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”

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  1. The far right are not conservatives in the old sense of the word, and that’s the problem.

    Once upon a time, conservative meant just that; you wanted to keep things the way they were as much as possible and were wary of throwing babies out with bathwaters.

    Conservatives valued the opinions of experts, the rule of law, social conventions, and freedom of the individual where such freedoms did not impact on others.

    The present right dismisses experts, breaks conventions, and interprets freedom of the individual as the right to do or say whatever you want to, regardless of the consequences to other people.

    Partly – I think – it’s because the break up of Russia and ‘the death of communism’ was misunderstood as ‘the triumph of capitalism’. Business people at the time used to tell me very seriously that there was no reason why growth shouldn’t keep happening basically forever. And humans always fall for the old fallacy that if a little bit of something is good, then more of it must be better – which meant ignoring the fact that capitalism has never really worked as a ‘pure’ system but, like all human constructs, has required all sorts of compromises to make it work.

    Of course, the GFC was an awful shock to these people. They couldn’t reject their basic premise – that there was nothing wrong with capitalism that even more capitalism wouldn’t fix – so they decided reality was wrong.

    If you’re a devotee of this kind of thinking, and you’re unemployed, it can’t be your fault, or the fault of your country, or an inevitable result of capitalism (where employment moves to where it’s cheapest) but the result of some kind of confidence trick on the part of migrants, the left, furriners, whatever…

    Climate change can’t be happening, because capitalism is equated with (economic) progress which is seen as a movement towards perfection, and thus can have no bad effects (you can throw in a sort of muddled idea about evolution meaning everything always gets better here, plus a touch of godliness always equally good outcomes).

    Basically, a bit like men who denigrate strong women because strong women won’t have a bar of them, the right has become a movement looking for someone or something to blame for the world’s problems. They can’t come up with sensible solutions because that would mean a re evaluation of their beliefs, and you can’t re evaluate beliefs when you think you’re always right.

  3. PP:

    It isn’t just conservatives who have enabled lobbyist creep. Just look at here in Oz and the pervasiveness with which lobbyists for the vested interests have access to our govts. And don’t get me started on political donations! Bernie Sanders produced a great video highlighting Republican sitting members and showing the amounts of money they had accepted from vested interests in mitigating AGW. It’s a scourge on our democracy that these corporations can effectively buy politicians as mouthpieces and votes in the parliament.

  4. I heard Pence speaking about John Lewis. In contrast to Trump, his words were far more measured and diplomatic. That suggests he is both more sensible and more disciplined than Trump…and thus safer.

  5. A real key in the Anglo Saxon world going “mad” is bloody Rupert Murdoch. Years ago there was an effect that was called the “Foxification” of America. Foxification inevitably leads to Tea Partyism or Trumpism type crap. He has pumped out fake news re refugees , EU and immigrants and endless other things for decades in UK. Here ? Come on down the Telecrap and the GG etc etc etc etc.

    I for one will not be sad when he falls off the perch. Which may given his mother’s longevity not be for some time to come. Till then he remains a blight on the western world.

  6. Zoomster:

    Yep plus 1 from me on that front. I remember some years ago having a PM twitter discussion with PvO about marriage equality. He was calling out coalition numpties on twitter for opposing equality and getting frustrated. I PM’d him saying wtte that the rational conservative stance on ME was to support it in order to continue the tradition of marriage, because the more you try to keep marriage away from non traditional couples, the more irrelevant it looks as an institution to younger generations. He agreed with me, saying that for him as a conservative leaning, that was his rationale too.

  7. zoomster @ #1854 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:01 pm

    I heard Pence speaking about John Lewis. In contrast to Trump, his words were far more measured and diplomatic. That suggests he is both more sensible and more disciplined than Trump…and thus safer.

    If you look up Pence’s record, the US is effectively getting Pence policies under Trump anyway – but they are being implemented by an unstable sociopathic narcissist with the nuclear codes in his back pocket and a propensity to get flustered, angry and bitter when confronted with reality.

  8. Confessions,

    No problem, I did post it in the wee hours. I was thinking the same thing – it would be a shit fight to prove that. Many psychiatrists observing Trump have already declared that he is mentally unwell and needs assessment.

