There are finally some interesting developments to report from the BludgerTrack poll aggregate, although they have nothing to do with the headline reading on voting intention, of which the only point of interest is that One Nation has lost its lead over the Greens. Rather, there has been an important change to the way state breakdowns are calculated, which only now is being determined on the basis of trend measures of each state’s results since the previous election, since a fairly substantial number of data points is needed before such measures can be meaningful. In particular, the crude averaging that was being done before was obscuring the big move to Labor in Western Australia amid the backwash of the state election there. It was also dampening the swing to Labor in Queensland, while amplifying it slightly in Victoria and South Australia. The new figures result in a haul of extra seats for Labor on the seat projection, reflecting in particular the richness of marginal seats in Queensland, and the relative paucity of them in Victoria and South Australia.
First Dog On The Moon’s guide to preparing for nuclear war. Are you ready?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/19/first-dog-on-the-moons-guide-to-preparing-for-nuclear-war-are-you-ready
SK
Tom Price whom Trump appointed as Health Secretary and departure is the reason for the election now.
He won the seat by 60%
Victoria:
“So not only is Donald Trump a corrupt mobster who committed treason he’s also got a degenerative brain disorder”
Yes, apart from being barely literate, all observed evidence points to some serious deficiency.
Other recent examples:
* the idiot facies when he’s obviously faking seriousness when seriousness should come naturally
* in contrast, excitedly child-like telling the interviewer about the chocolate cake, the best cake ever, he was eating with Japanese PM when they sent missiles to Iraq, before she told him it was Syria.
* had to be nudged to put hand on heart for Anthem by the Mrs, televised, at the start of the nauseating saccharine Egg Thing at the WhiteHouse, where he was the only one not reading (can’t) but that was OK cos Kelly-Anne Dipstick was reading about Easter being a gift from God
* opening Easter Thing address veers off into his ‘we’re gunna be great’ circuit for a few loops, which surely impressed the children
*etc etc
So what’s the verdict on the 457 visa changes? Is it a fugazi?
blanket criticism @ #1004 Wednesday, April 19, 2017 at 12:36 pm
It was devised by Dutton and Turnbull. That answers both of your questions.
Make no mistake, any crackdown on 457’s however marginal or however much of a beat up it is will be a vote winner for the coalition amongst people of my generation, who have experienced employment instability almost all of their adult lives as a result of the GFC changing the rules re: the mass casualisation of the workforce, the lack of entry level jobs across all industries, increased off-shoring and so on.
Found the results
As of 10:15 p.m. ET, Ossoff had 50.4% of the vote, with 72% of the vote in, according to Edison Research.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/18/politics/georgia-house-6th-special-election-jon-ossoff/
With fairy dust sprinkled over it by Pauline and Corgi.
Blanket Criticism
That’s illogical. The Coalition have made all your employment conditions worse, not better.
CNN vote count lot further ahead than NYT. Don’t know why. (CNN is based in Atlanta, Georgia… but I doubt that makes a difference.)
Question: has anyone any experience with VueScan ?
I have been trying to contact Crikey on their 1800 number also their main line , for days now as I want to suspend my subscription while overseas for 3 months. All I can get is voice mail I leave a message , no calls back. Can anyone suggest what else I can do please? Otherwise will not renew subscription when it comes
He has once again over egged
It’s not so much that Turnbull over promises and under delivers. It’s that he over promises and delivers something between zero and the complete opposite of the promise.
The man’s a political dunce in a way that makes Abbott look like a genius. It has taken a superhuman suspension of critical thinking to ever see this bozo as even barely competent. He is quite simply shit.
As of 10:40 p.m. ET, Ossoff had 50.3% of the vote, with 77% of the vote in, according to Edison Research.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/18/politics/georgia-house-6th-special-election-jon-ossoff/
mari
Email support@crikey.com.au
I questioned them about a subscription and got a reply within 2 days.
Dutton might as well belong to PH One Nation.
PHON may as well belong to the LNP. Only diff is a small percentage of Libs are slightly smarter than your average PHON and keep their xenophobic thoughts for private conversation. Your PHONS would all fit quite comfortably in the less insane and incompetent end of the Libs spectrum. The Nats argument with PHON is a pure demarcation dispute about who should represent regressive morons.
