Essential Research: US visit, economic conditions, Middle East intervention

A new poll records a broadly favourable response to Scott Morrison’s US visit, mixed feelings about the state of the economy, and support for Australia’s new commitment in the Middle East.

Essential Research has released its fortnightly poll, once again without voting intention results. It includes a series of questions on Scott Morrison’s visit to the United States, with results generally more favourable than I personally would have expected. For example, the most negative finding is that 32% agreed that Donald Trump’s presidency has been good for Australia, compared with 49% who disagreed. By way of comparison, a Lowy Institute survey in March found 66% believed Trump had weakened the alliance, and only 25% had either a lot of or some confidence in him.

Only 38% agreed that a good relationship between Scott Morrison and Donald Trump reflected badly on Australia, compared with 48% who disagreed. Other results were probably too influenced by question wording to be of much value. Fifty-seven percent felt Morrison had shown “good diplomacy skills” during the visit, a quality that might be attributed to anyone who maintains a straight face in the President’s presence. The statement that Morrison “should have attended the UN Climate Summit, alongside other world leaders” is compromised by the words in italics (which are my own), but for what it’s worth, 70% agreed and 20% disagreed.

A question on the state of the economy likewise produces a result less bad than the government might have feared, with 32% rating it good and 33% poor. Fifty-one per cent supported Australian military involvement in the Middle East, after it was put to them that Australia had “agreed to provide military support to their allies in the Middle East to protect shipping and trade in the region”, with 35% opposed.

Essential has not yet published the full report on its website, so the precise sample size cannot be identified, but it will assuredly have been between 1000 and 1100. The poll was conducted online from Thursday to Sunday.

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.

1,065 comments on “Essential Research: US visit, economic conditions, Middle East intervention”

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  1. The problem with your theory, ‘fess, is that Trump doesn’t buy it. In this article by Greg Sargeant about how Trump thinks he is, and has placed himself, above the law, he finishes on this point:

    Which brings us to the final point …

    Trump can legitimately and brazenly cheat to prevent his removal in an election. The subject matter of the impeachment inquiry itself casts the entire election into doubt. As Will Wilkinson puts it: “Trump’s brazen attempt to cheat his way into a second term stands so scandalously exposed that there can be no assurance of a fair election if he’s allowed to stay in office.”

    I’d go even further: Trump is declaring for himself the power to engage in bottomless corruption to prevent a legitimate election from removing him, while also declaring that any effort to impeach him for those corrupt acts is inherently illegitimate.

    What’s more, we already know Trump will likely declare any election that he loses illegitimate. In the run-up to 2016, Trump repeatedly declared that the outcome would not be legitimate unless he won. Trump is again reviving his false claims of rampant voter fraud — a preview of how he’ll delegitimize an electoral loss.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/02/trump-has-placed-himself-above-law-his-latest-eruption-confirms-it/

  2. Mavis Davis @ #300 Thursday, October 3rd, 2019 – 7:09 pm

    C@tmomma:

    Thursday, October 3, 2019 at 4:49 pm

    [‘Actually, MD, now that I think about it, if I email Mr Bowe with the gift he might be the one to end up with it! So, with your permission, I’ll get him to send me your email address and I’ll mail it direct to you.]

    That will be fine, and thanks muchly.

    I’ll send Mr Bowe the email then. 🙂

  3. C@t:

    Yes it’s a given that Man Baby will do whatever it takes to stay in office, chiefly to keep his ass from being arrested.

    I guess it remains to be seen what power he commands against congressional Republicans as a whole if they finally decided to extract their heads from their behinds and put country before party. He doesn’t have huge support in voter land, and we’ve already seen how the administrative arm of government have had to war game everything it does with Team Trump.

  4. ‘fess,
    GG’s link wrt Rick Perry is interesting. It led me to this about the documents the Inspector General of the State Department took to Congress last night:

    Earlier today the State Department Inspector General urgently briefed the House and Senate about the fact that someone had tried to plant suspicious documents in the State Department which promoted pro-Trump conspiracy theories. These documents were so obviously inauthentic, some of them were reportedly on Trump hotel stationery. If you’re wondering which idiot on Donald Trump’s team was behind this stunt, don’t worry, he just confessed.

    After the State Department Inspector General’s briefing today, Rudy Giuliani appeared on CNN tonight and promptly confessed that he was behind at least some of the documents involved. Rudy told CNN that he provided some of these documents to the State Department, and that he received assurances from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the allegations being made in the documents would be investigated. Rudy now seems surprised that instead of that happening, the Inspector General decided to report the documents to Congress for being phony.

