The latest fortnightly Essential Research poll again comes up empty on voting intention, but it does offer the pollster’s third set of leadership ratings since the election. As with Newspoll, these record a drop in Scott Morrison’s net approval rating, owing to a three point rise in disapproval to 37%, while his approval holds steady at 48%. However, Essential parts company with Newspoll in finding Anthony Albanese up on disapproval as well, by five points to 29%, with approval down one to 38%. Morrison’s lead as preferred prime minister narrows slightly, from 44-26 to 44-28.
Further questions suggest the public leans positive on most aspects of the “influence of the United States of America” (defence, trade, cultural and business), excepting a neutral result (42% positive, 40% negative) for influence on Australian politics. The same exercise for China finds positive results for trade, neutral results for culture and business, and negative ones for defence and politics. Asked which of the two we would most benefit from strengthening ties with, 38% of respondents favoured the US and 28% China.
The small sample of respondents from New South Wales were also asked about the proposed removal of abortion from the criminal code, which was supported by an overwhelming 71% compared with 17% opposed. The poll has a sample of 1096 and was conducted online from Thursday to Sunday.
Note also the post below this one, being the latest Brexit update from Adrian Beaumont.
Pegasus says:
Sunday, August 25, 2019 at 1:14 pm
The Greens Party – a political party in its own right with its own policy agenda that it stands up for and advocates for. Just like Labor, just like the Liberals, just like the Nationals, just like every other minor and micro party.
I understand why supporters and members of the political duopoly continue to be in denial about this and believe Australia ought to be a two-party state.
I’m not in denial. Lol. I can see very clearly that the Greens see themselves as opponents of all others including Labor. I agree with them. They are not Labor’s allies.
When will the Lib-kin start to pref the Lib-Libs? You know you want to.
If you don’t live in America, this is funny. But is it Fakenoos?
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/24/1881141/-Trump-Orders-Americans-To-Stop-Eating-Chinese-Food
As usual, Labor and Greens supporters on PB talk past each other. As I have said in previous posts, both are progressive parties with almost identical agendas but with different short-term goals.
Labor aims to win government, which means appealing to a broad enough cross-section of voters to win an election. The Greens, despite Di Natalie’s reported ambition of also winning government, stand no chance of that in the near future and aim to shore up and incrementally increase their base.
That is why the Greens, who probably don’t have much support in coal country, constantly talk about 90% renewables by 2030, a coal-free world and talk down proposed new coal mines, such as Adani.
In contrast, Labor’s position makes it appear to sometimes walk both sides of the street, particularly where the coal industry is concerned. Labor is committed to 50% renewables by 2030 – could be more ambitious IMO – and has talked up the renewables industry at every point.
But it does not want to scare away part of its base by appearing to threaten jobs with the imminent closure of the coal industry.
When asked about NEW coal mines or new coal-fired power stations, Labor’s typical response is, only if they stack up economically or environmentally. In other words: no new coal mines or coal-fired power stations. Let proposals such as Adani fall over on their own merits.
Whether this is a sustainable strategy for winning votes while continuing to work towards a lower and ultimately zero carbon economy remains to be seen. One way through it could be to constantly talk up the job opportunities in the renewables sector.
If this doesn’t pan out, Labor would be best advised to not count on its traditional supporters in coal country and concentrate on vote-winning elsewhere. Labor would have a chance of winning them back with the job opportunities of the future, which the Coalition is not highlighting, but the ALP may have to do without them in the short-term.
SHP
‘…The Greens, despite Di Natalie’s reported ambition of also winning government…’
He stated that the Greens would form government.
delete
@briefly:
“When will the Lib-kin start to pref the Lib-Libs? You know you want to.”
Federally, something approaching 20% of Greens voters already do so.
At a state level – in NSW, where there is optional preference voting, about half of all Greens primary votes exhaust: a principal reason why Gladys was not forced into minority government or worse back in March.
mundo @ #1539 Sunday, August 25th, 2019 – 2:14 pm
Bill Shorten
mundo @ #1555 Sunday, August 25th, 2019 – 3:27 pm
Anthony Albanese
“Peter Garrett on twitter
The cumulative effects of this Arctic burn out & melts in Antarctic, dry rivers & dams in NSW, the Amazon on fire – bad signs of our times. Major parties (inc. the one I loyally served) blind addiction to coal & refusal to see climate crisis a betrayal of the national interest.
He has seen the light and it aint Labor’s flickering ‘light on the hill’ because the latter died a long time ago.”
__________________
Taking an educated guess, I’d say Labor’s Light on the Hill never resonated with you at any stage of your time on planet earth.
