Ipsos: 53-47 to Labor

The latest monthly Ipsos poll suggests a steadying for the Coalition after recent abysmal results, although it does so from an unusual set of primary vote numbers.

The latest Ipsos poll for the Fairfax papers is the Coalition’s least bad result of the Scott Morrison prime ministership so far, recording the Labor two-party lead at 53-47, an improvement on the 55-45 blowout the pollster recorded as Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership entered its final week (which was the one poll suggesting a significant weakening in Coalition voting intention in the period up to the spill). Ipsos’ primary vote numbers are still idiosyncratic, with an already over-inflated Greens gaining two points to 15%, while Labor slumps four to 31% and the Coalition gains one to 34%. No conventional leadership ratings that I can see yet, but ratings of the two leaders across a range of eleven attributes finds Morrison scoring better than Bill Shorten on every question other than “has the confidence of his/her party” and “has a firm grasp of social policy”. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Saturday from a sample of 1200; more detail presumably to follow.

UPDATE: As related by the Financial Review, the poll has Scott Morrison debuting with 46% approval and 36% disapproval, while Bill Shorten is up three on approval to 44% and down four on disapproval to 48%. Morrison holds a 47-37 lead as preferred prime minister, little different from Turnbull’s 48-36 lead in the last poll.

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.

2,765 comments on “Ipsos: 53-47 to Labor”

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  1. sprocket_ @ #42 Sunday, September 16th, 2018 – 6:54 pm

    Andrew Probyn struggling with the numbers..

    I mean, how on earth, Mr/Mrs Ipsos, can you get a 53-47 ALP advantage with Labor on 31% primary, a full seven pts below the Gillard rock bottom in 2010, when JG had to negotiate victory for 17 days on 38% primary? Your numbers look very odd.

    PHON and cross benchers more of a presence now than then?

  3. dave:

    Yes, but sometimes it’s nice to have an insider view. 🙂 I have a friend who is going to a wedding in Sydney in the new year and was asking me about accommodation options for her and her brood. I have no clue about accommodation in Sydney cause I always stay with family when I go there.

  4. @Confessions, what reason do you have for believing the WA-wide TPP swing to Labor of 8.2%, currently measured by BludgerTrack, will be only 6.7% or less in Canning? Do you have some evidence that Canning is less elastic than WA as a whole? And which seats in WA do you think will swing by more than 8.2%, to counterbalance a below-average swing in Canning?

  5. 53/47 to the ALP sounds to me like th epolling is starting to settle back to the long term level for this Govt. I’m cool with that. 🙂

    With everything else happening i dont think that the TPP stuff is going to impact the ALP much if at all. Thanks the links and opinions last thread as good reading to educate myself. 🙂

  6. Tristo @ #27 Sunday, September 16th, 2018 – 6:22 pm

    @grimace

    Nationally I am predicting a swing to Labor of about 3-4%, a GetUp! campaign would magnify any swing since they are a huge organisation. I have a feeling Liberal right-winger especially high profile ones will be especially targeted by the voters.

    @Confessions

    However the voters of Canning know he is a “right wing” nut, I say a post where somebody quoted somebody living in the Canning electorate saying ‘I did not know he was so right wing’.

    GetUp! aren’t very active in WA unfortunately. If they were, I imagine they would target Porter before Hastie, and they are not active here (Pearce).

  9. Since Aug 19, Labors vote by age;
    18-24: 35 (-13)
    25-39: 34 (-5)
    40-54: 29 (-3)
    55+: 29 (-2)
    Opposition Leader netsat -4 (previous was -11)

    So nearly a third of 18-28 have abandoned ALP, opposition leader netsat improves.

    Labor did drop opposition to the TPP, younger voters might be angry about that and switch to greens, but still, im calling rogue.

  10. The concept is that the government is eternal, it’s whose in charge of it which changes.

    ‘Governments’ sign legislation binding future governments all the time.

    Yes, sorry, mixing my conceptions of state and govt.

    One parliament cannot bind future parliaments’ actions, except via legislation, which can be overturned. So treaties can come and go.

    So what happens if Labor, in control of the parliament, says “you know what? ISDS can GAGF…”

    International law says… ah bugger, international law is just a set of conventions and niceties, it doesn’t really say anything and has no coercive power.

    But other govts or their parliaments/legislatures/exectutives (whichever has the powers vested in them to do so) will respond according to their own incentives.

    So now, what are their incentives? To kick off a shit storm with Aus over a set of TPP clauses that are viewed with scepticism at home, or to concentrate on other stuff and get on with it? THAT’S the question I posed.

    Anyone want to hazard a guess?

