YouGov-Fifty Acres: L-NP 36, ALP 33, Greens 12, One Nation 7

The second federal poll from YouGov goes against the grain in recording an uptick in support for the Coalition, while also finding a big majority in favour of legalising same-sex marriage.

The second fortnightly federal voting intention poll by YouGov for Fifty Acres records a three point increase in the Coalition primary vote, now at 36%, with Labor down one to 33%, the Greens steady on 12% and One Nation steady on 7%. The combined vote for all other parties is down two to 12%, making it slightly less unusual than that score than Newspoll and Essential Research, who respectively have it at 8% and 10%. However, what’s very unusual is a respondent-allocated two-party preferred result that gives the Coalition a lead of 52-48, the reverse of what the result would be if 2016 preference flows were used, as per the other pollsters. I don’t quite have the confidence to lead a post with “52-48 to Coalition” based such an unorthodox reading, so I’ll be using primary votes for my YouGov headlines for the time being.

The poll also found 60% support for same-sex marriage, with 28% opposed; health and hospitals were rated the most important election issue by 45%, followed by pensions on 33% and job security and unemployment on 31%; 56% supportive of a tax on companies that used robots to fund support for those who lost jobs as a result; and 54% expressing concern at indigenous languages falling into disuse, but only 33% believing the government should do anything about it. The poll was conducted online from Thursday to Tuesday, with a sample of a little over 1000.

UPDATE: The Australia Institute has published results of a poll conducted in South Australia by ReachTEL, which shows (after allocating the forced response question from the 7.1% undecided) federal voting intention in the state at 34.3% for the Liberals (down 0.8% on last year’s election), 32.1% for Labor (up 0.6%), 14.9% for the Nick Xenophon Team (down 6.4%), 6.6% for the Greens (up 0.4%), 4.6% for One Nation (didn’t field lower house candidates) and 3.9% for Australian Conservatives (unchanged on the Family First vote). There’s also a separate question on Senate voting intention, and while I have my doubts about such an exercise, it has the Liberals on 30.1% (down 2.5%), Labor on 26.1% (down 1.2%), the Nick Xenophon Team on 21.7% (unchanged), the Greens on 8.2% (up 2.3%), One Nation on 4.8% (up 1.8%) and Australian Conservatives on 5.2% (up 2.3% on the Family First vote, for the most encouraging poll result the party has yet received).

The poll also records strong support for the ABC, with 40.4% wanting its funding increased, 33.4% kept as is and only 17.5% reduced; 64.8% opposed to the government cutting funding to the ABC to get support on relaxed media ownership laws from One Nation, with 16.5% supportive; and 56.3% supportive of a strong online presence for the ABC “even if it effects the commercial viability of commercial media outlets”, with 16.4% opposed (the anti-ABC numbers across the three questions being notably similar). The automated phone poll was conducted from 1589 respondents on June 29.

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.

1,501 comments on “YouGov-Fifty Acres: L-NP 36, ALP 33, Greens 12, One Nation 7”

Comments Page 3 of 31
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  1. From a great distance and with no knowledge of any details, my impression is that Brexit has been rushed into, with no planning. If it survives it will be a failure with many unintended consequences.

  3. Sohar, listening to either of those for over half an hour would lead to a psychic upheaval of massive proportions.
    There should only be so much smugly delivered bullshit that a person could be expected to endure.

    In fact if I recall correctly, Mad as Hell started with references to Ulhmann.
    I get the impression that Shaun Micaleff doesn’t give a shit anymore.

  4. I think we can guess what the Liberal campaign will be for the next election :
    Tax cuts
    Unions – bad
    Shorten – bad
    Labor = carbon tax
    Boats

    I think that is about it.