    DTT

    Nowhere did I say I wanted Pence. Someone asked the question as to whether Trumpy can be removed and I answered with the bit about the constitution. Obviously the rest of Trump’s team are just as bad as him or worse.

    I note that someone here pointed out that before the election you said that out of a choice between Donald Trump & Hillary Clinton you thought Trump was the best bet. I light of that they contended you had no credibility re Trump and should be ignored. I thoroughly agree with that advice.

  9. peter piper @ #1850 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 8:54 pm

    Confessions,
    But why do conservatives now let them wield that influence? A century ago the US supreme court broke up Standard Oil because it was a monopoly, and then the Rockefeller family went on to be one of the major forces in establishing national parks. They weren’t deniers of reality. The question is, why are the current crop of conservatives?

    …………………………………………………………………….

    The following is an extract from the latest quarterly newsletter from GMO – a Boston-based fund manager with $US99 billion ($130 billion) in funds under management. Jeremy Grantham, is the co-founder and chief investment strategist of GMO. He writes –

    Princeton University Professors Gilens and Page had reported on the complete lack of influence that voter opinion had on the probabilities of any bill passing through Congress.

    If favored by the public the average 31% chance of passing rose to a dizzying 32%.

    If not favored, it fell to 30%, justifying the nickname given to the influence of the average citizen: “Gilens’ Flatline.”

    When favored by the richest 10%, bills passed at a 65% rate – there is inertia after
    all.

    But when opposed by the wealthier and supported by inertia, the passing rate was essentially nil.

    Those hoping that there is any life at all left in representative democracy have to hope that some critics of this work are right when they claim that the data is complicated to sort out and the conclusions may be overstated.

    https://www.gmo.com/docs/default-source/public-commentary/gmo-quarterly-letter.pdf?sfvrsn=40

    There is huge amount of other stuff in the pdf including this at the start of Grathams article –

    The Road to Trumpsville:
    The Long, Long Mistreatment of the American Working Class

    An extraordinary, large exit poll run by Reuters/Ipsos in which 45,000 people participated took place in the early evening on election day in the US. To say this was a detailed poll is an understatement. The spreadsheet for each question in small print runs the length of a generous dining room table, 11 feet! It will tell you how the American Hindu sample of 172 voted.

    The poll’s early results of 9,000 inputs also revealed on the night before the election, when the bookies’ odds against Trump were 5 to 1, that the odds were wrong.

    The critical statement polled, in my opinion, was this: “America needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.”

  10. That suggests he is both more sensible and more disciplined than Trump…and thus safer.

    He also has governing experience which surely has to count for something in his favour!

  11. phylactella @ #1846 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 8:48 pm

    Sydney has water; Melbourne does its innovation in the Education Department
    http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/ibac-finds-disastrous-ultranet-project-for-schools-was-a-corrupt-shambles-20170126-gtzr67.html

    I vaguely knew Darrell Fraser as 2 of my kids went to Glen Waverley Secondary College. He was very highly regarded and it is had to recognise the man in that story as the same one that I knew.

  14. Charles:

    And you can imagine Trump, highly litigious at the best of times, tying it all up in lawsuit after lawsuit till the cows come home.

    If the GOP do pursue that avenue, along the lines Jackol posited last night (not sure if you were around then), this is a longer term strategy and not something that will be resolved any time soon. Unfortunately.

  15. charles @ #1844 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 8:43 pm

    Just saw on the on CNN the Mexican Foreign Minister saying that he was in the White House meeting with Trump’s people when he found out about Trump’s tweet re Mexico paying for the wall. Genius diplomacy Donnie.
    Meanwhile, Germany is implying that if Trump lifts the Russian sanctions, then the Atlantic Alliance is over.

    The UK is in a perilous position. Do they go with the USA which is probably going to desert them in their time of need or do they go with Europe. Perhaps Brexit will need to be abandoned? No easy answers I think.

  16. A century ago the US supreme court broke up Standard Oil because it was a monopoly

    ………………………………….

    Its all changed since then, All from GMO referenced above –

    The Citizens United ruling reminds me of what a good ally of the “rich and powerful” and corporatism the Supreme Court’s majority has recently been, particularly in its strange assumption that corporations are human and deserve the same constitutional protections as we humans.

