BludgerTrack: 53.7-46.3 to Labor

BludgerTrack returns from hibernation, albeit with only one new poll result to play with.

The return of Essential Research provided the BludgerTrack mill with its first grist for the new year, but the model is at its least robust when it only has one data point to play with after a long gap. This means BludgerTrack strongly follows the lead of a poll that was less bad for the Coalition than their usual form, resulting in a substantial reduction in Labor’s still commanding lead on two-party preferred. Labor is also down six on the seat projection – one in each mainland state and two in Queensland. The Essential poll also included a new set of numbers for the leadership ratings, and these produced a weak result for Bill Shorten that has blunted his recent improving trend. Full results through 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.

3,129 comments on “BludgerTrack: 53.7-46.3 to Labor”

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  1. C@tmomma @ #2733 Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 – 3:39 pm

    Itza,
    I have recently read that yoga is the best type of exercise for the old and creaky, beyond Tai Chi, that is. But who wants to go down to the local park in the morning and look like you are directing the traffic? 🙂

    The advice I got was to keep looking until you found the right (yoga) teacher. To that I would add the right class. Kings X is the mix you would expect, and the teacher very meditative aligned, and slow and gentle. We often start by just lying on our mats for about 5 minutes thinking about our bones pressed to the floor. Suits me. That’s until the elderly gay man, I mean elderly, who has had a coffee shop in the X for decades, and a residual Italian accent, and is a bit disinhibited, suddenly says – ‘I’m sorry I’m late’ / ‘Happy New Year everyone’ / ‘no one came to my party’ – and there’s a ripple of giggles above the soft music the teacher is playing from her phone. She’s heavier than the average yoga teacher, which is reassuring, and her husband is also there, except I didn’t know it was her husband, this person who kept correcting what I was doing till I told him I couldn’t watch two people at once, and thought just because you are so good at it, get out of my space, I’m trying to be one and whole and healed, not !!

    Totally agree about the traffic warden routine. ha

    (btw, it’s part of Sydney City Council, and free. Go Clover. There’s a beautiful reno done on an old warehouse in Woollomooloo, now the Juanita Nielsen Community Centre, also Sydney City. Yoga there too. And at the pool. Yoga here, yoga there.)

  3. Morrison is having a great day.
    He has people laughing out loud at his plan to re-enact something that never happened.
    Then he has upset the party faithful in one of the most marginal seats in the country with the endorsement of Mundine.
    They say good things, or bad, come in threes.
    I wonder what his final act for the day might be.
    Can’t wait to see him on the campaign trail.

  4. Some of the MSM are really enjoying themselves. As someone said: once you become a figure of fun…

    Michelle Grattan
    ‏
    21m21 minutes ago

    It’s not the end of Jan yet and we’ve had PM exhorting us to get with the Cook vibe and DPM on stage dressed as Elvis. Bill is so CONVENTIONAL

  5. ratsak

    For political analysis of Turnbull you developed………….

    The Turnbull Assumption-Assume he is an idiot and it all flows from there

    Scrott Morrison seems imbued with a different flavor of idiocy. Have you developed a Morrison Assumption for political analysis ?

  8. We used to have to wait, for Parliament to sit, for the fuck ups in Turnbull’s time.

    Each Liberal PM certainly has brought a different quality to the job. 😆

  9. In a speech to the conservative Sydney Institute on Tuesday, the Treasurer will say the “invisible hand of capitalism delivers far more than the dead hand of socialism” and talk up the government’s five years of economic management.

    The speech, titled Creating opportunity and encouraging aspiration: the key to a growing economy and a stronger Australia, asserts that individual enterprise, equality of opportunity and not equality of outcomes, and looking after taxpayers’ money are in the Coalition’s “DNA”, according to extracts of his speaking notes.

  10. ItzaDream

    Talking books, Wilcannia and Louth – you should read “The Bush Soldiers” by John Hooker.(1984)

    Set in the outback of NSW in 1943 after Japan has taken over most of Asutralia – its is about a few soldiers conducting essentially a ‘scorched earth’ rearguard action against the enemy.

    Very evocative of the Darling and the far west. And somewhat allegorical of older events.