    Mine is that hands will be thrown in air by diplomats and vested interests, who will still scramble to get what they can out of the remaining TPP clauses, and most people won’t give two shits either way.

  13. bug1 says:
    Sunday, September 16, 2018 at 9:25 pm
    Since Aug 19, Labors vote by age;
    18-24: 35 (-13)
    25-39: 34 (-5)
    40-54: 29 (-3)
    55+: 29 (-2)
    Opposition Leader netsat -4 (previous was -11)

    So nearly a third of 18-28 have abandoned ALP, opposition leader netsat improves.

    Labor did drop opposition to the TPP, younger voters might be angry about that and switch to greens, but still, im calling rogue.

    Not 1 voter in 100 would be able to tell us what TPP is, let alone whether it may have moved their vote one way or another….

  14. It gets even weirder with the 18-24
    Netsat for Opposition leader is +28 (was +5)

    Margin of error is 8%, ALP primary down 13%, Shorten Netsat improves by 23

    (Maybe someone at IPSOS made a typo ?)

  15. Can’t imagine the Greens getting anything like 15% nationwide unless moderate Libs are unhappy about Turnbull but can’t bring themselves to vote Labor. The numbers look a touch crazy (not a scientific term).o

  17. briefly @ #63 Sunday, September 16th, 2018 – 7:31 pm

    Not 1 voter in 100 would be able to tell us what TPP is, let alone whether it may have moved their vote one way or another….

    I very much doubt that is that few people. I agree it wouldn’t be a majority but GetUp which has a pretty huge following has been making a big deal out of it, both the version that included the US as well as the newer version.

    Plus union leaders are fully aware of it and will have been notifying their membership, at least on the original version of it.

    Still, probably not a majority, but a hell of a lot more than 1% of the voting population.

  18. Dio – re Phelps -absolutely.
    You must also ask what she stands for apart from herself. She was Bruce Shepherd’s nominee for AMA president then became Clover Moore’s deputy until Clover worked out how vain and pompous she was. The politics seem to be all over the place or, more probably, she will agree to whichever way the wind is blowing.

    Her partner Ms Stricture (small urology joke) has also created waves

  20. ‘Labor did drop opposition to the TPP, younger voters might be angry about that…’

    Seriously, I hardly know or care about the TPP, and it’s hard to get much more politically tragic than I am. . I’m absolutely certain none of the young people I know do. Perhaps a small percentage of ‘woke’ youf do, but not enough to register.

  21. Bill Shorten’s performance on Insiders today:

    1. Much improved from the last few times I saw him. He looked confident (who wouldn’t in his position given the current lay of the land).

    2. He doesn’t know where to put his hands. At one stage, in a long shot of Cassidy and the Opposition leader, Shorten clasped his hands around his knee, with legs crossed – a fairly common pose. Trouble is, this position simply emphasises the fact Shorten is clearly uncomfortable about his height.

    3. If indeed Shorten has “short man’s syndrome”, has anyone psycho-analysed what it must be like for someone with short man’s syndrome to have the name Shorten?

    4. Why can’t he take lessons from Bob Hawke, who is also height challenged, but managed to shrug it off, and least by outward appearances, and took measures such as always bounding up a stair or two if photographers were lurking, and getting photographers to shoot him from a lower position.

  23. Im not saying its a reasonable conclusion that the TPP had that big an effect, its just the only thing of significance i can think of that might be a negative since the last one.

  25. Are you sure Zoomster? He doesn’t look five ten, which is about 178cm in the new money. I realise that’s what is says on Wiki but that’s the sort of thing that’s very hard to verify if his own people are fudging the figures. Unless you get him to stand against a vertical tape measure, you could really be sure. I reckon he looks about 172cm at most.

  26. bug1

    It’s too soon for the TPP to have registered in a poll – there’s generally a lag between an issue and its influence on polling.

  27. The Coorey article says Labor’s internal polling just above 40 which is inline with newspoll.

    Greens will be lucky to get 9 at the election

  30. ..I checked because I’ve met him a couple of times and got the impression he was tall. He’s not as tall as I thought, but then I’m titchy.

  33. Michael @ #54 Sunday, September 16th, 2018 – 7:11 pm

    @Confessions, what reason do you have for believing the WA-wide TPP swing to Labor of 8.2%, currently measured by BludgerTrack, will be only 6.7% or less in Canning? Do you have some evidence that Canning is less elastic than WA as a whole? And which seats in WA do you think will swing by more than 8.2%, to counterbalance a below-average swing in Canning?

    The swing in WA probably won’t be 8.2%. Labor will pick up Hasluck, Pearce and Swan pretty easily and *may* have one last shot at Stirling before demographics shift it permanently out of reach. Canning has been named as a targeted seat for Labor, probably using this election as the first of a two or three election strategy to win the seat.

