BludgerTrack: 52.3-47.7 to Labor

A detailed quarterly breakdown of federal voting intention at state level records Labor sagging in Victoria, but still on course for an election-winning swing in Queensland.

First up, please note that we have had the rare treat overnight of a state poll from South Australia, which you can read all about here.

Now to BludgerTrack, and the in-depth look at state-level federal voting intention trends that I lay on at the end of each quarter. First up, the vanilla weekly version of BludgerTrack, which is displayed at the bottom of the post, is inclusive only of the usual result from Essential Research. ReachTEL will have to wait until next week, because I don’t yet have all the data I need from it, and the new fortnightly YouGov/Fifty Acres poll won’t make the cut until I have more than one data point to work with. The only change worth noting on the headline numbers is that some of the edge has come off the recent spike to One Nation, although the overall pattern of recovery from a nadir around May is still evident. The Coalition makes a net gain of one on the seat projection, being up one in Victoria and Western Australia. Nothing new this week for leadership ratings.

There has been a very slight trend back to the Coalition over the past three months, but overall the impression has been of consistency on every measure, whether relating to voting intention or leadership. But as illustrated by the detailed quarterly breakdowns, which draw on this week’s breakdowns from Newspoll together with unpublished numbers from Essential, there has been quite a bit going on beneath this deceptively calm surface. Since the last such update three months ago, Labor has gone down 0.6% on two-party preferred, but up four on the seat projection – testament to the sensitivity of Queensland, where Labor’s 0.8% gain has translated into five seats.

It’s in the two biggest states that the Coalition’s modest improvement has been concentrated, particularly in Victoria, where Labor is down 2.7%. This raises the possibility that the heavy weather encountered by Daniel Andrews’ government is causing the party damage federally, which is going unnoticed due to Labor’s strong standing in the state in absolute terms (the swing since the last election is still bigger than New South Wales, off an already stronger base, the state’s limited strategic importance (while more than three times bigger than Queensland’s, the change on the previous quarter has only shifted the seat projection by one) and Labor’s sustained strength elsewhere. South Australia joins Queensland as the other state where Labor has gained ground, and they have tapered off only a little in Western Australia after what was probably an unsustainable peak at the time of the state election.

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.

747 comments on “BludgerTrack: 52.3-47.7 to Labor”

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  1. I had a quick look at some of the figures, and I can’t see that the Catholic school system gets more funding. The methodology looks at levels of disadvantage and the capacity of parents to pay, so you’d expect that Catholic schools would thus get more than leafy suburb private schools run by other denominations. And there are, of course, more Catholic schools.

  2. c@tmomma @ #450 Monday, July 3, 2017 at 9:29 am

    BiGD,
    The one thing the Greens need to consider, if they move right they risk moving into the part of the political spectrum controlled by Labor.
    I don’t see any advantages in that for anyone except the Right.
    EXCEPT if you combine it with this snippet of information from Urban Wronski today(the veracity of which I am unsure about):
    Bugger consensus politics. Di Natale generously tells the Left Renewal faction their anti-capitalist rhetoric is ridiculous and that they should join another party. Critics accuse Di Natale of shaping The Greens into a potential coalition partner for the Liberals; point to his record of support for Coalition legislation.
    Interesting, no?

    Both scenarios are ridiculous and would lead to the Greens complete demise.

  3. ….in other words, the calculations you need to do to work out if a particular school system is being paid ‘more’ involves numbers of students x levels of disadvantage and I don’t think Vanstone has the necessary qualifications to be capable of crunching those numbers.

  4. Early this morning (4am) I heard an eloquent talk on ABC RN by the one of the authors of “Merchants of Doubt”.

    Essentially she didn’t introduce anything new (i.e. the cc deniers are using the same techniques as Big Tobacco), and laid out the arguments used by deniers, but it gave me more insight into the minds of conservatives, who support free markets and small government.

    The book states that Seitz, Singer, Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow were all fiercely anti-communist and they viewed government regulation as a step towards socialism and communism. The authors argue that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, they looked for another great threat to free market capitalism and found it in environmentalism. They feared that an over-reaction to environmental problems would lead to heavy-handed government intervention in the marketplace and intrusion into people’s lives. Oreskes and Conway state that the longer the delay the worse these problems get, and the more likely it is that governments will need to take the draconian measures that conservatives and market fundamentalists most fear. They say that Seitz, Singer, Nierenberg and Jastrow denied the scientific evidence, contributed to a strategy of delay, and thereby helped to bring about the situation they most dreaded. The authors have a strong doubt about the ability of the media to differentiate between false truth and the actual science in question; however, they stop short of endorsing censorship in the name of science. The journalistic norm of balanced reporting has helped, according to the authors, to amplify the misleading messages of the contrarians. Oreskes and Conway state: “small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organised, determined and have access to power”.

