Newspoll: 52-48 to Labor

What will presumably be the last Newspoll of the year adds to impression given by other pollsters of slight movement to the Coalition as the year draws to an end.

More evidence that the Coalition is ending the year in a very slightly better position than it’s been in over the past few months, this time courtesy of Newspoll in The Australian, which records Labor’s lead narrowing to 52-48 from 53-47 a fortnight ago. The Coalition now leads 39% to 36% on the primary vote, after a 38% draw in the last poll, with the Greens steady at 10%. Malcolm Turnbull is down two points on approval to 32% and up one on disapproval to 55%, while Bill Shorten is respectively down two to 34% and steady at 51%. Turnbull holds a 41-32 lead as preferred prime minister, compared with 43-33 in the last poll. The accompanying report has further results on the salience of jobs, asylum seekers and same-sex marriage as political issues. The poll was conducted Thursday to Sunday from a sample of 1629.

UPDATE (Essential Research): After a week at 51-49, Essential Research moves back a point in favour of Labor, who now lead 52-48. The most interesting aspect of the primary vote is that One Nation have gained a point to reach a new high of 8%, with the Coalition down one to 38%, and Labor, the Greens and the Nick Xenophon Team steady at 36%, 9% and 3%. The most interesting of the supplementary questions records approval ratings for senior government ministers, which finds Julie Bishop to be by far the government’s most popular figure, with 52% approval and 23% disapproval. Christopher Pyne, Barnaby Joyce, Greg Hunt, Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison more or less break even, but George Brandis has a net rating of minus 8%, and Hunt records a particularly high “don’t know” rating.

A “party trust to handle issues” question records a slight deterioration across the board for the Coalition since August, the biggest mover being “controlling interest rates”, on which their lead has narrowed from 12% to 7%. On a series of “party best at looking after the economy” questions, the Coalition has an 11% lead over Labor on “handling the economy overall”, but a less helpful 33% lead on “representing the interests of the large corporate and financial interests”, with nothing separating the parties on “handling the economy in a way that best helps the middle class” and “handling the economy in a way that helps you and people like you the most”. Also canvassed: voluntary euthanasia, Gonski funding, climate change, and where we go when we die.

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.

2,249 comments on “Newspoll: 52-48 to Labor”

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  2. We sure are headed into uncharted waters this century, especially when the STEM Revolution gains a head of steam. What we have seen done already with Algorithms, Nano Engineering and the elucidation of the human genome is only the beginning.

    For example, my eldest is returning to Uni next year to study Science, hopefully to major in Genetics. He is possessed of a pioneering zeal to take CRSPR and run with it.
    His motivations are good because his brother was born with a genetic abnormality, but as is so often the case, good work gets taken up by people and governments whose motives aren’t so pure and is used to further the advances made into more malign areas.

    And there’s not a lot we can do about it because, as I said, the initial research was done with the best of intentions.

  3. Sean Black sounds like he is power crazed. He has travelled to Labor to Liberal to One Nation in search of political power. Quite frightening really

  6. Simon
    Yes I noticed a few engineerng firms in there too. A number of the large ones paying zero are foreign owned (invariably US) and they are presumably (hopefully) paying tax in the USA. But I have no good explaination of it. I am not a shareholder so cannot easily comment on the firm I work for.

    I checked the figures last year and there was a general pattern that the locally owned engineering consulting firms paid more tax than the foreign owned. But there was a disturbing range in % tax paid between firms working in the same industry. Those in the mining industry generally paid less tax too, whether local or foreign owned. Perhaps they have more deductions available for work in mineral exploration? I do not know.

    It is one of many examples that show our coporate tax system is broken. Time to start again with a new Act, and a simpler system with fewer exemptions.

    Have a good day all.

  8. I hope Malcolm Turnbull realises that the one lobby group that defeated the resolute determination of John Howard to get something done was the Pharmacy Guild.

  9. Thanks Soc.

    I know quite a few Australian Eng Consult companies have, over the last 10 years, acquired foreign companies and International Development arms. Many will have offices in the ME, parts of SE Asia and Africa. One of these companies paid 0% on total income and 10% on taxable income.

    It’s a mystery.

  12. Seems entrepreneurs are deciding to take Turnbull’s message about being agile and innovative by upping stumps and shifting to greener pastures.

    A pioneering wave power company says it is building its first commercial wave plant in Cornwall, England because the policy support for renewable energy there is more enticing than the climate policy chaos in Australia.

