Something for the weekend

Random notes: a WA only poll on coronavirus, some detail on the elections in Queensland last Saturday, and a look at Donald Trump’s counter-intuitive poll bounce.

The West Australian had a Painted Dog Research poll of 500 respondents on attitudes to the coronavirus, with field work dates undisclosed – or at least its website did, as I can’t see any mention of it in the hard copy. What the online report ($) tells us is that 71% believed the federal government should “enforce a full lockdown”; that 25% expected three months of social distancing, and 23% six months; that 18% were extremely worried about losing their job by September, with another 42% slightly worried; and that 68% were most concerned about the health impact, compared with 28% for the economic impact.

Other than that, I have the following to relate about Queensland’s elections on the weekend, which I’ll put here as the dedicated post on the subject doesn’t seem to be doing much business:

• As the dust settles on the troubled counting process, it’s clear the Liberal National Party has enjoyed something of a triumph in the election for Brisbane City Council, extending their 16-year grip on the lord mayoralty and quite probably repeating their feat from 2016 of winning 19 out 26 wards on the council. Incumbent Adrian Schrinner leads Labor’s Pat Condren in the lord mayoral race by a margin of 5.5%, although the latter gained a 4.0% swing off Graham Quirk’s landslide win in 2016. The ABC projection is awarding 17 ward seats to the LNP, to which they look very likely to add Enoggera, while maintaining a slender lead over the Greens in Paddington. The Greens’ combined council ward vote is up 3.4% on 2016 to 17.9%, and they retained their sole existing seat of The Gabba with swings of 12.2% on the primary vote and 8.5% on two-party preferred.

• However, it was a less good performance by the LNP in the two state by-elections, where all the detail is laid out at my results pages for Bundamba and Currumbin. The party finished a distant third behind One Nation in Bundamba, which remains a safe seat for Labor, and have only narrowly held on in Currumbin, where Labor has achieved a rare feat for a governing party in picking up a swing of nearly 2% at a by-election. Party leader Deb Frecklington would nonetheless be relieved by the result, since a defeat in Currumbin, which a pre-election poll suggested was in prospect, would surely have imperilled her leadership, despite her being able to point to the highly unusual circumstances in which the election was held.

• Speaking of which, I offer the following numbers on the ways the enrolled voters of Bundamba and Currumbin did and didn’t vote, with the qualification that there is an indeterminate number of postals still to be counted — perhaps rather a few of them, given I understood that there had been a surge in applications (although it seems a number of applicants never received their ballots).

Finally, a few thoughts on the situation in the United States, elaborating on a subject covered in yesterday’s post here by Adrian Beaumont – you are encouraged to comment on that thread if you have something specific to offer on matters American, and in particular on Donald Trump’s confounding opinion poll bounce over the past few weeks. I sought to put the latter event in context in a paywalled Crikey article on Monday, the key feature of which is the following comparison of his approval rating trend, as measured by FiveThirtyEight, with comparable trend measures of my own for Angela Merkel, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron and Scott Morrison.

The upshot is that leaders the world over are enjoying a “rally around the flag” approval bounce, and that Donald Trump’s looks meagre indeed compared with his colleagues across the Atlantic. I feel pretty sure that the lack of a clear bounce for Scott Morrison is down to the fact that there have been no new numbers since Essential Research’s poll of over a fortnight ago, with the surges for Merkel, Johnson and Macron being concentrated since that time.

It’s also interesting to observe that Trump’s improvement has not been consistently observed. The chart below records his trends so far from this year from the five most prolific pollsters. For some reason, Rasmussen, the pollster that is usually most favourable to him — and which is accordingly the most frequent subject of his vainglorious tweets on the odd occasion when it reaches 50% — has in fact found his approval rating going in the direction he deserves. There is also no sign of change from the Ipsos series. However, the improving trend from the other three is more in line with the many other pollsters included in the FiveThirtyEight series, hence its overall picture of his best ratings since his post-election honeymoon.

