Essential Research: 53-47 to Labor

Harmony between the regular pollsters as Essential Research ticks another point back in favour of the Coalition.

NOTE: Nothing new I can report on the comments debacle, sadly. All I can do is reiterate that it’s not supposed to be this way, and the intention is that it will be fixed. If you use Google Chrome, as you should, this plug-in will get the blog looking more like it ought to (with thanks to AR).

UPDATE: We’re all good again. Thank you for your forbearance, where applicable.

Essential Research is now back in line with Newspoll, with the latest reading of its fortnight rolling average recording Labor with a lead of 53-47 after a one point gain for the Coalition. On the primary vote, the Coalition is up two to 37%, Labor is down one to 36%, the Greens are steady on 10% and One Nation is steady on 8%. Also featured:

• Questions on political donations, including from whom political parties should be allowed to accept them, which records a net positive only from “individual Australian voters”, and heavily negative results for unions, companies (especially foreign), property developers and casinos. Forty-one per cent support a ban on foreign donations to activist groups, with only 31% opposed.

• On the government’s proposed changes to the Racial Discrimination Act, there is an all but perfect split between strongly support, strongly oppose and no strong opinion either way, following a question that explains the finer detail of the change.

• Fifty-one per cent support and 20% oppose “a carbon emissions trading scheme in the electricity sector to provide more incentive for investing in renewable energy and low-carbon electricity”, demonstrating how much difference including the rationale in the question makes when gauging such issues.

• A question on who should have tax deductibility for donations has churches and religious groups ranking second after “groups that campaign on social issues” at the bottom of the list.

• Respondents were asked which interests were represented by Labor, Liberal and the Greens, and received the responses you would expect, with little change recorded since the question was previously posed in September 2015.

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.

2,488 comments on “Essential Research: 53-47 to Labor”

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  1. fess @ 2338
    I can understand getting bored with the toing and froing as I’ve certainly scrolled past repetition, however, a lot of the repetition seems to arise from people not actually reading what others have written and simply repeating themselves, or citing stuff that supports their point of view.
    As I said, I’ve actually learned quite a bit, on the whole.

  2. bushfire bill @ #2343 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 7:29 pm

    Back to the same old format.
    Back to the same old shit fight.
    Whoever it was last week who said the short-lived “experimental” format sucked the life out of flame wars here, the bitching and the insults was absolutely spot on.
    Take a look at yourselves. You’re a disgrace! Self-indulgent, vain, lacking in self-awareness… and most depressingly… deeply, deeply boring.

    BB you are a champion of projection.

  3. Mungo on that internal Liberal post election review.

    I still maintain that Turnbull bears the lion’s share of responsibility for rushing a DD election and then delivering a poor election campaign. Gillard’s election campaign back in the day was undermined by Rudd, but from memory Abbott was well behaved and rarely sighted throughout last year’s campaign.

  4. Confessions
    Monday, April 10, 2017 at 8:08 am
    So PHON’s vote is increasing among the oldies. Those old men have always had a thing for Pauline.

    Fess

    Just got home and saw your post from this morning.

    IMO any man – old or young – who has a thing for Pauline has appalling tastes in women. I would rather be celibate for the rest of my life.

    That said, I think your probably facetious comment tends to mask a more serious truth about the older demographic. Given that ‘old’ women live on average about seven years longer than ‘old’ men, most of the ‘old’ men would be in relationships with ‘old’ women. There are plenty of women of that vintage out there looking for replacement male company after their partners have died; which also means of course that “old” women usually make up a greater part of the demographic than ‘old’ men.

    Furthermore, the figures in the article below show that overall the number of women giving their pv to PHON is about the same as men. My main point being that there does not appear to be any reason at all to see the rise of PHON as an ‘old’ man thing. IMO, in the older demographic, indeed across all the demographics, the cause is much more likely to be something that effects both genders in much the same way. A much more likely explanation is an economic one, where both genders are being impacted by factors relating to their security and financial well being – and they think (wrongly IMO) that PHON may have the answers they are looking for.

    In America we have seen something similar. There has been a lot of talk about the “angry old white men” who voted for Trump in the rust bucket states, but very little about their angry white partners and wives, who in all probability are probably affected just as badly as their husbands and partners, through job losses and financial hardship. If we really want to understand the full extent of what is driving these people to the far right, I think we need to look beyond the ‘old white male’ cliche

    /national-affairs/newspoll/newspoll-oldies-deserting-malcolm-turnbull-as-one-nation-continues-to-rise/news-story/56da493385dc2f97f24bd6542886e6ab

  5. BB @ 2341
    So, you don’t like us then? Would I be correct in concluding that individually and collectively, the bludgers are a waste of space and time?

  6. darn @ #2358 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 7:44 pm

    Confessions
    Monday, April 10, 2017 at 8:08 am
    So PHON’s vote is increasing among the oldies. Those old men have always had a thing for Pauline.