    It turns out, though, that humans are quite often cooperative and altruistic for no apparent self-advantage.

    Corporations, tied as they are these days to the single-minded goal of profit maximizing, seem to be close to saying that altruism, or the common good, when it compromises profitability, is a dereliction of their duty.

    In a human this would be considered pathological.

    (I wonder what the Founding Fathers would really have thought of this odd idea of corporate humanity. Or the equally odd idea that unlimited spending by
    corporations on elections is the moral equivalent of free speech.)

  19. Dave
    “The critical statement polled, in my opinion, was this: “America needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.” ”
    And that was probably what got Trump the gig from day 1. At the very start a huge point he made was that he was not going to be a candidate taking “Wall Street” money and so be beholden to them. It was a huge selling point.

    For decades now the Americans have seen the cavorting of the Wall St. banksters cost them their 401Ks , jobs, pension prospects, jobs , futures’ and after every financial crisis the that the banksters precipitated the peasantry have seen those fat cats emerge fatter and sleeker. While they have seen their world slowly and not so slowly turning to shit.

  21. Corporations, tied as they are these days to the single-minded goal of profit maximizing, seem to be close to saying that altruism, or the common good, when it compromises profitability, is a dereliction of their duty.

    If corporations were people they’d be psychopaths.

  22. In his tweets etc, as the world’s head explodes, Trump is making “ambit claims”. This is his world. He still thinks in terms of the bigshot in World Wide Wrestling. It all has descended to total farce. The USA. Should be be so embarrassed.

  24. Pence being more “sensible” may actually make him more dangerous. It may make him far more likely to be able implement his particular flavour of crazy than the all over the place disorganised Trump.

  25. Dave, great post. That link is a bedtime story to frighten the kiddies with.

    And it doenst seem to matter that Congress is despised by almost everyone. They just keep on tooting along in the gravy train, regardless.

    I would like to add 2 bobs worth – total expenditure for political parties (Aus) doubled from 1998/99 to 2013/14 (and 1998 had a big NSW election). That is a lot of extra time sitting in functions, swilling fine wine, toadying up to corporate donors.

  26. poroti @ #1869 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:18 pm

    Dave
    “The critical statement polled, in my opinion, was this: “America needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.” ”
    And that was probably what got Trump the gig from day 1. At the very start a huge point he made was that he was not going to be a candidate taking “Wall Street” money and so be beholden to them. It was a huge selling point.

    ……………………………..

    Jeremy Gratham commented on that also –

    To promote a pushback against excessive corporatism (and elements of oligarchy) one needs first of all to recognize the problem.

    …The wimpy phase is probably over. The question now is which path
    will this struggle take?

    Will it be a broad societal effort through established political means to move
    things back to the 1950s to 1960s when a CEO’s pay was 40x his average employee’s pay and not today’s over 300x;

    when corporations never dreamt of leaving the US merely to save money;

    when investment banks set the standard (and a very high one) of ethical behavior?

    Or do we try to do it through the other historically well-used method, and a much more dangerous one – that of resorting to a “strong leader?”

    Strong leaders work out just fine if we end up with a Marcus Aurelius, the mostly benevolent and wisest of Roman Emperors. But when things go wrong, as they often do, we could more easily end up with Caligula.

    I certainly know where I regard trump on the Marcus Aurelius/ Caligula scale!

  27. steve777 @ #1871 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:20 pm

    Corporations, tied as they are these days to the single-minded goal of profit maximizing, seem to be close to saying that altruism, or the common good, when it compromises profitability, is a dereliction of their duty.
    If corporations were people they’d be psychopaths.

    When I was at Uni in the late 60s and early 70s studying economics and Commerce this idea was just starting to take hold. I had a bad feeling about it then. Nothing since has persuaded me that feeling was wrong.

  28. poroti @ #1874 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:22 pm

    Pence being more “sensible” may actually make him more dangerous. It may make him far more likely to be able implement his particular flavour of crazy than the all over the place disorganised Trump.

    The difference would be that if Pence signed an Executive Order that had unintended and horrible consequences, he’d probably rescind or amend it. If The Donald did so, he’d double down on it and either deny the facts, or argue that it was really what the public wanted all along.

