BludgerTrack: 53.2-46.8 to Labor (still)

No new grist for the BludgerTrack mill this week, but there’s a Greenpeace-sponsored federal poll and some preselection news to relate.

There haven’t been any new polls this week, so the headline to this post isn’t news as such – the point is that a new thread is needed, and this is it. Developments worth noting:

• We do have one new poll, but it was privately conducted and so doesn’t count as canonical so far as BludgerTrack is concerned. The poll in question was conducted by uComms/ReachTEL for Greenpeace last Wednesday from a sample of 2134, and has primary votes of Coalition 38.8%, Labor 36.7%, Greens 9.7% and One Nation 6.1%. A 53-47 two-party split is reported based on respondent-allocated preferences, but it would actually have been around 51.5-48.5 based on preferences from 2016. The poll also features attitudinal questions on carbon emissions and government priorities, which you can read all about here.

• The Greens have landed a high-profile candidate in Julian Burnside, human rights lawyer and refugee advocate, to run against Josh Frydenberg in the normally blue-ribbon Melbourne seat of Kooyong. This further complicates a contest that already featured independent hopeful Oliver Yates, former Liberal Party member and chief executive of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

• The Liberal preselection to choose a successor to Julie Bishop in Curtin will be determined by a vote of 60 delegates on Sunday. Initial reports suggested the front-runners were Celia Hammond, former vice-chancellor of Notre Dame University, and Erin Watson-Lynn, director of Asialink Diplomacy at the University of Melbourne, which some interpreted as a proxy battle between bitter rivals Mathias Cormann and Julie Bishop. However, both have hit heavy weather over the past week, with concerns raised over Hammond’s social conservatism and Watson-Lynn’s past tweets critical of the Liberal Party. Andrew Tillett of the Financial Review reports that some within the party believe a third nominee, Aurizon manager Anna Dartnell, could skate through the middle.

• Tom Richardson of InDaily reports moderate faction efforts to install a male candidate – James Stevens, chief-of-staff to Premier Steve Marshall – in Christopher Pyne’s seat of Sturt are prompting a slew of conservative-aligned women to nominate against him. These include Deepa Mathew, a manager at the Commonwealth Bank and state candidate for Enfield last year; Joanna Andrew, a partner with law firm Mellor Olsson; and Jocelyn Sutcliffe, a lawyer with Tindall Gask Bentley. However, Stevens remains the “overwhelming favourite”.

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.

2,867 comments on “BludgerTrack: 53.2-46.8 to Labor (still)”

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  3. I just had a koala walk up the driveway to a fence which it climbed and then jumped off to get to a gum tree. It is blissfully asleep six metres up.

  4. Good morning and thanks to BK for the Dawn Patrol.

    Adele Ferguson explains how employers that deliberately underpay their workers could face a stint in prison as part of a radical national suite of reforms designed to stamp out worker exploitation and systemic wage fraud plaguing industries across the country.
    https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/bosses-who-underpay-their-workers-to-face-jail-20190306-p51291.html

    and ⏬⏬

    https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/industrial-relations/criminal-charges-for-rogue-employers/news-story/dc6601ea3965651dc14fb4808e8ffb93

    https://outline.com/NSz3nV

    Ms O’Dwyer said the government had “no tolerance for those who repeatedly and deliberately underpay workers, whether they are an Australian or worker on a visa”.

    “For the very first time, we will introduce criminal sanctions for the most serious and egregious forms of deliberate exploitation of workers,’’ she said, adding that such penalties would not apply to “employers that accidentally or inadvertently do the wrong thing”.

    An appearance of steely determination and iron willed, dead set irresistible force to get the job done. Those exploiters are already quaking, reeling and possible jigging in fright as the juggernaut bears down on them.

    In my pathetic, doubtful manner I expect to see this story again (and again) with only the pictures changing year on year – although the lines on the forehead may be adjustable with botox or later substitutes.
    Professor Alan Fells get a mention – as does jail time (suspend posting for loud braying laughter — 🤣 😂.
    ☮☕

  5. Trump’s America First policies have blown out the trade deficit.

    The Commerce Department said Wednesday that — despite more than two years of President Trump’s “America First” policies — the United States last year posted a $891.2 billion merchandise trade deficit, the largest in the nation’s 243-year history.

    The trade gap with China also hit a record $419 billion, underscoring the stakes for the president’s bid to reach a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping as soon as this month.