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.

2,303 comments on “Something for the weekend”

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  1. Eddy Jokovich
    @EddyJokovich
    ·
    3m
    Morrison is now being compared to Hawke and Curtin? Wow, senior journalists are really drinking the LNP Kool-Aid express today, laced with extra sugar. Morrison is not even a bootlace of those two leaders. #AUSPOL

  2. Barney: “You really don’t understand this shit!!! (i.e. numbers and maths)

    A growth rate of less than 1 means that we are starting to move towards an upper limit and a possible end is in sight.

    Whilst the growth rate is above one the upper limit remains the total population.”

    I thought a growth rate less than 1 was a decline in total numbers. Or do you mean a growth rate of 1.1?

  3. Shellbell, I suspect there is community transmission too. Can’t be sure because they were not tested.

    This is what makes me suspicious:
    1. They had most of the symptoms of C19
    2. Two were in close contact with a person with the sniffles who, it turned out, had just returned from China. This occurred mid February.
    3. Another has a limited social circle and spends most of his time without contact with people (lives by himself, swims, runs, rides his bike and rebuilds a classic car in his garage). However, he does shop in Sorrento where those idiots in Portsea who had just come back from Aspen also shop.

  4. meher baba @ #103 Friday, April 3rd, 2020 – 7:19 am

    Barney: “You really don’t understand this shit!!! (i.e. numbers and maths)

    A growth rate of less than 1 means that we are starting to move towards an upper limit and a possible end is in sight.

    Whilst the growth rate is above one the upper limit remains the total population.”

    I thought a growth rate less than 1 was a decline in total numbers. Or do you mean a growth rate of 1.1?

    An exponent of 1 gives linear growth.

  5. lizzie says:
    Morrison is now being compared to Hawke and Curtin? Wow, senior journalists are really drinking the LNP Kool-Aid express today, laced with extra sugar. Morrison is not even a bootlace of those two leaders. #AUSPOL
    ———————————–
    Lizzie
    Do we know which journalists are saying that because if they are not known Liberals then they are seriously deluded. Besides the increase in newstart, wage subsidy and child care initiative which deserve a tick despite a few flaws but none would be happening if Dutton and Morrison were half as tough on borders as they claim to be.

  6. Good Morning.

    I hope the face masks thing is true. Our society and economy can start again. Plus drastically reducing the spread of the virus. It may be time to take up culture from Asia.

    Meanwhile the economic shock of ten million unemployed in a month in the US has not really registered to the world. That’s a massive downturn in the world economy.

    We see Sally McManus and Greg Combet making great progress in finally reforming work from home rules. It could be Greg Combet’s greatest success in fighting climate change.

    The change has been that dizzying in speed.

    Scott Morrison and the Liberals can never again say Labor are the big spending party. Too many voters have again been impacted personally even those that have kept jobs.

    Those Franking Credit people have seen their bubble burst big time.
    I really hope we have passed the world peak of the virus as a result of that news about masks.

    Crossing my fingers that we are at the beginning of the end of having to economically shut down to flatten the curve of the virus. 🙂

  7. Mexican

    Andrew Earlwood has been preaching the truth about the LNP and borders.

    Dutton’s career is finished as long as Labor politically keeps their foot on his throat.

  8. Shellbell: “Queensland has fewer (or should that be less) new cases today than 14 days ago.”

    Righto. So that means that the combined total for the 3 largest states plus Tassie and the ACT is the lowest it has been since 21 March. We’ll see how WA, SA and the NT go.

    That said, Annastacia has released some modelling today that suggests that, due to anticipated community transmission, the peak caseload in Queensland won’t occur until July-August. Please note my use of the words “modelling” and “anticipated”: as I have been saying, any assessment of a likely upsurge in rates of community transmission have to be based on assumptions, most likely based on the experience of other countries. There is nothing much to be found in the existing Australian figures to help us estimate what the future trend in community transmission might be.

