Newspoll and Ipsos: 53-47 to Labor

Two more pollsters add to an impression of little immediate change on voting intention in the wake of last week’s budget.

Two more sets of post-voting intention budget numbers, though nothing yet on their regular questions on response to the budget:

• Newspoll moves slightly in favour of Labor, who now lead 53-47 after dropping back to 52-48 in the previous poll three weeks ago. Both parties are on 36% of the primary vote, with the Coalition steady and Labor up a point, with the Greens up one to 10% and One Nation down one to 9%. The report states that Malcolm Turnbull’s net approval has improved from minus 25% to minus 20%, while Bill Shorten’s is down from minus 22% to minus 20%, although approval and disapproval ratings are not provided. Turnbull’s lead as preferred prime minister has widened from 42-33 to 44-31. The poll was conducted Thursday to Sunday from a sample of 1716.

• The post-budget Ipsos poll for the Fairfax papers, conducted Wednesday to Thursday from a sample of 1401, has Labor leading 53-47, down from 55-45 in the previous poll in late March. On the primary vote, the Coalition is up four to 37%, Labor down one to 35%, and the Greens down three from a hard-to-credit result last time to record 13%. Both leaders have improved substantially on person ratings, with Malcolm Turnbull up five on approval to 45% and down four to 44% – the first net positive result we’ve seen for either leader in a long time – and Bill Shorten up seven to 42% and down six to 47%. The preferred prime minister shifts from 45-33 to 47-35. Newspoll hopefully to follow.

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.

1,160 comments on “Newspoll and Ipsos: 53-47 to Labor”

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  1. dingbat the first @ #994 Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 7:12 pm

    What i also find interesting is those who attack P1 in the energy bleh very rarely refer to emissions in their arguments, always citing technology and economics and price.

    Yes, I have made the same point on several occasions.

    Odd, isn’t it?

  2. The Jervis Bay nuclear power plant wasn’t abandoned because of public sentiment. It was abandoned because of expense – it was going to cost far more than a comparable coal fired power station. THEN natural gas and oil were discovered in Bass Strait, and it was game over.

  3. BW,
    Shorten is out and about looking for a puppy to massacre as we post.

    😀

    Yeah. Nah. Bill is too smart for necromancy. He might buy Chloe a new puppy though. 😉

  4. Mark Kenny eternally optimistic that his man Malcolm will come out on top:

    Budget fails to propel Turnbull, but it may yet pay off (Fairfax headline – I’ll leave to someone else to read Kenny’s pearls of wisdom).

  5. I see no one is mentioning how much water Nuclear Power Plants need and how little the Driest Continent on the planet has. Not to mention how Nuclear Power Plants need to be located where the best and most expensive property is.

  6. Ta, Corio at 7.11 pm.
    Certainly a pattern. Similar garbage being spread here by Murdoch journalists about Julia Gillard winning a Mercedes in the Beyond Blue raffle. I guess Brian Trumble will call a royal commission into the ‘Mercedes Win’ next, with Bronnie presiding.

  7. Z
    Much to the benefit of the Green and Gold Bell Frog which has a colony in the swampy lowlands created by the excavations done to flatten the site. Plus it makes a fine car/boat trailer carpark. The spoil was used for local roadworks and the like.
    Waste not want not.

  8. zoomster @ #1002 Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 7:20 pm

    The Jervis Bay nuclear power plant wasn’t abandoned because of public sentiment. It was abandoned because of expense – it was going to cost far more than a comparable coal fired power station. THEN natural gas and oil were discovered in Bass Strait, and it was game over.

    So you propose we try again? And do you think the public would be in favor of that?

  9. The Jervis Bay Proposal was abandoned in 1971. Anti nuclear sentiment for the subsequent 40 years ensured we never developed any interest in developing nuclear energy technologies, skills or capabilities. Cheap coal also played a significnat part.

  10. c@tmomma @ #1005 Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 7:24 pm

    I see no one is mentioning how much water Nuclear Power Plants need and how little the Driest Continent on the planet has. Not to mention how Nuclear Power Plants need to be located where the best and most expensive property is.

    I can solve all those problems. Mal could contribute his Point Piper mansion!

  11. P1

    No. I was just pointing out that you were wrong to blame public sentiment for the lack of nuclear power in Australia. As has been pointed out to you before (almost endlessly) it simply wasn’t economic. And it still isn’t.