Human-beings are illogical I have found. Or at least don’t pay as much attention to these things as they should. Don’t make the mistake of over-estimating the electorate, especially when it comes to under 30s. Many will be swayed by the head-lines about this that will try to make out that Turnball and co are attacking 457’s without delving into it any deeper. The coalition understands this. It’s a strategy they’ve used to much success in the past.
Human-beings are illogical I have found. Or at least don’t pay as much attention to these things as they should. Don’t make the mistake of over-estimating the electorate, especially when it comes to under 30s. Many will be swayed by the head-lines about this that will try to make out that Turnball and co are attacking 457’s without delving into it any deeper. The coalition understands this. It’s a strategy they’ve used to much success in the past.
“I want the value of the pound to fall. I’m going there later this year ”
Hey!, that effects all our British pensions here!. don’t be stingy!.
Full essential up.
Libs dropped 2%, but Coalition as a whole only dropped 1 (Nats flat), so some rounding going on.
Labor gained 1 and others gained 1
SDK @ 10:30
**I think you’ve finally unearthed Mal’s brilliant plan!**
Mal and the Coalition are full of cunning stunts.
I don’t think many of them are stunning!
@Lizzie
Human-beings are illogical I have found. Or at least don’t pay as much attention to these things as they should. Don’t make the mistake of over-estimating the electorate, especially when it comes to under 30s. Many will be swayed by the head-lines about this that will try to make out that Turnball and co are attacking 457’s without delving into it any deeper. The coalition understands this. It’s a strategy they’ve used to much success in the past.
Really sorry about that, don’t know what happened.
lizzie
Wednesday, April 19, 2017 at 12:47 pm
Question: has anyone any experience with VueScan ?
I use it on a mac for an older scanner that the new Mac OSX no longer supports. Works fine with a few minor annoying quirks.
Many will be swayed by the head-lines
That might not be much help to Turnbull if the Telegraph is indicative.
The story is all pro Mal as you’d expect from the cesspit. But that headline inferring it’s all above saving Trumble’s job and the photoshop work to Trumpify Trumble’s hair? Amazing that the DT would go with something like that. Maybe they’re so deep in the cool aid that they think Trumble = Trump is a winner, or they’re pumping up Dutton (pge 5 has a “I so want to have Pete’s babies” editorial from Markson), but I can’t for the life of me see that front page doing Mal any good at all.
As Doyley says. The dope has almost certainly lost the politics on this (strike me down with a feather!).
Even Blind Freddy knows the Tele is a right wing joke nowadays.It was a failure in the election trying to piss all over Shorten.It wont work this time round either.
SDK,
I would throw a educated guess that many rabid Trump supporters that came out in the Presidential election arent regular mid-term voters either.
Also, the rabid Trump supporters aren’t so rabid any more, so may be staying away as a message to Trump:
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/trump-base-supporters-turn-on-him-237200
Ratsak
Ever wondered why people value enormous wealth?
It is not so they can afford luxuries – you dont need enormous wealth for that. It is not just for power and security either. ‘Status’ gets close.
For many, wealth helps remind themselves (and us) how amazing they are. And people like Malcolm need a heck of a lot of reminding.
Malcolm is the Minister for Conspicuous Success.
A couple of people have talked about gerrymandering in a way that I think misrepresents what it does.
The point of gerrymandering, of course, is to bias an overall election result in your favour – to win seats you wouldn’t otherwise in order to win elections/control, but you don’t actually change voters – you just shuffle them around.
So if you assume a roughly balanced 2 party situation – let’s assume there’s only 2 parties and they win 50/50 of the people who vote, and let’s assume the voters are distributed roughly evenly across the region, although textured locally (so there are more and less dense areas on a neighbourhood scale) – as a party implementing a gerrymnder what you want to do is draw the electorate boundaries to concentrate your opponent’s supporters in massively safe seats (any votes over 50%+1 are ‘wasted’ in single member districts), while at the same time spreading your own supporters as widely as possible across somewhat marginal, but usually winnable seats.
If you do it right all of your own seats will be fairly close, but you’ll have a lot more of them, while all of your opponent’s seats will be stonkingly huge wins for your opponent, but far fewer seats.
So, eg, you could gerrymander to have your opponent win 1/3 of the seats with 65% of the vote in each while you win 2/3 of the seats with 51% of the vote. In this artificial but not unreasonable example you win, say 66 seats to your opponent’s 34 seats even though your opponent scored ~55% of the overall vote to your ~45%.
