The addition of this week’s Newspoll and Essential Research polls have ended a period of improvement for the Coalition in BludgerTrack, which records a solid shift to Labor this week. Labor’s two-party lead is now 53.8-46.2, out from 53.1-46.9 last week, and they have made two gains on the seat projection, one in New South Wales and one in Queensland. Despite that, the Newspoll leadership numbers have resulted in an improvement in Scott Morrison’s reading on the net approval trend. Full results are available through the link below – if you can’t get the state breakdown tabs to work, try doing a hard refresh.
National polling news:
• A poll result from Roy Morgan circulated earlier this week, although there’s no mention of it on the company’s website. The primary votes are Labor 36%, Coalition 34.5% and Greens 12.5%, which pans out to a Labor lead of 54-46 using past preference flows (thanks Steve777). Morgan continues to conduct weekly face-to-face polling, but the results are only made public when Gary Morgan has a point to make – which on this occasion is that Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party is on all of 1%. One Nation doesn’t do great in the poll either, recording 3%. The poll was conducted over two weekends from a sample of 1673.
• The Australian had supplementary questions from this week’s Newspoll on Tuesday, which had Scott Morrison favoured over Bill Shorten by 48-33 on the question of best leader handle the economy – little different from his 50-32 lead in October, or the size of the lead consistently held by Malcolm Turnbull. It also found 33% saying the government should prioritise funding of services, compared with 27% for cutting personal income tax and 30% for paying down debt.
• The Australian also confused me by publishing, together with the Newspoll voting intention numbers on Monday, results on franking credits and “reducing tax breaks for investors” – derived not from last weekend’s poll, but earlier surveys in December and November (UPDATE: Silly me – the next column along is the total from the latest poll). The former found 48% opposed to Labor’s franking credits policy and 30% in support, compared with 50% and 33% when it was first floated in March (UPDATE: So the latest poll actually has support back up five to 35% and opposition down two to 38%). Respondents were instructed that the policy was “expected to raise $5.5 billion a year from around 900,000 Australians that receive income from investments in shares”, which I tend to think is friendlier to Labor than a question that made no effort to explain the policy would have been. The tax breaks produced a stronger result for Labor, with 47% in favour and 33% opposed, although this was down on 54% and 28% in April (UPDATE: Make that even better results for Labor – support up four to 51%, opposition down one to 32%).
With due recognition of Kevin Bonham’s campaign against sketchy reports of seat polling, let the record note the following:
• Ben Packham of The Australian reports Nationals polling shows them in danger of losing Page to Labor and Cowper to Rob Oakeshott. Part of the problem, it seems, is a minuscule recognition rating for the party’s leader, one Michael McCormack.
• There’s a uComms/ReachTEL poll of Flinders for GetUp! doing the rounds, conducted on Wednesday from a sample of 634, which has Liberal member Greg Hunt on 40.7%, an unspecified Labor candidate on 29.4% and ex-Liberal independent Julia Banks on 16.1%. That would seem to put the result down to the wild card of Banks’ preference flows. There was apparently a respondent-allocated two-party figure with the result, but I haven’t seen it. UPDATE: Turns out it was 54-46 in favour of Greg Hunt, which seems a bit much.
• The West Australian reported last weekend that a uComms/ReachTel poll for GetUp! had Christian Porter leading 52-48 in Pearce, which is above market expectations for him.
• Another week before, The West Australian reported Labor internal polling had it with a 51.5-48.5 lead in Stirling.
Preselection news:
• Following Nigel Scullion’s retirement announcement last month, the Northern Territory News reports a field of eight nominees for his Country Liberal Party Senate seat: Joshua Burgoyne, an Alice Springs electrician, who was earlier preselected for the second position on the ticket behind Scullion; Bess Price, who held the remote seat of Stuart in the territory parliament from 2012 to 2016, and whose high-profile daughter Jacinta Price is the party’s candidate for Lingiari; Tony Schelling, a financial adviser; Tim Cross, former general manager of NT Correctional Industries; Gary Haslett, a Darwin councillor; Kris Civitarese, deputy mayor of Tennant Creek; Linda Fazldeen, from the Northern Territory’s Department of Trade, Business and Innovation; and Bill Yan, general manager at the Alice Springs Correctional Centre.
