The addition of Newspoll and yesterday’s Essential Research result to BludgerTrack leave nothing between the two parties to the first decimal place. Observers of BludgerTrack’s form will know that actually translates into a small Coalition majority on the seat projection, which has the Coalition up one on the seat projection in New South Wales and down one in Queensland. I haven’t updated it with Newspoll’s leadership ratings yet, but will get around to doing so tomorrow. I haven’t yet covered the Essential Research result, which was once again unchanged in having Labor leading 51-49 on two-party preferred. On the primary vote, both parties were down a point – the Coalition to 41%, Labor to 37% – while the Greens and Nick Xenophon Team steady on 9% and 3%.
The Australian has also been treating us to a series of supplementary results from the weekend Newspoll over the past few days that echo the further questions posed by Essential Research this week, to wit:
• The latest in Essential’s occasional series on leadership attributes finds Malcolm Turnbull deteriorating between five and seven points over the past three weeks on “out of touch”, “arrogant” and “understands the problems facing Australia”, without suffering much change with respect to capacities such as “intelligent” and “good in a crisis” (although “hard-working” is down five). Bill Shorten’s numbers are little changed, leaving him rated lower than Turnbull on most attributes, with the singular exception of being out of touch with ordinary people, which is the largest point of difference between the two. Similarly, The Australian today has Turnbull ahead on a series of measures, but with Shorten leading on “cares for people” and “in touch with voters”, while Turnbull has lost all but two points of a ten-point lead on “understands the major issues” from February.
• There has been a whole bunch of “best party to handle” results in the past few days. Amid an overall predictable set of results, Essential Research finds Labor increasing leads from 4% to 11% on health, 6% to 13% on protecting local jobs and industries, and 4% to 10% on housing affordability, the latter of which has only recently emerged as an area of Labor advantage. The Seven Network last night had further results from Friday’s ReachTEL poll showing the Coalition favoured 55-45 on economic management, Labor favoured 61-39 on health. Newspoll framed the questions in terms of the leaders rather than the parties, and had Malcolm Turnbull favoured 55-29 over Bill Shorten on the economy, 48-25 on asylum seekers and 43-38 on the cost of living, 46-33 on tax reform, 50-27 on interest rates and 42-38 on unemployment, while Shorten led 47-40 on health, 47-41 on education and 41-36 on climate change.
• When it asked if respondents expected Labor to keep or change the government’s asylum seeker policies, Essential Research found 28% opting for keep, 38% for change, and 34% for don’t know.
• As recorded in the chart below, the three betting agencies have been consistent in offering odds on the Coalition to form government that imply a probability of between 70% and 80%, although the one most immediately responsive to the actions of punters, Betfair, seems to have recorded a bit of a dip over the past few days.
• In further horse race news, Phillip Coorey of the Financial Review reports Labor is having trouble landing the swing where it needs it, with Labor margins that were cut fine in western Sydney over the past two elections set to blow out again. Coorey had earlier reported one Liberal strategist saying the election was “genuinely close, but at this stage, the retention of the government is more likely”, while a Labor counterpart concedes they were behind, but concluded: “We haven’t put our cue in the rack.”
Local matters:
• Labor is scrambling for a new Senate candidate in the Northern Territory after Nova Peris today confirmed she would not be seeking re-election, with widespread reports she is to take up the position of senior adviser for indigenous and multicultural affairs with the Australian Football League. Trish Crossin, whom Julia Gillard forced out of the seat to make way for Peris at the 2013 election, told ABC Radio yesterday that Peris had presented Labor with a “selfish distraction”, and called on Gillard to admit she made a mistake. There are as yet no indications as to who Labor might preselect to replace her.