The point is to make ‘your’ seats as marginal as you feel safe doing within the vagaries of election dynamics while making your opponent’s seats as safe as they can be.
Gerrymandering for the Republicans is not about making ultra-safe Republican seats – if that happens they’re doing it wrong.
@Ratsak,
I saw that Telegraph front page only a few moments ago in the supermarket and laughed out loud. The telegraph has to know how toxic the Trump brand is in Australia I would say the theory that they have lost any small amount of support they have for Turnball and are now deliberately sabotaging him in the hopes of drumming up support amongst their readers for a future challenge is the correct one. The challenge for them is to make Scott Morrison or Peter Dutton look like sane and sensible alternatives. I think the article ‘Sco-Mo says ‘Give me back my Budget” is an indication of how they are going to spin things. The argument is that Morrison and Dutton are the true visionaries of the party and Turnball is becoming an obstacle to them accomplishing their goals. Any unpopular measures in the budget will be blamed on Turnball and there’ll be a challenge shortly afterwards.
Jackol
“If you do it right all of your own seats will be fairly close, but you’ll have a lot more of them, while all of your opponent’s seats will be stonkingly huge wins for your opponent, but far fewer seats.”
A few points to expand on this:
(1) Gerrymandering can be done in such a way that one party maximises the number of seats that it holds on pretty solid margins. As you say, from a Republican perspective, the point is *not* to create as many ultra-safe Republican-held seats as possible, but as many Republican-held seats on fairly hefty margins as possible. In a blow-out congressional election where the Repugs are out of favour, these seats will fall. Very few seats in the US are genuine marginals. Gerrymandering (by both sides) has put paid to this.
(2) The demographics of most states make it easier for the Republicans to restrict the Dems to as few seats as possible. This is because the Dem vote tends to be stonkingly high in cities, making it easier to ‘quarantine’ the Dem vote in a relatively few urban-based seats.
(3) The latest re-districting occurred at a time when the Repugs dominated the State legislatures (including in some swing and blue-leaning states) who crafted the boundaries. The current electoral map reflects this bias
A government with very little or no direction but brain farts in spades.
Agreed, I don’t understand the Corbyn hate either, but he seems to have very little support outside the UK Labour faithful.
From my distant position I agree with others that he should make it a Brexit referendum. That might find him some wider support, which he needs. Unfortunately, he seemed fairly quiet during the referendum, even though a Labour MP was murdered for arguing “remain”.
I also remember after the last election people said Labour suffered because the English were scared they would have to cater to the SNP and Scottish independence. Now Brexit is driving arguments for Scottish Independence. Corbyn could make the patriotic case that Brexit is tearing the uinion apart.
As for UK polls… I’ll have some faith when they have earned it.
Q
“Agreed, I don’t understand the Corbyn hate either, but he seems to have very little support outside the UK Labour faithful.”
The latter may go some way to explain the former.
The Australian is pretty good at what they do.
The Australian claimed that voting for the party that wants a hard Brexit is the only way to avoid a hard Brexit.
They then implied that when Tony Blair called upon the SNP, Labour and Lib Dems to tactically vote to keep the Conservatives from power, what he actually meant was to vote Conservative (to avoid the hard Brexit that the conservatives are pushing for).
Seriously, you may not agree with their motives. But you have to be impressed with the quality of the spin.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/general-election-2017-theresa-may-heads-for-landslide-victory/news-story/f28fe75ab13e2803b323a1bf0e6b5536
Sanders, Di Natale, Corbyn – all right but wrong handwringers – all have the historic role of ensuring that the Right Mad Bastards attain and retain power.
Their ilk are right now earnestly busy, playing around with making sure the opposition to Le Pen is divided thus doing their best to ensure that another bunch of racist right wing thugs triumph.
Insane.
Feel free to elaborate Kakuru. Are there actual reasons to hate Corbyn, or is it just the fashion?
Headline sums it up well.
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/malcolm-turnbull-goes-full-aussie-on-donald-trumps-coattails-20170419-gvnjl7.html
I don’t think you can separate the practice of politics and what may or may not be fashion.
A leader who can’t generate popular support may merely be unfashionable, but that still can make them unsuitable to be leader whatever you may think of their policy agenda.
