No Newspoll this week, which is holding back for the resumption of parliament next week. However, we do have a new Victorian state poll out from ReachTEL, which you can read about in the post directly below this one, along with an update of my poll aggregation from the state. The Guardian should bring us results from Essential Research’s regular fortnightly federal poll overnight tomorrow. Also on the polling front:
• The Fairfax papers have reported state breakdowns aggregated from the last three monthly Ipsos polls, which mix one poll from before the leadership coup, one from the immediate lead-up to it, and one from a month after. This shows Labor leading 52-48 in New South Wales (53-47 in the previous quarter), 56-44 in Victoria (unchanged), 52-48 in Queensland (unchanged) and 51-49 in Western Australia (an unusual 53-47 to the Coalition last time), while the Coalition leads 51-48 in South Australia (52-48 to Labor last time).
• The Guardian reports on another poll in Wentworth, conducted for the Refugee Council of Australia, which I’m going to assume was a ReachTEL although the report doesn’t say. This one is particularly interesting in providing two-party results for Liberal-versus-Phelps as well as Liberal-versus-Labor. This suggests Phelps will win 53-47 if only she can get ahead of Labor. However, the primary votes suggest she has a hurdle to clear, with Dave Sharma (Liberal) on 38.1%, Tim Murray (Labor) on 24.5%, Kerryn Phelps (independent) on 15.9% and others in single digits (there may be an undecided component in the mix of perhaps around 5% or 6% as well). The Liberal-versus-Labor result is consistent with earlier polling in showing it to be extemely close: 50-50 in this case. However, as with the previous polls, this is based on Labor receiving around two-third of preferences from mostly conservative independent candidates, which seems a bit much. The sample for the poll was 870; no field work date is provided. UPDATE: Ben Raue has provided the full numbers. After inclusion of a forced response follow-up for the 4.8% undecided, the primary votes are Sharma 39.9%, Murray 25.0%, Phelps 17.3%, Greens 9.1%, Heath 3.6%. Respondents were also asked how they had voted in 2016, and the responses are fairly well in line with the actual result.
Also on Wentworth, my guide to the by-election has been expanded and updated. Antony Green’s guide offers a particularly useful survey of the how-to-vote card situation that makes use of the term “virtue signalling”. Joe Hildebrand of the Daily Telegraph has taken aim at the Greens for putting Labor ahead of Kerryn Phelps – which, he correctly notes, reduces her chances of overtaking Labor and making the final count, at which she would receive a stronger flow of preferences than Labor and thus stand a better chance of defeating the Liberals. But as Antony Green also rightly notes, “Green voters are a tough flock to herd”.
ItzaDream @ #287 Monday, October 8th, 2018 – 11:38 am
You reminded me of a thought I had some days ago. I was speculating that self-regulation isn’t quite an oxymoron since it is a single word that contradicts itself rather than two words that in combination create a dissonance. Single word dissonance ‘deserves’ a single word label.
ItzaDream @ #287 Monday, October 8th, 2018 – 11:38 am
The important thing is to read the Old and New Testaments together so you can see which bits Jesus didn’t endorse and which cultural taboos of his time he and his followers broke through.
In proper Christian theology, the Bible isn’t an instruction book. It’s a set of stories meant to point in the right direction, to serve as cautionary tales and to allow for ongoing social and personal development.
(end of sermon)
‘Michael says:
Monday, October 8, 2018 at 12:40 pm
Boerwar says:
Monday, October 8, 2018 at 12:27 pm
“Lying degenerates like the Democrats and their fact-free lying women…”
————————————-
Wow! Someone sure has been guzzling the Fox News Kool Aid all these years since they donned the black hats over HRC as SoS.’
WWP angrily instructed me that it was impossible to come up with a set of words that were more or less the same as an earlier post but coming from the TrumpsterDumpsters.
I delivered. Not only that, I delivered so successfully that you have been taken in by it.
I suggest you discuss the issue with WWP for further clarifications.
