Essential Research: 52-48 to Labor

Six weeks on, Essential Research finds the budget has done the government more harm than good, as the Lowy Institute reports a mixed bag of attitudes about the United States.

Labor’s lead remains steady at 52-48 in this week’s reading of the Essential Research fortnight rolling average, from primary votes of 38% for the Coalition (steady), 35% for Labor 35% (down one), 9% for Greens 9% (down one) and 9% for One Nation (up one), whose curious resurgence was the subject of an article I had in Crikey on Monday. Also featured are Essential’s monthly leadership ratings, which find Malcolm Turnbull down one on approval to 36% and down three on disapproval to 45%; Bill Shorten steady at 34% and down two to 43%; and Turnbull leading 39-26 on preferred prime minister, up from 39-31 last month. In other findings, the poll also records only 17% saying the recent budget improved their perception of the government, compared with 30% saying it made it worse; a 41-32 majority in favour of a clean energy target if it resulted in price rises of 5%, turning into a 50-21 deficit if they rose 10%; and 64% favouring investment in renewables in a no-strings-attached question compared with 18% for coal.

Also out yesterday was the Lowy Institute’s annual survey on Australian attitudes to international affairs and the direction of the country. Among many other things, the results find Australians continuing to rate the alliance with the United States highly (53% very important and 29% fairly important, recovering to near 2015 levels after a dip to 42% and 29% last year), with Donald Trump’s influence on perceptions of the US rating slightly less badly than George W. Bush in 2007 (60% said Trump contributed to an unfavourable opinion of the United States against 37% for no, compared with 69% and 27% for Bush). However, the proportion of respondents rating the US as Australia’s best friend has slumped from 35% to 17% since 2014, with the beneficiary being New Zealand, up from 32% to 53%. Only 20% now say they have a “great deal” of trust in the US to act responsibly in the world, compared with 40% in 2011.

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.

1,400 comments on “Essential Research: 52-48 to Labor”

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  1. Cud Chewer
    Removal of CO2 from high pressure sources is tried and true tech. It is energy intensive though and currently once removed from the gas it is is vented. Carbon capture from low pressure sources like coal power stations makes for an even more fraught situation. Chief engineer at a coal fired power station told me it would use up 30% of their power to do it even before the problem of what to do with the captured CO2 was considered.

  3. Glastonbury silent disco crowd breaks into impromptu Jeremy Corbyn chant – video
    Festivalgoers break into a chorus of ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ – to the tune of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army – during a silent disco in which music is played through headphones rather than loudspeakers. The Labour leader is to make an appearance on the Pyramid stage on Saturday afternoon

    ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!’: how the Labour chant all started – video
    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2017/jun/23/glastonbury-silent-disco-jeremy-corbyn-chant-video

  6. cud chewer @ #1222 Friday, June 23, 2017 at 8:04 pm

    Trog, I agree. Renewable electricity is a done deal.
    Its transport fuel and other fossil fuel uses that presents a challenge.

    There are quite a few projects where algae to fuel has been demonstrated as *technically* feasible: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-22/algae-farmers-spruik-potential-for-wa-biofuel-boom/4769326
    They have since pulled out and the site is now used to produce some sort of algae based food.
    .

  11. cud chewer @ #1224 Friday, June 23, 2017 at 8:07 pm

    Grimace,

    Along these lines, last night I went looking for any news of the wave farm that WA Labor promised at the last election and found the WA Government has committed $19.5m to the farm and it is planned to be up and running in about 18 months: https://thewest.com.au/news/albany-advertiser/albany-wave-energy-farm-18-months-away-ng-b88502674z

    I’ve been following this technology for over a decade and its great to see it has been refined and is now being implemented. Its such a cool technology and it answers so many of the technical/engineering problems that have bedeviled wave power. There’s huge resources. And the other nice thing (shhh don’t tell P1) is that wave power is even more constant and more predictable and adding it to the mix will mean even less need for gas

    I’ve been to a couple of their industry events and had discussions about them at other industry events. They are VERY secretive about the cost of the generated electricity and there is nobody I’ve ever spoken to who has an accurate idea.

    I was at a table with a few other finance type people at one event, and we worked out based on some of the information that was in the media (yes I know, a poor way of doing it) that the cost was somewhere around $0.12 per kWh before you took into account maintenance, of which none of us had any idea, other than a general agreement that it would probably be quite a lot.

    The major advantage of the Albany site is that it can generate electricity, or desalinise water 24/7.

  12. Alias
    Can anybody imagine a Bill Shorten chant erupting spontaneously, out of pure affection and inspiration?

    Ah yes, spontaneous crowd chants are a crucial metric of leadership quality and electability. Well do I recall how often crowds of young people broke into spontaneous chants for Tony Abbotr and Malcolm Turnbull… they were deafening!

