Newspoll: 52-48 to Labor

The latest result from Newspoll lands slightly at the upper end of the government’s recent form.

Courtesy of The Australian, the latest result from Newspoll records Labor with a two-party lead of 52-48, down from 53-47 in the last poll (which was three weeks ago rather than the usual two, owing to Easter). Labor and the Greens are both down a point on the primary vote, to 35% and 9%, with the Coalition and One Nation steady on 36% and 10%. Malcolm Turnbull is up two on approval to 32% and down two on disapproval to 57%, while Bill Shorten is up one to 33% and down one to 53%. Turnbull’s lead as preferred prime minister shifts from 41-32 to 42-33.

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.

1,209 comments on “Newspoll: 52-48 to Labor”

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  1. zoomster @ #139 Monday, April 24, 2017 at 1:45 pm

    bemused
    My grandfather was a pacifist and a Methodist Minister during WWII. His pacifism was considered so appalling that he ended up in Murtoa, which at the time had a very high German population (who didn’t find someone saying we shouldn’t be fighting at all to be too objectionable…)
    My mother remembers girls at her school giving the Hitler salute in the toilets. Ironically, though, the school also raised a record amount for the war effort!

    I was thinking of your father being in WWII on the wrong side.

  2. We don’t know what the actual 2PP value in the population is.

    Three weeks ago, we had an estimate of 53:47. Now we have an estimate of 52:48. Is this significantly different at the 95% confidence level? No.

    It may be that there has been a change in the population value, but we can’t conclude that from this data.

  4. “It may be that there has been a change in the population value, but we can’t conclude that from this data.”
    But that doesn’t stop the commentariate and bludgers from making up reasons why the 2PP has changed.

  5. Fess

    No doubt Assange is attempting to get the Trump admin to now reward him for his efforts. what is Trump to do? NSA, FBI, CIA etc have other ideas. So I am guessing Assange is looking for leverage. Cos if he had got the hacked stuff on Hillary and the Democrats, he can also get the hacked stuff on Trump and Co. Can Trump trust Assange not to get spiteful? you gotta laugh

  6. Never trust attention seekers.

    Assange has always been one. The concept of opening all secrets to the general populace to me is like giving an 18 month old a cigarette lighter. What you end up with a Donald Trump.

    While I know state secrecy is fraught with the possibility of corruption there is a balance where destructive information should not be in the hands of those who are too stupid or too unpredictable to be careful. I am sure every person like Assange or Snowden who wants complete openness is secretly hoping that Kim Jong Un will not attain the knowledge/ability to use nuclear warheads.

    Or would they, in principle, think that its OK and who cares if it leads to the end of the world?

  7. bemused

    Oh, I knew that!

    He wasn’t in the war very long – court martialled for stealing hundreds of boxes of cigars, sent to Flossenburg concentration camp for a while, and was later in an American POW camp (he escaped) before ending up as a Displaced Person and migrating to Australia on the first migrant ship in 1947.

    He was very young – only nineteen when the war ended, so I don’t think he really did anything much.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flossenb%C3%BCrg_concentration_camp

    My response was to the account in the article of Australians “Heil Hitlering” during the war.

  8. jenauthor
    Where have Assange and Snowden demonstrated that they want complete openess.
    if that were the case, why havent they disclosed anything on team Trump or Putin for that matter?

  9. zoomster @ #157 Monday, April 24, 2017 at 2:34 pm

    bemused
    Oh, I knew that!
    He wasn’t in the war very long – court martialled for stealing hundreds of boxes of cigars, sent to Flossenburg concentration camp for a while, and was later in an American POW camp (he escaped) before ending up as a Displaced Person and migrating to Australia on the first migrant ship in 1947.
    He was very young – only nineteen when the war ended, so I don’t think he really did anything much.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flossenb%C3%BCrg_concentration_camp
    My response was to the account in the article of Australians “Heil Hitlering” during the war.

    Going with the flow I imagine.
    It took a lot of courage to oppose the Nazi’s, just look at what happened to Sophie Scholl and her colleagues for example.

  10. jenauthor:

    I never thought Assange was into openness and transparency, more like political maneuvering and attention seeking. For me Snowden had more authenticity as a whistleblower than Assange.

  11. fess

    Snowden not authentic at all. He is not a whistleblower. Why do you think he ended up in Russia of all places?