    The department’s final 2018 trade report, which was delayed by the partial government shutdown, showed that the United States bought far more in foreign goods than it sold to customers in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. The shortfall topped the 2006 record of $838.3 billion, set as the housing bubble was peaking, and marked the third consecutive year of rising deficits.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-promised-to-shrink-the-trade-deficit-instead-it-exploded/2019/03/05/35d3b1e0-3f8f-11e9-a0d3-1210e58a94cf_story.html?utm_term=.278dae75e9a3

  8. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/07/greens-propose-private-sponsorship-of-refugees-as-they-targets-inner-city-seats

    The Greens will propose private citizens should be able to sponsor refugees to boost Australia’s humanitarian intake by 10,000 as part of a push to target leafy inner-eastern Melbourne lower house seats.

    On Thursday the Greens will launch their refugee policy with a series of contentious demands opposed by the major parties including a seven-day time limit before asylum seekers are released from onshore detention and a royal commission into immigration detention.

    On hand will be Julian Burnside, the refugee advocate and barrister contesting treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong, and the Greens candidates for Higgins, Jason Ball, and Macnamara, Steph Hodgins-May.

    The Greens are targeting the three inner-eastern Melbourne seats – two of which are held by the Liberals – to capitalise on the government’s perceived weakness with liberal progressives on the issues of climate change and refugees.

    The Greens will aim to boost their credentials with Liberal voters by revealing an endorsement of Burnside from Malcolm Fraser’s immigration minister, Ian MacPhee, a noted critic of current home affairs minister Peter Dutton.

  9. @David Scutt Twitter:

    UH OH: The largest parts of Australia’s economy are going backwards (via @BIAUS) businessinsider.com.au/australia-econ…

    At least the company I work for now is super busy and expanding.

  11. Pegasus says:
    Thursday, March 7, 2019 at 9:15 am

    ‘The Greens will propose….’

    The Greens have been proposing for the last three decades. They are proposing now. They will propose for the next thirty years.

    The Greens are the Great Proposers.

  13. Zuckerberg outlines his plans to reform his social media outlets, proposing integrating Instagram, WattsApp and Messenger.

    This privacy-focused platform will be built around several principles:

    Private interactions. People should have simple, intimate places where they have clear control over who can communicate with them and confidence that no one else can access what they share.

    Encryption. People’s private communications should be secure. End-to-end encryption prevents anyone — including us — from seeing what people share on our services.

    Editors’ Picks

    New York City Transplants and a River Town’s Natives Fight for Its Soul

    The New 30-Something

    Bigger, Saltier, Heavier: Fast Food Since 1986 in 3 Simple Charts
    Reducing Permanence. People should be comfortable being themselves, and should not have to worry about what they share coming back to hurt them later. So we won’t keep messages or stories around for longer than necessary to deliver the service or longer than people want them.

    Safety. People should expect that we will do everything we can to keep them safe on our services within the limits of what’s possible in an encrypted service.

    Interoperability. People should be able to use any of our apps to reach their friends, and they should be able to communicate across networks easily and securely.

    Secure data storage. People should expect that we won’t store sensitive data in countries with weak records on human rights like privacy and freedom of expression in order to protect data from being improperly accessed.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/technology/zuckerberg-privacy.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

  14. lizzie: “ScoMo probably wanted a long lead-up to the election to give him time to get all his ‘messages’ out. Instead, I think he’s given the electorates (and his desperate team) time to wish it could all be over.”

    you’d think they would have learned from the same failed thinking that went into the 2016 election, and then the longman bi-election

  15. The recycling crisis in Victoria

    https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/recycling-crisis-set-for-parliamentary-inquiry-20190306-p5128w.html

    The disastrous state of Victoria’s recycling system will be the subject of a parliamentary inquiry that will propose solutions to the mounting problem.
    :::
    The parliamentary inquiry, proposed by the Victorian Greens, was endorsed by the State Parliament’s upper house on Wednesday.
    :::
    The Greens are also continuing to push for a container deposit scheme, much like the cash for cans program that was popular in the 1980s but later scrapped.

  16. Wages

    We have a wages recession dating back 5 years by National Data

    We have Westpac axing teller (yes, teller) bonuses under guise of responding to the findings of Hayne. How convenient?

    In the face of a Wages Policy (such as the government of the day supporting a wage increase at least above the rate of inflation instead of making no submission to the FWC) being on the radar, employers go back to the generational presentation that one man’s pay rise is another man’s job (and the sexist nature of that quote identifies the time span that presentation has been the currency of employer organisations)

    And now we are going to jail those who underpay their employees – except from reporting this practice is absolutely rife across business models, so why now?

    Being from an older generation, there were 2 fundamentals being that you received a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and that, if you earned it you paid the tax

    The tax contingency was never seen as a deterrent to ambition to progress – not even when the upper marginal tax rate was 60 cents in the $1-

  17. I thought the hit of the day yesterday was the Shorten promise to legislate a “living wage “ to replace the minimum wage.

    Of course, definition is everything but the use of a “ living wage “ as a policy direction is both good policy and good politics.

