Results from Newspoll and Essential Research have elicited next to no change on BludgerTrack, at least so far as the results are concerned – negligible movement all round on voting intention, although what’s there is enough for the Coalition to claw back a seat in Queensland on the projection. Newspoll provides a set of leadership numbers as always, and here too their effect is negligible.
What is new on BludgerTrack is that it’s now tracking One Nation, although the only hard data here is that Essential Research has been providing since the start of September. Polls that don’t report One Nation still have some influence on them through their “others” results, and the estimated results for them show up as data points on the chart. I’ve implemented a bit of a cheat to get the One Nation trendline started from the beginning by using their national Senate vote of 4.3% as a post-election starting point. However, the “since election” reading on the tables goes off the national House of Representatives result of 1.3%, which is unflattering to them as they only fielded 15 candidates.
Two bits of electoral boundaries news to relate:
• The redistribution of the two federal seats in the Northern Territory has been finalised, with no changes made to September’s draft proposal. Three thousand voters have been transferred from growing Solomon (covering Darwin and Palmerston) to stagnant Lingiari (covering the remainder of the territory), in an area encompassing Yarrawonga, Farrar, Johnston and Zuccoli at the eastern edge of Palmerston, together with the Litchfield Shire areas around Knuckey Lagoon east of Darwin. To the very limited extent that this will have an electoral effect, it will be to strengthen Labor in Solomon and weaken them in Lingiari, the area transferred being conservative-leaning.
• The South Australian state redistribution has been finalised, with a large number of changes made to the draft published in August. These are largely to the benefit of the Liberals, who stand aggrieved by their failure to win government in 2014 despite winning the two-party vote by 53-47. The draft redrew the Labor marginals of Elder and Mawson to make them notionally Liberal. However, they did the opposite in Fisher, a normally conservative-leaning seat that Labor managed to win at a by-election in December 2014 after the death of independent member Bob Such. This seat has been renamed Hurtle Vale, and pushed southwards into the Labor-voting Morphett Vale area.
The new set of changes adds a further two seats to the Liberal column, most notably Colton, where Labor cops a transfer of 8000 voters from Glenelg North and West Beach (currently in Morphett), turning the Labor margin of 2% into a Liberal margin of 3.7%. The other seat is Newland, where there was so little in it that a further 200 voters in Humbug Scrub have been enough to nudge it to the Liberal side of the pendulum. There has also been a further boost to the Liberal margin in Elder, where gains around Lower Mitcham in the east (currently in Waite) push the margin out from 1.1% to 4.3%.
The Liberals has also benefited in Adelaide, where the reversal of a proposal to move Walkerville out of the electorate leaves the margin at 2.0%, compared with 2.5% at the election and 0.6% in the draft; and in the Labor-held seat of Lee, where an extra 4000 voters from Colton reduce the Labor margin from 4.6% to 2.6%.
Zoomster
The “aging population” is just a temporary thing as the baby boomer bulge passes through.
Poroti
In which case, once that’s passed, we’ll have no trouble funding all of those services.
(and it’s a pretty long term bulge; I’m at the tail end of it, and I expect to be around another forty years….)
VE, regarding the grassland ‘up for sale’ in Canberra. They way I read it was the LR would lead to the destruction of remannent native grasslands. It appears that your comments and link confirm that this will indeed happen.
poroti @ #101 Monday, December 12, 2016 at 1:12 pm
It is not really a problem if policy measures are put in place to address it.
As life expectancy has increased, we cannot maintain policies based on shorter lifespans.
Zoomster, about 5 years ago, Elizabeth Broderick, a director of Nestle Australia, said that Australia was a net food importer. We may grow our grains and vegetables but we send them overseas for processing into frozen vegtables, biscuits. Many Australians don’t eat much unprocessed foods.
Zoomster: Australia’s population will be capped by the water supply not land availability. We live on the driest continent with a poorly management water system, [think Murray Darling Basin under Barnaby’s management and what South Australia can drink]. Workers are being retrenched as their jobs are automated and off-shored so it doesn’t matter if we have a shrinking working age population because we have a diminishing demand for workers
Bemused they want thoroughly discredited academics like Keith Windshuttle or Ian Plimer to be Chief Scientist
The NEM recommendation of a second interconnector for SA does not make a lot of sense.