  12. fess

    I should add that Snowden’s whole objective was to damage the US govt and their national security and intelligence services. simple as that

  13. I was talking about ‘principles espoused’ in terms of openness rather than behaviour.

    That’s part of the point. These so-called whistleblowers proclaim it is in the interest of openness and the public’s ‘right to know’ – yet what they disclose is every bit as censored as what governments etc. put out – just they censor different bits for different effects.

    What they proclaim/what they actually do, is all part of the attention seeking … and is in no way for the benefit of the ordinary people of the world.

  14. Zoomster, the most amazing story of all was that of Yang Kyoungjong who was a Korean soldier who fought in the Imperial Japanese Army, the Soviet Red Army, and later the German Wehrmacht during World War II. He is to date the only soldier to fight on three sides of a war, and this legendary status has earned him much recognition.

  15. Victoria –

    Snowden not authentic at all. He is not a whistleblower.

    I beg to differ. Snowden’s material was very important to reveal, and very much in the public interest.

  16. Victoria at 2.27PM: “Cos if he had got the hacked stuff on Hillary and the Democrats, he can also get the hacked stuff on Trump and Co.”
    This seems to me a severe misconception. Wikileaks do not hack stuff themselves, nor do they commission hackers. What they do is make public stuff that is leaked to them. Someone leaked information to them about the Democratic campaign, and they published it. The people who leaked this information may have also had information about Trump, but since they wanted Trump to win, they would not have passed such information to Wikileaks. There is no evidence and no reason to suppose that anyone leaked information about Trump to Wikileaks which Wikileaks failed to publish.

  17. I mean seriously … an egoistical computer geek misfit from Queensland becomes front page news around the world.

    A Trumped-up (pun intended) real estate developer with dodgy financial tentacles all over the world becomes president of arguably the most influential country in the world.

    A loud-mouthed fish & chip shop owner of dubious intelligence becomes the most recognised woman in the country.

    They each have a need for attention. They each found a way of getting it – never mind how destructive their attention-seeking behaviour has become for the rest of the country/world.

    Am now jumping off my soapbox.

  18. And whenever Assange loses ‘air time’ for a while he comes up with a reason to be in the headlines again … run for Aust senate? For UK commons? Presser from balcony of embassy to denounce somethingorother.

    Oops, tripped when descending from soapbox.

  19. Vic:

    I disagree with you about Snowden. I don’t know if he was primarily motivated by a desire to harm US relations with other countries, but the stuff that he released was very much in the interest of the international community.

  20. The lying Dutton and his mates in Immigration (Keane)

    Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s petulant, aggressive, blame-the-media response to being rigorously but fairly questioned by Barrie Cassidy yesterday about the recent armed assault on the Manus Island detention camp is consistent with the man’s political persona. He is thin-skinned and uninterested in debate; it was instructive that he resorted to the Trumpesque justification that he had facts that no one else did when challenged on the colossal discrepancies between his own version of events and that of the local police commander (described by Dutton as “the Twitter version”).
    …
    But we’ve been here before, and it isn’t all about Dutton. In February 2014, when Manus Island asylum seeker Reza Barati was murdered trying to hide from a mob during a riot, the Immigration Department and its then-minister Scott Morrison immediately, and without evidence, tried to claim Barati had brought his death on himself by trying to escape. The department’s version of events quickly unravelled, and Morrison had to backtrack. In October 2014, the department accused staff of its contractor Save The Children of encouraging self-harm among detainees — based on a dodgy, biased “intelligence report” — and removed them from Nauru. This claim too unravelled — the department’s own report blowing the claims out of the water was sneaked out after Malcolm Fraser died, in an attempt to hide it — and the department was forced to make two humiliating public apologies and pay more than $1 million in compensation to STC and its staff.

    In 2014, Morrison also dismissed reports of poor medical care, asylum seekers being stripped of medicine and medical equipment and deteriorating mental health among detainees as “sensational claims”, only for those claims — which the Department tried to suppress — to be repeatedly confirmed by the department’s own internal documents. Morrison also claimed that Manus Island asylum seeker Hamid Kehazaei, who died from septicaemia from a simple cut on his leg, had received “outstanding care”. It is now known a lazy Immigration Department public servant didn’t bother checking his emails to see a request for the evacuation of Kehazaei and disputed the advice of doctors when he did, delaying the eventual evacuation that might have saved Kehazaei’s life.
    …
    There’s a clear pattern here, whether it’s Dutton or his predecessor Morrison — first comes the lie, then the truth emerges eventually, resisted furiously by the department, extracted by the media, parliamentary inquiries or independent reviews. And the lie is invariably intended to smear: Barati was responsible for his own death; Hanson-Young was an embarrassment; doctors were inventing claims of poor health treatment; asylum seekers and contractors are responsible for self-harm. Now here we are again — in Dutton’s paedophile panic version of events, detainees provoked the assault on their own camp in which a large number of shots were fired into the facility.
    …
    It is past time for a major independent inquiry into the many, and massive, failings of this discredited, deceitful department. Ministers may lie and bungle, but ultimately they answer to voters. The Immigration Department has had a series of epic failings. It is high time they were made to answer.

