Ipsos: 51-49 to Labor

The first Ipsos poll for the year produces a much stronger result for the Coalition – but another poll finds them struggling in Queensland.

The first Ipsos poll of the year for the Nine newspapers is the best for the Coalition of the five published under Scott Morrison’s prime ministership, with Labor’s lead cut from 54-46 to 51-49 since the December poll. The Coalition gains two on the primary vote to 38% while Labor slips four to 33% (albeit that the last result was something of an outlier, as Ipsos leans on the low side with primary votes for both major parties). The Greens meanwhile are steady on 13%, a characteristically high result for them from Ipsos. The two-party figure is presumably based on 2016 election preference flows – we should have a result for respondent-allocated preferences later (UPDATE: 51-49 on respondent-allocated preferences as well).

There is little corresponding movement on leadership ratings: Scott Morrison is up two on approval to 49% and up one on disapproval to 40%, Shorten is down one to 40% and up two to 52% (relatively positive results on leadership ratings being a further peculiarity of Ipsos), and Morrison’s lead as preferred prime minister shifts from 46-37 to 48-38. The poll was conducted from a sample of 1200 from Tuesday to Friday, which makes it an imperfect measure of the impact, if any, of the parliamentary vote on asylum seekers on Tuesday.

The same goes for the other poll this weekend, a Queensland-only affair on federal voting intention by YouGov Galaxy for the Courier-Mail (state voting intention results from the poll can be found in the post below). The news here for the government is bad, with Labor recording a 52-48 lead on two-party preferred, which represents a 6% swing in that state since the 2016 election, and compares with a 50-50 result at the last such poll in November. The primary votes are Coalition 35% (down three on the last poll, compared with 43.2% at the 2016 election), Labor 34% (steady, compared with 30.9%), Greens 10% (up one, compared with 8.8%) and One Nation 8% (down one, and they only ran in a few seats in 2016).

The poll also has a question on the party with the “better plan on border security and asylum seekers” which finds the Coalition leading 44% to 29%, which is a par-for-the-course result for such a question. The poll was conducted Wednesday and Thursday from a sample of 810.

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.

2,918 comments on “Ipsos: 51-49 to Labor”

Comments Page 54 of 59
1 … 53 54 55 … 59

  1. meher baba,
    And there is a very strong sense abroad in the community that the Coalition have been engaging in Reverse Robin Hoodism and THAT is the problem that needs to be rectified.

  2. PlayerOne
    Probably because that’s the only deal that would actually work. And if Labor supported it, it wouldn’t matter what the DUP did, would it?

    I agree that Labour should support May’s deal if there is no prospect of a second referendum.

    In any case, I believe that a referendum should be between May’s deal and Remain. May’s deal should be legislated to be automatically accepted by parliament if Leave was to win the second referendum, and article 50 permanently revoked if Remain wins. This would preclude the prospect of any further referendums being held.

    Corbyn doesn’t like either of these options, which seems to be why he’s angling for a no deal brexit.

  4. meher baba….you’ve always misunderstood -ve gearing. As now practiced, it creates a tax transfer from the class of renters to the class of landlords. It does not subsidise rents. Perversely, it increases them. It does not improve access to affordable housing. It undermines affordability. Labor’s reforms will encourage investment in new housing and will add to supply. The current laws have no such focus. They create a tax shelter for speculation in existing housing and land stocks.

  5. ‘Sohar says:
    Wednesday, February 20, 2019 at 5:00 pm

    Frednk,
    “Boerwar
    Could you be little more careful with your spelling of Labour; different countries different parties.
    Australia: labor
    England: labour”

    Agreed, and I’m not sure how someone could set themself up as an expert on British Labour if they can spell the name of the party.’

    I am sure this is intended to make a point.

  9. Okay, here goes:

    Should we see it as a disaster or a triumph? There are arguments on both sides.

    Triumph:

    * Most high-speed trains are powered by electricity. High speed rail travel is much lower in carbon emissions than aviation.
    * Melbourne-Sydney is the second most popular air route pair in the world, serving 9.3 million trips a year.
    * The east-coast routes plausibly served by high speed rail have around 20 million passenger flights per year. If rail captures half of those trips it would have an excellent level of patronage: 27,000 passengers a day. Trains on Sydney-Brisbane and Sydney-Melbourne routes could depart in each direction every 30 minutes for 12 hours with 300 people aboard. That compares well. Spain’s AVE trains fit 300 people. (Although a Japanese Shinkansen can fit 1300.)
    * Rail competes with road as well as aviation, although less effectively — people who drive long distances may have low willingness to pay for a ticket, substantial luggage or a need for a car at their destination.
    * Rail terminates in the city centre giving most people better access to their destination than arriving at an airport.
    * High speed rail could make regional cities more attractive to live in, reducing congestion in the city. (Bonus: Nationals votes!)
    Disaster:

