Parkes from 2001 to 2007, and Calare henceforth. The front-runner to succeed him as Nationals candidate in Calare appears to be Andrew Gee, member for the state seat of Orange, although media reports suggest opponents may include Wellington councillor Alison Conn, Bathurst businessman Sam Farraway, Orange councillor Scott Munro, Bathurst mayor Gary Rush, Lithgow councillor Peter Pilbeam and Bathurst region farmer Paul Blanch, who was the Liberal candidate in 2004.
vic
[guytaur
Yesterday i said you were as thick as two short planks. After your post at 2273, i revise it to four short planks. Cant believe the stupidity of that comment]
You owe guytaur an apology for that comment. Who do you think you are?
Sorry, dtt, misread your original quote! Still, the rest of the post stands – the Greens are very keen to gain Lower House seats, and indeed, they have every reason to do so. If deals in the Senate result in favourable preferencing from the Liberals, they’ll jump at it (if they have any political smarts to speak of).
Of course, like the Dems, it might be the beginning of their decline.
zoomster
Completely agree with your 2293.
Lizzie 2246
Thank you for that link re Savva’s book, I tweeted it and the response was amazing, people seem to have bought the e book not hard copy. Very intersting observations from those who bought it.
On a personal note I wish people would shut up about melanoma, unless you have been through it, noone knows what a terrible thing it is, so please no more
mari
Bludgers do rather tend to analyse metaphors to death. 🙂
Lizzie
Agree but very hard for me in this case as I said I hope no more smart comments on melanoma.
Tweeters are the same as bloggers I have noticed but with the 140 character limit have to be more brief and succinct 😀
I think Pell was right not to rely on his God to protect him during a flight to Australia.
[Christian ‘Prophet’ Loses His Buttocks to a Hungry Lion While Trying to Prove God Would Save Him
“I do not know what came over me. I thought the Lord wanted to use me to show his power over animals.”]
http://www.alternet.org/belief/christian-prophet-loses-his-buttocks-hungry-lion-while-trying-prove-god-would-save-him#.VuSszYw0-Dk.twitter
mari
I do understand, my dear.
victoria
Facts speak volumes. Labor has aided and abetted the LNP agenda much more than the Greens. Over the time since 1972 when the Uniting Tasmanian Party started.
Labor had no choice really. It was the politics of the day but its still the reality.
Now the reality is the mainstream voter knows about climate change and that the Greens are not nutters. At some point unless he wanted to be seen as a nutter its no surprise the likes of Kroger are saying the Greens are not nutters no more.
Its the rise of the Greens and thats causing frictions as parties have to adjust to that. Just like we have to adjust to the rise of China.
Your naivety is in thinking that Greens voters think like Labor voters.
[The Greens are not giving preferences to the Liberals. They are running an open ticket.]
So they are pretending they can’t pick (Nicholas style, it is much too hard I shouldn’t have to pick I’m not smart enough or hard enough working to pick) between the worst Government in Australia ever and Labor. Well they should be put behind the liberals as too stupid to get any votes.
lizzie,
The long and winding metaphor is a staple of PB.
guytaur
As per my last comment. There is no point engaging further with you on this subject.
GG
And usually leads nowhere. 🙁
WWP
No the Greens are not pretending anything. It the voters choice.
Its also the choice of the Liberals as to whom they preference just like its the choice of Labor as to who they preference.
Kroger has concerns about the Doctors wives vote in the leafy suburbs. His comments are pure self interest and the Greens do not need to make a deal for that self interest to be felt in the LNP.
Seabirds ingest plastic.
Raptors prefer metal.
zoom
[If deals in the Senate result in favourable preferencing from the Liberals, they’ll jump at it (if they have any political smarts to speak of).
Of course, like the Dems, it might be the beginning of their decline.]
You’re contradicting yourself.
WWP
[So they are pretending they can’t pick (Nicholas style, it is much too hard I shouldn’t have to pick I’m not smart enough or hard enough working to pick) between the worst Government in Australia ever and Labor. Well they should be put behind the liberals as too stupid to get any votes.]
Harsh but fair 🙂
guytaur
You may not be a paid up member of the Greens but you certainly are the Most Honourable Member of the Greens.
One other thing Labor Party members and voters never claim to be purists – they know they never going to get everything they want but they know that the Party will do its best for the country and its people.
Mind you the Greens will always be above the Libs when I vote.
WWP
The problem for the Labor claims is that the Greens are in fact doing less deals on preferences than previously precisely because they do not need to.
Go back and look at the comment by Antony Green on why the Greens prefer OPV.
An open ticket is an open ticket. Its voters choice. If the voters choose to follow LNP instructions on HTV cards because in some city seats its in the interests of the LNP to so direct that is up to the LNP.
Just as the ALP does
guytaur
[ Now the reality is the mainstream voter knows about climate change and that the Greens are not nutters. ]
The trouble the Greens have is that this statement only really applies to LNP voters. Most Labor voters already knew about climate change, and still regard the Greens as nutters – not least because they helped (with the LNP) to demolish our best chance to put effect climate change action in place.
