Newspoll: 52-48 to Labor

After a career-threatening result for Malcolm Turnbull three weeks ago, Newspoll records the Coalition bouncing back to near-competitiveness.

Newspoll records a much improved result for the Coalition, with Labor’s two-party lead cut from 55-45 to 52-48. The Coalition is up three on the primary vote to 37%, Labor is down two to 35%, One Nation are steady on 10%, and the Greens are down one to 9%. Malcolm Turnbull is up one on approval to 30% and down two on disapproval to 57%; Bill Shorten is down one to 29% and up one to 57%; and Turnbull’s lead as preferred prime minister has improved from 40-33 to 43-29. The poll was conducted Thursday to Sunday from a sample of 1819. Report from The Australian.

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.

925 comments on “Newspoll: 52-48 to Labor”

Comments Page 17 of 19
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  2. Regarding that silly Queensland teen; he doesn’t even get an Honourable Mention! Not only is he still capable of procreating and passing his genes down (to the detriment of the human average IQ), he’s actually apparently going on a movie date with the girl – after he gets out of hospital!

  3. Looking at the legal definitions of harassment on the govt website means it’d be years before anyone could be prosecuted because they are so complex.

    So much for ‘clear’ definitions that Brandis was taking about …. but then again, if he can spend an hour parsing one word …..

  6. Grauniad’s live politics column finished of with a summary of today’s events. A succinct and lol pair at 6+7

    6:The prime minister said the changes strengthened both free speech and racial protections.
    7:Labor said bollocks.

  7. Seeing these geese trying to explain how changing a couple of words that mean something specific at law that is much less broad than the pub definition with another word which they haven’t the faintest idea what it’s meaning at law might be is a great leap forward for both freedom of speech as well as racial harmony is hilarious.

    And if you thought the above sentence was convoluted (and it is), it is nothing like as indecipherable as the Libs’ arguments on 18c.

    All this pissing off large proportions of the population. All this baffling the majority who think there are about a million and a half more important things to be getting on with. All this making themselves look like idiots trying to explain the inexplicable. And all to pander to a small clique of RWNJ loons. And all doomed to die in the Senate as most of their stupidity eventually does.

    If a government set out with a plan to make themselves look utterly idiotic they couldn’t have possibly done it as effectively as these dopes.

  8. Poroti,
    We need a legal eagle to explain what the definition of harassment is in the legal world. Like many other words it may have a very different meaning to what people commonly think of as the definition.

    From the Australian Law Reform Commission (the best I could come up with):

    14.7 A
    serious invasion of privacy may often also amount to harassment. Harassment involves
    deliberate conduct. It may be done maliciously, to cause anxiety or distress or
    other harm, or it may be done for other purposes. Regardless of the intention,
    harassment will often cause anxiety or distress. Harassment also restricts the
    ability of an individual to live a free life.

    They also seem to quote the UK’s ‘Man on the Clapham Omnibus’ perspective of Harassment:

    14.10 The UK’s Protection
    from Harassment Act 1997 creates criminal offences when a person
    engages in a ‘course of conduct’ that amounts to harassment.
    It is an offence for a person to pursue a course of conduct which amounts to
    harassment of another and which they know or ought to know amounts to
    harassment.
    The Act defines harassment as having occurred if ‘a reasonable person in
    possession of the same information would think the course of conduct amounted
    to harassment’.

    https://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/14-harassment/commonwealth-harassment-act

    However, I will point out that this discussion by the ALRC pertained to stalking and other personal forms of harassment.

    How you define ‘Racial or Religious Harassment’ will be in the legislation I imagine.

  9. The World Meteorological Organisation and released its report on 2016 : the hottest year on record and the world being pushed into uncharted territory.

    “Our children and grandchildren will look back on the climate deniers and ask how they could have sacrificed the planet for the sake of cheap fossil fuel energy, when the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of a transition to a low-carbon economy,” Watson said.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/21/record-breaking-climate-change-world-uncharted-territory

  10. Wise words that centrist twats will no doubt continue to refuse to heed:

    Shorten managed to confirm all of the Prime Minister’s worst charges of working-class duplicity. When he distanced himself from McManus’ perfectly reasonable statement that the law had become unreasonable for workers, he appeared, as Turnbull has claimed, like a rich man in a poor man’s shirt. If there ever was a time for Labor to remember the origin of its name, it’s right now. The median Australian wage is at $50K, there is a crisis of housing affordability and no reason at all to keep believing that Keating’s move to a market-friendly regime is a workable model for the present. Underemployment is a problem so vast, even the confident liberals of our central bank concede that they may need to consider it a factor. Still, Shorten continues to make like an under-done Blairite, equally under-committed to the everyday needs of workers and the quarterly confidence of bosses.

    https://www.crikey.com.au/2017/03/21/razer-when-did-the-right-start-to-sound-so-left-wing/

  11. Calling FalconWA! I believe you are a West Australian legal eagle. May I ask a favour?

    In today’s press conference about the changes to 18C Turnbull and Brandis referred to WA’s law along similar lines to the one that they are putting up. May I ask what it is called and how is it constructed and does it work to tamp down Race and Religious Hate Speech?

