Essential Research leadership ratings

Essential’s latest leadership ratings find Scott Morrison continuing to struggle, despite being back to level pegging on preferred prime minister.

The Guardian reports on yet another fortnightly Essential Research poll with no voting intention numbers, but we does at least get the monthly leadership ratings. These show Scott Morrison down a point on approval to 39% and steady on disapproval at 52%, after the previous poll respectively had him down five and up nine. Anthony Albanese is respectively down two to 41% and up one to 31%, and he has lost his 39-36 lead as preferred prime minister, with the two now tied on 36%. The BludgerTrack trends on the sidebar have now been updated with these results.

Further questions on bushfire recovery, sports rorts and coronavirus don’t seem to have turned up anything too mindblowing, but the publication of the full report may turn up something hopefully later today.

UPDATE: Full report here. The most interesting of the supplementary findings for mine relate to the budget surplus, the consistent theme of which is that respondents aren’t that fussed about it: 79% agree spending on bushfire recovery is more important than maintaining it, with 11% disagreeing; 65% say it would be understandable if the coronavirus impact meant it wasn’t achieved, with 18% disagreeing; and 57% agree it was wrong for the government to discuss the surplus in the present tense before the election, with 24% disagreeing.

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.

1,911 comments on “Essential Research leadership ratings”

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  10. Bushfire Bill @ #1522 Thursday, February 13th, 2020 – 4:57 pm

    No, no, no Lovey…

    Imagine you are an Asian ethnic, Australian born, knows no other country, and now is being shunned – as a disease carrier, displacing the earlier meme of spy, BB.

    One of the key traits of the Holier Than Thou brigade here – the Loveys, the Pegasii, the roaring Guytaurs – is their indecent rush to condemn others morally, particularly with the “racist” slur. They think it’s a conversation stopper. How can anyone recover from it?

    The point is this: one of the few lucky breaks the world has been afforded with the COVID-19 epidemic is that, for better or worse, it’s pretty easy to avoid potential carriers of the disease: by their ethnicity (or race, if you want to use that term).

    Referring to “Africans” doesn’t mean you’re racist towards black people. Even using the term “black people” isn’t racist – a word employed to denigrate, not just identify.

    Likewise referring to “Chinese”, is not to use a racist code word. Recognizing physical “Chinese” ethnic or racial traits doesn’t mean you’re racist. That is too easy a driveby slur to make.

    99% of COVID-19 patients are Chinese. Many, many travelled here before the government banned flights. It is effectively impossible to distinguish the 3rd generation Chinese- Australian waiter serving your table in a Chinese restaurant from the newly-arrived Chinese tourist from Wuhan sitting at the next table.

    I guess you could make enquiries of the individuals in question. Perhaps the government would force the tourist to sew a Chinese flag on the sleeve of their jacket? The former would be rude, the latter disgraceful. It’s easier to avoid the entire embarrassing (and potentially infectious) situation by staying away.

    We’ve already seen here today the cocksure Dr Wombat tell us all that COVID-19 definitely cannot be transmitted by air, so anyone not wishing to be seated near a possibly infected person, or to breathe the air they breathed a few seconds before must be hysterical, or racist.

    I’d already read the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) web site on the disease before I wrote what I wrote. Wombat assumed I hadn’t and took the opportunity to score an easy point, and impress us all with his superior knowledge.

    Except he was wrong.

    You CAN catch COVID-19 by inhaling airborne droplets. That is the primary method of infection according to the CDC.

    Hey, the CDC could be wrong too. But that only goes to prove how LITTLE we know about this disease, which was unknown to science up to a couple of weeks before last Christmas.

    Just sashaying off down to Chinatown to show solidarity, assuming that others will accuse you of being racist if you don’t, is how this disease is going to spread. It mighn’t be a restaurant. It might be a university college or lecture theatre with newly arrived Chinese students present. Or a school hall at assembly time. The latter two are why many of these institutions remain closed to Chinese students until we know more: we are erring on the side of caution.

