The latest Essential Research poll, conducted for The Guardian Australia, has two-party preferred steady at 53-47, with both major parties up a point each, to 38% in the Coalition’s case and 37% in Labor’s, and the two biggest minor parties down one, leaving the Greens at 9% and One Nation at 7%. Other findings:
• Compulsory voting has the support of 66% of respondents, which is down five points since the question was last asked in October 2013, with 27% opposed, up two. Eighty per cent say they would have been likely to vote if it were not compulsory, versus 12% for unlikely.
• Economic sentiment has improved since December, with 30% now describing the state of the economy as good (up seven) and 29% as poor (down seven), and 29% thinking it headed in the right direction (up three) against 41% for the wrong direction (down four).
• A question on budget priorities find respondents want spending increased on nearly everything, with the exception of defence, foreign aid and business assistance, with health care, education and age pensions at the top of the chart. Respondents expect the budget will most favour business and the well off, and least favour “older Australians” and “you personally”.
• Contrary to expectations earlier in his career, respondents are confident that Malcolm Turnbull can deliver on “tougher citizenship requirements”, “tighter regulations for foreign workers” and “secure borders”, but not a strong economy, jobs and growth, a balanced budget and, most of all “action on climate change”.
In other polling news, there will shortly be a new entrant into the market in the shape of British market behemoth YouGov:
A new nationally representative political poll launches and goes into the field for the first time this week — a partnership between leading international research and polling firm YouGov and Australian engagement and communications agency Fifty Acres.
YouGov is an international online market research firm, headquartered in the UK, with operations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Australia …
The poll will be a fortnightly online survey conducted amongst 1,000 Australians aged 18+. The poll sample is nationally representative with quotas based on age, gender and region.
From previous thread …
dan gulberry @ #619 Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 3:56 pm
Crikey blocks the posting of some links. Try turning your link into a different one using a URL shortener (e.g. https://goo.gl/).
YouGov…doubtless hoping to improve on their dismal recent record by practicing in the greatest democracy on earth…
From the previous thread…
poroti @ #634 Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 4:12 pm
Catmomma tends to redefine the spectrum when convenient
a r Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 4:12 pm
Why buy when you could just get on Facebook and read Turnbull’s verbose rebuttal straight from the horse’s mouth?
Which reminds me. Has anyone checked twitter for Trump’s inevitable rant?
********************************************
Trump seems to be getting a fair bullocking on the Internet for his twisting of history on the Civil War ……. and on the regular newstreams for his ‘support’ of dictatorial thugs like Duterte, Putin etc
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-keeps-praising-international-strongmen-alarming-human-rights-advocates/2017/05/01/6848d018-2e81-11e7-9dec-764dc781686f_story.html?utm_term=.df2b27b54855
Another attempt:
For those who who want to have a bit of fun, create your own fake Trump tweets using this site – https://goo.gl/PtdPXD
YAY!!! It finally worked.
(Thanks P1).
The main thing about Macron is his wish to modernise the French economy wthin the EU framework.
The alternatives want to take France into the Never Never.
Damn! I had the URL wrong on the link shortener site.
Finally here’s a link which should work: https://goo.gl/yvZb9x
(If this doesn’t work, i give up).
briefly @ #7 Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 4:27 pm
Another bloody Blairite…
Phew!!!
It’s fair to say that Macron will meet the same fate as Hollande: he will quickly become a desperately unpopular president who will serve but one term. Macron has the same centrist (i.e. ineffective) policy framework as Hollande. Macron is Hollande with a slimmer waist and a weirder romantic history.
The most interesting political question for France is whether, five years from now, it will be right-wing nationalism or democratic socialism that emerges as the main alternative to neoliberal mythology.
Dan, for reasons unclear to me, your comments have been running foul of my spam filter.
Brexit is about as sensible as a decision as landing the ANZACS on the wrong Turkish beach.
Hollande’s presidency never recovered from the moment he abandoned prior commitments to govern with a social democratic framework, and instead moved sharply towards centrist No Man’s Land. Macron’s policy framework is not substantively different from the one that that doomed Hollande’s effectiveness as president. Any centrist who thinks that a Macron victory will contribute something positive to France’s macroeconomic condition, its social cohesion, and the future of Europe, has not been paying attention to the recent past. More neoliberal reform will not improve matters.
Poroti: “A bit hard to call someone wanting to cut wages and conditions, cut government services, cut public servants and dish out a tax cut to business “centre left .”
Bob Hawke and Paul Keating introduced:
The Accord – which pushed down real wages over time.
The Efficiency Dividend – which led to staffing reductions in government departments for core activities.
Company tax cuts: between 1988 and 1993 Hawke and Keating reduced company taxes from 49 cents in the dollar to 33 cents (although Keating raised them back up to 36 cents in 1995).