  13. Whilst travelling today I thought I heard the dysfunctional treasurer saying Howard and Costello “saved” Australia from the ravages of the GFC

    The government which spent the rivers of gold Mining Boom Phase 1 from 2004 until 2007 (see the performance of the ASX over that period) as they did leaving the structural problems the National Budget still has not addressed and leaving a minuscule $20 Bilion budget surplus

    Then undermined the recovery by resorting to the right wing ideology that austerity results in confidence where, again, the Nation continues to suffer courtesy of that change of direction at precisely the wrong time only 5 years on from the GFC

    The dysfunctional treasurer needs to be called out

    He has been a disaster of the first magnitude across every portfolio he has been introduced to – and dangerous

  14. lizzie @ #2758 Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 – 12:21 pm

    In a speech to the conservative Sydney Institute on Tuesday, the Treasurer will say the “invisible hand of capitalism delivers far more than the dead hand of socialism” and talk up the government’s five years of economic management.

    The speech, titled Creating opportunity and encouraging aspiration: the key to a growing economy and a stronger Australia, asserts that individual enterprise, equality of opportunity and not equality of outcomes, and looking after taxpayers’ money are in the Coalition’s “DNA”, according to extracts of his speaking notes.

    To whom?

    The sort ideological absolutism that has got us to where we are with growing inequality.

    Idiot!

  16. In a speech to the conservative Sydney Institute on Tuesday, the Treasurer will say the “invisible hand of capitalism delivers far more than the dead hand of socialism”

    Yes, but which ideology delivers how much, and to whom?

    And, quite frankly, it’s the dead hand of capitalism that is killing stone dead, our fish, our rivers and our environment.

  17. The Cook stuff is harmless idiocy Fulvio.

    Pissing off your own members in a marginal seat for a nobody like Mundine is suicidal idiocy. It won’t just be the few Libs on the ground in Gilmore that will be pissed off. Every member of Scott Robinson’s partyroom has just had yet another indisputable proof that he’s going to fuck up the campaign. They won’t tear him down (probably), but deep down they’re wanting to.

  19. Another outcome of decades of the political duopoly at both state and federal levels:

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jan/22/victoria-spends-less-than-half-what-nsw-does-on-social-housing-report-shows

    Victoria is spending less than half as much on social housing as New South Wales, according to a report that has also provided evidence that homelessness agencies across Australia are being strained by increased demand.

    The Productivity Commission’s report on government services, released on Tuesday, was labelled a “damning insight into many years of neglect” from both state and federal governments.
    :::
    Taking into account its growing population, the commission said Victoria’s expenditure equated to just $82.94 per person, compared with $173.35 in NSW. The national average in 2016-17 stood at $166.93.

    Victoria’s per person spending on social housing has also fallen each year since 2014-15, down from $95.92 per person, the report showed.

    During last year’s election campaign, Daniel Andrews’s government faced a campaign from social services groups to build 30,000 social houses over a decade. It responded by pledging $209m to build 1,000 new public housing units over the next three years.

    Government data showed in July last year that there were 82,000 on the social housing waiting list in Victoria.
    ::
    In 2017-18, there were 53,286 homeless people who were turned away from a service, the report said.

  20. Rocket Rocket @ #2654 Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 – 2:15 pm

    I think I can safely make two predictions of parts of the original Endeavour voyage which will NOT feature in this pseudo-reenactment:

    Cook sailing the Endeavour straight past what we now call Sydney Harbour (he didn’t realise there was an inlet there).

    I think someone here posted that in fact Cook had sent a scouting party from Botany Bay north over the low ridge, which discovered Port Jackson.

    Cook was also believed to have discovered Bass Strait.

    In both cases, the Admiralty suppressed all mention of these things in Cook’s reports as being of strategic value.

    Which is why, when Philip landed at Botany Bay, and found it unsuitable for a settlement, he immediately decamped to Port Jackson, since he knew it was a far better place for the settlement from his knowledge of Cook’s unredacted report.

  21. Her Indoors and I discovered Lake Cawndilla almost by accident, in 1999.

    We took the back way (western side of the Darling, all dirt tracks) from Pooncarie to Menindee, navigating by GPS linked to a computer with “moving map” software installed on it. Only a few days before President Clinton had ordered that the inbuilt GPS error (called “Selective Availability” or “SA”) be removed, rendering even consumer GPS accurate to just a few metres. Beforehand GPS accuracy was limited to 200 metres. The SA was actually removed on the very day we set out for the desert – May 2nd AEST – and once we realised there was no error anymore – an incredible piece of good luck – we used GPS to navigate back roads right up to Lake Eyre and beyond.

    Sadly, the maps weren’t absolutely up to date. A couple of times we found roads that, while they existed officially, were washed out, or had dingo fences across them. As a result we didn’t make it all the way to Menindee, settling instead for the Lake Cawndilla National Parks’ campground. We arrived at night and so had to wait until next morning to see the lake itself.