It will cost billions and push up power prices even further. More and more people will install solar and batteries leaving fewer to bear the cost of the grid.
Instead why not just spend 100 million on batteries that can be installed next year and just make the problem of energy security go away.
People fail to understand that Adelaide’s gas fired power station was 2/3 shut down at the time of the storm. A battery system just needs to keep the lights on for a few minutes or hours until gas fired stations can come on line.
The best solution would be for distributed battery storage and micro grids. Big centralised power generators do not deliver energy security only cost.
The link below I have posted before, but it worth revisiting given today’s announcement.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/res-lloyds-consider-100mw-battery-storage-plant-in-south-australia-93039/
@ PeeBee – that seems like a confused statement. The land will be in filled with or without LR. The thing that LR changes is it takes money from property developers and gives it to the ACT government.
Nice people, the Coalition.
billie @ #106 Monday, December 12, 2016 at 1:22 pm
Well that will work well won’t it?
Windschuttle has no scientific credentials I am aware of.
Plimer is pretty much discredited already.
Laming another age of entitlement f…wit.
Trog Sorenson I agree that residential customers would be better served by batteries and a distributed grid, but I think the second power connector is for industry, particularly Olympic Dam.
Alcoa in Portland, when all pot lines are working, consumes 20% of electricity generated in Victoria. Alcoa lost 1.5 pot lines when the power was lost for 5 hours
Could the connector allow electricity to flow from SA to Vic
Alcoa uses so much power that they paid half the cost of teh pipeline from northwest shelf to Perth that provides gas for the electricity generators for Perth and Kwinana refinery
Alcoa used to share a secure power source with Fremantle hospital, ie the last consumers cut and first to be reconnected
Surely, Malcolm can’t keep going on like this. He’s becoming more and more of a laughing-stock and that will inevitably affect his poll numbers. At some point in the first half of next year when his poll numbers get bad enough, he will realise that he has to stand and fight, not out of courage, but desperation. At that point, the govt will fracture and we will probably have another election.
Ah Trog, always giving me reason to comment:
It does, actually, and could be even better if it also went to Qld.
Transmission is really efficient. It’s a few billion for an asset with a 40-50 year lifetime.
They will do that in any case.
Because you don’t understand what the technical term “security” means. A secure system is one in which assets will not be damaged by another outage or failure. Whenever there is a failure of a power system component, whether that’s a transmission line, a generator or a load substation, you have rapidly changing power flows, and sometimes huge currents flowing through the system until balance is restored. This can damage really expensive equipment, including the very sensitive power-electronics that connect PV and wind farms to the grid. Having excess capacity and mesh networks provides resilience in the face of failures, making the system more secure than before.
Although I have sympathy with your argument there, the ramp rates on a closed cycle gas plant are not much better than those on a coal-fired plant. There are fundamental limitations to the combustion process that control how quickly you can pump up the power. Having that particular plant operating at full output, and drawing the reserves from the broader NEM could have same SA froma separation event – but the key here is that the flexible supply would have come via an interconnector, like the proposed new one between SA and NSW.
Maybe if you were building it from scratch, in India. Otherwise that is nonsense.
Free wind-farms for all, batteries included?
I would argue that the investment on a SA-NSW link could be made on the basis of getting the most out of SA’s excellent wind resources. It will link geographically and climatically separate regions of the continent, and better connect the great big energy storage in the Snowy mountains with one extreme of the NEM, thereby reducing its reliance on gas peaking plants (and AGL – who are the enemy, whatever the battle is).
You do know that RES is in the business of selling batteries, just like TransGrid and ElectraNet are in the business of building transmission lines?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/12/queensland-to-use-coal-driven-budget-boost-to-create-jobs-in-one-nation-heartland
The Queensland government is planning to use a windfall from rising coal royalties to boost jobs growth in regions thought to be fertile ground for One Nation.
The Palaszczuk government is expected to announce an economic stimulus package targeting areas that have not benefited from the state’s employment recovery, using a $1bn state budget boost driven by coal exports.
The treasurer, Curtis Pitt, will unveil the jobs and business package as part of a midyear fiscal and economic review to be released on Tuesday.
