We’re still yet to have a new poll of federal voting intention after the election, for whatever that may still be worth, but I would imagine Newspoll will be breaking its drought to mark next week’s resumption of parliament. We do, however, have one of the Lowy Institute’s occasional surveys on attitudes to foreign affairs, the results of which are attractively presented on the organisation’s website.
The headline topic of the poll is Sino-American relations, and the results point to a sharp decline in trust towards China, which a clear majority of respondents rated the “world’s leading economic power”. Even clearer majorities, of around three-quarters, believed China was pursuing regional domination, and that Australia should do more to resist its military activities even if it affected our too-close economic relationship.
However, the poll also finds a further decline in trust in the United States, to add to the body-blow it took when Donald Trump was elected. Of particular interest here are the age breakdowns. Whereas there was little to distinguish the age cohorts in their positive view of the US on Obama’s watch, respondents in their youth and early middle-age now take a substantially more negative view than older ones.
Relatedly, the highly negative and worsening view of Trump personally, while evident across all age cohorts, is most pronounced among the young. This carries through to a head-to-head question on whether respondents should prioritise strong relations with the United States or China, with a majority of those aged 18-30 favouring China, and a large majority of the 60-plus cohort favouring the United States.
Beyond that, the survey offers no end of interesting material:
• Respondents were asked about their satisfaction with democracy – which, one often reads, is in freefall throughout the western world, particularly among the young. However, the Lowy Institute’s yearly tracking of this question going back to 2012 doesn’t show any such thing. If anything, there seems to be a slight trend in favour of the response that “democracy is preferable to any other kind of government”, which is up three on last year at 65%. While the young are less sold on this notion than the old, there has been a solid improving trend among the 18-to-30 cohort, with this year’s result up six on last year’s to 55%, a new high over the course of the series.
• Evaluations were sought on a limited sample of foreign leaders, specifically concerning whether they could be trusted in world affairs. Donald Trump ranked down alongside Vladimir Putin, while Jacinda Ardern recorded near-unanimous acclaim, with 88% expressing either a lot of or some confidence. New Zealand was rated “Australia’s best friend” out of six available options by 59%, up from six since 2017.
• Brexit was rated a bad thing for the United Kingdom by 62%, a bad thing for the European Union by 70%, and a bad thing for the West in general by 58%. The UK’s rating on a “feelings thermometer” fell six points, to 76.
• Concern about climate change maintained an upward trajectory, with 61% favouring action “even if this involves significant costs”. The long-range trend on this question going back to 2006 suggests climate change is less of a problem when Labor are in office.
• Views on immigration were less negative than last year, after a significant hardening of opinion between 2014 and 2018. However, the immigration rate was still held to be too high by 48% of all respondents, and a very large majority of older ones.
The survey was conducted online and by telephone from March 12 to 25 from a sample of 2130.
The second part of today’s lesson relates to Senate preference flows, from which we can obtain no end of information thanks to the Australian Electoral Commission’s publication of the data files containing the preference order for every single ballot paper. By contrast, we’re still waiting on the two-party preference splits the AEC eventually publishes for each party in the House of Representatives. There will be a lot of analysis of this information here over the coming weeks, but for starters I offer the following:
This shows, from left to right, the rate of voters’ adherence to their favoured party’s how-to-vote-card; the rate at which minor party voters’ preference orders favoured Labor over the Coalition or vice-versa, or neither in the event that they did not number either party (“two-party”); and a similar three-way measure that throws the Greens into the mix (“three-party”).
This shows that United Australia Party voters heavily favoured the Coalition over Labor, but not because they were following the party’s how-to-vote cards, a course followed by around 0.1% of the total electorate. One Nation preferences were only slightly less favourable to the Coalition, and even fewer of the party’s voters followed the card. Since One Nation’s preferences in the lower house split almost evenly in 2016, out of the 15 seats where they ran, it seems safe to assume a shift in One Nation preferences accounted for a substantial chunk of the two-party swing to the Coalition. I will calculate Senate preference flows from 2016 for comparison over the next few days.
Been reading about the dem candidates and their hand raising for medicare for all.
