BludgerTrack: 52.4-47.6 to Labor

Poll aggregation records a slight trend in favour of the Coalition ahead of Tuesday’s budget.

Before we proceed, please note posts below on British and French elections, and a bumper post on Tasmania that encompasses newly published federal and state electorate boundaries, today’s three elections for seats in the state’s upper house, and a state poll result that provides good news for the new Labor leader, Rebecca White.

The only new addition to the BludgerTrack aggregate this week is the usual weekly Essential Research result, an all too common state of affairs in Newspoll’s off weeks that should finally be rectified with YouGov’s imminent entry to the Australian polling caper. The trendline is now doing something it hasn’t done since the election – bending back slightly in favour of the Coalition. The Coalition have also picked up two this week on the seat projection, one apiece in Victoria and South Australia. The other trend worth noting is that One Nation are down for the seventh week in a row. Nothing new this week on leadership ratings.

I’ve had two paywalled articles this week in Crikey, which is well worth your subscriber dollars if the state of the Australian news media is of concern to you, as it should be. One of these tackled Peta Credlin’s revisionism concerning the electoral gender gap:

In defiance of the conventional wisdom, Credlin sought not just to dispel the “myth” of the Tony Abbott “woman problem”, but also to argue that the charge could more properly be levelled at his successor. The implications of Credlin’s claim run well beyond the small matter of the Turnbull-Abbott rivalry, as gender has been the most volatile demographic element in the federal electoral equation since the knives came out for Kevin Rudd on June 23, 2010.

The other considered One Nation’s recent fadeout and its implications for the looming Queensland state election:

The One Nation renaissance is once again inviting comparisons to Groundhog Day, as the party faces the possibility of deregistration in Queensland over irregularities in its legal structure. The latest development adds to an accumulation of bad news not just for One Nation, but also for Queensland’s Liberal National Party opposition, which has been hoping that One Nation will provide the key to a quick return to office after its shock defeat in January 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.

1,881 comments on “BludgerTrack: 52.4-47.6 to Labor”

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  1. OK. Time to start selecting words/phrases for the Budget Night drinking game card. Kicking off with a slack “international headwinds” .

  2. Simon Katich

    “Initial studies have shown that taking a poo sample from a person with a healthy gut, freezing it and forming it into a pill and getting a person with IBS to ingest it helps reduce their symptoms”

    I don’t think that will convince my friends, let alone me.

    Good luck with it, though.

  3. Vic

    Don’t get me wrong, I find Trump the most despicable person to ever be POTUS.

    I can’t even bear looking at his mouth; it’s vomit-inducing, but you’re wasting your time with him.

    He’ll still be there, four years hence, I’d rather you put your forensic skills to something closer to home.

  4. Kezza2,
    Hope it was a King Island cock. And you paid top price. And you baked home grown taties, and, kneaded coeliac-free pastry, with your funny fetta (imported from Greece).

    Or what?

    Why do we compete with bullshit menus? Like it’s important?

    * Coles Free Range Roast Chook (anyway, the females are better than the cocks. They are all stringy and bitter 😉 )

    * Coles Aussie Fetta

    * Coles spuds

    * Sweet Potato from the Fruit and Veg shop

    * Coles carrots

    * Rose onions

    * Coles Frozen Short Crust pastry

    (And I forgot the pumpkin, for which I will be burnt at the stake, until I look like a steak, and then be eaten by my son when he gets home from Uni). 🙂

    Don’t worry, I am unlike the couple I visited yesterday who were feeding their 9 month old Organic veggies, from the local Co Op, for lunch, which he promptly ate half of and then threw the rest down on the ground for their dog.

  5. Poroti,
    OK. Time to start selecting words/phrases for the Budget Night drinking game card.

    I don’t want to get jiggered, but here goes, my word is ‘Fair’.

    Because that’s the one word people strangely don’t seem to be associating with the Coalition these days, so I expect it to be as overworked as a bride getting ready for her wedding day dress squeeze ritual.

  6. Ted Lieu‏Verified account @tedlieu 4h4 hours ago
    More
    James Clapper statement he wasn’t told of FBI Counterintelligence investigation suggests some Trump folks should be very scared right now.

  7. Good afternoon all,

    I posted earlier today that once government school principals started doing the math of the fund g figures delivered to them from the government funding calculator then the whole ” who gives a Gonski” will really get going.

    The whole focus until today has been on the Catholic sector because it is a centralised system and the various Catholic education commissions have already calculated the hits got the s hooks under their control. Now the figures for individual state schools across the country are available courtesy of the federal government the mouse will ramp up.

    The funding calculator may gave seemed like a good idea at the time but as other posters have pointed out it is really easy to do comparisons between schools in different sectors and states and serious concerns and questions will now arise.

    Cheers.

  8. Dan Gulberry, the conversation just evolved that way, dare I say, it grew organically

    PS think on the bright side, I’m sure there’s currently a heap of journalists wishing they could be talking about food and poo on PB rather than being locked in a room with ScoMo for fudget lockup

  9. Please excuse my spelling and grammar.

    I have the iPad shakes. Hope some of my last post makes sense.

