The Guardian reports the latest fortnightly Essential Research poll has Labor’s lead unchanged at 53-47 – as usual, we must await the full report to see the primary votes. Other findings: Scott Morrison is credited with a 35% to 28% edge over Malcolm Turnbull, which he appears to owe to Coalition supporters falling in behind the incumbent; only 20% believe the leadership change has “refreshed” the government, with 59% saying it hasn’t; 26% support moving the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, with 32% opposed; 56% say Australia is not doing enough to address climate change, with 23% saying it is; 63% express belief in anthropogenic climate change, compared with 25% favouring the alternative response attributing climate change to normal fluctuation. UPDATE: Full report here. No change whatsoever on the primary vote, with the Coalition on 38%, Labor on 37%, the Greens on 10% and One Nation on 7%.
Also:
• The Australian has published one of the occasional sets of Newspoll breakdowns by state, gender, age and metropolitan-versus-regions, aggregated from multiple poll results over a period usually consisting of three months. This time though, the July-September quarter suffered the interruption of the leadership coup in late August. So results from the last three polls under Malcolm Turnbull were published shortly after the coup, and now the first four polls under Scott Morrison have been aggregated, with one more set presumably to follow at the end of the year. The two-party results show the Coalition doing three points worse than the late Turnbull period in New South Wales and Victoria, where Labor respectively leads by 54-46 and 57-43; four points worse in Queensland and Western Australia, both of which have Labor leading 54-46; and fully nine points worse in South Australia, where the Coalition led 51-49 last time, and Labor now leads 58-42. The Labor primary vote in South Australia is up fully 12%, from 28% from 40%, with “others” as well as the Coalition well down, perhaps reflecting the decline of Xenophonism. However, it should be noted the sample in the case of South Australia was only 478.
• New Matilda has results of a uComms/ReachTEL poll for GetUp! from Tony Abbott’s electorate of Warringah, although it may be showing its age, having been conducted on September 13. The poll credits Abbott with a two-party lead of 54-46 over Labor, a swing of 7% – though in fact it was the Greens who made the final count in 2016, with a final two-party result much the same as it would have been against Labor. Perhaps more to the point, 52.6% of respondents said they would consider voting for an independent, although it was only 21.7% among Liberal voters. After allocating results from a forced response follow-up for the initially undecided, the primary votes were Liberal 41.7%, Labor 25.3%, Greens 12.7% and One Nation 4.4%. The kicker for Abbott is that 46.3% of respondents rated his performance very poor, and 10.3% the ordinary kind of poor, compared with 23.8% for very good and 10.4% for good, with a tellingly few 9.3% opting for average. The sample for the poll was 854.
• Counting in Wentworth continues, and will do so in steadily diminishing form until the end of next week. You can follow the action on the ongoing live count thread. For what it’s worth, Andrew Tillett of the Australian Financial Review quotes a Liberal source clinging to the hope that late postal votes arriving from Israel might yet yield a surprise. I had a fairly extensive look at the excitement that unfolded on Saturday and Sunday in a paywalled article in Crikey yesterday.
The corporate regulator has agreed to investigate further the business affairs of the Liberal MP Stuart Robert, at the request of Labor.
Robert, the assistant treasurer – who recently blamed “connectivity issues” for charging taxpayers nearly $38,000 for his home internet usage since 2016, before agreeing to repay it – will face deeper scrutiny of his involvement with Robert International and Cryo Australia.
Officials from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (Asic) have agreed to consider if Robert breached the Corporations Act by failing to notify Asic in time of his recent resignation from Cryo Australia.
From the Guardian.
Interesting Poroti…….Queensland important to them. Fair ol use of internet
Scomo now not even answering questions directed at him
Zeh,
Hope you are enjoying yourself. Tassie is nice.
Cameron Murray wrote a book called Game Of Mates.
He also wrote a September 2018 report entitled Unspoken Alternatives To Expensive Housing.
http://www.tai.org.au/sites/default/files/Unspoken-Alternatives-final_web.pdf
He describes the ACT’s Land Rent Scheme and its Community Land Trust.
Cameron has written a lucid report about the ACT Government’s efforts to restructure property rights in a way that emphasizes intelligent use of land. There is an obscene amount of waste involved in organizing access to land around the goal of rent-extraction. We can’t afford to tolerate this level of waste.
The mainstream framing of land and housing as a means of accumulating wealth and minimizing tax must be challenged directly and vigorously.