    * Domestic aviation contributes 1.4% of Australia’s carbon emissions. High speed rail can be expected to replace perhaps one in every ten domestic flights. The carbon reduction of high speed rail is tiny compared to replacing one coal-fired power station.
    * The big question is whether high speed rail can win half of the people who currently fly. The issues are time and cost.
    Australia’s big cities are far apart. It is 880km from Sydney to Melbourne. Brisbane to Sydney is 920km. London to Paris is 480km. High speed rail has a good advantage for trips of up to two and a half hours. Beyond that it gets murky. Melbourne-Sydney would be around three hours at 300km/h.
    Europe’s systems look amazing but the conditions are very different. Spain alone is 40% smaller than NSW, with over 45 million people.
    * Serving regional towns will mean stopping frequently. You can run a mix of expresses and stopping trains only if you have a lot of patronage. This can become a vicious circle. Any political pledge to stop trains in sensitive rural seats could make the system less useful for long-distance travel.
    * $110 billion is a lot. Here’s a thought experiment to get a grip on it: imagine the government doesn’t want to recover the $110 billion cost of building the rail, just the interest payments on the debt. That’s around $3 billion a year. Assume a rail ticket is one-half profit (generous!). The system would need to make $6 billion a year in revenue to cover the $3 billion interest. If it does serve 10 million passengers it would need to charge each passenger $600.
    * Clearly that does not compete with aviation prices. Ultimately the system would price train tickets much lower and the fares would likely cover operating costs only (and probably not even that). The $110 billion would likely be written off and ongoing subsidies required.
    Doubtless the final cost would be more than $110 billion. A mega project without cost overruns is almost unheard of. In the worst-case scenario we don’t even get we were promised and we end up with a “multi-technology mix”, like the NBN.

    Whether Scott Morrison pulls high-speed rail out of the bag this election or another politician does so next time, it’s worth bearing both the pros and cons in mind. High-speed rail is tantalising. But it has a risk of being an enormous white elephant.

  10. guytaur @ #2631 Wednesday, February 20th, 2019 – 4:46 pm

    Labour has offered to negotiate but after the No Confidence circus and May turning her back on the will of the parliament Labour knows there will be no negotiating

    This is a complete mis-statement of what actually occurred. Had the Commons passed a vote of No Confidence an election could have followed. However, the vote was lost. The will of the Commons was to continue. Corbyn put a motion that was bound to fail, thereby illuminating his weakness. He also knows there is nothing to negotiate. He is merely posing. Everyone can see it.

  11. Sohar has just reminded me of something I had long forgotten.

    I did Pol Sci 101, or the equivalent, half a century ago. One of the topics was something that might have been called ‘How the British Political System Works.’ There might have been some sort of segue into how the Australian one worked. And there was some comparative stuff with how the US one worked.

    These days the wording would be ‘How the British Political System Does not Work.’

    I wonder whether I am the only Bludger formally qualified to comment on the British political ins and outs of the EU?

  12. Rex Douglas @ #2650 Wednesday, February 20th, 2019 – 5:02 pm

    Barney in Vinh Long @ #2632 Wednesday, February 20th, 2019 – 4:46 pm

    Rex Douglas says:
    Wednesday, February 20, 2019 at 4:28 pm

    Ed Husic on The Karvellis Show pours the bucket on the CI policy.

    …but Bill says it’s fine.

    Where and when did Shorten say it was fine?

    here – https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/pm/labor-now-supports-medevac-transfers-to-christmas-island/10826786

    Another report that forgets to mention the little word -“if …” – which preceded Bill’s statement about it being fine.

    Oddly enough, they all seem to be traceable back to the ABC 🙁

  13. N….neo-Lib is simply used as a term of abuse. It is a polemical gesture….nothing more. It’s a term of derision. It’s used this way at PB on an hourly basis.

  14. Rex: “do you support Bill Ludwig and the CFMMEU threats to campaign against any Labor candidate who refuse to support Adani ?”

    I suspect that such a candidate may well see an increase in primary vote. CFMEU members are hardly likely to switch to the Greens – more likely they’ll chop down their tree-houses in the dead of night (I am joking BTW) and despite that idiocy with Howard in Tasmania, they aren’t that likely to switch their votes to the Coalition

    Moreover it would tend to put paid to the complete idiocy that Bill Shorten is somehow a creature of than the CFMEU – in fact he was AWU: “Australia’s Worst Union” as the CFMEU called them. It’s fine to respectfully disagree with the CFMEU: respect is warranted by the fact they do most of the really dangerous jobs; agreement is a different matter.

