BludgerTrack: 53.9-46.1 to Labor

Ipsos and Essential’s 52-48 results have knocked nearly a full point off Labor’s lead in the BludgerTrack aggregate, although that still leaves plenty to spare.

Two much better results for the Coalition this week, from Ipsos and Essential Research, have knocked 0.8% off Labor’s still commanding two-party lead on the BludgerTrack poll aggregate. This converts into three gains on the seat projection, being one apiece in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia.

For those playing particularly close attention, I am not making use here of The West Australian’s local poll by unheralded market research outfit Painted Dog Research, as I have no benchmark for calculating bias adjustments for them. In any case, it was a small sample poll that particularly low primary votes for both major parties. I have, however, included it in the archive of poll results you can find with a bit of digging under the “poll data” tab at the top of the BludgerTrack page.

Bill Shorten maintains a steady upward trend on the leadership ratings, on which I’m still not producing a result for Scott Morrison – this will require a fair bit of tinkering that I won’t have time for until the poll drought over new year. Full results, as always, on the link below.

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.

2,091 comments on “BludgerTrack: 53.9-46.1 to Labor”

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  1. 😆 Watching Murdoch orc Chris Kenny. Wot we learned from teh election. 1) Stop being softies and giving things away 2) Bloody Canberra brand damage 3) Bigly though they need BOLD policy decisions. Stop being Labor Lite. “Stop going down this path of Moderate Liberal, Labor Lite”

    Love it. So the only thing wrong was they were not RWNJ enough.

  2. Does anyone here seriously think that without the greens nipping at Labor’s heels in the inner city it would have been anywhere near as progressive. The greens are a very beneficial influence on the labor party. And I say that as a labor voter.

  3. antonbruckner11 @ #1954 Sunday, November 25th, 2018 – 7:09 pm

    Does anyone here seriously think that without the greens nipping at Labor’s heels in the inner city it would have been anywhere near as progressive. The greens are a very beneficial influence on the labor party. And I say that as a labor voter.

    The Labor right are more comfortable with small l liberals. They aren’t of the left so they attack the Greens with vigour.

  4. Aanton there is also the argument that because of the Greens, Labor has moved a little to the right because it can reasonably expect progressive voters to 2nd preference Labor anyhow. That’s arguable.

    However one thing is clear from this. There is s lot of sense in more progressive policies and Federal Labor could learn from this.

    NSW Labor as well. It could learn that voters actually want ambitious public transport infrastructure. Rather than band aids.

  5. A cheeky thought.

    If
    *) The Greens are a political party that promotes socially progressive environmentally aware policies.
    *) The Labor party has (largely) adopted that role.
    *) The Liberal party has abandoned the socially conservative environmentally aware voters.

    then
    *) Is there not an opportunity for a party that promotes socially conservative environmentally aware policy? (Conserve our environment. Conserve our traditions.)

    The cheeky thought is that this new party could be known as the “Browns”.

  6. Socrates you know even if the PB mean were spot on, you should expect it to differ from Newspoll more often than not owing to sampling noise. But this hasn’t happened. Newspoll has been smoothed in recent times. Which can only add a time lag.

  7. ‘antonbruckner11 says:
    Sunday, November 25, 2018 at 7:09 pm

    Does anyone here seriously think that without the greens nipping at Labor’s heels in the inner city it would have been anywhere near as progressive. The greens are a very beneficial influence on the labor party. And I say that as a labor voter.’

    The Greens delude themselves with this as well.

    Here is a little test for the theory.

    Will Labor apply the following Greens’ policies?
    1. Disbanding the ADF
    2. Shutting down Australia’s GMO cotton industry.
    3. Open slather entry to asylum seekers.
    4. Shutting down Olympic Dam.
    5. Mandatory job sharing.

    (I can do chapter and verse on these being in the Greens policy statements.)

    Labor will do none of these things. No amount of ‘nipping at the heels’ will make Labor do those things. No amount of Greens advocacy will make Labor do those things.

    In other words, Labor will continue to pursue the implementation of real world policies in the real world.

    The Greens are kidding themselves. There is no need for Labor peeps to indulge this chronic Greens self-delusion.

  8. CC – I’m not sure about that. The thing Labor absolutely does not want is the Greens taking seats off them. It’s the green-labor contests in the inner city they fear. That means they have to get closer on policy.

  9. antonbruckner11

    Fiona Patten worked with labor to get Voluntary Assisted Dying up giving people options when they previously had none, worked with labor to get Medically Supervised Injecting rooms up.

    Greens spent the term attacking labor. The Greens preference Hinch before Pattern.

