Newspoll and ReachTEL: 51-49 to Labor in Herbert and Flinders

Seat polls show Labor with their nose in front in one seat where they won by a whisker in 2016, and another where they haven’t won in since 1983.

Two new seat polls today, with due caution for the fact that seat polls tend not to perform very well:

• The Australian has a small-sample Newspoll from the Townsville-based seat of Herbert, which Labor won by the barest of margins in 2016 for the first time since the Hawke-Keating era. The reason this seat in particular has been targeted appears to relate to Clive Palmer’s expensive bid to re-establish his political career, to which Townsville is relevant given the failure of his nickel operation there. The poll has the 50-50 result from 2016 turning into a Labor lead of 51-49, which I’m guessing is based on respondent-allocated preferences, as the primary votes look a little more favourable for Labor than that. Labor’s Cathy O’Toole is on 32%, up from 30.5% in 2016; the Liberal National Party is on 32%, down from 35.5%; One Nation is on 9%, down from 13.5%; Katter’s Australian Party is on 9%, up from 6.9%; the Greens are on 7%, up from 6.3%; and Palmer’s United Australia Party is on 8%. The poll was conducted Thursday from a sample of 509.

• The other poll is a uComms/ReachTEL poll for the CFMMEU, which targets Greg Hunt’s Melbourne fringe seat of Flinders, which he holds on a post-redistribution margin of 7.1%. As related by the Herald Sun, the poll credits Labor with a lead of 51-49, with the Liberal primary vote at 36.8%, compared with 51.6% in 2016 – although this is probably complicated by an undecided element. Hunt’s primary vote is only 32.7% among women, compared with 41.2% among men. I hope to be able to obtain full results over the next few days. The poll finds 47.8% less likely to vote for Hunt due to his role in the move against Malcolm Turnbull, compared with 34.4% for no difference and just 17.8% for more likely. The poll was conducted Thursday from a sample of 627. The Herald Sun report also reveals that Julia Banks, the Liberal-turned-independent member for Chisholm, is considering running against Hunt.

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.

924 comments on “Newspoll and ReachTEL: 51-49 to Labor in Herbert and Flinders”

Comments Page 16 of 19
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  1. Being a student of the life and times of Bill Shorten, nth would know, that as a dedicated Union leader concerned for the welfare of his members he stood in the rain waiting for word from the rescuers. There was nothing he could do personally, but to be there and show solidarity with his members – above and below ground.

  3. Confessions says:

    So Rupert invited Shorten to visit with him when he’s next in New York, to which Shorten politely said that won’t be happening as he’s perfectly happy dealing with his Australian-based management.

    Really ? I hope so.At last someone who has refused an opportunity to kiss Rupert’s ring.

  5. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/immigration/boat-turnbacks-critic-not-dealing-in-real-world-says-dutton/news-story/a3830c37b9583743f81a8870504717f0

    https://outline.com/EzpDfS

    Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has lashed the UNHCR for branding Australia’s boat turnback policy as dangerous and ineffective, suggesting the global body did not “deal in the real world”.

    The UN refugee agency’s Indonesia chief, Thomas Vargas, warned in The Australian today that boat turnbacks left “other countries to deal with the situation” and warned it was “ultimately not going to work”.

    Bill Shorten has also maintained Labor’s support for boat turnbacks in the face of opposition in previous years from members of his frontbench, including deputy Tanya Plibersek and former leadership rival Anthony Albanese.

    Lashings of lashings – more to come on tomorrow’s Poll Bludger BDSM page.
    🏓 Couldn’t find a riding crop – paddle will have to do. Handcuffs extra.

  6. Yabba
    But the outbreak in NSW doesn’t seem to be German Measals; so I take your point. It’s just one of the options these wankers are exposing us to.

  7. a r:

    I meant she’s the queen of daytime chat shows, has a loyal following of tittering oldies who love her, and if she moves to Sky After Dark, esp at 9.30pm she’ll lose her fans as they’ll all be in bed at that time!

  10. poroti:

    Yes it’s true. He also dismissed Tingle’s questions about News ltd being hostile to Labor by saying he isn’t going to worry about things he can’t change.

    Reading between the lines I reckon he knows they have little influence anyway other than with rusted on coalition voters. So what is the point getting worked up about it?

  11. sprocket_
    says:
    Monday, January 28, 2019 at 7:51 pm
    Being a student of the life and times of Bill Shorten, nth would know, that as a dedicated Union leader concerned for the welfare of his members he stood in the rain waiting for word from the rescuers. There was nothing he could do personally, but to be there and show solidarity with his members – above and below ground.
    ______________________________
    that’s one way of looking at it. Another would be to see someone who has been planning to be Prime Minister since they were a teenager seizing the moment to get national recognition. But hey, whatever floats your boat!

