First up, the latest dispatches from the front:
• The preference deal with the Greens being pursued by the Victorian Liberals at the behest of the party’s state president, Michael Kroger, is meeting resistance from other branches of the party. Rick Wallace of The Australian today cites unidentified Liberal sources expressing displeasure at the idea, and gets Tasmanian Senator Eric Abetz to reiterate that the “very strong view” of his own state division was that the Greens should be put last. The party’s federal director, Tony Nutt, issued a statement yesterday stressing that no decision had been made.
• Labor hit a spot of bother today in the Townsville electorate of Herbert, which it has never quite been able to pick off since it fell to the Liberals in the 1996 landslide. Bill Shorten’s Queensland road trip brought him to the electorate today, but a doorstop he conducted together with the Labor candidate, Cathy O’Toole, was dominated by O’Toole’s involving in a protest at Liberal member Ewen Jones’s electorate office in February pleading for “a more humane policy for refugees”.
• Apropos Dennis Jensen’s announcement he will run as an independent in Tangney, the Australian Parliamentary Library reviews “the electoral fortunes of MPs who left major parties and contested the next election as Independents”, going back to 1949. Out of 17 identified examples, 12 failed to win their seats (several of whom left office under a cloud); three won re-election but were then defeated at the next election subsequently; and another won re-election and then retired at the election subsequently. Only Bob Katter went on to lasting electoral success.
Now to polling. BludgerTrack has been updated with the latest Essential Research, along with state data from Ipsos, Essential and ReachTEL. The Coalition is now credited with a lead of 50.5-49.5, which is full point better than the pre-budget reading from last week. That translates into a net gain of three since last week on the seat projection, with two gains in New South Wales and one each in Victoria and the Northern Territory balanced by a loss in Queensland. At some point in the not distant future, I’ll start including state-level primary vote breakdowns and two-party results from respondent-allocated trends as well as previous election preferences, but for the time being the display looks like so:
Two new polls were released yesterday, and I have a bit left to say about one from the day before:
• Essential Research’s fortnightly rolling average has the Labor lead down from 52-48 to 51-49, with the Coalition up a point on the primary vote to 42%, Labor steady on 38% and the Greens steady on 10%. The poll also records 20% approval and 29% disapproval of the budget, with 35% opting for neither and 15% for don’t know. Twenty-one per cent felt the budget had made them more confident in the government, compared with 32% for less confident and 35% for makes no difference. However, most of the specific measures were well supported; 69% for internships for the young unemployed versus 14% opposed; 72% for the higher tax on cigarettes, versus 21% against; 62% for capping super tax concessions, versus 21% against; and 50% in favour of company tax cuts, versus 34% against. Opinion was evenly divided on the tax cut for those on more than $80,000, at 43% for and 44% against, and there was a predictable result for “cuts of $1.2 billion to aged care providers”. A bonus survey question provided exclusively to SBS recorded a view that the budget would make it harder for young people looking to buy their first home and gain a higher education, migrant families seeking education jobs, and people saving for their retirement – but there was a relatively good result for “young people trying to find a job”, presumably reflecting the internships scheme. The poll also recorded 48% opposition to bringing asylum seekers from Manus Island to Australia with 30% in support, and 39% holding the view that conditions in detention centres were poor, versus 32% for good.
• The Guardian Australia yesterday published a poll by Lonergan Research showing 50-50 on two-party preferred, from primary votes of Coalition 42%, Labor 35% and Greens 12%. It also found only 12% felt they would be better off because of the budget compared with 38% for worse off, and that 29% said it made them more likely to vote for the Coalition compared with 47% for less likely. The poll was automated phone survey of 1841 respondents conducted Friday to Sunday.
• I hadn’t mentioned the budget response results from Newspoll, which are worth a closer look. Among other things, there are breakdowns by income cohort, which you don’t often see in published polling. Those on higher incomes ($100,000 and lower) were more disposed to have an overall favourable view than those on lower incomes ($50,000 or less), but not by a great order of magnitude: 39% good and 22% in the former case, 31% good and 22% bad in the latter. However, bigger disparities were recorded on personal impact, with 11% of low-income earners expecting to be better off and 45% expecting to be worse off, compared with 29% and 27% for higher income earners. There are also interesting differences by age, with the most favourable responses coming from the young and the least favourable from the middle-aged, with the older cohort landing in between. Charts below put all this into the context of the regular post-budget Newspoll questions going back to 1988 (although there’s a slight change this year and that there are no longer neutral as distinct from uncommitted response options), and show the historic relationship between the “own financial position” and “economic impact” questions, with this year’s question identified in red. On pretty much every measure, this was an average response to a budget, although the plus 5% net rating for economic impact compares slightly unfavourably with an average of plus 10.9%. Its also a weaker than usual result for a Coalition budget, which have had historically better results (part of which is to do with the Howard government holding the reins in the pre-GFC boom years).