  9. The linear looks hopeful but it wont take much to shift it and the real test is to come and its probable that we wont be in the clear until this time next year as that will take us through our winter and another northern hemisphere winter. Only with a vaccine is the job done because this virus doesn’t seem to need much to take off.

  10. The order has come down from Rupert: Saint Scott can do no wrong. Anyone who questions his actions, even mildly like Albo, is a traitor and unfit for future government.

  11. So if the cases were say 5,000 yesterday, what number of new cases would equate to growth of 1.0 today.

    I kind of thought* it would have to be zero.

    *I will deny any wrong thoughts if challenged.

  12. Barney,

    I think you are confusing the rate of growth with the acceleration. A rate of growth of 1 means no change, and a rate of growth less than 1 means the total number of cases is going down.

    So if we have 5000 cases today and the rate of growth is 1.0, tomorrow we will have 5000 x 1.0 = 5000 total cases. If the rate of growth is 0.9, tomorrow we will have 5000 x 0.9 = 4500 total cases.

  13. PeeBee

    If wide ranging social distancing is an effective response to knowingly caused cases, then why won’t it be doing the job, roughly, in the same way for community transmissions?

  14. Shellbell @ #115 Friday, April 3rd, 2020 – 7:31 am

    So if the cases were say 5,000 yesterday, what number of new cases would equate to growth of 1.0 today.

    I kind of thought* it would have to be zero.

    *I will deny any wrong thoughts if challenged.

    5,000.

    When the growth rate drops below 1, we will see the number of new cases declining .

  15. Shellbell: “So if the cases were say 5,000 yesterday, what number of new cases would equate to growth of 1.0 today.”

    In any sort of sane universe it would be zero. But, in the arcane world of PB, the magic “exponent” means that it’s pretty much what any poster wants it to be.

    BTW, in the article Maud Lynne linked to in her earlier post which started off this debate, all the growth data seems to be expressed in terms of simple percentages and trend lines. The same sort of data you’ll find on most sites looking at the coronavirus stats from around the world.

    Because those are the trends that make sense to most people, as opposed to complex and (I believed) misapplied techniques borrowed from the physical sciences. Plus arrogant and childish name calling along the lines of “I really understand these things and you’re a moron.”

  16. Toff

    Murdoch has taken a massive hit in political power.

    Newscorpse has shut down many community papers. That’s bye bye to the Nationals having media at their back. It could be vital in Queensland in making the ABC the only local media outlet.

    That’s not great for progressives of course. However losing sport to drive viewers to Sky along with that community paper shut down greatly reduces Murdoch influence.

    Lots of people have been driven online. An area Murdoch is weak in and he feared so much he got Abbott and Turnbull to destroy FTTP NBN.

    Those journalists also are being hit by the reality sledgehammer

  17. Barney: “When the growth rate drops below 1, we will see the number of new cases declining .”

    Which is what I said in my earlier post, to be responded to by a whole lot of gobbledygook and name-calling from yours truly.

  18. ‘fess,

    “Frankly I’m incredulous that in this day and age people continue to use ‘Australia’ when what they really mean is NSW.”

    With that attitude, you are welcome in Qld anytime.

  19. No Barney. If the growth rate drops below 1.0, we will see the total number of cases declining, not the number of new cases. The number of new cases would be zero.

  20. Are there hints here of the modelling which Australian health authorities are working from?

    Speaking on ABC Radio this morning, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said how bad the crisis gets in Queensland would depend on community transmission.

    “At the moment we don’t have community transmission in Queensland,” she said.

    “We can’t get rid of the virus, we need to contain it as much as possible.

    “That’s why we’re doing all of the planning.”

    Ms Palaszczuk said that “we’re not even on the curve yet”.

    “We (Queensland) haven’t even started to climb the curve,” she said.

    “The evidence is telling me we are about two or three weeks behind NSW and the peak could be in July, August, September.

