The only new poll this week was the weekly Essential Research, owing to the poll glut last week and the Anzac Day public holiday on Monday. The Essential result was an eye-opener, with the normally sedate series lurching two points in favour of Labor, who have opened up a 52-48 lead. The primary votes are Coalition 40% (down two), Labor 39% (up three) and Greens 10% (down one). Other questions found 40% approving of a double dissolution election, up one from two weeks ago, with opposition up four to 28%; 42% expecting the Coalition to win compared with 28% for Labor; 35% saying Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership has made them more likely to vote Coalition, compared with 23% for less likely; and 67% saying they would view their vote as one in favour of the party they supported, compared with 21% saying it would be against the party they opposed. On next week’s budget, respondents anticipated it would be good for business and the well off, bad for everyone else, and neutral for the economy overall. The poll also found that 45% would sooner see Helen Clark as secretary-general of the United Nations compared with 21% for Kevin Rudd.
Single Essential Research results tend not to knock the BludgerTrack poll aggregate off its axis, but this result was forceful enough to drive a half-point shift on two-party preferred, which tips the balance in favour of Labor. However, the gains from last week to this have tended to be concentrated in states where they are of little use to Labor on the seat projection, which only ticks one point in their favour through a gain in New South Wales, leaving the Coalition with the barest possible absolute majority. That would be a little less bare if I started crediting Clive Palmer’s seat of Fairfax as a Liberal National Party gain, which I really should have been doing since a Galaxy poll of the seat in January credited Palmer with 2% of the vote. I’ll implement that one next week. Nothing new this week on the leadership ratings.
Other news:
• The WA Liberal Party’s state council has endorsed Matt O’Sullivan as the party’s candidate for the new seat of Burt in the southern suburbs of Perth, formalising its overturning of a local party ballot three weeks ago. O’Sullivan is closely identified with mining magnate Andrew Forrest, as the chief operating officer of his GenerationOne indigenous youth employment scheme. The earlier ballot was won by Liz Storer, a Gosnells councillor who had backing from the Christian Right. Storer defeated O’Sullivan with 13 votes out of an eligible 25, but the state council ruled three weeks ago that the number of preselectors was insufficient, and that it would take matters into its own hands.
• The Central Western Daily lists four candidates for Saturday’s Nationals preselection in the rural New South Wales seat of Calare, to be vacated at the election by John Cobb: Andrew Gee, the state member for Orange; Alison Conn, a Wellington councillor; Sam Farraway, owner of the Hertz franchise in Bathurst; and Scott Munro, a butcher and Orange councillor.
• The Blue Mountains Gazette last week reported that a ReachTEL poll conducted on April 19 for the NSW Teachers Federation had Liberal and Labor tied in the Blue Mountains seat of Macquarie, which Louise Markus holds for the Liberals on a margin of 4.5%. Markus has secured the Liberal preselection for the seat after the withdrawal of a challenge by Sarah Richards, a local party branch president.
• It escaped my notice four weeks ago that The Australian had ReachTEL results commissioned by the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union from the Liberal-held Adelaide seats of Hindmarsh and Sturt. Results in the report are incomplete, but they appear to credit Christopher Pyne with a 5% margin in Sturt, down from 10.1% at the 2013 election, and also have the Liberals leading in the difficult seat of Hindmarsh. Only modest support was recorded for the Nick Xenophon Team, at 14.5% and 11% before exclusion of the undecided. A good deal has happened in the month since the poll was conducted, with Coalition support continuing to plummet nationally, and the government this week seeking to staunch the flow in South Australia specifically by committing to have the $52 billion submarine construction project built in the state. I have also obtained ReachTEL polling conducted early last month for The Australia Institute, which has the Nick Xenophon Team’s support in South Australia at 16.1% in the House of Representatives and 24.8% in the Senate – keeping in mind that polls like this have form in overstating the distinctions between House and Senate results (or at least, they did before the Senate vote went haywire in 2013). There are also Queensland results inclusive of the parties of Clive Palmer, Glen Lazarus, Nick Xenophon and Jacqui Lambie, which have their Senate support ranging from 1.6% (Lambie) to 3.4% (Xenophon).
Bushfire Bill
“”We wouldn’t need CBDs where to even buy a car park nowadays costs $250,000. We wouldn’t need expensive motorways into them. High property prices. Apartments everywhere. Crowding and dysfunction rife.””
If we returned to Labors FTTP NBN a hell of a lot of people could work from home,
easing the stupid clogged highways and congestion.
Something that Turnbull has completely stuffed up!.
‘ The Canberra Press Gallery has its agenda set by the Coalition, whether in Government or Opposition, and then they wonder why they are treated as increasingly irrelevant and their jobs are under threat.’
This is what it boils down to, and to greater and lesser extent it has always been the case.