    The Greens are about the Greens not progressive politics.

  10. That TIM Dunlop tweet posted by Rex:

    “Australian conservatism – its political and media wings – are in absolute crisis and it is damaging the whole country. Their entire project – economic and social – is incoherent, making it impossible for them to understand the nation they seek to govern, the world they live in.”

    I think the “conservative” parties don’t have a problem with their economic agenda. They agree on the Big Business/ IPA vision, one which has very little support outside the nation’s board rooms and executive suites, so they keep it hidden. That’s what lends an air of incoherence. They have to lie and they often don’t get their story right, or like Abbott, they are too blatant.

    As for the social side, that is incoherent. Someone might buy the Big Money agenda, or at least the story they’re told, but they have no concerns about African gangs, same sex marriage or ‘safe schools’. They just want to be free to make money and not pay tax. And they might be concerned about climate change. However, the Right have a lock on social policy and climate policy, so you want the Big Money agenda, you have to vote for social conservatism and climate inaction. That’s got to lead to instability and discord on the right.

  11. Please let me know if full twitter text is not the go, it is the best summary I have seen of the current state of the Liberal party I have read, it deserves more than a few twitter messages.

    timdunlop‏ @timdunlop

    Australian conservatism – its political and media wings – are in absolute crisis and it is damaging the whole country. Their entire project – economic and social – is incoherent, making it impossible for them to understand the nation they seek to govern, the world they live in.

    Economically, they are nothing more than the party of rent seekers, doing the will of everyone from the corrupt banking industry to the dying fossil fuel industry. Instead of preparing us for the technology-driven economy of the near future, they are propping up the old order

    Socially, they’re dominated by old white men who refuse to acknowledge the inevitable diversity of a European settler nation in the heart of Asia with an Aboriginal past and future. They rail against women, immigrants, LGBTI: anyone who isn’t them. It is damaging them and us

    Ideologically, they can’t tell the difference between fact & fiction, reality and fantasy. They think climate change is something we can choose to ignore, just like they think being gay is a choice. They are inevitably racist & misogynist, bc that is the only ground left to them

    Institutionally, the LNP is a broken vehicle for conservatism. News Ltd is a broken vehicle for conservatism. They are the phantom limbs of the body politic: we feel them as if they are real, but they are gone. They can cause us pain, but they can’t carry us into the future.

    Those who want a future for conservatism should welcome the rise of thoughtful conservative independents wherever they emerge, as this is the only way forward for that side of politics. (And stop listening to the Jones-Bolt-Devine-SkyNews axis of idiocy.)

    For those who want a more progressive country, we need to be braver and more demanding of the institutions that seek to represent us & trust that the electorate will embrace a practical AND forward-looking agenda. The biggest mistake is to play to a centre that no longer exists.

    This goes much deeper than the Victorian election, and things will play out differently in different places, but if you think there are no national ramifications for what happened yesterday, you are still in denial. Or the LNP. Or the News Ltd bubble.

    One last thing: they cannot be reasoned with, they can only be beaten. Which is not a withdrawal from political engagement, just a recognition that the LNP and its supporters in the media are no longer the vehicle for reasonable engagement. It will need to come from elsewhere.

  12. antonbruckner11
    I have no problem with the Greens being for the Greens but please don’t pretend they are about progressive politics, or for that matter the environment ( the charade is long dead I suppose).

  13. anton in practice very few people move from Labor to Green and then drift to Liberal in preferences.

    So its a totally overated issue.

  14. Molan spits the dummy in a big way – not what you would expect of a soldier:

    Bumped Molan pulls out of Q&A

    Senator quits TV appearance, saying he “can’t bring myself to defend my party” after being denied a safe senate spot.

  15. What are they smoking on Sky ? 😆 Promo
    “Sharri reveals why Bill Shorten’s plan for a national corruption body and 20 different genders is a bad idea”
    I can’t wait to see their level of desperation and doolally by the time of the next Fed. election.

  16. Cub Chewer
    I can write a policy document, but it means nothing because I can’t turn it into reality. Fiona Patten mattered because she worked with Labor to make progressive policy a reality, the Greens have spent their time trying to damage Labor instead of working with reality.

