Mid-week miscellany

Federal electoral news nuggets, sourced from Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory.

We are having one of the poll-free weeks that have occasionally bedevilled us since Essential Research moved from weekly to fortnightly, with Newspoll having one of its occasional three-week gaps so its next poll coincides with the resumption of parliament. So here’s some random bits of electoral news:

• A polling nugget I forgot to relate a fortnight ago: according to a report by Nick Butterly of The West Australian, a Labor internal poll recorded a neck-and-neck result in the Perth seat of Stirling, which Michael Keenan holds for the Liberals by a margin of 6.1%. After excluding the 10.8% undecided, the primary votes were Liberal 40.2% (49.5% in 2016), Labor 37.6% (32.2%), Greens 9.0% (11.7%) and One Nation 5.3%. The poll was conducted by Community Engagement from a large sample of 1735.

• Gareth Parker in the Sunday Times reports that Matt O’Sullivan, who ran unsuccessfully in the lower house seat of Burt at the 2016 election, has narrowly won preselection for the third position on the Liberals’ Western Australian Senate ticket, behind incumbents Linda Reynolds and Slade Brockman. O’Sullivan emerged with 56 votes to 54 for Trish Botha, co-founder with her husband of an evangelical church in Perth’s northern suburbs. The closeness of the result surprised party observers, especially given Christian conservative numbers man Nick Goiran backed O’Sullivan. As Gareth Parker noted in his weekly column, Botha appears to have attracted support from “non God-botherers” opposed to Goiran’s alliance with Mathias Cormann and Peter Collier, who may not have been aware of the messianic language employed by Botha’s church.

• Katy Gallagher has announced she will seek preselection to recover the Australian Capital Territory Senate seat from which she was disqualified last month over Section 44 complications, after speculation she might instead seek the territory’s newly created third lower house seat. However, it appears she will face opposition from the newly anointed successor to her Senate seat, David Smith, former local director of Professionals Australia.

• As for the lower house situation in the Australian Capital Territory, Andrew Leigh will remain in Fenner and Gai Brodtmann will go from Canberra to the nominally new seat of Bean, leaving a vacancy available in Canberra. Smith appears set to run if he loses the Senate preselection to Gallagher; Sally Whyte of Fairfax reports he will be opposed by Kel Watt, a lobbyist who has lately made a name for himself campaigning against the territory Labor government’s ban on greyhound racing. Other potential starters include John Falzon, chief executive of the St Vincent de Paul Society; Jacob Ingram, a staffer to Chief Minister Andrew Barr; and Jacob White, a staffer to Andrew Leigh.

• Occasional Poll Bludger contributor Adrian Beaumont has launched his own website of local and international election and polling news.

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.

1,992 comments on “Mid-week miscellany”

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  2. …as a minor coincidence, my youngest son is in the air presently, headed for Sarawak. Swinburne has a campus there, so he’ll be there for six weeks, taking up his job at Melbourne Water a couple of days after he gets back.

  3. Guytaur, I am not crabwalking the Rudd no.2 Government’s responsbility for reopening manus.

    Unless yiu are auditioning for a job with fairfax or as a LNP media advisor, please stop your ‘look. over there. labor’ antics.

    The immediate and direct consequnce of (once again for the hard of thinking on this issue) the JOINT LNP and Green vote was that the boats kept coming and many sank with more drownings. THAT is what you cannot crab walk the Greens away from. They are as equally responsble with the LNP for that DIRECT consequence as the getaway driver is with the money snatcher in an armed robbery.

    Now – and we can both agree on this – just as the getaway driver may not be responsible for the post robbery actions of the member of the crew who walked back and shot the security guard dead afterwards ‘just to be thorough’, that the Greens are not responsible for Dutton’s gulags. That is besides the point. However, I would also strongly argue that the Greens intransigence gave Labor no lattitude and realistic option other than to go back to offshore processing and reopen Nauru and Manus as a last gasp effort to fix both a massive human tragedy at sea and a complete breakdown in the orderly and lawful reception of refugees.

  4. psyclaw @ #1636 Sunday, June 17th, 2018 – 4:36 pm

    DTT

    “However no one in Malaysia was prepared to sign publicly on the dotted line.”

    Not so. The Malaysian government signed a MOU about the deal (swap 800 refugees here for 4,000 in Malaysia).