The theological problem is that the OT God was changeless.
Logically, this means that the OT God and the NT God are one and the same.
Jesus, being the Son of God, was simultaneously the OT God AND the NT God.
Boerwar @ #276 Monday, October 8th, 2018 – 11:27 am
However, the difference there is that your version lacks the factual basis which underpinned my original version. My use of “lying” and “degenerate” was not pejorative, it was merely descriptive.
So for your version to fly, you’ll need to demonstrate a current, top-level Democrat politician who lies as often, as blatantly, and as provably as Trump. And who is on-record boasting to their friends about how they’re able to leverage their wealth and power to abuse and molest women (hence “degenerate”).
Good luck with that. 🙂
Both sides are, sure. But only one side has facts and truth behind their language. The other is just doing empty rhetoric and name-calling.
C@t
Brilliant news
As I have said earlier, thanks to BK.
https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/pedo-confessional-priests-lawrence-researchers-pose-a-sex-abuser-priests,11972
I ask all adherents or ex-adherents of the Roman Catholic Church,the Holy Mother Church to the World, to read it, and provide their comments, particularly about ‘confession’.
ar
As I pointed out earlier, facts don’t count; further, the meanings of words don’t count much any more either.
Boerwar @ #304 Monday, October 8th, 2018 – 11:56 am
Actually not the case – witness the central Jewish sensibility to this day about “struggling with God”. The key aspect of struggle and argument is that both parties are inevitably changed by the encounter.
Much of our modern thinking is conditioned by the Deistic views of many Enlightenment philosophers and scientists which is not really “Judeo-Christian” in origin. Ir is also the source of the deterministic basis of much modern philosophy and science, which has been very powerful in terms of understanding the universe but which may have limits which fundamental physics especially is starting to come up against.
The God of the Old and new testament was seen as being active and engaged in the Universe, not just a “first cause”.
Yabba
I got about half way before the histrionic nature of the article overcame my will to read further.
Random crap.
ajm
It is not my fault that the Jews have God wrong. The next thing you will be trying to tell me is that God chose a People!
#MakeAmericaGayAgain #MakeAmericaGirlpowerAlso #MakeAmericaGenerousAgain #MakeAmericaGiftedAgain #MakeAmericaGracefulAgain #MakeAmericaGenuineAgain #MakeAmericaGreenAgain #MakeAmericaGOODAgain #MakeAmericaBeautifulAgain #MakeAmericaAmericaAgain #MarchToSaveDemocracy November3rd
Isn’t it great how, if you don’t like a particular interpretation of Christian scripture, all you have to do is shop around and find a different one that agrees with you?
The marriage equality debate was (and still is) a classic example. Both sides claimed to be the true Christian point of view, both backed up by scholarly biblical assessment. Just take your pick.
Edit: Mr David Rowe of course for those that missed it.
But how much does he influence the politicians? They seem to kowtow to him.
I do hope Latham’s not declared a vexatious litigant:
https://www.smh.com.au/national/mark-latham-s-ill-considered-defamation-defence-takes-a-cut-20181008-p508ca.html
Jackol says:
Monday, October 8, 2018 at 12:49 pm
Murray winning for the ALP would certainly be a shock to the Libs in the here-and-now, but in all likelihood the seat would simply revert back to the Libs in short order, probably in May, so the practical significance would be zip.
Phelps winning could well be a medium/long term proposition – a Ted Mack kind of figure that the more blue ribbon parts of the NSW electorate seem fine to keep around once they establish themselves. And no, I don’t think Phelps is at all equal to Mack in terms of principle or integrity, but I am willing to believe there is the possibility she can attract a similar support base in Wentworth.
————————————-
Yes, that is a quite substantial longer-term consequence of a Phelps victory as opposed to a Murray one. Thank you, both to you and for Andrew Earlwood for that perspective.