Harris has had to explain her stance today – it seems completely reasonable to me. She is all for Medicare for all…. who want it. Otherwise you can keep your private insurance for ‘supplemental’ cover.
If she hones this further it is a winning policy. Something along the lines of what Medicare should be.
briefly
Seriously, go away until you can come up with something that doesn’t end with ‘We’re all f*cked”.
Assume we know that, and work from there.
What we saw in the last election wasn’t big and bold, it was small and timid.
Shirley the point is to be big but not make it seem bold. Make the case that the status quo is scary and that the big changes needed are far less scary – almost humdrum.
It is a shame that such otherwise worthy changes were sold by people who were not quite up to the challenge of selling it in a hostile media environment and the fearmongering lies of the moral vacuum Coalition.
This is an interesting overview on Brexit, political privilege and the way Conservatives hoodwink the working class into believing they are on the same side as a means to secure their vote. Much is applicable in Australia:
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/boris,-brexit-and-the-british-ruling-class/11261198
Simon² Katich® @ #904 Saturday, June 29th, 2019 – 10:05 am
Get used to the moral vacuum Coalition, it seems half the country don’t mind a bit of moral vacuity. This is a dumb little country currently led by a rat cunning fck.
It ain’t gonna end any time soon.
WeWantPaul @ #903 Saturday, June 29th, 2019 – 9:54 am
Small and timid.
It’s the Labor way.
Thanks Kimbo.
zoomster @ #902 Saturday, June 29th, 2019 – 9:53 am
Leave Briefo alone. At least his posts are based on reality.
We ride to victory on the morrow!
And then we’re all fcked.
How about that.
Morrison is toast!
Toast I tells ya!
Sweet Jesus, I’ve got my mojo back!!!
Zoom…my comment was originally connected to the story about the record high temps in France and elsewhere in Europe.
I think my comment was entirely apt.
The environmental, social and economic impacts of climate change are real. We have to deal with them. The institutional and political barriers to doing this are absolutely formidable. Until we recognise all this, we will get nowhere, as the recent election has just demonstrated.
I’m going to continue to tell it like it is.
Lizzie & Catmomma
Excellent work although I disagree with a few interpretations.
Regards
B
Good to see you are home BK. And there is some nice new bitumen and kerbing in town for your return. And pram ramps!
__
Not yet SK. Still waiting for the doctor to come in and discharge me!
briefly
I’m not saying that you’re not telling it like it is. I’m saying you can assume we know that, and not keep repeating it.
However, I do know where you’re coming from. My deepest depressions – and I’m a cheery person – have always been immediately after an election campaign, and that was when I went into them knowing we were going to lose!
You’re having the opposite effect to your intention – you’re not spreading a message, you’re turning people off reading your posts.
Labor got the messaging arse about – they focused on how they were going to raise the money, rather than how they were going to spend it. And they were too niggardly with the spending.
I’m told Bowen’s ego got in the way here – he was more focused on having bigger and better surpluses than in what governments should do with money. A little bit of a surplus is fine – but too much of one means you’re either raising too much money or not spending it where it’s needed.
Labor should have focused on more wholesale cash splashes – not ‘we’re going to help with childcare’ which discriminates against stay at home parents, but ‘we’ll ease the costs of raising children’, not ‘we’ll help with cancer patients’ but ‘we’re going to tackle out of pocket expenses in healthcare’, not ‘we’re going to subsidise dental care for pensionsers’ but ‘all public dental waiting lists will be slashed by…’ and so on.
And those should have been the focus. ‘Where’s the money coming from?” should have been left, as is tradition, to five minutes before polling day.
Crabb hosting again. 🙁
Zoom, while on pre-poll duty I had a conversation with the Green. They told me how sincerely they wished Labor would adopt some of their policies…how good it would be.
I said they might like to think so. We might like stronger policies too. But we had to change the Government first. They looked absolutely astonished, as if this could be taken for granted.
Until left-of-centre activists wise up to the fact that we should not expect to win, we will not fight nearly hard enough. The Greens in particular need to know they are destroying the chances of that which they most desire – the election of a reforming government.
They really need to understand that the dysfunction of which they are the authors is killing us.
briefly
The Greens will die off naturally. Once Labor gets its act together – and having joined the party and campaigned for it at a time when we were being told we’d never be in power in either Victoria or federally for generations, I’m not at all pessimistic about this happening -voters won’t have a reason to vote Green.
