The fortnightly Essential Research result has Labor’s lead at 54-46, down just slightly from its 55-45 in the poll conducted in the very immediate wake of the leadership change on August 24. All we have of the primary vote at this stage is that the Coalition is up a point to 36%. Scott Morrison records a 39-27 lead on preferred prime minister, little changed from his 39-29 lead in the last poll. As with Newspoll, Essential’s second poll of the Morrison era includes its first approval ratings for the two leaders: Morrison debuts on 37% approval and 31% disapproval, while Bill Shorten is on 35% approval, up one on a month ago, and 43% disapproval, down one.
UPDATE: On the primary vote, the Coalition is up a point to 36%, Labor is down two to 37% – solidly lower than Newspoll – the Greens are steady on 10% and One Nation is up one to 8% (their second increase in a row, the opposite of what Newspoll has shown). The full report is here.
The poll finds 47% disapproving of the leadership change compared with 35% in support, widening a gap that was recorded at 40% to 35% in the last poll (the narrowness of which I found hard to credit). Presented with a series of propositions on the leadership change, 63% agreed with the proposition that they had lost trust in the government and wanted a new one; 60% that Morrison “was not elected by the people and has no legitimacy” and “needs to go to an election as soon as possible“; and 67% that they were “sick of the major parties changing their leaders” and “consider voting for a third party to send a message to them both”. Also included are a finding that 69% think a policy to reduce carbon emissions important, versus 23% for unimportant; and leadership attribute ratings which I may or may not take a closer look at when the full report comes out later today.
Also today, The Australian has some results from a poll of 1000 respondents in Wentworth. The poll was conducted for Andrew Bragg, the early Liberal preselection frontrunner who is now set for a seat in the Senate, who seems to be publicising it to back his decision to vacate the field in Wentworth for a woman. A straight voting intention question recorded the Liberal primary vote at just 39%, compared with Malcolm Turnbull’s 62.3% in 2016, with Labor’s Tim Murray on 25% and Kerryn Phelps, who is expected to announce shortly she will run as an independent, on 20%. However, a secondary voting intention specifying a female Liberal candidate found the party’s vote increasing to 43%.
Oops, sorry Rocket, looking at old data before the announcement.
Now TRY has appreciated. Look, they have moved a long way, it’s all high risk stuff. What happens if the US Fed moves up too?
The great tide of USD is receding around the world. It could get really ugly really quickly.
Barney, sadly disappointed you remember Song of Australia as ‘rah rah rah’. I remembered:
There is a land where summer skies
Are gleaming with a thousand dyes,
Blending and witching in harmony, in harmony
Where grassy knoll, and forest height,
Are flushing in a rosy light,
And all above is azure bright
Which on checking isn’t quite right, and remember none of the other verses.
But anyway I liked the concept I read via Philip Adams of no flag, so whenever we see a flagless flagpole we can think of Oz. The extension being whenever there is a solemn or formal occasion and there is silence we can reflect on our nation.
LU not logged in
Thanks – and they must have been really desperate as they have gone against President Erdoğan’s wish for them to lower rates which I presume they could sense would be an even bigger disaster?
Have the happy clappy Parlimuppets made the leap to the MSM yet?
Pumpkins.
Wentworth news can wait.
Nightie night to all the stayers.
If any of you could complete this research-related survey I would be grateful. It is about making it easier to regime abandoned dogs, by U Adelaide: https://twitter.com/howlingdingo/status/1040231727409422338
Bryon @ #2205 Thursday, September 13th, 2018 – 8:54 pm
I was only 5 or 6 years old and then the school stopped playing it!
It was the early ’70s and the cusp of modernisation.
The school drums and bell were soon replaced by an electric bell.
We also got a Resource Centre (library) and an Activities Hall.
🙂
Thanks for the laughs guys 🙂
I really am going to bed now.
Thanks – and they must have been really desperate as they have gone against President Erdoğan’s wish for them to lower rates which I presume they could sense would be an even bigger disaster?
============================
Ock-aye. The Lira would have collapsed. They’d be importing double-digit inflation.
From memory the problem is private debt, not public, and a large portion of the loans are foreign owned, hence the need for currency stability.
Kinda like here 🙂
Bon nuit Itza….I have various works by Beethoven for piano and cello to listen to tonight…Richter and Rostropovich from the 1960s….indelible…
LU not logged in @ #2212 Thursday, September 13th, 2018 – 9:06 pm
I travelled in Turkey not long after they introduced the New Turkish Lira.