    Mike Ottaviano, chief executive of ASX-listed Carnegie Wave Energy, said the company was divorcing itself from political uncertainty over renewable energy in Australia by diversifying geographically and technologically.

    Carnegie Wave had received “phenomenal” development aid from ARENA, the federal government clean energy funder, Dr Ottaviano said. But that one-off backing contrasted with broader support in Britain from start-up to commercialisation.

    Read more: http://www.afr.com/news/climate-policy-chaos-sends-wave-energy-pioneer-carnegie-wave-to-cornwall-20161207-gt6i4o#ixzz4STmNnqxE
    Follow us: @FinancialReview on Twitter | financialreview on Facebook

  13. My OH and son are heading off for about 5 weeks in UK and Portugal. Any tips from the travellers here on the best way to transfer money there. The Cash Passports all seem to have lousy exchange rates and I expect using a credit card won’t give a good rate either.

  14. CTARI

    Quite – i was making a bit of a rhetorical point (comprehend)? However prior to the recent price wars you would have been looking at more than $30 for a large leg of lamb. which OK is not $100 but is still getting high and by the time you add the rest of your standard lamb roast – potatoes pumpkin, gravy and mint source probably pushing $40. This is NOT within the budget of many families – especially those on single incomes and maybe just part time work. So if you are a family of 4 with net after tax of say $600/wk, (this is about $31,000/yr) pay $350 for rent, $50 for transport weekly (more if kids have to catch buses) and say put away $50/wk for utilities and phone you have $150/week for food and clothing and emergencies as well as any smokes or alcohol. Meat of any kind becomes a bit of a luxury. Lamb roasts might occasionally make it to the table and mass produced chicken but never ever a lamb chop and a cutlet is something you may dream of but never ever eat.

  15. CTar1
    Sunday, December 11, 2016 at 9:35 am

    I scrolled through the comments from yesterday arvo and night and can’t resist commenting on this one –

    Daretotread
    #1917 Saturday, December 10, 2016 at 11:13 pm
    Tricot
    The irony is that we no longer have a carbon price, but Sunday lb roasts DO cost $100 or pretty close if you get a large leg.

    Legs of Lamb are $10 a kilo at Woolworths.

    I’ve never seen 10kg one.

    lol

  16. DTT

    potatoes pumpkin, gravy and mint source

    I guess many people these days are too useless to be able make their own gravy and mint sauce …

  17. Martha Farquahar
    Sunday, December 11, 2016 at 10:12 am
    My OH and son are heading off for about 5 weeks in UK and Portugal. Any tips from the travellers here on the best way to transfer money there. The Cash Passports all seem to have lousy exchange rates and I expect using a credit card won’t give a good rate either.

    Where do you live? I take a mixture more cash (broken up into various hidey holes) which is reason I asked you, some credit loaded onto qantas cash, and some banks overseas have reciprocal agreements with banks here, re fees charged on credit card withdrawals

  18. martha farquahar @ #1963 Sunday, December 11, 2016 at 10:12 am

    My OH and son are heading off for about 5 weeks in UK and Portugal. Any tips from the travellers here on the best way to transfer money there. The Cash Passports all seem to have lousy exchange rates and I expect using a credit card won’t give a good rate either.

    I’ve found using a credit card or just withdrawing money from an ATM (with cirrus link) pretty reasonable. There are extra charges – usually around $5 for each ATM withdrawal and credit card companies put a 3% charge on the exchange – but the exchange itself is very close to the going exchange rate. My experience has been with Westpac and ANZ, so it is possible that other banks or financial institutions are more rapacious.

    One thing to be very careful about is skimmers – a setup that crooks use to capture the metal strip on the card and film the PIN number input. I’ve been caught once in Rome and, while the bank gave me my lost money back, it is very annoying and you feel a bit violated. As they say at ATMs – cover your PIN – especially outside ATMs.

  19. Hanson is a person with a strong brand (fwiw) and is easy to manipulate. Of course she attracts lots of rogues. Ashby thought he was in heaven when he latched onto her.

  22. Martha, I should add that they need to take some cash for use on arrival. You never know what the set up is at the airport. When I arrived at Heathrow earlier this year I found that Travelex, which charges outrageous commissions, had the monopoly there and I couldn’t get their ATMs to work for me either as I didn’t have the right bank card. Fifty pounds or Euros (depending on whether they are going to Britain or Portugal first) might be enough as a kickstarter. You will get ripped off a bit buying the notes in Australia before departure, but that is just a cost of travelling.