    Fess
    Just got home and saw your post from this morning.
    IMO any man – old or young – who has a thing for Pauline has appalling tastes in women. I would rather be celibate for the rest of my life.
    Yes. Fancy waking up next to it!

  7. Monica L:

    Others have said they have learned new things from engaging with the electricity wars, and that’s great. For me however, if I wanted in depth information about the issue I’d probably seek out the specialist blogs written by experts rather than read material posted by anonymous commenters.

  8. monica lynagh @ #2352 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 7:38 pm

    fess @ 2338
    I can understand getting bored with the toing and froing as I’ve certainly scrolled past repetition, however, a lot of the repetition seems to arise from people not actually reading what others have written and simply repeating themselves, or citing stuff that supports their point of view.
    As I said, I’ve actually learned quite a bit, on the whole.

    I tried to summarise it @2249

  9. monica lynagh @ #2317 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 7:01 pm

    Hola bludgers
    You know one of the things that puzzles me in the energy wars here, is this.
    If people put each other on STFU, how can they meaningfully engage in the debate?
    I’ve been following a lot of it, and learning a lot, but wind up very frustrated.

    Certain posters have not matured to the point where they can cope with seeing posts that they disagree with, or that differ from their opinion or that point out when they are wrong. These same posters are so delicate that they view any form of disagreement with them as abuse and have not yet learned to cope when faced with dealing with people they don’t like.

    I pity these people, their lives must be truly pathetic if they are so affected by an anonymous poster on a blog that you are motivated to install a script so you don’t see what they have to see.

    There are people on here whose contribution I don’t generally care for and regulars who I doubt I’d get along with in real life. I deal with these people by scrolling past their contributions, occasionally taking the time to read because there are times where everyone here has something insightful to say.

  10. fess @ 2359
    Yep, I’ve been doing the same, i.e., looking at other sites, though what has had me intrigued is people talking past each other here.

  11. fess,

    But, in the end Turnbull may have been the reason the Libs got over the line. You look at the internal division, the lack of policy and an arrogant disregard for the voters and yet they won.

    Sure Labor fought a good fight, connected with the electorate and went close. But, clearly the electorate had not forgiven Labor completely for the post 2010 infighting. Without Turnbull, Labor might have won.

  12. Bemused,
    I can’t figure out which comment you were referring to for my *cough* considered opinion (I don’t have numbering, only date stamps). 🙂

  13. Darn:

    Yes my comment was a little tongue in cheek given the people you tend to see loving all over her on TV are invariably old men. And there have been some old man PBers who have slipped the odd approving comment here from time to time about her.

    Personally I think anyone who votes for PHON needs their head read. The party has no coherent workable or realistic policies about any of the issues facing our country, and their leader needs subtitles whenever she appears in interviews.

  14. bemused @ 2360
    Yep, thought it a useful summary.
    BTW, did you see the guardian australia reports today on what’s happening to the Barrier Reef?
    I am appalled, to say the least.

  15. Monica Lynagh
    “Fred Dagg” and Murray Ball were two that I grew up up and loved and in a short space of time both gone 🙁 I grew up on a farm in NZ and both taught us to larf at ourselves. They pinged us beautifully and with good humour.
    fred dagg 01 Country Calendar 1974.avi
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeUzrsjwF4I
    Had this vinyl record back in the day . Sing along 🙂

    We Don’t Know How Lucky We Are

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwgHGeGxlus

  16. grimace @ #2363 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 7:51 pm

    monica lynagh @ #2317 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 7:01 pm

    Hola bludgers
    You know one of the things that puzzles me in the energy wars here, is this.
    If people put each other on STFU, how can they meaningfully engage in the debate?
    I’ve been following a lot of it, and learning a lot, but wind up very frustrated.

    Certain posters have not matured to the point where they can cope with seeing posts that they disagree with, or that differ from their opinion or that point out when they are wrong. These same posters are so delicate that they view any form of disagreement with them as abuse and have not yet learned to cope when faced with dealing with people they don’t like.
    I pity these people, their lives must be truly pathetic if they are so affected by an anonymous poster on a blog that you are motivated to install a script so you don’t see what they have to see.
    There are people on here whose contribution I don’t generally care for and regulars who I doubt I’d get along with in real life. I deal with these people by scrolling past their contributions, occasionally taking the time to read because there are times where everyone here has something insightful to say.

    Well said. Pretty much how I see it too.

  17. Here’s something for a bit of a diversion from the Energy Bores(it’s about politics!):

    With the Liberal Party in mounting crisis – fraught by poor polling, ongoing speculation about Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, a bitter tussle in Victoria over the party presidency, and the still-raw wound from the electoral drubbing in Western Australia – little attention is being paid to the Nationals, themselves embroiled in turmoil and a steadily worsening relationship with their Coalition partner.

    http://insidestory.org.au/the-coalitions-restless-bedfellows

  18. ML
    Being possibly an Age reader of the right vintage you might remember the superb series of Letters to the Editor on, I seem to recall, the Great Sorenson.
    I note that there were a couple of reports by Clarke of Sorenson’s exploits as a player in the Australian Farnakling Team, in particular the brutal game against (the then) East German Farnakling Team and believe that these might have triggered one of the greatest bursts of creativity in the Letters to the Editor pages in Australian history, possibly rivalled only by the ‘First Cuckoo of Spring’ letters to The Times.

