BludgerTrack: 52.3-47.7 to Labor

One stray poll brings the BludgerTrack aggregate back to life, but the result is much the same as it was at the close of business last year.

BludgerTrack returns following the break of the New Year polling drought, courtesy of GetUp! ReachTEL poll and the year’s debut for Essential Research – although BludgerTrack features only the latter, as it includes only media polls for the sake of consistency. Since the Essential result is the only data point available from the past month, it more or less single-handedly determines where things currently stand, which is to say in much the same place as they did before the start of the drought.

The Essential results on the primary vote were Coalition 38% (up one), Labor 37% (steady), Greens 9% (down one), One Nation 8% (steady) and Nick Xenophon Team 4% (up one), with Labor maintaining its 53-47 lead on two-party preferred. Being the first poll of the year, these results are purely from a one week sample of 1017, and not a rolling average combined the results of two consecutive weeks. The poll also featured the monthly leadership ratings, which both leaders down on “don’t know” for their personal approval. Malcolm Turnbull is up three on approval to 37% and two on approval to 48%, while Bill Shorten is respectively up two to 37% and six to 44%. Turnbull’s lead as preferred prime minister is unchanged at 39-28.

Essential did not features its usual supplementary questions on selected current issues this week, but we do have an international survey by Ipsos that used a variety of measures to probe for Trumpian sentiment around the globe. This found Australia generally landing in the middle of the pack, but one exception was that 48% of Australians rated their country as being in decline, which compared favourably with most other countries – in particular the United States on 60%, and the United Kingdom on 57%.

My paywalled Crikey content has included a review of Mike Baird’s polling and electoral record from today:

Given the circumstances of his departure, and his success in keeping his nose clean as leader of a state that has become proverbial for political malfeasance, most reacted to the news sympathetically (Mark Latham being a seemingly inevitable exception). Even so, Baird leaves office with a patchy electoral record, and with recent polls suggesting the public was growing increasingly disenchanted with his leadership.

And yesterday, an analysis of the electorates where the Coalition is most likely to be punished for the Centrelink debacle:

Reports this week suggest the next targets will be disability support and, particularly dangerously, the aged pension … The highest concentrations of those on unemployment benefits tend to be in low-income areas of the big cities and remote regions with high indigenous populations. The former account for the most reliable Labor territory in the country, while electorates encompassing the latter usually bring together white conservative and indigenous Labor voters, with the former being decisively greater in number. But when pensioners come in to view, real problems start to emerge — especially for the Nationals, whose rural and regional heartland is distinctive for being whiter, poorer and older than the big cities.

And on Monday, a look at the Queensland seats most likely to fall to One Nation, based on analysis of the 2016 Senate vote:

Clear at the top of the list for the LNP is Lockyer, which covers the rural areas between Ipswich and Toowoomba … Labor’s danger areas include the two seats that cover Hanson’s old stamping ground of Ipswich, where the threat is intensified by the weakness of the LNP, since the One Nation candidates will have a low bar to clear in overtaking the LNP and scooping up their preferences.

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.

1,696 comments on “BludgerTrack: 52.3-47.7 to Labor”

Comments Page 3 of 34
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  1. Frednk

    Agree that Ice has killed more than terrorism, but it doesn’t mean we minimize the risk that terrorism also brings.
    What a terrorism event does apart from the obvious, is a loss of confidence and forment anger and hate in the community

  3. frednk @ #83 Saturday, January 21, 2017 at 12:15 pm

    Victoria
    Ice addiction has killed and harmed many more people in Australian than terrorism ever has. The resources used to create the “are you scared yet” dept. would be better spent on dealing with ice. A good place to start would legalizing drugs that cause people to sit around singing Kumbaya and really going after those that cause aggression. Charging the dealer with the crime committed as well as the taker with the addled brain would in my view be a good second step.

    EXACTLY what I was thinking. This drug is a far greater danger to our society than heroin (whose main danger lies in the criminal elements who distribute it).