I’d say that sanctimonious bourgeois is how you came into the world and how you are going to go out.
Labor’s Light in the Hill has never been as some environmental movement. Or as as some socialist debating club, or bourgeois missionary project: it is about creating an equality of opportunity for those Australians who – by their own efforts or luck – can’t achieve it totally under their own steam.
Ditching an adherence to left wing causes, identity politics, intractable environmental policies and other inner city woke issues in favour of a National Economic Policy of Hope: better incomes, less tax, and an end to structural long term unemployment via strategic government interventions will set Labor’s Light on Hill ablaze!
Pegasus says:
Sunday, August 25, 2019 at 1:27 pm
Gosh it’s beginning to be like the pre-2010 federal election around here.
The charmers and head-kickers of the ALP right fulminating and employing their metaphorical steel-capped boots getting stuck into the handful of individuals who do not agree with their orthodoxy.
Times are a-changing.
The planet is burning.
Yes, we will all swelter in Lib-Kin Garden. The campaign against Labor by the Greens helps sustain the Reactionaries in office. This is so obvious it must be intentional. The Greens are in no position to change anything. Nor will they ever be in such a position. Not one single value they claim to believe in will be translated into action.
The Greens can forget having any role in the retarding and reversal of climate change. This will not happen. They are completely irrelevant to this urgent project. The best the can muster are a few gimmicks that interfere with Labor, with Australia’s only historically important progressive political party.
By their gamesmanship, the Greens have helped procure the most idiotic and reactionary governments we’ve ever had. This is their only achievement.
Mundo: are you having a conversation with yourself?
briefly @ #1558 Sunday, August 25th, 2019 – 3:31 pm
Except Labor votes for the Govts agenda.
Boerwar says:
Sunday, August 25, 2019 at 3:01 pm
SHP
‘…The Greens, despite Di Natalie’s reported ambition of also winning government…’
He stated that the Greens would form government.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
He did? Well, if this historically ground-breaking shift in electoral support is really about to happen, Di Natalie had better work out how the Greens are going to be able to win votes from as many different sections of the community as Labor has been able to do.
Is Di Natalie going to compromise on off-shore processing of refugees to bring Greens policy into line with what the majority of Australians think about refugee boat arrivals? I think that such anti-refugee sentiment sucks, but that is the electoral reality.
If the Greens are seriously up for winning government, they had better learn how to win votes across the wider community, which involves the art of grubby compromise.
You’re correct in one respect, Rex, and that is when you refer to the Liberals as ‘the government.’ They are the governing party most of the time. This is the default position in Australian politics. The Liberals win most of the time. This will continue with the active collaboration of the Greens, who are determined to defeat Labor at all times and in all places.
The result is the Greens have ‘issues’ they can fight on. But they will never have power. Never.
Their only potential collaborators are Labor, and yet they detest Labor. They practice to topple Labor every day. The Greens are the idiotic shotguns riding for the Liberals, who cannot believe their luck. If the Greens did not exist, the Liberals would invent them.
briefly @ #1562 Sunday, August 25th, 2019 – 3:42 pm
Except that Labor collaborates with the Govt by voting for their agenda.
Poor AE he can’t accept the fact I started voting #1 Labor at 18 yo and continued doing so for a few elections, then the Democrats for a few elections until the Tampa loomed on Australia’s horizon when I switched to becoming a supporter of the Greens.
I wouldn’t be alone in this voting pattern.
Anyone who uses the term “woke” as you do, chugs down a couple of bottles of shiraz and talks about plans to have 22 solar panels to power what surely must be a relatively large house, with pool iirc, would fit right in with your negative stereotypes of the inner-city and bourgeois types you fulminate about and despise so vehemently.
RDN opined The Greens would form government in 20 years time.
Nothing wrong with optimistic hyperbole and is no different to the hubris of the majority of Laborites here before the last federal election and on many other occasions.
One thing is for sure. The Liberals and Labor are involved in an eternal struggle for power. It’s hard for Labor to win and hard to govern. It’s even harder to achieve valuable and enduring reforms, but Labor have done it in spite of all the obstacles they have faced.
The Greens lie about Labor. The Liberals lie about Labor. The Greens and the Liberals are on a unity ticket when it comes to defeating Labor. They will use any ploy to do it.
“Then I voted Democrat … until Tampa”
Says it all, really. The Defence rests, Your Honour.
Oh, and the Shiraz is good.
briefly,
So, if I understand your view, in your world, Labor will never form government again, ever, aka we are fucked.
Also, the Greens will never ever form government either.
What stage of the grief process have you progressed to?
AE
Your response “says it all” and validates why I eschew Labor as the party to represent my values, principles and hope for a better world.
