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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  2. and interprets freedom of the individual as the right to do or say whatever you want to, regardless of the consequences to other people.

    I think you’ve missed the mark on that one. It’s more like they interpret it as the right to be “free” in purely orthodox ways. They don’t believe homosexuals should be free to get married, or that women should be free to make their own choices regarding their reproductive health and sanity, or even that protesters should be legally free to burn flags as a way of voicing their discontent.

    But want to buy a ridiculously powerful firearm and carry it with you at all times? Go for it! Want to use your religious beliefs as an excuse for refusing service to gay people? That’s your right. Want to kill a gay person for coming on to you and making you feel uncomfortable? You can do that too.

    I’d say that modern conservatives interpret freedom as 1) the “freedom” of an individual to do orthodox things, where orthodox things are those that a straight, white, somewhat angry and devoutly Christian male might generally want to do, and 2) the “freedom” of businesses and corporate entities to do basically whatever they feel like, without any regard to the social, environmental, or ethical costs of their actions.

  3. [Donald Trump v Marcus Aurelius

    Oh my! Are they the same species even?]

    Hmmm. One is Homo sapiens sapiens, the other is The Donald.

  5. Confessionms

    “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’.”
    .
    Of course not. He is and remains the caricature of the loud mouth New Yorker businessman of the 1980’s . But that was the straw the desperate clung to. that he at least mentioned them. As did Bernie.

    The trade deals are shaped largely by the multinational manufacturers, financiers, accounting firms. They don’t give a fig about the local “the workers” . Which is no great surprise but it should also be no surprise that at some stage the ‘peasants’ go feral.

  6. Which is no great surprise but it should also be no surprise that at some stage the ‘peasants’ go feral.

    What’s surprising is that they go feral in such a completely useless and counterproductive way.

    Is it so hard to dismantle, or at least properly regulate, the multinational manufacturers, financiers, accounting firms, etc. of the world? Fight the real enemy, for once.

  7. GG
    Trump may not be President by March, but there will still be a Republican President, a Republican Congress and there will still be a debt ceiling to be resolved. Won’t be pretty.

  8. Of course not. He is and remains the caricature of the loud mouth New Yorker businessman of the 1980’s

    If he were English he’d be a Thatcherite wanker.

  9. Steve777

    Although Abbott didn’t have nuclear codes.

    We can only hope the US forces have a number of “Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov ” peeps

    You (and Almost Everyone You Know) Owe Your Life to This Man.

    It’s October 1962, the height of the Cuban missile crisis, and there’s a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean that’s been spotted by the American Navy……………………The captain felt doomed. Vadim Orlov, an intelligence officer who was there, remembers a particularly loud blast: “The Americans hit us with something stronger than the grenades—apparently with a practice depth bomb,” he wrote later. “We thought, That’s it, the end.” And that’s when, he says, the Soviet captain shouted, “Maybe the war has already started up there … We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not become the shame of the fleet.”

    The Russian in question, an exhausted, nervous submarine commander named Valentin Savitsky, decided to do it. He ordered the nuclear-tipped missile readied. His second in command approved the order. Moscow hadn’t communicated with its sub for days.

    Had Savitsky launched his torpedo, had he vaporized a U.S. destroyer or aircraft carrier, the U.S. would probably have responded with nuclear-depth charges, ……………………..But it didn’t happen, because that’s when Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov steps into the story.

    http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/25/you-and-almost-everyone-you-know-owe-your-life-to-this-man/

  11. Steve777
    Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:57 pm
    Although Abbott didn’t have nuclear codes.

    Very scary. At the end of Abbott there where more flags and death cults by the day.

  12. ajm @ #1882 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:32 pm

    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.

    I don’t think so. Abbott was an establishment party figure, albeit a somewhat wacky one. The reason Abbott was more harmless than expected wasn’t that he was incompetent – though he was also that – but that he never seemed to actually get around to doing much. Trump on the other hand has certainly hit the ground running, though it may well turn out he was running round in circles.

    While Elder’s opinions are often interesting it is worth bearing in mind that he said Abbott would never be PM and that he would stop blogging if he was wrong.

  13. OMG: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/27/can-raccoons-of-the-resistance-save-science-from-the-tantrumocracy?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=First+Dog+on+the+Moon&utm_term=210429&subid=15284682&CMP=ema_1732

    Sorry if already posted, but this has given me hope for the first time on two days.

    Over the last two days I have discovered that the femi-nazi physicists will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes (I did not actually think I was one of these, but apparently others decide). Also, the Daily Telegraph, according to the headline I saw in Springwood IGA, while buying my mother bananas (Oh don’t ask why), I discovered that female barristers are also femi-nazis.