Today, if you listened to the ABC you could be forgiven for thinking that the opposition didn’t exist, yet when the ALP was in government, every other news bulletin began with ‘the opposition says…’
Enthusiastic endorsement of Cruz by Boehmer.
[“I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”{
cstmomma
What I see the LNP doing here is overreach. They think they have carte blanche to be cruel to AS in the name of border security.
I think they are wrong. I think the public has a different view. The public wants a fair go. So yes they want secure borders. They want a government in control of a fair process.
So when the public has brought to its attention that the process is not fair there is a backlash against the government.
Rudd lost the narrative not because he was accepting refugees into Australia but because it appeared he was being forced to.
This is exactly what is happening now for the LNP.
The election loser result is the image of loss of control of incompetence.
The LNP have exploited that ruthlessly in their myth about a flood of refugees but now it is facing a real out of control situation on their watch.
This is karma coming home to roost
Where Miranda Devine got it wrong was this is not the LNP Tampa moment. Its the LNP children overboard moment.
They have yet to have a Tampa come to their rescue on the AS issue
Dio –Enthusiastic endorsement of Cruz by Boehmer.
You mean Boehner. And its a doozy!
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/04/28/boehner-unleashed-ex-speaker-calls-cruz-lucifer-miserable-son-b.html
Tour operator refuses to take Greens senators to Barrier Reef, fears bad publicity for tourism
612 ABC Brisbane By Elaine Ford and staff
Updated 36 minutes ago
Daniel McCarthy
A tour operator in Cairns has refused to take Greens senators to view coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef because negative publicity would be detrimental to the local tourism industry.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-29/tour-operator-refuses-greens-senators-barrier-reef-bad-publicity/7370336
Chip Rolley one of the ABC talking heads just said something I agree with.
The government should be putting its positive message out now not attacking Labor’s negative gearing the LNP should be leaving that for the Campaign proper.
By mounting the attack on Labor now and not presenting their own agenda the LNP have ceded the advantages of incumbency to the Labor party.
That’s right, it’s not climate change that’s detrimental to the tourism industry, it’s those bloody people trying to do something about it.
Sorry forgot quote marks last about ceding incumbency was my conclusion.
They are obsessed with Bill Shorten.
I heard Dutton at a presser today, and all he could talk about was “Bill Shorten… Electricity Tax… Bill shorten… Negative Gearing… Bill Shorten… CFMEU, TWU, Eff-U… Bill Shorten… Debt… Bill Shorten… Boats…”
The presser was about Manus Island, and what he’s going to do with the inmates.
Daniel McCarthy – You know you really have a problem when the very people who benefit from tourism to the reef want to hide the reality of it’s destruction. It’s that let’s just rake it in now and dam the future mentality that pervades so much of our society – politicians, developers, miners…..
“damn” that should be.
stephanieando: And here’s the Treasurer. Scott Morrison is addressing media at Parliament House, opening with #Budget2016 commentary #auspol
Hear that? PAYE people are now risk takers according to Morrison
political_alert: Treasurer @ScottMorrisonMP has made a preliminary decision to block the sale of S. Kidman & Co. to a Chinese-led consortium #auspol
SabraLane: Here is the full statement by @ScottMorrisonMP https://t.co/DuHx1aWgQR
faaaaaarrrrqqqqqqqq!
Listening to Morrison it is clear he has absolutely NO IDEA about his portfolio.
He will be reading a statement prepared by someone else next Tuesday without know what it all means. Like Dutton, he is clearly not up to the job.
Re Guytaur @12:44PM: I would actually charecterise the current PNG mess as the Government’s “Oceanic Viking” moment, the time when they risk losing control of the issue. Their media allies are trying to morph it into a Tampa moment.
UNCLE80075178: Don’t trust what Libs say about boat arrivals, best friends the smugglers ever had. #auspol #ausvotes https://t.co/VEe0IFlAID
Can someone explain how, once the Manus prisoners are freed, anyone in the Australian government can exercise any kind of jurisdiction at all to stop them from travelling to New Zealand and setting up a new life there?
‘Can someone explain how, once the Manus prisoners are freed, anyone in the Australian government can exercise any kind of jurisdiction at all to stop them from travelling to New Zealand and setting up a new life there?’
Tough guys like Dutton don’t need no jurisdiction.
https://www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/e3e106c8-d880-4b04-b3e9-cd1051cfe340
Listening to Senator Scott Ryan on The World Today in the car just now, apparently the Private Training College disaster is all Labor’s fault too!
The Labor Party extending VET-Fee HELP to these Colleges, well to TAFES really and only for courses which had a Tertiary course equivalent and not the Mickey Mouse courses that the Liberal mates run amok with and sucked the intellectually-incapacitated into signing up for, is wot done it.