  21. I really don’t understand the hostility that is expressed here towards Assange. Leakers do not have to be, and often are not pure of heart in their intentions for leaking the information that they do. That doesn’t change the fact that the information that they leak is in the public interest however embarrassing or damaging that may be to our chosen side. Take for example the leaking that goes on in Australian politics, it’s likely that many leaks are motivated almost exclusively for the blatant self-interest of the leaker and/or the side that they represent, yet it is uncommon for the media to undertake a public examination of the motives of the leaker.

    Assange has been far from a model citizen in his private life and based on the public information about his private life, I’d conclude that he’s quite and arsehole. That doesn’t change that he was responsible for and is to be applauded for publishing leaked information that is undoubtedly in the public interest. Ask yourself, if the media were to trawl though your private life with sordid intent, and then put their slant on any of the details they found, how well would you fare under such scrutiny? Just look at what happened to Duncan Storrar when the media turned their spotlight onto him for the high crime of speaking the truth to the powerful.

    Whether the Americans made it public or not, Assange had a reasonable fear that the Americans were going to get their hands on him by whatever means they could. How soon we forget the American policy of extraordinary renditions and its impact.

    As for the rape allegations in Sweden, I’ve seen so much backwards and forwards on this issue that I’ve concluded the truth and justice long ago took a back seat to the politics of Assange and his behaviour. He is almost certainly guilty of arsehole behaviour, whether that behaviour is criminal or not is another matter.

  22. Feds

    We can agree to disagree on Snowden. I am utterly convinced he is not a bona fide whistleblower. Frankly don’t know how he was employed by US Intell in the first instance.

  23. Grimace

    Assange has managed to stooge many progressive thinking people into believing he is a beacon of truth and freedom. In reality, he is nothing of the sort. He is a narcissistic egotistical and fangerous individual. I have nothing but disdain for him. But of course, I respect that you have a differing opinion.
    Funny how it is being reported just today by the Guardian that he is besties with Nigel Farage.

  25. My old boss kicking anti-vaxer butt.

    “The reason we managed to vaccinate the entire under-15 population with polio is because people were so scared. They saw it, people were dying and being paralysed, they saw this dreadful disease,” she added.

    “But there isn’t the fear like there was before because of the success of vaccination.
    “You know what really pushes vaccination rates up is when vaccination rates fall, there is an epidemic and kids die and get very sick.

    “But I don’t want that to be the stimulation for vaccination. What I want to be the stimulation to vaccinate is that you understand what protective vaccination is.”
    Professor Stanley said anti-vaccination campaigners were “evil” for spreading lies about the jabs.

    “They are quite evil and give misinformation to parents which is very scary,” she said.

    https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/professor-fiona-stanley-speaks-out-against-evil-anti-vaxers-ng-b88454661z

  26. “It is past time for a major independent inquiry into the many, and massive, failings of this discredited, deceitful department. Ministers may lie and bungle, but ultimately they answer to voters. The Immigration Department has had a series of epic failings. It is high time they were made to answer.”

    Amen to that.

  27. Did none of WikiLeaks releases have “sordid intent”?

    Was absolutely nothing the media reported “in the public interest”?

  30. Magicpudding

    Just to give you an idea of what Assange is all about, check out his tweets to the Guardian journo today. As I said to Grimace, you are entitled to your views re Assange. I made up my mind about him years ago.
    If anything I am more convinced than ever I am right about him
    https://mobile.twitter.com/carolecadwalla

  31. Grimace –

    Whether the Americans made it public or not, Assange had a reasonable fear that the Americans were going to get their hands on him by whatever means they could. How soon we forget the American policy of extraordinary renditions and its impact.

    America kidnapping and torturing various people and shifting them around to jurisdictions that would accommodate their wishes was appalling and has done terrible damage to America’s reputation.

