Essential Research: 53-47 to Labor

No change in voting intention from the latest Essential poll, which also finds respondents evenly split on the future of the Nauru detention centre.

The Guardian reports the latest fortnightly Essential Research poll has Labor’s two-party lead unchanged at 53-47. The poll also includes the monthly leadership ratings, which show Scott Morrison leading Bill Shorten 42-27 as preferred prime minister, out from 39-27 a month ago. We will have to wait for the full report later today to see primary votes and approval ratings. The poll also finds 40% in favour of transferring families and children on Nauru to Australia, with 39% opposed; 37% supporting the closure of the Nauru detention centre and transferring those remaining to Australia, with 42% opposed; and 35% in support of keeping them there indefinitely, with 43% opposed. The poll was conducted Thursday to Sunday from a sample of 1025.

UPDATE: Full report here. Both major parties are up a point on the primary vote, the Coalition to 38% and Labor to 37%, with the Greens reverting to 10% after a spike to 12% a fortnight ago, and One Nation up two to 7% after dropping three in the last poll. Scott Morrison is up six on approval to 43% and down three on disapproval to 28%, while Bill Shorten is respectively down three to 33% and down two to 45%.

The Guardian report focused on asylum seeker questions, but the other focus for the supplementary questions this week is the media. Thirty-six per cent offered that the government had too much influence on the ABC, 16% not enough, 17% about right and 31% don’t know, with Labor and Greens voters greatly more likely to offer the first response. Forty per cent felt ABC reporting was independent and unbiased and 34% the opposite – Labor and Greens supporters weighed more heavily towards the former, with Coalition supporters evenly split.

Also featured is an occasional “trust in media” question, along with a new question identifying specific news outlets. Despite all the fuss of late, results to both follow the usual patterns: public beats commercial, broadsheet beats tabloid, news beats tabloid, and there’s nothing lower than an “internet blog”. The Australian has a slight edge over the Fairfax papers, which I would hypothesise has something to do with the latter’s move to tabloid.

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.

2,060 comments on “Essential Research: 53-47 to Labor”

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  1. Diogenes @ #1309 Wednesday, October 10th, 2018 – 6:24 pm

    The Supreme Court decision is fine by me. The bakery was asked to make a cake with the words “Support gay marriage” on it and refused. They didn’t discriminate because the person asking for the cake was gay; they refused because they didn’t want to write a slogan they didn’t believe in which was their political right.

    Disagree. When you offer a commercial service to the world as a whole then you take all comers.

    The issue at hand is the ability of each of us to fully participate in civic life, there can be no compromise here.

  2. grimace @ #1797 Thursday, October 11th, 2018 – 3:34 pm

    You are in the business of producing cakes with messages on them. The words are not your words, they are the words of the person purchasing the cake. The same principle applies to a sign writer, a speech writer or a print shop – their role is to produce the physical product and it is clear the words are not their words.

    But, as some of us keep pointing out, none of these businesses can be compelled to do so.

  3. Those two letter highlight why I have a problem with the court case. Its the use of religion to justify not printing a political slogan.

    Keep your religion out of it. Serve the customer or don’t get in a business where you have to do messages the client asks you to do.

    Thats where the bakers are wrong. They gay client was wrong in using this stunt to prove a point and lost in the law as a result. Thats why I seriously asked if the Tories can now use religion as an excuse not to print Labour election material in a campaign. Or any other issue like euthanasia abortion promoting a sugar tax promoting anti smoking messages etc etc.

    The question has to be is this refusal of political communication reasonable. The Court has ruled in this case it’s not. Its going to be very interesting when Richard Dawkins successor takes a religious customer to court for trying to promote religion when he wants freedom from religion.

    Probably with the customer asking for a cake promoting support of marriage between a man and a woman.

  4. Not so sure of this Poroti…

    Well, we certainly have no hope of perpetuating the lifestyle we currently enjoy, in the numbers that we currently do.

    We have a choice of either reducing our lifestyle, or reducing our population, or both – and the IPCC report shows that we must do so dramatically and soon.

