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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  1. The notion that Littleproud might be a compromise candidate is interesting.

    After a bit of ritualistic faffing around he now accepts AGW.

    His response to the MDB irrigation crisis was more or less on the rational side and certainly supportive of the continued operation of the MDB Plan.

    He has a tendency to accept the way the Coalition is working right now.

    It seems to me that Littleproud would therefore not meet the Joyce/Canavan Coal Crazy Claque basic requirements.

  2. Seems the problem with COVID-19 and cruise ships is how do you isolate up to 4,000 people EXCEPT by keeping them on-board?

    There’s nowhere else to take them. We have no such mass isolation facility.

    I’m expecting Horsey, Luvvy and Dr Wombat to be down at the docks pronto to show solidarity with the afflicted. You can’t catch the virus by just inhaling, so there should be no problem.

    Risk-free sanctity.

  3. The Greens’ proposition is that they are not politically accountable for the emissions of individual Greens voters, supporters or members. Implicitly, politically the Greens are blaming the Government for Greens’ emissions. I say tosh to that bit of hypocrisy while noting that it is much more comfortable than actually doing something real.

    Australians use on average around 150 kg of paper per annum. While the figures are very, very rubbery and it all depends on recycling, etc, etc, etc, 1kg produces around .6kg of CO2 emissions.
    Therefore the average Australian produces 90kg of CO2 emissions by consuming paper.

    Now, there are many pathways to being an emissions ZeroHero such as myself.

    To assist the Greens move towards my ZeroHero status I have added foregoing paper to Bandt’s Greens New Deal CO2 Emissions Strike 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.
    14. Stop using paper.

  4. Bushfire Bill @ #1703 Friday, February 14th, 2020 – 9:32 am

    Seems the problem with COVID-19 and cruise ships is how do you isolate up to 4,000 people EXCEPT by keeping them on-board?

    There’s nowhere else to take them.

    I’m expecting Horsey, Luvvy and Dr Wombat to be down at the docks pronto to show solidarity with the afflicted. You can’t catch the virus by just inhaling, so there should be no problem.

    Risk-free sanctity.

    How about off the ship and to some other place fit for purpose.

  5. C@tmomma
    Friday, February 14th, 2020 – 12:29 pm
    Comment #1702

    imacca @ #1697 Friday, February 14th, 2020 – 12:23 pm

    “Please can we have less chat about gorgeous, lovely, chubby, cuddly wimmin.”

    Less chat and more in the way of feelthy pictures??

    Oh, momma. Stop it ❗

    I jest cain’t take no more. 🙏

  6. Via David Leonhardt of the NYT:

    Asha Rangappa, former F.B.I. agent: “I have really tried to have, and encourage others to have, faith in the resiliency of our institutions. But today I just feel so much sadness — grief, really — over what is happening. There is a cancer in the White House, and it has spread to the Justice Department.”

    Harry Litman, a former prosecutor, in The Washington Post: “It is hard to overstate the irregularity and impropriety of the department’s rollback of Stone’s sentence. … As a general matter, the Justice Department and the White House are supposed to communicate only in rare, well-defined instances and almost never about the results of individual cases.”

    Elizabeth de la Vega, another former prosecutor, noted that the judge in the case, Amy Berman Jackson, could ignore the new Justice Department request and sentence Stone “as she sees fit.”

  7. Barney in Tanjung Bunga @ #1705 Friday, February 14th, 2020 – 12:42 pm

    Bushfire Bill @ #1703 Friday, February 14th, 2020 – 9:32 am

    Seems the problem with COVID-19 and cruise ships is how do you isolate up to 4,000 people EXCEPT by keeping them on-board?

    There’s nowhere else to take them.

    I’m expecting Horsey, Luvvy and Dr Wombat to be down at the docks pronto to show solidarity with the afflicted. You can’t catch the virus by just inhaling, so there should be no problem.

    Risk-free sanctity.

    How about off the ship and to some other place fit for purpose.

    How about to keep Jenny Morrison company at Kirribilli House? 🙂

  8. Bushfire Bill @ #1451 Friday, February 14th, 2020 – 11:32 am

    Seems the problem with COVID-19 and cruise ships is how do you isolate up to 4,000 people EXCEPT by keeping them on-board?

    There’s nowhere else to take them.

    Build somewhere to take them, like China did. Only takes a week or so. Or cordon off a nearby beach/national park and tent-city them, at least.