  29. And that was probably what got Trump the gig from day 1. At the very start a huge point he made was that he was not going to be a candidate taking “Wall Street” money and so be beholden to them. It was a huge selling point.

    I don’t get this. It was obvious to anyone that if ever there was a Wall St candidate it was Donald Trump. Just look at what’s eventuated since he was elected, a total Wall St takeover of the cabinet!

    Talk about cognitive dissonance!

  30. Dave

    I certainly know where I regard trump on the Marcus Aurelius/ Caligula scale!

    I ‘m looking forward to finding out what position Trump gives “Incitatus” 🙂

  31. Business people at the time used to tell me very seriously that there was no reason why growth shouldn’t keep happening basically forever.

    Consider 2% per annum growth. Anything growing at 2% per annum doubles every 70 years (say 2-3 generations). After 350 years (about 12 generations), that’s about 32-fold, after 1,400 years that’s a factor of about a million.

    Grow forever? Or for a few centuries? The maths says ain’t going to happen.

  32. I’ve seen some comment today (can’t remember where) that many of Trumps Executive Orders are inept and probably don’t achieve anything or have unintended consequences.

    Our best hope may be that the Trump administration proves as incompetent as the Abbott government was. Their incompetence certainly blunted their negative effect and hastened their electoral decline.

    Andrew Elder explicitly states that he thinks Abbott was our Trump (Australia leads for once!) so the events of the last few years in Australia may be a bit of a guide as to what is likely to happen in the USA.

  35. ajm @ #1877 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:24 pm

    steve777 @ #1871 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:20 pm

    Corporations, tied as they are these days to the single-minded goal of profit maximizing, seem to be close to saying that altruism, or the common good, when it compromises profitability, is a dereliction of their duty.
    If corporations were people they’d be psychopaths.

    When I was at Uni in the late 60s and early 70s studying economics and Commerce this idea was just starting to take hold. I had a bad feeling about it then. Nothing since has persuaded me that feeling was wrong.

    It seems to me that an amendment to the Company Act should fix that problem.
    Give them multiple obligations in a clear hierarchy with meeting all tax obligations at the top.

  36. It may make him far more likely to be able implement his particular flavour of crazy than the all over the place disorganised Trump.

    There’s no evidence that the disorganised Trump is any impediment to this happening anyway. A week in and already much of Pence’s public pledges have already been fulfilled:

    Obamacare: dead, awaiting burial/cremation.
    Foreign aid for abortion counselling: dead.
    EPA: seriously nobbled to the point of being effectively dead.
    Refs to AGW: dead.
    Reintroduction of torture/’enhanced interrogation’: pulse found!!
    Dakota pipeline: revived.

  38. “The former W. Bush ethics attorney who has already sued Donald Trump for violating the Constitution by continuing to take payments from foreign sources has also filed a complaint with the Government Ethics Office charging the FBI Director James Comey violated the Hatch Act by publicly disclosing unsubstantiated information about Huma Abedine’s emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.”

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/1/26/1625323/-Ethics-complaint-filed-that-FBI-Director-violated-the-Hatch-Act-during-election

  39. Confessions

    Despite who Trump appointed he was previously seen as very much on the outer by the Wall St “establishment” . Very much Non U by the U of the establishment . Joe blows are fwarked but they were getting screwed either was so why not put your money on the 100-1 chance outsider ? The American workers and middle classes have been slowly screwed down for decades in the most horrible ways by both parties.

    Years back I read how there was a core GOP lot obsessed for decades with the erasing of FDR’s New Deal. I have come to realise it was no conspiracy the scum have been tearing down FDR’s New Deal .

    Relief, Recovery, and Reform: relief for the unemployed and poor, recovery of the economy to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.[1]
    The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority (as well as the party that held the White House for seven out of nine Presidential terms from 1933 to 1969), with its base in liberal ideas, the South, traditional Democrats, big city machines, and the newly empowered labor unions and ethnic minorities.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

  40. A final extract from GMO. Seems most Americas know what the *problem* is.

    Trouble is the voting system delivered trump as the answer –

    By this time some readers may be asking for a profile of the 74% of the final 45,000 who voted against the rich and powerful.

