Essential Research leadership polling

The second set of leadership ratings since the election is featured in the latest release from Essential Research, which may also offer a hint of how it plans to respond to the great pollster failure.

The fortnightly Essential Research release is the second since the election to encompass the monthly leadership ratings. These offer positive signs for Anthony Albanese, who is up four from his debut on approval to 39% and down one on disapproval to 24%, while Scott Morrison is slightly improved in net terms, with approval steady on 48% and disapproval down two to 34%. Morrison’s lead as preferred prime minister is effectively unchanged, shifting from 43-25 to 44-26. The poll also features a series of questions on the ban on tourists climbing Uluru, which 44% support and 30% oppose, and 69% professing awareness of the issue.

Of particular interest in this release is the revelation that Essential is inquiring about respondents’ income, which appears to be a new development. The only detail provided in the polling results is that Morrison has 59% approval among higher income earners, but the appendices go to the trouble of telling us that Essential has set three income cohorts for its surveys: low (below $52,000), high (above $104,000) and medium (in between).

I suspect this means Essential’s response to the pollster failure will be to start using income to weight its results. This is a departure from the Australian industry norm of weighting only by geography, gender and age, and would also seem to be a bit unusual internationally. An American pollster noted last year the practice had fallen out of favour there due to the high non-response rate to questions on personal income. The preference is to instead weight to other factors which themselves correlate with income, notably education and, particularly in Britain, social class.

The poll was conducted Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1091. In the Guardian report accompanying the poll, the elephant in the room was addressed thus:

There has been controversy post-election about the reliability of opinion polling because none of the major surveys – Newspoll, Ipsos, Galaxy or Essential – correctly predicted a Coalition win on 18 May, projecting Labor in front on a two-party preferred vote of 51-49 and 52-48. The lack of precision in the polling has prompted public reflection at Essential, as has been flagged by its executive director, Peter Lewis. Guardian Australia is not currently publishing measurements of primary votes or a two-party preferred calculation, but is continuing to publish survey results of responses to questions about the leaders and policy issues.

Also in The Guardian today are results from a separate Essential Research poll, this one for Digital Rights Watch concerning recent police raids on journalists. In response to a question noting raids on “the offices and homes of News Corp and ABC journalists who reported on national security issues”, 40% said they were very concerned, 34% slightly concerned and 26% not concerned. Similar results were produced on questions relating to metadata and police powers to break into online communications systems. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1089.

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.

819 comments on “Essential Research leadership polling”

Comments Page 13 of 17
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  1. Looks like the good guys (supported by the industry bean counters) have a win over the bad guys.

    Automakers, Rejecting Trump Pollution Rule, Strike a Deal With California

    Four of the world’s largest automakers struck a deal with the nation’s largest auto market to reduce tailpipe pollution.

    The move is a blow to the Trump administration, which is preparing to roll back national vehicle pollution standards and revoke states’ rights to set their own such rules.

    (NYT headline)

  2. Tricot @4:35

    “It was not until some friends came over from Qld (so-say Labor voters) who told me the “The Bill we can’t afford” jibe made sense to them so they voted for Morrison. When I called them on it, they claimed they still supported Labor but not with a “high spending leader like Bill Shorten”. Bloody hell, where do you go from there?”

    Your friends believed what was being blared out on all sides by the Government and the Noise Machine. The only thing wrong with the economic management of Rudd, Gillard, Swan et al was that they let themselves be sucked into promising a surplus. As for Bill Shorten, he had a plan which paid for all spending initiatives. You never see a “Liberal” do that.

    In the 1995 NSW State election, NSW Labor Opposition Leader Bob Carr relentlessly attacked “Griener waste and mismanagement”, referred to the then Liberal Premier Nick Griener, who actually wasn’t bad for a Liberal. But recent Coalition Federal Governments have been wasteful, incompetent, mendacious, nepotistic, disdainful of due process and almost certainly corrupt in pockets. I say go on the attack – at every opportunity. On the floor of Parliament. Old media. Social media. Work with unions (as they did with “Your Rights at Work”), maybe activist groups like GetUp. Labor had to do it with a hand tied behind their back. They don’t have a Noise Machine like the bad guys, but they have to do.

  3. “One-off payments to low-income households are far more responsible than permanently lowering income tax rates.”

    That’s one view. If you actually tripped over a low-income family – like my daughter’s family (single income $85k pa, 3 kids under 10, one with a permanent disability) – you’d realise that ongoing tax relief and assistance is required. She’s lucky to have the Bank of Andrew to bail her out. Many in her cohort do not have such a luxury.

  6. Mexicanbeemer @ #600 Friday, July 26th, 2019 – 5:36 pm

    Boerwar
    The headline cost is bad enough and that $7b would be before you try administrating it.

    Forgetting the cost, the card is unnecessary as the state can already impose administration orders on people that are unable to manage their own financial affairs.

    Perhaps there is a better way of dehumanizing people short of torture or execution.
    If such there be then the current Gummint will have the process ready to roll any day now.
    Only one detail is mandatory – the process must be privatised and a really good earner except for those whom it purports to benefit.

