The window for a May 11 election has passed, which would seem to narrow it down to May 18 or May 25, with the former seeming more likely given concerns expressed in the past about the latter. Some details on where things may or may not stand:
• Roy Morgan has published its weekly face-to-face poll result, normally available only to subscribers, but occasionally sent out in the wild when its proprietor has a point to make. This time, it’s that the government’s position has improved post-budget, with the Labor lead not at 52.5-47.5, from 55-45 last week (it may be observed that the organisation wasn’t duly excited by any of the results that got Labor to that position in the first place). On the primary vote, the Coalition was up 2.5% to 37%, Labor down 1.5% to 35%, the Greens up 1% to 13.5% (Morgan sharing Ipsos’s apparent skew to the Greens) and One Nation up half a point to 4%. The poll was conducted on the weekend from a face-to-face sample of 829 respondents.
• Michael Koziol of the Sydney Morning Herald reported on the weekend of Liberal polling that was “diabolically bad” for Tony Abbott in Warringah. Abbott’s primary vote is said to be down 12% on his 51.6% in 2016, which would indeed leave him a fair way short of competitive. Nonetheless, Liberal sources quoted by Koziol were optimistic Abbott would hang on, in part because of “a $1 million war chest from fundraising and his Advance Australia lobby group allies”. Whether that confidence remains intact now they have had a look at how Advance Australia plans on spending that money is not yet known.
• Other than that, the Liberals appear upbeat about their prospects in New South Wales. The Sydney Morning Herald reports optimism Kerryn Phelps’s win in Wentworth will prove to have been a one-off, now that voters there have vented their spleen about the removal of Malcolm Turnbull. Furthermore, the Sydney Morning Herald report says the Liberals believe they are in front in Lindsay – a claim that is both corroborated by Labor sources, and fleshed out in a report yesterday by Andrew Clennell of The Australian, which says the party’s polling credits them with a lead of 53-47. Clennell’s Liberal sources were particularly bullish, claiming leads in Dobell – on which Koziol’s source was more circumspect – and also to have the lead in their existing seats of Reid, Gilmore and Robertson. A Nationals source cited in Clennell’s report believes the party to be “marginally ahead” in their Mid North Coast seat of Page.
• Nonetheless, Labor is reportedly hopeful of maintaining the status quo in New South Wales, considering that Gilmore or Reid might balance a loss in Lindsay (apparently not rating a mention is Banks, which I for one would have thought vulnerable). Beyond New South Wales, Labor “believes it will win at least nine – and probably more – elsewhere”. Ben Packham of The Australian reported on the week end that Labor feels too secure in Victoria to devote resources to any of its own seats, and will target five held by the Coalition with “full field” campaigns: Dunkley, Corangamite, La Trobe, Chisholm and Deakin.
• The Australian reports Nick Xenophon’s Centre Alliance will only field candidates in Mayo, which is held for the party by Rebekha Sharkie, along with Grey and Barker, where they have respectively endorsed Andrea Broadfoot and Kelly Gladigau. The party’s predecessor, the Nick Xenophon Team, polled 21.3% across South Australia in 2016, and finished second in Grey, Barker and Port Adelaide (the latter now abolished).
• Jamie Walker of The Australian notes that Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, which has endorsed candidates in more seats than any party other than Labor, has nonetheless left open its Queensland Senate ticket and the Townsville-based seat of Herbert. Palmer earlier maintained he would run in Herbert, but few now expect that to happen, given the certainty he would fail there.
• There’s a redistribution in train in the Northern Territory, which Ben Raue at The Tally Room is on top of if you’re interested.
Cud Chewer @ #381 Wednesday, April 10th, 2019 – 3:44 pm
https://junkee.com/kristina-keneally-electric-cars/200839
“Gareth says:
Wednesday, April 10, 2019 at 3:58 pm
Payroll software glitches never seem to overpay anyone.”
———————————————-
Qld Health employees were one case. Having to pay it back caused a lot trouble for many.
Upgrading from fttn is not easy. Most of the work done to upgrade already will need to be redone. This is the dilemma for every future government. This is what this government has done to us.
Late Riser @ #394 Wednesday, April 10th, 2019 – 4:07 pm
Depends what they mean by:
I take that to mean that for smaller numbers the algorithm doesn’t work.
If “very big numbers” means “numbers with on the order of a billion digits”, then it’s neither here nor there for current encryption techniques which tend to use keys which have not more than a few thousand digits (when expressed as a decimal number…or even in binary). Those values would be too small to work with the algorithm (presumably). And even if not, what you want is a fast way to factor large numbers, not multiply them together to make an even larger number.