  4. From what I heard on the radio this morning, Malcolm is now nervously backing away from legalising medical marijuana. So any further sensible treatment of the subject of drugs is unlikely.

  5. A look at Hilary’s campaign by Fisk. Looks like there was a bit of “computerr says no” and GIGO going on which did not help.

    Hillary Clinton’s supporters in Michigan knew they had a problem when Bernie Sanders pulled off the electoral primary and beat Clinton by 17,000 votes in March 2016. ……..The would-be US president made similar mistakes in the other swing states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where she failed to address white working class or African-American voters. Even Bill Clinton was urging her to speak to the communities there that had serious social problems. Some of Clinton’s campaign workers – including Noe and his colleagues – partly blame a computer algorithm called ADA (of which more later, readers!) which supposedly knew how to parse opinions, guess voting patterns, deploy the candidate and run 400,000 electoral race simulations a day – according to the Washington Post – but which wasn’t very good at working out how poor people feared for their future or what Arab-Americans thought about their country’s role in the Middle East………………………………..Now to ADA. Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace, a 19th-century English mathematician and the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, is regarded as the first computer programmer. The Clinton campaign named their top-secret computer algorithm after Ada

    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-clinton-michigan-american-arabs-how-presidency-could-have-been-avoided-a7534931.html


  6. victoria
    Saturday, January 21, 2017 at 1:38 pm
    Frednk
    Agree that Ice has killed more than terrorism, but it doesn’t mean we minimize the risk that terrorism also brings.
    What a terrorism event does apart from the obvious, is a loss of confidence and forment anger and hate in the community

    Yes; which is why you deal with it quitely, no noise. Making a noise about it gives the terrorist what he wants without one act of terror. As things stand the most successful purveyors of terror in Australian, is the Australian federal government.

  11. I’ve been looking on the net for politicians who have been likened to Trump. The list is amazing.
    In rough order of how common their name is related;
    Berlusconi
    Nixon
    Putin
    Hitler
    Andrew Jackson
    Huey Long
    George Wallace
    Herbert Hoover
    Not a lot to like about that list 🙁

  12. ‘It’s made in Vietnam!’ At inauguration, origin of red Trump hats shocks many

    One of the biggest cheers President Donald Trump received from supporters watching his inaugural address on Friday was his call to “buy American and hire American.”

    It was a moment rich in irony.

    Many of those supporters were sporting Trump’s trademark red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps that were made in China, Vietnam and Bangladesh.

    Some were horrified when they discovered their Trump hats were foreign made

    http://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/its-made-in-vietnam-at-inauguration-origin-of-red-trump-hats-shocks-many/

  17. tpof @ #103 Saturday, January 21, 2017 at 1:42 pm

    frednk @ #83 Saturday, January 21, 2017 at 12:15 pm

    Victoria
    Ice addiction has killed and harmed many more people in Australian than terrorism ever has. The resources used to create the “are you scared yet” dept. would be better spent on dealing with ice. A good place to start would legalizing drugs that cause people to sit around singing Kumbaya and really going after those that cause aggression. Charging the dealer with the crime committed as well as the taker with the addled brain would in my view be a good second step.

    EXACTLY what I was thinking. This drug is a far greater danger to our society than heroin (whose main danger lies in the criminal elements who distribute it).

    Fine. So tell me, what are those magical drugs that just cause people to sit around and sing Kumbaya?
    I know some that can have that effect but they can also have far more serious effects and the potential consequences are just not worth it.
    Any decriminalisation should be accompanied by controlled distribution through doctors and pharmacies.

  24. Saw this report yesterday, but didnt post it at the time.

    The night before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, the New York Times dropped a bombshell: intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been examining intercepted communications and financial transactions in an investigation of possible contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials. This report seemed to confirm previous indications that the US government has collected sensitive intelligence about interactions between Trump insiders and Russians. And hours before the inauguration, I ran into Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has been one of the few Republicans to call for a special investigation of the Russian hacking that helped Trump, and I asked him about this latest development.

  25. Kay Jay

    Oops, that was supposed to be for the orangutan comment.