    Anyone else from WA can answer the query too if they want. 🙂

  14. Dreyfus had his turn on the Speers Show hot seat and hit it out of the park.

    Turnbull has delivered Shorten another gift with this terrible 18c proposition, will Shorten botch this one as well.

  16. C@T

    Speaking of WA. Truffles getting no lurve in today’s deadwood West Australian .Entire front page with “We’re Being Plucked” and a cartoon of Truffles plucking a black swan. A couple of pages in a lovely photo of Truffles in Mussolini set jaw pose for an article about the $23 billion WA has allegedly been GST short changed. Moving along to the editorial page we find the main cartoon has rustic Truffles and Mesma in rocking chairs on the back veranda looking on as the dunny down the back yard (WA) is well ablaze. Truffles on being informed the dunny is on fire says just leave it , it will go out. So all in all WA’s GST whinge has Truffles as the villain.

  17. nicholas @ #810 Tuesday, March 21, 2017 at 5:28 pm

    Wise words that centrist twats will no doubt continue to refuse to heed:

    Shorten managed to confirm all of the Prime Minister’s worst charges of working-class duplicity. When he distanced himself from McManus’ perfectly reasonable statement that the law had become unreasonable for workers, he appeared, as Turnbull has claimed, like a rich man in a poor man’s shirt. If there ever was a time for Labor to remember the origin of its name, it’s right now. The median Australian wage is at $50K, there is a crisis of housing affordability and no reason at all to keep believing that Keating’s move to a market-friendly regime is a workable model for the present. Underemployment is a problem so vast, even the confident liberals of our central bank concede that they may need to consider it a factor. Still, Shorten continues to make like an under-done Blairite, equally under-committed to the everyday needs of workers and the quarterly confidence of bosses.

    https://www.crikey.com.au/2017/03/21/razer-when-did-the-right-start-to-sound-so-left-wing/

    ‘an underdone Blairite’

    😆

  19. Greens Rachel Siewert on the NT intervention and income management that was introduced by Howard and subsequently supported by Labor.
    https://newmatilda.com/2017/03/21/10-years-on-the-northern-territory-intervention-continues-to-cause-harm/

    As anticipated, the year-long trial supported by the two old parties has turned out to be a rubber stamp; spruiked with premature evidence, anecdotes and ideology for the entire year of the trial. Some journalists would be cherry-picked and flown to the trial sites for a personal tour by the Minister for positive write-ups.

    Journalists were sent snippets of an interim ‘confidential report’ that, according to the Department of Social Services in senate estimates, did not exist. It miraculously appeared a week and a half later and had clearly been thrown together. Raw data sets were not questioned; sweeping statements and anecdotal feedback were treated like gospel.

  20. Grauniad’s live politics column finished of with a summary of today’s events. A succinct and lol pair at 6+7

    6:The prime minister said the changes strengthened both free speech and racial protections.
    7:Labor said bollocks.

    I keep hearing and seeing Turnbull in high dudgeon at Labor for ‘suggesting’ that the Australian people are Racist, consequent to Labor’s objections to changes to 18C.

    If only someone in Labor could fire back at Turnbull that, no, the Australian people, on the whole are not racist, but that there are certain elements in Australian society who would like to be given the green light that a higher bar to prosecution would give them, to BE racist and engage in Religious Hate Speech.

    It’s not the majority of Australians that the law is proscribed for, but the small, destabilising element who want to wreck the Post WW2 muliticultural consensus.

  22. Jenauthor

    It takes a lot more than Russians egging on some fringe groups to get polls like the one mentioned at the end of the article.

    …….a recent poll suggesting 81% of German citizens believe the Chancellor has lost control of the situation. Support for her is now at a four-year low.

  24. Like this from Kenny:

    “And so, under the whip from his own roiling backbench, another moderate shibboleth associated with the social mainstream, with Malcolm Turnbull himself, and with national unity, has been slain. On Harmony Day. Priceless.”