  5. guytaur @ #69 Thursday, July 13, 2017 at 10:31 am

    P1
    Bemused is correct with you about this issue. Here is another source saying basically the same thing.
    ACOSS: ‘It’s not the wind, it’s the gas. Why power prices are going berserk,’ writes @1petermartin smh.com.au/comment/it-not…
    #electricity #energy

    I don’t read bemused, so I don’t know what he said. But what you said is the same as what the solar enthusiasts always say – i.e. it’s all about price, not GHG emissions. You and they (and probably bemused as well) are wrong – deadly wrong.

  9. Canavan and Kelly rightly attacked on Twitter for their silly suggestions.

    Some pointed out the seemingly selective focus of the government’s concern for “intergenerational theft”, which it spoke a lot about when attacking the budget deficit under Labor.

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/13/stop-trying-to-save-the-planet-matthew-canavan-tells-queensland-government?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+AUS+v1+-+AUS+morning+mail+callout&utm_term=234766&subid=22688624&CMP=ema_632

  11. player one @ #105 Thursday, July 13, 2017 at 12:37 pm

    guytaur @ #69 Thursday, July 13, 2017 at 10:31 am

    P1
    Bemused is correct with you about this issue. Here is another source saying basically the same thing.
    ACOSS: ‘It’s not the wind, it’s the gas. Why power prices are going berserk,’ writes @1petermartin smh.com.au/comment/it-not…
    #electricity #energy

    I don’t read bemused, so I don’t know what he said. But what you said is the same as what the solar enthusiasts always say – i.e. it’s all about price, not GHG emissions. You and they (and probably bemused as well) are wrong – deadly wrong.

    A complete misrepresentation of what others are saying.
    Perhaps we can cut a deal: you stop lying about us and we will stop telling the truth about you!
    Of course it is about GHG emissions.
    But resources are finite and so the cost of reducing emissions really does matter.
    You want to waste resources on a solution that, at best, leads to a 50% reduction in GHG in the electricity sector.
    We want to take the direct path that leads to zero emissions without wasting resources on your cul-de-sac.

  12. Space.
    Remind me; who terminated the Australia Space Office, the Australia Space Council and the National Space Program?

    With the Liberals, no opportunity is too great to be lost.

  13. P1,

    Bemused said:

    n another Galaxy, far far away, coal power stations can magically, at zero cost and in zero time, start burning Gas. P1 lives there.
    In the real world it takes time and money to build new gas fired plants or convert existing coal fired power stations to burn gas and in a lot of cases it is futile as those coal fired plants are due for retirement.
    That money could be better spent on renewables, storage, and perhaps a small peaking gas fired capacity.
    </

    Why waste money building stuff that can’t be amortised (gas) when for about the same money you can build renewables sooner, have a faster reduction of CO2, and end up with something that won’t be a stranded asset.

    Same thing has been said to you multiple times and you just ignore.

  14. Adrian,
    “In fact if I recall correctly, Mad as Hell started with references to Ulhmann.
    I get the impression that Shaun Micaleff doesn’t give a shit anymore”
    Perhaps the ABC is preparing for a post-Lib/Nat world.
    Mind you, I’d still sack the lot of them and have GetUp and the trots run the ABC.

  16. lizzie @ #109 Thursday, July 13, 2017 at 12:42 pm

    Canavan and Kelly rightly attacked on Twitter for their silly suggestions.

    Some pointed out the seemingly selective focus of the government’s concern for “intergenerational theft”, which it spoke a lot about when attacking the budget deficit under Labor.

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/13/stop-trying-to-save-the-planet-matthew-canavan-tells-queensland-government?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+AUS+v1+-+AUS+morning+mail+callout&utm_term=234766&subid=22688624&CMP=ema_632

    How can two idiots like these be tolerated by a leader?

  17. **How can two idiots like these be tolerated by a leader?**
    Tolerated? Someone earlier was speculating what the next Liberal party election campaign will look like. One priority will be to have a bunch of the usual suspects trying to capture the ON vote. The suckholes will be singing from several song sheets with stony straight faces.

