Essential Research: 53-47 to Labor

In the first new poll of the year, both major parties are up on the primary vote, yet their leaders’ disapproval ratings have shot upwards.

Essential Research is back in business, its first poll for the new year no change on Labor’s 53-47 lead in the final poll last year. Both major parties are on 38% on the primary votes, which is a two-point improvement for Labor and a one-point improvement for the Coalition. Minor party primary votes will have to wait for the publication of the full report later today. In a spirit of seasonal goodwill, monthly leadership ratings find both leaders well up on disapproval – by five points in Morrison’s case to 39%, and four in Shorten’s case to 47% – while Morrison is up one on approval to 42% and Shorten is unchanged on 35%.

As related by The Guardian, further questions mostly focused on the recent far right rally in St Kilda, the most interesting finding being that 48% thought Scott Morrison “demonstrated poor leadership by not immediately condemning the rally, and those who attended it, in stronger terms”, compared with 36% who disagreed. Only 22% thought it appropriate for Senator Fraser Anning to “use taxpayer money to attend the rally”, with 66% saying it was appropriate; 74% felt there was ”no place in Australian society for the use of racist and fascist symbols used by participants in the rally”, whereas 17% were apparently all in favour of them; and that 73% nonetheless felt that “Australians have the right to peacefully protest, no matter how extreme their views”, while 19% didn’t.

The poll also find 63% support for pill testing, although the question was very particular about the specifics, specifying circumstances in which “trained counsellors provide risk-reduction advice informed by on-site laboratory analysis of people’s drugs”.

UPDATE: Full report here. The Greens are down a point to 10%, and One Nation are steady on 7%.

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.

2,042 comments on “Essential Research: 53-47 to Labor”

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  3. jenauthor
    says:
    Thursday, January 17, 2019 at 6:42 pm
    Didn’t I read somewhere that woolly mammoths (and large dinosaurs) would not survive now because of lower oxygen levels in the atmosphere? I may be mistaken – but I am almost sure ….

    Doesn’t matter. We’ll be growing their meat in a factory, where it can’t impale us. Yum!

  4. Shorter Andrew – Labor reps might agree with Greens but when they say it it is virtue signalling. It is more important that we get into government first – without any mandate to touch this though. Unfortunately.

    Why always run scared? You can “take the country with us” from opposition, too. I would like Bill Shorten to at least leave the door open to a plebiscite.

  6. don at 6:29 pm

    I believe it’s the methane farts that are the problem. I am not sure if pasture or grain fed would be worse. Which has more fibre?

  7. Yeah. A plebiscite. Now that’s real leadership. What could possibly go wrong.

    I simply have a different view on what constitutes political leadership than you Lovey. Blowing hard earned political capital on a symbolic gesture isn’t leadership in my view.

    Telling a whole bunch of your supporter base, and prospective supporter base to effectively go and stand in the naughty corner over an issue of ideological purity – over that symbol -isn’t leadership in my view. Especially when those who presumably have most to benefit from such a gesture are actually calling for real leadership on actual structural changes to the country that would matter in a demonstrably tangible way and desperately want Labor to spend its political capital on those matters.

  9. Lovey @ #1857 Thursday, January 17th, 2019 – 3:07 pm

    Shorter Andrew – Labor reps might agree with Greens but when they say it it is virtue signalling. It is more important that we get into government first – without any mandate to touch this though. Unfortunately.

    Why always run scared? You can “take the country with us” from opposition, too. I would like Bill Shorten to at least leave the door open to a plebiscite.

    Because it’s reality and it’s an issue that will sort itself out more than likely when we finally become a Republic.

    Also, how many plebiscites do you want?

    You have pick your fights and not be so woke about everything!

    Tracey Ullman 🙂

  10. Question

    Ruminant farm animals farting (+burping B.S. Fairman 😉 ) contribute 10% to our GHG emissions. So if we all turn righteous vegans it will not make a yuge difference. Might even make it worse what with all those beans being eaten 😆

    Australia (Department of Climate Change 2008). About 50% of Australia’s total methane emissions are derived from the livestock industries, and this represents about 10% of the total national greenhouse gas emissions. More than half of the methane emissionsfrom livestock in Australia are attributed to beef cattle (Table 1).
    http://www.greenhouse.unimelb.edu.au/pdf_files/TropicGssldHenry.pdf

  12. Barney in Go Dau @ #1859 Thursday, January 17th, 2019 – 6:52 pm

    Lovey @ #1857 Thursday, January 17th, 2019 – 3:07 pm

    Shorter Andrew – Labor reps might agree with Greens but when they say it it is virtue signalling. It is more important that we get into government first – without any mandate to touch this though. Unfortunately.