Corbyn fails in my eyes because he has taken an established political party and effectively taken it over to drive his own agenda ignoring the electoral consequences and the need to take the organisation as a whole along with him.
Whether he represents the Labour party of decades past or not is irrelevant in my eyes – the modern Labour party (as much as you might disagree with their direction) is not compatible with Corbyn’s vision.
Parties, of course, are subject to change and evolution over time, but there’s a clear distinction between evolution and revolution and Corbyn has insisted on revolution. In my opinion he should not have done so from within the Labour party, he should have struck out on his own and – if he had a message and a platform that appealed – proven that himself.
Instead I think he has destroyed the Labour party and royally screwed UK politics at the same time. For that I have nothing but contempt for him and his enablers.
I have a much simpler metric Jackol
Corbyn or May?
If you want May, then bitching about Corbyn makes sense.
Also, I would take Sanders over Trump, and I would take Di Natale over Hanson.
Unfortunately they all think they are millionaires in the UK nowadays and working classes dont exist anymore so they side with the real rich hoping to be like them one day.Sad really.It will end up like the USA there.They obviously love austerity too.
‘Gerrymandering for the Republicans is not about making ultra-safe Republican seats – if that happens they’re doing it wrong.’
Very true Jakol, what is confusing is that in certain states the Democrat vote is so concentrated, that even with Gerrymandering, many Republican seats have a very healthy margin.
Michael Moore talked of towns in the Midwest where the Democrat votes were in single figures. And then on the other hand there is Washington DC.
This sudden flurry of activity from Turnbull is not just a lead up to the budget.
I am sure the LNP have been getting feedback that their drifting ways and laid back attitude are not going down well with the electorate, and so they have had a nice fireside chat with themselves to come up with ideas to ‘galvanise’ the electorate.
Hence the 457 stuff and moving lots of departments or pieces of departments to regional centres. After all Barnaby’s opening gambit worked so well.
Maybe this is why the working class vote Conservative in the UK. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/jun/05/why-working-class-people-vote-conservative
Corbyn simply comes across as totally gormless.
Question –
I have a much simpler metric too – when Labour is pulverized at the upcoming (and clearly incredibly opportunistic) election, and the Tories win a very handsome majority for another 5 years, we can all celebrate how wonderful Corbyn was for UK politics and how much better he was than May.
Earlier you said:
Corbyn can’t do that because he basically supports Brexit (not to mention substantial support for the Brexit referendum in Labour leaning areas). He had been tied enough by Labour rules to have been obliged to nominally support the Remain case when the referendum was on, but he was so lacklustre in his support because his heart wasn’t in it.
I’m not actually bagging Corbyn for being a Brexit supporter – I can understand the reasoning on both sides – but let’s not fantasize that in Corbyn’s heart of hearts he can be a fierce warrior in this election for some mythical Bremain scenario that is no longer a possibility.
Mikehilliard
Thanks for reply. I have an HP Scanjet with the common out-of-date driver problem.
Could you explain your ‘minor quirks’? I’m going crazy here!
I can use it as a photocopier, but want to transfer documents to Word files.
Another point of view.
Why do British working classes vote Tory? Because they’re:
a) Aspirational, believing that the Conservative party offers more routes out of their social class than the left – despite every grain of historical and factual evidence proving otherwise;
b) Seduced by the constant barrage of baser instincts paraded by the right – witness Osborne’s attack on ‘closed curtain houses’ pre-election. This appeals to the more angry elements of working class men;
c) Suspicious of the left, as regardless of governmental persuasion very little changes when any party is in power. This manifests in anger against parties who claim to speak for all, and trust in parties who claim to speak for the individual;
d) Some working class men don’t want everyone’s situation to improve – they just want theirs to. And when they see any benefit being ‘handed out’ to ‘undeserving’ people, they get angry;
e) Distrustful of foreigners, and the right tends to own the franchise on foreigner-bashing.
Basically, they’re just misguided.
I think Corbyn seems to be dragging his feet with the referendum and this coming election is that he perhaps has been supportive of Brexit all this while.
Otherwise he would have been hammering May hard on Brexit and even stop this election from happening.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2017/04/19/leaked-government-policies-renamed/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CrikeyDaily+%28Crikey+Daily%29
Also, probably paywalled, but outrageous if true. First with 457 and now with Medicare.