    I love Abbee.

    Perhaps you can tell me why I am now living in downtown Spidersville. Starting to freak me out. I’ve had 1 white tip in my hair (Urrrrgh), 1 fat black house spider creeping across my pillow (double urrrrrgh) [on the same night!!!], 2 more white tips on my walls (I’m currently torturing the last one – the other two didn’t make it), and some unknown specimen that I discovered squashed in my bed this early a.m. [woke up to NewsRadio screeching an orange person, rolled out of bed cos couldn’t bear listening to the augur, went back to get my glass of water, and there it was].

    What am I gunna do?

  27. Yes; which is why you deal with it quitely, no noise. Making a noise about it gives the terrorist what he wants without one act of terror.

    This.

    You take it as seriously as you want privately, behind the scenes. But publicly, you absolutely minimize the risk posed by terrorism. Both because 1) doing otherwise is exactly what the terrorists want and actually encourages more attacks by showing that attacks produce results, and 2) the risk posed by terrorism is in fact quite low when compared to other risks that people face every day. Our public discourse should be accurate, factual, and neither beholden to irrational fear nor constructed in a way that emboldens our enemies.

  30. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jan/21/donald-trump-sydney-womens-march-protest-thousand-turn-out

    Maybe these people and women in particular would be taken even a little bit seriously by anyone if their fight against the oppression of women wasn’t conducted on the day a democratically elected president of the US was inaugurated.
    A nation whose women are among the most privileged and empowered women on Earth and who will still continue to be even under a Trump presidency.

    I must of missed the march involving such social justice hypocrites as Jane Caro and Mariam Veiszadeh that was held as a show of support for Asia Bibi.
    A woman who is facing a death penalty in Pakistan for the crime of blasphemy.
    Nor do I recall their 5000 strong march in support of Aayan Hirsi Ali.
    A woman living under constant death threat who for the basest of political reasons has been shunned by so called feminists and womens rights advocates.
    And I must of forgotten the march against Saudi Arabia and other backward nations treatment of rape victims as the criminal or their march against honour killings, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, or the thousands of cases of women having acid chucked into their face.
    Or the complete lack of voting rights for millions of women.

    No, they channel their anger against Donald Trump.
    A sexist dinosaur to be sure but not even in the same league as many many other foreign leaders and the societies they rule over.

    A pointless exercise in public virtue signalling by the usual crowd of noisy hypocrites is how these so called protests will be seen by most people.

  31. kezza2
    #125 Saturday, January 21, 2017 at 3:28 pm
    I typed a really funny, grouse, bonza, best in class witticism. Honest. You can trust me because the dog does.
    That damn securi thingy took my absolutely brilliant comment and sent to Washington.
    In the meanwhile…Ƹ̴Ӂ̴ƷƸ̴Ӂ̴Ʒ

  35. Hey Colton

    How bout you get of your arse and go protest for some wimmin, if you feel so strongly about it.

    Besides which, wimmin like Ali Hirsi has told we western wimmin to butt out. She wants Muslim wimmin to do it for themselves. Western wimmin aren’t going to change a thing in the Muslim world.

    My nephew said to me years ago, why don’t wimmin raise the profile prostate cancer, we’re sick of hearing about breast cancer.

    I said the same to him; get of your arse and do it yourself.

    And guess what, men finally started taking their own medical problems seriously. We all know about prostate cancer now, don’t we.

  37. Colton

    I find that form of argument exceedingly tiresome.

    Any protest against anything anywhere can thus be dismissed, because there’s always something that could be being protested against which isn’t.

    Women (and not just women, any sane person on the planet) have good reasons to protest against Trump. If you don’t agree with them, fine, but respect both their right to do so and the concerns they’re expressing, neither of which should be dismissed or minimised because of the things they could be protesting against that they’re not.

    It’s a travesty of free speech and democracy to dismiss people’s concerns because they haven’t ticked every box you think they should have.