    I am not sure what song to sing in solidarity as they put us – the physicists and the barristers – up against the wall, but I think Monty Python’s philosophers’ song may be appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9SqQNgDrgg

  14. AR
    “What’s surprising is that they go feral in such a completely useless and counterproductive way. ”
    .
    Not long before the great JK Galbraith died P Adams did an hour long interview with him for LNL at JK’s home . He mentioned, as he was there when they planned it , that the establishment of the welfare state in post WWII Europe was to prevent people falling into the poverty that saw them in the 20s and 30s go for extreme politics be they left or right.
    Paradoxically it was to protect what he called the “elites” as they were the ones that suffered the greatest destruction of wealth due to WWII. Ever since then I have seen the erosion of the “welfare state” as being a path to extreme politics and the effing Ginas and Truffles of the world push what will lead to their types doom.

  15. Poroti:

    My view is that voters weren’t drawn to Trump because he represented some kind of anti Wall St establishment candidate, but because he represented the cult of celebrity and could draw on his celebrity ‘credentials’ in a way that meshed with his presidential campaign.

  16. So why was Trump elected?

    – Seen by many as anti-establishment?
    – Seen by many (erroneously) as fir the Little Guy against Big Money?
    – Convinced racists, mysoginists and other bigots he felt their pain?
    – desparation, hope of the hopeless (sort if like St Jude)
    – Because he was a celebrity, with his own “reality” TV show?
    – Because many voters thought he was the ‘strong leader’ they needed?

    Answer: all of the above.

  17. I’m sorry for their pain, but they f*cked up voting for Trump.

    Then you haven’t really put yourselves properly in their shoes.

    There were only two choices at the election – Clinton and Trump.
    You had three options – vote for Clinton, vote for Trump, or don’t vote at all.

    If you as a US voter are convinced that the current situation is bad and has been getting worse for your adult lifetime and that business as usual cannot continue, what are your options? A vote for Clinton was most definitely a business-as-usual vote, in any practical sense. No vote at all is … refusing to commit to anything or have any influence on the outcome. At the election a vote for Trump was clearly the only possibility (however remote of this being positive) of effecting any kind of change at all.

    And he has certainly shaken things up, almost entirely for the worse (but, the TPP is dead), but if people want something different, and you’re presenting them no option but a box of matches, it should come as no surprise that a lot of people will choose the matches even if it is almost guaranteed to mean substantial self-inflicted injuries.

    Trump is a disaster. He’s despicable and deranged. And all the things that people here accuse him of being.

    But the real failure happened way before election day – you can probably nominate decades earlier, in fact, and some of the accusations about neoliberalism and the failings of the centre-left by the Nicholas’s et al have substance in my opinion. Yes this past election, and the rise of Trump are calamitous and unforgivable, but, again, if you give people no choice they will often do terrible things.

    And whatever the solution is – and in my opinion the only actual solutions at this point in time are radical verging on revolutionary in nature – offering anodyne blah blah blah, with or without a bit of celebrity glitz, is never going to come close.

  19. I think Abbott was our Trump — we just have better checks and balances hat restrict our PM.

    If Abbott could have issued heaps of ‘executive’ orders on his first day, he would have done so with relish.

    While the US does have some restrictions on what a president can/cannot do (which Obama fund out bitterly) they have singularly more power to enact decrees and veto legislation.

    Abbott was thankfully stymied by our better system.

  20. Getting my yearly dose of tennis. Being well past the age of winning Wimbledon myself I would kind of like the older Nadal to win… and then he starts grunting… I can’t back a grunter.

    Also, Nike must have made too many peachy coloured tennis shoes and have a huge oversupply to shift, because they have decked out all the players in them.

  21. “No biggie. They will just raise the debt ceiling. ”
    Australian Greens to fly in and do the same suckhole job for Trump that they did for Abbott?

  22. Then you haven’t really put yourselves properly in their shoes.

    Yeah maybe. Maybe I can’t ever envisage myself in a situation where I’m so ignorant about the choices facing me in terms of voting that I’d deliberately turn to a megalomaniac incompetent wealthy guy bully boy misogynist to solve my problems in the hope that things swing my way because of him.

    Even the most disengaged voter in whatever tin pot Mid Western state can google Donald Trump on his Verizon-powered flip cell phone and see what was staring down the barrel at him.

    And we haven’t even touched on those people who chose to stay home and not vote.

  23. Abbott got a few Trumpy things done. He got rid of the ETS, sacked scientists, spent on Chaplins while cutting ABC and future Gonski. And he stuffed the NBN, just to name a few.

    I can forgive Elder a bit of Bravado. Abbott was un-electable, it’s just we have a lot of stupid people who think “grown ups” can promise no cuts, while promising to reduce revenue, and somehow get the budget to balance.

    Elder has been a bit too forgiving of Turnbull if you ask me, but I haven’t read anything of his for a while. I’ll have to go and check.

  25. Poroti
    Friday, January 27, 2017 at 10:29 pm

    Thanks for the Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov story.

    I have long thought we don’t need anything radical to rid ourselves of all this nationalistic Trump, Brexit rubbish. Just a return to more equitable tax scales and welfare.

