This week’s Newspoll result had added 0.3% to Labor’s two-party reading on the BludgerTrack poll aggregate, and added one seat to their national on the seat projection, the gain being in South Australia. The biggest change on the primary vote is an improvement for One Nation, who reversed a weakening trend over the past few months with the latest poll. Newspoll also recorded a weakening in Malcolm Turnbull’s personal ratings, but evidently the aggregate had this priced in already, as the trend results show little changed on last week. As always, full results on the sidebar.
Luci: “Progressive minority seats are the only opportunity for progressive voters to wedge things the opposite way – to push back towards the left.”
Actually I do not believe this is true at all – if anything they provide fodder conservatives to have something to build fear campaigns against. Just as ON provides fodder for progressives.
This is the crux of my argument. Steps rather than leaps actually cement policy change in a progressive direction. An example would be carbon pricing – (and I don’t want to open up the old war again) – had we gone with Rudd’s Very imperfect model that would have been progressed into a better model by now.
Abbott is also an example – he was a knee jerk reaction.
Radicals on both ends of the spectrum are short-lived because most of Australia leans either centre left/centre right – the path of least resistance, so to speak.
poroti @ #1911 Sunday, February 25th, 2018 – 1:31 pm
Yes I find it amusing (actually depressing) that so many here spout Wapo pieces as gospel ignoring the fact of its CIA connections. Sure it was OK for a time in the 70s (I also saw The Post) but recall how before then Katherine Graham had been in bed (possibly really as well as metaphorically) the super macho Vietnam war proponent. With Bezos having a huge contract with CIA, they are just not going to publish anything that denigrates or disagrees with that august body.
Given that WaPo is the leading war bugle at the moment, one assumes that the CIA is itching for war with Russia.
I am actually quite afraid.
briefly @ #2148 Sunday, February 25th, 2018 – 3:08 pm
Actually it was an anti-Adani rant. An anti-right-wing rant. An anti-fence-sitting rant. As Labor is currently on the wrong side of this issue, then yes they get my criticism in regard to it too. It was in relation to the Batman by-election, continuing on the earlier discussion of how Adani is an election issue. My hope isn’t necessarily that the Greens win Batman, but that Labor wises up to take a strong stance against the Adani mine. If they do this before the election they may win the seat, if they wait until after the election they will probably lose the seat. Does that make me “anti-Labor”?
Report on gun control in Australia:
Firearm Legislation in Australia 21 Years : After the National Firearms Agreement. By Philip Alpers and Amélie Rossetti
http://www.gunpolicy.org/documents/6936-firearm-legislation-in-australia-21-years-after-the-national-firearms-agreement
You’re kidding, right? I’ll grant you Turnbull at least looks genuine, but Trump’s smile is totally just going through the motions.
Fake! Sad!
@grimace 2.52pm – undoubtably there are complexities with foreign loses, but it is certainly very fertile soil to till.
Moreover, my point was a rebuttal point to Meher’s assertion that there was no low hanging fruit to pluck in the areas of tax expenditures and deductions. Clearly that is nonesense. Meher seems to forget that one of eleventy Joe’s first actions as incoming treasurer was to reverse Labor’s initiative on this very issue – at a cost to the budget measured in billions. …
Luci
Keep up the good work.
Confessions
Compared to his usual look it is rinky dink genuine.
ANd the fakest of fake smiles in that photo would have to be Melania’s!
This is an obvious move by the Chinese government, given the level of pollution that has accumulated during the years of rapid industrialisation and few environmental controls. You will have seen a lot more of China than myself but from flights and ground travel, the amount of atmospheric pollution is terrible over the eastern half of the country including Hong Kong.
A lot of the push for a greener country will have come from the rapidly increasing numbers of middle class people who want a cleaner, healthier environment. Even a one-party government cannot afford to ignore the voices of its citizens.
That said of course, China seems to be becoming a world leader in clean energy technology and can certainly offer lessons to Australia.
“had we gone with Rudd’s Very imperfect model [CPS] that would have been progressed into a better model by now.”
Absolutely. The kinks could have been ironed out. Rudd would probably have won an election in 2010 and by 2013, no matter who was PM by then, the CPRS would have been part of the furniture. If the Coalition won in 2013, they might have doctored the CPRS to be more friendly to their mates but they probably wouldn’t have abolished it.
