BludgerTrack: 50.1-49.9 to Labor

Newspoll’s 50-50 was matched yesterday by Essential Research, and the BludgerTrack poll aggregate continues to say much the same.

BludgerTrack is now updated with all of the federal polling published over the past few days, results of which are displayed at the bottom of this post. As has been the case since at least the start of the campaign period, the tracker is resolute in recording an effective dead heat on two-party preferred, with the seat projection continuing to point towards a slender absolute majority for the Coalition. The latest addition to the aggregate is the weekly reading of Essential Research’s fortnightly rolling aggregate, which echoes BludgerTrack in coming in at 50-50 on two-party preferred. This follows a two-point movement the previous week that turned a 51-49 Coalition deficit into a 51-49 Coalition lead. On the primary vote, the Coalition is steady at 41%, Labor is up one to 36%, the Greens are up one to 9%, and the Nick Xenophon Team is steady on 4%.

Further questions offer some encouragement for Bill Shorten with respect to perceptions of the two leaders during the campaign, although I wonder how good respondents are at isolating that period specifically. The results find 20% saying they have become more favourable towards Shorten versus 21% for less favourable, but these are much better than Malcolm Turnbull’s respective figures of 7% and 33%. Another dose of Essential’s “party trust to handle issues” records a big drop in the Coalition’s lead on managing the economy since a month ago, down from 20% to 12%, with most other measures remaining fairly stable. An occasional question on climate change records a four point drop since March in those attributing it to human activity to 59%, and a one point increase in those favouring the alternative option of it being “a normal fluctuation in the earth’s climate” to 28%. Most of the survey period was before large parts of Sydney’s northern beaches crumbled into the sea. Further questions confirm the impression that the electorate has been less than fully switched on during the first half of the campaign marathon, with only 14% claiming to have shown a lot of interest in the campaign, compared with 39% for some interest, 27% for very little interest and 18% for no interest.

Federal election bits and pieces:

• Labor’s candidate in Malcolm Turnbull’s seat of Wentworth, Evan Hughes, has provided Fairfax with results of a ReachTEL poll he commissioned showing a 10% swing against Turnbull, reducing his margin from 18% to 8%. The poll was conducted last Tuesday from a sample of 626.

Steven Scott of the Courier-Mail reports Labor optimism about the regional Queensland seats of Capricornia and Herbert is not matched for the state’s capital. The northern suburbs seat of Petrie, held by the LNP on a margin of 0.5%, is identified as a seat where Labor is falling short. A similar prognosis was offered in my own paywalled article in Crikey on Thursday.

• More of my words of wisdom on the campaign can be found on a podcast for The Conversation, and in a review of northern Tasmania’s flood-stricken marginal seats in a paywalled Crikey article yesterday.

Mark the Ballot tracks Sportsbet’s win probabilities for all 150 electorates to the start of the campaign. Sportsbet has substantially revised its odds over the course of the campaign in favour of the Liberals in Banks, Hindmarsh and Lyons, the Liberal National Party in Leichhardt, the Greens in Batman, Labor in Cowan, and Bob Katter in Kennedy.

Fairfax reports the Victorian Liberal Party’s administration committee discussed, but ultimately decided against, disendorsing McEwen candidate Chris Jermyn following his struggles before the news cameras as he gatecrashed a Bill Shorten event in Sunbury last weekend.

• An alleged promise by South Australian property developer Roostam Sadri to donate $500,000 to the Liberal Democratic Party in exchange for the top position on its South Australian Senate ticket has been referred to police by the Australian Electoral Commission, as reported yesterday by Josh Taylor of Crikey. This followed last week’s publication by Fairfax of an apparent written agreement to that effect. Sadri denies having paid such an amount, or that there was ever a “formal agreement”. The section of the Electoral Act pertaining to bribery offences provides, with helpful exactitude, that “a person shall not ask for, receive or obtain, or offer or agree to ask for, or receive or obtain, any property or benefit of any kind, whether for the same or any other person, on an understanding that the order in which the names of candidates nominated for election to the Senate whose names are included in a group in accordance with section 168 appear on a ballot paper will, in any manner, be influenced or affected”. Graeme Orr of the University of Queensland’s TC Beirne School of Law notes that Section 362 of the Act states that candidates forfeit their seats if involved in bribery, and that this requires only the civil rather than the criminal standard of proof. This could equally apply to David Leyonhjelm’s bid for re-election in New South Wales as to Roostam Sadri’s run in South Australia, if the Fairfax report’s assertion that Leyonhjelm “considered entering” an agreement was substantiated.