    The issue for the HC was that Malaysia had no domestic law guaranteeing the protection of the 800 to be sent, nor were they a party to relevant international law.

    When the Gillard government then tried to alter (s186 I think) of the Migration Act to counter the HC decision (the normal statutory practice when the HC is “offended”), the Abbotteers and the Greens combined to block the legislation.

    It is hard to imagine that Malaysia would have been more harmful to the refugees than Manus and Nauru turned out to be, nor that the Malaysian government would have been crueller than Dutton.

    Labor’s policy turned out to be better than what transpired when the Greens balance-of-power vote blocked it.

    Quick goog;le

    You mean MOU like this)
    (ABC Lateline leaks UNHCR Malaysian deal documents – Steve Cannane’s Lateline report reveals how Malaysia deleted references to ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’, replacing them with the term “illegal immigrants”, and how human rights protections sought by Australia were deleted. The Report triggered a ripple effect that became a shockwave amongst Labor backbenchers, UNHCR Geneva and human rights organisations,)

    The MOU was not signed byt the PM and lacked the authority of the Cabinet and certainly the support of the Opposition. This was a very poor prognosis for success long term.

    You do I hope recollect that the very words that fell foul of the HC were those inserted into the Howard Act by the decent and brave Liberal Rebels such as Petro Georgiou, which most of us here applauded at the time. The High Court (or enough of them) would probably have accepted any sort of clear commitment by Malaysia – signing the Convention would have been one such but even a clear signed agreement (more binding than an MOU) may have been sufficient.

    The thing is that the commitment was for LIFE. A five year old girl sent to Malaysia may well have been seriously exploited 10 years on if her parents had no work and her Australian supported education had ceased as she finished school.

    Yes as I said in hindsight, despite the very real risks it would have been preferable to Nauru, but hind sight is a wunnerful thing.

    This is an article I found on google
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/16/dozens-of-refugees-have-died-in-malaysian-detention-centres-un-reveals

  5. Bemused

    I am talking facts not myths.

    Fact. The key vote that voted the Malaysian solution down was always that of the LNP.

    The Greens would never had the numbers without the LNP.

    This does not make the Greens responsible for the LNP when in government having indefinite detention.

    Thats on the LNP they are the government they are the policy makers.

    With the numbers in the Senate who has the ability to vote against indefinite detention?

    The Greens Labor and the Crossbench if the government brought such a policy into place.

    You can only vote on the legislation in front of you. Especially when you don’t know the outcome of an election.

    One of which many here including myself thought Labor would win.

    I remember the Murdoch media using the sly tool of a comedy programme to put a Nazi look on the Labor Party. Despicable propaganda.

    I don’t blame the Greens for that either.

  6. …and of course we have no responsibility for refugees from Iraq and Syria or Afghanistan?

    Come in spinner! 😀

    I deliberately left that bit vague to see if anyone from teh Greens’ camp bit, and there you go!

    Of course we should, and have, taken refugees from the Afghan and Iraq wars. However, to my point, those wars are over now, despite continuing civil unrest, but that’s not the same thing. So, we no longer need to take any more other than those who are in the pipeline legitimately. Syrians deserve our attention more at the present time.

  7. Fact. The key vote that voted the Malaysian solution down was always that of the LNP.

    guytaur, as John Howard used to say, “It’s all about the arithmetic”. So, the arithmetic was, Coalition + Greens = Regional Resettlement voted down in the Senate. Fact.

  8. FFS

    An MOU is not a law or even a contract. It is simp;ly a warm inner glow to give a fig leaf of respectability.

    Does NO ONE recall that it was only signed by a relatively junior minister and had about as much public support as small pox.

  9. DTT..yes all those areas were covered, especially staffing hospitals on minimal staff. Even food distribution and rationing was covered. The committee had very good professionals in charge (no political hacks).
    Epidemics and pandemics are well researched and understood-they chart a well known course usually, so good planning is possible.

  10. I can remember Shire staff being seconded to do similar planning at a regional level – for example, game planning scenarios such as a major dam failure.

    Recently there was a disaster preparedness simulation here involving a major oil spill in the harbour. Multiple state govt agencies, local government, and non profit organisations participated in the 2 day exercise.

    These things are not uncommon, as others have said.