  23. I honestly don’t know how James Ashby can raise his head in Canberra and Parliament House again. Christopher Pyne probably made him feel welcome though. 😉

  25. These are important realities about federal government finances:

    Fiscal surpluses provide no greater capacity to governments to meet future needs, nor do fiscal deficits erode that capacity.

    Governments always have the capacity to spend in their own currencies.

    Why? Because they are the issuers of their own currencies, governments like Britain, the United States, Japan and Australia can never run out of money.

    Why, then, do governments borrow? Under the gold standard governments had to borrow to spend more than their tax revenue. But since 1971 that necessity has lapsed. Now governments issue debt to match their deficits only as a result of pressure placed on them by neoliberals to restrict their spending.

    Conservatives know that rising public debt can be politically manipulated and demonized, and they do this to put a brake on government spending.

    But there is no operational necessity to issue debt in a fiat monetary system. Interestingly, conservatives are schizoid on the question of public debt: public borrowing provides corporate welfare in the form of risk-free income flows to the rich because it allows them to safely park funds in bonds during uncertain times and provides a risk-free benchmark on which to price other, riskier financial products.

    The fact that bond yields have remained low throughout the latest economic crisis (reflecting strong demand for public debt) tells you that the parasitic bond markets do not buy the neoliberal rhetoric. They know that national governments (outside the Eurozone) have no solvency risk.

    Zimbabwe! has also become the one-word response conservatives use to scare us into believing that deficits cause hyperinflation (the cry used to be Weimar!).

    The reality is this: if the economy is operating at full capacity—which means it cannot produce any more new products—then attempts by the government to expand spending will cause inflation.

    But up to that point, governments can run deficits forever without causing inflation. By supporting spending in an economy not at capacity, deficits induce more production rather than higher prices, since companies will be happy to supply the growing demand.

    Deficits will drive up interest rates! Another part of the ‘post-truth’ mainstream economics world.

    That’s funny, since deficits have rose sharply in recent years but interest rates have remained close to zero. Japan has been running large deficits since its property market collapsed in the early 1990s and has maintained zero interest rates and low inflation ever since.

    The neoliberal lie forgets to mention that the central bank sets interest rates, not the market.

    What neoliberals don’t tell you is that when government deficits stimulate growth, savings also grow as a result of higher incomes.

    So the claim that private and public borrowers compete for a finite pool of savings is a lie. Far from taking funds away from private investors, deficits expand the pool of available savings.

    http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=34936

  26. Caught some bits of a show on SBS (?) last week about professional shoplifters in the UK. Their most common request – meat. For the UK poor its become an unaffordable luxury item. The thieves showed some conscience by only knicking the meat from the big supermarkets though.

  27. MF

    When I got home from China and compared the various rates we’d been charged, withdrawing money from ATMs was definitely the best way to go.

  28. When Annabel Crabbe writes a good thoughtful article exposing the stupidity of the Liberals’ over climate change – without trying to turn it into some kind of comedy sketch – you can be sure that they have a real problem on their hands.

    The MSM (excluding Murdoch’s lying rags of course) are clearly flagging that the blow torch is going to be applied to Turnbull at the next election over this issue – and about bloody time.

    Annabel Crabbe puts Bernardi’s squealing about energy intensity into perspective

    .
    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/politicians-need-to-come-with-a-trigger-warning-20161209-gt7pyq.html

  29. Martha I found Qantas cash card excellent last trip OS but DON’T use it for holding deposit on accommodation (which isn’t actually charged but takes up to a month to be recredited – use an ordinary CC for that).

    Qantas Cash can have 2 denoms – you load say GBP & Euros – and just like ordinary cash OS. Exchange rates are already done here when loading. OS it is just like a debit card. I bought everything and withdrew cash no problem with the card.

    You can also move pounds to euros automatically (eg) if you need more of one than the other and run out of one denomination.

    When I got back I just withdrew what was left. You can also put more money on the card if needed during the trip.

  31. vogon poet @ #1976 Sunday, December 11, 2016 at 10:49 am

    Caught some bits of a show on SBS (?) last week about professional shoplifters in the UK. Their most common request – meat. For the UK poor its become an unaffordable luxury item. The thieves showed some conscience by only knicking the meat from the big supermarkets though.