  18. John McCain Throws Tantrum Because Russia Scandal Is Stalling The Deadly GOP Health Care Bill

    “I think it’s very difficult when you have this overwhelming barrage of new information that unfolds every few days. I think it’s obvious.”

    “It’s sucking the oxygen out of the room, everybody knows that,” McCain said to CNN.

    After all, each day that we focus on the serious matter involving the Trump campaign’s questionable and troubling ties to Russia, the GOP is kept from passing Trumpcare.

    That may irk Republicans in Congress, but it’s good news for the millions of Americans who will continue to have access to health care through the Affordable Care Act – at least for now.

    http://www.politicususa.com/2017/07/12/john-mccains-throws-tantrum-russia-scandal-stalling-deadly-gop-health-care-bill.html

  25. Guytaur

    You’ve reminded me that on ABC News Breakfast, Del Irani (presenter) was parroting support for fracking, and unfortunately Mark Butler didn’t bring up the objection that it disrupts land use for food production. He tended to defend the expansion of gas fracking.

  26. Lizzie

    I hope Butler was leaving it up to states. I don’t see any defence for Fracking as not all evidence in that it is safe yet

  27. Last post for the day.

    In case you missed it. Alan Jones is wrong in the attack. However I think he got the title correct.

    AlanJones: I’ve known the Minister for Blackouts, Josh Frydenberg for years. Josh- you are out… your political career is finished. #auspol #energy

  28. She referred to a post election analysis done some years ago. The analysts were stumped: they could not explain why certain seats, which were otherwise identical, had swung so differently. Then someone thought to look at the gender make up of the volunteers campaigning in each seat – and found that the seats where there were women actively involved in the campaign were more likely to show a positive swing than those which were male-dominated.

    If the argument is that involving more women will make the LNP more successful (and I’m not disputing it) then why as Labor supporters do we want to see that? I certainly don’t. I would much prefer to see the LNP with its pernicious ideology wither and die.

    Male or female, the Liberals all sing from the same nasty, selfish, song sheet and the type of women they seem to attract are hardly the type of role models we would like our young women to follow – think Bronwyn Bishop, Julie Bishop, Sophie Mirabella, Michaelia Cash, Sussan Ley or Kelly O’Dwyer for example. IMO we should just concentrate on building a good strong Labor party based on equality and dignity for all and to hell with what the Liberals might do.

  30. @ Boerwar – so you want to smoke some difficulty in applying a methodology developed for a low turnout voluntary voting first past the post system with voting along class and nationality lines to a system of high turnout mandatory preferential voting with voting correlated to distance to the closest smashed avo.

  31. VE
    Not really. I just want some of what they are smoking to persuade themselves that their nonsense is worth publishing.
    Anyone who thinks the Coalition is even remotely ahead of Labor 2PP by 52/48 is dreaming.
    In numerical terms, You Gov is out by well over a million voters.

  32. Darn

    I wasn’t advocating a more successful Liberal party. I was pointing out why a more successful Liberal party isn’t going to happen.

  33. Anyone who thinks the Coalition is even remotely ahead of Labor 2PP by 52/48 is dreaming.
    In numerical terms, You Gov is out by well over a million voters.

    I wonder if WB will include them in the Tracker. It would be like shoveling a wet cow cake onto a carefully prepared cheese cake.

  34. Prue MacSweeny…..ugh, what a person. I once watched a season of the Celebrity Apprentice, and I can’t believe now how sympathetic I felt toward her when she got the boot!
    Fantasizing about running over Yassmin Abdul-Mageed, on-air, to a large crowd of already hate-filled 2GB listneners…no wonder Yassmin A-M left the country because she didn’t feel safe!

  35. Boerwar, Tom Hawkins: Be careful about rejecting polls simply because they show results that you think are implausible. PB is largely a Labor bubble environment; it could well be that sentiments among the general public are far more favourable to the Coalition.
    I don’t think that’s the case here, but it’s possible.