    I’ve been to many beautiful places in my life. Lake Cawndilla was certainly one of them, right up there with the best.

    It was full to overflowing, inundated with waterfowl, pelicans and other seabirds. So far inland! It was amazing. You could see fish broach the surface occasionally, a long way out. There were aboriginal stone artefacts everywhere in the surrounding dunes. Lots of old middens too. God knows how old they were. There was long, green grass by the shore, and reed beds in the shallows.

    We had just come from Lake Mungo (via Pooncarie), which of course was dry, but Cawndilla, to my mind, looked just how Mungo must have looked thousands of years before when it was an aquatic paradise. I’ll never forget the beauty of the place.

    Later on in our trip Lake Eyre was also full. On our way back we camped by a full and flowing Darling River, in Kinchegar National Park. It was a holiday to remember: so many stars to sleep under, so much natural bounty everywhere.

    But from reading recent reports both the Menindee lakes and the Darling River of today are dry, and – worse – dead, or dying… the aquatic life killed, with the worst die off right there in beautiful Lake Cawndilla The greedy, thieving, clueless bastards who did this should be punished.

    But something tells me they won’t be.

  22. Interesting that Scott Morrison has already laid claim to the Opposition Leader’s job after the election. He said, wtte, I still have a lot to give the party as leader after the election.

    Hmm.

  23. I have always been somewhat bemused by Mundine’s progress in public life. Never has someone with so little ability, conned so many and progressed so far. Seriously, this guy is incapable of uttering a coherent sentence. Listening to him, I have never once really understood whatever point he is attempting to make. He is to be pitied, rather than be reviled.

  24. The Greens had six Upper House members in the last Victorian parliament. Often their vote was crucial to getting government legislation implemented.

    Did they use this position of power to improve the provision of public housing?

  25. Pegasus @ #2767 Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 – 4:30 pm

    Another outcome of decades of the political duopoly at both state and federal levels:

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jan/22/victoria-spends-less-than-half-what-nsw-does-on-social-housing-report-shows

    Victoria is spending less than half as much on social housing as New South Wales, according to a report that has also provided evidence that homelessness agencies across Australia are being strained by increased demand.

    The Productivity Commission’s report on government services, released on Tuesday, was labelled a “damning insight into many years of neglect” from both state and federal governments.
    :::
    Taking into account its growing population, the commission said Victoria’s expenditure equated to just $82.94 per person, compared with $173.35 in NSW. The national average in 2016-17 stood at $166.93.

    Victoria’s per person spending on social housing has also fallen each year since 2014-15, down from $95.92 per person, the report showed.

    During last year’s election campaign, Daniel Andrews’s government faced a campaign from social services groups to build 30,000 social houses over a decade. It responded by pledging $209m to build 1,000 new public housing units over the next three years.

    Government data showed in July last year that there were 82,000 on the social housing waiting list in Victoria.
    ::
    In 2017-18, there were 53,286 homeless people who were turned away from a service, the report said.

    Shame !

  26. I’ve got friends who are LNP members on the Gold Coast. They hated Mal because they thought he was a Labor plant. Can’t wait to hear what they think of an actual Labor plant over riding a preselected member.

  27. Dee Madigan

    Hey @ScottMorrisonMP have you considered offering a posthumous knighthood to Captain Cook? @TonyAbbottMHR may be able to help you.

  28. ratsak @ #2767 Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 – 4:29 pm

    The Cook stuff is harmless idiocy Fulvio.

    Pissing off your own members in a marginal seat for a nobody like Mundine is suicidal idiocy. It won’t just be the few Libs on the ground in Gilmore that will be pissed off. Every member of Scott Robinson’s partyroom has just had yet another indisputable proof that he’s going to fuck up the campaign. They won’t tear him down (probably), but deep down they’re wanting to.

    Not to lessen your main point, but beyond the idiocy is a fucking great waste of money in what is essentially self adulation.

  29. This morning Greens candidate for Higgins, Jason Ball, was interviewed by Fran Kelly on ABC RN Breakfast:

    https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/the-blue-ribbon-has-been-cut/10734500

    The electorate, which has been held by the Liberals for 70 years, is under assault again from the Greens candidate Jason Ball.

    He secured more than 25 per cent of the primary vote at the last election to come in second behind the Minister, but well ahead of Labor.

    A Greens upset at this year’s election could be on the cards.

    We can hope.