  14. phoenixRED @ #466 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 3:52 pm

    Can anyone answer this :

    To opt out of myhealthrecord we had to supply ALL sorts of data – as well as such standard things like name, DOB, address etc etc but also including unique things like driver licence number, medicare number etc etc – that all must go to some database somewhere so that it does not get included in myhealthrecords

    So what if some hacker gets into THAT database ?????

    You are quite right, that never entered my mind when I was opting out.

    Another question:

    Is it possible to determine that you have opted out? That is, that myhealthrecord has no record of my health details?

  15. In a general election Labor can’t run dead in any electorate as it could harm their senate vote.

    Sure they can. And do.

    It’s all about resources, which aren’t infinite, and are therefore managed to produce the maximum result.

    Labor will run a campaign in Warringah same as always, but it won’t be greatly funded and whilst they won’t shout it out loud people will know that it’s ok to vote one Zali in the Reps and put a 1 in the Labor ATL box on the Senate paper.

    And all the resources will go into making sure seats like Reid come home and Labor wins government with as big a majority as possible.

    What’s left will go to ensuring that there are plenty of red shirts at as many booths as possible (especially in Labor seats) to boost the total vote especially the Senate vote. But that’s a fair way down the priority list. You get to 76 seats in the reps first and foremost. The more you can get over that number in the Reps, the more the Senate will take care of itself.

  17. Ok nth, I’ll play nicely – here is Bill Shorten getting a puff piece in the Herald Sun. Surely he wouldn’t have milked this sad occurence?

    And not even paywalled – one could think the demented plutocrat has flipped!

    https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/bill-shortens-muchloved-bulldog-theodore-dies-after-15month-battled-with-lymphoma/news-story/ca10e17992e96ad23d2c31f2597556c1?utm_medium=Twitter&utm_campaign=EditorialSF&utm_source=HeraldSun&utm_content=SocialFlow

  18. Desert Qlder @ #501 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 4:26 pm

    The by-election was also a special circumstance. The Wentworth electorate was seething with rage at Morrison for removing their beloved local member and PM. Phelps was able to capitalise on this and even then, facing a non-descript entity as an opponent, won by a relatively small margin.

    Abbott, is a veteran. He will draw on a wealth of experience in campaigning and resources that will be sent his way from supporters across the country. I can see his margin taking a significant hit, but he will find a way to win and continue as member.

    Interesting. I think you are right, it will not be easy to dislodge Abbott.

    I had not realised the background of the skier. Abbott is cunning, she is not.

    And skiing is all she has, pretty much.

  22. Jack Aranda @ #506 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 4:29 pm

    I know there seem to be some dangers attached to myhealthrecord, but, although I’m tremendously fit and healthy for a 78-y-o I have to accept there’s some small danger of being wheeled in an unconscious state into a hospital where nobody know me one day. I think I’d like them to be able to look up my record, including minor congenital heart defects and the name of my cardiologist. Spose I should check it for accuracy though…

    Someone here said that when you are wheeled into Emergency, your medical history is the least of their worries. They treat what presents. If your heart has stopped, they treat that. If you have a broken leg, they treat that. If your physical condition and blood sugar levels indicate that you have a diabetes crisis, they treat that.

    Bugger the databases, they don’t have the time or energy.

  24. don @ #763 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 7:03 pm

    phoenixRED @ #466 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 3:52 pm

    Can anyone answer this :

    To opt out of myhealthrecord we had to supply ALL sorts of data – as well as such standard things like name, DOB, address etc etc but also including unique things like driver licence number, medicare number etc etc – that all must go to some database somewhere so that it does not get included in myhealthrecords

    So what if some hacker gets into THAT database ?????

    You are quite right, that never entered my mind when I was opting out.

    Another question:

    Is it possible to determine that you have opted out? That is, that myhealthrecord has no record of my health details?

    Proving a negative? Probably not.

  25. Ken Wyatt is the latest Liberal MP to confirm he isn’t deserting the sinking ship.

    West Australian Federal Minister Ken Wyatt has played down the prospect of a mass exodus of senior Liberals in the lead-up to this year’s election.

    “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

    “I’m in for the long haul. I’m not intending to be in Opposition, but if I end up in Opposition then I’ll still put into my work the same rigour and commitment that I give to the people of Hasluck and to Australia and to my party.”

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-28/wa-liberals-confident-despite-michael-keenan-exit-in-stirling/10755646

  26. KayJay @ #516 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 4:38 pm

    https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/robert-gottliebsen/close-shave-as-southern-states-once-again-spin-climate-roulette/news-story/7187c5e143874487228cce11b8c7100c

    https://outline.com/CtkUgp

    Close shave as southern states once again spin climate rouletteRobert Gottliebsen

    States spin climate roulette
    January 27, 2019

    New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia last week again diced with massive power blackouts. The politicians who have vandalised our power system were again lucky — although AEMO was forced to pull the trigger on rolling power outages — their numbers by and large came up.