Some of the petrol stations still had 6 extra zeros on their price signage.
They don’t want to get to that again!
I wonder if the Wentworth electors are right now trying to work out how to spin their result?
Especially if it is at odds with the apparent wishes of their current Prime Minister?
Rocket Rocket says:
Friday, September 14, 2018 at 12:16 am
I wonder if the Wentworth electors are right now trying to work out how to spin their result?
Especially if it is at odds with the apparent wishes of their current Prime Minister?
They seem seriously incapacitated, RR.
They truly don’t get it do they?
Scott Morrison
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The full lyrics of the song used in my earlier video from QT today were just not OK. When I found out, I asked the team to take it down. Apologies.
************************************************************************
rochelle
@__rochellemarie
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Replying to @ScottMorrisonMP
So “the full lyrics” are not appropriate, does that mean the chosen part of the song was something you consider appropriate? Pretty disturbing if you thought so.
Fair enough Barney. I assumed you were a bit younger than me and so had less opportunity to have it imprinted in your memory. 🙂
Gawd – can I coin a phrase and say that with that parliament rap video ScuMo just “ate the onion”. (similar to jumping the shark). Primary vote starting with a 2 in the next lot of polls?
There appear to be at least three Lib PMs trying to influence this preselection – Howard, Turnbull and Morrison. Maybe Abbott is involved too. It’s shambolic. There will be only losers.
briefly – my money is on them having picked Dave Sharma (John Howard’s choice), and now they are trying to work out how to spin it.
Maybe get the PM’s media team to get some footage of them voting, and add some ‘sketchy’ American rap lyrics………
Bryon @ #2218 Thursday, September 13th, 2018 – 9:21 pm
Just shows the power of indoctrination! 🙂
So apparently Katherine O’Regan flopped. So much so that she was excluded earlier than Peter King (unless I’m doing him a disservice). So the only chance of a woman getting up now is Mary Lou Jarvis, who is from the Right and, dare I say it, unelectable.
Of course, they’re all from Sydney, which indicates how Sydney-centric Liberal politics has become; and in particular how power struggles in Rich-Sydney have come to preoccupy the Liberals. They are spectacularly irrelevant to the rest of the country.
The other possibility is they come out and say no decision was made, and they are calling for new additional nominations. Which could be a real opening for one of the real Muppets – they would just have to get an “express” Liberal Party membership (Kroger, Sukkar and Stratov here in Victoria can fix that up easily)
William Bowe @ #2223 Thursday, September 13th, 2018 – 9:25 pm
WOW!!!!
The PM has real influence! 🙂
So apparently Katherine O’Regan flopped. So much so that she was excluded earlier than Peter King (unless I’m doing him a disservice). So the only chance of a woman getting up now is Mary Lou Jarvis, who is from the Right and, dare I say it, unelectable.
John Ruddick @JohnRuddick2
now
Final four in Wentworth preselection: King, Sharma, Jarvis … and Shields. Stay tuned. #wentworth #auspol
Cheers, William….
vachement chouette
Down to three – Jarvis out.
Love that John Ruddick’s page has him with Howard and Murdoch. Who is the other guy?
Jarvis out now too.
It’s a boy!
RR – at first glance I thought it was Clive Palmer 🙂
William Bowe @ #2230 Thursday, September 13th, 2018 – 9:34 pm
So that completes an embarrassing week for our beloved new PM!
But wait there’s still time for more.
Lucky Parliament’s not sitting tomorrow! 🙂
Interesting thoughts by this John Ruddick in 2015 when he resigned from the party after Abbott got rolled.
Part of the critique went to the heart of the way the leader of the Liberal Party is selected. At the moment the decision is made by a ballot inside the Liberal Party room.
“The party room model for electing a leader is wrong because of the whopping conflict of interest,” Mr Ruddick wrote in The Guardian.
“The few dozen in the party room elect the leader and that leader then appoints around a third of the party room to the executive with higher salaries and prestige.
“It is inevitable that votes in the party room are exchanged for promotion.”
He went on to suggest an alternative model for selecting a leader, through a televised federal convention that all party members could participate in.
“Leadership aspirants will know once every three years they can either put up or shut up,” Mr Ruddick said.
“Membership-wide ballots to elect our parliamentary leaders would transform leadership contests from the realm of intrigue into contests that reward merit and that essential political quality — popularity.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-21/ruddick-resigns-amid-frustration-over-need-for-reform/6791832
Bloody unusual, having only Sydney siders vying for a Sydney seat, eh, Briefly?
