New polls from Newspoll and Ipsos have made next to no difference to the BludgerTrack poll aggregate’s reading on voting intention, unless you count 54-46 as a psychological barrier, since it was 53.9-46.1 last week. There has been no change on the seat projection, and only small movements in the primary vote – the largest being a drop from 6.6% to 5.9% for One Nation, who were down from 7% to 5% in the Ipsos poll. I still don’t have a Scott Morrison net approval trend in action yet, but Bill Shorten’s reading records a slight improvement after a somewhat stronger result from Newspoll than their previous poll three weeks ago. The preferred prime minister trend has hardly moved at all, and remains very much as it was under Malcolm Turnbull.
Full results on the link below. Note also the post below this one, dealing with the rather more interesting subject of Saturday’s Wentworth by-election.
Yes, I agree GG. I was very tempted to take those odds. But I prefer not to get involved in election betting. Much prefer to stick to harness racing.
He’s not.
1) Shorten is the second most popular Opposition Leader in PPM over the past 35 years. (Rudd being the most popular).
2) The PM conventionally always polls higher in PPM.
3) The 2PP is the most accurate election predictor.
4) Constant 5 year personal attack on Shorten by the Coalition and their propaganda arm News Corp/Sky/2GB gives a false perception.
————————————————————————–
I was bitterly disappointed when shorten became leader, since I wanted Albanese. But honestly? He’s grown on me. Yeah, he doesn’t have that much charisma. But he’s bold, he led a fantastic 2016 campaign that went really wide target, he’s introduced a lot of really solid policies, and he’s forged labor into a disciplined team when they could have easily fallen apart after rudds defeat.
I actually like him quite a bit now. Five years ago I would have laughed if you told me I’d think that.
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For a moment I thought that the collective Poll Bludgers would be turning the plowshares into pitchforks (or summat) and marching on the hacienda de Shorten.
For a matter of more moment. Adding subtitles to The Thick of It, I listened to a little piece that contained FUBAR .
The medical staff at the local Emergency Room would often use this with the addition of BUNDY
So F***ed Up Beyond All/Any Reason/Recognition/Repair plus But Unfortunately Not Dead Yet. As far as I know they never deliberately killed anybody.
About Mr. Shorten Esq. the reason he has the supposed head of a oompa oompa can be put down to the now headless midget’s deformity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkC8wPSmcPg
Lunch. 🍔
Cheryl Kernot nailed it with the preferred PM for my money on that podcast I linked.
Very sneaky manipulation by Murdoch journalists.
Another worthy contender for worst run out of all time.
https://twitter.com/WisdenCricket/status/1053206492847976448
Nath, Reddit’s your source??
R U kidding???
That’s pretty tough on Craig Thomson. He didn’t contest the action to prevent him from being admitted, but they still awarded costs against him.
Seems all of the Establishment is out for Thompson’s blood. It almost amounts to a kind of institutional hatred. Or perhaps a justification for what was done to him in the past, and to the government in which he was an MP.
Connected embezzlers walk high and proud amongst us as pillars of society, and some very, very shady characters still exist in our various parliamentary chambers – state and federal. Both groups have daily misappropriated much larger sums of money than Thomson ever did over years of petty pilfering, but have not excited judgemental media cockroaches and their holier-than-thou conservative political accomplices half as much as Thomson could ever have hoped to. As a result, he has been punished far more than they ever will be.
In my opinion it’s unnecessary cruelty of the worst kind: that being the cruelty brought down upon selected victims by others who, but for connections, political favour, money or just dumb luck could have had their own heads firmly on the chopping block.
I’m not trying to excuse Thomson, or even defend what he did. It’s more pity I feel for him, plus a goodly amount of outrage that others, much worse than he, are laughing.
There but for the grace of God might have gone any of us.
People who live on reddit live for headlines and instant news (my programmer son spends half his life there) so all they’d get is the negative ‘news’ about Shorten.
In fairness to the parliamentary ALP, most of them opposed the TPP. Penny Wong, Chris Bowen, Jason Clare, and Bill Shorten are the main culprits behind this bad decision. They truly are the Duds Army of economic policymaking. They should not be allowed anywhere near decisions of this nature. They should focus on non-economic portfolios where they can’t do too much damage. The PALP were unwise to defer to the poor judgement of this group.
Also, Nath, if you think being on your phone in a restaurant is so sinister, next time you go to a restaurant, why don’t you go up to every person you observe on their phone and belligerently accuse them of being up to no good. Please let us know the results of this social experiment.
Nicholas
Are you saying that Bowen, Wong, Clare, Shorten are the only ones responsible? That They are the only “ tricklers” in the PALP?