    An effective quarantine isolates infected individuals from the healthy; not cruisers from non-cruisers. You don’t aim to stick healthy people with infected people under conditions that practically guarantee exposure. And of course, if you do that and (predictably) increase the number of people infected you just end up having to bring them to shore anyways when they all start needing proper medical treatment. The paranoia self-defeats.

    Virtually anything is better than leaving them all to stew on the boat.

  9. BB
    “Do we have no COVID-19 outbreak here because Australia’s just sorta healthier than mainland China? Or is it because we have, if belatedly, imposed bans on travellers from those parts, and a period of medical isolation on Australian citizens returning from them?”

    I’d like to see a study to determine if nations that blocked travellers from China have proportionately lower rates of COVID-19 compared to those nations that didn’t. At the moment, there’s a great deal of hand-waving and narrative-building going on, but precious little hard data.

  10. Sydney was well serviced by a Quarantine Station tucked in the harbour side of North Head at Manly. It is now part of National Parks, virtually privatised so as to support itself (like other should be publicly funded and totally available to the public parks, like Centennial Park) while the Cons save money to rebuild football stadia and shuffle museums from one end of the city to the other.

    quaranta giorni which means “forty days”.

    The practice of quarantine began during the 14th century in an effort to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics. Ships arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before offloading on shore. This practice, called quarantine, was derived from the Italian words quaranta giorni which means “forty days”. From the 1830s until 1984, migrant ships arriving in Sydney with suspected contagious disease stopped inside North head and offloaded passengers and crew into quarantine to protect local residents.

    https://www.qstation.com.au/our-story.html

  11. ItzaDream

    Yep, the Venetians invented quarantine. They also invented ghettos and banks. Let’s give thanks to the Most Serene Republic.

  12. Coalition likely to give $11m to Vales Point coal-fired power station for upgrade

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/14/coalition-likely-to-give-11m-to-vales-point-coal-fired-power-station-for-upgrade

    The Morrison government has made it known to the owners of the Vales Point coal-fired power plant that they are likely to get an $11m grant to upgrade the facility in the May budget.

    Canberra buried the probable commitment to the coal project on page 12 of a 13-page $2bn agreement with the Berejiklian government to increase gas supply and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector.

    The agreement says the commonwealth will fund three state projects that have applied for support through the Morrison government’s underwriting program. The Vales Point upgrade, pursued by energy baron and LNP donor Trevor St Baker, was shortlisted by the energy minister, Angus Taylor, last year.

  13. @BoerWar

    Could we at least go a day without your BS fake greens pledge? It’s repetitive and boring, and contributes zero to the discussion. We’ve made it thus far without starting round 876 of the Greens/Labor war, let’s try and keept it that way!

  14. Zoomster – had to go out so didn’t see your post re grains.

    A couple of things: we’ve been around for 200,000yrs (give or take) and settled down and began farming grains about 20,000 (give or take) – so it isn’t ‘natural to base our diets on grains’. In fact, most of the diet was hunter/gatherer and seasonal. Game & animal products were the staple – fruits and veg were seasonal and grain use was a rarity until farming happened (same with dairy).

    We have modified our fruits/veg & grains over time to increase the sugar/fructose content by many multiples of their original state – in fact, according to scientists – we would not recognise fruits, for instance, because they are more than double the size they originally were and are now many times more sugary. Most veg were much more fibrous.

    We even feed our pets grains, when in the wild they’d likely only chew on a grain of wheat or rice if they were absolutely starving … no wonder dogs and cats get diabetes, weight issues, kidney disease and cancer now.

    Despite the anecdotal evidence, or cultural norms – the most recent science proves that grains and sugars (glucose/fructose/lactose etc.) increase body fat (in concert with insulin) especially around the trunk and that leads to cancer in those susceptible. This is not in question any more in the scientific community.

    It struck me while I was out that this discussion is similar to climate change in that I am following the latest progressive nutritional science … stuff that has come to light in the past 10-15 years and is being updated continually … While the ‘we’ve always done it this way’ dietary conservatives want to allow a proportion of the public who should not be eating many carbohydrates to continue eating them.

    I.e. Sugar can be likened to coal for some of us. And that a segment of society wants to fix the problem with adding more and more drugs to a person’s daily regime (like using a technological fix so we can keep using coal) instead of removing the thing that is causing the problem. Dietary abstention.