Confessions
That was a smile ? 😆
The political clout of a non-major party:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooters,_Fishers_and_Farmers_Party
poroti:
Nah he reserves his truly genuine smiles for when he’s among the faithful.
Confessions says: Sunday, February 25, 2018 at 3:26 pm
ANd the fakest of fake smiles in that photo would have to be Melania’s!
****************************************************************
……. and I bet if she had chosen to use one of the digits on her hand it would not have been her thumb …..
poroti:
No doubt the best she could muster.
I love how she refuses to do the mate thing and also doesn’t touch her husband. The Trump’s body language and public interactions are simply fascinating.
phoenixRed:
Lol!
(originally posted in wrong thread – sorry William)
Electric vehicles: SA Labor proposes no stamp duty, free rego for zero emissions cars
http://reneweconomy.com.au/electric-vehicles-sa-labor-proposes-no-stamp-duty-free-rego-zero-emissions-cars-94207/
Also:
Shorten should pledge to remove luxury car tax from electric vehicles, or at least significantly increase the threshold.
Apparently, David Gillespie has pulled out of the Nationals leadership contest #auspol
I wonder if the White House will employ a body double if Melania one day decides she has had enough of acting as a prop for Donald when on public display?
Trog
SA trying to attract a F1 Grand Prix ? 😆
.
Bernie Ecclestone urges Formula One to make bold switch to electric cars
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/feb/24/bernie-ecclestone-formula-one-liberty-media-electric-cars-ferrari
pegasus
Happy to take your word for it that the Greens have never polled above 10%.
The numerous pollbludger conversations around “The Greens are polling 16%! We’re going to win a swag of seats at the next election!” must have been figments of my imagination.
Luci says:
Sunday, February 25, 2018 at 3:19 pm
briefly @ #2148 Sunday, February 25th, 2018 – 3:08 pm
Luci says:
Sunday, February 25, 2018 at 2:40 pm
…another self-deluding anti-Labor rant….
Actually it was an anti-Adani rant. An anti-right-wing rant.
Ranting will fail. Of this there is no doubt at all. If there is one thing from which voters recoil it is a rant.
Your premises are mistaken. Therefore the conclusions you draw will be wrong too.
Michael Steele slaps CPAC chair down in an awesome way over comments that he was only selected as RNC chair because he’s black. I disagree with numerous positions of Steele’s on a range of issues, but I’ve watched him on Real Time over the last couple years and he is not a Trump fan and has been prepared to criticise Trump and his party on policy matters and on how the party deals with race.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-FSrL6Jhpw
Meanwhile, Labor frontbencher Jason Clare has warned that Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott “will be like Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet Show” as they sit together on the backbench,
‘IT WILL BE THE MUPPET SHOW’ Meanwhile, Labor frontbencher Jason Clare has warned that Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott “will be like Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet Show” as they sit together on the backbench,
GG:
By all reports Gillespie wouldn’t have had the numbers anyway.
Sad McKenzie isn’t throwing her hat in the ring.
pegasus
Winning seats and having political clout are two different things.
Indeed, you can be outside of Parliament and have more political clout than someone sitting on the green (or red) seats.
Pegasus @ #2097 Sunday, February 25th, 2018 – 2:29 pm
I trust you’re not being serious. Greens are massively over-represented on PB compared to the general populace. And as for”infrequent” posts, don’t be ridiculous – just your own drive-by posts each day make up a significant contribution.
‘lizzie says:
Sunday, February 25, 2018 at 1:56 pm
Boerwar
Never thought of Canberra as floodprone. Just rain? Poor drainage? What gives?’
The Canberra CBD sits on a local floodplain.
Local flash floods, local flooded roads, building sites not designed for very high rainfall in a very short period of time, and Sullivan’s ‘Creek’ overtopping its banks.There have been a couple of incidents of people drowning in Canberra over the years – always because of poor decision making involving driving into water.
As for bad planning, over the years urban infill, dual occupancy, and the process gentrification (which exchanges small old houses for large new houses which cover the entire block, essentially means that the proportion of hard to absorbent surfaces is becoming less and less over time.
There were police boats around and about a few hundred meters from our house so we are hoping that nobody has done a silly thing.
poroti
Bernie can see the writing on the wall. There will be no significant further development of ICE cars. Sponsors won’t want to back polluting dinosaurs.
jenauthor @ #2152 Sunday, February 25th, 2018 – 3:18 pm
So you don’t agree with the theory of Overton’s Window? I think you’re more susceptible to it than you realise. The regressives (they are not true conservatives so I won’t call them that) do not need any fodder to build a fear campaign around – they are happy to make it up. It is when progressives bend over backwards to try and avoid triggering them that we end up shifting further to the right ourselves: as we try to meet them half way, they shift the goal posts, and we all end up right of centre.