Victorian Labor’s approach, under Andrews, has been ruthless. We basically don’t talk to them. And their vote is going backwards.
Labor needs an outstanding leader to get back in to government.
Either that or some arcane form of rocket science.
My money is on an outstanding leader.
This brought back many memories of my time in the UK.
I had the misfortune to enter a Walkabout pub twice. Once to discover how shit they were, while the second was to demonstrate this to a mate from home who didn’t believe me. The only thing worse than a Walkabout was a Wetherspoon pub.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/28/uk-australia-refugees-boris-johnson-immigration
mundo says:
Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 11:02 am
What a simplistic way to brush away the issues, call for a messiah.
lizzie @ #857 Saturday, June 29th, 2019 – 7:06 am
I’m confused. The Tesla Model 3 was supposed to be the “affordable” electric car for the average person. It was specifically designed to cost the same as the “average” car sold in the US.
But here in Australia it will cost more than twice the average new car price. More expensive than a Mercedes C class! Really?
Is Elon Musk a really brilliant salesman, or are Australians just exceptionally gullible?
I suppose it could be both 🙁
Barney,
I found Wetherspoon Pubs in the UK to vary significantly. Some were average and some were excellent.
Barney in Makassar @ #919 Saturday, June 29th, 2019 – 11:09 am
You’re right.
Arcane rocket science it is.
Oh, and make Chris Bowen leader. You know it makes sense.
One of the ‘the issues’ is leadership.
Brush that away at your peril.
Oh wait, Prime minister Shorten just made an outstanding speech…..
Player One
Yes, I was confused about the Tesla, too. Luckily it’s not a choice I will have to make.
zoomster
It sounds to me as if your judgement is much better than some in charge of Labor strategy. Why aren’t you more influential? (Don’t answer that. 🙂 )
I have always been a little wary of some egos such as Fitzgibbon and Bowen, who were part of the Ruddstoration.
Perhaps Izzy needs to come up to date (not too modern, just 1946!)
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/29/testing-welfare-recipients-for-drugs-still-on-agenda-coalition-insists?CMP=share_btn_tw
@Confessions
I think Trump knew about the ‘achievements ‘ of Scott Morrison when he was immigration minister, evidenced in this tweet.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1144033134129758208?s=20
So, if I have the boss’s new enforcement regime correct, discussing the P.M’s wife’s lopsided titties would be just fine and dandy, yet telling c@tmomma she is a plebian dipshit for bring them in the first place would be verboten?
On Foxtel right now, Sky News Extra is playing a 70 minutes doco on the Ramsay Centre for Western Studies, and does that just let all the cats out of the bag. At the moment a women is giving a speech which denounces social justice, gender studies, race studies, sociology, humanities, and calls ‘modernity’ a white, western, (by implication) male where a working class woman like her has had the opportunity to be educated and work. Straight white men are blamed for a culture which actually made nations rich, progressive and free. She calls this ‘applied post-modernism.’ She reckons post modernism says that ‘white people are racist and black people cannot be’. (In all my reading I have never read that claim everywhere in any academic writing.)
These wankers have come up with a new term for Social Justice Studies. They call these Grievance Studies.
Anyway you get the idea. Any university hosting this absolute shit should be ashamed of itself.
And Sky is giving free publicity to this as any good Murdoch organ does.
I would suggest you watch it if it is available, in a know-your-enemy way.
Bucephalus says:
Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 11:18 am
I found them very anti-social, especially the no standing and drinking at the bar rule.
In their endeavour to maximise sales, they removed many of the elements that make an English pub such an integral part of the Society.
As someone who worked in the pub industry there, I couldn’t imagine a worse place to work.
lizzie
Chances are they are happy for it not to be passed. It is a handy piece of red meat that can be trotted out at a convenient time and thrown to their base in ‘shout back radio land’.Nothing like a bit of ‘dole bludger’ bashing’ to lift their spirits..
Not Sure says:
Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 11:51 am
Well the dress did seem out of character for her and it would be interesting to see what other female partners wore considering the range of cultures present and whether it was considered appropriate.