    Like I said – it doesn’t effect everyone … but for me, it does. And if the number of Type 2 diabetics (and the exponential growth in those numbers since 1950) are any indication – a lot more people are going to become ill if we don’t change our attitudes to carbohydrate consumption for those susceptible.

    I have almost no visceral fat now (despite having a very high fat diet — that is because the largest percentage of fat we eat does not get laid down as body fat). And as I said – I have ceased meds.

    I will get off my soapbox now and profound apologies to anyone I have bored shitless.

  15. [‘Well may the charges continued to be shedded and progress stalled so the ill-conceived cases fall over.’]

    For obvious reasons, the suppression order Judge Kidd placed on Pell’s convictions was legally sound though, in practice, a simple internet search revealed the results of his second trial (the first having resulted in a hung jury). But at the time, he was still to face a third trial, which was eventually abandoned. But that’s not the point. Had Kidd not placed a gag order on the proceeding, Pell’s defence would’ve claimed public knowledge of it would’ve been highly prejudicial. On the question of whether contempt charges should still be pursued against some news outlets, what’s the point of having suppression orders if they’re breached willy-nilly, mainly by the tabloid press?

  16. I reckon if us women have been told to quit it with the diet advice etc, certain other individuals should quit it with their endless classical music adulation.

  17. Pegasus

    Thanks for highlighting this latest travesty of handing out taxpayers money to private interests with egregious conflicts of interest.
    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/14/coalition-likely-to-give-11m-to-vales-point-coal-fired-power-station-for-upgrade

    In this case the recipient is parted owned by National Party powerbroker Trevor St Baker. He paid $1 million for the old Vales Point power station, which was considered of scrap value because it needed a major overhaul. Presto the government gives them $11 million for the overhaul. Obscene.

    I am not a lawyer but I really have to wonder if laws were not broken in this case. It is no better than what Obeid did in NSW, being allegedly given what was a State owned asset (the mining license) for a fraction of its real value. Lest my concern seem too hyperbolic, Obeid argued what he had done was legal before ICAC investigated.

    What happens now if St Baker/Sunpower Energy gives say a million dollars back to the National Party?

    The nation’s treasury is being ransacked by political grifters.

  18. Socrates

    Trevor St Baker, now that name rings a bell. What else was the bustard involved in ? I’m sure it is some pretty rotten stuff back in the day.

  19. Pegasus and Socrates

    He paid $1 million for the old Vales Point power station, which was considered of scrap value because it needed a major overhaul. Presto the government gives them $12 million for the overhaul. Obscene.

    Yes, obscene. Of course he had no idea Gladys would bail him out. Piffle!

  20. Australia … a third world country still trying to work its way further down the list of nations …

    Today, 10 weeks after we were burned out and lost our telephone service, we received a response to our complaint on Telstra’s inaction from the Telecom Industry Ombudsman: It will be 6 more weeks before we can expect to even be be assigned a case manager to investigate our complaint, let alone get our phone fixed.

    Also today, 8 weeks after lodging our insurance claim and getting no response from our insurance company, and 2 weeks after raising a complaint about this, we were advised by the Australian Financial Complaints Authority that it would be 3 more weeks before the insurance company is obliged to even respond to our complaint, let alone settle our claim.

    Also yesterday, 2 weeks after being told by Vinnies that we were entitled to a small amount of compensation – which we now desperately need, because we have no money left to undertake any remediation work because we have lost all our income, are not entitled to any government assistance, and our insurance company is dicking us about – we have not yet received a dollar. They can’t understand what went wrong, and have sent it off for further investigation. No expected date for resolution given.

    Also this week, we found out that the recent rain has washed out the temporary bridges the local council had put up on two of our local access roads. Both these roads are again impassible.

    Also this week, we got a letter from Centrelink threatening us with prosecution unless we provide them further financial information immediately, because we lodged a claim for assistance. We apparently have no right to refuse, even though we are not eligible for assistance. We still apparently have to provide the information, just in case we might have been lying to them about being affected by the bushfires. We are of course ignoring this demand – why wouldn’t we? The police can’t get to our place to arrest us anyway!

    Although I suppose they could get here by helicopter. In which case … Come and get us, you Bastards! … I’m nearly finished riveting together my bullet-proof armour and helmet, made from a couple of old plough shares.

    What a shithole of a country we live in. Nothing works properly any more. Nothing.

    Makes you understand what drove Ned Kelly.