As far as ON being fodder for progressives… that may have been true when they arrived on the scene 20 years ago, but now the Coalition has shifted so far to the right that these minority parties aren’t saying anything new. Abbott, Dutton, Abetz, Joyce, Christensen… they’re both scary AND in power.
Where is their left counterpart? There isn’t one, and that’s my point. You can’t gain a shift to the left if each giant regressive leap is met by a meek fence-sitting fairy step.
Equating Greens to ON is not correct – Greens is the left equivilent of the Nationals. The Coalition are only in power because the Liberal and National parties teamed up (neither could ever form government without the other). Personally I would love it if Labor and the Greens buried the hatched to make a similar alliance – but I know that isn’t going to happen. And that is one of the reasons why the regressive right is stronger and more powerful than the progressive left.
When was the last time Labor actually came out of an election with more than 50% of the 2PP?
My point is that people who are saying that SA State Labor (and South Australia as the beggar state) should be a model for Federal Labor and the nation.
Extract Federal transfers (of all forms) plus Olympic Dam, and South Australia would be struggling to have an economy bigger than about 1 or 2% of the national economy.
And the Greens WANT to shut Olympic Dam as well.
Hell, they can’t even stop the Goyder line from moving south.
I can understand why the Greens are trying to white-ant Federal Labor by pointing to South Australia but, really!
I have a theory: The Greens are psychologically drawn to defeat and loss and would not actually know what to do if they were forced to run a Government.
Boerwar says: Sunday, February 25, 2018 at 3:45 pm
There were police boats around and about a few hundred meters from our house so we are hoping that nobody has done a silly thing.
**************************************************
The new USS Canberra will soon be on hand to take on board those poor souls affected by all those factors you list, Boerwar
Trump’s answer? I have lots of good ideas.
Luci
‘Equating Greens to ON is not correct – Greens is the left equivilent of the Nationals. ‘
Nice try, but no potato. The Nationals are a party that genuinely aspires to government and in fact is in government more often than not. Its policies are executable. They are routinely accountable for doing stuff, not for talking about stuff.
The Greens and PHON are a fringe extreme protest parties, each with a set of policies that around 90% of Australians will never support.
One other thing separates PHON, the Greens Party and the Nationals.
The Nationals have arrangements that increase the chances that the Liberals will get into government.
PHON tries to destroy the Nationals and the Liberals.
The Greens tries to destroy Labor.
Spot the patterns.
Been busy today, so sorry if someone else already calculated this.
Using the last election preference flows with the Reachtel primaries gives a TPP result of…
ALP 55.5% L-NP 44.5%
Trog
And he is pushing 90 yo !
Confessions @ #2176 Sunday, February 25th, 2018 – 3:44 pm
Mckenzie has issues to do with travel rorts to deal with. She also lives in Elwood a seaside suburb of Melbourne. So, her credentials as understanding and supporting the urban battlers are entirely fake.
Littleproud might be the surprise winner tomorrow!
Boerwar
Don’t underestimate the first mover advantage from a shift to renewables. I think the voters in eastern states are likely to notice a major drop in SA power prices or the kickstarting of new industries.
Also, a huge majority of voters support renewables.
They just need to be weaned off the “renewables are expensive” schtick.
Takes leadership. Time to step up, Bill.
@citizen agreed!
For the past week over the New Years the weather in S.China has been very good, passing through Chengdu today with the family had pretty much blue sky with warm sun.
Chengdu still has plenty of pollution the last time we visited prior to New Years was full of smog/pollution and could not see the sky, clouds, sun, moon.
Luci….
Personally I would love it if Labor and the Greens buried the hatched to make a similar alliance – but I know that isn’t going to happen. And that is one of the reasons why the regressive right is stronger and more powerful than the progressive left.
The inexorable facts are that Pop-Left posing by the Gs harms the Left, in exactly the same way that Pop-Right posing has caused the LNP vote to disintegrate.
What is also true is the G schtick has outlived its usefulness and is alienating Labor-affiliated voters. I think, in fact, that G attacks on Labor probably help Labor these days. Of course, Labor know they are best served by staying away from G-issues; that they do best when they campaign on their own hallmark issues, of which there are very many.