  11. dtt

    ‘The MOU was not signed byt the PM and lacked the authority of the Cabinet and certainly the support of the Opposition. This was a very poor prognosis for success long term.’

    Wow, talk about shifting goal posts.

    Your original claim was that Malaysia did not sign up to the deal.

    They did.

    I thought you were never afraid to admit you were wrong?

  12. Guytaur. Is part of your brain comprised of dead matter?

    You say: “The Greens would never had the numbers without the LNP.”

    Correct.

    But you then skip over the equally true ‘fun fact’:

    “The LNP never had the numbers without the Greens”.

    Can you then see the problem with the rest of your reasoning?

  13. Does NO ONE recall that it was only signed by a relatively junior minister and had about as much public support as small pox.

    Missed it, ran out of Tally-Ho’s

  14. AE

    No. The Greens are not responsible for people choosing to get on boats and drown at sea. This was only ever the LNP using the honest empathy and compassion of the majority of Australian people including Labor politicians for political purposes.

    Labor has never been in favour of people drowning at sea. Neither for that matter are the Greens.

    This is a tool the LNP have been using to wedge Labor people into thinking they can’t be strong on speaking up for human rights. To do such a thing makes you soft on people smugglers and for people drowning at sea is their narrative.

    The Greens have never been in favour of this. Labor certainly has not. Yet you see in parliament this claim being made despite the fact that Labor has been more than crystal clear on this.

    Time to put the red herring to bed and blame the LNP for the deaths and injuries and human rights abuses they are making and stop blaming the Greens for being for human rights and thus voting against the Malaysia solution.

  16. Julian Burnside
    ‏ @JulianBurnside
    Jun 16

    In the coming weeks, 12,500 people including pregnant mothers and families with school-age children will be left destitute – cut off from a basic living allowance while seeking asylum.
    YOUR government is cutting the SRSS
    Time to protest, if you think Australia is a decent country

  17. Our exercise last month was very practical.
    We immunised 90% of the clinical staff (1200) against flu in 6 hours with no disruption to business as a test of the immunisation strategy

  18. Andrew Earlwood

    You keep posting as if the Malaysia vote was up to the Greens. It was not. It was up to the LNP. They were the ones that changed policy position and voted against their own policy not the Greens.

  19. Labor really needs to confront their denial of what they’re supporting in Australia’s offshore torture/death camps.

    Continuing to turn away from the reality is craven and shameful.

  20. Andrew_Earlwood @ #1572 Sunday, June 17th, 2018 – 3:19 pm

    C@t – do you remeber the palbable glee amongst the LNP MPs, Senators and staffers in Parliament House when the vision of that refugee boat dashing itself against the rocks on Christmas Island was broadcast live on TV? I do. … For the Greens to give any comfort to that outfit was beyond the pail.

    Yep. And I remember the Bobsie Twins crocodile tears over asylum seekers. What a pair. Joe Hockey and Sarah Hanson-Young. I won’t say what they are a pair of!

  21. Zoomster

    Malaysia signed (via a junir minister) a much modified MOU but it was not specifically what we wanted and had many qualifications.

    IT IS NOT ME saying this but the bloody foolish ignorant High Court eh what. What would they know after all. Mere babies.

    Tjhe other obvious point that some of you who seem to think you understand politics is that has the Malaysian legislation been supported by the greens and the deal gone ahead, within three months there would have been Murdock paper splashes all over the papers about how pur cruel dal had led to something or other – prostitin, jl stavation abuse, who knows what it would have been buut you can be bloody sure that the Abbott forces in the Murdoch news would have found some. Moreover they would have fanned the flames in Malaysia and there would have been a riot or some such.

    This should have been obvious to anyone with a smidgeon of common sense. ONLY if there was STRONG public support could the swap have worked.

  24. Guytaur you are showing the arrogance and denial that pus people of the greens

    FACT the greens voted WITH the LNP to stop the Malaysian solution

  25. OC
    As a matter of curiosity, was there a blip in absenteeism in the days immediately after the mass innoculation?

  26. Another Liberal Party travel rort is uncovered. However is this connected with Liberal pre selection battles over their SA senate list? Gichuhi was also recently accused of contravening s44.

    A new Liberal senator recruit will fork up thousands of dollars to pay back Australian taxpayers for the misuse of public funds.