If there’s countless examples, should be no sweat for you to come up with one.
I’m not your personal researcher, sorry. If you want to say that no government has ever pushed for unpopular policies that the ruling party nevertheless believes are right and won re-election subsequently, that’s on you. I would say it’s a very bold assertion, but it’s on you.
Adrian
I like it! 👿
My point so excellently made by TPOF, I’m bowing out. Enjoy the remainder of Day 4.
abcnews: #ICYMI: We’re being sold the trickle-down economics con https://t.co/7zVPEzNiCS #auspol #ausbiz via @ABCthedrum
Paddy O,
http://www.caramba.com.au/
398/402 King St, Newtown (i.e. in Grayndler)
“Kakuru – you left out the world renowned expert, Andrew Bolt …..”
Thanks PhoenixRed. How could I forget THAT fount of scientific acumen? 😛
Even though it was given the prominence it deserves as the first item on the World Today, the story commenced with wtte “Labor are trying to make an election issue out of Panama”
When their first word is “Labor” on that story, you really have to wonder.
Apart from that, quite good reporting as far as it went, but we really just need investigation into exactly why this company was engaging in these practices. Tax avoision might not be enough to bring him down. Corrupt dealings or criminal activity probably would.
Feeney
Unfortunately, but no doubt for reasons of convenience, applications for special leave are being dealt with on the papers so what is going on in the mind of the HC is not revealed.
It could be that the HC thinks there is an obvious error or an important point of legal principle which needs clarification or both.
guytaur @ #1144 Thursday, May 12, 2016 at 1:24 pm
State elections – and especially Tasmania – are very different. Each election, Federal and State, and its consequences has to be seen on its own merits. Which is why I have been predicting a solid Labor win this election despite the conventional wisdom of past elections pointing the other way. It can depend on the players, the kinds of agreement they have and the past experience as perceived by voters.
In this case, I believe strongly that it would not be in Labor’s interests to make a governing agreement with the Greens where Labor made concessions that could leave it vulnerable. Your take is different. I expect neither of us will have the opportunity to know who is right, but time will tell.
Neville Wran had an appetite for suing for defamation.
I can’t think of anything better at the moment than Adrian’s suggestion re Panama Hats and pollywaffle crowds to follow Turnbull on the trail.
So I am out for the day.
TPOF
States are Westminster system actual examples. Better than hypotheticals any day of the week.
Cya for now
guytaur
‘The party that refuses to be part of the deal will be punished at the polls. The party that is most likely to form a deal will be rewarded at the polls. ‘
Not the experience in 2010, when all the polls indicated – and indeed, continued to do so for several months – that people would rather have gone back to the polls.
raaraa @ #1065 Thursday, May 12, 2016 at 12:25 pm
Thanks Raaraa. An interesting development which should be extended to existing underground stations in the loop.
One of the comments under the article points to the difficulty of getting trains to stop at the same place each time to align with the doors in the screens. I believe in Singapore the tolerance is 5cm and I can’t see this being achieved consistently without some automated assistance.
Strange how the words in the url differ from those in the headline which says: “Melbourne’s new train station revealed – and there’s something a bit different about it”
adrian Thursday, May 12, 2016 at 1:26 pm
It’s good to see that the SMH work experience business deputy editor (they’ve got to cut costs somehow) completely misses the point by declaring that Mal has done nothing illegal.
***********************************************************
Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
As H.L. Mencken said :
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
president of the solipsist society @ #1150 Thursday, May 12, 2016 at 1:28 pm
If neither side wants to compromise that’s fine. I’m not arguing there should be compromise.
But only the Greens are demanding a coalition. More so, they want it on its terms. Labor doesn’t want a bar of either proposition.
Re the Labor Left vs Greens issue.
I appreciate that my perspective is very Tassie-focused, but it seems to me that in recent years the Labor Left had a choice of two paths, and it went down the wrong one and massively opened the door for the Greens.
During the 1970s and 1980s there was a large influx of new members into the ALP: highly educated, inner city types who gravitated towards the Left faction, where they found they could relate well to leading Labor left figures like Jim Cairns, Brian Howe, Peter Baldwin and John Faulkner.
It was all looking pretty good, until, with the assistance of the Labor Right, the elements within the Left faction who were more closely tied to the unions rather than the party membership embarked on a campaign of “degentrification” of the Left, simultaneously eradicating the “Centre Left” faction that was prominent in SA and WA and which also featured highly-educated inner city types.
The process has continued relentlessly ever since, as is illustrated by the decision to bump Lisa Singh down the Tassie Senate ticket in favour of a second AMWU official, or the preselection in Freo of Brown over Melissa Parke’s anointed successor.