    The Professor’s reply to a similar comment from me was that “Technology” would help soften the blow.

    For example: motor vehicles.

    Imagine if all cars ran, not on fossil fuels, but on hydrogen produced by either alternative energy (sun, wind, hydro) or, one day, thermonuclear power. Suddenly we’d have reduced fossil fuel pollution by a very large percentage. This wouldn’t be a carbon neutral measure (like, say, fuel from algae, plants, or whatever), but a “carbon negative” measure: water plus energy.

    There was such a plan proposed by Alan Finkel just a few days ago. Australia could benefit and profit greatly from a hydrogen generation industry, orientated at both export and self-sufficiency.

    Imagine that we work out a way to stop having to kill animals for meat; that we can “culture” meat in a test-tube: more efficient, less polluting (and less cruel). This technology is on the way already.

    Many would say they were pipe dreams, but so were motor vehicles in horse and buggy days, as were aircraft that could carry hundreds of passenger from Australia to the UK in under a day. Computers that do what they do today were unheard of fifty years ago when 128k of memory was all even NASA’s moon astronauts (with all the technology at their disposal) could have at their disposal.

    You would know of dozens more examples that could allow us to maintain our “lifestyle” (or a semblance of it, or even better) and still reduce our carbon footprint really significantly.

    With unlimited energy, we can do almost anything. But we are not using it… yet.

  6. Diogenes @ #1319 Wednesday, October 10th, 2018 – 6:34 pm

    WWP
    I bet if most of the people here were signwriters they would refuse to paint a billboard saying “Shorten is a Union Thug: Vote Liberal for a Strong Economy”.

    And I’d be among the first to tell them to harden up and perform the commercial service that they offer to the world or to close their business.

  7. Bushfire Bill, the summary of your discussion of global warming with your fellow dog-walker is interesting. I think your time scales may be off by a bit, but I’m no expert and I think I get the general gist of your summary. Though I would modify your closing sentence to be something like, “To believe otherwise is to admit our civilisation has no hope.” Without proof, I think humans as a species are resilient. I worry about the pain and grief to us individuals that the comes next while our civilisation figures it out.

    Thanks for sharing.

  9. Get off you’re fucking high horse.

    Obviously something has gone amiss with punctuation here, leaving three possibilities I can conceive of. Determining which is most likely would require knowledge of who Horse or High Horse might be, but that would involve reading the thread, and who has time for that.

    Get off, you’re fucking high, Horse.
    Get off, you’re fucking, High Horse.
    Get off, you’re fucking High Horse.

  10. Disagree. When you offer a commercial service to the world as a whole then you take all comers.

    Disagree. Show me the law that says you have to take on all comers? I have never heard of or seen such a law. Businesses, in the main, are not essential services. It is not essential to make use of them, or for their management to take on all comers.

    The cake shop up the road has a sign that says it will not serve anyone who is talking on a mobile phone. Admittedly they are weird people, and I don’t know how they stay in business (because they always seem to be out of pies). But I’m not about to start forcing them to keep a supply to suit my timetable, or to watch me as I chat on the phone to my wife asking her whether she wants pink icing or chocolate on her donut.

    I just don’t go there. It’s all to bloody hard to be their customer.

  11. @BB

    Not serving on mobile phone is obviously rude.

    This is pure hatred and discrimination.

    “The unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex”

    Are you a fascist liberal ?

  12. Get off, you’re fucking high, Horse.
    Get off, you’re fucking, High Horse.
    Get off, you’re fucking High Horse.

    How did he know I owned a horse?

    Actually I smell a smartphone spellchecker. They love inserting apostrophes.

  14. It is only overdue if the climate drivers stay the same. In the case of the 11500 cycle, the main drivers are regular changes in the orbit and tilt of the planet. To work, the drivers have to act in concert and to generate feedback mechanisms. This is neither impossible nor very likely given what we know about conditions ATM.