Of course, such a long-term “Mack-like” presence by Phelps on the cross bench would only (maybe) help nudge the Liberal Party towards some sort of a more progressive stance, on socio-cultural issues if not on economic/financial/taxation ones. It would be of no help at all to Labor to get enough numbers on the floor of the House to carry confidence in a move to a fresh Labor Government, or to remove confidence in a Coalition Government.
Phelps made it clear in her podcast interview with Katharine Murphy that she believed Governments should serve their full terms (in fact, she supports fixed 4 year terms) and that voters across all electorates nationally should be involved in the replacement of one Government by another. Pressed on this, she admitted it would take severe malfeasance in the part of the Government for her to consider voting to bring it down. I can’t see her as anything but a vote to preserve an existing Government until the next scheduled general election. (Though, come to think of it, that would make her a de facto vote for Labor on the floor of the House, once Labor wins a general election. That’s a substantial benefit for Labor down the track, just not this side of a general election.)
Against the presence of Phelps on the cross bench exerting pressure on the Libs from there (if that happens), must be measured the absence of an MP from a socially progressive electorate like Wentworth in the Liberal party room itself. I’m not sure how those opposing influences would wash out in practice – or how we could ever know if there was any difference.
So, gaming out how a “left-libertarian” voter like myself should judge the prospects of each preference combination for this Wentworth by-election in achieving the most progressive possible long-term outcome for the Australian Parliament is not straightforward. Given that, I think voters in Wentworth are better off voting the way I mentioned before:
a) if you want to put a brake on all this Government’s legislation, vote Murray;
b) if you want a brake out on its socio-cultural legislation but not its economic ones, vote Phelps;
c) if you want all this Government’s laws waved through more easily, vote Sharma.
Ante: hence my response “random crap”.
Its all designed to destroy reason.
No surprise that the more religious a country is the more insane its governance.
lizzie
Is Huntley a psephologist?
Or a second guesser?
Ante Meridian says:
Monday, October 8, 2018 at 1:15 pm
Isn’t it great how, if you don’t like a particular interpretation of Christian scripture, all you have to do is shop around and find a different one that agrees with you?
The marriage equality debate was (and still is) a classic example. Both sides claimed to be the true Christian point of view, both backed up by scholarly biblical assessment. Just take your pick.
————————————-
Great point. It is clear that Christian teaching cannot be an unambiguous guide to moral or political decisions. I think its only effect is to enable people to feel more righteous about holding the beliefs, values and prejudices they do, and so cling to those views more stubbornly in the face of empirical evidence or reasoned argument to the contrary.
For this reason, I think public debate and government decisionmaking would be better if they were not influenced at all by people with firm religious convictions.
In Earth-shattering news, a small but growing body of opinion now believes that deadly chemicals might actually be dangerous.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-08/cancer-council-calls-for-review-amid-roundup-cancer-concerns/10337806
(Apologies if already linked)
lizzie says:
Monday, October 8, 2018 at 1:21 pm
Rebecca Huntley @RebeccaHuntley2 · 22h22 hours ago
15 years of research and I haven’t found Alan Jones to be that much more influential with voters than ABC radio or the SMH. He is only powerful because politicians think he is. #auspol
But how much does he influence the politicians? They seem to kowtow to him.
—————————————
Alan Jones must have some real dirt on a lot of politicians, and being Liberal himself and mixing more with them and their sort, he probably has more and worse dirt on them than on those of any other party. Nothing but individual, personal blackmail really explains a politician (especially a Premier or PM) kowtowing to him so blatantly, handing him so much power to bluster and threaten his way to what he wants in the future.
Boerwar
Rebecca Huntley (born 1972) is an Australian social researcher.
AM
😆
Always follow the money?
ajm
“In proper Christian theology, the Bible isn’t an instruction book.”
Theology is the study of self contradictory nonsense. In particular, christian theology is the study of a book, and history, of which the authors are almost totally unknown. The actual existence, ie birth, life and death, of ‘Joshua ben Joseph’ is not recorded by any confirmed contemporary source.