  30. zoomster

    They are hardly natural bedfellows, but mutual loathing of Labor from the Greens and the state Opposition has seen the parties unite to tear up a government plan to fund new public housing by selling off public land.

    This week, the parties combined in the Victorian Parliament’s upper house to overturn Labor’s plans to rebuild the Markham public housing estate in Ashburton, in the city’s south-east.

    https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/coalition-and-greens-combine-to-dump-public-housing-project-others-now-in-doubt-20171117-gznf9q.html

  31. C@tmomma says:
    Tuesday, January 22, 2019 at 4:28 pm
    In a speech to the conservative Sydney Institute on Tuesday, the Treasurer will say the “invisible hand of capitalism delivers far more than the dead hand of socialism”

    Yes, but which ideology delivers how much, and to whom?

    _______________________________________

    Neither ideology delivers. Because whatever good ideas are embedded in the ideologies are more than outweighed by the mindless inflexibility applied to them. However, the democratic socialism of The Australian Labor Party has been less bound by the inflexibility of socialist ideology than the lunatics now in charge of the government – a concept that they hate with a vengeance.

  32. Rocket Rocket @ #2760 Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 – 4:21 pm

    ItzaDream

    Talking books, Wilcannia and Louth – you should read “The Bush Soldiers” by John Hooker.(1984)

    Set in the outback of NSW in 1943 after Japan has taken over most of Asutralia – its is about a few soldiers conducting essentially a ‘scorched earth’ rearguard action against the enemy.

    Very evocative of the Darling and the far west. And somewhat allegorical of older events.

    Thanks R R. It’s on the list.

  35. BB

    We had been to the Menindee Lakes several times and the sight of thousands of pelicans on Lake Menindee was beautiful. We also went to Lake Mungo and it is fascinating to imagine how that and the Willandra Lakes were thousands of years ago with water, birds, fish and people.

    Which was why last year I was distressed to see the Menindee Lakes nearly empty.

    I think after the destruction of Carthage by the Romans a historian said “They made a desert and called it peace”. The NSW and Federal Coalition governments have done what recurrent droughts over two hundred years couldn’t do – totally stuffed the system.

  36. Barney

    Labor had a candidate preselected for Bennelong but installed Brian Owler as the candidate instead. Labor does it as well from time to time.

  38. Peg
    “” A Greens upset at this year’s election could be on the cards.

    We can hope.?””
    With the Labor majority being high, your mob won’t be needed.
    you’ll be a wallflower!.
    ie: Impotent

  39. Cap’n Cook: not racist enough for the Shire methinks…

    An interesting fact about James Cook is that when he found Polynesians in Tahiti he (as an expert sailor and scientist) was able (and willing, more importantly) to predict with some accuracy how the why got there (by sailing, of course) and from where they had come.

    100 years later ALL historians in Britain believed that it was by ocean drift: i.e. the fuzzy-wuzzies could not possibly have sailed—because sailing the Pacific was something only advanced peoples such as the British could do—so they must’ve fallen asleep in rafts, drifted out into the ocean and somehow survived hundreds or even thousands of days at sea and ended up drifting to Tahiti! This was universal belief amongst otherwise intelligent people: a theory that was more or less impossible (it involves surviving 1,000 days at sea without having any preparation to obtain water…) and based solely on racism.

    That imperial moment—which the Ramsay centre now seeks to crystallise and glorify—was when it all started to go wrong for the British (and indeed other Europeans), they went from progress to the celebration of nostalgia

  40. I think the Greens may have a shot in Wills. Batman/Cooper is safe for Labor with Ged Kearney.

    Im sceptical that anyone other than the Libs will win Higgins this time around. Though it could be within 1-2% margin of falling.

  41. Observer

    I was having this same discussion with someone a few days ago. Stating that a surplus is taxpayers’ money that the government hasn’t spent (it did not belong to Howard and Costello!).

    And that such money should be used for stimulus to prevent the mass unemployment a recession would bring.

    And of course if the Coalition want to claim credit they would need to explain why they opposed Rudd’s stimulus package and voted against it.

  42. IoM @ #3098 Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 – 3:45 pm

    Barney

    Labor had a candidate preselected for Bennelong but installed Brian Owler as the candidate instead. Labor does it as well from time to time.