Can the algorithm perform division if you run it in reverse?
FTTN doesn’t really have an upgrade path, as all the hardware will be thrown away just like ADSL, the fibre is the only thing retained.
FTTC maybe too little too late once that gets rolled out to most people.
So FTTH is still probably the best long term solution.
Either way it will require rolling out load more fibre, which is what should have happened in the first place.
Upgrading from fttn is not easy. Most of the work done to upgrade already will need to be redone. This is the dilemma for every future government. This is what this government has done to us.
_____
An infrastructural deficit no less!
The revelations of Shorten’s attendance at the Huang Wedding and his lunch after the $55,000 donation to the ALP cancel out the Dutton sledge but expose the ABC as a partisan player for ignoring those events in their reporting.
Kate @ #319 Wednesday, April 10th, 2019 – 12:10 pm
L/NP door knockers? The Red Shirts knocked on many more doors last weekend than the L/NP are going to manage during the entire election campaign.
And that’s really not how door knocking works, Dean Smith is talking out of his backside.
Roger
I get that it won’t be easy. The only question I have is it faster to go FTTC for FTTN areas than straight to Fibre?
I am thinking mainly of the LNP using the whole dig a trench to your house combined with the Asbestos problem. Either way it’s going to cost more than going to FTTP from scratch.
From the Guardian blog:
Shorten: “We have made it very clear about donations. The issue here is that it’s not me saying that Mr Morrison is wiping this under the carpet, it’s Malcolm Turnbull.”
This is the point, isn’t it. Division from within the Liberal Party, freshly exposed.
@Roger
Move to more direct FTTP, rather than FTTP.
Our cousins already going to 10gb any slower we go we will hurt 5x economically
Gareth @ #388 Wednesday, April 10th, 2019 – 1:58 pm
I’m a CPA. I can assure you that they do.
Bucephalus @ #406 Wednesday, April 10th, 2019 – 4:27 pm
Nothing is ‘cancelled out’.
Both major parties clearly make the case for banning political party donations.
Surely the real problem is that current laws apparently allow Australian political parties to accept donations from foreign entities in the first place for some inexplicable reason?
Socrates: “So a car axle loading is eight times less than a truck. The damage is proportional to the fourth power of the axle loading. Hence a single semi damages a road pavement more than 1000 cars.”
I found this one of the most interesting observations in the history of Pollbludger*! Well done. I sort of knew about it (because fourth and higher powers are kind of rare in comparison to cubes and squares, and more common in engineering than in physics), but almost every punter will think: only eight times more damage: that seems like a reasonable tradeoff given the importance of trucks doing deliveries etc.
But the truth—4,000 times—is a completely different story, and in fact so extreme that many people would just not believe it (people have “had enough of experts”, after all). Unfortunately innumeracy is on the rise (perhaps because people no longer need to calculate bills / change in their heads), but is also the major enemy of sound policy. Someone who can find a way to present the truth (x 4096) in terms understandable to the barely numerate will do well. There were about 16 million vehicles in Australia in 2011, 12 million cars and 4 million others. The impact of the 12 million cars = that of 3,000 trucks. There are over 450,000 trucks in Australia, having 150x the impact of all the cars (and 150 is a more “believable” number than 4000, even though they are in this case logically equivalent) and then there’s all the rest of the 4 million non-car vehicles …
*With the obvious exceptions, viz the inventions of the terms “negging” and “libling”
Charles @ #409 Wednesday, April 10th, 2019 – 4:32 pm
The point is that donors have corrupted the major parties to an unacceptable level.
Our parliament has be bought by big donors. The public, we voters, have lost control.
Toyota distances itself from Liberal ads falsely claiming Labor wants to tax cars
The ads use Facebook functionality to target users with an interest in particular car brands, including Toyota Hilux utes
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/apr/10/liberal-party-facebook-ads-falsely-claim-labor-wants-to-tax-cars
Quite clearly, if you don’t want your parliament controlled by big local and foreign donors, find a good progressive local independent to vote for.
Charles, there isn’t division in the LNP. Turnbull is hell bent on ensuring the LNP lose, just as he did in the by-election for Wentworth.
I have been overpaid a couple of times. It is real pain in the arse when you don’t realise it and they subsequently adjust following pays.
a r
Sort of where I was going too. How small a number can it work with? If you can increase multiplication speed by a factor of 2.5 million you could presumably brute force multiply a bunch of smaller numbers along the way to factoring the bigger one. And you could first make the not quite big enough number big enough by multiplying it be something you already know. ??