Sorry, you said main culprits .
nath says:
Saturday, October 20, 2018 at 10:57 am
Here we go again, zoomster on how important she is.
And what exactly do you bring to the table?
Sprocket@11:36am
The good old days for Dictators when they can kill millions of their own people and nobody questioned them. Now you try to kill a traitor (or double agent) or some pesky journalist, you are treated very harshly. Don’t despair you current dictators, The leader of free world is with you. 🙂
Eunoe:
Phillip & Peter Jensen have to be the most bigoted clerics in Australia, save perhaps for the ubiquitous Fred Nile.
Phillip learnt his trade from the 1959 Billy Graham “crusade”, which I, against my will, attended.
As for Peter:
[‘Jensen has a reputation with the Australian media for being an outspoken advocate for “evangelical”
[my emphasis] Christianity. He has spoken out on issues as diverse as abortion, euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research as well as on industrial relations. He has expressed his opposition to the ordination of women as priests, saying “the church is more like a family and, within the family, men are the spiritual guides”, but believes women can be appointed to the diaconate, and has ordained women as such within the Sydney diocese. He is opposed to the ordination of women as bishops. He has also opposed the ordination of homosexuals as clergy.
In a June 2012 opinion piece, Jensen argued that the acceptance of same-sex marriage is not “for the moral good”. He also criticised the notion of “marriage equality”, noting that society does not allow marriage between siblings or between adults and children. He also wrote a letter to parishioners of Sydney’s Anglican churches in which he quoted Bible extracts from Genesis on the nature of marriage and said that “The education of children must not be distorted by the state-imposed idea that a family can be founded on the sexual union of two men or two women as a valid alternative to that of a man and a woman.”
In September 2012, Jensen was a panellist on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Q&A program and was questioned about his views on several key issues involving the church and society.[22] On the question of whether women should be submissive to their husbands, Jensen focused on the vows made by the husband at the time of marriage to act towards his wife in a Christ-like manner.]
They are of course intitled to their views, but they most also expect that their views will be torn asunder by secularists, progressive Christians.
I feel a song coming on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63yBpl6Oixo
Sohar @ #1849 Saturday, October 20th, 2018 – 11:37 am
I assume the ‘Establishment’ is trying to drive the man to top himself. We surely need a good clean out of our society and I am not talking about Thompson. There are so many who should be behind bars and they are walking free and contemptuous of decent people.
When global warming hits, these petty dictators and sleazy gropers might find themselves in the town square test driving the latest designs of knitting-needlers’ public entertainment devices.
swamprat
You already have your protest party; vote for them and be happy, you have a preferential system; you can then vote for a party likely to win. If you really think same/same toss a coin.
nath
Whatever importance I had – and it was never much – was because I went out and tried to change things, rather than just complaining.
It’s amazing what happens when you accept that the somebody who should be doing something about whatever it is that bothers you…is you.
Mao’s Great Leap Forward killed (indirectly) 20 million give or take 10million.
From memory, similar (or more) dies as a result of famines during British rule of India.
It has been argued (on here, by me) that the IMF and WB structural adjustment packages in the third world indirectly caused millions of deaths and plunged millions more into desperate poverty.
Stalin got one thing right – 1 death is a tragedy…..
frednk @ #1862 Saturday, October 20th, 2018 – 12:26 pm
A high chair.
Don’t talk to me of Jensen. He was loud and strong in opposition when I was a member of the Anglican based Movement for the Ordination of Women (we won btw, I was at the first Australian ordination of Anglican female priests, at St Peters Cathedral Adelaide, the one you could see just beyond the Adelaide Cricket Ground).
I wish he had gone over to the Catholics, like the resident Anglican dinosaur in Adelaide did.
Jensen, and the Sydney Diocese are always seen as a barrier to progress and a good example of reactionary fkwits.
I had to look again at this photo because at first glance I thought JBishop’s partner was HTVing for Sharma!
— next time you go to a restaurant, why don’t you go up to every person you observe on their phone and belligerently accuse them of being up to no good. Please let us know the results of this social experiment. —
Careful. Restaurants have bone saws.
I made the same mistake as whomever signed Thomsons name on that piece of vital ‘evidence’. I spelt it ‘Thompson’.
I don’t know what is more pathetic that Rupert and Stokes are still running a kill bill strategy or that there are lib-bot-trolls stupid enough to read and spread that moronic crap still. sad.
Ronzy says:
Saturday, October 20, 2018 at 11:36 am
briefly says:
Friday, October 19, 2018 at 11:42 pm
“Ronzy….my post is entirely self-explanatory…and it’s likely falsifiable, so could qualify as possible knowledge.