The idea that there is a ‘proper christian theology’ as opposed to an improper one is not supportable. All theology that is not just a straight history search is a set of fairy tales composed around a set of myths and legends of multifarious, dubious origins.
Morrison’s ‘prosperity church’ teachings are based on the ‘talents’ parable (Matthew 25:14–30) in the so-called gospel according to matthew, which was written by someone unknown in Greek in the second century CE. The catholic theologians say that it turned up in India. Holy shit!
This story, supposedly told by “Jesus” says that a slave who turned 5 talents into 10,(somehow, but not explained), while his master was away, was seen by the slave master to be vastly superior and worthy of trust. The poor sucker slave who was given only one talent, and kept it safe, was abused and excoriated (treated like shit) by the loving master.
Good story, eh. Those that start with a lot, deserve, and will get, a lot more. Those with bugger all don’t even deserve our pity. Wonderful teacher, the lord jeebus.
lizzie
Thanks.
“Alan Jones has defended his attack on Louise Herron & attacked her some more while admitting he has a financial interest in the Everest Horse race…”
Well that’s as surprising as the fact that the Sun rose this morning.
Really, Scott Morrison thinks that a World Heritage listed national icon, of such instantly recognisable fame around the world, as our Sydney Opera House, is a ‘billboard’??? What will he think next, they should project a promotion for the Todd River Regatta across the sides of Uluru?
Nobody in their right mind would publicly attach their name to any idea so ridiculous, unless they felt they had no choice, that they were forced to. The question is: what made Gladys Berejiklian and Scott Morrison feel they had no choice but to chain themselves publicly to this ridiculous crusade of Alan Jones on behalf of the horse race gambling industry? What did Alan Jones have that forced them to? Was it the cogency of his arguments in favour of the worthiness of the cause?
Yabba
For me, the nub is what is forgiveness. That Melb Archbishop had no qualms about forgiving the pedophile. I don’t know w1hat he means by forgiveness. And inherent in that is the relationship of forgiveness to a belief in a Deity – a judgemental One, or an all forgiving One.
I don’t know what forgiveness means. I’ve thought about it forever, my forgiving and my being forgiven; I don’t know, but have thoughts. I’m currently reading Tony Doherty and Ailsa Piper, following on from her book Sinning Across Spain, walking the Camino de Santiago to carry others sins. Google is your friend.
But I do know that article made me sick to my stomach.
Let’s hope Morrison loses power before he decides that Uluru is ripe for advertising like the Opera House.
shellbell says:
Monday, October 8, 2018 at 9:21 am
Best lawyer in the family, Mrs Shellbell, up for the gong of leading pro bono lawyer at Australian Women in Law Awards.
__________________
Congratulations to Mrs Shellbell – and to you!
Michael @ #324 Monday, October 8th, 2018 – 1:36 pm
Bullies are always hiding something.
Michael @ #322 Monday, October 8th, 2018 – 12:31 pm
So you would support banning people with a religious belief from voting?
Former seminarian John Cornwell traces how a sacrament went astray:
……………….
CORNWELL: After confession was made a sacrament, in the 13th century, you didn’t make your confession until puberty or afterwards, at age 12, 13, or 14. And you went maybe once a year. Pius changed that in one fell swoop, by introducing weekly confession and insisting that it start at the age of 7. This made children of that age group suddenly accessible to priests on a routine and frequent basis, which had never happened before.
IDEAS: You make a direct link in the book between confession and the sex-abuse scandal.
CORNWELL: Many priests in the wake of the scandal have admitted to using it as a way of grooming and testing children for their vulnerability. This is something that the great John Jay Report, on pedophile priests, which was done in the US in the early part of the last decade, missed out on. They didn’t see the importance of confession. That’s why I think my book is important in an investigatory sense. I’m bringing that out. The statistics in the report show that a third of all of the crimes of abuse occurred in a confessional setting….The interesting thing is that from the late 1950s, when all of this started to rise, to the mid 1980s—this was the period in which priests were going outside the box. So you get confession as something that takes place in the privacy of a priest’s room, or in the sacristy, or in his car. But something else happens that is very important: Many priests squared the circle of their offending lives and their pastoral lives by going to confession themselves. There you have the morally weak aspect of confession: this belief that you can commit terrible sins and then go and get them washed away….There was a case in Australia not so long ago when a priest on trial admitted that he had confessed to sexually attacking children 1,500 times. He’d confessed it 1,500 times!