Division is interesting. Is there way to create the numerical inverse (1/x from x)? My guess though is this algorithm is for whole numbers, so 1/x isn’t really the way to go.
I am reminded of the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm, I don’t know why, but the Inverse FFT was similar to the FFT algorithm. I think. (It was decades ago.) Maybe there is an inverse multiplication.
It’s interesting.
Is changing from 7% to 22%, without explanation, in the margin of error?
Asking for a friend.
Frydenberg looks ridiculous as government gets into a pickle
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg joined the ranks of Springfield’s Police Chief Wiggum of the Simpsons, and South Park’s Officer Barbrady, in his Q&A performance this week, adhering to the mantra: “Move along, nothing to see here.”
Frydenberg ducked a direct answer to almost every question. He looked ridiculous claiming that “we are back in the black” this financial year when we clearly are still in deficit and the wafer-thin surplus in 2019/20 is only a forecast. His unwillingness to admit the extent to which our national debt had increased under the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison governments was comical.
The government’s economic narrative that “the good times are rolling on” is not resonating with the lived experience of an increasing majority of voters, who are struggling, day in, day out, to meet the seemingly ever increasing costs of living, while their wages are flatlining, their debt is at record levels, they have run down their savings, and their house prices are falling.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/frydenberg-looks-ridiculous-as-government-gets-into-a-pickle-20190410-p51cpv.html
nath
“KK was very amusing and she’s a star in front of the camera. Although I find it a little hard to be objective about her as she gets my pulse racing and stirs something deep inside me.”
I’ve met KK in person – she used to be my state local member. To my ears, she also has a mellifluous accent, very similar to my better half (like KK, a Yank who immigrated to Oz).
Bennelong Lurker
I heard that interview this morning. It was chilling.
https://abcmedia.akamaized.net/rn/podcast/2019/04/bst_20190410_0752.mp3
Alexander the Great’s horse was named Bucephalus – he was scared of his own shadow.
I met KK last Saturday night with a couple of nice photos to go with it. A fabulous speaker, and drop dead gorgeous.
Late Riser:
No impact. The Schönhage-Strassen algorithm dates back to the 70s and the new algorithm is a slight improvement on that, but the time complexity of it was already known to be the theoretical lower bound. And multiplication isn’t the crucial problem for breaking encryption, anyway.
Encryption libraries didn’t even use the previously-known best algorithm – they tend to use Karatsuba multiplication – because practical implementations of it aren’t an improvement until you get to numbers much larger than are used in that environment.
It’s an interesting result, one more neat brick in the wall of human knowledge.
Note to WB (most respectfully), Ladbrokes have LNP out to $5.00, Labor $1.16.
Rex Douglas
Turnbull sledge Dutton and Morrison
guytaur says Wednesday, April 10, 2019 at 4:14 pm
If your node is only a few hundred metres away then upgrading to FTTC might be an option. I would require a card swap in the node.
If your node is more than that distance, and for most people it would be, then their is no upgrade option. It’s all rip and replace.
Every new upgrade to DSL technology requires shorter lengths of copper. G.fast is the same. So for most households on a node it’s a case of replacing the copper with fibre up to the front of their property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.fast
The advantage of FTTC (or FTTdp or FTTF) is that it doesn’t require running fibre from the street into the premises. That can be half the cost of deploying FTTP. It’s also possible to go back later and replace that last bit of copper with fibre. You don’t have to throw anything away except the electronics, and you can make use of the fibre that’s been deployed up to the distribution point.
At the time the government started deploying FTTN, FTTC technologies were still in the development phase. However, Blind Freddy could have told you that FTTN was a dead end and wide spread deployment a waste of money.
BK
“An infrastructural deficit no less!”
That is pretty much it. Fibre to the premise would have left us with an asset that would be upgradeable for decades, and therefore payed for itself many times over. Fibre to the node will be redundant in a few years and either be replaced almost completely, so effectively discarded, or we will live on in a digital backwater, paying for the foolishness.
Advised again this afternoon, that there is no talk of a date for a HoR election in May. But there is talk of the Half Senate election and the preparations for same.
If there is a May election proposal it is the best keep secret in the place that leaks the most.
Time will tell.
OK. Thanks caf. I’ll file it away. 🙂
If there is one leader who deserves the sack it is Morrison.
He is as cack-headed as Trump. Reckons that Shorten is going to steal people’s utes, weekends and set their houses on fire. What sort of fuckwit says those things?
Plus he pours beer on his own head.
What sort of fuckwit wastes beer like that?
The Australian voters will take care of Morrison.