  15. Player One @ #2662 Wednesday, February 20th, 2019 – 5:11 pm

    Rex Douglas @ #2650 Wednesday, February 20th, 2019 – 5:02 pm

    Barney in Vinh Long @ #2632 Wednesday, February 20th, 2019 – 4:46 pm

    Rex Douglas says:
    Wednesday, February 20, 2019 at 4:28 pm

    Ed Husic on The Karvellis Show pours the bucket on the CI policy.

    …but Bill says it’s fine.

    Where and when did Shorten say it was fine?

    here – https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/pm/labor-now-supports-medevac-transfers-to-christmas-island/10826786

    Another report that forgets to mention the little word -“if …” – which preceded Bill’s statement about it being fine.

    Oddly enough, they all seem to be traceable back to the ABC 🙁

    So he said ‘if’ – so what. He’s still fine with CI hosting tortured asylum seekers.

    It’s terrible policy on humanitarian and financial grounds. It’s indefensible policy.

  17. Rex Douglas says:
    Wednesday, February 20, 2019 at 4:51 pm

    Barney in Vinh Long @ #2622 Wednesday, February 20th, 2019 – 4:36 pm

    Rex,

    Darn posted the quote which was attached to something they had received.

    The quote says it refers to Turnbull’s business tax cuts.

    What more do you want?

    Isn’t that clear enough for you?

    No, it referred to Turnbull tax cuts. Go back and read darns post, then apologise for mis-representing him.

    Then, you can again apologise again for inventing a context that suits your Labor leanings.

    FWIW, Turnbulls tax cuts include personal tax cuts – https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jun/21/coalitions-143bn-tax-cuts-package-passes-in-parliament

    😆

    Whether it’s a business tax cut or a personal one is irrelevant, it doesn’t change the fact that if you’re not paying any tax, then any tax cut will not benefit you one cent.

    The whole point that Labor makes again and again is that tax cuts do nothing to help those who are really struggling be it business or individuals.

  20. Ok thanks C@t. The usual grab bag of generally irrelevant concerns.

    For a start, HSR isn’t about replacing aviation, or at least it should not be. That’s a distraction that has set the whole issue back years.

    Second, there is no issue with mixing regional trains with longer distance express services. There’s enough patronage to justify trains to places like Coffs or Albury.

    Third, $100 billion is a lot of money. Its also an over-estimate and it denies the fact that you can start by building HSR in places like the Newcastle-Sydney-Wollongong corridor for a lot less and once that is viable, then you can think about intercapital extension.

    Fourth, back of the envelope calculations about fares will always lead you to despair. Fare revenue is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether the cost of HSR gets paid back in terms of wider social an economic benefits.

    I very much doubt Morisson will pull HSR out of the bag. However, he might try to spin the results of his “Faster Rail” process, but that probably won’t conclude till mid this year.

  24. Nicholas: “Political scientists, sociologists, and economists don’t agree with you”

    Bullshit-artists don’t agree with him. Umm … sorry … you already said that … my apologies.

  25. P1

    There is your problem. May presented the agreement to parliament as a Fait Acompli.

    As I said after the No Confidence motion all hope of avoiding a Hard Brexit died.

    However it was only ever a slim hope. The mess for parliament started when there were no representatives of other parties to work out the deal.

    May could not do that because of the Hard Brexiteers.
    That left Labor no room to move.
    Thus hard Brexit inevitable b

  28. Rex Douglas @ #2647 Wednesday, February 20th, 2019 – 4:02 pm

    Barney in Vinh Long @ #2632 Wednesday, February 20th, 2019 – 4:46 pm

    Rex Douglas says:
    Wednesday, February 20, 2019 at 4:28 pm

    Ed Husic on The Karvellis Show pours the bucket on the CI policy.

    …but Bill says it’s fine.

    Where and when did Shorten say it was fine?

    here – https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/pm/labor-now-supports-medevac-transfers-to-christmas-island/10826786

    Thanks for the link. It is to an audio file with a few seconds of quote from Shorten. “If the medical treatment is required, and its delivered on Christmas Island and it makes people well, that’s fine. The issue here is the safe treatment of people within the context of strong borders.”

    I don’t know where in the general context of the questions and answers this snippet was taken, so it could mean other things. But I interpret it as meaning “If the treatment on Christmas Island makes people well then that is fine.” The converse is that if it doesn’t make people well, then it is not fine.

    So I’m not sure what your point is.