It seems to me that a possible explanation for the Greens latest shenanigans is that they have realized that their best chance of attracting new voters is from the LNP, not from Labor (who have traditionally been their target of choice).
Jolyon Wagg
Me too!
Zoomster
I am not sure you understand.
For the Greens (and any other minor party eg Xenophon) the CURRENT GTV Senate voting system is a disaster. They do not need to do any deals with anyone to oppose the current system. It works out really, really, really badly for them. The reson is simple. The micros have an incentive to gang up on the minors. So they gain NOTHING in the many vote preference deals. So here is the balance equation for Greens and Xenophon and probably also for lazarus in Qld.
1. Greens and/or Xenophon will gain about 2% from various minors who now are delivered to the RWNJ parties via GTV – I am thinking Animal Justice, Drug Law reform, Wikki, Democrats etc
2. Greens or more particularly Xenophon might gain a small but significant share of the preference from the many odd ball micros. Even 10% share is better than 0% which is what they get now.
3. Greens and even more Xenophon may expect to pick up 5-20% of preferences from Libersals, so that when surpluses are distributed they will come ahead of Family First or Shooters. This could make a very big difference. Oddly enough Labor too should benefit here. Think your classic moderate liberal. NOW their surplus votes ends up with FF but for this group of liberal voters, Greens OR Labor may well come ahead of FF or Shooters.
4. On the negative side Greens may LOSE some ALP preferences – say 15% which could be a problem in many cases. However this is only very significant where Labor gets 1-4% above a second quota (or fourth quota in DD) and where Labor does in fact preference Greens ahead of FF or other RWNJ parties. Given the emergence of the Sex Party in Vic, I suspect the Greens probably feel that their chances of getting ALP preferences under GTV are narrowing anyway.
[You owe guytaur an apology for that comment. Who do you think you are?]
PB royalty?
[No the Greens are not pretending anything. It the voters choice. ]
What a pathetic cop out, with the group voting tickets and above the line votes, if voters were complaining, then I might have listened. But it wasn’t voters, it was insiders, elites and ‘experts’ who didn’t like what voters were doing, there was no evidence voters were unhappy with either the group voting tickets or the outcome of senate elections.
in fact that reality that each of the parties man’s up every booth in the country shows exactly how important they think how to votes are, the cop out is pathetic.
And yes the greens do get a much lower return from HTV than the majors, but still it is a pathetic cop out. Kind of ridiculous like the ridiculous lie that Rudd’s CPRS was worse than the CPRS we have now. Fools and idiots.
daretotread# 2298
Minor parties vote fluctuate, I really think you definitely over overstating the Greens chances long term.
Also Dennis Atkins statement of the Greens winning 6 or 7 seats has not been called out by anyone else. And it probably is an over-exaggeration considering most politcal pundits are suggesting the Greens won’t match there high of 11.76% vote that they received in the federal election in 2010.
lizzie
From the same article:
[The Zion Christian Church Prophet was at the park with his fellow church members when …. he went into a trance and began speaking in tongues. The group approached the pride of lions while they munched happily on an antelope, but that’s when Ndiwane ran toward the lions.]
Our tongue speaking Treasurer may not want to rely on his God either when he presents the “budget”.
My bet is that the electorate will chew his buttocks off just like the idiot Ndiwane.
[Go back and look at the comment by Antony Green on why the Greens prefer OPV. ]
I know why the greens prefer OPV because it gives them an more effective weapon against Labor, it gives them leverage they desperately want. OPV to them is like the proverbial hammer, ‘when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail’ and so they have indulged with the insiders and elites in the idea that OPV is some magic hammer that solves all the ‘nails.’
Can I point out that it’s an obvious fallacy that the Greens needed to negotiate with other parties? They could easily have had a system where they decided their Senate preferences by a ballot of their members. The group voting tickets only meant the party had to assign preferences, the party itself makes the conscious decision whether to sit in a room with other parties to negotiate how those preferences would be assigned.
Mari
[On a personal note I wish people would shut up about melanoma, unless you have been through it, noone knows what a terrible thing it is, so please no more]
Having got through an episode myself I can’t help but agree!
[They could easily have had a system where they decided their Senate preferences by a ballot of their members. ]
Lol, I’m not sure they like that kind of democracy do they?
victoria
No there is not because you are looking at it from a partisan Labor view. The Greens do not have that view. To the Greens Labor can be as bad as the LNP.
That view was reinforced to Greens voters with the Rudd ETS. Rudd failed to negotiate with the Greens and instead watered it down in a failed attempt to get the LNP on board (A view btw I thought was the reasonable thing for Rudd to do before he even thought about a DD)
So to Greens voters the influence of the Labor right in supporting the fossil fuel industries like with the subsidies to mining companies and farmers on fuel are just the same. More delay on carbon reduction.
Its a partisan view but its their view. That includes a great many former Labor voters changed to the Greens because that is what they think. In fact they probably think it the most.
Thats the political reality no matter what you think of the rights or wrongs of that argument.
All this hand wringing on vote preferences comes from the false linking of Senate reforms to the calling of a DD and blackmail of Senators.
Labor is just as bad as enabling Turnbull to do that blackmail because Labor is voting to block the ABCC legislation too.