A different frame – that rentier income is a drain and a form of value extraction – needs to become entrenched in our culture.
We should establish the frame that land is a scarce, non-produced resource with multiple potential uses that have to be managed with thoughtfulness and care.
We should employ the frame that good quality housing for all is a human right, a mark of a civilized society, and well within our existing productive capacity.
The main reason to expect that the ALP will have three or at most six years of disappointing government is that they are foolishly committing themselves to shrinking the fiscal deficit. The Australian Government has no way of knowing what the spending and saving decisions of the domestic private sector and the external (rest of the world) sector will be. If non-government spending rises significantly, then a shrinking fiscal deficit would be consistent with good discretionary economic policy. But if non-government spending falls, the government can and must use discretionary economic policy to fill the spending gap, which entails a larger fiscal deficit.
The Australian Government should always target real economic and social outcomes such as full employment, price stability, socially useful production, environmental sustainability, low degree of inequality of income and wealth.
The Government should not be targeting a particular fiscal balance. It is economically illiterate to do so. It will likely prove to be politically disastrous to commit to a shrinking fiscal deficit.
Neither the LNP nor the ALP nor the Greens understand that crucial reality of how our monetary system works.
Until they do, we can expect frequent changes of government and insufficient progress on meeting the nation’s challenges.
@Douglas and Milko
Tassie is great if you’ve got yourself a job, and housing is cheap!
I work as a developer / head of IT, managing ‘all-of-business’ systems for over 100 employees.
We manufacture and distribute disability equipment, mainly for children.
A very fulfilling job, I’ve been very lucky.
Nicholas. You would be the first to claim you can’t trust labor. Then you say you can trust labor to shrink the fiscal balance and destroy themselves. Which will it be?
@Douglas and Milko
Also, from memory it was Thermodynamics and Computational Physics I had you for 😛
Zeh – hope you are enjoying Tas, jobs more available here than in the past.
I live in Hobart and travel a lot for work which helps me appreciate it more!
@SCOUT
Sure am, I’m up north in Latrobe and work not far away, but the beauty of a tech job is I can do it anywhere…
Bought a house last year, already own a quarter, might even have most of it paid off before I’m 30, which is in pretty stark contrast to the Sydney life I was headed towards…
poroti @ #1250 Thursday, October 25th, 2018 – 2:55 pm
Can’t wait for the ’embattled’ headlines, unnamed sources, promotion of a sense of crisis and other propaganda techniques commonly employed by the MSM. Oh wait…
Latrobe is a good spot, will be up there (Devonport ) next week for work. Love their sport up on the Coast.
Cricket training tonight!
I peaked at 15yo as a fast bowler, although, looking at our current national team, I reckon I’d have a chance if I got back to peak fitness… As a batsmen even. 😛
Zeh you can replace one of the Marsh brothers
A government can try to shrink the fiscal balance but if the non-government sector’s spending is falling, a contractionary fiscal stance from the government would be pro-cyclical (i.e. it would reinforce what is happening in the private sector). The result is that the automatic stabilizers (tax receipts and welfare spending) will automatically increase the deficit anyway (but not by enough to achieve significantly better output and employment growth). So in that scenario the ALP would fail to meets its silly self-imposed fiscal target and it would be rightly blamed for poor employment and output growth.
You need to understand that the fiscal balance is largely out of the control of the government. Where the fiscal balance ends up depends heavily on the spending and saving decisions of millions of people and institutions in the domestic non-government and external sectors.
Since we cannot know whether non-government spending will rise significantly over the next few years, it is economic illiterate and politically disastrous of the ALP to commit to a smaller fiscal deficit over the next few years.
Target real outcomes (employment, output, inflation etc), not sectoral balances.
”
guytaur says:
Thursday, October 25, 2018 at 10:12 am
baba
Its a type of dodgy loan that concealed the real debt levels of banks. Edit: Even concealed real debt from banks themselves
Made possible due to lack of financial regulation in the name of free markets
”
A subprime mortgage is a type of mortgage that is normally issued by a lending institution to borrowers with low credit ratings. As a result of the borrower’s lower credit rating, a conventional mortgage is not offered because the lender views the borrower as having a larger-than-average risk of defaulting on the loan.
The ASX has fell 515 points since the 5th October. If thats the sign of a good economy, I will eat my hat.