• Both major parties have now lost their first choice candidates for the seat of Fremantle, after Sherry Sufi resigned as Liberal candidate, after local newspaper the Fremantle Herald reported he had been recorded in 2013 doing an unflattering and profanity-laden impersonation of his then boss, state Mount Lawley MP Michael Sutherland. There had been news reports in the preceding days about articles Sufi had written in opposition to same-sex marriage and an apology to the stolen generations, which had actually been in the public domain for some time, and rather technical allegations he had provided an inaccurate account of his employment record on his candidate nomination form. The Liberals have rushed to endorse previously unsuccessful preselection candidate Pierette Kelly, an electorate officer to Senator Chris Back.
• Pauline Hanson’s prospects for a Senate seat is the topic of the hour, having been canvassed by me in Crikey last week, Jamie Walker in The Australian on Saturday and a Courier-Mail front page yesterday. Antony Green told ABC Radio’s World Today program yesterday had “some realistic chance”. Kevin Bonham is a little more skeptical, but doesn’t rule it out.
• Phillip Hudson of The Australian reported on Monday that Labor is seeking to exploit talk of a preference deal between the Liberals and the Greens in Victoria to shore up working class support in two low-income regional seats: Bass in northern Tasmania, and Dawson in northern Queensland.
• Matthew Denholm of The Australian reports that Jacqui Lambie is advocating that her voters give their second preference to the Nick Xenophon Team, and put Labor ahead of the Liberals.
Wakefield
Bill Shorten is from Victoria. He would have very little power in NSW Labor, even as Leader of the party, due to the way the party is structured. The administrative arm of the party and the parliamentary arm are kept fairly separate.
The Labor party is not going to implode because of Feeney.
diogenes @ #956 Thursday, May 26, 2016 at 6:20 pm
My model has no way of computing 1-3. It’s mostly sophomore effect and also a slight skew in the swing distributions (such that even ignoring sophomore effect 50-50 would probably give the Coalition a few more seats than Labor).
Wakefield:
Labor has a transparent process for electing the Labor leader. If Labor is defeated, the leadership will spill and presumably if Shorten wants the job again he can stick his hand up and face the membership vote.
But this has nothing to do with there being an obvious a war inside the Greens party. Di Natale is trying to force his way. He says he has no knowledge of the NSW Greens internals, but it was him who tried to dump Rhiannon from their Senate ticket not long after being elected leader and failed,but he’s getting blowback from the party internally.
The Greens blather about being more democratic than those dreaded major parties, yet they have a technocrat, autocrat leader who is very comfortable orchestrating major party moves on a party which claims to be above that stuff.
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2016/05/poll-roundup-not-even-dead-cat-bounce.html
Poll Roundup: Not Even A Dead Cat Bounce
50.0-50.0 again (78-68-4*)
*Batman still modelled as ALP because there is not yet an objective data basis not to.
Article updated to deal with a fishy Morgan release about Indi.
Matt:
My sister in law is a Greens voter and she is seriously unhappy with Di Natale.
Personally, I didn’t think Milne was cutting through and was very pedestrian, but seriously, bring back Milne to make the case for a genuine 3rd party alternative! At least she wasn’t flashy and autocratic.
No gaffe or blunder or misspeak is going to win or lose the election, this is fodder for the press.
In case people have missed it there is a bigger grassroots campaign being run than ever before, it makes the yraw campaign look like chicken feed. The ALP will personally talk to over a million people by election day, not recorded messages but real people (like me ) answering their questions or getting info for a follow up.
This is why good or bad news is not moving the polls, people are not responding to the news. Every poll shows a small improvement to the ALP. This will continue as the person to person campaign continues. It is driving the Libs batty cos they just dont have the people to do it. (Note the reason for the Lib candidate for Whitlam chucking in the towel).
Bluepill
No worries! BTW I wonder if the Blue Pill reference goes a lot further back than The Matrix? Long ago, the “blue pill” was the special cure-all cathartic medicine all ship’s surgeons had in their medical chests…
2GB (Steve Price & Andrew Bolt) hosted their Shorten Bus political reporter tonight, to ask him how the campaign’s going.
The reporter enthusiastically gave the plaudits to Shorten’scampaign.