:::::
One Nation commands a primary vote of 16% statewide, according to a recent Galaxy poll, a rise political observers speculate is driven by economic insecurity and disillusion with mainstream parties that both face losing chunks of their blue collar and semi-rural bases.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-12/oxfam-report-worlds-15-worst-tax-havens/8111768
Tax dodging by Australian-based multinationals through 15 of the worst corporate tax havens cost Australia up to $4.8 billion in 2014, 90 per cent of Australia’s lost corporate tax, a new report from Oxfam has revealed.
::::
Oxfam noted the average corporate tax rate across G20 countries was 40 per cent 25 years ago, compared to less than 30 per cent today.
::::
Despite net profits by the world’s largest companies tripling in real terms over the last 30 years, from $2 trillion in 1980 to $7.2 trillion by 2013, tax contributions of large corporations are diminishing, the report said.
:::::
Around 62 people own the same wealth as the bottom 3.6 billion people, Oxfam said.
Developing countries lose around $100 billion annually as a result of corporate tax avoidance schemes.
‘Tax dodging by Australian-based multinationals through 15 of the worst corporate tax havens cost Australia up to $4.8 billion in 2014, 90 per cent of Australia’s lost corporate tax, a new report from Oxfam has revealed.’
Another rather large elephant.
Let’s pretend that the budget problems are all the fault of dole bludgers, Muslims, single mothers, the disabled and any other disadvantaged group we’ll demonise for political purposes.
Pegasus
Just how bad do things have to get before the friends of the corporates and tax dodgers are thrown out of office. If One Nation and their ilk replace them, will they understand what is needed for tax reform? :shudder:
Adrian
Thats the Fibs philosophy in a nutshell,and it will never change.
Adrian
The mot de jour is Mussies with many wives, all on welfare. Twitter full of stupidity.
du jour. Lizzie’s a show off.
poroti @ #101 Monday, December 12, 2016 at 1:12 pm
Best news I have had in 77 years.
Praise the Lord! I can stop being old.
Hoorah! 😛
KayJay, you must have misread– my interpretation is that you are a bulge that will just pass through soon enough 🙂
That’s supposed to be a smile, btw!
http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/malcolm-turnbull-to-address-australian-republican-movement-anniversary-dinner-and-monarchists-arent-happy-20161212-gt92mb.html
libertarian unionist @ #124 Monday, December 12, 2016 at 2:23 pm
I now retire in confusion.
Now is not the time to put on my glad rags (which include my Mickey Mouse braces and bow tie) and head out raging for the bright light of Sydney and the fleshpots?
What the hell are fleshpots anyway.
Retires in even more confusion to read adventure novel. 😉
As Adrian says: “The problem isn’t immigrants, it’s our politicians.”
Importing people as is now happening is affecting our children’s ability to find decent work, which is a right the politician’s should not be allowed to take away just so they can fulfil their anti-union, low-wage agenda.
There is little politicians can do to force anyone (new arrivals or not) to live in the ‘boundless plains to share’. They gravitate to Sydney and Melbourne, which is where the big accommodation problems are getting worse, forcing up prices.
Make no mistake, higher prices is part of the plan. Hockey actually said he wanted prices to go up, within a month of being elected in 2013.
We are not the only country with an ageing population, but others are not importing young people like we are, to try and prop us up, because we have squandered our mineral wealth instead of investing it in a future fund (as has Norway). Our ‘Future Fund’ tm, created from the sale of Telstra, is entirely to pay for public servant pensions, which should have been paid for from the salaries budgets at the time.
Zoomster, I suspect you and I probably agree on more things than we disagree. NBN, VFT, taxing international entities – all good ideas which should be revisited frequently until properly implemented.
The problem of rampant immigration must also be revisited, frequently, until it is stopped. Avoidance of the ‘how many’ question is not an answer.
What are the Coalition trying to prove with Triggs. Seriously their tone of voice to her is nothing short of disgusting.
Another post-truth word: flushable.
Link
http://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-takes-court-action-on-%E2%80%9Cflushable%E2%80%9D-wipes
MIKEH – Are you watching? How is it going?
How many disabled, single mother, dole bludging Muslims are there anyhow?