    !!

    https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/rudy-giuliani-just-confessed-that-he-was-behind-the-fake-state-department-inspector-general-documents/21438/

  5. Some interesting quotes in an article on why low interest rates are bad.

    Banking is a low margin, high risk business at the best of times – so when those margins are squeezed even tighter (thanks to very low interest rates), lending policy becomes super-cautious, which, as Das points out, “perversely reduces the amount of credit available”.

    People aren’t fools and know that the central bankers and politicians wouldn’t be resorting to such measures if they weren’t desperate – and that they wouldn’t be desperate if the underlying situation wasn’t dire.

    In short, persistently low interest rates are nothing to celebrate; there’s no clearer sign of long-term economic stagnation.

    https://unherd.com/2019/10/how-much-trouble-is-the-economy-in/

  8. C@tmomma:

    [‘I blame Ronald Reagan.’]

    It goes back further than that: to Herbert Hoover, whose administration, through lack oversight, not only was responsible for the Great Depression but also exacerbated it by claiming it was a mere blip in the market. The only thing Hoover can claim is the dam named after him; arguably the worst president of the 20th century.

  9. Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC) has provided partial turnout figures for Saturday’s presidential election, but the numbers and the manner in which they have been released are somewhat baffling. Two days after the vote, it is also still not clear how many polling centres opened on polling day. The fluidity of the figures and a sudden jump in reported turnout, from one to two million voters, raise important questions that the IEC will need to answer swiftly to avoid confusion and allegations that they may not be in control of their own process. The AAN team takes a closer look at the figures that have been released so far and explains why they may be troubling.
    https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/afghanistans-2019-election-12-scrutinising-the-iecs-partial-turnout-figures/

  12. Is Rudy Giuliani becoming senile? He’s not that old, 75, but these days he doesn’t seem to be quite all there. In his days as New York Mayor (1990s), he seemed like one of the more sensible Republicans.

  13. Frydenberg also shifted the frame for the $7 billion in Drought Assistance Package.
    The Coalition has ‘committed’ $7 billion.

    Sales missed the obvious follow up question:
    What good will funds announced this year but committed for expenditure in 2028 do for farmers today?

    There is, opined Frydenberg ‘3 billion’ available for spending on dams.
    Sales missed the obvious follow up question
    ‘Why has it taken the Government 7 years to keep $3 billion available to do precisely nothing?’

    But then Sales is not alone. Not a single MSM journo is asking these sorts of specific questions.

    They don’t make journos like they used to.

  15. ‘Weather-related challenge’ is like something out of Utopia.

    Stave777:

    It’s incredible to think that Giuliani was once commonly referred to as America’s Mayor. Now he’s just America’s Crazy Uncle.

  16. Steve777 @ #311 Thursday, October 3rd, 2019 – 7:45 pm

    Is Rudy Giuliani becoming senile? He’s not that old, 75, but these days he doesn’t seem to be quite all there. In his days as New York Mayor (1990s), he seemed like one of the more sensible Republicans.

    I read today that he even allows Trump to humiliate him in private and that he’s the guy who always weasels his way to be next to Trump at dinner.

    No wonder his 3rd wife is divorcing him! He no longer has any balls.

  19. In another example of journalistic slackness Sales forgot to ask Frydenberg why it always rains more under Labor governments.

    Did she remember to ask Frydenberg whether he was proud that his election posters specifically misled Chinese voters?

    Sales did remind Frydenberg of all the things that the Reserve bank SAID that was less than complimentary to the Government.

    On the whole, did we end up with a tummy rub? I was in and out so missed most of the interview.

  20. “However, the blame for the disturbance overwhelmingly lies with one person: Andrew Earlwood. At the minimum, his next dose of unprovoked nastiness will land him in the sin bin.”

    I missed our lord god’s warning rattle this afternoon.

    While I don’t feel contrite in the least, I shall desist from giving the daily Greentaur bulletin the throat punch it so richly deserves.

    Andrew out.

  21. What would full employment look like?

    Bill Mitchell’s view:

    http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=43261

    A journalist asked me this morning what is the definition of full employment.

    I told him that full employment is when everyone who wants to work has sufficient hours to satisfy their desires.

    Historically, 2 per cent unemployment was considered to be full employment (before the NAIRU nonsense) – which was the frictional level.

    With better information systems (computer networks, etc), the frictional level is likely to be lower (people can access job information more easily and employers can access workers more easily). How much lower is an empirical matter. Probably a few points.

    Further, Australia now has underemployment as a new problem (since 1991).

    So my operational full employment benchmark is 2 per cent unemployment and zero underemployment and participation rates at trend levels.