    “As I said there is extensive modelling, there is extensive preparation happening.”

    Queensland Health has been preparing for the virus to ramp up from the end of this month, heading into May.

    But the Premier said “one positive” was that Queensland “hopefully” wouldn’t experience a massive flu season because of the social distancing measures which are in place to help combat COVID-19.”

    https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/qld-covid19-cases-jump-by-39-as-cars-line-up-to-cross-border/news-story/53f14acf995034c06dcda72cedd70f71

  21. MB
    As i often point out when people get bogged down on the statistics that they are only useful for helping to tell what is happening and in many cases do not tell the full story. It is entirely possible the spread is being slowed but this virus seems to spread in a ad-hoc fashion and policy steps seem to be impacting the number of new cases but we really wont know because statistics are often backward looking.

  22. AM: “No Barney. If the growth rate drops below 1.0, we will see the total number of cases declining, not the number of new cases. The number of new cases would be zero.”

    Of course you’re right. I misread Barney’s most recent post. Sorry for any confusion.

    Barney, in old internet lingo, I think you’ve been pwned.

  23. A relative believes that Morrison is doing a good job.

    I don’t think so because:

    1. No plans: reduced fund for CSIRO, Insufficient stock pile of essential stuff, lack of action because they hadn’t thought about what to do beforehand.
    2. Poor communication: messages change often, late public education and then only very simple and restricted eg, don’t explain how to socially isolate. No telling people OS to warning them to return. Press conferences that are a lot of words but say little. Essential jobs should continue as all jobs are essential.
    3. Poor execution: Acting a little late all the time. Allowing people in to Australia from hotspots. Schools are either open except when they are shut.
    4. No policies: Allowing cruise ship to unload. Allowing people to go OS (and on cruises.), no quarantining people returning from hotspots.
    5. Ignorance: Not listening to expert advice or putting in place a CMO that is complicit in not providing expert advice/or insisting they act of his advice
    6. Secrecy: keeping info about announcement confidential
    7. Lose of Control: States initiated individual actions, meaning no national response.
    8. Wrong priorities. Treating this as an economic threat first, rather than a health threat which would effect the economy.
    9. Financial: targeting bosses/businesses over consumers. This will play out as a biggest rotting spree that we have seen. Variable unemployment response depending if you were casuals, recently unemployed and long term unemployed.
    10: Social response: Not much there apart from asking us to be nice to each other. No response to hoarding issue.

    What are bludgers thoughts?

  24. Growth rate of 1.05 daily (equivalently, growth rate 5% daily):
    5000, 5250, 5513, 5788… doubles in 14 days, about 5 million in 140 days.

    Growth rate of 1.00:
    5000, 5000, 5000… forever.

    Growth rate 0.95:
    5000, 4750, 4513, 4287… halves in 14 days, down to 5 cases in 140 days

  25. AustralianSuper backs RBA bailout

    CEO Ian Silk says the fund has been actively managing its liquidity and is well-positioned but he worries that other funds might need central bank support.

    He says if the Treasury’s estimate of a $27 billion drawdown of super savings by millions of Australians proves accurate, the industry will probably sail through with no liquidity issues.

    But if Treasury is wrong and the figure is more like the $40 billion to $50 billion estimated by actuaries Rice Warner Silk, there will almost certainly be industry funds in need of emergency liquidity.

    “I think any discussion about it, including Murray’s comment about moral hazard, has to be seen in the context that as far as I see it, this has never happened before, that people have been able to take significant amounts of money out with virtually no notice,” Silk says.

    https://www.afr.com/chanticleer/australiansuper-backs-rba-bailout-20200402-p54gdj

  26. PeeBee

    Keneally attacked Dutton on borders for very good reason. It was an opening of Labor’s new attack.

    By excluding Labor from decision making Morrison was politically inept. People are not stupid. They understand Dutton and Morrison did not stop the boats. That means Labor wins on competence. And is able to politically attack because they don’t own the decision.

