No change on voting intention from Essential Research this week, at all – Labor leads 54-46, from primary votes of Coalition 37%, Labor 38%, Greens 10% and One Nation 6%. Nonetheless, there is a net positive response for the budget, which records 41% approval and 33% disapproval, and for each of eight individual measures, ranging from 82-7 in favour of a levy on vacant properties owned by foreign investors to 49-39 for the Medicare levy increase. However, 56% felt the increase should be higher for high income earners, as per Labor policy, with 27% favouring a flat increase (though no allowance was made for those who didn’t think it should happen at all). For all the “Labor lite” talk, the Liberal Party’s reputation dies hard, with the budget rated best for “people who are well off” and “Australian business”, and worst for “you personally” and, suggesting at least some insight as to what the budget specifically contained, university students. On the question of preferred Treasurer, Scott Morrison (26%) and Chris Bowen (22%) ran a distant third behind “don’t know”.
I see wrecks the troll is back at it.
Tom.
My post above should read a top marginal rate of 49%, not 48.5%, my apologies everyone.
john boy @ #1146 Friday, May 19, 2017 at 6:05 pm
I don’t hate Bill Shorten. I think he was a competent minister in the right portfolio.
He’s just not a competent party leader though, as many polling respondents agree.
Boerwar
So water will be no problem then ?
rex douglas @ #1100 Friday, May 19, 2017 at 4:46 pm
Shorten is on track to win 100+ seats in the HOR, and will get very close to control of the Senate. He’ll be as close as you can get to Labor leader for life with that achievement.
So Grimace at $6 million you loose half your salary to tax.
That’s why I never became a star NBA point guard.
You would play one game for yourself and one for Morrison.
rex douglas @ #1153 Friday, May 19, 2017 at 6:15 pm
Name them.
Australia would be better placed than most of the world in the face of a 4 to 5 degree warming. We could also cope with a sea level rise of a metre or two, although both would cause major economic pain. Imagine the shrieks of agony when anyone suggests we, say, abolish negative gearing, imagine that it was actually true and multiply by 10 ^ N.
Other countries (e.g the in the Sahel region, Bangladesh) can’t build a network of vast greenhouses, move to follow the rain or move cities built on river deltas inland and they will go under, literally and metaphorically. And they are on the same planet as Australia, Australia will be sucked into the consequences.
player one @ #1157 Friday, May 19, 2017 at 6:19 pm
who ?
steve777 @ #1158 Friday, May 19, 2017 at 6:21 pm
You’re assuming the rest of the world would leave us alone to cope.
Seems doubtful.
Poroti
The hotter it gets the cheaper it will get to get it from the sea. The beauty of closed systems is that you use only a minor fraction for each cropping event.
The rest gets recycled.
It is exactly the opposite to current broadacre irrigation across most of Oz ag where you use it only once and the percentage lost to evaporation, transpiration and percolation is humungous.
You’re assuming the rest of the world would leave us alone to cope.
They won’t. If I gave the impression that I thought they would I wasn’t being clear enough.
The SA operation converts around 450 megs a year. Actual rainfall in the area is immaterial.
William
Are you going to do a bludgertrack update soon?
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australias-two-new-15-billion-warships-may-have-design-flaws-navy-chiefs-reveal-20170519-gw8vmd.html
Rex
Change the subject, your damn annoying.
That 450 megs produces around 15,000 tonnes of tomatoes a year.
Boerwar
The technical ability to produce food is not the issue.
Bludger Track shouldn’t move much at all from recent polls.
Hope that small move is up for Team Red though.
JOHN BOY
Yes, I’m not expecting a great deal of change in bludgertrack, but interested to see the trend, for which bludgertrack is invaluable.
Ditto Monica.
S777
There is no doubt at all that sea level rise is going to have humungous impacts in terms of forcing populations to shift all over the globe.
The harbingers are here.
This will certainly be impacts on Australia as a result of the desperate hordes arriving.
(Miami is spending $400 million on walls and pumping stations as we post).
The Sahel is practically a goner already.
OTOH, many coastal areas will have the climate to use solar to generate water and power to run intensive food growing plants.
Inland areas will have options around pumping salt water in and partly desalinized water back out. This will cost more but all current ag systems have disparities in their cost bases.
I remain somewhat unconvinced about the billions starving scenario.
I anticipate my descendants grumbling about their forebears as they lip their gruel burgers.
I guess what I am saying is that food growing will happen in factories, not farms, and will require infinitely less land than is required ATM – and that food as we know it will be as far distant in human history as folk cracking mammoth bones with large rocks for marrow bones.
‘Trog Sorrenson
Friday, May 19, 2017 at 6:48 pm
Boerwar
The technical ability to produce food is not the issue.’
I am mystified by this statement.
IMO, technical ability is ALWAYS part of ag investment productivity.
Boerwar
The starving will happen because the tech will likely not be ready or widely available enough or affordable enough.
So cheers have a round of Soylent Green 😉
Looks like A Current Affair was too busy scaring deplorables about Muslim women using public swimming pools to get the scoop on the ATO scam
http://www.smh.com.au/business/steve-barrett-spoke-to-a-current-affair-about-ato-tax-fraud-scoop-amid-arrests-20170519-gw8qr4.html
Boerwar
Technical does not imply practical for those without resources. I may seem sentimental, but I believe we shouls protect ecosystems.
P
That is not a global warming issue.
That is the same issue we have right now with the 500 million who go to bed hungry each night.
My view is that at 4 degrees we can probably feed everyone should there be the political will.