    One of my very favourite grand daughters works in a booze outlet in Canberra. She told of the master criminals who stuff bottles of VB down the trackies and walk out.
    Now, being a non boozer these days, bottles of Johnny Walker or Canadian Club would take up no more room. The world is truly going to hell in a handcart.
    How would these daring dudes go making off with a $25 leg of lamb from Coles.
    😉

  32. My OH and son are heading off for about 5 weeks in UK and Portugal. Any tips from the travellers here on the best way to transfer money there. The Cash Passports all seem to have lousy exchange rates

    I would use an Australian bank account that has no account maintenance fees, no currency conversion fees, no ATM withdrawal fees, no transaction fees when buying things in shops. I’ve used a Citibank Plus account with a Visa Debit card when travelling overseas. It worked well. It provided fee-free access to my money when I was in other countries.
    https://www.citibank.com.au/aus/banking/everyday_banking/citibank_plus.htm

  35. In this excellent article linked by BK, Lenore Taylor excoriates Turnbull over his EIS back flip, by throwing his own words from 2009 back at him.

    The ALP is also onto it with a very damaging little video that was linked by someone a couple of days ago which takes the same approach. No doubt it will feature prominently at the next election. Turnbull won’t know what hit him.

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/10/turnbull-was-right-in-2009-ruling-out-emissions-trading-is-bullshit

  36. KJ, for one particular thief , the leg of lamb was nothing compared to the size of the rolled pork roast nor the turkey. I suppose the need for drugs makes one a pretty ingenious thief.

  37. Kay Jay
    I imagine thieves would choose smaller meat packages. However a “pregnant” lady pushing a stroller could comfortably squirrel away a leg of lamb.

    How do book thieves do it – that was the go when I was a student? Now I have smuggled books INTO a library – the sort where personal books not allowed but still needed text books for study.

  38. martha farquahar @ #1963 Sunday, December 11, 2016 at 10:12 am

    My OH and son are heading off for about 5 weeks in UK and Portugal. Any tips from the travellers here on the best way to transfer money there. The Cash Passports all seem to have lousy exchange rates and I expect using a credit card won’t give a good rate either.

    Just use your debit card to make withdrawals from your Australian bank account at atms . Make fewer, larger withdrawals to minimise fees. Works for me but I haven’t tried those countries.
    I use on-line banking to transfer money into my transaction account prior to going to an ATM so that I never have much in that account.

  39. Vogon
    I think the tragedy is that these days someone may well be thieving not for drugs but so they can put a Xmas dinner on the table.

  41. Much to my surprise, I also liked the Crabb article.

    It attempts to seduce the kind of nutter’s who oppose an ETS by introducing the argument with another of their pet peeves, “political correctness”. It’s a pity the copywriter who wrote the headline didn’t get the angle (and pretend the article was a rant against PC).

    BTW, I was under the impression that PC was invented by a right wing think tank as a way to battle “do-gooders” in the culture wars? Lesson 1 in the shock jock hand book; How to pretend to be a victim when people point out you are an obnoxious arse.

  42. Vogon

    As I was saying earlier if you are a family on a single semi part time income – say single mum working 5/6 hrs as a cleaner or family with three young kids and one income. Dad may have only part time work eg as janitor or security guard, earning say $25/hr.

    You still need to put a roof over the kid’s heads. A caravan park will cost a family $300/week way, way out of town. More realistically you are looking at $350/$400/week. You still have to travel – by PT or car and there will be no change from $50/week. Sure there will be some extra family allowance and rental assistance, but these will be gobbled up by school books and uniforms, medicines or emergencies.

    In families where one or both adults smoke, there will be very, very little over for food even an Xmas dinner. We are talking “working families” here – not those on welfare, so they will NOT by and large go to charities for assistance. With something under $150/week to spend on food and clothes and luxuries, there will be one helluva temptation to thieve a leg of pork.

  43. Kate Carnell was on The Drum last week. She effectively stated that the world population must keep growing no matter what; otherwise the economy will tank.
    Not sure what happens when we get to 20 or 50 billion. She will still probably want more people on the planet.

  46. With something under $150/week to spend on food and clothes and luxuries, there will be one helluva temptation to thieve a leg of pork.

    No.

  49. dtt

    ‘We are talking “working families” here – not those on welfare..’

    Sorry, the family you describe (confusingly, in one sentence it has a single parent, in the next it has two…) would be on welfare.

  50. Apologies, dtt, you are apparently describing two different families. However, both would be on welfare. For a start, that means being on a health care card, and rent assistance.

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