    Goodnight all.📺💤💤

  7. Shellbell “Greiner resigned in 1992 after ICAC”

    You are right. I was thinking of the 1991 NSW election, when Griener was still Premier. The election returned the Coalition for a second (and last) term, but it was unexpectedly close.

  8. The Cashless Welfare card is all part of the Coalition’s goal to make the experience of being unemployed as close as practicable to something like being in a 19th century workhouse.

  9. The Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) is important because it is THE reason why policymakers don’t expand the size of the public sector until unemployment is brought down to 1 or 2 percent and underemployment is brought down to zero. They could do this, but they don’t because they wrongly believe that it would be inflationary to do so. There is no empirical support for this concept and it is a crime against humanity to deliberately keep total labour underutilization at 14 percent because of an unverified and illogical guess that bringing it down to 1 or 2 percent would be inflationary. The sensible course of action is to use expansionary fiscal policy to bring labour underutilization down as low as possible, and if inflation starts to get too high you can stop the expansion.

  10. mikehilliard @ #584 Friday, July 26th, 2019 – 4:47 pm

    Monbiot

    “Today corporate power is overlain by – and mutating into – oligarchic power.

    What the oligarchs want is not the same as what the old corporations wanted. In the words of their favoured theorist, Steve Bannon, they seek the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. Chaos is the profit multiplier for the disaster capitalism on which the new billionaires thrive. Every rupture is used to seize more of the assets on which our lives depend. The chaos of an undeliverable Brexit, the repeated meltdowns and shutdowns of government under Trump: these are the kind of deconstructions Bannon foresaw. As institutions, rules and democratic oversight implode, the oligarchs extend their wealth and power at our expense.

    The killer clowns offer the oligarchs something else too: distraction and deflection. While the kleptocrats fleece us, we are urged to look elsewhere. We are mesmerised by buffoons who encourage us to channel the anger that should be reserved for billionaires towards immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, people of colour and other imaginary enemies and customary scapegoats. Just as it was in the 1930s, the new demagoguery is a con, a revolt against the impacts of capital, financed by capitalists.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/26/trump-johnson-nationalists-billionaire-oligarchs

    Just brilliant how Monbiot, when he lists the present crop of buffoonish world leaders, has Morrison (yes, he gets a mention) sandwiched between Bolsonaro and Duterte.

  12. Nicholas says:
    Friday, July 26, 2019 at 6:32 pm
    The Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) is important because it is THE reason why policymakers don’t expand the size of the public sector until unemployment is brought down to 1 or 2 percent and underemployment is brought down to zero. They could do this, but they don’t because they wrongly believe that it would be inflationary to do so. There is no empirical support for this concept and it is a crime against humanity to deliberately keep total labour underutilization at 14 percent because of an unverified and illogical guess that bringing it down to 1 or 2 percent would be inflationary. The sensible course of action is to use expansionary fiscal policy to bring labour under-utilisation down as low as possible, and if inflation starts to get too high you can stop the expansion.

    Exactly right.

    NAIRU is an algorithm for the repression of labour.

  13. BW

    Allianz Stadium is the mother of all Coalition cock ups.

    Remind me again why we’re paying for this vanity project. Is it to shut up the Parrot?

  16. [‘On Wednesday Peter Dutton, the federal home affairs minister, told Sky News “there are consequences” for breaches of safeguards, such as internal sanctions and civil penalties if police are sued.’]

    As if this young man cares a rats ‘for breaches of safeguards’. Make no mistake, Dutton’s a first-class prick, who’d take every opportunity to subvert the division betwixt the executive, the judiciary – a very unequal division. Labor: get out of the trenches.

    This man attempts to argue that a retired judge will have oversight of his decisions. Bullshit. As soon as a decision doesn’t meet with his approval, he’ll commission anor.

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/26/act-police-admit-unlawfully-accessed-metadata-more-than-3000-times

  17. Greens senator Rachel Siewert is to make a last-ditch attempt to prevent a trial of the cashless welfare card, saying people remain deeply concerned about the process.

    Doughty little Rachel presses on. And doughty little Pegasus posts of her doughty efforts.

    Neither of them can count though it seems. The Senate numbers are more against The Greens and their ideas than in the last Senate. And The Greens voted with Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition government to make it this way. Well they shouldn’t be surprised if the Coalition doesn’t give a rat’s about what they want now. 😐

  18. “NAIRU is an algorithm for the repression of labour.”

    Van Badham – Having a constant pool of unemployed workers is deliberate policy

    The purpose is to maintain an economy for the benefit of the rich under the pretext of fighting inflation

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/26/having-a-constant-pool-of-unemployed-workers-is-deliberate-policy

    “Under the dissembling, econobabbly name of the “non-accelerated inflation rate of unemployment” – or Nairu – structurally obliging a percentage of work-capable Australians into joblessness has been the framework of government policy for the 40 years since Australia began its serious neoliberal shift under prime ministership of Liberal Malcolm Fraser.