    Extrapolating from the stats in the link below, and assuming 40 generations per millenium, the next glacial is not likely to arrive for another 400 generations. By way of comparison, Christ lived 80 generations ago and Tut around 130 generations ago. The hard evidence record for Indigenous people living in Australia is around 2400 generations long. The First Fleet arrived around 10 generations ago.

    https://skepticalscience.com/heading-into-new-little-ice-age-intermediate.htm

  15. “synonyms: prejudice, bias, bigotry, intolerance, narrow-mindedness, unfairness, inequity, favouritism, one-sidedness, partisanship; More”

    https://www.humanrights.gov.au/employers/good-practice-good-business-factsheets/quick-guide-australian-discrimination-laws

    Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986

    Discrimination on the basis of race, colour, sex, religion, political opinion, national extraction, social origin, age, medical record, criminal record, marital or relationship status, impairment, mental, intellectual or psychiatric disability, physical disability, nationality, sexual orientation, and trade union activity.

    Also covers discrimination on the basis of the imputation of one of the above grounds.

    Sex Discrimination Act 1984

    Discrimination on the basis of sex, marital or relationship status, pregnancy or potential pregnancy, breastfeeding, family responsibilities, sexual orientation, gender identity, and intersex status.

    Sexual harassment is also prohibited under this Act.

    I wonder how many laws would people break?

  16. grimace
    “And I’d be among the first to tell them to harden up and perform the commercial service that they offer to the world or to close their business.”
    Admirable consistency. What if it was a hetero guy asking a gay signwriter to write “Gay marriage is a travesty” on a billboard?

  17. BB

    I think its crossed wires.

    People are objecting to a whole class of people being the reason for exclusion. Thus the comparisons to the KKK etc.

    However your point is about common sense and a business owners right to refuse. Eg. Drunk customers refused by taxis due to vomiting risk.

    I don’t think we need to conflate the two. Your point is reasonable. It becomes unreasonable when you argue that a business can argue that a whole class of people can be excluded from getting service due to their sexuality when we know its prejudice not a reasonable common man refusing service for good reason.

  19. Not serving on mobile phone is obviously rude.

    I’ve only ever seen one shop use this as a reason for not serving. If it is rude, then all the other businesses I have patronized are prepared to put up with it so as to earn their keep.

    If it is not rude, then this is clear discrimination against mobile phone users.

    Whether is Is rude, or not, depends on your point of view. Why do you keep assuming that you are the only person who has a valid point of view, and that you can fucking dictate to others how they think and what they believe? Who are you? Jesus Christ? Mother Theresa?

    Are you a fascist liberal ?

    More boring labels from the one who wants to sool the courts onto the local cakeshop and who (wrongly) believes that businesses have to serve anyone who walks in their door, or answer to him if they don’t.

    Try looking in the mirror when you start calling others “liberal fascists”.

  20. Bushfire Bill @ #1804 Thursday, October 11th, 2018 – 3:41 pm

    The Professor’s reply to a similar comment from me was that “Technology” would help soften the blow.

    The IPCC specifically addressed this. To make it feasible to avoid catastrophic warming, they had to assume we would see more technological innovation, plus accelerated deployment of such technology on an unprecedented scale, but that even so this was not enough to avoid the need for substantial lifestyle changes. They had to assume that would occur as well.

  22. BB

    One point about your mobile phone example. Is a mobile phone an essential service today?

    Thus the owner is discriminating. Not disputing your common sense point just making a cheeky remark about your example 🙂

  25. “Get off you’re fucking high horse.”

    I wondered if the indefinite article “a” was missing here, right in front of “high horse”. In which case, I infer that the horse is affected by an illicit drug, and therefore may have abrogated consent.

  30. I agree with Bushfire Bill. I possibly would not give a service or goods to a pedo, a spouse beater or an animal abuser. I would to a Liberal, National voter on the assumption that they are too stupid to know any better.

  31. ‘Get off, you’re fucking High Horse.’

    I would rate this as a rather unpromising introduction to any cake shop business relationship.

  38. It’s no wonder my superannuation banks shares are in the crapper.

    “THE overall bill to pay back customers who have been ripped off by Aussie banks is closing in on $5 billion, a new analysis says.