    News Corp reported on Sunday that Senator Lucy Gichuhi, who joined the Liberals in February, billed taxpayers to fly two family members to Adelaide for her 50th birthday.

    “This was an administrative error involving misunderstanding of travel rules,” Senator Gichuhi tweeted on Sunday.

    “I’ve raised an invoice from the department to pay the costs of $2139 in full.”

    https://www.sbs.com.au/news/liberal-senator-to-repay-misused-funds

  27. Coalition + Greens = Regional Resettlement voted down in the Senate. Fact.

    There are two well known and accepted measures of power of a voting block on a majoritarian committee, the Banzhaf and Shapley-Shubik indices.

    Both put LNP and Greens power in the Regional Resettlement vote as 0.5-0.5. As in, both were essential and had effective veto power on the outcome (every other voting block had committed to a side).

    Because mathematics.

  28. dtt

    ‘IT IS NOT ME saying this but the bloody foolish ignorant High Court eh what. What would they know after all. Mere babies.’

    The High Court made no ruling about the nature of the deal. They ruled that it was not legal for Australia to sign a deal with a country which was not a UNHCR signatory.

    But it’s great to see you putting into practice your often stated position that you admit when it when you’ve been shown to be wrong.

  29. The torture/death camps aren’t going anywhere. The cruel destructive Govt will use the camps to split Labor so avoiding the issue will only harm Labor politically.

  31. Not noticeably so. There were 2 reactions out of 1200; 1 nurse fainted at the sight of the needle and 1 was a genuine mild allergy

  32. zoomster @ #1674 Sunday, June 17th, 2018 – 5:11 pm

    dtt

    ‘IT IS NOT ME saying this but the bloody foolish ignorant High Court eh what. What would they know after all. Mere babies.’

    The High Court made no ruling about the nature of the deal. They ruled that it was not legal for Australia to sign a deal with a country which was not a UNHCR signatory.

    But it’s great to see you putting into practice your often stated position that you admit when it when you’ve been shown to be wrong.

    rubbish

    read the judgement – i did. each judge was different. several would have been ameb=nable if there was some more formal agreement.

  33. “This was an administrative error involving misunderstanding of travel rules,” Senator Gichuhi tweeted on Sunday.

    These excuses are totally unacceptable to Robocop. Cut her pay. Lock her up.

  35. Scout

    Fact. I am not denying that.

    Fact voting against the Malaysia solution does NOT make the Green responsible for LNP actions and policies.

    Saying that the Greens are thus responsible for the actions of the government of the day are in fact Labor myth. Except perhaps for supporting the Gillard government with confidence of course.

    The Greens so anti Labor they kept Labor in power for three years.

  37. @Guytaur:

    “Andrew Earlwood

    You keep posting as if the Malaysia vote was up to the Greens. It was not. It was up to the LNP. They were the ones that changed policy position and voted against their own policy not the Greens.”

    Facepalm.

    I did not and do not “keep posting” that the “Malaysia vote was up to the Greens”. Clearly and obviously it was not.

    Where you fall, down is in your assertion “It was up to the LNP”. Again, clearly it was not.

    Neither could vote the malaysian solution down. It required the votes of both. Get my drift? No??

    OK – I’ll try another analogy. A man and a woman have consensual sex. This is after the man – who had frequently said that he wasn’t interested sexually in the woman, changed his mind. They both knew that neither was using birth control. As a consequnce, the woman fell pregnant and later gives birth. Riddle me this. Who is responsible for the child. The man or the woman?

  38. Just got Reachteled. Offered a choice of 4 short surveys, Social media, Cost of Living, Politics and one other I’ve already forgotten. Chose politics and it was just Federal voting intention with a choice that included ONP and then got age & gender.

  39. OC, most of the oldies down here had their flu shots last year ,as prescribed. So many of them went down with the flu it was comical [in a deathly way]. My aversion to needles somehow got me through unscathed.

  40. daretotread. @ #1643 Sunday, June 17th, 2018 – 4:39 pm

    Oakeshott Country @ #1633 Sunday, June 17th, 2018 – 4:32 pm

    Thanks Torchbearer. I am on a LHD disaster committee and I am impressedby the amount of planning and resources that NSW Health has in place. Of course we won’t know its effectiveness until an incident happens but the effective response to last year’s flu, when we had 10x the usual number of cases indicates that we are in a good space.