  12. Nuclear ? Pig Iron Bob hoped to become Megaton Menzies in the good old days.
    .
    “Revealed: Australia’s Failed Bid for Nuclear Weapons

    At 9:00 in the morning on Oct. 3, 1952, a 25-kiloton nuclear explosion vaporized the retired British frigate HMS Plym off Australia’s remote western coast. The Operation Hurricane detonation in the Monte Bello Islands was a seminal moment for Britain and marked its return to the club of great powers.

    But for Australia, these tests and others served a murkier purpose – as important and deliberate steps toward Australia’s own acquisition of nuclear weapons.

    It was in the tense Cold War environment of the late 1950s and early 1960s that these aspirations moved beyond talk and into concrete action.”
    http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/revealed-australias-failed-bid-nuclear-weapons-13857

  13. I don’t know anything about the story about Gillard, but if she ever got anything when she was PM, she usually donated it elsewhere … I used to read he disclosures at times and compared to the Libs, her declarations were frugally frugal.

  14. zoomster @ #1012 Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 7:29 pm

    No. I was just pointing out that you were wrong to blame public sentiment for the lack of nuclear power in Australia. As has been pointed out to you before (almost endlessly) it simply wasn’t economic. And it still isn’t.

    The Jervis Bay reactor never proceeded for several reasons – public sentiment was a factor:
    From http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/20050822_nuclear/nuclear-chronology.htm

    1969:
    Plans for a nuclear reactor at Jervis Bay, NSW, are approved. It is proposed as a power plant but by the late 1960s there is a considerable drive for Australia to become a fully fledged nuclear power, with many nuclear reactors and weapons-producing capability.

    1971:
    Growing anti-nuclear demonstrations and the possibility of Australia producing nuclear weapons sink the project.

    Public sentiment is one of the main reasons the idea of nuclear power was never revived.

    I still don’t understand what the point of this discussion is.

  15. “Hollande clapped a 100% tax on income about $1 million per annum.
    The stampede to get out of France was something to behold.
    He was forced to backtrack to something a bit more sensible.”

    So who exactly left France? Rich people often make such threats, but rarely carry them out. Look at the highest taxing countries on earth – Norway, Sweden and Denmarck – you don’t see a rush of people to leave. People seem to accept high taxes if they get excellent social services. Combine high taxes with waste and corruption and its a different story.

  16. For what it’s worth, I think that Labor should wave through the Medicare increase after a suitable amount of grumbling, drawing attention to the contrast with cuts to Corporate Tax and also after extracting a couple of concessions. It will put the NDIS on as secure a footing as it can be while he Coalition is in power. It would even help tie the Coalition committed to Medicare, in which they don’t really believe. In any case, a future Labor Government will need the revenue and it will never be able to increase any revenue measures without an almighty shitfight, no matter how strong the case might be. For example, if the increase doesn’t get through now, a future Coalition Opposition will oppose it.

    Of course, it would be better if the Greens and a couple of backbenchers could support it any allow Labor to remain pure, but they never do what you want them to.

  17. ‘ In June 1971, a Cabinet submission noted that the cost had escalated to $208 million and that the government would need to subsidise the station by $6 million a year. The submission also noted that Cabinet’s original decision to approve the station was based on national considerations, not economic ones. Given that a coal-operated station would only cost $87 million to construct, Cabinet decided to defer the matter for 12 months’

    http://guides.naa.gov.au/records-about-act/part1/chapter5/5.7.aspx

    Nuclear wasn’t an economic option then, and it isn’t now.

  18. Steve
    Maybe Labor should just vote according to its own policies. That would easily allow voting to support tax funding for the NDIS, and vote against the corporate tax cuts. Its a dirty trick, consistency.

  19. Let’s get something straight.
    THE MEDICARE LEVY INCREASE S NOT FOR THE NDIS. THEMONEY GOES INTO CONSOLIDATED REVENUE.
    Has Fizza mentioned a special fund to hold the increased levy just for NDIS, e.g the Future Fund? ***crickets

  20. poroti @ #1014 Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 7:33 pm

    Nuclear ? Pig Iron Bob hoped to become Megaton Menzies in the good old days.
    .
    “Revealed: Australia’s Failed Bid for Nuclear Weapons
    At 9:00 in the morning on Oct. 3, 1952, a 25-kiloton nuclear explosion vaporized the retired British frigate HMS Plym off Australia’s remote western coast. The Operation Hurricane detonation in the Monte Bello Islands was a seminal moment for Britain and marked its return to the club of great powers.
    But for Australia, these tests and others served a murkier purpose – as important and deliberate steps toward Australia’s own acquisition of nuclear weapons.
    It was in the tense Cold War environment of the late 1950s and early 1960s that these aspirations moved beyond talk and into concrete action.”
    http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/revealed-australias-failed-bid-nuclear-weapons-13857

    The last place I lived in the UK was Burghfield Village, a village just out of Reading.