The federal COALITION government, of the LAST 3 YEARS could only stand by in a horrified stupour and watch on as it all went to hell according to Scott Ryan.
I guess it just goes to prove how freakin’ useless the Coalition have been then. Which wasn’t exactly what Scott Ryan was trying to portray. However his anti Labor tirade served to prove the point, even if unintentionally.
C@tmomma @ Friday, April 29, 2016 at 12:03 pm
C@t…It follows, therefore, the implicit reality is that Australia has trafficked humans into a foreign jurisdiction on a no-return basis. The terms and conditions of this trafficking may be extensively defined in an MOU. This does not change anything other than to emphasise what has actually been done by the Australian Government. Australia’s practice has been to take humans into arbitrary detention on the high seas and then procure their forcible transfer into other territories where, all told, they have been simply dumped.
The Australian Government has run a locate-collect-confine-transfer-and-dump policy. This has been applied indiscriminately, which is to say, has been wholly arbitrary with respect to the circumstances and rights of any particular individual.
When not trafficking persons under its own steam to Nauru or PNG, Australia has also hired traffickers to carry out parts of this process in Indonesian territories. Australia, along with North Korea, includes human trafficking among its official policies and procedures. This trafficking has obviously been authorised and enabled at the highest levels of Government. The policy relies for its success on the suppression of the legal rights of those taken for trafficking and is in every sense a perversion of the rule of law by the very authorities charged with upholding the law.
This will come back to haunt us all. At its most basic, this is despotic. It is de-humanising. It is in every possible sense a policy of calculated depravity.
Since it is no longer possible for Australia to consign human cargo to Manus, and since, as I understand it, Nauru is also closed to new cargo, it follows that any new arrivals will have to be “processed” (in itself a dehumanising and bureaucratic term of concealment ) in this jurisdiction.
Necessarily, we must find an alternative set of measures to respond to the dislocation of populations, their dispossession and dispersal. We really have to do this. Doubtless, there are no easy answers or they would have been adopted by now. But since this problem affects very many jurisdictions – and especially our neighbouring jurisdictions – it follows that we will find common ground with others if we go looking for that ground.
We can see very clearly that these problems will persist for decades and likely grow worse rather than better at various points. The question we should ask ourselves is whether we will proceed as despots or by respecting and protecting the rights of individuals. We should find ways to be true to our deepest values…difficult though that will be.
Milennial
Good Grief!
The value of his Point Piper pad may drop a million.
Unthinkable.
Does anyone besides me think that the only outcome of Maldemort’s 50 million dollar “city infrastructure” spiv think tank will be yet another LNP attempt to justify financing Melbourne’s East West Link from the public purse?
C@tmomma
Yes, I heard that interview. No attempt by the ABC interviewer to point out the facts. How do they get away with this?
Player One @ Friday, April 29, 2016 at 1:48 pm
Urban economies exist because they are successful. They enable all kinds of advantages of scale to be found and complex combinations of investment, production and consumption to take place. If ways can be found to make cities more successful then in principle it will be possible to improve the circumstances of both city-dwellers and of those that interact with cities – with peripheral and satellite domains.
So building successful urban economies is intuitively appealing. The question is not really whether to build but how to do it? Who should have responsibility for the design and development of the economy? The Liberals just do not believe the State can have a successful role in this. In fact, they believe the opposite – that the involvement of the State in economic planning is doomed to fail. And certainly, they are themselves proof that they cannot plan anything. They don’t want to do it. They don’t believe in it. And they have a very long string of failures to prove they are useless at it.
Labor believe in using the agency of the State in all kinds of ways. This has to include using state authority to develop and carry out plans for the economy.
So the Liberal proposal is really just to state the obvious – that we must invest in urban economies. But they have no plan themselves. They have nothing other than the Commonwealth credit rating and a willingness to invoke it. That is hardly an economic plan. It is as lazy as it’s possible to be, even by the indolent standards of the LNP.
NEWSFLASH! Next Tuesday’s budget will contain $10 million to save the tourist industry on the Great Barrier Reef.
http://www.ebay.com/bhp/artificial-coral
Morrison seems like a fish out of water as Treasurer. He doesn’t have any affinity for it, so let’s see him deliver and sell a budget that leads to an election campaign straight after.
I fully support Scott in blocking the Kidman sale. Those Chinese would have taken all those cattle back to china and enslaved them, not to mention all that grazing land they would relocate to Tibet.
briefly #626,
We can see very clearly that these problems will persist for decades and likely grow worse rather than better at various points. The question we should ask ourselves is whether we will proceed as despots or by respecting and protecting the rights of individuals. We should find ways to be true to our deepest values…difficult though that will be.