He said it was professionally run, considerate of work/life balance (of pollies, staffers AND reporters) and offered more interesting interviews. Interesting because Shorten was asked a lot of curly questions, which he answered with ease.
He said the Press gaggle is generally very impressed with Shorten and his campaign, and expects much more favourable personal poll results in the weeks to come for Shorten.
This tied in with a focus group company also mention on the show. This company published a survey that found Turnbull’s traits to be “arrogant”, “tricky” and “insincere”. There were no real negatives for Shorten, except that it was clear people didn’t really know him. Both Bolt and Price opined that a very long campaign could only work in Shorten’s favour, as punters got to know him better.
They both seemed to be saying it was Shorten’s campaign to lose.
Now, of course, both Bolt and Price are Turnbull haters, but the qualitative evidence from the focus group company and the on-the-ground observations from 2GB’s own reporter were very encouraging.
So while youse are all worried about Feeney, Greens v.Labor, and all the rest, “Out There” the people are gradually turning towards Labor (or at least Shorten) , as are the media people who are getting to know and admire him.
Good evening all,
In my opinion I do not think labor had a ” bad ” day at all whatever that term means.
The story that contained the person with the biggest profile was not Feeney but Joyce and his cock up irrespective of how they were presented.
In my humble opinion the majority of voters would think ” who the fu**k is Feeney ” if they thought anything at all so I think there would be little effect.
I still believe the biggest bang for buck when it comes to grabbing the attention of voters comes from the major news programmes and on most days that is only a slot of a few minutes duration.
I missed the commercial news programmes this evening so I cannot comment but on Tuesday night and last night the overall look was not good for the government. To me they came across as hysterical and shrill but perhaps I am not a good litmus test because of my ” skin in the game ” as a political tragic.
Anyway, as I said I missed the commercial news tonight so if anyone would be able to take the time and let me know what 9 and 7 presented tonight would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Cheers.
The Price/Bolt show was surprisingly encouraging tonight from a Labor perspective. Price announced that he had some research regarding the way Turnbull and Shorten are respectively viewed by the public. At that point I was thinking of turning it off because I figured I knew what was coming. But no. Quite the contrary.
It was in fact a “word cloud” where people are asked to use just one or two words to describe their perception of the person – and the main words used to describe Turnbull were “arrogant”, “smug” and such like. Not very complementary at all. For Shorten it was words like “not sure” “don’t know” and “seems nice”, from which price concluded that the long campaign is much more likely to favour Shorten. The longer it goes he said the more the voters will get to know him and the more they will like him.
They then crossed to Michael Pacci, the political correspondent travelling with the PM in Darwin and asked him his perception of how the two campaigns are going. He said he thought the Labor campaign was better organised and more professional and that Shorten was more relaxed, better prepared and handled the press conferences better.
So there you go. Who would have thought? All this must be a great disappointment to people like Rex, Alias and the Lorax who wanted to see Shorten sacked last year without even having a chance to strut his stuff. And even more disappointing to the Liberals, who thought their RC witch hunt had finished him off.
With five more weeks to go it’s definitely game on.
Jeez BB. I wrote all that for nothing. You had already covered it and much better than I did.
I wonder how many other bludgers are closet listeners to Price and Bolt.
A longish read by Jim Chalmers on Labor’s superannuation policy. In short, no change to the policy released last year
https://www.laborherald.com.au/economy/labors-vision-for-superannuation/?utm_content=buffer87520&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
I have been out of the msm loop today and just caught up with ABC774 twitterstream to see what BCassidy had to say in his segment today…..
ABC Radio Melbourne @774melbourne
PM wasting time on Alan Jones feud: “Preaching to the converted: What does his audience do? Vote twice for the Liberals?” @barriecassidy
Given that the candidates were not named in the Morgan poll I personally won’t be paying a lot of attention to it. I was travelling visiting my dad a few weeks ago at the end of April and spent a couple of weeks just over the border in Howlong. All of the local media coverage politically in the Albury/Wodonga area was around the implosion from Mirabella at the debate with McGowan in Wangaratta. I cannot comment on the goings on during the last 3 weeks but I commented to my Dad at the time that Mirabella just lost any chance she had on winning the seat, which was the general consensus of the locals I spoke with.
