BludgerTrack: 52.7-47.3 to Labor

An improvement in the Coalition’s still weak position on the poll aggregate, and a possible first sign of the Greens paying for their recent turmoil.

A bumper crop of three new polls this week has caused the BludgerTrack poll aggregate to revert to type after blowing out in Labor’s favour for a couple of weeks. The Coalition had a particularly strong result in the weekly Essential Research sample, which elicited a one-point movement on its fortnight rolling average. The Coalition has gained three on the seat projection – one apiece in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. The Greens have taken a fairly solid knock on the primary vote, which certainly seems intuitively reasonable. However, a two-point drop from YouGov has had something to do with that, and this may for all I know reflect methodological fine-tuning. Newspoll has furnished a new set of data for leadership ratings, which hasn’t yielded anything too dramatic. YouGov also had approval ratings for the two leaders, but I gather they won’t be making a habit of this, so it hasn’t been included.

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 thoughts on “BludgerTrack: 52.7-47.3 to Labor”

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  1. briefly

    Aqualung
    Doyley and Citizen, the problem is that these events always seem to occur when this government has a particularly crap week.

    The LNP are themselves a source of anxiety. The electorate would like a lot less anxiety/ a lot more contentment. Terror events only accentuate anxiety…which has to be negative for whoever happens to be in power.

    ********************************************************

    It follows the classic Mencken rule :

    The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

  2. Re tax ‘loopholes’. Labor should say that family trusts, like investment properties, serve a legitimate purpose, but that does not mean that those people who have them should be allowed to use them to substantially avoid paying their legitimate tax obligations.

  4. Afternoon all.

    When I first heard Labor would be going after trusts during the week I was concerned about the backlash, how would they defend, it along with other policies (Defic Levy, CG and Negative Gearing changes).
    When the announcement came today I realized this was a smart move, assuming they have done their costings and covered the details.

    In a campaign Liberals always try a scare campaign against Labor on family trust tax changes, the only time they don’t is when there are newer, actual policies like last election.
    So if the debate moves to the detail, and timing of the announcement is planned by Labor then it is a big positive.
    So far, from Insiders this morning, very early days, I think it has been done well.

    I think the terror raids are an operational matter, timing completely unrelated to the government. Of course Turnbull’s presser when he is supposed to be on leave, is a sign of their use of terrorism as a political tactic.

  5. phoenixRED
    briefly

    The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

    This has become self-defeating for the LNP. John Howard certainly tapped into something very deep when he famously said what he most wanted for Australians was that they should feel relaxed and comfortable. The LNP have become a well of doubt and misgiving, of false promise and broken trust. This will condemn them to a resounding defeat whenever the next election is held.

  6. I’ve been saving this for a quiet Sunday afternoon. It’s waaaay off topic, but I think William will forgive us this one digression from politics for a couple of minutes.

    For those of you who don’t know, Penn and Teller are a couple of very skilled and experienced magicians who have a show in which up and coming magicians are invited to come on and try to fool them with tricks they cannot explain. In most cases they are straight onto how the tricks were done, but occasionally they have to admit they just haven’t got a clue. This is one such case.

    Enjoy the sheer genius of Shin Lim (the act starts at about the one minute mark).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJnmFOC8ym4

  12. bemused
    Barney in Go Dau @ #1214 Sunday, July 30th, 2017 – 10:39 am

    Bemused,

    I remember that.

    What a horrible impost that that places on them.

    Training and education, untenable!

    The thing that surprised me was their refreshing honesty in stating it so openly.

    It just proves that 457s were a cop out and a rort for some employers.

  13. Doyley

    Do a compare and contrast with the UK. Just like with other police operations they don’t have the PM announcing police operation

    I think its fair to say as a result this is politiciasation of Terror.

    Be very afraid our government is dog whistling

  17. Guytaur,

    I am sure Turnbull grabbed onto the raids for his own advantage after the event. My comments were focused on the suggestion of some form of ” collusion ” between the government and AFP re the timing of the raids. Two separate issues.

    Cheers.

  19. Lizzie

    Done well its a good idea. Puts the thread on your email. Thus not missing a thread on a topic you are really interested in.

  21. I received follow-up emails for the previous thread the last couple of mornings. I subscribed then very quickly unsubscribed. It appears WB has turned that option off manually for the previous thread. Nothing to be seen now on that page.