    The north end of Canning encapsulates WA Labors’ safest state seat of Armadale and much of the also very safe seat of Mandurah, the rest is very solid Liberal. Despite much of the heavily populated part of the electorate being very safe for state Labor, federally, the same voters lean very solidly to the Liberals. In 2016 Labor only narrowly won the TPP at one large booth and three small ones.

  34. I wish to emphasise that I’m not “heightist” but it remains true to observe that many of the most charismatic national leaders are taller than usual. Whitlam, Keating, Obama. It’s the law of the jungle. People gravitate to taller people – and that in turns feeds their ego, so the charisma finds a happy breeding eco-system.

    I must remember to observe what kind of shoes Shorten wears, and whether they have particularly thick undersoles/heels.

  37. I don’t think height matters at all. Unless you are Dastyari-like. Then you can only achieve power by dictatorship. That’s why there are so many little dictators. Napoleon was the greatest of them.

  38. alias @ #71 Sunday, September 16th, 2018 – 7:44 pm

    Bill Shorten’s performance on Insiders today:

    2. He doesn’t know where to put his hands. At one stage, in a long shot of Cassidy and the Opposition leader, Shorten clasped his hands around his knee, with legs crossed – a fairly common pose. Trouble is, this position simply emphasises the fact Shorten is clearly uncomfortable about his height.

    3. If indeed Shorten has “short man’s syndrome”, has anyone psycho-analysed what it must be like for someone with short man’s syndrome to have the name Shorten?

    4. Why can’t he take lessons from Bob Hawke, who is also height challenged, but managed to shrug it off, and least by outward appearances, and took measures such as always bounding up a stair or two if photographers were lurking, and getting photographers to shoot him from a lower position.

    Complete rubbish. Having briefly been in proximity to Shorten a couple of times he is of normal height. Wikipedia tells me he’s 178cm.

  41. alias @ #75 Sunday, September 16th, 2018 – 7:50 pm

    Are you sure Zoomster? He doesn’t look five ten, which is about 178cm in the new money. I realise that’s what is says on Wiki but that’s the sort of thing that’s very hard to verify if his own people are fudging the figures. Unless you get him to stand against a vertical tape measure, you could really be sure. I reckon he looks about 172cm at most.

    Having stood next to him and being 182cm tall, 178cm is about right.

  42. Interesting Diogenes. Don’t think I’ve seen those studies. Perhaps Shorten could stand on a couple of them.

    I note that according to Wiki, Morrison is 182cm, or five 11 and a half. He seems rather anxious to claim that half.

    If Shorten is indeed 178cm, which I seriously doubt, but let’s say it’s true, then the 4cm differential shouldn’t look too bad in TV debates and so forth – though if you were a Shorten adviser you might well prefer the contenders to be seated. Or get those really thick soled shoes.

  44. I note that according to Wiki, Morrison is 182cm, or five 11 and a half. He seems rather anxious to claim that half.

    Shorten and Morrison are the same height at the shoulder.

    The extra 4 cm is all Morrison’s head.

  45. Shorten’s judgement is more important than his height. So far as Boss he has got Feeney and Kimberley Kitching into Parliament. It’s whole building a powerbase of his friends, who are not very talented, would-be Machiavellianism of him that makes me want to vomit. Plus his whole I’m just a humble man who (has wanted to be PM since a teenager). Who wants to be PM when they are teenagers? Sociopaths most likely.

  46. alias @ #84 Sunday, September 16th, 2018 – 7:57 pm

    I wish to emphasise that I’m not “heightist” but it remains true to observe that many of the most charismatic national leaders are taller than usual. Whitlam, Keating, Obama. It’s the law of the jungle. People gravitate to taller people – and that in turns feeds their ego, so the charisma finds a happy breeding eco-system.

    More rubbish. Of the three leaders youve mentioned, only Whitlam was taller than normal/average at 194cm

  47. Good lord, the anti-Labor forces are now down to pegging Shorten’s height as an indicator of his unfitness for office?

    This would be funny if it weren’t so desperately sad.

  48. Take as a fr’instance, this picture. You could hardly describe Shorten as a towering sort of fellow. Indeed he does look rather on the short side.

  49. alias @ #84 Sunday, September 16th, 2018 – 7:57 pm

    I wish to emphasise that I’m not “heightist” but it remains true to observe that many of the most charismatic national leaders are taller than usual. Whitlam, Keating, Obama. It’s the law of the jungle. People gravitate to taller people – and that in turns feeds their ego, so the charisma finds a happy breeding eco-system.

    Weren’t you a Ruddist? He is roughly the same height as Shorten.

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