Q
It does but I suspect that there are good reasons not to use last election preferences as a guide.
Luci @ #2135 Sunday, February 25th, 2018 – 2:56 pm
Yeah, yeah, whatever. Suffice to say that your googling of a series of non-contemporaneous positions that Labor used to hold, proves exactly three fifths of bugger all, quite frankly.
Now, if you are really interested about knowing the truth of where the federal Labor Party stands on Thermal Coal Mining, Coking Coal Mining, Climate Change policies, Adani and the global perspective wrt all these things, then I recommend you read Mark Butler’s speech to The Sydney Institute, which he gave last week on February 19th, 2018:
https://markbutler.net.au/news/speeches/managing-climate-related-financial-risk-lessons-from-adani/
Then get back to me if you still think Labor are gung ho for Adani. 🙂
C@tmomma says:
Sunday, February 25, 2018 at 2:46 pm
Luci,
It’s no wonder Pegasus is lauding your posts. They are a confection and a fantasy created wrt to the Labor Party’s positions and policies.
The real @ person at work – cannot resist personal attacks as per above. If you disagree with the @ person its not just differences in points of view it must be lies and fraud. Sad!
Katherine Murphy @murpharoo . How Ostrayan can you get?
Y’all know I’ve had a beef with Katherine Murphy, aka @murpharoo, since she decided, during the Gillard years, that ‘colour and movement’ was all that mattered in politics, and she was not hesitant to sink the boot into Australia’s first female PM, Julia Gillard.
Fast forward. After her defection to The Guardian, and after a lot of criticism of her reporting, Katherine Murphy has done so many mea culpas for not reporting the “facts” but rather how she perceived them, has become de rigueur in her articles.
Her justification for not reporting the BJoyce affair was pretty pathetic. She, and a photographer, were apparently assigned a duty – to go to New England and report on the suspected BJoyce affair. One presumes the dispatcher was Lenore Taylor.
She comes back, and reports “Nothing to see here.”
Fair enough. Katherine, being a New Englander herself, apparently, decided there was nothing to the rumour of an extramarital affair, because ‘Fair Dinkum Accountant’ Barnaby said so.
So, then, after the affair is confirmed and reported by various other outlets, out comes the mea culpa from Murphy, wtte, “despite most people thinking the CPG is a hive mind, nothing could be further from the truth. I didn’t even know about the affair. And when I confronted him, he said “No.” So I couldn’t report anything. Obviously the photographer thought the same, or why mention him/her.
Fast Forward Again. Well, as it turns out, Murpharoo had a big story on her hands. Apparently, Barnaby Joyce, the Deputy PM of Australia, in the prime of his political career, was ‘pensive, didn’t want to be there, and talked about succession’.
And in true Murpharoo fashion, completely missed the story under her nose.
And in true Murpharoo fashion, reports this as a round-up of yet another mea culpa in the making.
FFS girl, get your act together.
briefly @ #2174 Sunday, February 25th, 2018 – 3:42 pm
Your semantics: if someone posts a pro-labor and anti-greens speil, it is not a “rant” and does not raise your ire; however if someone replies to that post by criticising Labor’s stance on the Adani mine, that is classified as a an “anti-Labor rant.”
Pray tell, how am I mistaken about Labor’s stance on the Adani mine? Publicly, they continue to use fence-sitting weaselwords. This, despite there being plenty of evidence that the project is stinker on every level you can think of. Are you in support of the Adani mine proceeding? If not, then how do you support Labor’s public position on it?
I would be quite happy for Labor and the Greens could have the same agreement as the Liberals and the Nationals have.
I look forward to the Greens running in National Party heartland seats like New England while Labor struggles with the Liberals in Liberal heartlands.
It should work a treat.
GG:
MickMack sounds like a gaffe-prone plonker so I suppose he’s following Barnaby’s footsteps on that front.
My observation of Nats MPs these days is that very few of them have any understanding of the issues facing rural and regional Australians. If they did they’d be locked and loaded behind trying to reduce the nation’s GHGEs.
Boerwar
The rare earths in Olympic Dam are worth trillions of dollars. Bummer that the economics of extracting them as yet do not stack up . Piggy backing it were yuuuge geothermal power projects which of course did not go ahead. Disclosure I had Hot Rocks ltd shares 🙂 + 🙁