That which cannot be known by rational means …that which is irrational… is incompatible with a rational cosmos.
I think this means that for you a cosmos without a deity is incomprehensible while for me it is precisely the opposite.”
It would appear that the inexplicable, illogical and mysterious is not confined to the realms of religion.
This appeared on the ABC news website this morning.
This is none of the things you suggest. It is comprehensible in the domain of the rational. There is nothing exo-cosmic, absurd or unaccountable about this experiment.
I reckon my point stands: ineffable deities are incompatible with a rational cosmos for the very reason that if they were present in the cosmos, it would no longer be rational.
Deists have to accept, logically-speaking at least, that if their deities are ineffable they can only exist beyond the cosmos. They will be absentee creators.
If we suppose that deities are in principle “knowable” – and capable of being present within a rational cosmos – then, a priori, claims as to their existence or the properties they possess or values they exhibit will be falsifiable. This is the basic epistemological condition under which it is possible for deities to be present in a rational cosmos. That is, in a rational cosmos, it is possible to prove the non-existence of deities.
@CNN tweets
“Get to the poll, because if not, you are going to have another two or another six years of this craziness.” Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, tells Americans to vote against the President and the Republican Party. https://cnn.it/2CVG25y https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1053460863313678337/video/1
We had a circle jerk and put up every stupid anti-Bill thing we could make up and the we put them on reddit, and you know there are a queue of morons lining up to read and spread it. ….
@skynews tweets
.@jmodoh: Govt sources are increasingly worried about retaining Wentworth.
The view within the @DaveSharma camp is quite pessimistic at this stage. They acknowledge it’s not looking good and it will be hard to come back from here.
MORE: https://bit.ly/2PIMzTX #WentworthVotes https://twitter.com/SkyNewsAust/status/1053461732847366144/video/1
Whatever the result tonight (given the number of pre-polls, it might not be known tonight), for a Tory, Sharma deserves to win: he presents as a moderate, balanced, presenting a good image, little doubt borne of his experience of foreign affairs. Yet if there was ever a misalignment of the planets, this is one, for the reasons that have been extensively canvassed.
Here’s a benchmark.
Aunt Mavis
Nope. I disagree because Sharma is no moderate he came up with following Trump on the embassy issue.
I also hope the stuff we are hearing today from Liberal party sources is true. The whole game changes with a hung parliament.
For starters we get real answers to questions in QT not the totally ignore the relevance to go an a blame Labor rant.
The government loses the ability (not that they used it much) to set the agenda
“Whatever the result tonight (given the number of pre-polls, it might not be known tonight), for a Tory, Sharma deserves to win: he presents as a moderate, balanced, presenting a good image, little doubt borne of his experience of foreign affairs. Yet if there was ever a misalignment of the planets, this is one, for the reasons that have been extensively canvassed.”
Err… umm… derr??????????????
Real Time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu0NrJlAZlU
lizzie:
In the 1995 Canberra by-election, the Labor candidate, Sue Robinson, recorded a PV swing against her of −21.78 per cent; 2PP, – 16.12%.
A late change in Liberal tactics in Wentworth has been revealed.
Is the point rather that the Libs will cop a massive swing despite having a good candidate?
Is he a good candidate tho? Not from the area, didn’t turn up to some community debates, is male, repeating the party line in climate change…
Seems to me the Libs Achilles heel – their arrogant sense of entitlement and faith in the power and support of Murdoch and shock jock press – got the better of them once again.
Hmm. Real Time is not a live show, but a look back over the last 25 years.
Disappointing.
Michael says:
Saturday, October 20, 2018 at 12:19 pm
Also, Nath, if you think being on your phone in a restaurant is so sinister, next time you go to a restaurant, why don’t you go up to every person you observe on their phone and belligerently accuse them of being up to no good. Please let us know the results of this social experiment.
_____________________
Yeah, working two phones with a call sheet on the night of the coup. Could be a coincidence. Instead of organizing the numbers Shorten was probably calling all the members of his bridge club to arrange the next meeting.
Briefly/Ronzy
My biggest argument against deity is the assumption that humanity is the ‘centre of the universe’ therefore a belief system based on a connection to humanity is ridiculous.
From what we know of the universe, and our utter insignificance within it, how is it even likely that a deity, if one existed, could be even be remotely interested in us as species (and even more unlikely the fate of individuals within it) when comparing the utter vastness of the known universe.
Now I expect Ronzy will come back with deity as being ‘all-encompassing and all-knowing’ yada yada.