  32. This is a great article about Poverty in Britain in the leave voting areas:

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/11/england-brexit-broken-neoliberalism

    “Even so, on my walk I was shocked by the level of poverty, by the sheer number of homeless people in doorways and parks, and by the high streets of boarded-up shops and pubs, full of payday loan outlets and bookies. People in those former industrial towns spoke of their anger and betrayal, of having being forgotten by Westminster politicians, of their communities having been destroyed as the manufacturing that had sustained them either folded or moved to low-wage economies.”

    ” But that might make the economy even more precarious, I said. He paused for a moment, narrowed his eyes. “If the economy goes down the toilet,” he said, “at least those bastards [in London] will finally know what it feels like to be us.””

    Worth a read, contains the word neoliberalism, and probably a good explainer regarding why doom and gloom about the economy doesn’t mean much to them, as they already live it.

  33. Using ‘Blairite’ as a catch-all insult, knowing many critics of Corbyn detest everything Blair represents, is dishonest- those that persist with its use seem to be flagging their own inability to make a case factually.

  34. You really have to laugh at this one from departing Kelly O’Dwyer.
    “This would mean parties agreeing to abide by a convention that the Senate won’t obstruct the passage of legislation to effect government policy which has been fully and fairly disclosed to the Australian people well before voting commences in an election.”

    This from a Liberal Party that has lied & deceived for generations .

  37. PlayerOne – I think Corbyn THINKS a no deal brexit is best for Corbyn.

    As I said earlier, my view is that if Corbyn helps facilitate a no deal disaster, he will receive his share of the blame, and he will lose the leadership.

  38. The converse is that if it doesn’t make people well, then it is not fine.

    Apologies, sloppy word choice above. When I said “converse” I meant “other way of saying the same thing”. Sorry.

  39. Re Brexit sweep, put me down for a good Hard Brexit, as Merkel would say “Es ist das, was die Engländer verdienen.”
    As for Newspoll dead flat and not budging a smegging inch at 53/47

  41. Boerwar says:
    Wednesday, February 20, 2019 at 5:22 pm

    Barney
    I take it you have had a look at:
    Toàn cảnh Tượng đài CTMT – NT

    ???? 🙂

  42. Oddly enough, they all seem to be traceable back to the ABC

    The Shorten snippet starts very abruptly, it is very very easy to miss the “If”. And if you only hear it once, once missed you can’t go back and listen again. It is a stretch to say it is a deliberate misdirection, but I think it might serve as a subtle test. How you hear it exposes your disposition to Labor and Shorten.

  43. BiVL @5:26 (changed location again I see):

    “The whole point that Labor makes again and again is that tax cuts do nothing to help those who are really struggling be it business or individuals.”

    In particular, a business has to make a profit to pay company tax. A tax cut won’t make an unprofitable business profitable.

    It might also be worth reminding the voters that in early 2016 Big Business were suggesting that the GST be increased to pay for corporate tax cuts. The Turnbull Government had the idea “on the table”.

    Like the IPA wish list, like the 2014 Budget items that didn’t pass, this is what the Government wants to do.

  44. With respect to the replies about Cormann, two points :

    1. This was supposedly personal travel paid for in the spot, not corporate account bookings, so there is no reason it would just get scooped up with other bookings.

    2. Even if tickets are reserved on the spot it is inconceivable that there would not be a tight integration between client payments and payments to the relevant airline such that it would have been immediately obvious that no payment had been received.

    Someone needs to pursue the relevant actors about these issues.

  45. P1

    Labour does not have a choice. The last part of that was taken away with the No Confidence motion.

    Corbyn has already nailed his colours to the mast.

    Part of the Problem was May not doing what Prime Ministers before her have done and called a General Election claiming “Special Circumstances”

  46. I suspect the Cancer Council in Queensland was told in no uncertain terms by the national body that the scale of donations which might be lost to it from people denied cash refunds for franking credits could be considerably less than that of losses which might arise if 50% of the population come to see the body as willing to be a running dog of the LNP.

  48. “Whatever the broader church of Labor supporters want, Labor is now controlled, via the branches, by extreme left ideologues.”

    I’m hanging on to this comment. 😀

    And I don’t want to hear any BS about Mispocchio, context, typing or spelling errors.

  49. Lab and Poroti

    That’s why we need to change our government
    That future is what the LNP would do here.

    I don’t want the despair and disassociation that enabled Brexit to take hold here

  50. OMG enough on the frikkin BREXIT thing already. We already get it our faces every news night report.. get over it or wake me up when the damn thing is resolved. Im sick of the word BREXIT and armchair speculation on it. I JUST DON’T CARE !1

Comments Page 54 of 59
1 … 53 54 55 … 59

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *