Newspoll: 53-47 to Coalition

The Coalition finally records an opinion poll lead, as Newspoll breaks the post-election ice.

The ten-week silence of Newspoll – and indeed Australian polling in general, so far as voting intention is concerned – has ended with a result of 53-47 to the Coalition, as reported by The Australian. To this, naturally, must be added the qualification that the pollster never once recorded the newly re-elected government with a lead in the entire three years of the previous parliamentary term. The poll has the Coalition at 44% of the primary vote (41.4% at the election), Labor at 33% (33.3%) and the Greens at 11% (10.4%). The report seems to be saying One Nation is at 3%, which compares with the 3.1% they scored at the election when contesting 59 out of 151 seats.

The leadership ratings have Scott Morrison’s approval at a new high of 51%, up five on the pre-election poll, and down nine on disapproval to 36%. Anthony Albanese’s Newspoll ratings are 39% approval and 36% disapproval, which is a) “the first net positive approval rating for an Opposition leader since 2015”, as noted in the report since Simon Benson, b) the worst Newspoll debut for an Opposition Leader since Andrew Peacock in 1989, as illustrated in this earlier post, and c) the equal lowest uncommitted rating for an Opposition Leader on debut, perhaps mitigating b) a little. Morrison leads 48-31 on preferred prime minister, compared with 47-38 in the pre-election poll, which we can now presume was flattering to Bill Shorten.

No indication at this point as to whether and how Newspoll is doing anything differently. Certainly it looks like business as usual to the extent that the poll was conducted Thursday to Sunday from a sample of 1601, with The Australian’s report trumpeting a 2.4% margin of error that is less than the size of its error at the election.

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.

911 comments on “Newspoll: 53-47 to Coalition”

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  1. Historyintime:

    $130 billion is pretty big. I can’t think of any single Australian Government financial decision with the same consequences.

    The cost from privatising Telstra (after Mr Beazley had structured it in such a way that privatisation didn’t make sense unless it was further restructured prior) is much larger.

    Holding CBA in public hands doesn’t make sense if there are other commercial banks owned privately, so the whole economy cost of not privatising CBA was non-zero.

    Asset trading is just about the last thing that should be government run (if it is subject to any political interference whatsoever). The government interference in the sale of the Telstra asset was large and significant, and highly detrimental over the following decades. There’s no merit in the Commonwealth government trying to make money from asset trading; instead it should try to get public/private allocation right at the start. State governments are in a bit of pickle; this leads them into asset trading, but that’s just a bad consequence of the underlying problem they face (no revenue base).

  2. Historyintime @ #900 Tuesday, July 30th, 2019 – 9:14 pm

    When the CBA was floated at $5.40, who could imagine it would now be $83.

    The merchant bankers who clamoured for its sale, and convinced the government to sell it in the first place.

    That’s nothing though compared to the sale of the old Commonwealth Serums Laboratory (CSL). Sold to the public at $2.30 a share in 1994. Check out what it closed at today:

    https://www.google.com/search?q=csl+share+price+today&rlz=1C1CHMD_en-GBAU545AU558&oq=csl+share+price&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j0l5.15407j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

  3. Oakshott

    Complainant on the stand from Monday after lunch and currently. Probably end early-ish tomorrow. Depends on when cross exam finishes. (It may have ended late this arvo ……. I wasn’t there till very end.

    Then witness evidence …… I think about 7 more. Think it could go into next week, perhaps.

    You may recall the outcry (“special treatment”) when result of 1st Pell trial was under a no-publication order, to protect 2nd trial from contamination.

    That is routine and this non publication had been also applied during this guy’s several trials in last couple of years.

    Don’t know whether I told you but in this case, judge ruled that tendency evidence is admissible (ie his past is not totally insulated from present case as is common practice). Pretty much expected since it is judge only trial and defendant’s history was known by judge and already in his mind; this wouldn’t be so had it been jury trial and maybe tendency evidence would have been probably 100% precluded from their minds.

  4. I shall add that Domingo attended Joan’s final performance with the AO, in awe of her. But that was post the post office incident. I don’t, however, think she was racist? – thinks she was.

  5. Puffy and Lizzie,

    Puffy
    As a distraction, last night on Netflix I watched the last episode, so far, in a series called Travelers. Loosely based on time travellers being sent back to the 21st Century to prevent events which put the human race on to the path to extinction, it tells the stories of the Travelers attempts at changing history. They can only go back as far as the computer age as they need to know the exact time of death of a person so the Traveler, as a consciousness, can move into the ‘host’ immediately after they pass away.

    In one of the last episodes the leader of the team, (they always come in a team of five specialists) was asked about how the human race became under such threat, and why only this time in the 21st was important.

    He said it was only in this time things could be changed. It started with climate change, leading to weather change, starvation, mass migrations, virus and such released from the permafrost and to chaos. Now humans live in domes on yeast-based sludge and endlessly recycled water, (Each traveler who arrives is delighted and amazed by the food, such as a hot-dog or stale doughnut).

    My point is that this is the first direct reference to climate and human extinction I have seen on popular television. It is a good show, interesting script, good production values, good acting and plenty of twists and turns in the story line and good character development.

    Lizzie
    A new development in science fiction? No longer about the wonderful benefits of the future, but more realistic.

    Thanks to both of you for your posts. I will look for Travellers on Netflix.

    Sci Fi is my special subject, and in about 18 months, when I am happy that my current, totally unrelated, project is in a fit state to hand on to others, I will write the book about Sci Fi and what it tells us about the future and our current situation that I have been planning for 20 years.

    One of my concerns has been that most Sci Fi is actually dystopian rather than utopian, by at least a 75% / 25% ratio. I had thought this was unnecessarily gloomy.

    However, I am now reappraising this. At times of great political and technological disruption, wars become more common, and authoritarian / totalitarian rule becomes more likely. Democracy is very fragile, I fear. In the era of machine learning (aka distributing fake news to the people it will influence most) we have seen this with the Brexit / Trump / Bolsanaro / Morrison / Johnson successes.

    The news from the UK and Ireland, where I have spent the past few weeks working in Galway, is bleak. The Tory press in the UK (according to an article I read today in the Irish Independent) is painting Leo Varadkar, the Irish PM, as the villain stopping the good people of England exercising their free choice to leave the EU. I have since confirmed this while watching the BBC in the Bates Motel under the flightpath at Heathrow, where I am staying before the 24 hour trek back to Oz tomorrow. I note that rather than the Irish government, we have a specific person as a villain – someone upon whom to focus hate I guess.

    anyway, the “Machine Learning” disruption is but a small foretaste of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) disruption that will be on us within a decade I suspect.

    Skynet here we come!

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