Further afield:

• The Northern Territory News offers a reminder that a territory election looms on August 27, and the Northern Territory News offers a helpful reminder with a Mediareach poll of 400 respondents in the Alice Springs electorates of Araluen and Braitling. The pollster appears to have failed to ask a follow-up question to prompt the 23% undecided, rendering it of little value, but it’s presumably instructive that less than 40% of decided respondents said they would vote for the Country Liberal Party, compared with 68% at the 2012 election.

• The Sydney Morning Herald reports the NSW Electoral Commission is investigating allegations of vote-rigging during Labor’s American primary-style “community preselection” process for the seat of Ballina ahead of last year’s state election. It is alleged that a party official used details on enrolled voters from the party’s database to fraudulently vote on their behalf during the online ballot, although the unnamed official is quoted saying he had merely “played along” when asked to do so by persons unidentified. The proposed beneficiary was the favoured candidate of head office and the ultimate victor in the preselection, Paul Spooner, with no suggestion that Spooner himself was involved. The formerly Nationals-held seat went on to be won by the Greens.

bludgertrack-2016-06-08

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,653 comments on “BludgerTrack: 50.1-49.9 to Labor”

Comments Page 2 of 34
1 2 3 34
  1. Looks like Labor is going to reach the finish line a few seats shy of government. The wind in their sails appears to be weakening and they seem to be still three or four seats short of government. Assuming they reel in another couple of marginals as they tack towards the line (but Sportsbet is right about Batman) where will David Feeney hide post-election?

  2. The government fiscal balance is not an entity that can be sick, wounded, broken, or degraded. It is merely an indicator that responds to what is happening in the real economy (labour, materials, skills, technology, output). Usually a government deficit is necessary for optimal economic performance. Right now Australia needs a larger deficit, not a smaller one. There are 1.8 million Australians whose desires for work are unmet. This is a massive waste of a real resource. There are vast social, mental, and spiritual costs to this waste. There are only two ways for this unused resource to be mobilized into production. 1. Large net injections of export revenue – which isn’t going happen and is not within our control to achieve. 2. Large net injections of federal government spending – easily achieved and completely within our control. The non-government sector needs a net addition to its savings in order to create more jobs and useful goods and services. The federal government needs to supply that net addition to non-government savings by increasing its fiscal deficit.

  3. Ab

    As Trog’s post indicates AGW is used interchangeably with Climate Change and it’s perceived that it has exclusive rights over that term.

    OK – to be pedantic – the Climate Change that we are seeing now, and specifically the global temperature increases since the industrial revolution are primarily anthrogenic in nature, i.e. AGW, and are caused by carbon emissions. The probability that they are caused by natural cycles is vanishingly small. Natural cycles can cause major changes in climate, but only over relatively long time periods.
    If one finds a squashed cat on the road it is reasonable to assume it was hit by a car. It is possible that it was hit by a fridge falling from the sky, but unlikely.

  4. It looks like Facebook is using the upcoming “debate” to promote its fairly new product Facebook Live. This allows anyone with a smartphone camera to send video live to Facebook and then Facebook users can comment. Explanation at https://live.fb.com

    Fortune magazine has an article about the debate and how Facebook is promoting Facebook Live, even to the extent of paying celebrities to use it.

    V

  5. Bernard Keane
    32m32 minutes ago
    Bernard Keane ‏@BernardKeane
    slow clap ABC News 24 for cutting away from Shorten’s speech.

  6. FWIW I do think the PM is very intelligent. I don’t know that he’s necessarily any more intelligent than a number of others who have held leadership positions in the past, but I don’t doubt he’s very bright. I think, however, that the idea of him as a great communicator is massively over blown, and I don’t think he has great political judgment.

    Anyway, just my two cents’ worth.

  7. That’s a ridiculous argument Zoomster. To think that there is no other possibility of climate change than human involvement is bewildering. If that was the case, then what caused the climate to change in our distant past in the absence of human involvement? Aren’t these causes also possible contributors in this instance? What I would like is for the media, and everyone else using the same tactics to say “This significant weather event is yet more proof of HUMAN CAUSED global warming and something must be done to curb this alarming trend.” At least then, people would be aware that this link was being made by those reporting it.