  19. GG:

    I hadn’t thought of it that way, but even so, given the high water mark they were at and that it was their first term, AND that Malcolm was such a popular Abbott replacement, the result was a shocker. There is no way they should’ve had such a result.

  20. Ides:

    I love that tweet in the wake of Trump’s strike on Syria that said perhaps they should just send Kendall Jenner over there with a carton of Pepsi to sort it all out!

  21. Somehow I don’t think homeopathic beer has much of a future. I think the punters would soon cotton on to the fact that’s it’s just water. Probably better for them though (disclosure: I like a beer or three).

  22. monica lynagh @ #2371 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 7:56 pm

    bemused @ 2360
    Yep, thought it a useful summary.
    BTW, did you see the guardian australia reports today on what’s happening to the Barrier Reef?
    I am appalled, to say the least.

    Thanks. It really doesn’t seem to be overly complex at that level. You don’t need to be an engineer or scientist to follow it at that level.
    Yes, most disturbing.

  23. Steve777,

    A fancy marketing campaign would fix that. Imagine ‘Homeopathic Beer” ads proclaiming it as good as sex on the beach. Fucking close to water!

  24. zoidlord @ #2337 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 7:17 pm

    Player One,
    What’s the point of being on the blog when you hate half of those who discuss, this to me sounds like you owning the blog and dissing those who disagree with your POV.
    It’s piss poor attitude.

    I’ll engage with anyone willing to engage with sincerity & politeness.

    Why would you want to engage with anyone else?

  25. Mrs Katich is in a community meeting with Rebekah Sharkie.

    Mrs Katich has texted that she is at least 20 years younger than anyone else at this meeting.

  26. kayjay @ #2378 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 8:03 pm

    bk @ #2369 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 7:54 pm

    Bemused
    I’m just about to have a homeopathic binge. A full glass of water!

    Great business opportunity beckons.
    Homeopathic beer.

    You beat me to it.

    I was about to post that I’ll believe homeopathy works when it is effective when diluting Scotch.

    I would then just need to buy one more bottle of Scotch, add a drop to every litre of water, dilute that fifty times, and be sozzled every night, at almost no cost.


  27. Greensborough Growler
    Monday, April 10, 2017 at 6:22 pm

    Barney,

    Not today.
    Go back and look at the crap served up by CC, Grimace and Bemused today. All of it is gratuitous insults with the sole intention of belittling and bullying P1 because she refuses to buckle to their allegedly “informed” views.

    Unfortunately for some facts do matter.

  28. Boerwar @ 2375
    Yes, I do. Brought a smile, thank you.
    Completely off topic, though it may entertain you.
    We’ve had a pair of magpies nesting in a tree on a nearby hill. Their nest was being hunted by what we think was a hawk of some sort. Well, the pair of them took off and attacked the other bird all the way to another hill way to the other side of us.
    It was extraordinary to see.
    Anyway, off to watch another ep of The Night Manager. Recommended, if you’re into spy type thrillers.

  29. “Bemused suspended all thought of national good when he decided to campaign heavily for the removal of a Labor PM”

  30. monica lynagh @ #2317 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 7:01 pm

    Hola bludgers
    You know one of the things that puzzles me in the energy wars here, is this.
    If people put each other on STFU, how can they meaningfully engage in the debate?
    I’ve been following a lot of it, and learning a lot, but wind up very frustrated.

    bk @ #2323 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 7:06 pm

    player one @ #2319 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 7:03 pm

    bk @ #2315 Monday, April 10, 2017 at 6:59 pm

    That’s OK but just make sure you never overdose on the homeopathic stuff!

    Isn’t it an overdose if you actually take none of the stuff? Powerful stuff indeed!

    Yes it is indeed a chemical conundrum!

    You can, under all the right circumstances overdose on water, its called hyponatremia. My guess is that drinking distilled or RO water would increase the risk of suffering from hyponatremia.

  31. It IS laughable. So many here refusing to speak to each other, banning each other’s posts or taking to insults. Much of the talk is about how to get around the latest bodgy version of code. Nothing more hilarious that a post that reads “test”.

    The fact that PB is not advised in advance of any changes shows just how much the self-styled gurus here figure in the grand scheme of things. Or even the Crikey scheme of things. They don’t give a shit about you, yet you continue to believe your anonymous opinions move mountains and that you own particular understanding of the science of whatever-it-is is superior to everyone else’s, giving you licence to insult, slur, cast aspersions, question the mental state of fellow posters and generally slag each other to death… when you’re not pointedly ignoring each other, and letting everyone know you are doing so.

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