  21. poroti

    St Baker was a one time NP candidate in Qld for the Nationals back in the 90s. He has also been a director on the Qld Mineral Resources Council. He is a hard core defender of Qld coal mining. His support of Qld Nationals dates back to the Joh era.

    Also note that, like most political dead fish, word of this grant was put out after lunch on a Friday afternoon. Because they knew it stank.

  22. Player One

    Also this week, we got a letter from Centrelink threatening us with prosecution unless we provide them further financial information immediately, because we lodged a claim for assistance. We apparently have no right to refuse, even though we are not eligible for assistance. We still apparently have to provide the information, just in case we might have been lying to them about being affected by the bushfires

    Welcome to the movie Brazil as performed by the public service which is made in the image of your average Coalition Minister. Fingers crossed some common sense breaks through. Not that such is likely 🙁

  23. Player One

    I think you should be forgiven for any narkiness displayed on PB in the circs.
    Have you thought of emigrating? (pop-eyed emoji)

  24. Some well earned free beer.

    ‘He said what the rest of us were thinking’: Firefighter’s free beers after spray at PM

    “Pretty much every day someone comes in and puts their money down, telling us to buy a few beers for that bloke who got stuck into the Prime Minister,” says the licensee of the Steampacket Hotel, Joel Alvey.
    https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/he-said-what-the-rest-of-us-were-thinking-firefighter-who-sprayed-pm-sees-free-beers-flow-in-20200214-p540rt.html

  25. Rick Wilson
    @TheRickWilson
    I TOLD YOU.

    I ***TOLD*** you Trump would confess.
    Quote Tweet

    CNN Breaking News
    @cnnbrk
    · 2h
    President Trump now admits he sent Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to find damaging information on his political opponents, despite denying it during impeachment https://cnn.it/2uJuYG6

  26. zoomster @ #1733 Friday, February 14th, 2020 – 3:12 pm

    P1

    Hope you’re running all this past your local member, and ideally, through the local media as well.

    Yep. No use at all. To her credit, Fiona Phillip’s office was in regular contact during our first month or so. But really, they finally had to acknowledge that about the only thing they could do was send a letter or two to various ministers.

    I now realize we should have elected Warren Mundine. At least we would have had some access to the government. But on the other hand, maybe not – we’ve also been in touch with our state member (Shelley Hancock). I got a formal acknowledgement from her office, but nothing else.

    We’ve also written to the local paper. As have many others. The thing you have to realize is that we are just a fairly ordinary case. We are not even especially badly affected. I felt guilty even applying for money from Vinnies, since we didn’t actually get hurt or lose our house or anything. Just our business. You’d think that would make us eligible for the “small business” recovery grants … but it doesn’t. We have yet to meet anyone who is eligible.

    Everybody we speak to here feels like the entire South Coast has simply been forgotten. I’m not saying we’re worse off than anyone else – I’d be fairly sure all the other affected areas are much the same (except they probably have a more useful local member).

    We’re just no longer newsworthy, and the problem is just too big for most people to comprehend how bad it really is, so that’s the end of it as far as most people are concerned. Time to move on.

  27. Victoria says: Friday, February 14, 2020 at 3:25 pm

    @TheRickWilson : I TOLD YOU.

    President Trump now admits he sent Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to find damaging information on his political opponents, despite denying it during impeachment https://cnn.it/2uJuYG6

    *****************************************************************

    The lawlessness and the corruption at the highest level continues on a daily basis in USA …… it is rapidly becoming a * banana republic * – following a historical pattern seen in other countries ….

  28. phoenixRED

    What is the problem with sending his lawyer to do that any way ? ‘Digging up dirt” on opponents has been SOP for all pollies since forever. Paying for it also SOP.

  29. phoenixRED @ #1492 Friday, February 14th, 2020 – 2:37 pm

    The lawlessness and the corruption at the highest level continues on a daily basis in USA …… it is rapidly becoming a * banana republic * – following a historical pattern seen in other countries ….

    Nobody bothered seriously standing up to money, so now money takes what it wants. You reap what you sow.

  30. poroti says: Friday, February 14, 2020 at 3:41 pm

    phoenixRED

    What is the problem with sending his lawyer to do that any way ? ‘Digging up dirt” on opponents has been SOP for all pollies since forever. Paying for it also SOP.

    ***********************************************************

    I think the issue of the President of the US withholding FUNDS to a so called ‘friendly/allie’ in Ukraine unless they supply *dirt* on a political opponent goes beyond the pale ……

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