  17. Off topis..but aint science cool. 🙂

    “However, Douka and Higham will use a new technology called Zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry – ZooMs. Developed by Mike Buckley, at Manchester University, the technique, which is derived from food science research, exploits the fact that collagen, a protein fibre found in bone, can survive for hundreds of thousands of years. Every major mammal group has a distinctive type of collagen, and ZooMs can read its structure like a molecular barcode, identifying which animal was the originator of a particular bone. This makes it ideal for differentiating human and animal remains.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/24/denisovan-neanderthal-hybrid-denny-dna-finder-project

  18. In case it hasn’t been posted here yet, the Democratic Party picked up their 39th House of Representatives gain today with the concession by 2-term Republican Mia Love (yes, the one chided by Trump for not giving him any love). What a marvellous month this has been, psephologically speaking! 🙂

    FiveThirtyEight.com is still predicting the Democratic Party will rack up a 40th seat when California’s postal votes are finalised. Come 2020, James Carville had better save is gormless guesses for his spouse, the former Republican (now a Libertarian) campaign manager Mary Matalin. She’s far too savvy to ever stuff up like Carville did on MSNBC.

  19. Re Frednk @7:35.

    There are some interesting observations there. The L/NP are the party of rent-seekers. To banking and coal I’d add the private health sector, private schools and those who want their private choices supported by the taxpayer, elements of the real estate, development and construction industries, as well as the many beneficiaries of middle class welfare, for example self-funded retirees. One of the ‘achievements’ of the Howard and Costello Governments was to create whole new classes of rent-seekers.

    And yes, they can’t be reasoned with, they don’t do negotiation or compromise, they can only be beaten.

  20. The Labor right are more comfortable with small l liberals. They aren’t of the left so they attack the Greens with vigour.

    I don’t attack The Greens because they are to the left of Labor, lord knows that I have landed in exactly the same spot ideologically as Pegasus when those quizzes come up here. No, I attack the attacks on Labor, reflexive attacks when a more reflective perspective would be appreciated, and I attack you for what you say, how you say it and for your refusal to ever apologise for saying egregious things. Which has zero to do with whether I am in the Left, Right or Upside Down faction of Labor. I just don’t appreciate frauds.

  21. Labor as the progressive political party in Australia is forcing the Greens to radical positions in search of relevance – and therefore unelectable

    With all the misjudged focus on Labor and the Greens, because there is not such a subject, what is not the subject of comment is the (so called) Liberal Party and its relationship and control by the National Party and the Liberal National Party (in Queensland)

    That is the real issue including because Wagga Wagga was lost and seats have also been lost in Victoria

    But there is no focus on the minor parties which have such influence on the Liberal Party including providing the Deputy pm and a raft of Ministers (and an Envoy, on water!!!)

    Why not?

    Vote Liberal and you get a National Party Government subservient to who they are subservient to

  22. On Tim Dunlop’s tweets, I posted exactly the same thing re real conservatives standing up and reclaiming their ideology only the other day, and have been saying this for yonks now. It’s either they take back their brand or this thing called conservativism dies from irrelevancy in today’s modern era.

  23. “Molan then pulled out, saying again he “would find it hard to defend my party”.”

    This is telegraphing that there is some small amount of trouble on the way over this. 🙂

  24. antonbruckner11 says:
    Sunday, November 25, 2018 at 7:09 pm

    Does anyone here seriously think that without the greens nipping at Labor’s heels in the inner city it would have been anywhere near as progressive.

    I think this is an entirely false reading of the dynamics. Because politics is adversarial, G-postures repel Labor. Political land-grabbing/claim-jumping by the Gs makes it more difficult for Labor to stand on “progressive” turf than would otherwise be the case.

    There is absolutely nothing articulated by the Gs that is not also articulated within Labor, and not only within the left.

    Just as competition between the Liberals and Labor drives them apart, so too does competition between Labor and the Gs tend to cause divergence. Labor’s response is to stick to its own game; to ignore its antagonists; to promote its own values/policies.

    The Gs justify their existence by claiming the influence Labor. This is a very peculiar claim. Labor does not set out to influence its competitors. It sets out to reach and serve its various constituencies; to enlarge its plurality and maintain its relevance as a party of Government.

  25. Quick update before I leave for a couple of hours. I will be back to capture any late guesses.

    PB Newspoll-Poll 2018-11-25
    PB mean: ALP 53.4 to 46.6 LNP
    PB median: ALP 53.0 to 47.0 LNP
    No. Of PB Respondents: 55

  26. Daniel Andrews, just keeping on, keeping on:

    The Victorian Labor government will immediately call for expressions of interest for the $16 billion North East Link ring road project as Premier Daniel Andrews moves to double down on the strategy that won his government a second term at the weekend with a resounding defeat of Matthew Guy’s Liberal-National Coalition.

    Mr Andrews told reporters that his government would keep the budget in surplus even as it continues to splurge on infrastructure to meet the needs of Victoria’s rapidly growing population, in a bid to reassure debt markets after Labor revealed it would borrow another $26 billion and double the debt cap to 12 per cent of gross state product to fund the program.