Can’t be that many.
Could be about the same as RW, loudmouthed, arrogant, self righteous, ugly white, nominally Christian talk back radio knobs.
I call the book a callin’
It’s got me round the bend
And I ain’t goin’ mowin’
Until the world has end.
Yodels raucously and off key. Yodelly odelly. 🙂
Doesn’t Libertarian Unionist have a nice smile, folks.
Too bad the Poll Bludgers Christmas get together has been calcelled we could all display our smiles together. What radiance that would have been.
KayJay
Take ‘prep’ it will help the bulge to pass through
Good afternoon all,
This whole deal about Turnbull addressing a republican movement dinner is nothing more than a exercise in optics.
Turnbull needs something to show he is his own man and not under the control of the right wing. He grabbed at this opportunity to show how committed he is to his beliefs. A nothing issue that in reality will upset no one be being used by Turnbull as a ” show of strength “.
Pretty pathetic and sad .
Cheers and a great day to all.
I am too frightened to enquire what is “prep”.
Bye.
Aw shucks, kayjay. Let me return the compliment, and also note your fine collection of braces.
Anton
Senator James Patterson is trying to prove how stupid he is by asking Triggs to comment on a matter that is still before the court.
Koutsantonis has this correct. It was a market-limiting move. The SA Libs didn’t agree to build the transmission line because they wanted to maximise the price they got for the local generators they were about to privatise. Surprised?
mikehilliard @ #138 Monday, December 12, 2016 at 2:46 pm
No further proof required after his Q&A appearance.
Billie
‘Zoomster, about 5 years ago, Elizabeth Broderick, a director of Nestle Australia, said that Australia was a net food importer..’
Well, I’d like to see a link to that. I haven’t been able to find anything referring to Australia being a net food importer, apart from a broken link to an article in 2010.
And that misses the point (again). If we needed to be self sufficient, we could be; we could very simply stop exporting food and process it here.
‘Zoomster: Australia’s population will be capped by the water supply not land availability. We live on the driest continent with a poorly management water system..’
As I said before, this is a bit of a furphy. We have plenty of water.
Yes, we are the driest continent but the bits where there aren’t water are really irrelevant when you’re talking about catering for the population, because no one is suggesting we populate these areas (or farm them).
At the moment, yes, there is some mismanagement of our water supplies – because we can afford to mismanage it. We ‘sell’ water very cheaply, so it isn’t valued. If it were, our channels would be piped, drip irrigation would rule, and we would not still be planting permanent crops in irrigation areas.
Water for people isn’t a problem (we don’t even recycle); the only relevant discussion is around whether we would have enough water to produce the amount of food we need.
Maybe by value?
Libertarian Unionist
The assumption in many of your points seems to be that energy generation and distribution technology will remain at the status quo.
The reality is that solar pv and battery prices have dropped consistently and will continue to drop for the foreseeable future. Given the high prices for electricity people are migrating to solar – where they have available space – and this trend will increase until in just a few short years the majority of domestic power usage will be from solar sources.
The grid, the metering and the current NEM is simply not designed for that.
If the bulk of energy generation is distributed, then distributed storage is also the most efficient.
Note: The other day on PB I made a claim which on further examination I realise was incorrect. I claimed that it already cheaper to simply go off grid in SA using the solar plus the latest lithium ion batteries – such as Tesla’s Powerall 2. This was not correct.
What I should have said is that it is cheaper to run with solar plus batteries than on the grid alone provided the collected /stored solar energy is 100% utilised at home. A grid connection is still needed for providing evening out the bumps in consumption.
This situation will not be maintained for much longer. If solar system owners are not given proper compensation for energy returned to the grid they simply leave.
Given the inevitability of this scenario, the best solution would be as follows:
1) Install smart metering
2) Change the NEM rules so that homeowners are empowered (get the pun) to become power generators and get paid proper feed in tariffs for output from solar and also from battery storage
We live in the age of the Internet, cheap electronics and smart software like blockchain that permit local trading of electricity as well as system management. Staying with the old technology of centralised generation is just keeping the spivs in clover.
ML
‘We are not the only country with an ageing population, but others are not importing young people like we are..’
Absolutely they are.