  36. YouGov is the new kid on the block and if they simply emerged with the same numbers as other existing polling, then what’s the point?

    William has already indicated he can get to 52/48 to Labor using last election preference flows. So, not that far out when you do the apples to apples comparison. I’d expect WB will wait a little while to incorporate these results more fully.

    I’d like to see a few more polls to identify any apparent house or methodological biases.

  37. From previous thread

    William Bowe
    Wednesday, July 12, 2017 at 8:00 pm
    YouGov have done a lot of work and consulted with some very well credentialed people, and are no doubt doing a lot of things right. But:
    — Their preference allocations are impossible to credit. I will be giving YouGov polls dedicated posts, including for this one this evening, but will be using primary vote numbers for the headline so long as their results are this eccentric.
    — For what it’s worth, David Briggs of Newspoll/Galaxy says “their current panel in Australia is too small to supply the number of respondents they need”. But I don’t have any hard numbers on the size of their panel, so I’m not sure how true this is.
    — Their weighting by education is likely to make their results volatile from poll to poll, since it involves amping up a small sample of those who left school early. Newspoll used to do this quite a long time ago but stopped, and its polls became less jumpy as a result.
    — I have my doubts about weighting by past vote. This can work for them in the UK because they’ve been working that market for a long time and have recorded their panellists’ responses at the time of the election, and thus don’t have to rely on their recall of how they voted, which is notoriously unreliable. But I don’t think they’d have comparable data to do that at this stage. Having said that, I’m not sure how they’re going about this, and I assume everything that’s occurred to me will have occurred to them to.
    — We’re used to extremely homogenous polling in Australia, possibly because everybody is herding to Newspoll. The sorts of anomalies we’re seeing between Newspoll and YouGov — 35% versus 36% for the Coalition, 36% versus 33% for Labor — wouldn’t blow anyone’s mind in the US or the UK. It’s really just the 2PP where they’re running into real trouble.
    — Yes, I’ll be using it in BludgerTrack, but with low weighting and adjusted for bias in such a way that their inclusion won’t make any difference in the long run (i.e. their fluctuations from poll to poll will influence the result, but if they persist in having the ALP primary 3% below the other pollsters, that will be ironed out).

    Thanks again for your thoughts WB. Interesting stuff.

    It could be that the polls are herding to Newspoll, or possibly they are herding to the correct result. At least on TPP the established polls at the last election were quite accurate.

    In any case, it might not be a bad idea for a new pollster honing their methodology to herd toward the established polls, at least until they have collected enough data and had enough real election comparisons to have confidence in their own method.

    The risk for them is they become a bit of a joke. It is highly unlikely (verging on absurd) that 2 weeks of L-NP infighting gave a 3% bounce in primaries and TPP (especially when established polls don’t agree).

    Anyway, I hope they stay around, and sort out their TPP to the point where you can use it as the headline. To me the 3% bounce in L-NP primaries suggests they have more than just the TPP to work on : )

  38. @ Matt – Newspoll, Essential and Bludgertrack have historically done very well in predicting election outcomes.

    Yougov has no such track record to rely on in Australia, and their record in the UK is hardly great – the most recent election, they had an 11th hour methodology change that herded their result to be more in line with the other pollsters, taking them from failing to predict the election correctly, to abjectly failing to predict the election correctly.

  39. Greensborough Growler
    Thursday, July 13, 2017 at 2:20 pm
    YouGov is the new kid on the block and if they simply emerged with the same numbers as other existing polling, then what’s the point?

    Um, because it’s attempting to be an accurate reflection. No points for originality unless the originality renders more accuracy.

  40. Tom Hawkins
    Thursday, July 13, 2017 at 2:07 pm
    Anyone who thinks the Coalition is even remotely ahead of Labor 2PP by 52/48 is dreaming.
    In numerical terms, You Gov is out by well over a million voters.