This Ramsay Centre for Western Studies is going to be a blot on our academic record. Anyone who pays for a degree in thiscrap does not deserve to get a job anywhere.
Ramsay Centre for Western Studies= IPA,NewsCorp,Liberal Party training centre and finishing school.
Briefly
One thing I notice with Green supporters is each election they seem to believe their vote is on the rise because there are a few more units/apartments in the area and they see young people and assume these two things equal larger green vote. They don’t seem to understand that while younger people might be more open minded but that doesn’t automatically rule out a willingness to vote with their hip pocket and some areas have been popular with young people for years so you will see a turnover of one generation of 20s/30s with the next generation of 20/30s.
Once I watched a video on demographics where a someone studied the case of the Richmond FC and why its venture at Craigieburn in Melbourne’s north with plenty of young families was unsuccessful and the study looked at football club memberships against postcodes and found that as cities grew, one new area was basically coping the area slightly closer to the CBD.
This is something we political watchers would know and it isn’t only a political thing but also impacts other attributes like which football team was popular. So when they researched where were the younger Richmond supporters, they found they were largely in the outer south eastern suburbs near Pakenham instead of Craigieburn in Melbourne’s north. That probably shouldn’t be a surprise considering Richmond’s traditional base was in the Richmond/South Yarra area which if you follow the train network takes you out to Pakenham.
I think the Greens make the mistake of assuming demographics change faster than they really do when electoral change can be slow and often isn’t permanent, take the seat of Dunkley centered on Frankston in Melbourne’s south. The boundary changes helped the ALP but there are booths in that electorate that the ALP won for the first time in something like twenty years, and demographically Frankston is economically better off than it was in the 1980s yet the ALP were to score its best results since then.
I think it was Antony Green once explained it by saying when a political party lost a traditionally safe seat, it would usually come back within two or three election, if it didn’t then it probably wouldn’t. We have seen this with seats like Cooper, Sydney and Grandler. All three seats spent one or two election cycles threatening to go Green but are now back to their traditional safe ALP status and will probably remain so until we see a ALP government seeking a third term and this is the key part, political parties generally lose support for a period and if things go bad for some reason then that period usually extends to about three terms, this is why winning third terms are usually harder because people generally stop hating whoever is in opposition. The last ALP government wasn’t popular and the next election will be at around nine years so based on what seems to happen the ALP should be more competitive next time than this time and when it comes to the Greens, they are currently on the wrong side of the election cycle and how they respond will determine if that cycle turns.
BK
Do we need to enact a rescue?
The SA Chapter stands ready!
PuffyTMD says:
Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 12:04 pm
Surely there’s a clear pathway to a position with the IPA or in a RWFW’s Parliamentary office. 🙂
Tesla is considered a luxury brand in the U.S, and like any new technology it starts off being expensive, also Tesla has to be more expensive because its had a number of supply related issues so at times they have been unable to match demand.
mundo says:
Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 11:02 am
Labor needs an outstanding leader to get back in to government.
Either that or some arcane form of rocket science.
My money is on an outstanding leader.
______________________
Clearly you speak of Jim Chalmers not Chris Bowen. He is a 100% committed to Kevin Rudd too!
SPEERS: I mention that Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard will both be here. This is a bit of a moment, because we haven’t seen the two of them I don’t think in the same room since their fallout. You of course were there through all of that as a staff member. How significant is this? They’re putting that to one side today.
CHALMERS: I think it’s terrific that they’ll both be here today, and both of them are doing amazing work on the campaign trail. I pay tribute to both of them. Kevin’s been doing a lot of stuff in Sydney and Melbourne particularly in our multicultural communities, and Julia as well. In the Labor team, we are united and stable and steady and experienced and ready to deliver a fair go for our country.
SPEERS: Is there some irony in the fact that Bill Shorten did play a hand in the demise of Kevin Rudd and a hand in the demise of Julia Gillard, now here they are helping make him Prime Minister?
CHALMERS: I just don’t see it that way, David.
SPEERS: Of course you don’t!
CHALMERS: No, I think it’s terrific to have former Prime Ministers here. I don’t think Malcolm Turnbull will be at Scott Morrison’s launch necessarily next week.