    Leave it to business and the government to argue against a “ living wage “ while they spend their time with “ snouts in the trough “.

    A close second was the announcement around abortion and reproductive services announced by Plibersek. Again, good policy and good politics.

    Like Pavlov’s dogs Morrison and co rejected the policy and revealed once again how the liberal party is full of grumpy old men telling women what is good for them and dismissing the announcement as nothing more than politics.

    Morrison was not even up for a decent debate on the issue.

  19. President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen has given the House Intelligence Committee documents purportedly illustrating how the president’s lawyers edited Cohen’s congressional testimony in 2017, statements that Cohen has admitted were false, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Lawmakers had requested that Cohen turn over the documents after his public testimony last week, when he alleged before a separate House panel that Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow had made a change to Cohen’s 2017 testimony about “the length of time that the Trump Tower Moscow project stayed and remained alive.” Sekulow has said Cohen’s claim is false.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-former-lawyer-michael-cohen-returns-for-fourth-day-of-congressional-testimony/2019/03/06/d367c39a-4018-11e9-922c-64d6b7840b82_story.html?utm_term=.03c61406c9c5

  23. https://theconversation.com/all-about-juries-why-do-we-actually-need-them-and-can-they-get-it-wrong-112703

    There has been some debate over the recent conviction of George Pell, whose first trial ended with a hung jury, and the second a unanimous guilty verdict. People are questioning our justice system, the potential bias of the jury, and whether the initial hung verdict invalidates the second, unanimous one.

    So, why should Australians trust 12 inexperienced people to sit in judgment on our most serious criminal trials, and get the verdict right?

  24. Scrotty using the ol’ play up to the local yokels ploy. Ho ho ho

    Scott Morrison reveals why WA will decide who wins the Federal election

  25. I’m no wrap for Frydenberg, but this report if true demonstrates the dangers of hyperbolic over reach which the Greens are forever indulging. This sort of rubbish severely dents their credibility.

    “Josh Frydenberg has labelled his new Greens rival Julian Burnside’s comparisons between Australia’s offshore processing system and the Nazis “totally abhorrent and inexcusable.”

    The Treasurer, the nation’s most prominent Jewish MP, launched an attack on Mr Burnside on Sydney’s 2GB radio this morning, days after The Australian revealed the Liberals are prepared to spend up to $1m to protect Mr Frydenberg’s blue-ribbon seat of Kooyong from the Greens.

    Mr Frydenberg hit out at a recent tweet by Mr Burnside where the Greens candidate commented on Scott Morrison’s border policies and then attached a quote by Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering”.

    https://outline.com/WfTaxD

  26. doug @ #72 Thursday, March 7th, 2019 – 6:35 am

    The existence of the Greens in broadening the debate means we get more value out of the ALP- just saying

    Yep, like the existence of PHON on the right enables a place for the more extreme fringes to depart the Liberal party, so too does the existence of the Greens give the extreme left a place to go other than the ALP.

  29. GG:

    The Victorian Greens aren’t the best campaigners. I still remember that state election campaign video they published several years ago instructing how to talk to rural people.

  30. ‘doug says:
    Thursday, March 7, 2019 at 9:35 am

    The existence of the Greens in broadening the debate …’

    The Greens Party has spent three decades broadening. It is broadening now. It will spend the next three decades broadening.

    ‘Proposing’, ‘Demanding’, ‘Broadening’, and ‘Pushing for’ are all Greens Party substitutes for the Labor Party’s ‘doing’.

  31. fess,

    Was there a Greens endorsed and supplied weather beaten hat with old corks dangling to scare off the flies as part of their kit?

  32. Tony Windsor
    ‏@TonyHWindsor
    20m20 minutes ago

    The Nationals are still ignoring CSIRO advice that there is up to a 1 in 3 chance of groundwater system failure regarding Communist Chinese Shenhua minining proposal on the Liverpool Plains . If those risk coefficients were abt Warragamba Dam ppl would go beserk.# putthenatslast

  34. Yep, like the existence of PHON on the right enables a place for the more extreme fringes to depart the Liberal party

    Would be good for the Liberal Party if it started to actually happen, rather than the reverse.

    I still remember that state election campaign video they published several years ago instructing how to talk to rural people.

    Should have been a short video.

    Talk slow ly. Use small words.

    The would have got extra value by using it for all their Qld candidates. 😉

  36. People on the extreme left do not join the Greens, they join organisations such as Socialist Alliance and the Victorian Socialists. The latter organisations routinely attack the Greens as “running dogs of the capitalist system”.

    Describing the Greens as a party of the “extreme left” is one of the favourite memes of the political duopoly and their right-wing supporters who will engage in any tactic designed to maintain their grip on power and the status quo.