Of course it’s all in the context: the downward push on real wages took place in the context of the introduction of Medicare and improved welfare payments; the efficiency dividend was compensated for by the recruitment of more staff to undertake new measures; and the company tax cut reductions were part of a broader tax reform process including the introduction of FBT, CGT, dividend imputation, etc.
Still, if we are to accept that Hawke and Keating were “centre left” (and IMO it would be absurd not to do so), then perhaps we can accept that Macron is also in that category.
Another thing illustrated by my reminiscences of Hawke/Keating is that, as I have pointed out on this forum in the past (to brickbats and catcalls), the Federal ALP of 2017 under Shorten is positioning itself a fair way to the left of where it was in the 1980s: a fact which some might see as a blessing and others (like myself) see as more of a negative.
Letter in The Age.
So, the Crikey Gerbils have been tweaking again?
No dialogue box at the bottom …
I think that only appears once we get on to a second comments page.
william bowe @ #13 Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 4:38 pm
Thanks for that William. Anyway, I got there in the end, so it’s all good.
meher baba
Yes I believe Hawke and Keating saw in the trend where wages/salary as a % of GDP started heading south and company share head north. Pity really.
I’m on the first page and have the dialogue box at the bottom. I am on W10 using chrome Version 58.0.3029.81 with cccp and stfu installed.
Tom.
The EU economic landscape offers advantages of scale, complexity, resilience and diversity that are really without equal. National policies can be so easily adapted to benefit from these characteristics. And yet the Brexiteers, the FrontNational, the Melenchons, Podema, Syriza and, no surprise at all, the Putinists prefer to renounce everything.
It’s easy to see how they delude themselves. The pity is they seek to delude everyone else too.
Hopefully these populist, revisionist temptations will lose their appeal.
So Poroti, you still haven’t told me what Marine Le Pen’s IR policies are. Just more of the same old, same old Macron pizzling.
As I said in the beginning, the French Presidential election is a binary choice. Macron or Le Pen. By voting for Le Pen, or against Macron and thus for Le Pen, as you seem to suggest is the better option (happy to be disabused of that notion), you are therefore voting for Le Pen’s policies.
Could you please let me know what Le Pen’s IR policies are that you seem to favour over Macron’s?
Le Pen is an ardent fan of Trump.
What else do sane french voters need to know?
C@Tmomma
As I said before, keep serving up shit sandwiches to the peasants and expecting them to keep voting for you because the other lot is worse will end badly.
Poroti
Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 4:53 pm
meher baba
Yes I believe Hawke and Keating saw in the trend where wages/salary as a % of GDP started heading south and company share head north. Pity really.
This is a mistaken, partial view. The wages share of the economy was lifted during the period of the Whitlam Government and then really soared during the short-lived mining boom during the Fraser years, a lift driven by an increase in the terms of trade. That boom ended and the inevitable slump followed, inducing the recession of the early 1980s. During the period of the Hawke/Keating government as domestic income adjusted to the decline in the terms of trade the wages share of the economy reverted to its Whitlam-like levels. At the same time, the Labor Government instituted measures that added to the social wage – measures such as universal Super and Medicare. At the same time, the labour force was greatly expanded and unemployment fell from recessionary levels to near-full employment.
The proposition that Hawke-Keating weakened the economic position of workers is utterly false. They rebuilt the institutions of the economy and fashioned it into a system that has lasted for 26 years without a recession.
Poroti,
So I’ll take it as a given that you have nfi what Le Pen’s IR policies are.
I think those here who would advocate a vote for Le Pen, because ‘Not Macron’ are not only falling for the well-laid plans of a man much smarter than any of them will ever be, Vladimir Putin, but are marching under a banner which reads, ‘Into the Valley of Death went the Marching Morons’.
I’m sure Vladimir can’t believe how easily his propaganda has worked against the Left by having some think they were purer than others and so using that as common cause to vote for the candidate who ISN’T from the Left!
Briefly
I did not say they did. I had just noted on graphs that that was when the decline showed up. Having 2 big global financial dives in the decade hardly made life easy for them
Re early 80s recession. Hard to imagine what would happen these days if the Howard trifecta struck. now 10%+ unemployment/interest rates/inflation.
Lizzie, that letter is genuinely shocking.
If elected Le Pen will begin an immediate and comprehensive program of, literally, punishing arabs and jews.
Announced measures will include differential access to social security and stripping french born and bred muslims from citizenship.
I posted earlier that the MSM and others will be wetting themselves over the education funding announcement by Turnbull today with David Gonski standing next to him.
I have huge doubts about whether people will give a “Gonski ” about the optics. All parents care about is a good education for their children.