If the militant unions, and those like Albo who are close to them, are going to continue to dominate the Labor Left, then the faction can continue to expect to lose its hold over the inner city electorates: Melbourne is gone, Denison is gone, Grayndler is shaky, Batman was lost to the Right anyway and might now go Green, and Freo is vulnerable (although a bit of a long shot, I’ll admit).
The Labor Left of 2016 has collectively very little interest in the environment (Doug Cameron atypically cares about global warming, and Baldwin and Faulkner cared, but they were part of the old gentrified element that has been steadily eradicated). And while the ALP’s current position on asylum seekers is the right one IMO, it doesn’t play well in inner city areas.
Despite all the ranting and raving on PB against the Greens as splitters and closet friends of the Coalition and whatever, the truth is that the rise of the Greens in the inner city is a symptom of Labor’s growing malaise, not a cause. What Labor desperately needs is to modernise itself: break the hold of the unions (be they left or right), abandon outmoded socialist ideologies, and fully embrace environmentalism. Some elements of the Right faction – particularly the non-Shoppies parts of the Victorian Right – have been far better at doing this than the Left.
Albo is a lively and engaging chap, but when he starts talking about what he truly believes, he always sounds desperately old-fashioned to me: fighting the battles of a generation or more ago about issues like public housing, working-class “battlers”, etc.
Thanks LU- perhaps one for the Chaser.
Re the Drum trickle down article is spot on. Duncan, Melinda et al versus the Panama hats!
potss @ 1.29
The RWNJs do that too. They make a ridiculous assertion and claim the evidence is out there.
But when they are challenged to come up with the evidence, they then insist that it is up to those who don’t accept the assertion to prove the assertion is true.
It’s like the prosecution demanding that Roger Rogerson make out the case against him in the current murder trial.
You know it makes sense (in the nut job fantasy world).
Whew! I just read the last few pages and I can feel the waves of angst and anger coming out of the computer screen.
I don’t think I’ll survive another few weeks of this.
There is not enough urgency in our responses to climate change. There very simple proposition is this: humans are causing climate change; therefore humans action can alter the trajectory of change.
It’s easy to say that no single person nor any single country can alter the result by themselves. This is true but is irrelevant. We all have a contribution to make. If we decide we will not make a contribution we are saying we will be freeloaders. So that is the choice – to bludge or not to bludge. We know the LNP are bludgers. They make no bones about it. They are freeloaders. They will be rejected for it.
LIZZIE – Simple solution: don’t read it.
Kevin 1-7
Yet amongst the dross there was much wisdom 🙂
TPOF
Thursday, May 12, 2016 at 1:10 pm
Except that the vast majority of bills passed the house and senate with LNP support.
This is false. As far as I’ve seen, information published on the current trends are all qualified by noting the strength of the El Nino.
In any case, for those of us in WA, the next La Nina holds much more to fear than the La Nina.
“Compromise” is another word for “leadership” which means “someone else doing all the work for the Greens”.
Razer eviscerates the Greens in Crikey today. Good writer and thinker, Razer.
Warning: Razer’s article contains a reference to her arse.
http://www.news.com.au/national/federal-election/single-mum-confronts-malcolm-turnbull-on-campaign-trail/news-story/ee2818ff99361318a00e79054a2283a4
Malcolm with Melinda. I couldn’t bear to turn the sound on because I knew he was being a totally patronising git. I love her head lolling to the side.
kevin-one-seven @ #1179 Thursday, May 12, 2016 at 1:50 pm
When the town hall style debates come on there will be plenty of Melindas and Duncans that Turnbull cannot avoid. And if you thought Kelly O’bigmouth made a hash of it, just wait until King Waffles tries to answer these questions.
I’m not sure how true this is! Pollies don’t come out well.
https://finnaarupnielsen.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/occupations-of-persons-from-panama-papers/
And your evidence for this is… what exactly?
Perhaps you shouldn’t speak of something about which you know absolutely nothing.
The Sex Party is more likely to win a Senate seat under the new system than under the old system. They got 2% of the Senate vote in Victoria in 2013; they were leapfrogged by the Motor Enthusiast Party which only got 0.5%. This only happened because the preference flows bore no relation to what voters consciously expressed through their votes. Ricky Muir fluked his win. The Sex Party is a micro-party that actually campaigns and brings its name and platform to the attention of voters. That kind of party benefits from a system in which preferences only flow to parties that voters know about and support.
mb
‘Albo is a lively and engaging chap, but when he starts talking about what he truly believes, he always sounds desperately old-fashioned to me: fighting the battles of a generation or more ago about issues like public housing, working-class “battlers”, etc’
What a hoot. What do you think the Liberals are doing? Only, unlike the Greens, the Liberals play for keeps.