    That means we are something like 1,060 thousand FTE jobs short of that benchmark at present, once we add the FTE underemployment to the unemployed and adjust for participation shortfalls.

    A simple way to find out how far below full employment the Australian labour market is would be for the Federal Government to offer anyone who wants to work an unconditional job offer at a socially-inclusive minimum wage.

    The number of people that turn up for work would be the degree of non-inflationary slack in the economy.

    I expect that to be well over the 1 million mark.

  22. While I don’t feel contrite in the least, I shall desist from giving the daily Greentaur bulletin the throat punch it so richly deserves.

    I said your next dose of unprovoked nastiness would land you in the sin bin — and there it is. Banned for a week.

  26. Every day for the past two weeks, I have repeatedly deleted comments by Andrew Earlwood in which he called people who dared to not share his narrow partisan political outlook “idiot”, “stupid”, “thick”, “bloviating unctuous fool”, “low life troll” and “tory boy”, over and over and over, and always without provocation. I warned him, and his response was to crank it up with actively violent rhetoric of the kind that gets progressives worked up when they’re thinking clearly about it. I have exhibited my characteristic moderation in merely consigning him to the sin bin.

  28. BW wrote:

    But then Sales is not alone. Not a single MSM journo is asking these sorts of specific questions.

    The produced (you could say “over-produced”), set-piece TV interview is a dinosaur. Linearly set-out, as it is, it has – of necessity – a time limit.

    The interview time limit is both an explanation for brevity, and an excuse for it.

    What is gained by the need for speed (and the concomitant possibility of scoring a gotcha under pressurized, adversarial conditions) is balanced by the victim’s capacity for regurgitating long-winded talking points. Sales’ obvious “You’ve allocated the money, so why haven’t you spent it?” potential question is headed off at the pass by Frydenberg’s “I’ve been speaking to farmers and by God they’re doing it tough” non sequiter.

  29. The Australian private sector’s demand for additional workers is essentially non-existent right now.

    From August 2018 to August 2019 the Australian economy created 312,000 jobs (in net terms).

    301,000 of those jobs were in the public sector (mostly state government jobs).

    Only 11,000 were private sector jobs.

    You can see the graph here:

    http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=43261

    Conclusion: Right now private firms see no profitable opportunities to expand what they are doing. Consumer spending is stagnant. Therefore firms don’t need more workers.

    Only increased net spending by the federal government will enable everyone who wants work to get all of the paid hours that they want.

    Cutting interest rate won’t do anything useful. Households are already heavily indebted – the household sector as a whole has a debt equivalent to 120 percent of GDP. If their incomes aren’t increasing and their jobs are precarious, they won’t spend more just because their variable rate mortgage repayments become slightly lower.

  33. Former foreign minister Alexander Downer has rejected claims he was “directed” to contact an aide to Donald Trump during the US President’s bid for power three years ago, countering new assertions in a letter that demands Australian help for a divisive US investigation.

    Mr Downer disputed the claim from one of Mr Trump’s top Republican allies after Senator Lindsey Graham issued a letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison and other national leaders asking for their “continued cooperation” with the probe.

    Senator Graham, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a vocal supporter of the President, wrote on Wednesday to Mr Morrison as well as Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson asking them to help the inquiry.

    In a key assertion, Senator Graham said the matters under review included US decisions to accept information from an “Australian diplomat” who was “directed” to contact George Papadopoulos, an aide to Mr Trump during part of the presidential election campaign.

    Mr Downer, Australia’s former high commissioner to the United Kingdom who met with Mr Papadopoulos, told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald this was wrong.

    “Of course I wasn’t ‘directed’,” he said.

    Mr Papadopoulos told Mr Downer in a London bar in 2016 the Russians were willing to release dirt on Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton ahead of the November election.

    Downer reported that meeting to Australian intelligence services, who later shared it with the FBI.

  34. Kate@12:22

    “In a series of essays published under Perspectives on Harmful Speech Online, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, noted:

    Rhetorically, sealioning fuses persistent questioning—often about basic information, information on easily found elsewhere, or unrelated or tangential points—with a loudly-insisted-upon commitment to reasonable debate. It disguises itself as a sincere attempt to learn and communicate. Sealioning thus works both to exhaust a target’s patience, attention, and communicative effort, and to portray the target as unreasonable. While the questions of the “sea lion” may seem innocent, they’re intended maliciously and have harmful consequences.

    — Amy Johnson, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (May 2019)[7]”

    Thanks for posting this. I am still catching up with today’s PB posts, but I do think that there is a lot of this happening on the current PB discussion.