    (my bold)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt

  5. So MT claims he’ll be PM for a ‘very long time’.

    What’s he going to do? Suspend the Constitution!?! Because I don’t think that an election is going to do it for him.

  6. Jenauthor

    Thank you! Hubris was the word I was searching for in another context yesterday. Possibly referring to Abbott?

    “Hubris is an excess of confidence: a boxer who shouts “I’m the greatest!” even though he’s about to get pummelled by a much stronger opponent is displaying a lot of hubris.”

  7. With party tensions on show over the past week – thanks in part to the former prime minister’s frequent interventions – senior frontbencher and close Turnbull ally Arthur Sinodinos conceded the party could not control him.

    “If you’re the government you can only control what you control. I can’t control Tony Abbott,” Senator Sinodinos said.

    http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/theres-a-fight-on-tony-abbott-launches-latest-criticism-of-liberal-leadership-20170702-gx38zd.html

  8. “Let’s see which of these fictions are breathlessly picked up by the YoungLib finishing school in the ABC newsroom. They would be better of plagiarising the FairGo web site which has more integrity than the Smear.”

    I think that the ABC’s current policy is to pretend that the ALP doesn’t exist, unless it’s a quick dismissal of an ALP policy by a business or vested interest group, or a quick 2 second sound grab from Shorten where he always seems to be cut off at the earliest possible moment.

  9. The Gs are trying to deal with the stagnation of their vote. Their long-run tactic of trying to wedge Labor on the left is really past the point of diminishing returns and these days probably costs them support who they try to us it. On the other hand, if they were to try to occupy the centre, like the Democrats before them, they should expect to lose their entire member base.

    Aside from their activists and members, it is not at all obvious who the Gs hope to represent. They have no continuous, developed connection with working people or their political organs. They have no constituency among farmers. Maybe they draw their support from the radical urban middle class. Such voters exist. But they are not numerous and they are not concentrated. Nor are they growing in numbers and influence. I suspect they’re also getting old and that younger voters from this socio-economic group are less likely to be attracted to the Gs than they were, say, 20 years ago.

    G voters are overwhelmingly Labor-positive. To the extent that the Gs campaign against Labor (say, campaign against Labor, adopt Lib-friendly positions or entertain power-sharing with the LNP), they will alienate their own supporters and risk their own PV support.

    The split in the Gs is not about nothing. It is about their stagnation; about the failure of self-renewal. All parties have to work for this. Unless the Gs can achieve it, they will fade away. They must know it.

  10. When a govt starts talking about itself all the time, it’s doomed. When a PM is talking about himself all of the time, he’s doomed.

  11. ‘If Turnbull were to start pushing policies in which he actually believes,’.
    Turnbull’s beliefs are like super atomic elements, they have been observed in the laboratory, but only last for fractions of a second before flying apart.

  12. I think, and this is merely speculation on behavioural observation, that Malcolm’s ultimatum yesterday that he’d leave politics if he lost the leadership, was seen by him as the victorious thrust of the dagger into Tony Abbott’s freezing heart.

    I suspect the party has assured him that “no, no now … we will not depose you” because even if he loses the next election, they want to keep their seats and they KNOW that Abbott would cause the kind of carnage that happened in WA. As would Dutts/Morrison/Hunt et al.

    The cooler heads probably think that some losses are better than catastrophic losses, and if they had to go to an election soon, it would be a wipeout.

    They are in the same place that ALP was when Crean threw the grenade … Abbott is currently throwing paint-bombs but the grenade is firmly in his hand and he probably just needs a little more energy to pull the pin

  13. Was very disappointed to hear Karen Middleton on ABC radio this morning, in response to a listener saying why doesn’t Mal grow a spine and stand up to the likes of Abbott, saying in effect that he had because of Conski and energy policy.

    WTF I thought…

  14. The Greens started this decline when Labor stopped pandering to them. Another strategic victory to Bill Shorten and the team .

  15. John Reidy @10:43AM: “Turnbull’s beliefs are like super atomic elements, they have been observed in the laboratory, but only last for fractions of a second before flying apart.

    Excellent rejoinder. Maybe worth a tweet.

    Maybe the term is “Transactinides”. These are radioactive and have only been obtained synthetically in laboratories. None of these elements has ever been collected in a macroscopic sample. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry defines an element to exist if its lifetime is longer than 10−14 seconds, which is the time it takes for the nucleus to form an electronic cloud. So maybe Turnbull’s policies don’t actually exist.

  16. Barney &BK..

    ..yes, my post was poorly worded. My point related to Vanstone’s suggestion that Catholic schools have been getting more funding than they need because they are Catholic, rather than based on needs of their students..

    ..I’m not sure they have been getting an unfair amount of funding ..though there appears to be evidence that the funding they do receive may not always go to their neediest schools/students. If this is the case, then this is the issue that needs addressing..

  17. “There are rules about physical separation of services , particularly power, for obvious reasons. ”
    I remember having swat up on all those separations to get my Austel open cabling license many years ago. Most were promptly forgotten of course.

  18. Also Barnaby was on his usual Monday morning fireside chat on AM talking about how terrible it would be if Australia was left in the hands of that awful Mr Shorten and they were all getting along with the job of making Australia stronger blah blah blah.

    Does AM rate in double figures these days or are there more masochists out there than just me one day a week?

  19. I heard Seenodonors on RNBreakfast this am, claiming the Coalition had put in place an energy policy..

    ..I thought they hadn’t accepted Finkel’s central recommendation of a CET ..they are at logger-heads with the States regarding CSG exploration/extraction ..they have not yet decided to fund the Adani railway via the NAIF ..they have some fanciful notion of maybe funding “clean coal” and/or CCS via the CEFC (though it’s highly improbable these fantasies would generate the returns required by the CEFC) ..they are even making noises about maybe ..possibly using taxpayer’s money to build new coal-fired power stations ..

    ..and Abbott is shouting his mouth off about scrapping the RET ..and banning future wind-farms FFS!!!

    Is this what Truffles means by “my year of delivery” ..??

  20. Ajm
    Monday, July 3, 2017 at 11:00 am
    The Greens started this decline when Labor stopped pandering to them. Another strategic victory to Bill Shorten and the team .

    Yes, that’s certainly a part of it. In general though, the Gs travails are self-inflicted.

    There are things they could do…but far be it from me to offer yet more unsolicited….

  21. Markjs:
    “I heard Seenodonors on RNBreakfast this am, claiming the Coalition had put in place an energy policy..”

    Karen Middleton and Barnaby Joyce were claiming the same thing on ABC this morning, so this is clearly what headquarters has come up with as one of their puerile talking points to ‘make Australia stronger’.

    Expect it to be adopted without challenge by the goons of the CPG.

  22. kevjohnno @ #481 Monday, July 3, 2017 at 11:26 am

    “There are rules about physical separation of services , particularly power, for obvious reasons. ”
    I remember having swat up on all those separations to get my Austel open cabling license many years ago. Most were promptly forgotten of course.

    That’s how I came to learn about them too. Much detail forgotten, but certain principles well remembered such that I have reacted on a few occasions when encountering very poor and dangerous work.

  23. adrian @ #483 Monday, July 3, 2017 at 11:28 am

    Also Barnaby was on his usual Monday morning fireside chat on AM talking about how terrible it would be if Australia was left in the hands of that awful Mr Shorten and they were all getting along with the job of making Australia stronger blah blah blah.
    Does AM rate in double figures these days or are there more masochists out there than just me one day a week?

    You truly are an obsessive. Get help.

  24. Briefly @11.33am – Brexit/Brits Abroad

    The status of Brits living in the EU is one of many issues that attracted next to zero discussion during the referendum campaign (along with numerous other issues) .

    Once or twice the Beeb or whoever took the cameras off to the Costa del Plonk for a vox pop and they often seemed to find Brits voting OUT with no idea how it would affect them in the future

  25. Good Morning

    Take note. Senator Lee Rhiannon has changed from her communist days. She is publicly backing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn policies.

    While she does that she is advocating socialism The exact same way Jeremy Corbyn is.
    Like or loathe her do not lose sight of this essential fact.

    I have my problems with the Senator but she is effective thats why she has been in politics so long. Promoting the Corbyn agenda of nationlising the railways electricity grids and the rest is where she is correct about Corbyn and what the voters are voting for.

    So good has Mr Corbyn been we are getting news that Tories yes that is Tories are pushing for the end of Austerity in the UK citing concern about front line nurses and police.

    Thats a political earthquake that seems to have escaped the notice of those commenting here. The same is happening here. Thus the LNP lame attempt at lower power prices rhetoric.

    However like with the UK austerity voters know scrapping the carbon tax did nothing to aid investment certainty and thus stable cost structures meaning today we would have lower power prices.

    Until the LNP is destroyed or accepts a carbon price is needed this is not going to change. That investment certainty is crucial. Watering down messages does not work with the voters. Voters also know no new coal mines is the future and just want the transition to happen with the least damage to employment as possible. That is what they mean by politics is not giving solutions.

    The Hazelwood workers were left out to dry even though politicians had plenty of warning and knew what would happen if nothing was done. Premier Andrews tried but his government alone was not enough. Why? No investment certainty.

    Its time for a carbon price to be the go to talking point for all parties on the basis of investment certainty. All Labor has to do is point out. No carbon price no investment. Thats the bottom line on climate and energy policy.

    Coming from the left as Rhiannon is doing and as Corbyn is doing is the way to success. Namby pamby not standing up to the right again just adds to the voters thinking the left is weak and divided as the Right through the Murdoch press paints them to be.
    The Senators supporting Di Natale may not see this, but the members of the NSW Greens do.

    zoomster

    Luke Foley has made the most voting gains when he has stood for something. Like standing up for the workers in the greyhound industry.

    That is doing a Corbyn. This is Mr Shortens message on inequality as well.
    Buying into the Greens must go right to gain more voters is to buy the right’s argument o how the future will be and being weak in fighting inequality as the right uses that to paint Labor as being weak.

    This is something the right of the Australian Labor Party has to come to terms with just as the right of the Labour party in the UK did. Being left and talking nationalise railways and electricity networks is NOT a vote loser

  26. Good morning all,

    I hope Turnbull, his ministers and the MSM continue to laud the action by the government re action on “energy policy “. The lived experience by consumers, both household and business, is completely different.

    Nothing will expose how far removed the government is from reality when they go on and on about how they are helping ordinary Australians with their energy costs while power bills are being delivered showing increases of around 20% and above.

    Long may Turnbull continue with that strategy and long may the MSM pat him on the back for taking positive action. Real life experience will beat that bullshit every day.

    It is a bit like pollies going on about ” Aussies doing it tough “. People know how tough things are and they want their government to get off its arse and actually do something. I am sure families drowning in debt will be calmed by Turnbull and the MSM going on about how great the government is by taking positive action !

    Cheers.

  27. ‘You truly are an obsessive. Get help.’

    Thanks for the great advice Bemused.

    Usually I try to ignore you, but for once you are giving advice and dispensing your pearls of wisdom on a subject on which you clearly have great expertise.

  28. Doyley

    Yes it does appear to me that Tony Abbott has truly highlighted how much of a wrecker he is and is discrediting his own term in government.

    Thus he is discrediting the whole Carbon Tax rhetoric and the repeal of the Climate Change legislation of the Gillard government. Voters are seeing what Labor said was right. Wrong way go back.

    Sadly the leadership soap opera kept Labor out of government. However now with Leadership soap opera in the LNP and policy shown to be discredited the only way is down for the LNP. The only question is how far down?

  29. ‘defines an element to exist if its lifetime is longer than 10−14 seconds’
    Being snarky this is an upper limit on the lifetime of his beliefs.

    It will be interesting to see if he does pick up his bat and ball and go back to his Harbourside Mansion.

    Re Kenny’s article on why we need Malcolm, I don’t think anyone thinks that the number of PM’S since 2007 is a good thing, on the other hand many people would think John Howard was PM for too long (and I don’t mean that as a partisan statement).

    When Kenny says we have become an embarrassment overseas, this is an over statement, post Brexit and the Trump election I don’t think anyone cares, if they ever did. Once again this is also a reflection on how long Howard was PM.

  30. adrian @ #494 Monday, July 3, 2017 at 12:03 pm

    ‘You truly are an obsessive. Get help.’
    Thanks for the great advice Bemused.
    Usually I try to ignore you, but for once you are giving advice and dispensing your pearls of wisdom on a subject on which you clearly have great expertise.

    Thank you for your compliment Adrian.
    Most of my ‘expertise’ was gained by observation – of you.

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