Essential Research: 52-48 to Labor

Little change this week on voting intention this week, but a barrage of negative results for the government on matters related to climate change and renewable energy.

Essential Research, which now comes to us courtesy of The Guardian Australia, records no change this week on two-party preferred, with Labor maintaining a lead of 52-48. On the primary vote, the Coalition is steady on 36%, Labor is down a point to 34%, One Nation is steady on 10%, and the Greens are up a point to 10%.

Also featured this week are a semi-regular question on climate change, which finds 60% saying it is real and attributing it to human activity – up six points since the question was last asked in December, with 25% favouring the normal fluctuation response, down two. A remarkable 65% approve of Labor’s 50% renewable energy target by 2030, with 18% disapproving, and 71% say the federal government is not doing enough to ensure “affordable, reliable and clean energy” (albeit that that’s a few too many positive adjectives for my tastes), with 12% saying it’s doing enough and 3% too much. Only 16% offered that recent blackouts were the result of too much renewable energy, with 45% instead blaming failures of the energy market and 19% opting for privatisation. Nonetheless, a solid 31% offered support for building new coal-fired power stations, with 45% opposed.

Other findings: 29% approve of the Liberal-One Nation preference deal in Western Australia, with 38% disapproving; and 82% support penalty rates, with only 12% opposed.

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.

2,397 thoughts on “Essential Research: 52-48 to Labor”

  3. “The simple rule that a relative pronoun must immediately follow the noun it refers to, is a classic rule which if broken totally destroys meaning viz ……

    The man was shot by the assassin who was walking across the street”

    Now this is where you are going wrong. Significant numbers of people would stop reading your first sentence because they didn’t understand it. Most people would understand perfectly your second sentence without a comma being present or without knowing what a pronoun or a noun was.

    If i don’t understand your formal grammar then whether a comma exists or not won’t make any difference. I will interpret that sentence based on the language skills I have picked up by communicating with people throughout my life. I have a masters degree yet putting a comma into that sentence won’t answer the question to me of the location of the assassin. I assume it was the criminal walking down the street because that makes sense.

    This is not to say that grammar is unimportant, only to say to make it compulsory for all HSC students in NSW is a poor choice of resources as we move deeper into the 21st Century.

  4. Cupidstunt : Trumps hairstyle should come with a health warning.

    Wasn’t there a London cafe with a sign at the entrance saying –
    ‘All Americans must be accompanied by an adult’

  5. The Greens regularly throw up some quirky results in the Essential Report.

    To this question,

    Do you think the federal government is doing enough, not enough or too much to ensure affordable, reliable and clean energy for Australian households and businesses?

    3% of Green voters answered too much, only 1% less than the Coalition, the same as others and 2% more than Labor voters. 🙂

  6. Tricot,
    Have not seen any reports on BBC World yet about British Parliament voting against a Trump visit. Where did this news come from as it is a bit of a surprising outcome given the healthy Tory majority in the Commons……………House of Lords perhaps?

    I just saw a report on SBS News about it. Very good too if you want to catch it on SBS’ version of iView. 🙂

  8. Zoomster & Bemused
    I now have permission to send you the document I referred to a couple of days ago.
    You will need to give William permission to send me your email addies.

  10. C@Tmomma
    I went looking for some confirmation of the report the British parliament had rejected a state visit by Trump and couldn’t find any, so thanks for that.


  11. “The man was shot by the assassin who was walking across the street”

    Pretty clear to me; the assassin shot the man from the window and after the event, the assassin walked across the street.
    If you meant to say the following, write it.

    The man was shot by the assassin; the man was walking across the street.

    Cost to make it clear; one extra word.

    Don’t write stuff that relies on grammar to interpret.
    End of Dyslexic rant.

  15. The plural of a sheep is sheep; the plural of “a platypus” is platypus.
    A latin wank is platypi.
    A geek wank is platypodes.
    Sorry but that is just the way it is.

  16. “Your very post is ironically most ambiguous.
    “grammar text books disagree amongst themselves!”
    Really. I hope they don’t come to fisticuffs and destroy the library furniture.”

    Ironically enough the only people who would find this sentence ambiguous would be grammarians. The other 99% knew exactly what she meant.

  19. Back when I was studying to be a teacher I used the word fungi and a significant number of my fellow students laughed. And Shakespeare shat/shit/shitted me to tears. $%#@ your stupid #$%ing togas and your balconic swooning.

  21. el guapo @ #119 Tuesday, February 21, 2017 at 7:42 pm

    Back when I was studying to be a teacher I used the word fungi and a significant number of my fellow students laughed. And Shakespeare shat/shit/shitted me to tears. $%#@ your stupid #$%ing togas and your balconic swooning.

    I don’t believe that ‘balconic’ is a word … but it should be! I love it!

    “Romeo and Juliet is just so balconic!”

  24. ““Romeo and Juliet is just so balconic!””