    Cheers.

  10. And, in Budget News, just for Dan 🙂
    Sky News Australia‏Verified account @SkyNewsAust 7m7 minutes ago
    .@_leo_s: The government is considering a levy on the big banks which will target institutional lending #Budget2017 http://bit.ly/2pppLdC

    Just to prove that the Turnbull government can be mean to Banks!

  11. C@Tmomma

    So massive cuts to the poor and maybe 1-2 small taxes for the rich, a very typical bad budget from LNP!

  12. Poroti, this probably won’t feature in the budget speech but if you stumble across academic language keep your eye cocked for “dispositions”. As in “The Conference invites explorations of the dispositions of law and jurisprudence, and how these relate to dissents, resistance and transformation.” I have acquired some skill in translating postmod-ish into plain language, but I’m not at all sure I know what that’s about. A special prize for the Minister who’s the first to use “dispositions” in Parlyament.

  13. Kez – I dont have IBS. I ate a lot of dirt as a child. And it was a long ways to the doctor so ear aches etc tended to get treated with a dash of whisk(e)y – not antibiotics.

    A dash of whiskey may be just the treatment for tonight. I am not nominating “Families” for the game. How about “fair” or “when they (ALP/those opposite/the opposition) were in power…”.

  14. poroti @ #1515 Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 3:56 pm

    Jack A Randa
    It will be double drink if ScoMoo manages to find a “disposition”.

    My words for those wishing to become extremely inebriated are

    opportunity, security and fairness.

    Actually I cheated.

    Malcolm Turnbull sought to reinforce the Coalition’s central theme for the 2017 budget: “opportunity, security and fairness”</p

    From the Guardian blog.

  15. Atlassian founder Scott Farquhar (he just paid north on $70m for ‘Elaine’, the old Fairfax house on the harbour) speaking in Barcelona:

    the government needed to change the impression Australia was giving to tech experts from around the world, at a time when many were looking for new options after becoming disillusioned by the political landscape in the United States.

    “If I had my way we would want to increase immigration versus decreasing it, because if you look at Silicon Valley, a huge percentage of the best companies that have grown and created lots of jobs were built by immigrants.”

    With the current political situation in the States, a lot of people from all around the world, the best and brightest, are asking themselves where else they can go to further their career … it could be anywhere in Australia if we had the right immigration policies around that.

    We’ve got a thousand people in Sydney, and the biggest thing constraining our growth is finding those senior managers, who have led around 150 engineers, there’s just not many of them there, or they’re the ones we’ve already trained at Atlassian.”

    Fin Review:
    /technology/atlassian-founder-wants-an-open-australia-to-grow-more-tech-giants-20170507-gvzp8v

  16. JTI has a look at the “news” reporters.

    TV news isn’t fake but often isn’t news, either

    There it was yesterday. A plethora of Australian journos standing mic in hand in front of the Champs Élysées or the Eiffel Tower reporting on the French presidential election.

    The trouble was what they were doing was not reporting. Or to be more precise, they started with a little reporting and then moved quickly on to speculation and opinion.
    Welcome to Australian media’s version of the Kon Tiki tour……………………When you get there, don’t worry so much about factual reporting. Tell us what you reckon.

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/blogs/jack-the-insider-tv-news-isnt-fake-but-too-often-it-isnt-news-either/news-story/ec186202065a4ba8e421033334da0c16

  17. AshGhebranious‏ @AshGhebranious · 1h1 hour ago

    Look at that. Apparently throwing money at schools does nothing, but increasing the funding of incompetent police stops crime #qt

  18. Buzzfeed has thoughtfully put out a Budget Bingo card for tonight:

    ROFLMAO
    Square 2 – Leigh Sales is called a Liberal stooge on Twitter
    Square 4 – Leigh Sales is called a Labor stooge on Twitter

  19. Chinda63
    Thanks for the research on the funding of Our Lady of Good Fortune. Clearly those gospel reported instructions from Jesus to “Give unto Caeser what belongs to Caeser” do not carry much weight since the collapse of the Roman Empire!

  20. An explosive factual account by Barrie Cassidy of the incident on Manus Is on Good Friday:

    TOM IN OZ‏ @SirThomasWynne 10h10 hours ago
    ABC’s Barrie Cassidy has information that disputes Peter Dutton’s account of the disturbance at Manus Is.

    #auspol pic.twitter.com/y0zJ7nfGJc

    Peter Dutton should go today!

  21. You get a triple shot of whatever you are drinking if Turnbull starts with, ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your fears.’

  22. Fairfax CEO Greg Hyland got paid $7.2 million in 2015/16! Imagine how much he would have earned if his company had made a profit!
    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/09/fairfax-boss-greg-hywood-paid-more-2016

    The Fairfax board really knows how to drive a hard bargain. No wonder they are sacking 150 editorial staff. Yet this bit is a little odd?
    “But while Hywood had been issued 8m options under the incentive package – which was linked to achieving 15% cost reductions in the company – there were another 8m options not issued, but which Hywood had the right to.”