McGowan has a lot of personal support and the Nats are thought of in better terms than the Libs in rural victoria at the moment (the Nats are very likely to win the neighboring seat of Murray). My relatively uneducated opinion is that it will be a tight contest between the Nats and McGowan but I give the Libs no chance on winning based on my experience in the area a few weeks ago.
The RC was their own backflip and should have severly been punished by the public, but the public is stupid.
Steve Price and Andrew Bolt are insuferable RWNJ, but if you really must…
http://www.2gb.com/article/steve-price-and-andrew-bolt-thursday-may-26
Thanks BB & Darn,
Life is too short for me to bother with the shock jocks, so I come to PB for the latest news, only to wade through endless lefty infighting.
Whilst we have rwnj such as Bolt and Price reporting favourable things re shorten, Barrie Cassidy…….
ABC Radio Melbourne
12h12 hours ago
ABC Radio Melbourne @774melbourne
Coalition won week: @barriecassidy “Shorten walked straight into a sucker-punch, saying ‘spend-o-meter'” #ausvotes
Embedded image
Shorten comforting Nova Peris is incredibly important. That sort of thing shows that he’s human. All this feeney stuff is totally irrelevant. Everybody knows that every political party has a few dopes. They just don’t care.
Clive Palmer going the full dump on Lateline
What the hell is that supposed to mean.
Darn
From recollection, Shorten made this comment at one of his town hall meetings. I have no idea why it is even a thing
Barrie Cassidy:
Gee how does that square with Barrie’s observation that BOTH Turnbull and Shorten were election neophytes?
Darn and BB
OH and I, channel hopping, hit on Bolt on Sky. He was telling Reith that conservatives in the Party need to lean more heavily on Turnbull to actually get stronger on the economy and workplace stuff. Bolt said, like others in the media, he thinks Turnbull will move left if he wins and the conservative cause will be lost.
Reith laughed that off and said No Way, he hasn’t to dste and take a look at the Party. They won’t let him stray or he’ll be gone. He will stay right said Reith
Good lines in that interview for Labor to use whenever the media writes twaddle about Turnbull running his own race when if he gets a mandate.
Feeney seemed to get equal billing on ABC radio with the DEPUTY PM accusing the government of our nearest neighbour and a major trading partner of assisting or directing criminal gangs to send asylum boats to Australia.
SPROCKET – On whom?
https://theconversation.com/csiro-cuts-as-redundancies-are-announced-the-real-cost-is-revealed-59895
Victoria,
Re the spend o meter
I doubt very much it matter at all to anyone except the MSM living in their bubbles.
Yes, Turnbull and co used it this week but to me looking at the commercial news on Tuesday and Wednesday night it came across as just another slogan that the libs were throwing around. All hysterical over kill.
And while I am at it whoever told Turnbull to push the ” Billion dollar Bill ” slogan should be shot. It simply made Turnbull look like a real prat.
Cheers.
Doley,
I half heard the ch7 (didn’t watch). They made a big deal about the Lib cuts that the ALP won’t restore. Sounded like Riley made out Feeny had left some secret document rather than message notes they want people to hear. Probably started with the Barnaby stuff. Reachtel Tomorrow.
Nine also had the won’t restore cuts stuff, and Morrison taking the credit for flushing them out. That was balanced by Barnaby being a dill. Pix of Shorten with Peris and Turnbull managing to look smug in a potato patch. Came off evens.
On tablet so keeping this brief.
Doyley
Billion dollar bill is dumb considering it is Turnbull who is Mr Harbourside mansion
Steve777,
Perhaps Feeney was getting equal billing but I do think it would be a comparison of ” who the fu**k is Feeney ” to high profile Joyce.
Joyce would come out the winner of the biggest dickhead award in that comparison.
My take anyway.
Cheers.