@SCOUT
Or both of them 😛
”
a r says:
Thursday, October 25, 2018 at 10:46 am
They create products and packages out of ‘these people owe me money, but will probably never pay’, and then somehow convince other institutions to buy it, and then those ones create their own weird derivatives that they on-sell to others,
”
Do you know why they were able to convince other institutions? There was a American law called ‘Glass-Stegall’. In 1933, Congress passed Glass-Steagall in response to the abuses of roaring 20s. Banks would be allowed to take deposits and make loans. Brokers would be allowed to underwrite and sell securities. But no firm could do both due to conflicts of interest and risks to insured deposits. From 1933 to 1999, there were very few large bank failures and no financial panics comparable to the Panic of 2008. The law worked exactly as intended. In 1999, Democrats led by President Bill Clinton and Republicans led by Sen. Phil Gramm joined forces to repeal Glass-Steagall at the behest of the big banks. What happened over the next eight years was an almost exact replay of the Roaring Twenties. Once again, banks originated fraudulent loans and once again they sold them to their customers in the form of securities. The bubble peaked in 2007 and collapsed in 2008.
”
Confessions says:
Thursday, October 25, 2018 at 10:48 am
Greensborough Growler @ #1143 Thursday, October 25th, 2018 – 7:39 am
Interesting that there are 5 Police Officers standing for the Libs in this coming Victorian State Election.
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All men. And all men with blue ties.
”
And one of them is G
‘Guy’
Mad Hatter’s presser:
Anning axed from KAP for his views on race.
Anning expelled from Bob Katter’s Party.
I guess the crocodile that Katter talks about regularly just ate Fraser.
”
shellbell says:
Thursday, October 25, 2018 at 10:55 am
Another excuse piece for Mitch Marsh which fails to mention that he has the lowest batting average since WW11 among top 6 batsmen twenty tests or more.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-25/you-can-not-blame-the-marsh-brothers-for-aussies-performance/10425754
”
As far as I know, nobody else has been given so many opportunities as Marsh Brothers. IMO, Geoff Marsh has some incriminating evidence against Cricket Australia. Glen Maxwell is dropped at the drop of the hat but the saga of Marsh Brothers continues.
“Search for new ABC chairman already tainted”
https://outline.com/y2Fg7Y
That’s right ven; Zeh is replacing both Marsh brothers in the Australian team. As a fellow Tasmanian im backing him in!
Jane Garrett versus United Firefighters Union – the outcome:
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/judge-rejects-firefighter-s-push-to-block-jane-garrett-s-preselection-20181025-p50bth.html
Does this mean Katter is angling for Labor prefs?
“Labor’s long-standing decision to preference Mr Katter over Liberal-National Party rivals has been crucial to his longevity in Parliament. But growing concerns about the 73-year-old’s behaviour have left Queensland Labor figures increasingly open to switching the preference order and accepting Kennedy’s probable return to the Coalition”.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/labor-could-end-bob-katter-s-career-following-embrace-of-anti-immigration-politics-20181004-p507pv.html
@SCOUT Unfortunately I’m not a native Tasmanian, otherwise I’d at least have the same number of heads 😛
Not true.
When asked to explain the legislation she was constantly interrupted by the questioner saying “But isn’t this just a tax?”
After being hectored in this way for some time, and wishing to explain the legislation, she made the mistake of saying “You can call it a tax if you like.” Handing the questioner the desired “Gotcha!”
I am sure if Gillard was given her time again, she would refuse to be accommodating, and would simply allow the interviewer to waste everybody’s time.
I suppose you think getting rid of the ETS (not a tax) was bloody brilliant. Eh Dio?
Good policy cut down by bullshit if you ask me.
Peter Brent on the vulnerability of safe seats falling to independents:
https://insidestory.org.au/when-safe-means-vulnerable/
The ASX was at 6,427 Points on 31st August 2018 (its all time high was 6,760 Points prior to the GFC), today closing at 5,759 Points, so off 668 Points or 10.4% since 31st August.
The DJIA reached an all time high of 26,656 Points on 21 September, 2018 when the ASX was at 6,305 (so down from 6,427 on 31st August).
Zeh,
Thanks for the update! Glad I did not put you off computers for life 😉
Also, I second your nomination to replace the Marsh brothers!
Ven
Read “Belly Up – the story of Penn Square Bank”
It is set in the times of the S&L crisis of the late 1980’s/early 1990’s.