    If Lovey can spot a tourist newly arrived from a Chibese city, in contrast to that 3rd generation Chinese-Australian waiter serving him at the next table, simply by sight, then good luck to him.

    But I’ll pass on the Yum Cha, just the same thanks. For the time being at least.

    Sigh.

    I’m so busted. You and Alan Jones are right of course – it’s all an evil plot by those bloody Commie doctors (like WHO DG (and Ethiopian malaria research scientist) Tedros Adhanoun) to deprive you of your nicotine vaporizer.

    Warning: the following may contain both uncertainty and traces of post-miasma-theory of contagion, but is as accurate as someone who has spent 35 years practicing, researching & teaching infectious diseases can be – because BBs untethered and unreasonable insecurity expressed on a public forum can have consequences for others that (I hope) he doesn’t realise.

    There is a difference between airborne and droplet spread. Measles (morbilivirus) & chickenpox (varicellavirus) can be airborne – breathing air exhaled by someone with primary disease can transmit the disease. That’s why measles is such a problem with the victims of ignorance. As far as we can determine all other human viruses are spread by droplet contact – including influenza, smallpox (variolavirus), SARS, MERS and the 4 other other human coronaviruses that cause cold-like illnesses (along with adenoviruses etc.) . We have no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is any different. It may be aerosolised (briefly ie seconds to minutes) by coughing , sneezing and when using high pressure devices – like high-flow oxygen or assisted ventilation, but it is almost always transient. The risk is of transferring live virus by contact with invisible deposits on surfaces to ones mouth and eyes by touching with hands. That is almost certainly how Dr Li Wenliang, the Wuhan ophthalmologist who died a week ago got the disease. It is also likely to be how the (very non-asian) UK businessman who acquired SARS-Cov-2 at a meeting in Singapore spread it to 6 other people (also respectably non-asian) including 2 UK GPs in a French ski resort. The spread on the ship in Japan is not airborne, it is droplet & contact spread. It is not sharing the same air.

    The other transmission mechanism is by faecal-oral spread. Shit happens. We know that SARS-CoV-2 is excreted in faeces. We know that SARS-CoV-1 spread by aerosolisation from faulty high-rise sewage systems at the Amoy Gardens outbreak of SARS in 2003 . We do not know whether SARS-CoV-2 has faecal-oral transmission – but it would also fit with the spread within ship sewage systems (which can generate aerosols).

    Breathing the air in Dixon Street is not putting anybody at risk of contracting COVID-19, and is actively ignorant. Your misscharacterization of my comment(s) to salve your insular insecurity is rather pathetic. Your nicotine vapouriser is a greater risk (of heart & lung disease) to you and others.

  12. RHWombat,

    Thanks again for your excellent information about the difference between airborne and droplet infection. I was going to answer BB’s post with my somewhat limited knowledge, but figured you would be along fairly soon to explain far better than I ever could.

  14. Goll

    A cooking blog……… nice

    Sure beats the hell out of the, oh forget it. I just remembered. Don’t mention the war 🙂

  16. On the way home i just heard the minister for lying about mining telling some whoppers in parliament as broadcast by ABC. A record number of resources jobs? Does she not recall the mining boom??

  17. ”A cooking blog……… nice”

    Sure beats the hell out of the, oh forget it. I just remembered. Don’t mention the war

    I just assumed that in my absence one side or other had won and we’d moved on to other stuff.

  19. Douglas and Milko

    The War came to mind when I read this earlier 🙂

    …….Indeed, a word in French with a very different usage than in English is ressentiment. This is the “sense of hostility directed towards an object which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration”. This cause can be a person, an institution, a system of belief, almost anything at all, but whatever it is, ressentiment causes in turn a debilitating jealousy and a niggling sense of inferiority.