    Last week, the vast wind generators in Victoria and South Australia worked at around 20 per cent of capacity in the crisis periods because the winds didn’t blow enough.

    It was a repeat of the events on February 10, 2017 when the NSW system had 2080MW in renewable capacity, excluding the Snowy, but only generated 707MW from that capacity at the peak demand time because the wind did not blow and at 5pm the sun had lost power.

    Mostly an exercise in getting Outline to work for me.

    I have an outline.com tab open but often when I enter an item from (mostly) The
    Australian

    Such as:
    https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/robert-gottliebsen/close-shave-as-southern-states-once-again-spin-climate-roulette/news-story/7187c5e143874487228cce11b8c7100c

    More or less (mostly less) nothing happens.

    Sip of the finest coffee –☕

    But then – if I scroll down the page to:-
    ” rel=”nofollow”>

    and then Right Click on Home and then click on Open Link In Outline
    I then get
    ” rel=”nofollow”>

    Following my nose I then click on

    🠰Return to Outline

    and get
    ” rel=”nofollow”>

    I then cleverly enter the original
    https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/robert-gottliebsen/close-shave-as-southern-states-once-again-spin-climate-roulette/news-story/7187c5e143874487228cce11b8c7100c

    Click on Create Outline

    Et Walla (as one of my dearest friends says)
    https://outline.com/CtkUgp

    States spin climate roulette
    January 27, 2019

    New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia last week again diced with massive power blackouts. The politicians who have vandalised our power system were again lucky — although AEMO was forced to pull the trigger on rolling power outages — their numbers by and large came up.

    Last week, the vast wind generators in Victoria and South Australia worked at around 20 per cent of capacity in the crisis periods because the winds didn’t blow enough.

    It was a repeat of the events on February ⏩⏩⏩

    Wasn’t that simple ❓

    I am using Windows 10 & in this case Firefox .

    I am getting dizzy with this item. 😵😵😵

    E & OE

    Thanks KJ, you are a genius.

    I will give it a whirl next time the %$&^%^&*^*()

    outline thingummy thumbs its nose at me.

  28. Davidwh
    says:
    Monday, January 28, 2019 at 8:15 pm
    I doubt Abbott is in any real danger. Bad smells are hard to get rid of.

    Good one.

  29. “Who the F… do you think you are? I’m gonna go harder because of that. Plus, when you get stooges on here praising his ‘courage’ for the way he media whored the Beaconsfield disaster it’s gonna provoke some reaction.”

    Remind me again nath what your pre election resolution was regarding Shorten? I think it is the one you keep making and immediately breaking.

    You can do better. Please dial back the trolling. Please FFS …

  30. That guy tweets that Ms Steggall has wiped her Facebook history, and some bright spark on PB says this is “stalky”.

    What hyperbowl. What BS. What a massacre of the current (and valuable) accepted meaning of “stalking”.

  31. Player One @ #567 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 5:23 pm

    WeWantPaul @ #549 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 5:09 pm

    It is difficult to believe people are this stupid. As if the engineers expected 100% output 100% of the time.

    I see this mistake made all the time – and from renewables supporters as often as opponents. They calculate how much solar and wind generation capacity we need to replace our current coal generators, but forget (sometimes conveniently) to take into account that you actually need something like 3 to 5 times that capacity, specifically to cope with cloudy & still days. This can be reduced somewhat if it is sufficiently widely distributed geographically, and/or has massive batteries and/or hydro incorporated in the grid – but that means lots of new transmission infrastructure has to be built, because our current grid was not designed to support such a distributed model.

    This is one reason we are a lot further from reducing our dependence on coal than many people think 🙁

    I have encountered this with solar rooftop installers.

    They seem to think that the maximum is what you will get at all times. No idea why, it is not in their interests to give you the minimum I would have thought, but that seems to be the way it is.

    If anyone here is considering rooftop solar, my advice, hard won, is that you cover the entire north facing roof of your house with solar panels, bugger the expense, the panels are cheap as chips now anyway, and there is a very significant time when the sun is less than visible, hidden behind clouds, and less than shining directly down on your panels. Often you get more from a vaguely cloudy sky than you get from a sunny sky when a big cloud comes over.

  34. “Last week, the vast wind generators in Victoria and South Australia worked at around 20 per cent of capacity in the crisis periods because the winds didn’t blow enough.”

    Does the author have evidence to support those assertions? Firstly, that wind generation in SA and Vic was operating at 20% capacity. And secondly that the wind didn’t blow enough.