SPEERS: He won’t.
CHALMERS: It’s good to see that they’re both doing a power of work for the good Labor cause.
SPEERS: Let’s talk about some of the announcements then today. So the front page, one of the papers, Bill Shorten promising a $1500 wage rise. I understand this is actually some modelling of already announced policies. Is he announcing anything further on wages today?
CHALMERS: We’ll have more to say on wages and jobs in Bill’s speech this morning. It’ll be an important contribution. We’ve got some big economic challenges right now. We’ve got productivity flat-lining, we’ve got wages which are stagnant, growth is slowing, people are running down their own savings to pay for the essentials of life, and this Government has more than doubled net debt during the life of their Government. So we’ve got some big challenges. Bill will be talking about those in his launch speech. But the Australian Investment Guarantee, which is the policy that the McKell Institute has modelled, is a really important investment to make sure that businesses invest onshore in Australia in Australian jobs. That will be good for the economy, but it’ll be good for workers too.
SPEERS: On wages, I get that you want to restore the penalty rates for retail, hospitality and pharmacy workers. You want to do more on the minimum wages, there’s no guarantee that will go up. Is there anything more that you can say to ordinary workers out there as to whether wages really will go up under Labor?
CHALMERS: Yes there is and Bill will be saying some more about that in his speech. It would be career-limiting for me to try to steal my boss’s thunder.
This program is described as “Grievance Studies hoaxer and editor of Areo magazine Helen Pluckrose delivers the fourth Ramsay Lecture for 2019′. Apparently they started a project to put ridiculous hoax papers to humanities peer-reviewed journals, seven of which were accepted and published. This is being used as a reason to discount all race, gender, feminist and anything they call ‘grievance studies’ academic areas.
If I was in the audience for the post-lecture questions, the one I would have asked is:
‘You denounce “grievance studies”, but you have just presented one huge grievance. How do you defend the charge of blatant hypocrisy?’
Lars
It always helps if you explain why you’ve copied and pasted slabs of text.
Demand for the Tesla 3 is huge. They are making 1,000 a day. A day!, with back orders in the order of 300,000.
Re pricing:
US35K is Au50k
Add shipping costs, import tariffs and taxes,
and then the various extras according to the way an order is ‘configured’ – battery size, wheels, paint finish, degree of autonomy, eg full self driving.
Mercedes C Class is a toy by comparison.
I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the Israel Folou saga but was quite astounded to read Lizzie’s earlier post that suggested he gets his guidance from the Old Testament and the book of Leviticus in particular. Does he actually support some of the practices apparently endorsed by his deity in the Old Testament? Things like incest & genocide come to mind.
– – What a simplistic way to brush away the issues, call for a messiah. – –
Well, changing the bias in much of the mainstream media and the growing trend of big money influence in social media isnt something that can be fixed in 3 years.
I dont want a messiah. I wouldnt trust one. But a messiah is different to a strong, coherent, engaging leader. He/she doesnt have to be as charismatic as Bill Clinton or Bob Hawke or Whitlam, but a little charisma goes a long way in the difficult environment a progressive or left of centre leader faces.
FWIW… Shorten did OK. And there werent significantly better options considering the backlash that would have occurred with another change in ALP leadership mid election cycle (especially considering the polls were showing ALP ahead). But this cycle is different. Albanese needs to show he can cut through the mountains of detritus that is our media landscape.
Lets form a posse.
The important issues tackled – physicists have worked out how to cook the perfect crepe —
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/no-more-lumps-let-physics-be-your-guide-to-making-the-perfect-crepe/
Barney in Makassar says:
Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 12:03 pm
Not Sure says:
Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 11:51 am
…”Well the dress did seem out of character for her and it would be interesting to see what other female partners wore considering the range of cultures present and whether it was considered appropriate”…
A topic worthy of a several theses I’m sure.
My theory is that she has quite a nice set, asymmetrical or otherwise, but Morrison only let’s her flash ’em to really, really important dignitaries like Trumpie.
Erdogan not so much.
zoomster @ #943 Saturday, June 29th, 2019 – 12:34 pm
It’s obvious he/she has decided, in the way of nath, to troll Jim Chalmers. It’s pathetic, but there you have it.