  13. Can anybody imagine a Bill Shorten chant erupting spontaneously, out of pure affection and inspiration?

    Because it’s sooo important that this kind of measure be taken of the modern aspiring national leader, eh, Alias?

  15. Actually JimmyDoyle, there is a serious point underlying this.
    Think about the qualities of the two most successful progressive political leaders we’ve seen over the past few months: Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.
    * They are non-party-machine types
    * They appeal massively to young voters because they speak from the heart with authenticity
    * They find their polar opposites in the wooden, scripted party-machine types eg: Hilary Clinton, Theresa May
    * At a time of political volatility and deep cynicism they are able to cut through for the above reasons

    I don’t need to point out which camp Shorten fits into, like a hand into a perfectly tailored glove.

  17. C@tmomma .. I did my reply before reading your comment (no snub intended).
    I’m not a sledger. I happen to believe passionately that Shorten is absolutely the wrong Opposition leader for these times.

  18. Alias
    Friday, June 23, 2017 at 9:09 pm

    I’m likely mistaken, but as I recall you were one who left to their feet and rejoiced when Turnbull deposed Abbott. Am I wrong? How soon the lustre can fade.

  19. I don’t have the expertise to engage in the Electricity Wars. However, a few thoughs as a layman in the issue:
    1. we are facing an existential crisis with climate change. Inaction is not an option. Australia has to play its part.
    2. the best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago. The next best time is now.
    3. We need to be carbon free by 2050. Earlier would be better. Now would have been better still.
    4. Coal has no future. Even if we were to have the world’s greatest ever coal industry ever in 20 years’ time, who would want to buy the stuff? The game’s up.
    5. That being said, we can’t stop using coal tomorrow. We need an orderly plan to phase it out, give it a gold watch and wish it a happy retirement.
    6. The future, if there is to be one beyond a return to a pre-industrial civilisation with a world population about a tenth of what it is today, is renewable.
    7. If gas can help us get there, go for it, but only as a stopgap over the next couple of decades as Renewables are geared up. How long we need it I don’t know, but see points 3 and 6. Gas is not renewable and burning it produces CO2.
    8. Clean coal – a fantasy: (A) Coal is not and cannot be “clean”. (B) If carbon capture and storage were workable, we’d be much more advanced than we are, what with such huge vested interests desperate to keep the coal game going.
    9. Nuclear – maybe, but its big, dirty, expensive and dangerous. Australia should be able to skip this step given advances in renewable technology.
    10. With such a vast area and resources, Australia should be best placed in the world to advance and use renewable technology – sun, wind, tides, geothermal. That we rely on extracting non renewable resources like a third world economy says a lot (not good) about this country.
    11. Morally, fossil fuel industry = tobacco industry. Ignore their bleating.
    End rant.

  20. And, Alias, you do not point out who the other wildly-successful politician of recent times is. Donald Trump. People chanted his name too. Should Bill also model himself on Donald. To keep your thesis consistent, that is.

    Or should we just let Bill be Bill? I, personally prefer it when politicians are themselves and we know what we are voting for. That’s all Jeremy Corbyn is doing after all.

  21. C@tmomma
    Yes of course Trump has been successful – and for similar reasons. But I was confining my argument to progressive politicians. I don’t begin to see how Trump’s success negates my argument. In his own way, he has been authentic (an authentic liar and proud of it, very often), he is also clearly a non party-machine type and whatever you think of his policies, he managed to inspire some people with them.

  24. Also I can’t allow “let Bill be Bill” pass without comment.
    The very notion of that happening is the nub of the problem. He’s very DNA is that there’s nothing much there of the type I was describing re Sanders and Corbyn. Knife two Labor PMs with his own prize in sight, play deeply cynical politics over Gonski 2.0, deliver wooden, tedious, scripted lines in lieu of authenticity. He’s only doing well in TPP because Turnbull has done remarkably poorly. Shorten’s preferred PM numbers tell you all you need to know.

  25. cud chewer @ #1233 Friday, June 23, 2017 at 8:33 pm

    Its not hard to show P1s trillion dollar claim are bullshit by a large margin.

    Well, you’ll certainly need to work harder than this …

    Solar is trending towards $1/W at scale. Its currently under $1.50/W and that’s the entire system not including interconnects.

    You are using capital costs instead of LCOE … again! Will you never learn the difference?

    Solar may have a capacity factor of 0.3 on average but at 2am it has a capacity factor in most places of 0.6.

    Wow. I remember Trog famously claiming that solar panels still produced 80% of their capacity on cloudy days, but you now have them even producing at night! Impressive : )

    In other words to produce 30GW of power in the afternoon you need 45GW of solar.