    I don’t question for a moment that someone anywhere without a public profile in the West would rightly be fearful of what the American government/agencies might do in cloak-and-dagger fashion.

    However, Assange’s profile meant he was never in any danger of this happening to him. If America was going to go after Assange then they would always have done so via regular means – extraditing him to face trial, which is what is being mooted now. And whatever else you can say about America they are very keen on their constitution, and upholding freedom of speech, rule of law, due process etc etc (renditioning was used precisely because the government/agencies desperately wanted to keep the victims from accessing the American legal system). Unless there is credible evidence that Assange was grooming leakers illegally I doubt he has much to worry about from fronting up to a court in the USA, and he would naturally receive the very best representation money (well, profile) can buy.

    Assange was never in any danger of being spirited away. He just claimed martyr status and special privileges to assert that the rules and processes that (properly) apply to the rest of us don’t apply to him. Because conspiracy reasons.

    I think whistleblowers need significantly more protection and respect from the people and governments across the world. I think Wikileaks, as a concept, is important and has done valuable things, although they are not the only outfit in that space. I think Assange is an extraordinary attention seeker and has played the game in a very political way (when he should have been very careful to walk an apolitical line for the sake of his organization and of the whistleblowers themselves), largely destroying whatever credibility he should have had for setting up Wikileaks and enabling whistleblowing. Assange wanted to be a player, and he basically got his wish – a pity about the various people he has burnt along the way.

  32. Jackpot

    Agreed. And not only burning people along the way, but colluding with the Kremlin to interfere in a democratic election. Of course he would argue that it served a great purpose cos Clinton is a neoliberal. But no matter in his view, the fascist Trump was a better option. Seriously Assange is a piece of excrement

  33. Jackol at 3:48 pm
    Unless …. I doubt he has much to worry about from fronting up to a court in the USA.

    I’m not so sure. He pissed in their soup*.

    (* Coral Browne to Guy Burgess, An Englishman Abroad, Alan Bennett)

  34. I think Assange is an extraordinary attention seeker and has played the game in a very political way (when he should have been very careful to walk an apolitical line for the sake of his organization and of the whistleblowers themselves)

    Absolutely. It’s the arrogant cynicism about Assange, along with the pouty sense of entitlement that has turned me off him. Refusing to man up and face sexual assault charges in Sweden (and yeah, if they were trumped up charges, then why so scared much of defending yourself?), along with the Ecuador embassy stunt were the icing on the cake for me.

  35. “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

    “Under Capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism it’s just the opposite.”

    Two little thoughts from. J K Galbraith

  36. Victoria at 3:57 pm
    cos Clinton is a neoliberal

    And she was widely reported to have said ‘Can’t we just drone this guy?” – not remembered but not denied.

  39. Let me be clear that I don’t for a moment doubt that Assange very likely has some serious character flaws or that he’s likely a world class piece of shit in his interpersonal dealings.

    WRT to the DNC leaks, however embarrassing the leaks were, Wikileaks didn’t publish anything that wasn’t true.

  40. I quite the idea of assange continually having to look over his shoulder for the rest of his miserable life – thats even IF he gets out of his current pickle with the rape allegation, being a bail breaker under UK law and of course hopefully trump will shaft him as well.

    Too ‘smart’ by half he is.

  41. Victoria,

    Maybe a tad hypersensitive, but the relevance of Touche escapes me when I’m not here to defend Assange, but rather suggest more than neoliberalism as his motive.

  42. WRT to the DNC leaks, however embarrassing the leaks were, Wikileaks didn’t publish anything that wasn’t true.

    That’s a *very* different standard to what you said earlier though. When “the media trawl though your private life with sordid intent” what they publish is usually true isn’t it?

  45. @ Mimhoff
    There is a huge difference between a private individual asking an elected representative a question in a forum intended for such interaction and the behaviour of an organisation seeking to represent hundreds of millions of people.

  46. Assange is a small boy who thought he could play big boy’s games. Now the big boys are shitted off with him as he kept breaking the games rules.

  47. dave:

    Like I said before, karma can be a biatch. Assange wanted to insert himself in a big way on the international political scene, and I guess we can’t argue he didn’t achieve that 😀

    But seriously, how long can Assange hole up in the Ecuador embassy?

  49. Assange leaks information with the same justification a general runs a war.

    They may be fulfilling their own feeling of self-interest, but there are bound to be good people who benefit from such actions as there are bad people on the other side.

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