    Investment bank Morgan Stanley says customer refunds and remediation costs, as well as associated penalties and fines, will cost the big four $4.83 billion for the three years ranging from the 2017-18 ­financial year to the close of the 2019-20 financial year.”

    https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/business/analysts-revise-banks-remediation-bill-for-customer-ripoffs-up-to-5billion/news-story/32b47a37ed8dc3429ab80515be11d9b4

  39. The vast majority of alleged breaches of anti-discrimination law are resolved by conciliation. Moreover, incidences of discrimination go on all day, every day. The policy underlying this area of law is educative, instructive rather than punitive. That the case in Northern Island reached the Supreme Court is a rarity.

    It will be interesting to see how the Morrison Government deals with the Ruddock Review, bearing in mind that the cake issue may be tested here. And while our courts and tribunals are not compelled to follow decisions of the UK courts, the cake decision is nevertheless obiter dicta. Hewson lost the ’93 election over a cake. I trust Morrison is a student of history.

  41. Poroti, I don’t know the ins and outs of whether technology will solve our problems. I was just quoting the Professor.

    But going over to a Hydrogen economy would certainly help to assuage and reduce carbon emissions, as would artificial meat.

    He wasn’t saying that the consequences might not be dire, and a very poor outcome for many (including many who didn’t fancy themselves as suffering at all). But he was expressing optimism that civilization could well be saved by technology, that it wouldn’t be all doom and gloom, and that eventually a better world would probably come out of it.

    A point he expressed was that if the world really is doomed, then it has been doomed for a long time by now, as it will take centuries to get rid of the CO2 already added to the atmosphere. He hasn’t given up hope, though.

  42. The AFL CEO has access to ponies.

    Since the bumbling, bumptious, bothersome Borisson has become the High Priest, the ASX has fallen over 7% – and more losses are in prospect.

    So over 7% in 6 weeks and still counting.

    And, unlike in the USA, interest rates are going nowhere fast because of continuing flat wages growth and a cooling house market (quoting the RBA Governor).

    So, in Australia, we do not have inflationary pressures driving interest rates (but there is an impact on the wholesale rates our banks pay on Global Capital Markets hence out of cycle increases by our home lenders) – and, indeed, we have the opposite with inflation below the band no matter that interest rates remain in accommodating phase, and at the lowest they have ever been.

    So what is the economic narrative of the High Priest, preaching at us from his Pulpit in Cloud Cuckoo, to get confidence back into Australian society such that we can aspire to better our positions both in terms of an ability to contribute to economic activity by deploying to discretionary spending and in having confidence in the tenure of our employment?

    Has the High Priest (or his now treasurer) addressed these concerns?

  43. O
    7% fall in ASX, on top of stagnant real wages, on top of falls in housing approvals, on top of falling house prices, on top of investment uncertainty about the impact of Trump v Rest of the World, on top of energy and emissions policy paralysis in the Government, is starting to look like a cumulative bad thing.

  46. I just want the recession to hurry the fuck up and get here.

    Wages flat for years, the housing ponzi scheme unravelling, Trump’s idiocy leading to trade uncertainty and feeding into share market falls, our banking systems systemic corruption being exposed. States spending on infrastructure and immigration seem to be holding it together and we might manage to muddle through, but if it’s going to go tits up then best it happens when this pack of arseholes are in charge.

    Doesn’t need to be (and definitely preferably not) too deep or prolonged, but if we’re going to have two consecutive quarters of negative growth any time in the next decade to 15 years then let them be q4 2018 and q1 2019. A recession any time in the first two terms of a new Labor government would be a disaster because you just know more than enough idiots will buy the bullshit that Labor caused it no matter the facts. Conversely a recession tied unambiguously to this shitshow of Liberal misrule would be the greatest contribution to our future in well over 20 years.

  47. Stephen Koukoulas

    The value of Australian stocks has dropped by around $110 billion since Scott Morrison became Prime Minister – not bad work in just 7 weeks #auspol

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