Essential Research: 54-46 to Labor

The Coalition primary vote sinks to the mid-thirties, as One Nation nudges ever closer to double figures.

This week’s Essential Research fortnight rolling average result finds Malcolm Turnbull slipping a point further towards the danger zone, with Labor’s lead now at 54-46. It also has One Nation once again reaching a new peak, of 9% (up one on the final poll of last year), with the Coalition now only able to manage 35% (down two), and Labor, the Greens and Nick Xenophon Team steady on 37%, 10% and 3%.

The poll also finds 36% approval and 48% disapproval for the Centrelink debt recovery program, from a question with less problematic wording* than was offered in the GetUp! poll by ReachTEL. Those opposed were more likely to do so strongly (29% of the total compared with 19% for less strongly) than those in favour (13% strongly, 23% less strongly). Another question finds 46% more concerned about politicians’ expenses than welfare overpayments and 8% vice-versa, with 40% opting for both equally.

A series of national identity questions to coincide with Australia Day includes a finding of 44% support and 30% opposition to Australia becoming a republic, which is more favourable than other such poll results in recent years – no doubt because the question specifies “a republic with an Australian head of state” Also featured is an occasional question on “trust in institutions”, which finds an across the board improvement since September, except for the ABC, environment groups and the Commonwealth public service, which are steady. Police forces and the high court continue to rate best, parliaments, religious organisations and trade unions worst.

In other polling news, Ipsos has a global survey on the American presidency that finds a very narrow band of results internationally with respect to Barack Obama (with the dramatic exception of Russia), with Australia being fairly typical in having 84% rating him good and 16% poor. Views on Donald Trump are a little more diverse, with Australia ranking at the low end in having 25% expecting he will be a good president compared with 75% for bad. Australians are evenly divided on the question of whether he will make it to the end of the year without being impeached.

* “Centrelink is currently conducting a debt recovery program in which welfare recipients are being automatically sent notifications regarding possibly overpayments. From what you have heard do you approve or disapprove of the way this program has been conducted?”

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.

1,936 comments on “Essential Research: 54-46 to Labor”

Comments Page 1 of 39
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  1. Thanks William.

    Good to see confirmation of the Reachtel 2pp result.

    It may have had its problems as you noted, but not a bad guide to the State of Play.

  2. Oops – caught out by William!

    From the old thread …

    zoomster @ #1688 Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 3:39 pm

    P1, my satellite service hasn’t failed once. It’s far, far better than the previous service.
    My only complaint is that they haven’t got around to removing the old infrastructure, so I have a forest of satellite dishes on the roof.

    Yes – me too. In total I have 6 satellite dishes on my roof – only 2 of which are currently used (one for TV, one Internet). The various companies never remove the old ones, and I am afraid to do so in case the roof starts leaking from all the holes!

    I have no idea what the problem is here – and obviously neither does NBN Co. Apart from the 17 official “maintenance outages”, my service drops out a couple of times each day, for anywhere from a couple of minutes to hours. Also, I get many “partial” failures when some websites work but others don’t (typically, this is because of a DNS failure, which has nothing to do with my service).

    My ISP publicly blames NBN Co (they have a blanket apology to all their customers up on their web site effectively saying there is not much they can do about it) and the maintenance outages are all definitely “official” NBN outages – we get the notifications from them, not my ISP.

    It’s a completely crap service. But I have no other option. I can’t even go back to the old service, which worked well – it’s not offered any more.

  3. This anxiety-inducing video shows more than 100 years of climate change in 20 seconds

    NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed this week that 2016 really was the hottest year on record… again.

    That might not seem so alarming – after all, climate and weather trends come and go. But the reality is that, regardless of how much the planet’s temperature has changed over its 4.5 billion years of existence, it’s nothing compared to what we’ve seen in the past century.

    http://www.sciencealert.com/this-anxiety-inducing-video-shows-more-than-100-years-of-climate-change

  4. Essential shows the federal Lib/LNP vote apparently suffering because of One Nation. At face value, this is a big difference to the recent ReachTel NSW poll, which showed the One Nation surge coming largely at the expense of the ALP in NSW. They can’t both be right, surely?

  8. There’s nothing like an American wordsmith for skewering their own:

    “I was born in 1933,” he continued, “the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”

    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/philip-roth-e-mails-on-trump

  9. william bowe @ #6 Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 4:06 pm

    Sure they can. Labor is making up the votes it’s losing to One Nation federally with votes gained from the Coalition, but it’s not doing so in New South Wales.

    I always suspect the movements of voters intentions are much more complicated than that comment suggests, with movements in all directions.
    What we end up seeing is the nett result.
    Do you agree and were just using shorthand for the same thing?

  17. From time to time I/we are told of research which indicates that some large percent of the population are functionally illiterate. One of the tests said to be that the subjects concerned cannot understand medication directions.
    This is an absolute disgrace. The directions on my pill packets are printed in very small print so that only a child with eyesight equal to the best of Wedge Tailed Eagles who are said to be able to spot a moving rabbit from 4 miles.
    So, therefore, I propose that all medication be equipped with a rabbit which can be placed in the approprate position while a borrowed (very well paid) youngster with armed guard protective supervision is trotted around to read the directions for we with the defective vision.
    I have looked over this proposal which is as good as any I put up while working at Dept of Air Victoria Barracks Melbourne prior to booze run at lunch time.
    Anybody spotting anything that could go wrong please inform William who is managing the latest Poll Bludger get rich schemes. ✞ Cross represent “Wing and a Prayer Investment Services”.