    Labor’s former candidate Lyndal Howison wrote to party members this morning, telling them she had withdrawn from the race to make way for a better candidate who would “give us the best chance of delivering a Labor government at the next federal election”.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-30/labor-pick-high-profile-candidate-brian-owler-in-bennelong/10445710

  43. Sir Henry Parkes @ #2740 Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 – 3:47 pm

    Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time was also a good read for me. Tey wrote a novel about what had already been unearthed in many historical works, that Richard III had been villified by the Tudors who arguably usurped the English throne and like all such players, sought to justify it through state-sponsored propaganda. William Shakespeare did no small service to the reigning Tudors in his play about the man.
    While there is still some doubt about Richard’s innocence over the disappearance of the little princes in the Tower of London, some of the more egregious charges against him have been dismissed by most historians. Most agree that he was the legitimate heir to the throne and that his opponent, Richmond, who became Henry VII, was by far a more brutal individual, working to kill off around 60 members of Richard’s surviving family, just to secure his place on the throne.
    This does not take away from Henry’s granddaughter, Elizabeth I of England, who was arguable her country’s greatest monarch. But this should not obscure how the Tudors got there.

    I am a long term member of the Richard III Society. Tey is almost as much a whitewash of Richard as
    Shakespeare was a blackening.
    There were several other people with access and motive to want to remove the Princes.
    There is also a strong possiblity that the pretender Perkin Warbeck may have been the younger prince.
    It is a mystery that may never be resolved but it does not take away from the many years of loyal service Richard gave to his eldest brother Edward IV and the good governance he provided across the north of England. Richard introduced a number of good legal reforms and was genuinely mourned in York after Bosworth.
    Elizabeth of York was left with little choice but to make the best of that marriage she was already promised to via her mother. Not a happy one in many ways as their eldest son died young and that led to Henry VIII on the throne and his overwhelming need for a son. Of course Elizabeth I was by far the best of his children.

  45. It’s ground hog day again.

    https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/coalition-and-greens-combine-to-dump-public-housing-project-others-now-in-doubt-20171117-gznf9q.html

    But the Greens’ housing spokeswoman Ellen Sandell said the party would not support privatising publicly owned estates while the increases to public housing were so minimal.

    She said that the government had “refused to discuss [the Markham] proposal with us and we have serious concerns about their plan to sell off [other] public estates to private developers”.

    “It’s time the government comes to the table to discuss a way forward to significantly increase public housing,” she said, adding that revoking the Ashburton case “does not stop the public housing renewal program”.

    The Greens support keeping public housing stock and land in public hands.

    Selling these public assets to developers for profit with only a minimal percentage of new housing stock allocated to social housing is a travesty with the likelihood of corruption being involved.

    To reiterate – findings of the Productivity Commission:

    The Productivity Commission’s report on government services, released on Tuesday, was labelled a “damning insight into many years of neglect” from both state and federal governments.

  46. “The government has announced $6.7 million for a 39-stop circumnavigation of Australia in 2020 by a replica of James Cook’s Endeavour.”

    WTF? – it was Matthew Flinders who was the circumnavigator – they have lost the plot (or is this Disney?)

  48. E.G.Theodore

    I have read a lot of Cook’s journals available online. If you could bring him back and enrol him anonymously in their “Western Civilisation” degree he would probably be found out by the Ramsay ‘observers’ if he expressed such thoughts, and disciplined or expelled for ‘wrong thought’.

  49. Darns,

    As Itza said @2.11 pm: “And the detritus of white man’s coming no more apparent than in the complete mess the indigenous people were/are in” is exemplified in the Paddy McHugh song. I acknowledge that my long gone in-law family would have helped sow the seeds of this.
    Thank you for posting.

    and Barney @4.28 pm:
    I found myself smiling back at those amazing kids. There is yet hope….but I also found myself wondering whether there was sufficient water in the Darling at the moment for them to dive and jump. I remember the sign on the bridge from the 1980s visit.
    Thank you too.

    Over and out for the time being.

  50. poroti,

    I suppose the thing with Trumble was that so many people didn’t realise what an idiot he was.

    I never assumed Morrison was a genius, but I was surprised by just how much of a fuckwit he has turned out to be. In immigration and Treasury he was at least capable of sticking to his lines. Stupid lines for sure, but he stuck to them. Most of the bad times he had as Treasurer (politically speaking) were from Trumble throwing him under the bus after he (Trumble) had to retreat from a brainfart.

    I really did think Morrison would have enough brains to know that he needed to just be boring and steady. It was never going to save the government, but it could have minimised the losses and set him up to retain the LOTO job and perhaps be placed to win back the top job if Labor fucked up deluxe.

    I was grossly wrong about that.

    Like Trumble and Abbott before him Scott Robinson looks like a man with a plan to become PM, but absolutely no fucking idea what to do with it.

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