    No, much more than that. Because you need to produce it all day, not just in peak sunshine. And not just in summer, either.

    That’s $45B. But of course a real system would have a mix of solar and wind because their output tends to anti-correlate, so you have less solar and more wind and the price stays roughly the same.

    Not true, and in fact they often correlate – i.e. cloud and no wind. If you don’t believe me, try watching the solar and wind output from the NEM for a few days. I have.

    Storage? In a 100% renewable system that matches wind and solar and includes some wave, you’ve got two kinds of storage requirement. One is essentially load shifting a portion of your peak towards the evening. The other is having a reserve system with lower peak power but higher energy stored. For the former you need about 100 GWHr and 30GW of storage in order to load shift a system dominated by solar into the evening.

    100 GWh runs the network for a few hours. You will need much, much more than that, or one night of no wind means your network is kaput.

    On present prices ($250/KWhr) that’s going to cost you $25B with batteries. In 5 years time, half that.

    Then there’s other tech like solar thermal with storage that is trending down towards $2.50/W but with 24 hour storage. Adding this into the mix means staying roughly competitive with battery but adding deeper storage.

    Is this capital cost again?

    Or, you can use pumped hydro. At scale you can get 10GWhr and 1GW of pumped hydro for under $500M (in some locations). A few of those gives you energy security.

    A few dozen, more likely.

    So what are we talking about? In the order of 100 billion bucks for the entire country. Not a trillion dollars.

    Your figures are just ludicrous. You have underestimated almost everything, sometimes by many multiples. And forgotten contingency. And maintenance costs. And increased demand (remember electric cars? – there’s a projected 40% increase just there!). And are you planning on burning coal till the coal stations reach the end of their natural life? Because it not there are write-off costs.

    You really should read the report Grimace posted, which was the source for the “trillion dollar” claim. While I don’t think it is realistic, it is far, far more plausible than your figures.

    P1 truly deserves the ridicule s(he)it gets.

    Whereas you really don’t get nearly enough.

  26. ‘… the qualities of the two most successful progressive political leaders..’

    On what basis?

    Bernie Sanders wasn’t a successful anything. That wooden, scripted party machine type absolutely trounced him.

    Corbyn got a big swing but failed to make it across the line…by that metric, he is exactly as successful as Bill Shorten.

  29. Some had borrowed from girlfriends, others from sisters. A few had gone the extra mile and shaved their legs. When the Isca academy in Devon opened on Thursday morning, an estimated 30 boys arrived for lessons, heads held high, in fetching tartan-patterned skirts. The hottest June days since 1976 had led to a bare-legged revolution at the secondary school in Exeter.

    As the temperature soared past 30C earlier this week, the teenage boys had asked their teachers if they could swap their long trousers for shorts. They were told no – shorts weren’t permitted under the school’s uniform policy.

    When they protested that the girls were allowed bare legs, the school – no doubt joking – said the boys were free to wear skirts too if they chose. So on Wednesday, a handful braved the giggles and did so. The scale of the rebellion increased on Thurday, when at least 30 boys opted for the attire.

    “Quite refreshing” was how one of the boys described the experience…

    Great!!!!

  30. Come on Zoomster .. Corbyn increased Labour’s vote by a staggering 10 percentage points against absolutely all expectations. Sanders – as the email leaks demonstrated – was cruelly hobbled by the party machine and despite that managed to generate enormous enthusiasm among young people in particular. If the DNC had recognised this at the right moment and got behind him, we’d be talking about President Bernie Sanders today.

  32. Removal of CO2 from high pressure sources is tried and true tech. It is energy intensive though and currently once removed from the gas it is is vented. Carbon capture from low pressure sources like coal power stations makes for an even more fraught situation. Chief engineer at a coal fired power station told me it would use up 30% of their power to do it even before the problem of what to do with the captured CO2 was considered.

    Poroti this is all true. The difference is that you get half as much CO2 per unit of energy from gas as coal so the carbon capture part of the process isn’t as costly. Plus you’ve got less to worry about with other impurities.

    The thing that strikes me is how little CCS applied to gas gets talked about and that says a lot about who is actually pushing it and the politics of the situation. If you were dead set keen to fund/subsidise CCS, you’d use gas, not coal.

  33. Alias, by seeking to confine your argument to progressive leaders (and the less said about the wooden Di Natale, the better), you are being disingenuous and creating an artificial barrier to hem your opponents, such as myself, in as you are seeking to advantage your argument only by not allowing us to consider wildly successful Conservative politicians such as John Howard.

    That he is a Conservative politician is neither here nor there, or should not be, when considering whether a successful national leader needs to have a rock star following in the electorate or not. Or whether their personality has some sort of requisite pizzazz.