• Andrew Burrell of The Australian reports Liberal nominees to succeed Michael Keenan in Stirling include Vince Connelly, Woodside Petroleum risk management adviser and former army officer; Joanne Quinn, a lawyer for Edith Cowan University; Michelle Sutherland, a teacher and the wife of Michael Sutherland, former state member for Mount Lawley; Georgina Fraser, a 28-year-old “oil and gas executive”; and Taryn Houghton, “head of community engagement at a mental health service, HelpingMinds”. No further mention of Tom White, general manager of Uber in Japan and a former adviser to state MP and local factional powerbroker Peter Collier, who was spruiked earlier. The paper earlier reported that Karen Caddy, a former Rio Tinto engineer, had her application rejected after state council refused to give her the waiver required for those who were not party members of one year’s standing.
• The Nationals candidate for Indi is Mark Byatt, a Wodonga-based manager for Regional Development Victoria.
rhwombat @ 3.22pm,
Interesting thesis you have there. I would like to add a couple of observations:
1. Back in the day, before John Howard and various other Neoliberal governments around the world began their destruction of the worth of the medical profession in society’s eyes, plus also favouring Specialists’ putative incomes over those of the humble GP, such that they now make a lot less relatively, and compared to other professional pursuits, than they used to, you used to find kids wanting to get into Medicine from High School, both because it tagged you as a member of the Intellectual Elite, and because you could guarantee to be on a nice little earner for your working life. Thus did we start to see people attracted by the $ rather than the desire to altruistically do good. I guess Michael Wooldridge was the best example of that. But you would have seen many more than him.
This leads me to my second observation:
2. As a result of the esteem and the $ to be had by becoming a medico, you found that a lot of the children of immigrants to this country were attracted to Medicine. Or, to put it another way, their parents were attracted on their behalf. So you saw an influx of them into the field. But lately less so as other professions have attracted them more.
This leads me to my third point.
3. What I have noticed about this influx is that a combination of the natural qualities of the races that have come into Medicine recently, to instinctively care about people rather than $, combined with that underpinning that Medicine, and other Allied Health practices, bring to society to care about the person at their most basic and vulnerable level, has worked to out itself again and to reassert its primacy over the search for a humongous income. 🙂
I think it’ll take a while to find its way to the Dentistry profession though. 😉
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/16/tormenting-meghan-markle-has-become-a-national-sport-that-shames-us
They sort of deserve the real-world consequences of a hard Brexit, IMO.
What is the law around shooting down a drone:
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/act/commercial-drone-shot-down-police-launch-investigation-20190215-p50y58.html
Suppose you thought it was invading your privacy?
poroti @ #977 Sunday, February 17th, 2019 – 3:47 pm
I am so not going to send him a DM about Clindamycin Lotion. 😆
@ Nath
Prix? Prix? What the fook?
Oh, now I get it.
PS. Wouldn’t Canberra be a more suitable place?
Just returning to its equilibrium after the shutdown. Trump’s ratings have been remarkable in their stability. People know what they think about him.
b
I am not sure about the laws but, as a matter of practical observation, anyone who sends a drone over a farm without prior agreement with the farmer is asking for serious trouble for their drone.
BTW, that would be the same sort of drone from the same company that patrolled our part of the ACT (and perhaps the whole ACT) and which resulted in notices being sent out about clearing branches from the electric wires.
I am not sure whether they had algorithms for mapping miscreant eucs and/or algorithms for triggering a letter (with an attachment of a map of the house and block pointing out exactly where along the wires the householder was breach.)
It would have killed the jobs of the people who used to walk around and do the checks.
I was this very morning up among the branches doing some pruning at the behest of the drone.
Yes. Rebounding. Recovering in value after a decline.
His base will always support him regardless; but there is a section of the community that express faux disapproval whenever negative news comes to light – disapproval that slowly disappears.
Rex Douglas says:
Sunday, February 17, 2019 at 4:04 pm
And you accuse others of living in a bubble! 😆
poroti @ #1000 Sunday, February 17th, 2019 – 4:09 pm
The conservatives, in this country at least, have lost control of the narrative these days thanks to the wide access to knowledge provided by the internet.
The old tunnel of information owned and controlled by Murdoch newspapers is no more.
The boomers and GenX are the last victims of the Murdochracy.