  23. I’m an advocate for removing the follow up comments, doesn’t really make sense for users, Crikey aren’t really going to get any more engagement via the email spam. Not to mention their email server load.
    The bug ridden nature of them is even worse. By rights every single email sent out should contain a link to an unsubscribe url, and this should actually work.

  24. Darn
    Spot on Laughtong – and it surprised me too. Malcolm Fraser changed a lot in the latter part of his life.

    Just shows what a corrupting influence the Liberal Party is on people that only those that are able to disassociate themselves from it are able and willing to comment without concern of the consequences.

    Fraser and Hewson are the two obvious examples of this.

    Other former politicians who are still enmeshed in the Party structure or rely on the public teat rarely wander from the Party or their factional lines.

  25. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/opinion/australia-immigration-as-a-security-threat.html?smid=tw-share

    Australia began this century with a Department for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. Back then, the department’s slogan was “Enriching Australia through Migration.” Just over a decade ago it dropped the multiculturalism portfolio entirely, creating instead a Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Now it’s to be rolled into a national security department. Thus, we can chart Australia’s public conception of migration from being a celebrated aspect of its multicultural character to a civic idea whose highest ultimate expression is citizenship to a threat to be managed.

    That certainly chimes with Australia’s established rhetoric on asylum seekers, which has dominated public expression of our immigration program. And it might suit the increasingly nationalist belligerence of our age. But it does not suit Mr. Turnbull, a man who until recently was fond of celebrating Australia as “the most successful multicultural society in the world”; a man who only a few weeks ago was declaring that his party was established to be liberal, in contradistinction to conservative.

    When the story of the Turnbull government is written, he will have been the prime minister who finally debased immigration in the Australian political imagination. The image last week of the prime minister draped awkwardly in military power will surely accompany that chapter. And those gas masks won’t look much like liberalism. Most likely they won’t look much like success either.

  26. Zeh
    I’m an advocate for removing the follow up comments, doesn’t really make sense for users, Crikey aren’t really going to get any more engagement via the email spam. Not to mention their email server load.
    The bug ridden nature of them is even worse. By rights every single email sent out should contain a link to an unsubscribe url, and this should actually work.

    William mentioned a few days ago that disabling this function was in the works when he warned people not to use it.

  28. When the story of the Turnbull government is written, he will have been the prime minister who finally debased immigration in the Australian political imagination. The image last week of the prime minister draped awkwardly in military power will surely accompany that chapter. And those gas masks won’t look much like liberalism. Most likely they won’t look much like success either.

    Oh boy, that’s gotta hurt Malcolm and in all seriousness should be a wake-up call for the modicum of moderate Liberals there are left in the party.

  30. LIzzie,
    “You may have to go back to you-gov thread to unsubscribe. Otherwise, sorry, dunno.”
    Thanks. I’ve tried doing this a few times, but they still keep coming. Does Bill have an email these days?

  31. It is definitely no coincidence that today’s announcement by Turnbull coincided with the ALP conference & Shorten’s policy announcements (not to mention one of the few times we had an ALP shadow minister on Insiders)

  32. Labor’s success at drawing the Government into a fight about fairness also shows how deft Shorten has been at setting the political agenda. In the past week, he has done so not just on the inequality debate but on fixed four-year terms and changes to trust law.

    Since the 2014 Budget when Tony Abbott tried arguing the age of entitlement was over, Australian politicians have been scrambling over who is fairest of them all.

    The coalition has been caught flat-footed over the argument, hitting back at Shorten for engaging in old-fashioned class warfare, but struggling to outline an alternative remedy for those feeling left behind.
    “It is blatant ideology masquerading as fairness, and we embrace or even indulge it at our peril,” Morrison said of Shorten’s proposal to tax high-income earners.

    Liberal MP Andrew Laming said that inequality was “staring over a fence and noticing another guy has got a jetski and you don’t have one”, arguing the government was better off focusing on poverty.

    https://thewest.com.au/opinion/bill-shortens-pitch-on-fairness-has-caught-the-government-flat-footed-ng-b88549837z

    I see Cormann is now saying Shorten is “getting too cocky” about becoming the next PM and is over-reaching.

  34. I attended a talk given by Tara Moss yesterday at the Alexander Library in Perth, an event that forms part of the Festival of Ideas.