    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/feb/13/being-an-outsider-artist-is-a-noble-pursuit-until-nobody-exhibits-your-work

  22. Re viruses (and pigs), I recall the Swine Flu outbreak of 2009, starting in Mexico. It seemed really scary to start with, having an apparent mortality rate of around 20% at the start. On that occasion, attempts to contain it failed. As it turned out, the early cases were only the most severe. There were many people with mild cases who never sought treatment and were never reported. They just treated it as a normal cold or flu and went on about their business. The virus turned out to be no worse or not much worse than normal flu in the end.

  23. wombat
    A few things I’ve read say the only point of the masks is to stop people sticking contaminated fingers into their mouths (or to make patients cough into their droplets into their masks). Those alcohol handwashes do more to stop coronavirus spread than masks.

  28. Dio

    Re masks….that’s what I have also read. That’s why goggles have also been suggested….to avoid touching your eyes….

    The advice is to wash hands…

  29. Bandt’s revised Greens New Deal Zero/Hero Pledge:

    1. Reduce personal housing footprint to the world average.
    2. Refuse to fly except in emergencies.
    3. Sell car.
    4. Eat low miles, low storage, low refined food, low irrigated foods and low storage energy foods.
    5. Eat no dairy and no beef products.
    6. Wear the same clothes and shoes until they wear out.
    7. Do not use cans. At all.
    8. Stop drinking alcohol. (Chardonnay Socialists will have a crises of conscience here. One bottle = 1.5 kg of CO2 emissions!).
    9. Stop smoking dope. All those lights!
    10.. Do not live in houses which use hardwood in construction.
    11. Despatch dogs and cats.
    12. Generate and store own energy.
    13. Don’t drink lattes.

  30. Well I’ve just been reading a long exposition about Anselm Kiefer, the man and his art, by the writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. Supposedly Kiefer is the world’s greatest living artist, so I thought I should check him out:

    There are some people who are famous in such a way that you would never expect to meet them, as if they existed in another world. This is true of actors, singers and politicians, whose faces are everywhere around us, while they themselves are always somewhere else. It is also true of artists, but in a different way: It is not their faces that are everywhere, but their work — and radiating from the work, their names.

    Anselm Kiefer has always been such a name for me — more so than any other artist of our time, perhaps — because his works are so monumental, so charged with time, so burdened by history, and because the private sphere, the near and the personal, is so completely absent from them.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/magazine/anselm-kiefer-art.html

  33. Diogenes @ #1598 Thursday, February 13th, 2020 – 7:27 pm

    wombat
    A few things I’ve read say the only point of the masks is to stop people sticking contaminated fingers into their mouths (or to make patients cough into their droplets into their masks). Those alcohol handwashes do more to stop coronavirus spread than masks.

    Yep. “Gel your hands, Geoffrey”.

    Allan Cheng, Prof of ID Epidemiology at Monash, tells a poignant story about commercial TV priorites – his advice on covid19 got bumped for the Pup divorce this morning.

    In other news from the front: the 5 covid19 patients in the Gold Coast are doing OK. All are from China. One developed clinical pneumonia. Three were treated with antivirals. We don’t yet know whether the treatment helped. There are large trials in China. We are a side-show.

  34. lizzie

    Gotta be careful tho. Cooking may lead to dancing.

    😀

    And cooking is just what I am doing.

    Actually, yesterday, I was walking around some O-Week stalls at a university. I saw a banner saying Join our wind orchestra and was looking to see what was involved (although I do not think they were looking for Recorder players). Then I caught the strains of ABBA from the next stall, and the young man of Chinese appearance stood out of his stall and said to me You know to just really want to dance. It is true! Friend with me pissed themselves lasting and said that they knew what they were talking about.

    I really like dancing, to anything. My male Irish friend is the same. Cannot be genetic, mind, because Riverdance – who would want to dance in such a repressed manner.

  35. poroti
    …….Indeed, a word in French with a very different usage than in English is ressentiment.

    This is the “sense of hostility directed towards an object which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration”.