    Who are these people?

    Well, they are us.

    All of us.

    I have never heard of a vote so uniform:

    whether Republican 72% or Democrat 77%;

    Male 74% or Female 75%;

    White 75% or Black 74%;

    Rich 70% or Poor 79%;

    Christian 74% or Muslim 72%;

    Graduates 68% or not 76%;

    they all agreed.

    They have all had it with the rich and powerful.

    And as for me, I don’t blame them.

    I think capitalism has lost its way. And has badly diluted the value of democracy along the way.

    We can only hope it is very temporary.

    Trump recognized this streak of strong opinion and played to it,

  41. bemused @ #1885 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:36 pm

    ajm @ #1877 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:24 pm

    steve777 @ #1871 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:20 pm

    Corporations, tied as they are these days to the single-minded goal of profit maximizing, seem to be close to saying that altruism, or the common good, when it compromises profitability, is a dereliction of their duty.
    If corporations were people they’d be psychopaths.

    When I was at Uni in the late 60s and early 70s studying economics and Commerce this idea was just starting to take hold. I had a bad feeling about it then. Nothing since has persuaded me that feeling was wrong.

    It seems to me that an amendment to the Company Act should fix that problem.
    Give them multiple obligations in a clear hierarchy with meeting all tax obligations at the top.

    Unfortunately it’s gone beyond legal responsibilities and become a cultural norm in business, which is much harder to dislodge, even with legislation. Any new legislation needs to be backed up with a powerful inspectorate and substantial penalties for clearly designed offences. By “substantial penalties” I mean effective confiscation of all the private assets of offenders so they have to go and get a job to survive afterwards. Put them in the same situation as Centrelink victims I reckon.

  43. Steve777 @ 9.32pm,

    It never ceases to amaze me that people think we can go on having exponential growth forever, especially when just about the first thing you learn in economics is we have FINITE resources that have alternative uses. Pretty much the whole economy is a Ponzi scheme.

  44. Charles Friday, January 27, 2017 at 8:43 pm wrote:

    Meanwhile, Germany is implying that if Trump lifts the Russian sanctions, then the Atlantic Alliance is over.

    I think Putin would consider this two for the price of one.

  45. poroti:

    Anyone only had to look at how Trump lived his life to know he was never going to be in the corner of the ‘little guy’. I’m sorry, and I’m sorry for those people who got screwed over, but lashing out and picking the brightest, loudest, shiniest bauble in the pack thinking you’re on a winner, invariably leads to disappointment, heartache and worse pain.

    The victims of trickle down economic theory have in effect delivered themselves bucketloads more trickle down, and they’ll be paying for a giant wall across the Mexican border to boot. I’m sorry for their pain, but they f*cked up voting for Trump.

  46. Meanwhile, this is a really informative, and frightening, article on “Germany’s extermination program for black Africans, a template for the Holocaust” http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-germanys-extermination-program-for-black-africans-a-template-for-the-holocaust/

    Decades before the Nazis turned to the Jews, German colonialists in Southwest Africa – now Namibia – dehumanized, built death camps for, and slaughtered tens of thousands of tribespeople in a systematic genocide. Here, Edwin Black reveals the full horrors of an eerie and odious precursor of the Shoah, and its legacy in the US

  47. peter piper @ #1893 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:45 pm

    Pretty much the whole economy is a Ponzi scheme.

    Yep. And in developed western countries this Ponzi scheme is fueled largely by migration. In Australia it is all legal migration. In the US a substantial part of it is illegal migration. I wonder when it will dawn on Americans that this is exactly what Trump is planning to stop … and we all know what happens to Ponzi schemes when the flow of new punters stops.

  48. Charles

    “The former W. Bush ethics attorney

    And what a bang up job he must have done parsing the ethics of George Dubya ‘Ehanced Techniques’ Bush 🙂 “W. Bush ethics attorney” , sounds up there with “military intelligence”

  49. Christopher Hayes ‏@chrislhayes 11h11 hours ago
    The entirety of the most powerful government on earth all being directed to soothe one man’s ego.

  50. Our best hope may be that the Trump administration proves as incompetent as the Abbott government was.

    Although Abbott didn’t have nuclear codes.

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