Surely the only sensible choice is Sharma. They must be waiting for us to get exhausted to sneak it in and spin it as an OK result for ScoMo.
I have taken to doing some of tomorrow morning’s work so I can wait a bit longer!
Rocket Rocket @ #2226 Friday, September 14th, 2018 – 12:33 am
So then, the two female candidates were the first to be eliminated? Yeah, the Coalition doesn’t have a women problem. Not in the slightest. 🙂
Fulvio…
Friday, September 14, 2018 at 12:44 am
Bloody unusual, having only Sydney siders vying for a Sydney seat, eh, Briefly?
I was referring to the concentration of power in the Liberal Party in a small part of Sydney. Everything we’ve witnessed in Liberal politics in the last 10 years has emanated from the struggles for power between a handful of people. The life experiences and expectancies of the rest of the country are more or less completely irrelevant to this microscopic elite.
They have outlasted me – have to be at work early.
Sharma – pretty likely now.
OK, that makes it clearer. Thanks. 🙂
John Ruddick @JohnRuddick2
56s
Sharma has won #wentworth #auspol
John Ruddick
@JohnRuddick2
Sharma 119 votes. Shields 83. #wentworth #auspol
OK, so the preselectors have made a very sensible choice. I think Sharma has a good chance of holding Wentworth for the Liberals.
Douglas and Milko says:
Friday, September 14, 2018 at 1:24 am
OK, so the preselectors have made a very sensible choice. I think Sharma has a good chance of holding Wentworth for the Liberals.
Morrison’s nominee has been rejected, implicitly rejecting Morrison too. The Liberal voters of Wentworth probably won’t mind that a bit. They can vote for Sharma and vote against Morrison at the same time.
Even so, it’s impossible to conceal the depth of the divisions inside the Liberal Party and the frailty of Morrison’s hold.
Where does Sharma fit in the RWNJ spectrum?
I wonder if the selection of Sharma will make it easier for an independent to win – say, for Licia Heath?
Sharma? Can’t quite place him. Over to Wkipedia.
adrian, this is only true until the metro is itself extended through the CBD. As you well know, construction is already well underway.
Just so funny. Can you imagine Scummo’s reaction when he had his attention drawn to what the song was really all about?
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/just-not-ok-scott-morrison-apologies-for-bizarre-social-media-video-20180914-p503nw.html
Some comments on light rail if I may. Its a bit disappointing for me that there are some choosing to use it as a political football. Its also disappointing that some people can’t seem to differentiate between worthwhile outcomes and poor delivery. Lets break it down.
The CBD light rail project was the initiative of the City of Sydney and it was pitched as a project that would improve the amenity of the city as much as a transport project. I fully support the CBD portion of the Sydney light rail project. The outcome will be thoroughly worth it.
The real problem with the project is that it got taken over and implemented by Transport for NSW. And then extended into the southeast. I remain agnostic about the effectiveness of the southeast part of the light rail system (Kingsford and Randwick). Not because it isn’t needed, but because there was the option of building a metro to the southeast along a similar path.
There is a lot that went wrong with the implementation of the project. But let me explain to you how it could have been done properly. For a start, the completion date was a political choice. As a consequence the initial utilities investigations were hurried. It might seem strange to you but the best way to minimise disruption would have been to extend the project time frame and I’ll explain in detail why.
The initial utilities investigations were hurried and they weren’t really complete. They didn’t go deep enough and part of this has to do with the heavy rail mentality brought to the project by TfNSW and its consultants. That heavy rail mentality led to over-design and a trackform that is over a metre deep in large sections – well past the boundaries of the initial utilities investigations. So we then had contractors brought in and told to build light rail, but then having to complete the utilities investigations themselves and worse, having to deal with the utilities and their slow processes and gold plating. There’s a lot of detail here I’ll skip.
A better way to handle this would have been to complete the treatment of utilities (relocations, protection etc) before bringing in the actual rail constructors. And this could have been done step by step, a block or a half block at a time. Yes, disruptive, but in localised fashion – so you’re not tying up the whole street. So, it would take longer overall, but would involve only small areas of disruption at any given time.
Likewise with the rail line itself. Its being tediously hand constructed. Multiple layers of hand formed concrete. There’s no need for this. Good engineering practice would have been to treat it like a road. Pour one reinforced concrete base slab (it takes only hours) and then build the light rail trackform in a factory and crane it in. Weeks rather than months. I’m going to this level of detail to point out to you that there is a difference between the merits of a project itself and the way its actually implemented/constructed. Light rail is being given a bad name by TfNSW and that has largely to do with the fact that they had no experience with light rail and paid money to the wrong consultants.