The resources and the techniques are available now.
boerwar @ #1163 Friday, May 19, 2017 at 6:35 pm
Phillip Adams used to bang on about a chap Max Whisson who had ideas for using wind and sun to desalinate and pump water inland along the coast to boost agriculture.
I was sceptical about his exact proposals, particularly his windmill, but I think there is much merit in the underlying concepts.
It was less high tech than the SA operation.
I guess I feel more pessimistic that optimistic about the future re: climate change and its impact.
Already, despite there being an abundance of food produced in the world, there is famine in Africa. What do we do in Australia? Reduce foreign aid.
Good grief!
boerwar @ #1177 Friday, May 19, 2017 at 7:05 pm
I find it amusing that you are using exactly the same argument that Trog uses to claim that solar PV will save humanity.
It is simply not credible.
Trog
We are as one in relation to maintaining biodiversity. In fact I may even be more passionate about that than your good self.
But that was not actually the issue which was whether billions would starve to death at 4C.
My view is it that that is not inevitable.
The MDB which receives 6% of Australia’s rainfall produces 40% of Australia’s food.
Boerwar
You’re right that mass starvation is not inevitable, but how people are now responding to famine in Africa doesn’t provide much hope.
I hope I’m wrong.
Bw
Tks. Can I sell you an option on some very recently planted wheat? In now 3 weeks, up, and it’s raining on it. Despite the changes the odds are still OK for September rain.
A better bet than the casino by just a little bit.
You could invest in the shed!
boerwar @ #1182 Friday, May 19, 2017 at 7:11 pm
Most falls in the north. What’s your plan to bring it south?
Breaking:
Swedish prosecutors have dropped their rape investigation of Julian Assange..
Just a tad optimistic I would say Grimace. But Labor should win and win clearly IMO. It is their’s to lose.
ML
There are, I understand, always hungry and/or starving people. IMO, and without wanting to oversimplify, there are two broad sets of conditions.
The first is what might be called a famine hotspot: usually a combination of overuse of local and regional water, bad management of local and regional water resources, cumulative environmental abuse and mismanagement, too many people, and too many animals for the resources, often combined with the disruptions of armed conflict. These conditions usually generate crisis starvation periods when the rainfall patterns in such regions enters a low rainfall cycle. The core of such famines is usual rural and pastoral.
Crisis famine requires a crisis response.
The second set of hunger is the hunger that poor people in urban areas experience around the world – including in Australia. This is a function of wealth disparity. Most of the world’s hunger (as opposed to starvation) occurs in urban areas, not rural and pastoral areas.
The extent of urban hunger is affected quite markedly by global supplies of ag commodities. When these are slightly or largely in surplus (as they are now) basic foods are cheap. There are more people who can afford enough food not to go hungry because it is cheap. When global traded ag commodities are in short supply, the extent of hunger will go up because people cannot afford to buy.
I believe that, in the broad, both sets of hunger generators will tend to climb with global warming.
At the same time, I also believe that we would have the necessary capacities to produce enough food to stop billions from starving.
It won’t be global warming that stops us from growing and distributing enough food to keep billions from starving.
I might just add while I think about it that GMO mongers are in the process of generating plant cultivars that will be vastly more nutritious food than they are now for more or less the same growing inputs.
One particularly promising line of research is in developing plant foods which will replace wild caught fish food completely.
CTaR1
If you could guarantee me that the Russian crop will cook in one of their one in a thousand year droughts of which they seem to have had several lately, and that the US crop will get some weird heat/moisture-related blight, I might be interested in a speculator…
It reminds of the line in Persuasion where the farmers are ploughing their fields in Autumn, meaning to have Spring. (Which is an Austenite dig at the Romantics and their rhapsodizing over the season of mellow fruitfulness and the like…)
Bw – You’re no fun.
The Market is telling against – big quality crops but shit prices.
CTaR1
Yep. No fun! There is nothing worse than sending a semi load of vegies to the market and having it come back to feed to cows because there were no buyers.
That is why you need the Russian and US crops to go seriously pear shaped.
The good times as strawberry growers were when we heard that production in other growing areas had been destroyed in a hail storm…
Trump must have let it be known that the US no longer wants to prosecute Assange since he did such a great service to the President.
J
I was just ruminating on something like.
I assume that some journalist will in due course ask the Swedish prosecutors to explain which changed facts caused them to drop the investigation.
And that the Swedish prosecutors will in due course seek to baffle the journalist with bullshit.
Bw – Or the Eyre Peninsular got trashed by hail … those were the days.
I remember attention being paid to crops in Hungary …
Boerwar
Thanks for that.
It’s not, as would be obvious, an area in which I have any real knowledge, so it was helpful.
I suppose I know more about the income disparity within developed areas and the impact of this .
I’m off to do some totally entertaining sci fi series watching. If you’re into sci fi, Legions. You may think you’re crazy, but maybe, you’re not
Saw ‘Their Finest’ yesterday. Well worth a watch, IMO.
Boerwar
Or ask what facts changed when the original Swedish prosecutor decided there were no charges to be laid but their successor on the same facts decided there was.
I don’t hate Malcolm Turnbull. I think he was a competent minister in the right portfolio.
He’s just not a competent party leader though, as many polling respondents agree.
There, fixed it for you, Rex!
CTaR1
If you want hyper real time and totally integrated global intel systems with multiple data inputs and sophisticated models, go have a look at what the commodity traders have at their disposal.
It makes Newspoll look pretty paltry as the pulse of the nation.
Maybe Assange can move in with Rolf Harris. You know, both being a bit suspect + expats.