    DTT’s basic schtick is that she is the only one who appreciates the danger of epidemics and all clinicians and the ministry are fools with no plans in place. To imply that we don’t have a stockpile is typical of her ignorance

    Disaster management must keep a low profile to ensure the chicken littles of the world don’t muddy the waters.

    Oakshott
    Geez you are offensive. I did not say that or imply it but I did question complacency. The fact that you made that comment convinces me I am right. How bloody dare you react in such a pathetic way to valid questioning. Arrogant god doctor you may be but that does not mean you are the fountain of all knowledge.

    NOTHING you or anyone wrote during the Ebola epidemic gave me any confidence in your having a clue. By contrast Torchbearer demonstrated an EXCELLENT grasp of reality. I was genuinely impressed.

    If you want me to treat you with respect, behave with respect to others.

    Hmmmm now let me see what I think is worse, alleged but non-existent complacency or scaremongering?

    I think the scaremongering wins.

    But it is getting stale now after all those reprises – carbon tax, ebola, etc.

  41. @kevjohnno

    Seems like a bad way to get political results as people that are politically engaged will be much more likely to opt-in.

  42. David Manne
    ‏ @david_manne
    24m24 minutes ago

    Fact is: Fariborz was exiled by Aus Gvt to Nauru & held in cruel, inhuman conditions.His death was utterly avoidable

  43. Hmm

    You keep posting as if the Malaysia vote was up to the Greens. It was not. It was up to the LNP. They were the ones that changed policy position and voted against their own policy not the Greens.

    If that is true, and I don’t know one way or the other, is there a possibility that the Greens influenced the LNP to change their policy position? C@tmomma’s statement that she witnessed SHY and Morrison in an embarrassed tete-a-tete prior to the vote, lends weight to that possibility. What follows is that the Greens might be responsible for a larger share of the outcome.

  45. OK – I’ll try another analogy. A man and a woman have consensual sex. They both know that neither is using birth control. As a consequence, the woman falls pregnant and later gives birth. Riddle me this. Who is responsible for the child. The man or the woman?

    Labor.

  46. Agreed Gorks.

    Hard to see how they would get a sample representative of our disinterested voters when, as you say most of the responses would be from politically interested people. I wonder who commissioned them.

  47. boomy1 @ #1695 Sunday, June 17th, 2018 – 5:29 pm

    OK – I’ll try another analogy. A man and a woman have consensual sex. They both know that neither is using birth control. As a consequence, the woman falls pregnant and later gives birth. Riddle me this. Who is responsible for the child. The man or the woman?

    Labour.

    Did the baby drown at sea?

  49. Frydenberg doesn’t come across as a total RWNJ, however this little spray suggests he is trending in that direction:

    Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg says he is worried about the “long march to the left” at universities, declaring the Australian National University’s decision to withdraw from a Western civilisation degree was a “new fault line in the debate”.

    Mr Frydenberg said the ANU was to blame for withdrawing from negotiations with the Ramsay Centre to hold a course on Western history.

    “It is absolutely critical that the next generation of students understand about where the rule of law came from, where democracy came from, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, women’s suffrage,” Mr Frydenberg told Sky News.

    https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/universities-in-long-march-to-the-left-josh-frydenberg-says/news-story/f6efb11e9df3bd7a32f580cd1a8a27b8?from=htc_rss&utm_campaign=EditorialSF&utm_source=TheAustralian&utm_content=SocialFlow&utm_medium=Twitter

  50. Greentaur @ #1655 Sunday, June 17th, 2018 – 4:54 pm

    Bemused

    I am talking facts not myths.

    Fact. The key vote that voted the Malaysian solution down was always that of the LNP.

    The Greens would never had the numbers without the LNP.

    This does not make the Greens responsible for the LNP when in government having indefinite detention.

    Thats on the LNP they are the government they are the policy makers.

    With the numbers in the Senate who has the ability to vote against indefinite detention?

    The Greens Labor and the Crossbench if the government brought such a policy into place.

    You can only vote on the legislation in front of you. Especially when you don’t know the outcome of an election.

    One of which many here including myself thought Labor would win.

    I remember the Murdoch media using the sly tool of a comedy programme to put a Nazi look on the Labor Party. Despicable propaganda.

    I don’t blame the Greens for that either.

    That’s OK, I get it, Greens are not responsible for anything.

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