    He wouldn’t rule out a further renewable energy tender after the state signed off on 928 megawatts of wind and solar energy projects in September, worth about $1.4 billion, but would make it a priority to embark on a promise to subsidise solar panels on 700,000 homes over 10 years at a cost of $1.24 billion.

    “Tender documents for (the North East Link) go out tomorrow,” Mr Andrews told reporters on Sunday, after Labor won the Victorian election in a virtual landslide with a likely 55 seats in the 88-seat Legislative Assembly, stealing heartland eastern suburb seats off the Liberal Party and reducing Matthew Guy’s Coalition to a 28-seat rump.

    https://www.afr.com/news/victorian-state-election-dan-the-builder-sends-out-tenders-for-16b-north-east-link-20181125-h18btg

  27. The Greens exist and are fairly strong because of our preferential voting system. Preferential voting was introduced by one of the Liberal Party’s predecessors in response to the rise of the Country Party, so that development would not split the conservative vote and let Labor through.

    Were we at some future time to adopt Proportional Representation or something like New Zealand’s MMP, Labor would probably need to join in Coalition with the Greens to rule. Should we introduce PR, if we were to adopt a minimum 5% rule for representation in our Parliament, like many European democracies, it would be touch and go whether the Nationals would gain any seats. They get half the number of votes garnered by the Greens.

    The Greens have the support of about 10% of the population. Labor needs to deal with it.

  28. And The Greens, as they always do, blaming Labor for Glenn Druery and their wipeout:

    The Greens look set to lose four of their five upper house MPs as counting continued on Sunday and Greens leader Samantha Ratnam slammed the “backroom” deals done by “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery that have lifted the microparties to new heights.

    “If Dan Andrews was truly committed to a progressive state, he should have spent less time attacking the Greens and more time worrying about the backroom deals that have the potential to see a host of right-wing MPs controlling the agenda in the upper house,” Dr Ratnam said.

    https://www.afr.com/news/politics/victorian-state-election-greens-slam-backroom-deals-after-wipeout-20181125-h18bjm

    Only a Greens’ leader could find a way to blame everyone else but themselves for their loss. 🙄

  29. Prof. Higgins

    I will say one thing about James Carville – I saw him speaking to some American college students one week before the 2016 Presidential election, and he was telling them that Trump could very well win the election (when some fairly well known political wonks were giving Hillary’s chances as something like 99%). He was telling them that enough people thinking Trump couldn’t win, in particular young people, and those people not voting while Trump mobilised his supporters in a manner not seen for a long time would mean waking up on the day after the election with President Trump.

    His predictions on what happens when Trump gets in are amusing, some of which have happened.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDm3TPE1BO4

    ps – with cross party lines spouse I feel some affinity with James!

  30. Anton

    Does anyone here seriously think that without the greens nipping at Labor’s heels in the inner city it would have been anywhere near as progressive. The greens are a very beneficial influence on the labor party. And I say that as a labor voter.

    I have thought long and hard about this. I think the Greens can raise issues that would be just electoral suicide for Labor, and hence generally help the progressive side of politics by starting the conversation.

    On the other hand, Labor was pretty good at doing this before the Greens came along. Whitlam spent years developing a universal healthcare policy and selling it to the Australian people, before introducing Medibank in 1974. It was eventually destroyed by Fraser, but then brought back by Hawke, and has remained a part of the Oz healthcare landscape ever since.

    Hawke and Keating raised the safety net for income support for everyone in Australia to make sure no one went hungry, and all kids and their families had access to the resources they needed to get their kids to school, before th eGreens came along.

    I think the Greens have generally been a positive thing, but lately they have spent a lot more time criticising Labor than the Coalition, and have proudly said that they will bring down a Labour government if it is not to their standards. I understand why they say this, as they need to differentiate themselves as a political party. However, for me, as a Labor person who has often voted Green in the various upper and lower houses, because I understand how preferential voting works, I will no longer vote 1 Green, because I do not, under any circumstances, want a coalition government.

    I think that many other erstwhile Greens’ voters are now making this same calculation.

    In the past we could vote for the Democrats, if we wanted to send Labor a message, but a vote for the democrats did not include the sinister probability that it would lead to a coalition government.

    The Greens are a legitimate independent party who owe Labor no more than they owe the coalition: i.e. nothing. However, it is not clear why they expect Labor voters to support them, when they are quite upfront about saying they actively want to destroy the Labor party so they can replace them.

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