Imagine if all Greens voters did preference the Liberals. The ALP would be left with about 33 seats.
briefly @ #1566 Sunday, August 25th, 2019 – 3:51 pm
It’s not a lie that Labor votes for the Govts agenda.
lol Labor never, ever lies about anything. It must be pure as the driven snow.
Tasmania
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-25/madeleine-ogilvie-to-contest-count-back-in-clark/11446396
iirc Ogilvie is anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia.
WA Labor Conference. Must be the Greens fault somehow 🙂
Booing, heckling, walkouts, a tearful apology and a boycott of a keynote speech by a sitting premier, leaving little doubt about the extreme level of division within WA Labor.”Embarrassing”, “disgraceful” and “outrageous” were just some of the words Labor figures used to describe the drama, and there was no shortage of factional finger-pointing over who was to blame.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-25/wa-labor-conference-walkouts-are-mark-mcgowan-nightmare/11445398
Pegasus @ #1573 Sunday, August 25th, 2019 – 4:03 pm
It’d be a pity if Tim Cox couldn’t up…..a much much better prospect
Andrew_Earlwood @ #1559 Sunday, August 25th, 2019 – 3:32 pm
Sad isn’t it.
WA Labor
https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/labor-puts-plan-for-50pc-representation-of-women-in-cabinet-by-2022-on-ice-ng-b881300869z
“Your response “says it all” and validates why I eschew Labor as the party to represent my values, principles and hope for a better world.”
By your own autobiography you eschewed Labor first for the small L Liberal “keep the bastards honest” vanity project.
As I said, Sanctimonious Bourgeois.
I thank you for your preferences (I assume, but who actually knows) and for NOT being a member of the Labor Party.
Oh, and this “hope for a better world” malarkey you talk of. From what I can see your keen eyed strategy to achieve change in that direction seems to boil down to the Greens repeating what they did to Labor in the May election (slut shaming Labor’s brand to other like minded petite bourgeois) and lifting the Greens Senate representation from 9 to 12.
Wow, great strategy that. I assume that with your ‘balance of power’ you can demand stuff off the government. One small problem: you won’t be in a position to demand anything. If ScoMo wins he has other pathways that don’t include the Greens. If Labor wins (and assuming 12 Greens Senators) then I can see Labor with anything more than 25 senators. That means that the equation of ‘Labor + Greens’ is once again short of a senate majority. Which means dealing with Lambie and at least one other in addition to Labor. Just like in 2009-10. Remember how incapable the Greens were in that environment? I do. You are incapable in seeing further than the next two moves on the chess board. If you could you’d realise you’d have to do the dirty deal and compromise your values in order to achieve some actual progress.
mundo @ #1576 Sunday, August 25th, 2019 – 4:07 pm
Threw a line in didn’t get a nibble….don’t want to waste the bait….
Wasn’t Albanese addressing WA Labor state conference today? Did he get a rock star welcome?
Peg….my thesis is that for as long as dysfunction persists on the centre-left we will lose. This is consistent with Australian political history from the 1850s on. As long as your party sets out to frustrate and defeat and run interference against Labor, we will never win. It’s too hard. We hardly ever win in the first place. If reformist opinion is divided we cannot win.
We are actually fucked for as long as the division – the dysfunction – holds.
Your party think they’re so much better than Labor. You never cease to tell us how to improve. You make your living from this pursuit. It drives people away from Labor – detaches them from Labor and frees them to move to the Right. Look at the history of voter attachment. The reformist plurality is getting smaller. This makes it less possible for reformist values to succeed politically.
But it’s good for the Greens. You always have ‘issues’. You can always campaign. But you will never have power. Not even a sniff of it. You will remain in opposition for all time and you will do your best to make sure Labor keeps you company. You have ceded power to the worst Reactionaries in the country for decades to come. This has been done quite knowingly by the Green leadership. They’re not stupid. As a result, nothing that you value will ever be enacted.
Live with it.
The global environment is going up in smoke and you can do nothing about it. Watch it. It’s all you can do.
nath says:
Sunday, August 25, 2019 at 3:57 pm
Imagine if all Greens voters did preference the Liberals. The ALP would be left with about 33 seats.
Do it. The Green PV would fall to 2%. Excellent.
Well bad luck briefly. The greens are not going away so suffer in your jocks sweetheart. Keep posting away, it’s amusing me.
briefly @ #1581 Sunday, August 25th, 2019 – 4:10 pm
It would be wise for Labor to distance themselves from the coal mining section of the CFMMEU who are tearing Labor apart.
Once again, Rexology demands that the Greens try to improve Labor. The Greens can GAGF.