After Morrison, the next leader to go just has to be Sniper DiNatale.
He has knocked the Greens vote back by a third.
He has droves of MPs losing their seats, walking out in disgust, or knifing each other in eye-grouging pre-selection battles.
His on ground achievements: zip; de nada; nuffink.
His big ticket WOW item for the 2019 Federal election: a UBI.
Estimated cost: 20,000,000 adults @ $20,000 per annum = $400 billion a year. This is comfortably more than any possible Greens wet dream about revenue and would therefore leave no funding for public hospitals, schools, transport, housing or the environment.
What sort of fool comes up with a policy that completely drains the coffers and then orders other Parties to spend more on everything from marmalade to chocolate biscuits?
The reason that Morrison is so opposed to EVs is that he has a better solution in mind!
Noted. Although I observe they have the Coalition out, but not Labor in. Meaning either that they’re allowing for the possibility that a third party might win the election (or perhaps it leading to some manner of constitutional crisis that prevents a government being “sworn in”, as per the terms of the bet), or they’ve decided to squeeze more money from the market.
@Red 3
The voters are going to be seriously p****** off if a half senate is called in May and a House of Representatives election is held in November.
All the chatter in Canberra is for tomorrow
Morrison said clearly, and more than once presumably, that the election would be called in April and held in May.
As far as lying goes, not calling a general election now would be up there.
shellbell @ #439 Wednesday, April 10th, 2019 – 5:34 pm
Election date versus last day to call it, 33 days prior.
May-11 … April-08 (too late)
May-18 … April-15 (5 days to go)
May-25 … April-22 (12 days to go)
But which election would be called in April for May? Has anyone asked that question?
The next election will be held on 2rd November 2019 and the Abbott and Turnbull and Morrison government will be returned with a big majority and our great country will be still in save hands..
God help us if the ALP win that election as our borders will be opened up again and the budget will be back in the red in no time…..
Mirrors turn the world inside out.
C@tmomma @ #440 Wednesday, April 10th, 2019 – 5:44 pm
The Libs will be declaring they can’t win a HOR election atm by calling a Half Senate Election.
The point is it’s totally within his rights to do so and Labor people should just accept the reality without anger.
The best thing Labor can do is watch the Libs tear themselves apart over the coming months and continue to present a calm, reasoned ready for Government face.
“Andrew Earlwood
On your NBN post at 2:59 pm.
If no one has mentioned it. Upgrade path for those on FTTN. FTTC then later FTTP.
Unless FTTC and FTTP tech is totally incompatible at the street level.”
I’m not sure that’s the viable upgrade path.
I think when the nbn is finally forced to abandon FTTN when the node boxes need replacing (they have an expected lifespan of around 8 years I beleive) that the obvious choice will be to run cable all the way to the premises. So perhaps using the 10 years from 2020 will be sufficient to shift the 5 million odd FTTN connections over to FTTP. Dunno.
I expect the other upgrade path will be to convert the FTTC customers over to FTTP progressively, probably in the 5 years or so from 2020.
Of course, us poor saps stuck with the ‘new’ HFC cabling (just because we were in the old Optus catchment) can go and take a flying jump.
Tristo says:
Wednesday, April 10, 2019 at 5:22 pm
@Red 3
The voters are going to be seriously p****** off if a half senate is called in May and a House of Representatives election is held in November.
_________________________________
How can they afford to run TWO federal election campaigns in 9 months?
No suggestion libs did not have enough dough to run NSW election
I’ve just watched Chris Bowen’s NPC budget in reply speech, and as usual was excellent. IMO he is an impressive performer. I honestly don’t understand the criticism. The Libs don’t like him cos they know he’s good. He also made the point that a Fin Review journo has written that the economic team that backs him is the most credentialed in Labor’s history.
https://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/national-press-club-address/
This month is the best, probably only, good month for economic news and an apparent budget surplus. It will all turn to custard soon enough, just like Swannies projected surplus in 2012. There is no way ScoMo will miss that opportunity. Unlike political dunces Swan and Gillard, who squandered the brief ray of economic sunshine contained in the 2012 budget because of their ‘need’ to bed down the Greens Carbon Tax. Gillard should have set herself up to rush to the polls days after the 2012 budget. Instead she was caught managing one Faustian political pact, come clusterfuck after another.
ps. Guytaur: save yourself the time of replying. Let me be clear – I supported the carbon scheme as policy, and I don’t actually think that budget surpluses are necessary economic outcomes, at least not all the time. This post is about the political outcomes.
Thanks for the link yabba 🙂