    Why always run scared? You can “take the country with us” from opposition, too. I would like Bill Shorten to at least leave the door open to a plebiscite.

    Because it’s reality and it’s an issue that will sort itself out more than likely when we finally become a Republic.

    Also, how many plebiscites do you want?

    You have pick your fights and not be so woke about everything!

    Tracey Ullman 🙂

    So we replace cow farts with human farts?

  13. Thanks B.S. Fairman.

    I’ll have to keep an eye out for the burping next time I’m around a cow. The crapping is quite constant 🙂

  16. The less meat eaten, the more Soy and other cereal crops are grown on land different to that which cattle graze on and the more of it you need. A lot of Soy is grown in Brazil. Do you want more of the Amazon jungle destroyed so you can be a vegan?

  21. Andrew, Shorten doesn’t dismiss it as “just a symbolic gesture” though, he has said instead that the date will not be changed, period. If you infer that this may change in government, and you think he is thus showing leadership, then yes, we do understand the term differently.

    Look, I understand there may not be a groundswell of opinion to change the date, but I doubt people are strongly wedded to this view, or the date itself. In a plebiscite there would be a case put for yes and no.

    I personally think the “no” case would be weak. It’s the day the country became white/European? It’s political correctness gone mad? Judeo-Christian values, or some such crap?

    I think reasonable Australians, the majority would be OK about moving it to a less offence-giving date. After all, we would not actually be losing anything.

  22. I have previously indicated my support for a date change as it is offensive to some and have suggested either the date of the referendum granting indigenous citizenship or the date it became law as the alternate.

    I do agree that for many, it is a non-issue and is being used as a political wedge. Shorten is wise to play a dead bat on it currently.

  23. People seem to have an unnatural and un-factual attitude to vegans. The fact is their footprint is much smaller.

    I hasten to add that I am not even a vegetarian, but I would be happy to eat meat made by some hipster on award wages in a factory, especially woolly mammoth, and I would feel good about the reduction in emissions, that some beast didn’t have to die, and that the provider probably didn’t vote for Barnaby.

  24. I think you need to get out from behind the Great Wall of Quinoa on 26 January. The level of jingoism is truly Amazing Lovey.

    I don’t think Shorten has a secret plan to change the date, but he has an overt plan to change the country. Which is what matters.

  26. There has been some success with changing the gut bacteria of cows to less methane producing using the gut flora from Kangaroos who produce very little methane. So you can still eat meat, but it has to be roo meat.

  27. jenauthor @ #1845 Thursday, January 17th, 2019 – 6:42 pm

    Didn’t I read somewhere that woolly mammoths (and large dinosaurs) would not survive now because of lower oxygen levels in the atmosphere? I may be mistaken – but I am almost sure ….

    Don’t think so. Woolly mammoths and humans coexisted for a long time on the same oxygen levels. They were proboscids, just as elephants are, and they are still with us. For the time being, at least, till we kill them off.

  28. I was brought up as an ovo-lacto vegetarian on account of my parent’s religious views. While the religion didn’t stick for either siblings or me, vegetarianism did – I alone eat meat, but I find it tough going and would abstain by preference save for the convenience that a little meat has for dietary purposes – other than tolerating a Palm size serving of chicken, beef or lamb 2-3 times a week I’m still basically vegetarian.

    I don’t think a little meat makes a huge difference to the work environment, but the disproportionate among of meat grazed using stock feed does.

  29. Question @ #1873 Thursday, January 17th, 2019 – 7:34 pm

    People seem to have an unnatural and un-factual attitude to vegans. The fact is their footprint is much smaller.

    Not if you include the extra land that has to be cultivated (and watered!) to produce the beans needed. And the forests chopped down to provide that broad acre farming which would be necessary for everyone to have a vegan diet. The tractors and diesel fuel to sow, cultivate, water and harvest it has a very significant effect on the ‘footprint’.

    Dry land grazing of livestock is a very efficient way of creating protein.

  30. Darn @ #1806 Thursday, January 17th, 2019 – 5:44 pm

    P1

    If you’re still around, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.

    There was a discussion on 3aw this morning involving a newly elected member of the Justice Party in the Victorian Upper House. This person stated that even if we do ALL the other things that are required to keep global warming at a manageable level we will fail if we don’t also massively reduce our consumption of meat.

    I have never heard this mentioned before in any discussion of this kind. Do you think we can put any stock at all in that type of argument, or is it just a vegan pipe dream?

    Yes, it’s true. I believe we will have to reduce our consumption – worldwide – of meat (especially red meat) by something like 50% to be sustainable.