  22. don @ #20 Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 4:37 pm

    If you haven’t seen Greg Jericho’s piece in the Guardian, it is a good read. The graphs of what has happened to car and clothing prices are staggering. The benefits of free trade.
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/24/turnbull-and-the-tpp-desperately-pressing-ahead-despite-negligible-benefits?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Politics+AUS&utm_term=209868&subid=7341516&CMP=ema_792

    Clothing prices may well have plummeted, but so too has the quality.
    Different story with cars where price has gone down while quality and features have gone up.
    The difference? Clothing industry remains low tech and price driven, whereas car manufacturing is increasingly high tech, as is the content of the cars.

  23. bemused @ #21 Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 4:37 pm

    kayjay @ #19 Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 4:33 pm

    william bowe @ #12 Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 4:17 pm

    I never agree with you, Bemused.

    I’m free at the moment. Just waiting for our thunder storms.
    Would you like me to mediate

    William and I have a love-hate relationship.
    I love him and he hates me.

    I now retreat in ignominious defeat. Outplayed by a master.
    Straight sets. 6-0, 6-0, 6-0.
    Where have you been. ❓

  26. BK, ring Telstra straight away and they will give you another month of data at your normal speed free of charge. They allow me to do this twice a year.

    ‘A bully all at sea’. Sounds like his ancestor Captn Bligh.

  30. I have been having a terrible time with this site. Page numbers disappear, chunks of comments disappear and them come back after hours. I am pestered by the offer of a subscription (which won’t allow me to subscribe). I can’t login.

    Now for the ‘technically aware’ out there who are asking themselves ‘how did I manage to post this if I can’t login?’ Answer: I had all that trouble with the iPad. I had to fire up the old computer and can login and post without problems.

  31. PeeBee
    Yes, I have used that before but for the sake of one day I decided to keep them for another time – when I will take the opportunity to download a heap of stuff from Netflix to the iPad.

  33. peebee @ #30 Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 4:54 pm

    I have been having a terrible time with this site. Page numbers disappear, chunks of comments disappear and them come back after hours. I am pestered by the offer of a subscription (which won’t allow me to subscribe). I can’t login.
    Now for the ‘technically aware’ out there who are asking themselves ‘how did I manage to post this if I can’t login?’ Answer: I had all that trouble with the iPad. I had to fire up the old computer and can login and post without problems.

    I have an old iPad and use Chrome on it with very few problems.
    I hope that information assists.

  35. I was in the Melbourne on Sunday morning and noticed Mal, Bill and Dan at the makeshift memorial for the people killed and injured in Burke Street Mall incident.

    After coming home and watching various news broadcasts, there was Mal and Dan, but Shorten was nowhere to be seen. They must have worked very hard to cut him from all the coverages.

  36. Bemused, a good suggestion. Seeing that it works on Chrome on this machine (PC), it was the next thing I was going to do. Load Chrome on the ipad and give Safari a miss.

  37. BK, ‘sake of one day’ This implies that your monthly allowance starts on the 25th of each month. I was under the impression my contract was for a calendar month starting on the first of the month. I will have to check that.

  40. peebee @ #30 #30 Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 4:54 pm

    I have been having a terrible time with this site. Page numbers disappear, chunks of comments disappear and them come back after hours. I am pestered by the offer of a subscription (which won’t allow me to subscribe). I can’t login.
    Now for the ‘technically aware’ out there who are asking themselves ‘how did I manage to post this if I can’t login?’ Answer: I had all that trouble with the iPad. I had to fire up the old computer and can login and post without problems.

    I can log in and post on Chrome on my laptop, but not on the desktop.

    But I can log in using firefox on my desktop.

  44. peebee @ #36 Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 4:59 pm

    Bemused, a good suggestion. Seeing that it works on Chrome on this machine (PC), it was the next thing I was going to do. Load Chrome on the ipad and give Safari a miss.

    No guarantees.
    I do mainly use my notebook, but I would use the iPad a couple of times a week on average with few problems.

  45. Bemused

    Clothing prices may well have plummeted, but so too has the quality.

    A point on which I can agree wholeheartedly. I can still wear garments I bought in the eighties and nineties, but the finish on more recent articles is shocking. Where is the saving if clothes have to be replaced more frequently? We are being forced into a throwaway lifestyle. And don’t start me on microwaves!!

  47. Hate? Love? I try to keep my feelings toward you all in the ‘tepid’ range.

    After a few glasses of plonk, my attachment has been known to move into the ‘warm’ part of the spectrum.

  48. Bill made Donald do it? Truffle logic in action.Front page SMH headline………………….

    Turnbull lashes out at Shorten after Trump bins deal

  49. KayJay

    The directions on my pill packets are printed in very small print so that only a child with eyesight equal to the best of Wedge Tailed Eagles who are said to be able to spot a moving rabbit from 4 miles.

    🙂
    Not only that, they have decided to print the contents in white on green, or other illegible combinations. Obviously to conceal the facts from consumers.

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