    Apparently Xenophon has already said NO so it is doomed

  25. Two articles covering Richard Di Natale’s NPC address:

    1. https://newmatilda.com/2017/03/19/a-universal-income-the-greens-have-worked-it-out-so-what-happened-to-labor/

    In the 20th century, right up to the time of the Hawke Government, Labor policy was guided by the idea of the “social wage”, before it drifted away from its own established principles. Greens leader Richard Di Natale has reminded Labor and the Australian community that the social wage is still appropriate for our times, writes Ian McAuley.

    2. https://newmatilda.com/2017/03/19/watermelon-proud-richard-di-natales-press-club-speech/

    In the eyes of Richard King, the Greens leader got off to a rocky start. So how’s he travelling now?

    :::::
    But then came Di Natale’s speech, last Wednesday, to the National Press Club – a speech that, while not exactly Marxist, did contain a genuine acknowledgment that we are entering new socioeconomic territory – a long interregnum, if you like, in which questions of how, and how much, we work, and how we (re-)distribute wealth will have to come to the fore. Though couched in the usual fluffy guff about the importance of ‘love and compassion’ etc, it was an intervention of unusual candour.

    But even to raise the question of work, and working less, in the current political climate is, well, courageous minister. This is not the kind of pabulum one expects from party leaders, especially in Australia.

  26. The headline on the ABC homepage regarding the 18C announcement.

    Turnbull denies bowing to the right on race hate laws

    I think Trumble is correct when he says this.

    The time is long past where he had any fight, now he just subserviently positions himself and lets the RWNJs have their way with him.

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/

  29. Daniel Andrews take note.

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/mar/21/northern-territory-to-pay-53000-to-four-teenagers-teargassed-at-don-dale

    The Northern Territory government will pay $53,000 to four teenagers who were teargassed at Darwin’s Don Dale youth detention centre after it lost a civil lawsuit.

    The boys, who cannot be named, sued the NT government after they were shackled, spit-hooded and teargassed in August 2014, arguing it amounted to assault and battery.

  30. Russians don’t have to be responsible for entire poll … just a small part is still meddling in another country.

    This is where lack of vigilance gains a foothold … people thinking small = inconsequential … all I can say is “Hanson has 4 senators”

  34. Ides of March,

    The Guardian in the UK apparently has a reputation for atrocious spelling and supposedly once misprinted its name as “The Grauniad”.

    I have no idea if that’s actually true or not.

  36. How Abbott and Gillard protected us from the ravages of the Greens and protected the environment at the same time.
    1) Gillard allowed the export of gas without a reservation policy.
    2) The Greens thought it would be a good idea to have a reservation policy – but, what the hell would they know, they’re just bloody Greens, with no serious donors economic credentials.
    3) Abbott killed off the Carbon Tax.
    4) With no policy surety, there is little new investment in gas, and electricity prices go through the roof.
    5) Solar, wind and battery storage become the major bankable investments both for domestic consumers and industry levels.
    Thanks Tony, you’ve helped to save the planet. Renewables R Us!

  37. Nicholas and Rex:

    There is an old saying, Attack the Argument, Not the Person.

    (This can go to others like bemused etc).

  38. Ides of March
    It’s thought that The Guardian in the UK used to be riddled with typos. So Private Eye started calling them that.

  41. Trog,

    Don’t worry, the Coalition and Labor are doing all they can to ensure the Adani Carmichael mine can go ahead.

    Fortunately, financial backers are not so sanguine.

  42. MTBW,
    Is it a rule of law that everyone has to like Shorten?

    Completely irrelevant snark. No one said everyone has to like Shorten. I was just commenting on the utter predictability that Rex Douglas and Nicholas would joyously pat each other on the back, for it.

    Anyway, Pegasus liked your pointlessly irrelevant snark. Again, predictably.

  44. I really do wish that the santimonious frauds pushing the “Basic Income” canard would stuff it where the sun don’t shine! Paying people to not-work will not help the economy, society or our general well-being.

  45. al pal @ #773 Tuesday, March 21, 2017 at 3:55 pm

    Zoomster
    You say Julia’s appointment as Chairman on BB was far more sensible than Kennetts. What an odd comment. Kennett was never appointed by anyone at Beyond Blue. He founded it, and has devoted 17 years to the cause. Still not sensible?

    It seemed to be therapy for his relevance deprivation.
    All he did was flounce around spreading mis-information and his half baked ideas.
    More of a menace than a positive force.

  46. Some (many) years ago the banner at the top of the front page of The Guardian in the UK had it spelt as Granuiad (Grauniad?). It has stuck ever since.

  47. John Barron on the Drum deliberately beating up anti-Julia sentiment. “Bringing baggage to the role” (What about Kennett!) and implying she’ll never be able to gain any funds from Shorten because he “backstabbed” her. Lots of assumptions there.

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