    In countries that consume a lot of meat – such as Australia and the US – this means we will have to reduce our consumption much more – perhaps by 75% – 90%.

  32. Andrew is right Don,
    It is impossible for meat to have a smaller footprint, because it consumes a lot before we get to eat it. Cows would have to have a 100% food-energy-in/food-energy-out ratio just to break even. They have nowhere near that.

  33. Like i said – could have been mistaken – I do know the large dinosaurs would have difficulty. That said – I remember ‘them’ saying that the lack of oxygen was why mammoths died out while their smaller cousins have survived????

    On the crops question, when I said a bout cereal crops/cotton – I reckon the need for extensive irrigation for these shows that their cultivation (in a big way) has a knock on effect. Deforestation, water, salinity …. these should be counted as part of the ‘footprint’

  35. Don – snap!

    The other thing is the obesity epidemic now sits fair and square on the shoulders of carbs, grains and man made oils derived (industrially) from seeds & grains. Proven science … have been researching this question of late and the evidence is more than compelling (coming from reputable biological scientists).

  36. I have no idea if this is accurate or not, but officials at the Port of Dover are concerned about a hard Brexit without agreement on trade, border and customs checks will create gridlock for the 10,000 cargo trucks that cross the Channel daily. In essence they predict for every 2 mins a truck is delayed at the port for checks will result in a 17 mile traffic back up on the M20.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-finds-a-faulty-shipping-safety-net-for-brexit-11546943401

  37. C@tmomma @ #1866 Thursday, January 17th, 2019 – 6:26 pm

    The less meat eaten, the more Soy and other cereal crops are grown on land different to that which cattle graze on and the more of it you need. A lot of Soy is grown in Brazil. Do you want more of the Amazon jungle destroyed so you can be a vegan?

    There is lot more Brazilian rainforest being cleared for hamburger mince than soy.

  38. Lord HH “I do agree that for many, it is a non-issue and is being used as a political wedge. Shorten is wise to play a dead bat on it currently.”

    Agree. Shorten has to choose his battles, he doesn’t have major media organisations ready to act as his propaganda unit. Morrison is trying to lure Shorten onto his turf to pick fights, mostly on 3rd or 4th or 9th order issues. Shorten isn’t taking the bait.

  39. It’s Time says:
    Thursday, January 17, 2019 at 7:57 pm
    C@tmomma @ #1861 Thursday, January 17th, 2019 – 6:23 pm

    If only 2 Greens Senate candidates get elected at the next federal election, how many in total will there then be?
    5

    See Kevin Bonham’s page for an analysis which shows it will likely be a hostile Senate even with a huge Labor victory in the Reps at the next election.

    The Gs will form a part of the anti-Labor majority in the Senate. They will collude with the Liberals and the right-leaning Independent and ON remnants to disrupt Labor.

  40. Some are saying that a hard Brexit is looking more probable, but what happens if Brexiteers get spooked by any negative impact on the economy in the weeks or days leading up to the EU deadline?

    The poet Rupert Brooke voiced the exhilaration of those Britons who welcomed the war in 1914 as a chance to escape monotonous normality, “as swimmers into cleanness leaping.” They got four years mired in Flanders’s mud. In a 2016 referendum, Britons voted, 52 percent to 48 percent, for the exhilaration of emancipation from the European Union’s gray bureaucratic conformities. They thereby leaped into a quagmire of negotiations with an E.U. determined to make separation sufficiently painful to discourage other nations from considering it.

    On Tuesday, Parliament emphatically rejected the terms of separation that Prime Minister Theresa May negotiated with the E.U. So, there is no majority, in Parliament or the country, for anything other than, perhaps, a second referendum, which might be impossible to organize before the March 29 deadline for leaving the E.U. — although the E.U. might extend the deadline, hoping for a British reversal. Another democracy recently rethought something momentous. On Sept. 29, 2008, with the U.S. financial system nearing collapse, the House of Representatives voted 228 to 205 against the George W. Bush administration’s bailout plan. The Dow promptly plunged 7 percent (777 points off 11,143), and four days later the House reversed itself, 263 to 171.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/theresa-mays-brexit-plan-isnt-dead-yet/2019/01/16/17fc6a00-19cd-11e9-8813-cb9dec761e73_story.html?utm_term=.e08eb01b65dc

  41. Brexit seems to have been a project of plutocrats and their political allies who wanted to create a haven in the U.K. for cowboy capitalism, harnessing nationalism and concerns (real and cultivated) about migration and asylum seekers to make up the numbers.