It’s clear the Lib-kin are not for changing. They will stick with the plan. This means we are all fucked. We are fucked in Lib-kin Garden. Nothing the Lib-kin hope for will ever be achieved. Nothing, that is, except for the defeat of Labor. This they will help procure again and again. The Lib-kin will keep the Lib-Libs in power forever.
The Lib-kin will keep the Lib-Libs in power forever.
_____________________
Yep. that’s the plan. It was hatched in a secret meeting between John Howard and Bob Brown in the late 90s. Only you have cottoned on to it. Your perceptive abilities were not reckoned with. Hopefully the ‘secret’ will not make it into the mainstream press.
AE
I didn’t realise being centrist was verboten. Isn’t that the position Laborites reckon its party ought to be.
The Democrats were a centrist party and at times held the Senate BoP being the largest minor party around. The Greens were a fledging party with little federal parliamentary representation.
The disruption of the political duopoly is my interest and I voted accordingly, as do Laborites who also vote strategically.
Your disdain for the Democrats would go down well with all the ex-Democrat voters who moved across to Labor.
You are such a Labor ‘true believer’ being no different to a member of a religious cult.
It occurs to me that pessimism regarding Labor’s election prospects won’t, in and of itself, cement a poster’s persona non grata status around here, provided they faithfully adhere to the line that Labor ran an absolutely flawless campaign and the only thing which prevented a divinely-ordained crushing victory in May was those dastardly Greens possessing the sheer unmitigated gall to exist.
However, anyone who instead dares to express their pessimism in the form of criticising what they perceive to be the party’s strategic shortcomings and offering suggestions as to how improvements could be made… well, they’d better prepare for an unrelenting campaign of mean-spirited excoriation the likes of which they didn’t realise was possible outside of a Daily Telegraph front page!
“It would be wise for Labor to distance themselves from the coal mining section of the CFMMEU who are tearing Labor apart.”
Nope. Nope. Nope.
Think about the Hunter, Lithgow, Northern suburbs of Brisbane, regional Queensland centres. That’s just the direct impact. Coal is also emblematic. So there is empathy for miners in a whole bunch of other outer rim and regional centres as well.
I think the analysis about the greens topping out at @10% could do with some qualifications.
Their progress is something I’ve watched closely since my father stood for them in the seat of Dunkley in the 1990s.
Using the House of Reps vote as a guide, the greens steadily built their vote up from around 2.5% of the vote in 1998 to about 11.5% at the Gillard election debacle of 2010.
imho, the slow ramp up to 10-12% is quite a respectable build. The more interesting question is why their vote has gone nowhere for a decade. For mine, its only the last 10 years of Green’s underperformance that needs the focus.
Trump & his acolytes think climate is just a ‘niche issue’. No doubt Morrison and Trump can bond over that thought.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/25/trump-officials-voice-anger-at-g7-focus-on-niche-issues-such-as-climate-change
To attribute Labor’s electoral failures to the Greens – even in part – is absurd. The Greens are responsible for convincing voters to vote Green. Labor are responsible for convincing voters to vote Labor. The fact that Labor doesn’t get enough votes to win is entirely on them.
Labor needs to become economically literate. Labor needs to become articulate. Those are the two qualities that they currently lack. For as long as that continues, they are very unlikely to win an election.
Labor is the political response of working people to labour repression, to their demand for social justice, to the need to value and protect the environment. It’s not complicated. There is no golden rule that says these values will be given practical effect. Only Labor have been able to do this. Only Labor can do it. Defeat Labor and you defeat these values. The dignity of working people is always expendable if you’re a Lib-Lib or a Lib-kin.
Nobody, I mean nobody, ever, ever tells the Greens Party what to do.
briefly just ranted (not for the first time) and told the party and its supporters to GAGF. What a charmer and how incredibly persuasive.
Nicholas says:
Sunday, August 25, 2019 at 4:26 pm
To attribute Labor’s electoral failures to the Greens – even in part – is absurd. The Greens are responsible for convincing voters to vote Green. Labor are responsible for convincing voters to vote Labor. The fact that Labor doesn’t get enough votes to win is entirely on them.
Yup. Labor need to fight the Greens with the same energy as they fight the Liberals. I’m on board with that.
“The disruption of the political duopoly is my interest and I voted accordingly, as do Laborites who also vote strategically“
ScoMo loves you to bits. You provide exactly the kind of political triangulation he seeks. How good is ScoMo!
Oh, and thanks for your confession: sanctimonious bourgeois.
lizzie:
Trump and his cronies are in the capture of vested interests. Already his presidency has been one of the most environmentally destructive in recent history.