The campaign that links the Senate reform on votes to that is false because its conflating two unrelated issues.
This because the myth has gone around that its advantageous to the LNP to have the voting reform so they can win a DD. Look at what the psephologists are telling you about that vote.
This is an amazing story about an amazing woman up against the might of the Russian State intent on a global propaganda effort enacted via the media and especially social media:
http://www.smh.com.au/world/finnish-journalists-jessikka-aros-inquiry-into-russian-trolls-stirs-up-a-hornets-nest-20160310-gng8rk.html
WWP
I think you are actually wrong. Voters who go along a tick say Animal Justice, probably assume their vote ends up with Greens or Labor or Liberal or exhausts. They probably would be horrified to know it ended up with the LDP who would be totally against any types of government regulation of animal welfare.
Labor voters would probably be horrified in SA, that their vote ended up with Bob Day ahead of Xenophon.
The only reason voters have not complained is that they did not understand the system.
From a couple of weeks ago by Piping Shrike:
[Following the fumbling over the GST, and the decline in polling since, the period of Fabulousness now also appears to be over. Supporters in the media, who had got carried away with Turnbull’s past culture war gestures, now a few months later express their disappointment at Turnbull not doing what he never said he would.
However, behind the disappointment of clueless cultural warriors, there is a more important element to the paralysis of the Turnbull government where more serious confusions are emerging.
Turnbull was merely expected to sell the existing program, not create a new one. But it is also apparent that there is no program really to sell. Most of it has died in the Senate. The displacement activity over Senate reform underway now, is partly to find a technical solution to what is basically a political problem.]
And on Senate reform:
[The problem is more how these reforms are being openly promoted as a means of removing specific Senators and parties that, whatever may be thought of them, were legally elected under the rules. To do this has involved not only delegitimising the Senators and the process that elected, but making assumptions about the voters that elected them (ignorant, fooled) that delegitimises them as well. This is not a great democratic precedent.]
http://www.pipingshrike.com/2016/02/awkward.html
2329
I suspect that, because we only know who is running on nomination day and voting starts very shortly after that, there is not enough time to hold a ballot of the membership. This is unfortunate but unlikely to be avoidable.
DN
No, I’m not.
The Greens doing what they think they must do to win seats does not mean it will work. In fact, it might backfire on them.
When AGW goes ballistic and civilisation reverts to a Max Max fight over resources, I’d be the first to advocate a return of the Coliseum.
Instead of feeding Christians to the lions we could feed climate change deniers. It’d be a hoot to watch the great cats chewing on their buttocks!
[On a personal note I wish people would shut up about melanoma, unless you have been through it, noone knows what a terrible thing it is, so please no more]
I agree. Enough is enough.
This is a political blog. If I want to know about cancer I’ll look up a medical site.
fess
Well Piping Shrike was reading my mind or I was reading its. 🙂
Jolyon Wagg 2330
So pleased to hear all is clear?
Wasn’t me I was referring to to but my beloved late husband, still very raw!
Thank you Lizzie
Darn 2339
Thank you
zoomste
I hope it does backfire on the Greens, they deserve nothing less
dtt
I said I’d misunderstood your post, and apologised for that.
I also said it really didn’t change the point of my post – which was about the Greens chances in the Lower House, nothing to do with their chances in the Senate.
victoria:
Indeed!
WWP
I think you do not understand. The Greens GTV preferencing in the Senate is predicatable and goes as one might expect – to sympathetic micros and then to Labor. I doubt that to date any Greens members would have much to copmplain about, exept for that small proportion who are Liberal leaning.
The problem for the Greens is that they are NOT ABLE to do any deals at all. None of the micros will give them preferences because they are the competition. Same with Xenophon and even PUP to an extent.
To make matters worse, neither greens nor Xenophon can rely on preference deals with Labor, since there is a histroy of preferencing Family First ahead of Greens or Xenophon, or in the case of Melbourne Ports, ther LIBERALS ahead of Greens.
http://www.smh.com.au/sport/tennis/nick-kyrgios-swears-gets-warning-from-chair-umpire-in-loss-at-indian-wells-20160312-gnhlbi.html
Do we really want Nick Kyrgios representing us?
[I think you are actually wrong. Voters who go along a tick say Animal Justice, probably assume their vote ends up with Greens or Labor or Liberal or exhausts. They probably would be horrified to know]
I might be wrong, but you are only guessing. You have no evidence anyone is horrified. In fact if they are so horrified why aren’t the complaining, protesting, starting online campaigns. They aren’t and the more intelligent conclusion to draw is they aren’t unhappy. No-one is complaining or upset, it is just the self interested parties, the insiders and the elites who are saying it is a problem. That itself should tell you something.
Mari,
So sorry to hear about your husband….it can be a cruel disease.
I seem to be OK now having had a skin graft 10 years ago and apparently my risk profile is just about back to normal.
Nicholas
Your comments apply to the Senate. The Greens have every reason to try and win Liberal preferences in the Lower House, if one looks at these things as a purely on paper exercise and doesn’t factor in a possible voter backlash.
Given the level of naivete shown by the Greens, it’s quite possible that they haven’t.