Fine sounding words, but…
So how many refugees do you think Australia should accept in the coming decades out of the hundreds of millions that there will be? For a start, there will be many a national conflict that will produce refugees and keep adding to the total of 40 million+ that exist now. Not to mention the Climate Change refugees. Just this week I heard a report that the prolonged drought in India has now affected 330 million of their citizens and their traditional wells are running dry and they are having to send trainloads of water in and ration it! They are not the first to be adversely-affected by Climate Change and they won’t be the last.
What happens then to our ‘deepest values’ when these people start looking around for other ways out of their predicament? Their government can’t keep conveying water to them, in order to keep them alive, forever. Soon enough, when the Himalayan glaciers melt the Indian traditional source of water will pass the country by and go on out to the sea and contribute to the oceans rising. Which will then cause it’s own problems in low-lying countries like Bangladesh.
Do we look to our ‘deepest values’ here in Australia and offer them refuge too when it occurs?
I don’t know what it is like in Perth right now but in Sydney we are all, as we head into the last month of Autumn, still able to walk around in our Summer clothes! We are also seeing the beginnings of the predicted adverse effects of Climate Change on our continent, the driest continent on Earth, and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better.
So right now we still have the luxury of altruism and looking to our ‘deepest values’ but I think the time is fast-approaching where we are going to have to look at reality as well.
[Yes, I heard that interview. No attempt by the ABC interviewer to point out the facts. How do they get away with this?]
Facts, who gives a fark about facts? It’s the vibe don’t you know?
And the vibe tells the journos that Mal is action man, urbane and sort of prime ministerial, whereas Labor? The less said the better, except Shorten is BORING.
bemused @ Friday, April 29, 2016 at 9:38 am
I think there were two reasons
1) The high marginal cost of including an inter-change with South Yarra and a relatively low number of passenger journeys that would benefit.
2) Screw you prahan/higgins electorate
I don’t the exact weightings applied to each reason in the final decision
NBN is up and running. Download 23.8 Upload 4.78
Not spectuclar but acceptable
By the way, I attended a pre-budget breakfast of the WA Labor Business Roundtable this morning. The breakfast was addressed by Ben Wyatt and Rita Saffioti, who both spoke very well to an assembled audience of around 100 business leaders.
There is obviously a widespread expectation in the Perth business community – including the business services firms, transport, construction, the resource sector, agriculture, manufacturing – academic and media communities that there will be a change of Government in WA next year.
It was also obvious that the WA Labor Shadows are excellent. They really know their material and have much more to offer than the Liberal incumbents.
david
Federal Politics @PoliticsFairfax 7m7 minutes ago
BREAKING: @nicole_hasham has confirmed the refugee who set himself on fire on Nauru earlier this week has died in hospital #auspol
Josh Taylor @joshgnosis 2m2 minutes ago
The 23 year old Iranian refugee who set himself on fire on Nauru has died, the Immigration Department has confirmed.
Julian Burnside @JulianBurnside 37s38 seconds ago
News from Manus: Gates between compounds have just been closed. A Wilson Security guard has said all mobile phones will be confiscated
@davidwh
Welcome to last century.
Oops, misclick.
In any case, zoid already said it :-P.
I suppose it hasn’t entered these dumb-brains that the lady will still be operating under the current Australian laws.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/simply-disgraceful-attorneygeneral-martin-pakula-calls-out-bigotry-after-muslim-woman-is-appointed-to-court-20160429-gohw1w.html
Zoidy compared to Bribie ADSL it’s not too bad.
@davidwh
No substitute for ignorance david.
What? To spray paint some of it?
Has the government a plan to ‘transition’ tourist operators as the Reef dies?
Ignorant but happy or happy to be ignorant I am 🙂
BK
Friday, April 29, 2016 at 2:26 pm
NEWSFLASH! Next Tuesday’s budget will contain $10 million to save the tourist industry on the Great Barrier Reef.
What? To spray paint some of it?
Actually, it was my attempt at a bit of humour. There was a link to eBay listings of artificial coral. However spray painting is not a bad idea. Great environmental job for Work for the Dole.
C@tmomma @ Friday, April 29, 2016 at 2:11 pm
C@t..It’s no longer practically possible to traffic human cargo to Manus. Nauru is also effectively closed to new business. It won’t be long before new boats try their luck. What will we do? Since they cannot be trafficked elsewhere and then forgotten, what will we do?
There is an alarmism that enters this discussion. There are millions of displaced persons, it’s true. But there are not millions of refugees clambering into boats. Nor will there be. These numbers just add to the fear that pervades reactions to the problem.
For mine, our “deepest values” also form part of the reality with which we are faced. We cannot separate our values from our deeds – at least, not for long. I think we will be forced to re-set the ground rules here whether we like it or not. The decision of the PNG High Court has ensured that if nothing else.