Before anyone can call today a master stroke by Turnbull the reactions of states, unions and the independent sector to the detail need to be forthcoming.
If they are scathing then it will not matter who Turnbull had standing next to him. The liberals are already on shaky ground regarding education and if today’s presser is exposed for nothing more than smoke and mirrors then game over.
The Ne t day or two will be very interesting after stakeholders do the numbers on all this.
It should also be noted that Turnbull intends to legislate these changes which, I believe, means he does not need the agreement of states and the independent sector. Very telling I thought.
Anyway, time will tell.
Cheers.
D
Bottom line is that they committed to the full Gonski while going to an election and now they are resiling from the full Gonski.
Smoke and mirrors will be applied but the difference between what the full Gonski would have cost and what they are proposing to pay over the next decade is the Coalition betrayal difference.
Lizzie
That letter needs attention and quickly she needs to see her local State member .
Will YouGov be as lousy as Ipsos?
C@Tmomma
I am sure they are rubbish. But how many iterations of people being expected to vote for the less terrible do you think there will be before people say “Fark You !” Basta !. Each time it happens makes extreme politics more likely to pop up and it sure as hell won’t reinforce people’s faith in democracy.
‘YouGov…doubtless hoping to improve on their dismal recent record by practicing in the greatest democracy on earth…’
Where’s that? Tell me about it.
Nicholas
Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 4:34 pm
It’s fair to say that Macron will meet the same fate as Hollande…
It’s even fairer to say this completely misunderstands the origins of economic weakness in Europe, weakness that has not yet fully passed.
Weakness in the EU has been of a piece with the same trends that have been observable elsewhere in the global economy and with which we are very familiar – the collapse of growth in world trade, the deceleration in trans-border direct investment, the decline in the growth rate of labour productivity, the stagnation in real wages and in labour demand, monetary and fiscal repression, the demographics of labour force stagnation, the increase in the inequality of income distribution, the deflationary impulse released by the GFC, the rise of protectionist pressures and the forced contraction of the EU banking system…
Some of these are receding and some are still retarding the global economy. It’s possible the business cycle will deliver yet another downturn. It is in any case completely simplistic to attribute all these different tendencies to just one thing…whether to neo liberalism or neo imperialism or any other single cause.
In the case of France, if French policy is directed towards taking advantage of their opportunities, they can lift their performance. They could, for example, take note of the revival of the Spanish economy…
A clear statement of the current energy reality. (We don’t need to wait 15 years – or even a few months to find this out.)
AGL kills idea of gas as transition fuel: wind, solar + storage cheaper
http://reneweconomy.com.au/agl-kills-idea-of-gas-as-transition-fuel-wind-solar-storage-cheaper-63013/
The french extreme Right has had a deep and long-term love affair with racism. It is utterly incapable of envisioning a France in which muslims can be french regardless of any other considerations whatsoever.
It is a by-definition thing.
This means that four-five million french residents/citoyen would have no recourse under Le Pen.
Under Le Pen they will become immediate targets for citizenship stripping and stripping of access to social security, education and health services.
They would become, literally, become non people.
I would have thought that Melanchon, and any other people from the Left, would simply state that there can be no justice for anyone in France if there is no justice for French muslims.
But, no, the French Left appear to belong to the Sanders/Di Natale/Nader/Corbyn school of at best, simply vacating the field to governments with racism/fascism at their core and, at worst, behaving in political ways that favor the racist fascists.
Poroti, you seem to think that electing Macron will eventuate in a far right government. So your solution is to elect a hard right government ?
TS
But… AGL is not disinterested. It benefits tremendously from being a large owner of a limited ‘immediately available’ gas fired capacity.
Lizzie
That letter from the old lady was disgusting, but now it has gone public I am sure it will be sorted out.
This government needs this type of ‘advertising” like a hole in the head.
boerwar @ #34 Tuesday, May 2, 2017 at 5:27 pm
Should be easy for Bill Shorten to win this policy debate, right…. ?
Boerwar
AGL is also reinventing its image. Changed the logo the other day – always an important step in reinventing oneself.
But AGL is not the only energy provider making similar statements and moves.
poroti @ #37 Tuesday, May 2nd, 2017 – 5:30 pm
Hopefully more iterations than it will take for people to realize that democracy only gives back whatever you put into it. If you think both options suck, then the way to fix that is by putting up a better option next time and then doing the work required to convince people to vote for it.
Voting for the most bad option out of spite for the system solves zero problems and creates many new ones. To the extent that people are stupid enough to do that anyways, maybe they deserve what they get.
Meher Baba, from previous thread. First time offenders should only get a lighter sentence if they spill the beans on everyone else involved.
TS
Yep.
Boerwar
The right probably still mourn the loss of Algeria and think they did not go in hard enough.