    Why link a huge “performance bonus” to a metric like cutting costs? Isn’t corporate performance based on improving returns to shareholders? What if revenue falls by more than 15%? Who wrote this contract? Hyland’s mum?

  23. That schools comparison app is going to cause angst in the lunchbox brigade. It should cost them somewhat. Whose idea was that, a Labor plant or a Liberal geranium?

  24. Without going into The Greens party shenanigans, I find De Natale a hopeless hypocrite. My judgement may be a bit harsh.

  25. Puffy
    I’m drinking on “We ALL have to make sacrifices” (both poor and unemployed alike). I expect to be smashed by 8pm.

    Here is the Morrison budget key points from last time:
    1. First, by sticking to our plan for jobs and growth.
    2. Second, by fixing specific problems in our tax system so we can sustainably cover the Government’s responsibilities for the next generation.
    3. And third, by continuing to ensure the Government lives within its means, to balance the budget and reduce the burden of long term debt.
    https://www.liberal.org.au/latest-news/2016/05/03/budget-speech-2016-17

    So how did that all go, Scott? So well, that it is time to move onto a new plan! 🙂

  26. chinda63 Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 2:48 pm
    “Across both governments, plus fees charged, Our Lady of Hope is funded to the tune of $11,955 per student.”

    Chinda63 what is the difference when you take fees charged out? i.e. what is the difference in total government funding per student?

  27. briefly

    “Oh….as well the SNP will have to parlay with an ascendant Tory party…tough luck for Scottish self-determination i spose…”

    Haha… oh yes…. the SNP will go to the election with a clear policy of a referrendum on independence in the context of Brexit. A majority win by the SNP will be a clear mandate from the Scottish people for said referrendum.

    As far as the SNP is concerned that is an open and shut case.

    If the Westmonster politicians refused to accept the will of the Scottish people then a number of options are open.
    One could be to hold a vote without the approval of Westminster.
    Or dissolve Holyrood and hold a Scottish election expressly on the issue of Westmonster opposition to democracy and independence and if the SNP won declare UDI.
    I do not know whether there is a role for the European Courts in this also.

    It would be a fascinating struggle.

    I think Scottish independence is now inevitable. Even some unionists admit that.

  28. Also dredging up the past, I went back to Turnbull’s 2009 budge reply speech. Who can forget this:
    “Mr Turnbull attacked Labor for its “colossal figure” of $188 billion in net debt saying it was twice as much as the amount left by the Keating government and two-thirds of it was due to a profligate spending spree.”
    http://www.smh.com.au/national/turnbull-to-block-key-budget-measure-20090514-b4pc.html

    Debt mountains! By Gillard’s time it had become a “debt tsunami”. Abbott grew it even further. Now that debt under Turnbull has grown to more than $350 billion, double Rudd’s $188 billion, what do you call it? A debt black hole? Debt avalanche? Or good debt?

  29. socrates @ #1541 Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 4:57 pm

    Debt mountains! By Gillard’s time it had become a “debt tsunami”. Abbott grew it even further. Now that debt under Turnbull has grown to more than $350 billion, double Rudd’s $188 billion, what do you call it? A debt black hole? Debt avalanche? Or good debt?

    A “reverse investment”?

  30. Well, here’s a first for the Greens and I certainly won’t be criticising it. 🙂

    Greens senator, Larissa Waters, has breastfed her daughter, Alia Joy, in the senate chamber. It’s the first time in the senate’s history that’s occurred, and it’s sparked congratulations from Waters’ colleagues.

    From the Guardian blog.

  31. what do you call it?

    Well, the $188 billion left by Rudd is bad debt.
    The remaining $180 billion or so (and growing) accumulated since then is good debt except for that which they can blame on Labor.

  32. What’s this about? Labor supporting Adani???

    Larissa Waters‏Verified account @larissawaters · 34m34 minutes ago
    So sad to see Labor lining up with LNP in the Senate to champion the #Adani mine. It’s like they think there is no other job except in coal.

  33. Steve
    Yes I think “Good debt” is what it will be called… a tsunami of good debt. I would be tempted to cal it “hypocratised debt”.

    To my pleasant surprise the government might actually be funding some of the desperately needed rail upgrades in capital cities rather than yet more freeways.
    “ABC News can reveal a multi-billion suburban rail package will be unveiled as part of tonight’s federal #budget, along with inland rail”
    https://twitter.com/AndrewBGreene/status/861838152176029697?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.abc.net.au%2Fnews%2Fstory-streams%2Ffederal-budget-2017%2F2017-05-09%2Ffederal-budget-2017-live-blog%2F8507424

  34. lizzie @ #1545 Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 5:20 pm

    What’s this about? Labor supporting Adani???

    Larissa Waters‏Verified account @larissawaters · 34m34 minutes ago
    So sad to see Labor lining up with LNP in the Senate to champion the #Adani mine. It’s like they think there is no other job except in coal.

    Queensland has votes to get !

    If it’s not dirty coal mines, it’s dogwhistles…. whatever it takes !!

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