  35. Senator Graham, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a vocal supporter of the President, wrote on Wednesday to Mr Morrison as well as Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson asking them to help the inquiry.

    OMG there’s a walking into a bar joke right there just waiting to be told!

  36. Yes….fiscal, financial and labour repression are entrenched in this Liberal-run economy. The RBA has apparently adopted a full-employment goal, though its idea of full employment is insufficient to absorb all under-utilised labour.

  37. EGT

    My point regarding Norway was serious.

    The Norwegians, like the Hawke-Keating government, create, trial, improve, refine and (where necessary) abandon policy sourced from all sorts of thinking, the whole point being efficacy rather than some notion of purity or conformance to some ideology.

    That’s the way countries (occasionally) get good government. It’s also the reason why the Hawke-Keating goerment is the only actually to cut spending in the pat 50 years – not due to ideology but instead due to pragmatics appropriate for the economic circumstances at that time, and ignoring any bullshit about “tax and spend” being a supposed “core value”.

    Thanks so much for this comment. Norway is actually often regarded as being a bit to the right in the EU. And who cares? Their political system has delivered stability and a decent standard of life for their citizens.

  38. RI

    I have spent many a day in and around northern, including Gulf, mangroves. This Repot is not small beer.

    It is another mass smashing of biodiversity.

  39. Norway is, of course, a very large producer and exporter of fossil fuels. Their Sovereign Wealth Fund -the world’s greatest – could be rebadged as a GHG Stockpile Account.

  40. I have a bone to pick with Norway’s alcohol prices.
    They have managed to achieve extremely highly taxed alchohol and a major problem with alcoholism.

  44. Boerwar
    says:
    Thursday, October 3, 2019 at 8:45 pm
    RI
    I have spent many a day in and around northern, including Gulf, mangroves. This Repot is not small beer.
    It is another mass smashing of biodiversity.
    ____________________________
    Only the zombie apocalypse can save us and the planet.

  45. Hi William,

    Since about a fortnight ago, I’ve been extremely diligent in chopping drive-by insults and tidying up flame wars. However, I came to today’s disturbances too late, which meant it was not possible to neatly excise the malignancy. As a result, there may be the odd comment up thread that appears to be either responding to nothing, or reacting angrily to very little. This is because the comments they were responding to are no longer there.

    Many commenters have been subject to the chop, with varying levels of culpability. However, the blame for the disturbance overwhelmingly lies with one person: Andrew Earlwood. At the minimum, his next dose of unprovoked nastiness will land him in the sin bin.

    I bow to your godliness, but I find Andrew Earlwood’s contributions sensible, if a bit provocative.

    I did actually suggest he tone it down a bit the other day, but only because I want the temperature of discussion on the blog to drop.

    I worry that a psephology blog does attract people with a legal and scientific mind, and we do tend to argue the point.

  46. There’s little doubt about it, Trump has a dirt file on Senator Lindsey Graham, it being anyone’s guess the nature of the it. This is what he said on December 21, 2015:

    “I think Donald Trump is going to places where very few people have gone and I’m not going with him.”

    Of that he was right. Now, however, he’s one of Trump’s most outspoken supporters.

  47. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/03/scott-morrison-echoes-trump-as-he-warns-nations-must-avoid-negative-globalism

    Morrison on Thursday night paraphrased the 2001 sovereignty credo of the former Liberal prime minister John Howard – we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come – declaring that under his prime ministership, in foreign policy terms, “we will decide our interests and the circumstances in which we seek to pursue them”.

    This is, of course, myth-making. Australia does not really determine the circumstances in which we find ourselves. We are rule-takers and price-takers in most things. This is the case for nearly all countries, even the most powerful. Morrison is resorting to escapism….as usual.

  48. nath
    IMO there is a very high potential for H. sapiens, as a species, to survive the suite of environmental feedbacks coming its way.
    There will be some brutal tradeoffs between average standard of living and total number of individuals.
    There is, IMO, no way that the current suite of biodiversity or the current level biodiversity services is going to survive.


  49. Boerwar says:
    Thursday, October 3, 2019 at 8:48 pm

    I have a bone to pick with Norway’s alcohol prices.
    They have managed to achieve extremely highly taxed alchohol and a major problem with alcoholism.

    Alcoholism has always been a problem in Scandinavian countries.
    It was a long time ago, but when I spent time Sweden:
    1)You had to buy your booze from a government shop (Systembolaget).
    2)The time you could buy was very restricted.

  50. It is not so easy for Morrison. Australia is a heavily trade-exposed nation. It needs globalism.

    So doing the nationalist/isolationist/xenophobic/racist pea and thimble trick is going to be a bit tricky for Morrison.

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