BludgerTrack: 53.6-46.4 to Labor

New poll this week from Newspoll (better for the Coalition), Essential Research (worse) and YouGov (about the same) add up to no change at all on the BludgerTrack poll aggregate, except that the Coalition is up a seat in Victoria and down one in Western Australia. The leadership ratings from Newspoll cause Malcolm Turnbull to gain a little ground on preferred prime minister, but lose it on net approval. Full details at the bottom.

First though, some news on forthcoming by-elections, which will get dedicated pages and threads soon enough:

• A date is yet to be set for the by-election in the Victorian state seat of Northcote following the death of on August 23. There will presumably be no Liberal candidate, but the Greens are highly competitive in the seat, having fallen 6.0% short of unseating Richardson at the 2014 election. Clare Burns, a political organiser with the Victorian Trades Hall Council and former speech pathologist, has been preselected unopposed as Labor’s candidate. The Greens will hold a preselection ballot today.

• There are now three state by-elections looming in New South Wales, and the date for them has been set at October 14. Cootamundra and Blacktown were already on the cards, following the respective retirements of Nationals MP Katrina Hodgkinson and Labor MP John Robertson, and Murray was added to the list earlier this week after Nationals MP Adrian Piccoli announced his retirement.

And some localised polling snippets:

• There was a rare Northern Territory opinion poll a fortnight ago, conducted by MediaReach for the Northern Territory News and encompassing a sample of 1400. On the primary vote, the poll has Labor on 43%, compared with 42.2% last year; the Country Liberal Party on 38%, recovering from 31.8%; and “others” on 19%. The respondent-allocated preference result is 50-50, compared with 58.5-41.5 to Labor last year, which implies a near-perfect reversal of the 63-37 preference split in favour of Labor last year.

• (UPDATE: I had a report here on Tony Windsor’s prospects on New England, but I wasn’t looking closely enough and it was actually from before the last 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.

795 comments on “BludgerTrack: 53.6-46.4 to Labor”

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  4. daretotread @ #299 Saturday, September 9th, 2017 – 6:44 pm

    Steve
    —
    Recall the massacre of the Japanese POW at Corowa.
    —

    Another re-write of history?
    I wasn’t alive at the time so I don’t recall it, but there was a mass break-out by Japanese POWs at Cowra and a number of Australian guards killed as well as a couple of others in the subsequent round up. One of my mother’s uncles was killed.

    It was not in any sense a massacre.

  6. dtt

    What was heartening about the pushbacks against Trump’s attempts to ban residents of certain countries entering the US was that these suggested some lessons had been learned.

  7. Cowra breakout: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowra_breakout.

    During the escape and subsequent round-up of POWs, four Australian soldiers and 231 Japanese soldiers were killed and 108 prisoners were wounded. The leaders of the breakout had ordered the escapees not to attack Australian civilians, and none were killed or injured.

    It was regrettable, it was war. But we couldn’t let hundreds of enemy soldiers and seamen loose in the Australian countryside and the Japanese were determined not to surrender.

    A Japanese garden has been built near the site of the prison camp.

  12. Steve777 @ #307 Saturday, September 9th, 2017 – 7:22 pm

    Cowra breakout: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowra_breakout.

    During the escape and subsequent round-up of POWs, four Australian soldiers and 231 Japanese soldiers were killed and 108 prisoners were wounded. The leaders of the breakout ordered the escapees not to attack Australian civilians, and none were killed or injured.

    It was regrettable, it was war. But we couldn’t let hundreds of enemy soldiers and seamen loose in the Australian countryside and the Japanese were determined not to surrender.

    A Japanese garden has been built near the site of the prison camp.

    Steve, I have been to Cowra and located the site of the camp and visited the Japanese Garden.
    Many of the Japanese killed were suicides and some were killed by other Japanese.
    Shooting only started when the prisoners rushed the wire. What were the guards supposed to do, blow them kisses? They had armed themselves with weapons such as baseball bats with nails embedded.
    There was no intent to massacre prisoners but many were shot attempting to escape.

  16. zoomster @ #310 Saturday, September 9th, 2017 – 7:26 pm

    …and apparently some of the escapees either suicided rather than be recaptured or were killed by their compatriots.

    I read one rather hilarious story about one prisoner who decided to commit suicide by lying with his neck on a railway line. He came from a place in Japan where there were frequent trains.
    After many hours lying there and developing a stiff neck, he gave up when no train came and meekly surrendered.

    Arising out of all of this some of the prisoners acquired a new insight into the value of life and formed an association known as the “Cowra Kai” where the word “kai” means something like a graduate. I heard a very good radio documentary on the topic and have a couple of books on the breakout.

  23. Another amusing anecdote from that document.

    The second was a talk by Keiko Tamura, in which she paid tribute to a Cowra farmer’s wife, the late Mae Weir, who, with typical country hospitality, calmly served tea and home-made scones to some escaped Japanese prisoners before allowing the guards to take them back to the camp.

  30. cud chewer

    Google up the following
    au/business/opinion/alan-kohler/coalitions-retreat-back-to-coalfired-power-stations/news-story/16a5eebf15f656d4440fa6a4f9affc40

  33. Boerwar

    A bit of “verbaling” there re Sanders. The claim for support of Sanders was not that they were the same but that Hilary = Business as usual. Business that ain’t working.

  43. I see. So the graph says wind with firming costs $90/MWhr, less than the cost of coal. And solar with firming costs about $120/MWhr, fractionally more than coal.

    Yet there is a commenter saying “Show me a credible solar/wind + pumped hydro LCOE that isnt A$200/MWh”

    Must be related to P1 🙂

  45. cud chewer @ #343 Saturday, September 9th, 2017 – 10:04 pm

    I see. So the graph says wind with firming costs $90/MWhr, less than the cost of coal. And solar with firming costs about $120/MWhr, fractionally more than coal.

    Yet there is a commenter saying “Show me a credible solar/wind + pumped hydro LCOE that isnt A$200/MWh”

    Must be related to P1 🙂

    Yes, most of the comments were just a hoot and quite contrary to reality.

  46. Those comments are ‘interesting ‘, our energy problems are all the fault of the RET, also there are 1600 clean coal fired power stations in construction around the world.
    Also renewables are heavily subsidized, there are no subsidies for coal.

  47. Alan Koehler in the article linked by AB11 @9:20PM:

    “Backs against the wall, the coal industry fought. Who knows what happened behind the scenes, but during 2016 coal became a right-wing deity, a totem for the conservative faction of the Coalition to dance around. Those who don’t believe in coal are heretics, if not infidels, and there is nothing worse than an apostate, like AGL.“

    So what happened in 2016? If the Coalition can chuck $80 million down the toilet in a union witch hunt targeting past and future Labor PMs, maybe an incoming Labor Government can set up an enquiry into Australia’s energy mess, a far more useful and productive endeavour, to include within its remit an answer to that question.

  50. Port and Weagles down to the wire.

    Great game. I’m no WCE or Port fan but it’s always good to see a great game of footy end on a knife edge.

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