  38. Making America great again.
    This morning I purchased from Ebay an item including postage for $1(Hong Kong) The same item from Amazon is US $ 4.95 plus postage of $4.65
    USA has lots of pencils to sharpen to match prices if Trump’s message comes true.
    “As a result, blue-collar towns and cities have watched their factories close and good-paying jobs move overseas, while Americans face a mounting trade deficit and a devastated manufacturing base.”

  42. alan davis @ #138 Saturday, January 21, 2017 at 4:00 pm

    Making America great again.
    This morning I purchased from Ebay an item including postage for $1(Hong Kong) The same item from Amazon is US $ 4.95 plus postage of $4.65
    USA has lots of pencils to sharpen to match prices if Trump’s message comes true.
    “As a result, blue-collar towns and cities have watched their factories close and good-paying jobs move overseas, while Americans face a mounting trade deficit and a devastated manufacturing base.”

    It is amazing how cheap the postage is on goods ordered from overseas.
    The postage on similar goods ordered in Australia would be much higher.
    The curious thing is that once the goods are landed on Australian shores, Australia Post takes over the delivery and would incur similar costs to if the goods were posted from within Australia.
    This is an enormous disadvantage for any Australian online store wishing to post their goods.

  46. the day a democratically elected president of the US was inaugurated.

    Inaccurate descriptor. Democracy is where the person or thing with the most votes wins. Usually US elections produce a democratic result, but the underlying system is not really democratic and in 2016 it did not produce a democratic result. Trump has no democratic legitimacy, similar to W Bush’s first election.

    A nation whose women are among the most privileged and empowered women on Earth

    And yet, they still rank second to men by a wide variety of metrics, from being more likely to be paid less for doing the same work to being much more likely to die or suffer serious injury as the result of domestic violence.

    Calling them “most privileged and empowered women on Earth” doesn’t say much when there are still some places on Earth that treat women like property. The goal is proper equality, not just more subtle oppression.

    No, they channel their anger against Donald Trump.
    A sexist dinosaur to be sure but not even in the same league as many many other foreign leaders and the societies they rule over.

    Kind of like arguing that Australia shouldn’t do anything about climate change because “look over there at China, they’re wrecking the environment so much faster than we are”.

    Which is an argument I’ve seen people make. But it’s still not a valid one. Worse things happening somewhere else in the world doesn’t mean nobody can protest other bad things happening without being a hypocrite. People can condemn more than one thing at a time.

  48. [Yes; which is why you deal with it quitely, no noise. Making a noise about it gives the terrorist what he wants without one act of terror.]
    Could not agree more, they want the infamy of being on the news, and they want people to do stupid things and say stupid things to marginalise vulnerable people, it is so so so very stupid to give them what they want EVERY SINGLE DAMN TIME.

  49. Afternoon all. Sympathy Victoria about your cousin being the victim of an ice addict. From my understanding ice is a much more dangerous drug (to others) than previous epidemics of heroin, cocaine and crack, because it fires the frontal lobe and makes addicts far more violent. This is also why so many doctors and nurses in hospital casualty wards are getting assaulted by addicted patients.

    On a more positive note, GetUp is planning to put on line a system called FraudStop to assist welfare recipients hounded by the Centrelink non-debt chasing fiasco. I thought it worthy of support.
    https://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/newstart/fight-against-debt-letter-fraud-check/turn-the-tables-on-debt-letter-fraud?t=5PExYu2WN&utm_campaign=FraudStop__Turn_the_tables_on_the_Turnbull_Government&utm_content=16561&utm_medium=email&utm_source=blast

  50. Vic, vic, vic

    Sorry, I just meant you have it bad over Trump’s election.
    That’s all.

    I feel for you, I really do, I can’t bear the thought of him anywhere near the levers of power, but he’s there. And there’s not much we can do about it.

    Maybe protest. Oh, scuse me, according to Colton, that’s a no-no, when there’s bigger fish to fry, like I dunno sticking up for Muslim wimmin instead of going after the fucking men who think they are nothing less than the right hand of a fairy friend.

    But try telling that to the privileged white fuckers, let alone the orange ones.

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