Then, of course, “The Big Short”.
Zeh I am a native Tasmanian and have the scar on my shoulder to prove it. Played cricket socially for year’s but im hopeless.
Re comments about the possibility of Morrison calling a half-Senate election in May, he may be thinking (a) I can grab another 6 mths power and (b) being a half Senate election, some more Independents may get up who I can bamboozle or buy, which will help me with (a).
Of course he could end up with a completely hostile Senate, with those Senators like Anning getting the sack, along with Giuchi and other liberal-like spivs, like the Liberal Democrats.
I can’t see PHON getting any others elected/reelected apart from that persistent leech Hanson.
He certainly will face antipathy /anger from voters who either want a full election in May or those who say wait until November and have both elections then. As Victoria and NSW (and the voters of Wentworth) would recently have had elections, voter “election- fatigue” may also be a factor. Whichever way he goes, he’s either going to look sneaky, or afraid, or just plain stuck in his own web of deceit.
I believe, short of a no-confidence motion being passed in the HoR before then, he will thinking of buying that extra 6 mths any way he can.
I believe that his hopes of Labor collapsing in a heap along the way are fantasy as the ATM Government has stuffed up far too often for a mass migration back to the Government to happen. Shorten, like him or loathe him, is highly unlikely to stuff it up now, and Labor is far too organized and disciplined. Sure, something could come out of the cupboard to derail Labor. In politics anything is possible.
(But I reckon Morrison is going to have to wear knee pads because his knees are going to be stiff and sore from beseeching his God to save him and his Government. Roll on 2019 and Judgement Day.)
Question
Let’s go to the transcript.
HEATHER EWART: With this carbon tax – you do concede it’s a carbon tax, do you not?
JULIA GILLARD: Oh, look, I’m happy to use the word tax, Heather. I understand some silly little collateral debate has broken out today. I mean, how ridiculous. This is a market-based mechanism to price carbon.
Note Gillard’s phrase “I’m happy to use the word tax.”
The Guardian
The crossbench is back in town
Dio
Notice the phrase “I mean, how ridiculous. This is a market-based mechanism to price carbon. “
“I suppose you think getting rid of the ETS (not a tax) was bloody brilliant. Eh Dio?”
Given Gillard was one of the strongest voices telling Rudd to shelve a carbon trading scheme, that question somewhat ironic.
Ven
Totally agree re the Marsh brothers – and their continued selection = culture problems.
But when the only thing between the ball and the stumps is the bat, you are simply not of Test class as a batsman which is where Matthews is.
I notice that the 18 year old leg spinner, Pope, has 5 v Queensland, mostly LBW or bowled so they can not pick him – on a Day 1 Adelaide Oval deck!!
So Cummins, Starc, Hazelwood and Pope.
Then to the batting!!!
The phrase they used the most often was “There will never be a carbon tax under the government I lead.” This was in response to Abbott calling it a tax and they used it out of context and out of time as a gotcha.
Yes, Julia was foolish to give in to the reporter’s hammering (it was ‘Mrs Cassidy’, btw).
steve davis
I guess you would have seen AMP ended -24.5% today. Wow, that’s a fall
Some quarterly update!
“Given Gillard was one of the strongest voices telling Rudd to shelve a carbon trading scheme, that question somewhat ironic.”
Got the transcript on that one?
The thing I hate the most about politics (as well as discussions on blogs) is that something said years and years ago can be quoted back as an accusation. As if no one ever changes their position on anything.
Gillard introduced the ETS, Rudd tried and failed.
It worked brilliantly. The only opposition was the rump of the L-NP and the MSM.
The irony is that the same issue put the L-NP in the fine mess they find themselves today. Turnbull would have done much better if the L-NP hadn’t done such a good job of stuffing up climate policy.
Too
Yes, giving the tick to the word tax was mistake for new players.
Older People Are Worse Than Young People at Telling Fact from Opinion
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/older-people-are-worse-than-young-people-at-telling-fact-from-opinion/573739/
This scientific finding comports with my personal experience of interacting with older folk and young folk.
Leaked Labor caucus minutes
“I wish to place on record here that Lindsay Tanner and Penny Wong strongly argued to me against taking that position. Equally strong was the advice from Wayne and Julia that the emissions trading scheme had to be abandoned.”
http://resources.news.com.au/files/2010/11/24/1225959/785379-101124-rudd.pdf