  37. P1:

    It went viral for all the wrong reasons and was deleted. Even William said at the time it was the most stupid thing he’d seen in a campaign.

  38. ‘Greensborough Growler says:
    Thursday, March 7, 2019 at 9:43 am

    I’m no wrap for Frydenberg, but this report if true demonstrates the dangers of hyperbolic over reach which the Greens are forever indulging. This sort of rubbish severely dents their credibility.’

    Burnside burns Burnside’s Side?

    As I noted the other day, the chap is absolutely clueless when it comes to the real world. Out of all his political enemies he deliberately and specifically attacked Shorten.

    He openly supported the Greens policies on Olympic Dam, the cotton industry and the ADF.

    He touted death duties.

    And now quotes Goering.

    Burnside is single handedly enabling Frydenberg’s re-election.

  39. the dangers of hyperbolic over reach

    Is the same “hyperbolic over reach we are now seeing here 24/7? (rhetorical question)

  40. ratsak:

    Yes, talking slowly was pretty much the gist of the message. The campaign video was supposed to boost their stocks in rural and regional Victoria, but served only to make the Greens look like out of touch metro-centrics.

    They deleted the video after being widely criticised for it.

  41. Greensborough Growler @ #75 Thursday, March 7th, 2019 – 8:43 am

    this report if true

    Your own outline indicates that it’s not true, and that the hyperbolic overreach belongs to Frydenberg (and media commentators).

    Frydenberg claims that there were “comparisons between Australia’s offshore processing system and the Nazis” made by Burnside in “a recent tweet”. The tweet is quoted in full at the end of the article:

    “Prediction: #Scomo will send a whisper to the Navy to let a couple of asylum seeker boats through before the election. Then he will try to terrify the nation that we are under attack.

    Could he be that dishonest? Don’t fall for it: read the attached comment,” he tweeted.

    Mr Burnside then posted a quote from Goering, stating: “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country”.

    So he’s predicted that the government will do something cynical and desperate, like deliberating letting some boats through so that they can whip up moral panic. Which is something that many on here have been predicting ever since Medivac passed.

    And he’s highlighted the underlying thinking behind such a political move, by providing a topically relevant quote from a Nazi.

    What he clearly hasn’t done is made a comparison between ‘Australia’s offshore processing system and the Nazis’. At most he’s insinuated that Morrison will have a Nazi-like philosophy philosophy endorsed by at least one prominent Nazi if he does indeed let some boats through in a deliberate bid for some cheap political points.

  42. Peg

    The Greens have been doing hyperbolic over reach for 30 years. They are doing hyperbolic over reach now. They are planning to spend the next 30 years doing hyperbolic over reach.

  43. Confessions says:

    The Victorian Greens aren’t the best campaigners. I still remember that state election campaign video they published several years ago instructing how to talk to rural people.

    After years of watching the likes of Joh and Barnyard it is not surprising that they concluded these rural folk speak some strange dialect 🙂

  44. Peg,

    I doubt anyone posting on PB is a Federal Candidate.

    Private citizens can indulge their fantasies to the limit of WB’s patience here on PB. Doesn’t represent the official view of a candidate or a PArty.

    Burnside is representing both. So, he needs to be far more circumspect and consider the broader community implications of overblown rhetoric.

  46. The funny thing is that Burnside is right. Just because Goering said it – and the nazis were especially good at public manipulation – that does not mean it is wrong. The quote is perfectly descriptive of how this government is going about its business.

  47. Shorten live on facebook speaking to some people at their workplace. He comes across so well in these sort of things rather than a staged speech.

  48. Pegasus,

    Yeah he does. He seems to err on the side of trying to blurt every point out instead of slowly articulating one or two key matters. He’s very obviously right across his brief though.

  49. If a nobody like me can be bangin on way back in the middle of last year that waiting for May 2019 was a bad idea for the Libs, wot with the obvious oncoming slow down in the economy ruining their economic myths, and the oncoming super heat wave summer destroying the last vestiges of respectability over denialism, then it really does illustrate what completely out of touch imbeciles that are (all the way down).

    If Sep-Dec could only rouse 0.2% growth then you’d have to get evens at least for a negative quarter to be coming this qtr. Maybe Scott Robinson thinks he’s clever because that won’t be announced until a fortnight or so after the election. But treasury will have a damn good idea what’s coming and will have to say so in the PEFO. And that will come out only a fortnight after the budget, so unless he wants to look even more stupid that he already does then the worst of it really has to be in the Budget.

    Downgrades everywhere. And even then no one much will be believing the reality isn’t even worse. Not so much free money to splash around. And then Bill gets to kick them in the balls with his reply just as he has for every other budget reply since 2014.

    The levels of incompetence of this mob really are breathtaking. The drunks in the front bar of most pubs could sort themselves out better than these fools.

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