    I wonder if WB will include them in the Tracker. It would be like shoveling a wet cow cake onto a carefully prepared cheese cake.

    In that quote of WB I just posted he said he plans to include YouGov with adjustments : )

  41. Q,

    If you read the rest of the post, then the published results are just a shaking of the the jelly beans in a jar and using last election preference distribution come out fairly close to the other polls.
    Polls are a means to drive media attention. Some pollsters dress up their results to get attention. This might be one of those occassions.

  42. Cannabis plants are sprouting up all over a German town after pro-marijuana supporters planted tens of thousands of seeds last month.

    Supporters of the group A Few Autonomous Flower Children spread several kilograms of seeds around the university town of Gottingen last month.

    They say they are protesting its ‘demonisation’ in Germany’s ‘restrictive drug laws’.

    Scores of the plants have sprouted all over the town this week to the fury of the local police and council.

    A website shows dozens of photos of the cannabis plants blooming in public parks, allotments, gardens and window boxes all over town – with some even growing outside the local police station.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2372554/Cannabis-plants-spring-German-town-campaigners-plant-thousands-seeds-protest-demonisation-drug.html

  43. GG,
    Perhaps you have hit the nail on the head. A bit of attention seeking. You could well be right about that.

    Not a good idea if you want to be trusted though.

  44. I don’t trust any of them to be truthful.
    Polls two years out from an election are a very poor indicator of the likely outcome of that election.

    Trends are what I watch. So, as I said I’ll wait till we have a few more Yougovs before assessing if they are of any value .

  46. State energy ministers have threatened to lock the Federal Government out of a national plan for a clean energy target.

    Ministers from Queensland and South Australia have been rallying counterparts in other states to go it alone if the Commonwealth refuses to commit to the target proposed by chief scientist Alan Finkel.

    Queensland Energy Minister Mark Bailey said time was running out to make a decision.

    “If the Federal Government isn’t going to get on with it, which appears to be the case, then it might be up to the states to again drive energy policy,” he said.

    “The Victorian Energy Minister and I have had discussions about this and it might be worth getting the Australian Energy Market Commission to do some design work, requested by the states, given the Federal Government is frozen on energy policy.”

    The clean energy target was the primary recommendation from the Finkel report, released last month.

    BUT: Josh Frydenberg warns any state-based solution would be counter-productive.

    You see, Josh wants to pretend that he’s still in charge of clean energy and he wants everyone to slow down. 🙁

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-13/ministers-consider-state-based-clean-energy-target-plan/8705072

  47. Matt
    Thursday, July 13, 2017 at 2:13 pm
    Boerwar, Tom Hawkins: Be careful about rejecting polls simply because they show results that you think are implausible. PB is largely a Labor bubble environment; it could well be that sentiments among the general public are far more favourable to the Coalition.
    I don’t think that’s the case here, but it’s possible.

    That was not the case in the most recent election we have, in WA.
    The established polls all gave it to Labor in a landslide, and Labor still outperformed said polls.

    That the L-NP is struggling isn’t some “PB echo chamber bubble” construct. Established polls that largely got the last election right happen to agree.

  48. @GG – I don’t see the relevance of talking about polls published 10 months ago when we were 2 years out from the next election?

  49. The Larsen C Iceberg floats. When it melts there will be no change to sea levels.
    but
    If the disappearing ice shelf reduces back pressure on Antarctic Glaciers and these speed up, then the Larsen C break up will drive sea levels up.
    so
    It is too soon to say.

  50. Greensborough Growler
    Thursday, July 13, 2017 at 2:48 pm
    I don’t trust any of them to be truthful.
    Polls two years out from an election are a very poor indicator of the likely outcome of that election.

    Well that is true, which is why as an ALP supporter I’m happy for Tony to stay right where he is.

    However, the L-NP just did an election year style budget, an it didn’t help. They have their work cut out for them.

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