  35. Alias,
    Bernie Sanders, Independent Senator from Vermont, was a freeloader on the Democratic Party’s coat tails. Of course they weren’t going to be wildly enthusiastic about his candidacy.

  37. Grimace, I can’t see how you can work out the cost per KWhr without knowing something about the service life of the gear. This is why I love the Carnegie system. Most of it it is out of the wave zone so it has to be a lot more reliable than other wave technologies.

  38. Bill Shorten is the Tortoise, as in the tale of the Hare and the Tortoise. A quiet achiever. He never looked that flash, but then neither did John Howard and look how far he went, to our sorrow. Bill’s uilty of political manoeuvring? Well, so, one way or another, is everyone else who gets near the top – even the sainted Whitlam (peace and blessings be upon him, and I mean that).

    Malcolm was a hare, since he became PM he’s mostly been a rabbit frozen in the headlights.

  40. cud chewer @ #1243 Friday, June 23, 2017 at 8:46 pm

    Why isn’t P1 going gung ho about “clean gas”? Because P1 is fundamentally conflicted and illogical, perhaps?

    I have considered pointing this out, but it is not really required for my argument. I am not trying to perpetuate the use of gas, I am merely pointing out that it is a good transition fuel if your primary goal is to minimize C02 emissions. However, it is clear this is not the primary goal of the ‘solar enthusiasts’ here, so adding this complication doesn’t really help.

    But you do make a good point – the fact that C02 emissions from gas can be reduced substantially (the only practical examples of ‘carbon capture and storage’ are in fact with gas, not coal) does increase the arguments in its favor.

  44. Howard wouldn’t stand a chance in the current environment. I think a lot of people underestimate the extraordinary impact the new media environment is having on the political process.

  45. Grimace, last time I looked (a while ago), cellulosic ethanol looked promising. I just don’t know if algae is going to prove cost effective.

    You can gasify old garbage and use the syngas stream as a feedstock for just about anything. I’m looking into a potential site.

  46. I happen to like both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Sure, they engaged people who otherwise may not have been engaged. But in the end, Bernie Sanders did fall a fair way short of winning the Democratic primary, and Jeremy Corbyn did not get Labour across the line.

    The reality in Australia is that opposition leaders rarely have massive cut through. Rudd to some extent defied this in 2007. But who was the last opposition leader in Australia to mobilise people in loud, noisy rallies? I’ll give you a hint, he lost the 1993 election.

    Shorten has Labor in an election winning position. The government are obsessed with him; do you think that would be the case if they really saw him as a positive for them? He has done a fantastic job of uniting the party. He has done all that could’ve been asked of him and more.

  47. “Knife two Labor PM”

    Alias
    I’m sure the second one was just because you begged and pleaded for it and cried until it happened.

  48. C@tmomma.. Ah yes.. so I’m quite sure the DNC is perfectly happy with their decision, with the benefit of hindsight, and the stark reality our glorious President Donald Trump. The fact the DNC was obsessively attached to Clinton doesn’t prove anything except that they weren’t agile enough to understand the power of social media, grassroots support especially among the young and so forth.

  49. They’re out there …

    (The two blocks are being paid for by the City of London Corporation (‘CoL’) who say at the ‘social’ rent rate they will still break even. The City owns lots of stuff in Metropolitan London where these will be – example Hamstead Heath (a large park) is owned by the CoL.)

    According to the old adage, charity begins at home – that is, unless you are the residents of a luxury apartment block in Kensington who are up in arms at the prospect of victims of the Grenfell Tower fire being housed anywhere near them.

    Sixty-eight social homes have been made available in a new £2bn development, where private homes sell from anything between £1.5m to £8.5m. Of course, beneath the spin, the truth is that residents will be housed separately from the luxury apartments in two purpose-built “affordable housing” blocks.

    They won’t have access to the development’s gym or the pool, and the design of the flats will be more modest than those of their wealthy neighbours – but that hasn’t stopped residents baulking at the idea of the great unwashed in their midst.

    Their concerns reportedly range from benefit scroungers being given free housing that they worked hard to buy, schemers sub-letting flats to cream profits off the state, and the devaluation of their precious assets.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/grenfell-tower-fire-luxury-kensington-block-residents-complain-devalue-houses-council-ashamed-a7802701.html

  50. Is it really wrong to aspire to an Opposition leader who really fires up the electorate?
    Why can’t we have a Whitlam or a Keating or a Hawke?
    Why are we stuck with this dill Shorten who can’t even deliver scripted lines with any visible level of conviction – and can’t even seem to get it through his thick skull not to pronounce words like “with” as “wif”?

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