    This cause can be a person, an institution, a system of belief, almost anything at all, but whatever it is, ressentiment causes in turn a debilitating jealousy and a niggling sense of inferiority.
    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/feb/13/being-an-outsider-artist-is-a-noble-pursuit-until-nobody-exhibits-your-work

    I love it – I now have a new word!

  37. Dio

    A few things I’ve read say the only point of the masks is to stop people sticking contaminated fingers into their mouths (or to make patients cough into their droplets into their masks). Those alcohol handwashes do more to stop coronavirus spread than masks.

    That is really useful. I work a lot in east Asia, and sometimes going between the Australian summer to the north Asian winter can make me come down with a sniffle. I always feel bad about not wearing a mask.

    But one thing I do notice is that nobody in the research institutes wears masks. I figured that would be talking to their local medicos, and they knew what they were doing.

    So, tomorrow I go to buy hand sanitiser. Actually, this is what work has suggested to us, rather then masks.

  39. Diogenes @ #1613 Thursday, February 13th, 2020 – 8:07 pm

    wombat
    “Three were treated with antivirals.”
    Do you know what antivirals they used?

    Lopinovir/ritonavir. It’s an HIV protease inhibitor combination (the ritonavir is there for the pharmacokinetics). It was tried at the patients’ insistence – they were very well informed about the agents being trialed at home in Wuhan. There was some dubious evidence that it might have worked in SARS & MERS, but the numbers were not large enough. The Chinese certainly have enough for a trial in covid19. There may be a problem with supply if it is shown to alter the outcome significantly.

  40. Here in Hong Kong one senior expat commentator wrote in the South China Morning Post that the masks were an overreaction, and did not protect the wearer; he would not be wearing one.

    But what if he is a carrier, without symptoms? It is reassuring to see everyone here in masks. Admirable, really.

  43. rhwombat:

    Your in-depth posts on the coronavirus are very instructive; I read them with great interest. Thank you.

    Diogenes:

    [‘Those alcohol handwashes do more to stop coronavirus spread than masks.’]

    That would explain why they’re as scarce as hen’s teeth on supermarkets’ and chemists’ shelves.

  44. Boerwar @ #1429 Thursday, February 13th, 2020 – 7:34 pm

    Bandt’s revised Greens New Deal Zero/Hero Pledge:

    1. Reduce personal housing footprint to the world average.
    2. Refuse to fly except in emergencies.
    3. Sell car.
    4. Eat low miles, low storage, low refined food, low irrigated foods and low storage energy foods.
    5. Eat no dairy and no beef products.
    6. Wear the same clothes and shoes until they wear out.
    7. Do not use cans. At all.
    8. Stop drinking alcohol. (Chardonnay Socialists will have a crises of conscience here. One bottle = 1.5 kg of CO2 emissions!).
    9. Stop smoking dope. All those lights!
    10.. Do not live in houses which use hardwood in construction.
    11. Despatch dogs and cats.
    12. Generate and store own energy.
    13. Don’t drink lattes.

    And are you prepared to take your own pledge yet?

    Thought not 🙁

  45. Cud Chewer @ #1441 Thursday, February 13th, 2020 – 8:25 pm

    rhwombat

    What’s the deal with masks? Do not not catch droplets with the virus in it (breathing in), or just not very efficiently?

    The masks are (mainly) to stop one touching one’s mouths with contaminated fingers (inbound), but they also decrease the amount and range of droplet contamination of surfaces (outbound). Some of the major human variables are interpersonal distances & duration, as well as temperature & humidity of the environment. This is why it used to be thought that “colds” were a consequence of getting cold. They’re not, but the transmission of respiratory viruses increases when people are closer together in a warmer, moister environment indoors in a temperate winter. We also used to be closer to animals in those environments – and SARS-CoV-2 is almost certainly a zoonosis (transferred from bats via an intermediate mammalian vector as yet unknown – ? pangolins).

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