    Edit: Like the virus itself the political damage is a lagging indicator.

  27. Shellbell @ #118 Friday, April 3rd, 2020 – 9:36 am

    PeeBee

    If wide ranging social distancing is an effective response to knowingly caused cases, then why won’t it be doing the job, roughly, in the same way for community transmissions?

    It should be. However there is always a proportion of idiots who don’t think it applies to them. And there are the real essential service people (excludes hairdressers) who still need to be mobile and physically interacting with others (eg. medicals). Nothing is perfect so you have to hope that we can be lucky.

  28. Shellbell:’If wide ranging social distancing is an effective response to knowingly caused cases, then why won’t it be doing the job, roughly, in the same way for community transmissions?’

    I assume it will.

    In the three cases I mentioned, one already works from home. One was retired and has a very limited social circle and then got that crook few people visited.

    The third was interesting as she is a doctor. Initially she dismissed having the virus until she found out the fellow with the sniffles had just returned from China. She also mentioned other doctors who attended the conference had also come down with C19 symptoms.

    I asked there should have been an widespread breakout because of the public contact by these doctors and she explained that they would not be very good spreaders. They sanitise their hands fifty times a day, spend little time with their patients etc. So in effect isolating themselves by default.

  29. Ante Meridian @ #123 Friday, April 3rd, 2020 – 9:43 am

    No Barney. If the growth rate drops below 1.0, we will see the total number of cases declining, not the number of new cases. The number of new cases would be zero.

    That’s not possible. The total number of cases only ever increases. You might see the total number of active cases decline, but then your growth rate is tied to your death and recovery rates (such that 1.0 would mean “new cases = deaths + recoveries”).

    I vote for simplicity.

    Growth rate 0 – 5000, 5000, 5000, … (total cumulative cases)
    Growth rate 0.1 – 5000, 5500, 6050, 6655, …
    Growth rate 1.0 – 5000, 10000, 20000, 40000, …

    Or: totalCases(t + 1) = totalCases(t) * [growth rate] + totalCases(t)
    Equivalently: totalCases(t + 1) = totalCases(t) * ([growth rate] + 1)

  30. meher baba @ #120 Friday, April 3rd, 2020 – 9:40 am

    Shellbell: “So if the cases were say 5,000 yesterday, what number of new cases would equate to growth of 1.0 today.”

    In any sort of sane universe it would be zero. But, in the arcane world of PB, the magic “exponent” means that it’s pretty much what any poster wants it to be.

    BTW, in the article Maud Lynne linked to in her earlier post which started off this debate, all the growth data seems to be expressed in terms of simple percentages and trend lines. The same sort of data you’ll find on most sites looking at the coronavirus stats from around the world.

    Because those are the trends that make sense to most people, as opposed to complex and (I believed) misapplied techniques borrowed from the physical sciences. Plus arrogant and childish name calling along the lines of “I really understand these things and you’re a moron.”

    Calling a spade a spade. Trends that “make sense to people” doesn’t mean they are valid. Oh, by the way, the modelling is based on biological science. Bacterial growth, predator/prey population dynamics, that sort of stuff.

  31. If you were simply going on policy announcements then Morrison has done a few good things but in doing so he has only got it half right. Increasing Newstart but ignored the disabled and the wage subsidy but excludes casuals with less than 12 months in the one workplace despite the newer casuals being more likely to be let go and the child care initiative is sound.

    Morrison might benefit from the headline announcements but in the longer term he is politically in a very deep hole.

  32. Hmm. The semantics of growth rates….

    I’d say (as in usage) that we have a growth rate of ~5% or r=0.05 per day atm.

    Representing it this way makes it really clear when the number is growing (r>0) and when it is declining (r<0), and when it is stationary (r=0). Ths matches the form of the (*trigger warning*) exponential function, e^(rx).