…………………
Yay for confession, and keeping it secret. As prescribed by Joshua ben Joseph, but only discovered/invented by holy mother church in the 13th century.
Boerwar @ #309 Monday, October 8th, 2018 – 12:07 pm
That I can’t accept.
If facts don’t matter and we can’t make them matter, then we might as well all go lie down on the beach and wait to see which idiotic despot decides to launch the nukes first.
Ante Meridian @ #315 Monday, October 8th, 2018 – 12:15 pm
And that’s exactly how it should be. Surely the greatest religious heresy is to believe that God is constrained by what God’s followers think individually or even collectively.
Michael @ #324 Monday, October 8th, 2018 – 12:36 pm
Possum has a more quantitative take on it:
Possum Comitatus @Pollytics
When Alan Jones came into Qld, colour-by-numbers politicians and media types latched onto it as a Big Thing. I couldn’t find his influence being statistically significant across a ~7700 balanced sample, nor did it arise in twenty something qual sessions
Major congratulations to both the Shellbells. To Mrs Shellbell for the wonderful nomination and to Shellbell who, I suspect, has much to do in providing support , emotional and practical, to Mrs S. especially during certain significant court hearings.
Morrison’s Horizon Church looks like the ideal place to project a few advertisements. Let’s see if Jones tells the pastor to do so.
(Wikipedia)
The Gs do not want Phelps to win. They do not want 3rd-Voice competitors in the Parliament. The success of independent candidates undermines the case for electing Gs.
Of the current 5 MPs that can claim to be 3rd-voice reps, only 1 is a G.
The Gs will see Phelps and those that might emulate her as a mortal threat. They will disfavour her and any that cone after her.
The real influence of Jones and his kind is in affirming the lizard-brains in the community.
Yabba @ #328 Monday, October 8th, 2018 – 12:46 pm
The slave master in this story does not represent God, because that would be totally inconsistent with all the other teaching attributed to Jesus which centres on unconditional love.
To me the message of the story is understood in our times in the phrase “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.
In 1922 young Anthony Mancinelli started work as a young barber. He’s still going !!
The World’s Oldest Barber Is 107 and Still Cutting Hair Full Time
……..But no, longevity does not run in his family, and he was never big on exercise. Diet-wise, he said, “I eat thin spaghetti, so I don’t get fat.”
He has all his teeth and is on no daily medication. He has never needed glasses, and his hairstyling hands are still steady.
“I only go to the doctor because people tell me to, but even he can’t understand it,” he said. “I tell him I have no aches, no pains, no nothing. Nothing hurts me.”
https://outline.com/PEt9w6
The Liberals will win the Wentworth by-election and the election in May. Morrison is no Turnbull with his kill bill campaign. Therefore; the Liberals will run one hell of a scare campaign on negative gearing, saying they will make house prices fall even further. That will scare enough voters to re-elect the Coalition. Plus he hasn’t p****** off the populist right yet like Turnbull.
AJM says:
“So you would support banning people with a religious belief from voting?”
—————————————
No. How could you, anyway?
I support doing my best to convince theistic believers to reconsider their beliefs, in the light of many coherent reasons to set those beliefs aside as insufficently certain to be true. At least, as not sufficiently certain to be true as to warrant them forming the basis of any actual moral or political position with any real-world consequences.
it appears that NSW pollies are so fragile that they gift Alan jones influence. One is reminded of the poem,
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
ItzaDream @ #332 Monday, October 8th, 2018 – 12:48 pm
I think the opposite of forgiving someone is to dehumanise them. That’s as close as I can get to it.