  8. [Victoria
    Wednesday, June 8, 2016 at 8:39 am
    And for all the right wing bias of Sky news, it does a much better job than the ABC. When they show pressers of both sides, they stick with it. The ABC has a habit of cutting away. Pretty useless]

    Fortunately perhaps, I don’t have access to Sky TV but the Sky website has stories that tend to have less opinion inserted into them than on the ABC website.

  9. Thankyou Trog – That’s all I’m after, because despite how pedantic you believe it is to distinguish between the two, I think it’s extremely important.

  10. Good Morning

    Victoria

    Smart politics. Gets the second preference from Greens voters when the voter is not doing Labor as primary.

  11. AB

    The Greens and Labor have addressed the issue you raise.

    They use the phrase we have policies to deal with dangerous climate change. Does not matter who you believe caused it. Fact is its happening policies have to deal with that reality.

  12. Turnbull has the fault of the insecure (understandable, given his childhood, and I’m not referring to the Poor Little Rich Boy riff) – he can’t admit an error.

    On one hand, this means he is cautious about making them – a lot of his waffle, when you listen closely, is him qualifying whatever it is he’s saying so that he can’t be accused of being wrong).

    On the other, he has enough intelligence to – at least occasionally – recognise he was wrong, but he can’t admit it. Hence the over the top Conroyvia rants.

    His belief in his own intelligence, however, means he doesn’t believe that others can see through him. (I had a cat like that, who simply refused to believe, when I told him off, that I had seen through his cunning plan, and kept on doing whatever it was anyway).

  13. The LNP have made a major strategic blunder. They think they can rely on the myth of better economic managers. Labor is campaigning on the reality.

    This will be very hard for the MSM to hide.

  14. Re science communication and AGW.
    Scientists are their own worst enemy when they make statements to the effect that it is difficult to ascribe any particular weather event to AGW, and that it is all down to probabilities etc etc. This type of thinking clearly goes over the head of 41% of the population.
    They should simply say that all weather is influenced by AGW and leave it at that.

  15. AB

    Seriously? You’re descending to that level of pedantry? We were clearly discussing climate change in the context of present events. If you’re going to clarify things to this extent, than I expect future posts of yours not to refer to ‘the government’ but to make it crystal clear we are talking about ‘the present federal government of Australia’. After all, that’s an important distinction.

    Anyway…

    ‘If that was the case, then what caused the climate to change in our distant past in the absence of human involvement? Aren’t these causes also possible contributors in this instance? ‘

    We actually have a good handle on what caused climate to change in our distant past. Obviously, when scientists first looked at the question of why the climate was changing (and the indicators have been there for decades) they considered these. (This is why scientists whose specialty is paeleontological climate, such as Flannery, became AGW advocates). When none of those impacts fitted the bill, scientists began looking for other explanations.

    Part of the problem with some of the basic sceptical questions about AGW is that scientists answered them decades ago, in the pre internet days, so the discussion doesn’t exist on line.

    Climate change science, in one form or another, has been looking at this questions for decades. The scientific community did all the sceptical stuff over forty years ago. Pretty much anything you can throw up has been extensively studied and answered over a couple of decades back then (I’ve been confident enough in on line debates to say ‘that question has been answered’ before looking for the answer).

    Now the consensus in the scientific community is that GW is AGW. Well over 99% of scientists accept this (and the other 1% tend to have a vested interest in not).

  16. fitzhunter: Malcolm wants debate on Facebook; hasn’t woken up that many regional residents have a dud internet service! #laborsnbn @SkyNews

  17. The worst offender for right-wing bias is the Guardian. Excellent opinion writers. But the political reporters are right-wing hacks.

  18. I wonder how Fizza central will handle the social media shit storm that will inevitably arise around his Facespace escapade. #nbnshitstorm?

  19. Why does everyone think that every significant weather event is further proof of AGW?

    Te\he way I see it, Climate Change theory predicts severe weather anomalies, in both frequency and strength, compared to the average (more in strength, though).

    In any set of anomalies you can treat them as isolated events, one-off, and look to see whether they can be attributed to the cause that you are claiming an effect from. You can always find a reason that exempts a particular event from application of the theory.