  36. I was thinking that Labor ran tactical/dead in Wentworth thus helping Dr Phelps cause an embarrassment as well as a minority government. In a general election Phelps and Steggall and other right independents won’t have this advantage.

  37. Player One @ #589 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 5:38 pm

    Catprog @ <a
    So it is not 6-7 times what we currently have that we will need, but more like 20 times. Even with storage.

    So, bring it on.

    Do it. It is not as though it is expensive.

    Nuclear power is expensive. Coal power is expensive. Solar power just sits there putting out electrons when the sun shines, and it is totally scaleable. If one panel fails, big deal, replace it next month.

    If a gas generator goes off line, if a coal generator goes offline, then you have a problem. And they go offline at the most inconvenient time, when it is hot. That is why they go offline, at the very moment you need them most.

    It is not a problem for one of a group of a hundred wind towers to go up in smoke, nor for one panel out of ten thousand in a solar farm to bust a foofoo valve.

  38. Diogenes:

    [‘As a lover of Eliot’s poetry, I would have preferred that never saw the light of day.’]

    That’s a tad hard. How about Prufrock?:

    https://owlcation.com/humanities/Analysis-of-Poem-The-Love-Song-of-J-Alfred-Prufrock-by-TS-Eliot

    Poetry comes down the reader’s taste, understanding; Eliot’s preeminent among 20th poets, a modernist par excellence – a quantum leap from the saccharin romantics – eg, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats.

  39. P1

    Any engineer with a power background is currently either specifying, building or commissioning renewable projects. In my case I spent the day reviewing a specification. And the talk in the industry is it is only going to get worse with my semi retirement under serious threat.

    Without slowing down the massive changes that are now happening to our power system, I’m curious as to where you going to get the resources for your gas dream and who is going to finance it. Perhaps you need to strike up a conversation with Barnaby.

  41. John in Highgate 6003 @ #785 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 8:34 pm

    I was thinking that Labor ran tactical/dead in Wentworth thus helping Dr Phelps cause an embarrassment as well as a minority government. In a general election Phelps and Steggall and other right independents won’t have this advantage.

    This ain’t Rorkes Drift and the Liberal Zulus ain’t going to do anything but murder the defenders of the past.

  42. I have not seen a reference to this statement on Venezuela by John Pilger, Noam Chomsky and others. Apologies to bloggers if it was posted earlier!

    Venezuela’s political polarization is not new; the country has long been divided along racial and socioeconomic lines. But the polarization has deepened in recent years. This is partly due to US support for an opposition strategy aimed at removing the government of Nicolás Maduro through extra-electoral means. While the opposition has been divided on this strategy, US support has backed hardline opposition sectors in their goal of ousting the Maduro government through often violent protests, a military coup d’etat, or other avenues that sidestep the ballot box.

    https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/24/open-letter-united-states-stop-interfering-venezuelas-internal-politics

    For views which we don’t see in Australia See
    https://venezuelanalysis.com
    It seems to be impossible to find non-aligned and dispassionate commentary

  44. The transmission system does have to be strengthened, and what is required is being designed, some is already under construction. Perhaps those engineers should be taken off their projects to design a nuclear power station that will never be built.

  45. WeWantPaul @ #634 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 6:03 pm

    WWP what you’ll find there is that P1 simply has its facts wrong.

    P1 is NOT constrained by facts.

    Agreed.

    P1? Facts? Come now.

    Instead, read this five hundred page pdf which proves that P1 has his facts wrong.

    Or be directed to look back at P1’s post a hundred pages and three weeks back. That is P1’s modus operandi.

  46. I knew a geologist once. I probably still do if I’m honest. Something he drilled into me was context. If I “bring you a rock” (that’s a US expression btw) the rock is worthless to science, which is what geology is, unless you know the rock’s context. This means where it was found, and when, and which way it was pointing, and even who found it.

    There are a lot of rocks.

  47. frednk @ #788 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 8:37 pm

    P1

    Any engineer with a power background is currently either specifying, building or commissioning renewable projects. In my case I spent the day reviewing a specification. And the talk in the industry is it is only going to get worse with my semi retirement under serious threat.

    Without slowing down the massive changes that are now happening to our power system, I’m curious as to where you going to get the resources for your gas dream and who is going to finance it. Perhaps you need to strike up a conversation with Barnaby.

    It’s always the money with you people, isn’t it? Never the emissions 🙁

    For once, I feel like agreeing with Nicholas – just print the money, FFS!

    Better to suffer a bit of hyperinflation than die, surely?

  50. don @ #794 Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 8:44 pm

    P1? Facts? Come now.

    Instead, read this five hundred page pdf which proves that P1 has his facts wrong.

    Or be directed to look back at P1’s post a hundred pages and three weeks back. That is P1’s modus operandi.

    I have noticed that you never actually try to contradict the facts. You just resort to posts like this.

    Telling.

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