Victoria,
Spot on and it really does make him look like a complete idiot.
Cheers
Question,
Thanks for that summary.
Cheers.
Rather like the Daily Telegraph trumpeting that Labor was fully intending to be… fiscally responsible, and… on a unity ticket with the government on Boats.
This is” bottom of the barre”l stuff.
The Spend-O-Meter? Didn’t Cormann use it on Insiders on Sunday? Hasn’t The Australian been flogging it around the traps?
BILL SHORTEN MAKES A JOKE is headline, not the Spend-O-Meter.
LABOR AT ONE WITH GOVERNMENT ON BOATS, BUDGET is the headline, not “Feeny, Boo!”
Turnbull heckled Shorten on the Spend-O-Meter as if he’d personally pissed in a Holy Water urn. YAWN.
It’s fluff. It’s noise. Shorten is winning the campaign, and expect both his personal ratings and his party’s polling to improve over the next couple of weeks.
feeney @ #1050 Thursday, May 26, 2016 at 8:58 pm
On the ABC Election Calculator, Batman is listed as the safest ALP seat in the country. Of course that is ALP v Libs without taking the Greens into consideration.
Feeney is probably protected because he has long been a mate of Bill Shorten. Bill was rather unfortunate in the friendships he formed.
Feeney is also a former Vic State Secretary so he probably knows where a lot of bodies are buried, or at least a lot of scuttlebutt, and probably has quite a few favours to call in.
I think he will survive.
Rowan retweeted
Jack Sumner
22m22 minutes ago
Jack Sumner @preciouspress
#lateline Explosive allegations from Clive Palmer. Liberal propaganda army will swing into action. It’ll be all about the messenger.
Feeney should have memorised the talking points like Cormann.
Peta Credlin said yesterday that Turnbull and cohorts should use Spendometer and Billion $ Bill every day. Add AS to that too.
Speers has a session with Credlin and Kristina Kenneally every day, I think. KK is all class. Credlin oozes Abbott.
zoomster @ #1051 Thursday, May 26, 2016 at 8:58 pm
He can provide the inspiration for action as Whitlam did in 1970 when the Federal Executive intervened in Victoria.
Formal authority is only one form of authority.
Events dear boy, events?
Look at Barnaby’s face!
Ministers and the PM spouting this spendometer nonsense is deligitimising. They look like Sydney University anti student union thugs whenever they raise it.
Sky News Australia
23m23 minutes ago
Sky News Australia @SkyNewsAust
.@JayWeatherill says govt would have been lucky to save one seat in SA if they dudded us on subs #ausvotes http://snpy.tv/1WW3ZgO
ruawake @ #1057 Thursday, May 26, 2016 at 9:11 pm
Yes, I have been working the phone bank in my electorate and also finally got a call tonight from the Libs.
The strong impression I got was that the Libs don’t have the volunteers and are using paid workers.
I think volunteers work a lot better because they come across as ordinary people and sincere. We have some great conversations with voters and some of these are certainly bringing people across from the dark side.
A good one from Andrew Dyson:
Doyley, checked the ch7 ( link) and as I heard, it did have a bit about Barnaby, but generally more LNP friendly. Ch9 was shorter and about even.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/video/watch/31703523/labor-dumps-schoolkids-bonus-payments/#page1
Is this why Bluey is away for the week?
“Clive Palmer turns Liberal wrecking ball as he prepares to depart Parliament”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-26/clive-palmer-turns-liberal-wrecking-ball/7449858
Fess
Credlin is interesting in that you every word she utters shows how closely she controlled Abbott and his 3 word slogans but Turnbull just sounds a bigger dork for being sucked into using them.
Susan Mackay retweeted
Dead Parrot Society
37m37 minutes ago
Dead Parrot Society @MyFirstCousin
Australians are facing their worst decade of income growth since the ’60s, excluding politicians of course. http://www.businessinsider.com.au/nab-australia-may-experience-its-worst-decade-of-national-income-growth-in-half-a-century-2016-5 …