    Like most of the economic ideas driving misery and inequality, the Nairu concept hails from the work of the economist Milton Friedman.
    :::
    Ever since, policymakers have engaged Nairu and employment policy as orthodoxy, activist neoliberals eager to insist that compelled unemployment is but a natural state of economic affairs from which there can be no deviation. There can. There has been before. Economic systems are a reflection of political priorities – and if we as a society believe that every citizen has a right to a dignified living and secure work, it is time to exert political pressure to rebuild or economies in that image.”

  19. C@tmomma @ #617 Friday, July 26th, 2019 – 7:35 pm

    Greens senator Rachel Siewert is to make a last-ditch attempt to prevent a trial of the cashless welfare card, saying people remain deeply concerned about the process.

    Doughty little Rachel presses on. And doughty little Pegasus posts of her doughty efforts.

    Neither of them can count though it seems. The Senate numbers are more against The Greens and their ideas than in the last Senate. And The Greens voted with Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition government to make it this way. Well they shouldn’t be surprised if the Coalition doesn’t give a rat’s about what they want now. 😐

    Just remind me how many senate seats Labor lost at the 2019 election compared to the Greens …?

  21. “Allianz Stadium is the mother of all Coalition cock ups.”

    It’s a supreme example of what I was talking about in my post @5:40PM. A perfectly good piece of infrastructure, a bit over 20 years old, is to be pulled down and rebuilt at a cost of hundreds of millions to benefit sectional interests. Imagine the screams if Labor tried this, not that they would. And now the project makes a dog’s breakfast look like a paradigm of good organisation.

    NSW Labor should attack attack attack.

  22. Siewart is right to ruthlessly condemn Morrison and the Coalition for the cashless ‘welfare’ card.

    And Greens supporters should contact Siewart and congratulate her for sticking it to Morrison, Corman, Frydenberg and Porter.
    Well done Senator Siewart!

  23. I’ve noticed of late – no names, no pack drill – that Greens’ supporter’s arguments are losing gravitas. I trust I’m not wrong(?).

  27. I see, shellbell, you’re still posting randomly. In point of fact, most times I don’t get your point, though I’m sure others do(?).

  33. Meanwhile in Queensland a reasonably good Labor Government is being destroyed by the incredible selfishness of Jackie Trad in stringing out an integrity crisis rather than immediately resigning.

  35. Historyintime @ #633 Friday, July 26th, 2019 – 8:59 pm

    Meanwhile in Queensland a reasonably good Labor Government is being destroyed by the incredible selfishness of Jackie Trad in stringing out an integrity crisis rather than immediately resigning.

    I’ll still vote Labor anyways. Not enough other people will. 🙁

  39. Though I will admit, when Queenslanders look south and see what the Taylor family gets up to they would be tempted to tough it out.

  40. C@tmomma says:
    Friday, July 26, 2019 at 9:22 pm
    ___________________
    Your very jolly tonight I observe…

  42. Lars Von Trier @ #640 Friday, July 26th, 2019 – 9:27 pm

    C@tmomma says:
    Friday, July 26, 2019 at 9:22 pm
    ___________________
    Your very jolly tonight I observe…

    No, I haven’t been drinking, if that’s what you are trying to get at, again. I have had an enjoyable evening watching reruns of The X Files with my son, on Viceland, on the other hand.

  43. On my way down Martin Place this evening, a swarm of tuxedoed men in squadrons passed me by. Then another, and another – with the occasional glammed up gal, the females being outnumbered 5 to 1. All making a bee-line up to the John Howard 80th birthday do at the Australian Club in Macquarie St.

    The penguin-suited missed an excellent performance of Handel’s Coronation Anthems by the Brandenburg Orchestra tonight – 20 in the orchestra and 20 in the choir. Interestingly, Zadok the Priest was written by Handel for George II’s coronation in 1727 – and has been performed at every coronation since…

    Zadok the priest
    And Nathan the prophet
    Anointed Solomon king
    And all the people
    Rejoiced, rejoiced, rejoiced

  47. “One for Anglophiles – Zadok the Priest, the Coronation anthem. Features portraits of every Monarch of England / UK from William I to Elizabeth II, 953 years. The good, the bad and the incompetent. This republican enjoyed it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HG2UMO6rZd4”

    I enjoy listening to this whilst watching PJK’s 1993 election victory speech.

    When I am feeling melancholic morose I listen to the Intermezzo From Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni whilst watching his 1996 concession speech. I can’t help but imagine what could have been if my fellow Australians were not so feckless.

    https://youtu.be/ykUCfqvnI9I

  48. “Just remind me how many senate seats Labor lost at the 2019 election compared to the Greens …?”

    That would be a net zero or perhaps one lost I think. Labor still has 18 more senate seats than the feckless 10%ers you feckless Tory wonder.

  49. Andrew @11:31 PM – thank you, beautiful.

    Re 1996, we didn’t realise back then what a disaster Howard’s ascension really was.

    Good night all.

  50. “Re 1996, we didn’t realise back then what a disaster Howard’s ascension really was.”

    I did. A Cassandra.

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