  42. briefly,

    They will collude with the Liberals…

    Yes, Labor will as it has done so often in the past, in the bipartisan agreement to maintain the status quo of a political duopoly that has ensured decades of their rule has landed where we are now.

    Short-termism, pork-barreling to buy the votes of the swinging voters in a minority of electorates, continuing the opaque relationships with lobbyists and sectional interest groups, the revolving door, ….

  43. Shorten is smart to put the Australia Day discussion to sleep. Government would love for this issue to dominate discussion. Big thumbs up to Shorten for reading the game.

    There is too much at stake, literally millions of people are relying on Labor to get in power and get shit done. Stay focused on your plan and don’t play your the game your opponents want you to.

    Labor is already committed to Uluru statement and treaty with first peoples. Don’t blow it all away by getting into symbolic fringe issues that majority of voters will punish you for.

  44. Confessions,

    My concern about Brexit has mainly been about nationalism. I am not in the UK, and have no idea what they are on, but that seems to be the core driver to me.

    Part of me wants to say “OK. I give up. Go and have your hard Brexit and suffer. That’ll learn you.”

    The problem is that is not how nationalism works. If the economy tanks the problem will be because the English are being hard done by in some other way. We’ll just see more stories about English fishermen ramming French fishermen and so it will go. The last time nationalism took hold in Europe it didn’t end well.

    The stagnant wages are what’s causing it. The EU should start getting pro-active about reducing inequality.

  45. Re animal vs vegetable proteins
    Anyone who bothered to click twice, once on the Guardian story and then once to get to an actual peer reviewed article from Science journal could read for themselves, from people who actually crunched the numbers and pondered the issues to a far greater extent than anyone here

    “In particular, the impacts of animal products can markedly exceed those of vegetable substitutes (Fig. 1). To such a degree that meat, aquaculture, eggs, and dairy use ~83% of the world’s farmland and contribute 56-58% of food’s different emissions, despite providing only 37% of our protein and 18% of our calories. Can animal products be produced with sufficiently low impacts to redress this vast imbalance? Or will reducing animal product consumption deliver greater environmental benefits?

    We find that the impacts of the lowest-impact animal products exceed average impacts of substitute vegetable proteins across GHG emissions, eutrophication, acidification (excluding nuts), and frequently land use (Fig. 1 and data S2). These stark differences are not apparent in any product groups except protein-rich products and milk.”

    The first two points, from five, made regarding meat vs vegetable protein production and the relatively excessive environmental cost of meat

    “First, emissions from feed production typically exceed emissions of vegetable protein farming. This is because feed-to-edible protein conversion ratios are greater than 2 for most animals (13, 34); because high usage of low-impact by-products is typically offset by low digestibility and growth; and because additional transport is required to take feed to livestock. Second, we find that deforestation for agriculture is dominated (67%) by feed, particularly soy, maize, and pasture, resulting in losses of above- and below-ground carbon.”

    With as already mentioned ruminant burps and farts contributing as well

    From the apparently open access paper in the journal Science
    http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987.full?ijkey=ffyeW1F0oSl6k&keytype=ref&siteid=sci

  46. This is fantastic. ‘Founding Father’ style portraits of the 131 women in the 116th Congress – such powerful imagery of diversity!

    For most of recorded American history, political power has looked a certain way. Portraits of power call certain images to mind — those of older, white men, dressed in suits and depicted in formal settings.

    The 2018 midterm elections ushered in a change in representation; for the first time, more than 100 women serve in the House of Representatives — out of 435 seats — and members of color were elected in more states than ever before.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/14/us/politics/women-of-the-116th-congress.html

  47. “Shorten is smart to put the Australia Day discussion to sleep. Government would love for this issue to dominate discussion. Big thumbs up to Shorten for reading the game.

    There is too much at stake, literally millions of people are relying on Labor to get in power and get shit done. Stay focused on your plan and don’t play your the game your opponents want you to.

    Labor is already committed to Uluru statement and treaty with first peoples. Don’t blow it all away by getting into symbolic fringe issues that majority of voters will punish you for.”

    With due respect to Lovely – your post above is the true “shorter Andrew”. Thumbs up.

  48. Question:

    I haven’t followed the Brexit issue at all, apart from skimming comments here. But several articles this week have appeared in my Facebook timeline, including that George Will article I posted. He says 2015 saw a surge in asylum seekers into Europe which he argues could’ve been the catalyst for the Brexit vote on the back of anxiety about resultant social cohesion.

    It seems plausible to me – just look how we respond to increased boat arrivals here.

  50. Very plausible Confessions, I also don’t pretend any insight. Unfortunately reasons for nationalism don’t lend nationalism any reason.

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