    I struggled through a term of studying it, complete with multiple viewings of scintillating 1950s studio film. Then had to change classes and sit through the whole #%$&ing thing again.

  26. el guapo @ #124 Tuesday, February 21, 2017 at 7:48 pm

    ““Romeo and Juliet is just so balconic!””
    I struggled through a term of studying it, complete with multiple viewings of scintillating 1950s studio film. Then had to change classes and sit through the whole #%$&ing thing again.

    I believe me and my first love had a balconic relationship.

  29. From Wiki

    ‘Grammaticalisation theory
    ‘Grammaticalisation’ is a continuous historical process in which free-standing words develop into grammatical appendages, while these in turn become ever more specialized and grammatical. An initially ‘incorrect’ usage, in becoming accepted, leads to unforeseen consequences, triggering knock-on effects and extended sequences of change. Paradoxically, grammar evolves because, in the final analysis, humans care less about grammatical niceties than about making themselves understood.

    88

    If this is how grammar evolves today, according to this school of thought, we can legitimately infer similar principles at work among our distant ancestors, when grammar itself was first being established.

    89

    90

    91

    In order to reconstruct the evolutionary transition from early language to languages with complex grammars, we need to know which hypothetical sequences are plausible and which are not. In order to convey abstract ideas, the first recourse of speakers is to fall back on immediately recognizable concrete imagery, very often deploying metaphors rooted in shared bodily experience.

    92

    A familiar example is the use of concrete terms such as ‘belly’ or ‘back’ to convey abstract meanings such as ‘inside’ or ‘behind’. Equally metaphorical is the strategy of representing temporal patterns on the model of spatial ones. For example, English speakers might say ‘It is going to rain,’ modeled on ‘I am going to London.’ This can be abbreviated colloquially to ‘It’s gonna rain.’ Even when in a hurry, we don’t say ‘I’m gonna London’—the contraction is restricted to the job of specifying tense. From such examples we can see why grammaticalization is consistently unidirectional—from concrete to abstract meaning, not the other way around.

    89

    Grammaticalization theorists picture early language as simple, perhaps consisting only of nouns.

    91

    p. 111 Even under that extreme theoretical assumption, however, it is difficult to imagine what would realistically have prevented people from using, say, ‘spear’ as if it were a verb (‘Spear that pig!’). Irrespective of the niceties of grammar as professional linguists understand it, people in real life would surely have used their nouns as verbs or their verbs as nouns as occasion demanded. In short, while a noun-only language might seem theoretically possible, grammaticalization theory indicates that it cannot have remained fixed in that state for any length of time.

    89

    93

    Creativity drives grammatical change.

    93

    This presupposes a certain attitude on the part of listeners. Instead of punishing deviations from accepted usage, listeners must prioritize imaginative mind-reading. Imaginative creativity—emitting a leopard alarm when no leopard was present, for example—is not the kind of behavior which, say, vervet monkeys would appreciate or reward.

    94

    Creativity and reliability are incompatible demands; for ‘Machiavellian’ primates as for animals generally, the overriding pressure is to demonstrate reliability.

    95

    If humans escape these constraints, it is because in our case, listeners are primarily interested in mental states.

    To focus on mental states is to accept fictions—inhabitants of the imagination—as potentially informative and interesting. Take the use of metaphor. A metaphor is, literally, a false statement.

    96

    Think of Romeo’s declaration, ‘Juliet is the sun!’ Juliet is a woman, not a ball of plasma in the sky, but human listeners are not (or not usually) pedants insistent on point-by-point factual accuracy. They want to know what the speaker has in mind. Grammaticalization is essentially based on metaphor. To outlaw its use would be to stop grammar from evolving and, by the same token, to exclude all possibility of expressing abstract thought.

    92

    97

    A criticism of all this is that while grammaticalization theory might explain language change today, it does not satisfactorily address the really difficult challenge—explaining the initial transition from primate-style communication to language as we know it. Rather, the theory assumes that language already exists. As Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva acknowledge: “Grammaticalization requires a linguistic system that is used regularly and frequently within a community of speakers and is passed on from one group of speakers to another”.

    91

    Outside modern humans, such conditions do not prevail.’

  31. El Guapo

    Taught it something like fourteen years straight, all with obligatory showing of fifties film.

    Went back for a stint at the same school ten years later, found myself sitting next to an ex-student, who had become a teacher’s aide (or is that ‘teachers’ aide’?) – we both had a fit of the giggles when we realised that not only was it the same film we were watching, but exactly the same recording…

  35. el guapo @ #124 Tuesday, February 21, 2017 at 7:48 pm

    ““Romeo and Juliet is just so balconic!””
    Misspelling there it is “Belconnic” . The , see Canberra, Belconnen.

  40. Boerwar

    What time of year ? Adventure or more the natural world ? Locals can sometimes be the worst for giving recommendations as what they think is ho hum meh as it is just part of their scenery may be just the thing someone who has not grown up with it finds OMG !! And vicky verka of course re what is exciting .

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