In my estimation that response is simply the cop-out answer to an unanswerable.
We are self-knowing, self-interested creatures and because we are, we refuse to believe in our own mortality (when the evidence of mortality of every living creature surrounds us). We want to be different. We want to think we have more purpose than our insignificant lives. We want to think we have ‘higher instincts and values. We also want to NOT be forgotten as individuals – therefore we have created a series of explanations for our world, the universe, our place within it and a bunch of ‘loving/vengeaful’ deities (who compete for preeminence) to satisfy our fear of mortality.
Ronzy asked ‘what of love’?
Love is, to me, a mostly bio-chemical imperative to guarantee the survival of the species. It is not exclusive to humanity (though we like to think we are better than other creatures).
Since everyone seems to be talking about nath (again), I must say that his obsession with Bill’s (alleged) physical attributes is more than a little weird.
Perhaps when nath is out of hospital, and on one of his days off work, he might like to seek some professional help.
Nath
Are you “stabbing me in the back” so to speak and taking over my important Watcha role of calling out clowns n bullies about which other members of the InGroupEchoChamber traditionally stay silent (out of professional respect, in the manner sharks respect lawyers).
You seem to have quickly and accurately identified several key players and called them out. Well done.
On the matter of Mr Shorten’s low ratings, you cite one person saying it was because of his main role in unseating Mr Rudd. But for years it was said Ms Gillard was the main player. Can’t have 2 main players. Perhaps you should consider that Mr Shorten’s unpopularity is related to the immense time, money and effort the Tory mob have spent on negative “advertising” about Mr Shorten.
And if the LNP de-merges then, as PvO points out, it becomes very hard for the party to be elected in Qld because no thinking person in the metro area wants a numpty hayseed as Premier.
Fess,
As you’re still around. I’ve been looking for the downside in this statement without success…
Bill Maher isn’t that funny. He is a comedian who aspires to be a political commentator. The best comedians focus on being funny first, and if the funniness makes a political point that is a bonus.
jenauthor
From what we know of the universe, and our utter insignificance within it, how is it even likely that a deity, if one existed, could be even be remotely interested in us as species (and even more unlikely the fate of individuals within it) when comparing the utter vastness of the known universe.
__________________________
The nice lady that did Religious Instruction at my Victorian state primary school suggested that God had sent an asteroid to clear the dinosaurs and make way for humans. I was horrified. Dinosaurs were awesome!
guytaur:
[‘Aunt Mavis
[‘…Sharma is no moderate he came up with following Trump on the embassy issue.’]
I’m attempting to assess Sharma as a bit more than a political animal.
adrian says:
Saturday, October 20, 2018 at 1:13 pm
Since everyone seems to be talking about nath (again), I must say that his obsession with Bill’s (alleged) physical attributes is more than a little weird.
Perhaps when nath is out of hospital, and on one of his days off work, he might like to seek some professional help.
___________________
wasn’t it you that admiringly posted about Lawrence Mooney as Malcolm Turnbull the other day? Anyway most of that stuff I got off Lawrence who does a great roasting of Shorten while being Malcolm. So, you love Mooney’s work but my rip off of his stuff is worthy of the psych ward.
The largest swing against a govt in a byelection is 13%. Anything above that, in their 6th safest seat in the country, is a massive Indictment of the Morrison Govt. and a precursor to an election wipeout next May. #wentworthvotes
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Without diminishing the significance of a 13% 2PP swing, should it occur, there have been bigger by-election swings at the Federal level (eg Bass 1975) and much bigger swings at the State level. In the circumstances, should the Coalition just hold on, I think they will regard it as an OK outcome. A 2PP swing of over 13% may or may not be a precursor to an “election wipeout” next May. That outcome would be no more likely based on a 13% swing than it is today, or was a week or a month ago. With Bludgertrack at 54% 8 months out, a Coalition loss of some dimension next year is more likely than not, but a 54/46 outcome on Election Day is not especially likely, given electoral history, and it would be naive to assume at this point that it’s inevitable that the Coalition will lose at all. And no, I am not Wayne, trying out a nuanced persona.
😆 From Scrott
JAMES JEFFREY
Declaring your party to be the least crap option is, one supposes, refreshing.
https://outline.com/aZukcs
Aunt Mavis
From all that I have seen n heard of Mr Sharma, he seems to be singularly unimpressive. He is electrifying, in the same sense that Mr John Alexander is electrifying. Or Ms Sudmalis.
nath @ #1895 Saturday, October 20th, 2018 – 1:17 pm
???????????? Mooney is a skilled satirist and comedian. And very funny IMO.
You, on the other hand…..