Many of them are doing it ‘unofficially’, however, by employing foreigners sort of permanently without giving them citizenship – America does this with Mexicans. Japan is looking at ways to make their foreign workforce citizens, because their restrictive immigration laws are proving to be counter productive. Merkel’s agreement to allow so many refugees into Germany was seen as part of a push for more migration.
Libertarian Unionist
And another thing.
You said the second interconnector would only cost a billion dollars and be good value as it will last another 40-50 years. Problem. We won’t own the fucking thing, the grid owners will and we will be paying for it through the nose for the next 99 years. Grid costs are already 40% of the electricity bill in SA, and are why people are leaving the grid in droves.
No thanks I’ll go with my own solar panels and storage. When the system is paid off I will be energy independent with no major bills for a long time. When the batteries reach the end of life the replacements will be dirt cheap.
P.S. Is your union something to do with fossil fuel extraction? Maybe power station boiler cleaning?
It looks like Mr Peter “Potatohead” Dutton has made it onto the pages of the New York Times (but not in a good way).
http://www.news.com.au/national/politics/the-new-york-times-has-slammed-australias-offshore-detention-policy/news-story/b0837d222922fb1bf24d37495711297b
The Palaszczuk government is expected to announce an economic stimulus package targeting areas that have not benefited from the state’s employment recovery, using a $1bn state budget boost driven by coal exports.
The treasurer, Curtis Pitt, will unveil the jobs and business package as part of a midyear fiscal and economic review to be released on Tuesday.
And that is a problem because?
The money has already been banked by the Queensland government. It comes from already existing Coal Mine projects, not new ones, and there is an employment crisis in that State that One Nation is trying to capitalise on. You’d be a stupid government NOT to do it.
Which is why The Greens will never be in government. They cut their nose off despite their face every time. All symbolism, no substance.
ML
‘The problem of rampant immigration must also be revisited, frequently, until it is stopped. Avoidance of the ‘how many’ question is not an answer.’
Hmm – you seem to have already decided on the answer before the question has been properly examined. Which suggest you’re not really interested in the evidence, but are working backwards from the answer you want to come up with.
VE, the LR guarantees the area will be in filled. Without the LR, it COULD be retained as a conservation area.
Hi Trog,
It is, actually, it’s just the winners from this situation are quite different from the existing ones, and many of them are trying to maintain the status quo. You should be happy to know that some of the network companies are not, however, and I recently spoke to a number of electricity execs who told a good story about the future.
Steady there, that’s still a very expensive option for most. But you are correct that there needs to be a way to reduce network costs going forward.
You can blame Victoria for cocking that up. Now every other state is shy of the technology.
If your local generation offsets large-scale generation and nothing else (i.e. does nothing to mange network congestion), which is the case for the vast majority of residential PV installations, then you should only get the price of the generation offset. That is between 3-10c during the day, which is where FiTs are. It’s really hard to argue with that.
However, if your energy resources can be used to overcome network constraints, then there should be a way for you to sell that service to the networks. In particular, most of the network costs in Australia are related to the distribution networks, not transmission.
Markets for supporting DNs do not currently exist for small users, by virtue of technological, engineering and regulatory barriers. But it is changing; see for example this approach paper by the AEMC on a distribution market model.
Key to this is how much compensation customers get for their services. For one, the value of network support services is not easy to estimate accurately. You have to work out the value of deferring or removing the need for network augmentation, based on highly-uncertain load forecasts into the future, amortised over the life of the assets. Then a choice needs to be made over a proportion of the savings to allocate to the PV and battery owning customers for each network peak event that is overcome. Then you still have to work out how to divide that allocation among each of the customers, given they contribute different amounts.
To complicate matters, a network company cannot establish a retail relationship with a customer on the charging side, and nor can it force a retailer to adopt a particular tariff. Yet all of the revenue for this has to be collected by a retailer and paid to the network company. It is then to be disbursed by the network company via a rebate scheme, which the networks have no corporate capability to do (atm).
On top of this are the matters of who supplies the back-end technology to support the trading platform, privacy, security and cyber-security, who bears what risks and obligations, and so on.
I could have just said that there’s a lot to do to get what you want up and running; but there is broad acceptance that something needs to be changed and fairly urgently.