    She was great. Warm, funny, intelligent and very interesting, her purpose was to encourage people to notice and speak out against sexism. She cited a few statistics to show some of the ways in which women are discriminated against. These included examples from the language, showing how sexist meanings can be embodied linguistically, to data on the shares of power held by men and women. She cited data from the US showing that men were more than twice as likely as women to be cited in the media in reports on abortion; that in general men were three times more likely to be cited as “experts” than women and that women were three times more likely than men to be depicted as “victims”.

    She also cited research that showed women were around 9 times more likely than men to be the subject of abuse in online settings. This certainly matches our experience here at PB, where women are very much more likely than men to be subjected to rebukes, insults, deprecations and general slurring and sledging. This conduct is in its very nature profoundly sexist.

    Following the example of Tara Moss yesterday, I would appeal to WB to impose an absolute embargo on the use of sexist expressions here. They are utterly objectionable and degrade us all.

  35. Labor’s framing of the inequality debate has also had the effect of snookering the coalition when it comes to arguing for its signature economic policy — cutting the company tax rate. Defending high-income earners and big business is a tricky gig, even if Morrison is right when he argues healthy business may lead to better profits and the wage increases so desired by workers. Try telling someone who hasn’t had a pay rise for five years that the answer is to give the big boss more money.

    Is there any evidence that employers given a tax cut pass it onto employees through increasing their salary and entitlements on even a semi-regular basis?

  36. Sorry, but I can’t do anything about the email issue. I was told it would be removed, and hopefully that will happen soon.

  38. Today was Sydney’s warmest July day on record, with a recording of 26.5 at 2:11PM. Penrith on Sydney’s Western fringe reached 28.2.

  39. When things are going badly for the Government talk turns to “Terror”. I bet the Liberals are also desperate to get “boats” back into the headlines.

  40. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/28/angela-rayner-shadow-education-secretary-interview

    “I’m Labour through and through, and I wouldn’t define myself by a particular leader.” She is a socialist, but less ideological one than some of her colleagues. “Ideology never put food on my table,” she says….She makes an economic case for better education, health and social care, arguing that early intervention and proper support will save money in the long run. She even praises Blair for winning three elections. “I’ve been considered rightwing, moderate, hard left,” she says. “I see myself as soft left. I’m very pragmatic. I’m interested in how we can change lives for the better; how we can we put socialism into practice. Every time we expend energy on fighting each other, we’re letting down the people that need us the most.”

  42. confessions
    briefly:

    I’ve seen Tara Moss interviewed and she is an incredibly intelligent and articulate woman.

    She’s just great. I thoroughly enjoyed the event. She was supported by Sisonke Msimang, without any doubt one of the cleverest, most articulate and talented people I’ve had the good fortune to meet…

  44. Re the emails, they have not stopped.

    However, we can live it by either hiving it off to spam and/or blocking it off by actually putting in a blocker by using – noreply@crickey.com.au – which seems to have also choked off the list/flood of emails. The latter move seems to have worked lately.

  47. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten wants the next election to be the hard hats versus the top hats, as equality becomes the new rallying cry of Western politics.

    The next election will be the Police State V the Welfare State.

    The Liberals will politically assassinate Turnbull again, symbolic as he is of the Top Hats, and replace him with the Ex Copper, Dutton and I think the Copper’s sprog, Morrison will stay on in Treasury, to lock in the Fundie vote and promote his Working Class Droog credentials. They are both the authors and political parents of the current legislative crackdown on our freedoms. Aided and abetted by Brandis. So they are the New Authoritarianism’s best avatars.

    We must Resist!

    The New Authoritarians, the world over, now have the means and the will to implement full spectrum control over our lives, physical and digital. They must not be allowed to complete what they see as the task at hand.

  48. confessions @ #1258 Sunday, July 30th, 2017 – 9:16 am

    Trog:

    Hastie was called a ‘rising star’ in a West article the other day as well.

    No clue why a thick as two short planks religious zealot could be called a rising star, but it is the Liberal party.

    From what I’ve heard Hastie is working very, very hard to connect with voters in his electorate doing town halls and the like.

  49. I am watching Utopia on iview. At least, I was, but the too real treatment is getting me so tense and frustrated I think I’d better stop.

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