    Only a couple of miles from my pub was the storage and assembly site for the UK’s nuclear programme. It was a fairly innocuous site with most of it in underground bunkers but the security fence and guard posts at the gates let you know what it was.

    It certainly gave me a strange feeling when I first moved in and found out.

  21. “Maybe Labor should just vote according to its own policies. That would easily allow voting to support tax funding for the NDIS, and vote against the corporate tax cuts. Its a dirty trick, consistency.”

    Exactly, while not buying into the lie that the NDIS under Labor wasn’t ‘fully funded’.

    Incidentally good interview on 7.30 with Ken Henry. He is none too happy with this government.

  22. Zoom
    I increasingly agree with you on the (non) economics of nuclear. I have been following the promises for Gen III reactors for years, and they are not panning out. Gen II are safe but expensive. Gen I are unsafe and expensive, and should all be shut down. I have no problem with SA having an export and waste storage industry for existing reactors, but beyond that we should avoid it. A fixed grid, widespread solar panels and wind farms make much more sense, and are now economic too.

  23. Socrates
    (a) If you are correct, Hollande buckled on the million euro plus tax for no particular reason. He didn’t. His back down was evidence-based.
    (b) You are comparing unlike with like comparing the Hollande tax and the Scandinavian tax.
    The Hollande tax was 100%. Total. The Scandinavian tax is not.

  24. I always thought Aus didn’t end up going nuclear because we didn’t want our really big neighbor to go nuclear

  25. I always thought the Jervis Bay nuclear plant was dumped by Whitlam (along with proposals to industrialise the whole bay with the likes of aluminium smelters) because the natural environment was considered to be more beneficial to the future public interest. Hard to believe it was even considered.

  26. Then we have nuclear fusion. We were told in Science classes when I was in school (1960s) that fusion reactors were about 30 years away. Fifty years later and they’re still 30 years away.

  27. Boerwar
    I was making a general point in the comparison. Of course I do agree a 100% tax rate is too high. But I asked a serious question on Hollande and the 100% tax rate furore. How many people actually left France in the stampede? Not many, I’ll wager.

  28. S777
    So near and yet so far.
    Incidentally one of the standard techniques of the Do Nothings when talking about responses to global warming is to start talking about nuclear power.
    I believe the reason is that the Denialists belief that suggesting nuclear poer is that beautiful thing: a wedge.

  29. Renewables are the fastest way to bring 1 coal plant worth of power online. An EIS does not change this.

    VE, this is exactly where P1’s grasp of facts is lacking.

  30. Nuclear power was the 1950’s fantasy of the future, along with cities on the moon. I have nothing against it philosophically, but the cost/benefit is never going to stack up in Australia, or in very many other places in the future. Public sentiment is definitely a factor, as it is with all major policies.

    This is just a bit of amusement:

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

  31. S
    I don’t believe that anyone actually counted them but Hollande’s retreat tells us something: it was significant.
    Part of the cost was political. Depardieu translocated to Moscow in a dudgeon and started bombarding Hollande with very public excoriations.

  32. Public sentiment is one of the main reasons the idea of nuclear power was never revived.

    I still don’t understand what the point of this discussion is.

    The point of this discussion P1 is that you cannot learn. You’re stuck in the past.

    Yes, public sentiment was a major factor in opposition to nuclear power in Australia in the past. But public sentiment is now irrelevant. What has changed (and you are incapable of accepting) is that nuclear has gotten more expensive whereas renewables have gotten a lot cheaper.

  33. So? Economics was not the driving force in the original decision. It wasn’t then and it wouldn’t be now.

    This is the kind of intellectual dishonesty that everyone hates about you P1.

  34. Steve777
    Been waiting for the promised “paperless office” that was due within a couple of years since about 1981 😆

  35. It has just come to me. The sure-fire formula for Shorten becoming PM. He needs to go to Rottie and kick a Quokka to death.
    Bound to work.

  36. Has Labor explained why not upping the Medicare tax on lower income brackets will yield more revenue in the medium term?

  37. As I recall, the McMahon Government abandoned the Jervis Bay reactor on economic grounds in 1971. I recall being vaguel disappointed. There was no big reaction one way or the other, the environmental movement was in its infancy, at least as far as public awareness went. It was the tail end of the ‘Our Friend the Atom*’ view of science and nuclear energy.

    * A ‘Tomorrow Land’ episode of Disneyland

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