S K,
The mid-term date is probably the best benchmark for Trump’s approval at this time. When people were paying the most attention and he and his opponents were presumably trying their hardest.
On Nov 2016 It was Approve 41.8% (same) and disapprove 52.8% (now 53.7%)
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/?ex_cid=rrpromo
Rex D….
The rank and file probably feel like outcasts given the weight of power the big unions wield in the ALP.
Not at all. The unions provide great substance to Labor even though their power has been reducing with various rule changes over the years. As a rank and file member, it seems to me the unions elevate the influence available to me. Without the commitments of unions – without their organisational ability, financial capacity and discipline – Labor could not function as effectively as it does. The success of Labor in Government amplifies the voice of indiviudal members.
The Liberals – by the application of ideological purity tests and obsessions – have been actively driving away potential members for many years. Labor, on the other hand, tries to recruit as widely as possible. Labor is a democratic instrument….something it’s competitors have no knowledge of or interest in.
In a presidential election year, with a clear opponent (or set of opponents for part of it), and non-stop rallies…. he will likely increase that.
S K,
I saw some pseph stuff on 538 about the shutdown a month or so ago. It said shutdowns tend to hurt the presidential Netsats but aren’t permanent. I can remember being disappointed reading it 🙂
https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/e94926e5d3d980ed06154cbcbfa3853a?width=650
C@tmomma @ #1004 Sunday, February 17th, 2019 – 3:45 pm
If one of my progeny turned out like that I would weep with disappointment. It would be a case of ‘I love him, of course. He is my son’, channelling Mother Milat.
SK,
You cut out an important part of the sentence when you quoted me. “…at this time.”
I doubt he will improve his netsats in the long term, but we will have to wait and see. Both sides will be cranking it up in 2020. Not just Trump.
Without any doubt, the attacks on unions by the Liberals and the Liblings are politically-motivated. They hope that by weakening unions they will also disable Labor. This is a transparent strategy. What it speaks to is the elitism of the Liberals and the Liblings. They do not want to hear from working people and they do not accept that Labor speaks for working people. Their goal is to dismantle the democratic representative organs of working people. It has been ever thus. The elitists are jealous of the democrats. It’s no more complicated than that.
The Liblings are at one with their Lib-siblings on this.
Simon² Katich® says: Sunday, February 17, 2019 at 4:30 pm
The mid-term date is probably the best benchmark for Trump’s approval
In a presidential election year, with a clear opponent (or set of opponents for part of it), and non-stop rallies…. he will likely increase that.
****************************************************
That’s IF he is running in 2020 🙂 …… there are a few *possibilities* that the Republicans MAY have a different candidate
Every time a Libling puts up an anti-union or anti-Labor flag I’m reminded of Murdoch. They speak the same dialect.
Read US VP speech to Munich Security Conference and can you find anything right or wrong with that speech. Everybody was speechless after the opening remarks.
https://amp-news-com-au.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/amp.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/donald-trump-wins-little-applause-during-munich-security-conference/news-story/35f7d940cbae36a9e7861c87b3f70571?amp_js_v=a2&_gsa=1#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.news.com.au%2Ffinance%2Fwork%2Fleaders%2Fdonald-trump-wins-little-applause-during-munich-security-conference%2Fnews-story%2F35f7d940cbae36a9e7861c87b3f70571
https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/42dba3dd4408598e56b61604a9a74f52?width=1024
@ Player One 420pm
What a zinger of a riposte to Rex’s snide comment. Rather like Federal Parliament these days- petty, pitiful comments by the Government blown away by intelligent, thoughtful replies from the Opposition.
Bill mightn’t be Rex’s cup of tea but doesn’t he and his team show up this motely crew who are supposedly the leaders of our nation?
briefly says: Sunday, February 17, 2019 at 4:41 pm
Every time a Libling puts up an anti-union or anti-Labor flag I’m reminded of Murdoch. They speak the same dialect.
***********************************************************
The great H L Mencken :
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
I’d like to dismantle Briefly’s organs.
In an ever so polite way.
The Libs pandering and listening to the commentators in Murdoch’s various organs is a dumb strategy. The Australian is a vanity project. No one watches Sky after Dark. So RW commentators venting their spleens about various issues doesn’t influence voters that much.