At the heart of this election is a massive transfer of wealth from everybody else to the Upper Class. The mechanism is a switch of money by way of Company Tax and a subsequent forced GST. It is transparently evident that the Liberals are doing their best to destroy the Commonwealth tax base.
Once achieved, this will make the GST increase inevitable.
Greens help is vital to the Liberals and the Nationals for this Grand Project.
There is an unfortunate concatenation of aims between the Libertarian/Raving Right Small Government Liberals and the Greens: both thrive on the destruction wrought by people like Abbott (Jim Casey is, strategically, exactly right to prefer an Abbott prime minister); both thrive on increasing levels of cynicism; both thrive on unfairness; both thrive on inaction by governments; both thrive on culture wars; they both thrive on history wars; both thrive on economic inequality; both thrive on environmental destruction; and, they both thrive on Manus and Nauru.
The list of Liberal/Greens win/wins is almost endless.
The Liberals get this.
The Greens do not.
Lizzie, the three largest groups : Pollies, lawyers, businessmen.
No wonder Mal is amongst it.
The Labor Left and the Labor Right and the Labor Centre have agreed to stick the Labor Party’s neck right out on global warming.
They have put their chances of forming government on the line on this single biggest environmental issue in the world.
Which is much, much more than you can say for the Greens.
Good afternoon all,
As others here have noted most of the AS fodder floating atm re labor candidates has been taken directly from social media pages of the candidates prior to their endorsements. The liberals would have gone through the social media of all labor candidates and would be feeding it go the MSM. That would be expected by labor and there is not much labor can do. That is politics.
ATM not much is happening policy release wise and to fill the void the MSM are grabbing at anything handy. Also to be expected.
Labor can only continue doing what it is atm and stay calm and measured just as Shorten is doing. He is not flustered and is calm and sure as he continues meeting real people each and every day in his open shirt, sleeves rolled up. A clear contrast to the fully suited Turnbull. Very deliberate.
Re the Freemantle situation. Labor has announced its new candidate and he will speak shortly. Done and dusted.
Long way to go and there will be more diversions and gotchas from social media pages of candidates but it should be remembered that works both ways.
Cheers.
The sex party has the balance of power in a well hung parliament!
The caption says it all. I hope these kids are getting award wages.
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/video/2016/may/12/labors-sam-dastyari-and-kids-star-in-cutest-guide-to-tax-avoidance-video
Boerwar
Thursday, May 12, 2016 at 1:49 pm
Razer eviscerates the Greens in Crikey today. Good writer and thinker, Razer.
Warning: Razer’s article contains a reference to her arse.
That would take up about three quarters of the article then.
Josh Wilson endorsed in Fremantle
Labor is dumping the Mr Brown, who is Maritime Union of Australia organiser, because he didn’t disclose two convictions dating back to the 1980s.Mr Brown beat Josh Wilson, who is the local deputy mayor and chief of staff to outgoing Fremantle MP Melissa Parke, in preselections in March.
See more at: http://www.skynews.com.au/news/top-stories/2016/05/12/josh-wilson-endorsed-in-fremantle.html#sthash.vMfgK99G.dpuf
CC
I suggest you stick to being wrong about global warming responses.
Boerwar
Thursday, May 12, 2016 at 2:00 pm
So if the ALP is “all in” on Climate Change and the electorate reject them (for a second time) will they get the message?
Is Shorten the Ed Miliband of Australian Politics.
Is Albo the Corbyn?
bemused @ #1164 Thursday, May 12, 2016 at 1:38 pm
My understanding is that Singapore now has train systems controlled from central control rooms. Even the older lines which still have “drivers” are controlled remotely, with the staff in the train just controlling the doors opening and closing.
From what I’ve read, in some other systems that still has front-seat drivers have some sort of aligning systems. It would be a boom for Melbourne if the Metro implements that system.
RE the URL, they have probably renamed it, but from my experience, you could probably reword the text in the URL and will point to the same page if you keep the numbers the same.
CC
Electorates vote for parties on bundles of issues, not single issues.
Global warming is getting worse, not better.
Governments and oppositions are getting less and less room to manoeuvre.
Even the Government, choc-a-bloc full of 100% climate science idiots, is spending a couple of billion on global warming responses.
compact crank @ #1194 Thursday, May 12, 2016 at 2:14 pm
Is everyone in your world just a clone of everybody else?
Nicholas @ 1.57
It may come as a surprise to you (and a few other posters) but the election on July 2 will be in the year 2016, not 2013. It is a strange, but true, fact that election results in western democracies always differ from election to election. I have no doubt it will happen again.
paddy o @ #1188 Thursday, May 12, 2016 at 2:03 pm
I, too, remember a similar joke from 2010.
compact crank @ #1194 Thursday, May 12, 2016 at 2:14 pm
Is Turnbull the billy mcmahon of Australian politics?