    The 1.05 figure is the multiplier you use to turn the current number into tomorrow's number; but to say 1.05 to represents 5% growth, or less than 1 implies a decline in overall numbers, is clearly confusing to some bludgers.

  33. PeeBee: “A relative believes that Morrison is doing a good job.”

    I’m sure that many others won’t like my view, but…

    IMO he’s started to do a reasonably good job in the past week or so: although I think it has largely to be judged as a team effort on the part of the PM, Premiers and Chief Ministers.

    Before that, ScoMo and his ministers and chief health advisers were really struggling to transmit a clear and coherent message. The low point was Hunt’s and Murphy’s appearance on Insiders, which verged on being a train wreck. After that, the Feds got their act together re communication.

    As I’ve posted often enough before, I think the gradual move towards home isolation that was implemented nationally was done at the right pace. There were signs that some states were threatening to go off on their own, but they were pulled back into line: possibly by ScoMo, but more likely by the entire group of leaders. That was a good outcome IMO. But, again, the messaging around all of it

    There are certainly grounds for considering that border control has not been managed as well as it ideally might have been. Arrivals from Europe should probably have been forced into quarantine much sooner than they were. The cruise ship fiasco is a bit more complex, as there weren’t really a lot of great alternatives to letting people off (eg, forcing everyone to stay on the ships would have resulted in many additional infections and therefore deaths, and finding accommodation for all of them in Sydney would have been a logistical nightmare). To the extent that people leaving the ships were not given clear instructions to self-quarantine, I think the system failed: how to allocate the responsibility for that stuff-up between NSW and the Feds I am not entirely certain.

    So, all in all, I think ScoMo is going ok. I’ll be interested to see if any other poster gives him a higher mark than me: I very much doubt it!

  34. Call me naive but I was expecting some improvement in daily new cases by now here in the UK 🙁

    Today (Thurs) marks day 10 of current lockdown rules (and day 13 of the pubs being closed)

    Talking of pubs, a landlord in Sutton-in-Ashfield (North Nottinghamshire) was busted yesterday having a lock-in with selected regulars .. dobbed in to the old bill by their new Tory MP (Ashfield being one of the Brexit-loving red wall seats that fell in the recent election)

  35. It’s Time

    “Calling a spade a spade. Trends that “make sense to people” doesn’t mean they are valid. ”

    It’s been my long experience than when people who set themselves up as experts start talking in incomprehensible jargon, and then respond to any questioning of what they are saying with a stream of condescending insults, that what they are saying is usually complete crap.

  36. Baba

    You don’t understand the political damage about the cruise ships.

    The party that has campaigned for decades on border control lost control of the borders.

    That’s irrevocable damage due to incompetence.
    No more saying Labor is weak on border control.

    Saying the spin afterwards is good just means no one believes you.

  37. meher baba @ #120 Friday, April 3rd, 2020 – 10:40 am

    Shellbell: “So if the cases were say 5,000 yesterday, what number of new cases would equate to growth of 1.0 today.”

    In any sort of sane universe it would be zero. But, in the arcane world of PB, the magic “exponent” means that it’s pretty much what any poster wants it to be.

    BTW, in the article Maud Lynne linked to in her earlier post which started off this debate, all the growth data seems to be expressed in terms of simple percentages and trend lines. The same sort of data you’ll find on most sites looking at the coronavirus stats from around the world.

    Because those are the trends that make sense to most people, as opposed to complex and (I believed) misapplied techniques borrowed from the physical sciences. Plus arrogant and childish name calling along the lines of “I really understand these things and you’re a moron.”

    MB, I posted this yesterday – I wish you would read it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth

    A “growth rate” (not “growth”) of r% is just plain and simple exponential growth. The exponent is always “time”. What complicates things in this case is that the growth rate is not constant – it varies depending on many factors (“social distancing” etc).

    If you see graphs that make the resulting growth look linear – which is often done for the purposes of comparison – it is probably because the graph is using a logarithmic scale.

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