The main game is jobs, economic growth and Government providing basic services.
Everything else is entertainment.
phoenixRED…The Liblings are Murdoch-lite…they are the punies in the arena. They have been Howard’s auxiliaries.
GG
Falling living standards. End of story.
Rex Douglas always sets these little tests for Bill Shorten that he knows will never be realised, like Bill Shorten should be further ahead of Scott Morrison on PPM, or Labor would be further in front of the Coalition if Bill Shorten wasn’t the leader.
The good news is that 99% of people are awake to it and see it for what it is.
Is this right?
The Bludger track data shows Flinders on 57.1%.
Was that the last Fed election 2PP?
And Shows On reported that Hunt was on 54% in the seat polling.
Are the two numbers comparable?
Was I polite enough to Rex? 😀
Rex Douglas @ #967 Sunday, February 17th, 2019 – 3:39 pm
C’mon, surely someone here can help me out …??
nath, envy is not a pretty thing. It sours the palate and the mind. Better to take up whisky, to fill the senses with the hot and the sweet.
C@tmomma
says:
Sunday, February 17, 2019 at 4:56 pm
Was I polite enough to Rex?
_________________
Yes, those who said you cant train a cat were clearly wrong.
cat
ffs stop talking about Rex and about yourself in relation to Rex.
If Rex makes a point you want to rebut, raise the point you want to rebut and then rebut the point.
briefly says: Sunday, February 17, 2019 at 4:50 pm
phoenixRED…The Liblings are Murdoch-lite…they are the punies in the arena. They have been Howard’s auxiliaries.
***********************************************************
Likewise with Trumps rusted on rubes and deplorables – there is a certain % of rusted on Murdoch supporters – nothing but nothing will ever change their opinions about either man …….
briefly
says:
Sunday, February 17, 2019 at 4:57 pm
nath, envy is not a pretty thing. It sours the palate and the mind. Better to take up whisky, to fill the senses with the hot and the sweet.
_______________________
Envy? just a little dismemberment joke between old friends! 🙂
Cats can be trained to know where the food is and where a lap is located. That is all. 🙂
C@tmomma @ #1031 Sunday, February 17th, 2019 – 4:54 pm
Instead of the focus of this post being on me it should be on why Bill Shorten should be ahead in the PPM polling, yes ?
Boerwar @ #1035 Sunday, February 17th, 2019 – 4:58 pm
I’m rolling my eyes at that, Boerwar. Even nath acknowledged that the point was made as delicately as possible. However, as there is just about only one person on this blog who repeatedly sets these meaningless tests, pray tell how I refer to them otherwise?
For example, maybe: Oi! That guy who keeps doing that thing where…
I mean, really, Bowerwar, sometimes you pontificate pointlessly.
Happy to be meaningfully corrected.
cat
ffs stop talking about me and stop talking about yourself in relation to me.
This Paladin does need explaining………
On Sunday the attorney general, Christian Porter, defended the home affairs minister Peter Dutton, who has said he had “no sight” of the tender process. Porter told ABC’s Insiders that “standard procurement processes are often at arms-length from the minister”.
The host Barrie Cassidy put to him the contracts were unusual given it is a “little-known Singapore company with a registered address on Kangaroo Island” which is a beach shack at the end of a dirt road
Rex Douglas @ #1039 Sunday, February 17th, 2019 – 5:00 pm
No.
That wasn’t my point. Others have made us aware of the reasons why it shouldn’t be so but that keeps being ignored by a certain person who shall not be named.
Boerwar, stop talking about cat in relation to rex and stop talking about yourself in relation to cat!
nath, stop talking about boerwar in relation to cat and in relation and rex and in relation to himself and in relation to yourself.
Boerwar @ #1042 Sunday, February 17th, 2019 – 5:04 pm
BW,
Nothing is better than Rex for cat unless it’s to stimulate her inathuation!
Victoria @ #1044 Sunday, February 17th, 2019 – 5:04 pm
The minister not being required to tick off a $443M contract just doesn’t pass the pub test.
If you use KB’s old formula you can add 16 and he is ahead. He should be ahead regardless, but there is nothing I can think of that he should do differently.
He will be well ahead when he is PM 😉
Nine news reporting a poll of some description in its 6pm news. Anyone heard anything about it?