    In that way you can dismiss all events, one-by-one, as not attributable to the cause you’re claiming. Therefore, at the end, with no events on the list, the claimed cause is dismissed.

    We’ve had October bushfires before. We’ve had warm autumns before. We’ve had East Coast lows before. We’ve had record rainfall and el Ninos before. We’ve had droughts in Tasmania and other places before. Taking them one-by-one each can be debunked in isolated (or at least have doubt cast) as caused by Climate Change.

    But you should be more careful about dismissing them all.

    It’s like polls. Some are ore favourable to the government than others. Some are rogues, some might reflect “special efforts” to put a populist policy out into the media just before a regular poll is taken. Some go up. Some go down. But as many here have observed, it’s the trend – an observation across the totality – that gives the true indication.

    The events at Collaroy mave have been due to Climate Change, or may have just been a statistical blip above the norm. Backyards may have been washed away because careless landowners and slack development sign-offs went too far in building swimmming pools or decks too close to the waves. In combination with a big storm the joint effects may have been worse than they might have been if those pools and decks were built more sensibly. It might have been a one-off event.

    But in concert with other events, now coming weekly, monthly, all of which point to a continuing trend in line with Climate Change theory, eventually you need to accept that what the scientists have predicted is starting to happen. There are too many maxima happening, too many “blips” that position themselves on the north side of the average curve to ignore.

    Demanding that individual events be examined out of the context of the set of all events is intellectually dishonest.

  20. Whilst it is understandably disconcerting that ABC24 cut off Bill Shorten’s Economic announcement, I have to say that Labor should be well aware that the news updates on the half hour are pretty well set in stone and so maybe the team could have made sure they started early enough to get it all in before the break.

  21. Bushfire Bill
    We can be dead certain that the east coast low, without AGW, would have been different.
    Scientists should be saying that, and letting the punters fill in the dots for themselves.

  22. C@Tmomma

    I’d agree with that, except that the recent “changeover to Mal” was not attached to news. However, ABC might have been looking for balance in minutes. Bowen had chattered a lot.

  23. annajhenderson: “Talking about transparency, why won’t @TurnbullMalcolm debate me?”
    OL @billshortenmp
    @abcnews #ausvotes

  24. Trog Sorrenson
    #67 Wednesday, June 8, 2016 at 9:33 am

    Re science communication and AGW.
    Scientists are their own worst enemy when they make statements to the effect that it is difficult to ascribe any particular weather event to AGW, and that it is all down to probabilities etc etc. This type of thinking clearly goes over the head of 41% of the population.
    They should simply say that all weather is influenced by AGW and leave it at that.

    So you suggest that the scientist should follow the deniers and start lying.
    That would really help their credibility.

  25. The ABC has a habit of cutting away. Pretty useless

    Some radio presenters do it with Talk Back.

    There used to be a show in the afternoons on Radio National called “Australia Talks Back”. It seemed that every caller got an on-air guernsey, to the point that contributions were cut short to fit in more and more callers. In the end it got to the stage where there were dozens of callers on any particular subject, but none of them got to say anything much at all before they were cut off in favour of the next caller.

    The ABC sends camera and sound crews. reporters and resources to cover an election campaign at large expense. To go to all that trouble and then to cut back to a talking head in a studio telling you what happened yesterday, playing tapes that took hours to edit and schedule concerning old news, in favour of what’s happening today, right here and now is abysmally stupid and wasteful.

    The expectation around here – with good reason – is that no matter how important an announcement – the ABC will find a way to have a technical glitch or something more allegedly important to cut away to. I the end we gets bits of things that don’t add up to anything much at all.

    But no-one from the Coalition can accuse them of giving Bill Shorten special treatment by abandoning a scheduled news readout. No-one from Labor can accuse them of not covering a Labor event. The reality is that both events – the news bulletin and the live presser – end up informing the audience not much at all. They may as well have played re-runs of QI, or Antiques Roadshow, Lateline or The Country Hour for all the actual information that was elicited.

    Same with a Leigh Sales interview. These have become so distorted as to give precedence to how Sales interrupts her subjects, or looks grumpy, or springs a gotcha on some hapless politician. The promos for 7.30 actually emphasize this aspect, rather than what should be the main purpose of such shows: to inform.