    It’s been a while since I’ve linked this, I’m sure most of you have seen it by now. An excellent series of graphs to scroll through by Robert Reich on the equality of the US economy (they translate well to AU).
    http://inequalityforall.com/resources/#/1

  26. I can have empathy (and sympathy) for people who genuinely voted for Trump because they didn’t want “business as usual”, but honestly, what did they expect? His number one policy was to get rid of Affordable Healthcare, which helped many poorer people. This is a guy who lives in his own golden palace on the most expensive street in New York City and has a history of stiffing his contractors, student at his uni and anyone else!

    How much could you think he really cares about working people?

  27. Steve777

    What happened to the grown ups who were going to be in charge? After nearly 3 & a half years, they still have yet to appear.

    The “grown ups in charge” was just a recycle of the Fox News et al declaration when Dubya won that after Clinton “The adults are back in charge.”. I knows as I was at the time a newbie viewer of Sky and Fox News.

  28. I can have empathy (and sympathy) for people who genuinely voted for Trump because they didn’t want “business as usual”, but honestly, what did they expect?

    I’m with you. I can only thank the forebears of our electoral system that an Australian Trump can be switched out easily and without much protest.

  30. Will there be a Newspoll this week?

    55.5 – 44.5 to Labor is my prediction for the next one, with the Green vote down to 7%.

    Oh happy day.

  32. Maybe there is something in Vietnamese/Chinese astrology.
    This year is the year of the Cock, (aka Rooster) the self-righteous one.

    Does this sound like anyone you know?
    (Sorry about the grammar, looks like it was written by a non-native speaker.)

    All rooster men are believed to be cheeky, which may cause a lot of troubles for their lives. If a rooster is provoked by some one, he may not control himself anymore and bad things may happen. The rooster that can repair this weakness is expected to become extremely successful since naturally, he is good at many fields. Being stylish is one of the top concerns of roosters. You love a man of rooster sign, do not waste time complaining about his lavish time spent on standing in front of mirror. It’s his nature.

    Unfortunately it goes on the year you were born, so Trump is a
    Dog, the faithful one.

    A dog person is secretive and you can feel free telling him your secrets that you mind not feel comfortable telling someone else.

    However, the dog zodiac often worry without reason and this make her or him often nervous, peevish. If you are dating a dog girl or boy, don’t rush yourself. She or he needs time to get used to with your presence and believe in you. Trust is of utmost importance to a dog sign holder and they need much time and effort to consolidate the trust. Vietnamese witness many dog zodiacs having troubles in relationship and marriage so they believe that dog zodiac groom should meet and bring the bride home twice to avoid marriage breaking in the future.

    So, just goes to show what a load of old Cock astrology is. 🙂

    https://www.vietnamonline.com/culture/vietnamese-zodiac.html

  35. Copy of post from a few days ago.

    Kayjay
    Thank Crikey for you. In my down moments I read PB for light relief (who would have thunk that, eh!) and you give me the laughs I need. Your Telstra post had me laughing and crying at the same time. Wonderful stuff.
    Many thanks to you too, William. You, BK and the Bludgers keep me up to date. A bit late but I trust 2017 will be kind to all here.

    I would like it known that my memory is what is known in medical circles as “ratshit”.
    So, because of that I make little business cards for various people, addresses such as Crikey Phone Numbers and Crikey Support.
    Simply aide memoir to you Spanish speakers.
    The post above was in response to my weird (I thought) experience with a gentleman from Telstra trying to sort out my Internet and Phone accounts.
    The real experience was even worse than described. The poor man from Telstra kept saying use this number to keep up with your order. I had no idea what he was saying and naturally enough signed off with no Order No.
    I have since obtained the order number and am now on track with my order for a “Telstra Home Internet Medium Bundle” which includes calls to fixed line and mobiles. So all is well there.
    I have digressed. Nothing new there.
    There were a few responses and the one above rang a bell. Only a week delay.
    I know why you were crying BH. I have done the same on realizing, not who you are – because I don’t know that, but a little of your circumstances because of your prior post for which I made a little card.
    I wish you and your son the very best of outcomes. If you would like a really good couple of stories that made me laugh even if I feature in one as “Mac” the drunk sliding down the wall – then I’m your man. (who would have thunk that, eh! – copied from your post.)
    I have the drunken ladies’ night pissup with “Kevin Barry” highlight almost ready to go.
    I am going to try to work up a story about the wonderful Post Office delivery girl. I have known this lovely girl for years and my wife always knew who it was because of her giggle.
    We are, most of us, anonymous and so I believe you will not be embarrassed in any way. Would that I could be of further assistance to you.
    I will post probably early morning.
    Again, my very best wishes to you and your family.
    Love from Abbee the regimental dog and me.
    ☮ ❤ ❤

  36. poroti @ #1855 Friday, January 27, 2017 at 9:05 pm

    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.

    In terms of his negative effect on the whole world he makes Bin Laden an utter amateur.
    He embodies what lies between us and positive evolution as a species.

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