Again, I support the CBD light rail line and I’m agnostic about the south east extensions.
As for all the hoo-hah about Cost Benefit Ratios. I work with people who do CBRs every day in transport. Its a absolute joke. The rules are set by economic rationalists and are tailored to suit short termism like toll roads. We do not have an established CBR process for transport projects that is worth shit. So when the ABC trots out a couple of “experts” who dislike the CBR done on the light rail I have to laugh. The fact is that wider economic benefits are hard to measure but are also very large and very real, and easily dismissed by those with an agenda against rail or light rail. The greatest benefits of the CBD light rail project are not exactly transport related. They are about establishing a better city and that’s why I support it, despite the political point scoring.
Could it have done better? Fuck yes. I have absolutely no love for TfNSW. They are also mishandling the Newcastle light rail (frankly, they put their “B” team on that). But the merit of the project is again an entirely different issue from its implementation. Has it caused a lot of loss to business? Yes. However the danger here is that we give up on such projects and instead accept worse outcomes through doing nothing. As I said, all of this has given light rail a bad name and that’s sad because its actually a very useful technology.
As for Newcastle. I live just outside Newcastle and I regard it as my home city. It absolutely shits me off no end to see people talking about “a perfectly functional” rail line. Well, yes it was. It was also ugly and destructive of amenity jammed right between the city and the harbour. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with the solution they came up with, but nor do I not accept cheerfully the people who turd polish what we had. Its my city and I hated the old rail line.
There were of course alternatives. One of those was to underground some of the rail line. I liked that idea but I admit it wasn’t going to be cheap. We’re talking about building in sand below sea level. Another option was to actually go further and not establish a terminus at Wickham. Instead run a “tram-train” on the existing tracks and actually run that one out to Telarah (one stop west of Maitland). What we are talking about is a relatively light weight vehicle that has sufficient performance (speed) over distance, but can still be treated as a tram in the east of Newcastle. What actually happened was that a small group within the government took the view that if light rail was good for George Street (it will be) then it will be suitably transformative for Hunter Street. Well, that’s a bit more complex. The reality here is that a light rail line will improve the amenity of Hunter Street, but in my view it would have also improved the amenity of the area running closer to or on the rail corridor. And there was a lot of local support for exactly that proposition.
The real problem here (apart from again making it more expensive than it should be) is the lack of real planning for a wider light rail network. Newcastle has a bus network that fails because it is simply so slow. Light rail on largely dedicated corridors could out compete buses and cars on the medium distance routes (say Newcastle city to Broadmeadow, Kotara and Charlestown). Even the Hunter Street light rail could have been faster had it stayed on a dedicated corridor.
But none of this says that we should abandon light rail as a technology. Done well its a transport tier above buses that improves the bus network and makes it more competitive with cars. And lets face it, Newcastle is a horribly car centric place. It may not matter if you live there and have a car, but if you go there often and you don’t have the eyesight to drive, its a pretty shitty experience. It would be improved substantially with a well designed, fast light rail network based as far as possible on dedicated paths.
Again, I’m pretty cross at TfNSW and certain other government agencies for giving light rail a bad name. It could have been done a lot more cost effectively. Indeed if you look at technology trends, there’s really no need anymore for an overhead wire (and associated underground structures). It can all be done on battery. Indeed there is a cross over with high capacity segmented electric buses. But we still need those dedicated rights of way.
Have the government fucked up? Yes quite a bit. Should we have stuck with an ugly heavy rail line that provided poor service and poor frequency. Not really. Light rail has a lot of advantages.
Now its all very well to get partisan and get into a lather over this, but the interesting question remains, what to do next? If Labor gets into power in NSW will they simply cancel and tear down? Or will they have an extensive framework for new rail transport infrastructure (including stuff like new passenger lines to places like Kurri). We need a light rail network for Newcastle – even if that means running what are effectively rubber tyred trams. But we can’t do this properly if the whole issue is a just a shit fight.
As for the comments about conversion of Epping Chatswood. Well sorry but those that maintain that is a bad thing are just plain wrong. We can go into that separately.
King finished third which rhymes with turd.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/canavan-ridicules-climate-health-report-days-after-climate-health-expert-wins-liberal-safe-seat-73431/