    If you want to see a pollie squirm, or Leigh Sales arch her eyebrows or rudely interrupt, watch 7.30. If you wish to catch a glimpse of your favourite politician, before they cut away, then watch ABC-24 during the day.

    But if you want to be informed, you have to use your own devices, because the ABC, in trying so desperately to seem unbiased, to be hard on both sides, won’t do that for you.

  26. Trog,

    Bushfire Bill
    We can be dead certain that the east coast low, without AGW, would have been different.
    Scientists should be saying that, and letting the punters fill in the dots for themselves.

    I think you make a lot of sense and put a good point: we are wasting time looking for events that are 100% attributable to Climate Change (or else all bets on global warming are off).

    We should be looking at how a particular event is worse under Climate Change that it might have been.

  27. Two different arguments.

    Climate change is happening – True. Weather anomalies tie in with this nicely.
    Climate change is caused by humans – Possibly true too. Weather anomalies do nothing to reinforce this link however.

    There are many things I don’t know, but one of the few things I’ve learnt in my life is this:

    There are no absolutes in life.

    Everything we think we know changes constantly and all we achieve by closing our mind to possibilities is limit the potential to solve problems that need solving. If we are the ones responsible for reducing those possibilities, that’s one thing, but when others close the possibilities for us, then I take issue with it. We don’t need others making that link for us. We need to do it ourselves.

    Isn’t this exactly the reason why we’re all here? To point out the deceit in government and in the media and everywhere else, that are primarily designed to steer you in the direction others want and make the links on your behalf. We’re here to make sure the information presented is unbiased and free from spin, so that others can decide for themselves what they choose to believe.

  28. Barney in Saigon

    So you suggest that the scientist should follow the deniers and start lying.
    That would really help their credibility.

    No I am not saying that at all.
    All weather is influenced by AGW. The probability argument confuses the issue, because it relates to the relative human impact of any particular event.
    For example, it would be equally legitimate for a scientist to make either of the following statements:
    “The destructive nature of the east coast low may have been the result of climate change, we just don’t know. We need to look at the frequency of such events over a period of time to say one way or another. ”
    or
    “The east coat low was definitely influenced by climate change, we just don’t know how much.”
    I think the second statement delivers the message more effectively.

  29. The ALP is going to have increasing Deficits demonstrating their lack of fiscal discipline and anything beyond four years really is on a wing and a prayer. This means that if the economic situation heads South the LNP will be better positioned to act because they will have more borrowing capacity available. If the economy goes better than expected then the LNP will run smaller deficits and reach surplus earlier.
    How many times did the ALP promise a surplus? And that was only a short time period away.
    Wayne Swan: “The four years of surpluses I announce tonight “

  30. The argument about whether a single event can be linked to global warming is over.

    Earth runs a single climate system. Essentially this means that every single climate parameter and every single climate event is connected.
    Alternatively, no event and no parameter is disconnected.
    Humans have succeeded in altering the balance of this climate system by capturing huge amounts of additional energy. Essentially this means that the normal is a new normal and that the new normal is constantly being re-set as energy continues to accumulate.
    So, any bit of climate, whether it is within the parameters of the old normal or not, is an expression of global warming.

  31. AB

    There are no absolutes in life.

    The laws of physics have nothing to do with whether you will get a root tomorrow.

  32. This is why, if Labor wins, they will be blamed for the downturn, through now fault of their own.

    Today it’s more true than ever that Australia has to make its own luck. The mining boom is over and the world economy is sluggish at best. The recent Federal Budget brought a number of issues into sharp relief: $67.7 billion in combined fiscal deficits by 2020, and net government debt up from $285 billion to $355 billion in that time.

    To make matters worse, most commentators agree that the key budget projections (on growth, inflation, commodity prices etc) are highly optimistic and unlikely to be achieved. This makes bigger deficits and higher debt more likely, with a credit downgrade from AAA highly likely this year – with the possibility of a further downgrade in 2017.

    http://www.theage.com.au/comment/australia-needs-to-start-making-its-own-luck-20160606-gpcrtj.html

  33. “But if you want to be informed, you have to use your own devices, because the ABC, in trying so desperately to seem unbiased, to be hard on both sides, won’t do that for you.”

    The desperation seems more like the desperation to channel LNP propaganda.

Comments Page 2 of 34
1 2 3 34

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *