No Newspoll this week it seems – which is unfortunate, because a report in New York Times ($) suggests coronavirus lockdowns are doing wonders for opinion poll response rates:
Even in online surveys, pollsters have also seen an increase in participation over the past few weeks. At the Pew Research Center, which does most of its polling through the online American Trends Panel, many respondents filled in a voluntary-comments box in a recent survey with expressions of gratitude.
It is inferred that “a wider variety of people are willing to tell pollsters what they think, so it’s more likely that a poll’s respondents will come closer to reflecting the makeup of the general population.”
Coronavirus is rather less conducive to the staging of actual elections, the latest casualty being the May 30 date that was set for Tasmania’s Legislative Council seats of Huon Rosevears, which was itself a postponement from the traditional first Saturday of the month. The government has now invoked a recently legislated power to set the date for a yet-to-be-determined Saturday in June, July and August. The Tasmanian Electoral Commission has expressed the view that a fully postal election, as some were advocating, did not count as an election under the state’s existing Electoral Act.
Tasmania and other jurisdictions with elections looming on their calendars might perhaps look to South Korea, which proceeded with its legislative elections on Wednesday. As reported in The Economist ($):
All voters will have their temperature taken before entering their polling station (those found to have fever or other symptoms will be directed to a separate polling booth). They will also have to wear a face mask, sanitise their hands and put on vinyl gloves before picking up a ballot paper and entering the booth. Election stewards will ensure people keep away from each other while queueing and voting. Door knobs, pencils and ballot boxes will be sterilised often.
Other than that, I can offer the following in the way of recommended reading: Antony Green’s post calling for pre-poll votes to be counted under wraps on election day starting from 2pm. This would address issues arising from the huge imbalance between election day booths, only one of which processed more than 4000 votes at the May 2019 federal election, and the three weeks’ accumulation of votes cast at pre-poll booths, of which 901 cleared 4000 votes, including 208 that went above 10,000 and ten with more than 20,000 (UPDATE: Make that 370 of more than 4000 and 208 of more than 10,000 – turns out the numbers in the table are cumulative). The result is that the largest pre-poll booths are not reporting until very late at night, many hours after the last trickles of election booths runs dry.
This has sometimes caused election counts to take on different complexions at the end of the evening — to some extent at the Victorian state election in November 2018, which ended a little less catastrophic for the Liberals than the election day results suggested, and certainly at the Wentworth by-election the previous month, when Liberal candidate Dave Sharma briefly rose from the dead in his struggle with the ultimately victorious Kerryn Phelps. It is noted that pre-poll votes in New Zealand are counted throughout election day itself, which is made practical by a ban on any election campaigning on the day itself, freeing up party volunteers for scrutineering who in Australia would be staffing polling booths.
Antony also argues against reducing the pre-poll period from three weeks to two, for which there has been quite a broad push since last year’s election, as it will lead to greater demand for the less secure option of postal voting, stimulated by the efforts of the political parties.
Also note my extensive post below on recent events in Wisconsin – you are encouraged to use that thread if you have something to offer specifically on American politics.
“ When did Andrew Bolt work for the Labor Party? ”
From what I can gather (not that I give more than zero fucks) he once handed out how to votes in a NT Legislative Assembly vote for Labor in the late 70s or early 80s before seeing the light. A bit like Rita Pahani – she once attended a Victorian Young Labor conference before her lurch hard right …
There is quite a track record of various right wingers sniffing around Labor in their salad days. Turnbull, Costello, Abbott (although I call bullshit on that one. He was always crazy DLP). Every so often there is a full blown Labor rat: Lyons, Hughes, Latham, Mundine …
Can QLD Labor really stick it to the LNP by buying equity In Virgin or is that an entirely Federal thing?
Andrew_Earlwood @ #550 Monday, April 20th, 2020 – 6:38 pm
… Rudd
Nothing wrong
It’s time to die
This is BB hard at work painting…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9MAmWnOznI
Andrew Bolt worked in his youth for NT Labor Senator Bob Collins (who, unrelatedly, met a sticky end).
Steven @ #553 Monday, April 20th, 2020 – 6:40 pm
Huh ?
Agree 1000%.
Something amazing happened in Australia. I think we qualify as “unique”.
There’s a combination of common sense, a low number (but not zero) of states, and at the heart of it a grudging acceptance of The Science that serves us well.
In short: ScoMo got rolled. Berejiklian, his best chance for an ideological ally, has enough sense in her to see that the virus doesn’t give a fig about ideology, or being a Nice Person. Or party donors.
While it’s easy to say, with the wisdom of hindsight, that we got a lot wrong, what we got RIGHT saved our national arses.
In one way, just one, I agree with Bolt: many of the restrictions probably did not contribute much to the good result we have had.
For example (just one): why is it so bad just to go to the beach? Up here we have the regulation signs and warnings. They even tried closing the beaches for a few days. But when you can walk your dog (or someone else’s dog) on a perfect, blissful beach that’s 3 kilometres long, but which has precisely three other people on it, what’s the point closing it, except “consistency”?
The point is that, in Bondi, the Bondi Boogie Bar revellers – never ones to pay much attention to anything but their tattoos, their Brazilians and their peroxide bleached buttholes – need a simple rule to abide by: no ifs, butts or maybes. “Barrack room lawyers not required. Just eff off our beach”.
It was a shame this (for a while) was applied to the paradise of Cellito, but there you go. Don’t tell anyone that civil disobedience up here – at least technically – is a way of life. They might come and see for themselves (although beware: the roads in have large potholes after the 600mm rains back in Feb).
So who is going to make the call? Which restriction can we tweak to see if it works? Which pollie is going to put his or her name to THAT?
We tried a lot of things here, yes, in a panic. Some of them worked a treat. Some didn’t make much difference.
What really needs to be hammered home is that this is not The End, nor The Beginning Of The End. It is only The End Of The Beginning.
Yes, the economy cannot be held in suspension forever. Yes, a choice will have to be made: a trade-off between an acceptable death count and prosperity for the vast majority.
But Bolt? He can eff off our beach.
TAA?
Or you can chance it with Ansett…
What happened to Bob Collins, William?
https://www.pollbludger.net/2020/04/20/what-the-papers-say/comment-page-12/#comment-3390213
As far as I know there is nothing preventing a state government buying airline shares on the open market and it may even be possible with compulsory acquisition (which may require it to be company registered in the relevant state, although I am not sure).
16000 workers on jobseeker payments $550 a week equals $17.6 million a month. Is it worth not bailing them out?
Read all about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Collins_(politician)
Eep!
Well indeed
William Bowe says:
Monday, April 20, 2020 at 6:41 pm
Andrew Bolt worked in his youth for NT Labor Senator Bob Collins (who, unrelatedly, met a sticky end).
___________
I had heard that Bolt also worked for an outfit called the ANIMALS. Or something like that, a Hawke government related media unit that was basically a propaganda arm of the party but run out of the government. Could be wrong.
Tom
Thanks.
Hopefully Palasczcuk is considering the impact of the jobs v budget right now.
Blot is just a goon for hire.
Murdochs operative to divide and conquer.
Seems I was right. A barely remembered snippet from a conversation 20 years ago.
His Indian sojourn over, Bolt returned to Australia and called his old friend Gary Gray, seeking employment in Canberra so he could be with Sally. It was 1987 and the Hawke Labor Government was chasing its third election win in a row, something federal Labor hadn’t achieved since the Curtin/Chifley Labor Government of the 1940s.
Gray found Bolt a job with aNiMaLS, the feared Labor attack machine of the Hawke and Keating years. aNiMaLS was the moniker given to the more prosaic, official title of National Media Liaison Service. But aNiMaLS was a highly political unit led by Labor apparatchiks which specialised in opposition research, rapid tactical response and marginal seat campaigning. Other alumni of aNiMaLS include the respected and ubiquitous David Epstein (a former chief of staff to Kevin Rudd); Labor veteran Colin Campbell; Rosemary Church, now a presenter with CNN; Col Parkes; and the highly-regarded Jack Lake, a long time Labor operative and also most recently a former senior advisor to Kevin Rudd.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110611120129/http://ipa.org.au/sectors/ideas-liberty/publication/1854/the-outsider
In my experience Bluetooth devices don’t have to pair with each other simply to know that each other exist. they onl;y have to do that when trying to share information.
If the only information being “shared” is that the other was close enough to ping the world, and that your phone was close enough to receive that ping, with or without confirming passwords, then that is enough to establish proximity.
The aim of the app is not to get the phones exchanging data. Just for them to acknowledge each other’s existence.And that can only be done if the two phones are within infection range.
So a lot more involved than handing out HTVs!
“ Andrew Bolt worked in his youth for NT Labor Senator Bob Collins (who, unrelatedly, met a sticky end).”
Was that when Collins was a federal pollie, or when he was the Territory opposition leader? Was Blot Canberra based (if working for Collins as a senator and not when he was just a Territory MLA)?
From Anne Summers in The Monthly:
The article doesn’t specifically say he worked for Collins, but it’s reported elsewhere that he did. I wonder how many people go into Job Network these days and come out with a political staffer’s job.
Having met Bob Collins, and has a bit to do with him professionally, I was shocked with the paedo stuff.
So Andrew Bolt has a track record of supporting paedos-politicians, priests – still Murdoch gives him a megaphone in the RWNJ firmament.
Waiting for the Deloitte to publish the usual statement saying they expect there to be a number of interested buyers when in fact there aren’t any and it’s just a question of how much they can gouge by way of administration fees before the whole shit show ends.
I’d leave that argument well alone if I were a Labor partisan.
When I knew Bob Collins he was a Senator in Canberra – and about 25 stone. Think George Christensen before the lap-banding surgery.
Which is why I was shocked at the subsequent revelations.
Bob Collins got his AO the same day as Ros Kelly.
Should he have been allowed to keep it?
The problem with bailing out Virgin Australia is it is simply not worth $5 billion and that is how much debt it has. It needs to be liquidated and then it can be bought at a much cheaper price….. but it will have to go on a diet…. sack people, cut flights…. it doesn’t make money as it is.
BSF
It’s a buyers market.
Administrators know this. The first thing they do is revalue it.
To keep it as a business keep the staff.
A cost per aircraft just like maintenance.
Yes. Thanks. That is it. I can see why I missed that. atm, for us, the working week has infected the weekend host and replicated itself.
From that IPA hagiography of Blot that naff cherishes:
“ Confessions of a former Labor staffer
One of the great paradoxes of Bolt’s career is his two periods of service as a Labor staffer. It’s a detail which inevitably confounds critics and supporters alike. But like most things in Bolt’s life, it wasn’t part of any grand design, instead it was just another accidental circumstance. ‘I went to Darwin as a minder for a belly dancer who was my then girlfriend’, says Bolt. ‘I soon got bored, went to the local Commonwealth Employment Service office and on the pin board they had a job as a political staffer. I don’t even know if the party was nominated. Anyway, I applied for it and it was the Federal Member for the Northern Territory, John Reeves, who’s a lovely bloke. It was supposed to be a temporary thing because one of his staff got sick, but it worked out so well that I stayed for the election.’
It was during this period that Bolt befriended Gary Gray, who at the time was working for Bob Collins, then the Leader of the Opposition in the Northern Territory. When Bolt reflects on this period he recalls himself as an interested observer rather than a participant. ‘The other people did the politics. I was really just in their shadow and enjoying it. It was just really intoxicating and it was the first time I got that real buzz you get from politics which is really dangerous. You know that space where you’re so convinced that your side is right and in those conditions the other side is immoral and therefore you’re excused all sorts of things. You start thinking: “they’re immoral so why should you be nice to them? Why should you follow all the rules?”’
John Reeves lost his seat (and later went on to be a Federal Court Judge) and Andrew Bolt, now unemployed, returned to Melbourne at The Age only to soon be offered a job by then editor of The Herald, Neil Mitchell. ”
And …
“ Unsurprisingly, Bolt recalls his role at aNiMaLS as mostly perfunctory, performing largely rudimentary tasks. ‘We were ostensibly a government department and so technically we couldn’t do party business. But we did. When Parliament wasn’t sitting I’d fly around the country doing party audits of the press functions of various local Labor members of parliament if they wanted it. I’d go into a marginal seat and I would say: “well, this is what you could do with the material we’re giving you to get a bit better publicity.” And when parliament was sitting we’d print up these little four page things where we’d package up the message of the day. It was designed so the local member could just drop in their name as well as the figure of spending for their electorate and “bang” they had their press release!’
Despite Bolt’s pessimism at the time that Labor would lose the 1987 election, Hawke capitalised on the disarray in Coalition ranks caused in some part by the ‘Joh for PM’ sideshow and increased his government’s majority from 16 to 24 seats.
Andrew and Sally left Canberra after the 1987 federal election and moved to Adelaide …”
So not really an ALP operative. Probably never a member. Seems like he was just filling in time in between journalist gigs and the connection with Labor was first accidental and then personal – through his friendship with Gary Gray.
No mention of working for Senator Collins there either.
Andrew_Earlwood says:
Monday, April 20, 2020 at 7:10 pm
From that IPA hagiography of Blot that naff cherishes:
_____________
I don’t cherish it. Plus I’m sure Bolt would like to downplay any work he did there considering his current positions. Was he an ALP member either in NT or Canberra? I don’t know. But your efforts to downplay his involvement in the ALP as ‘handing our HTVs’ is spin quite in the tradition of the ANIMALS! 🙂
Given standard receiver’s practice Virgin will go the same way as ANSETT.
Bolt saw an opening and he took it. He has not made a secret of the fact. Suckers all round I would say.
FredNK
There are as many jobs at stake as Adani.
Or is the political will only there for supporting mining companies?
Who would want to buy heavily leveraged heavy aircraft from Virgin’s administrator?
I miss Compass.
guytaur says:
Monday, April 20, 2020 at 7:21 pm
FredNK
There are as many jobs at stake as Adani.
Or is the political will only there for supporting mining companies?
?????????????????
BK @ #585 Monday, April 20th, 2020 – 7:21 pm
What do you call an airline that doesn’t fly?
A walk!
Simon Katich says:
Monday, April 20, 2020 at 7:22 pm
I miss Compass.
Give Australian National Airways another run.
I miss TAA.
Spanish flu did get it’s name because as non-combatants in the great war, the Spanish press were the first to make a story of it. The press in combatant nations being subject to censorship and compliant to their governments.
It seems one of the most likely as index patient was actually from Kansas and it was taken to Europe by US soldiers joining in the great conflagration.
As posted before Peter Piot belled the cat over 18 months ago on the coming global pandemic and has an interesting account of the story behind the Spanish flu as well as zoonotic disease pandemics in this video from a royal institution talk.
The Spanish themselves called it the Naples disease apparently, as those Neopolitans were long time go to miscreants deserving of blame for disease calamities in Europe it seems. Or the Chinese, which also has a long history.
Seems blaming the other for calamities real or imagined is the go to default for many humans. LNP blaming Labor, Labor blaming ‘teh Greens’, you get the idea.
Almost all the video commentators rightly answer the rhetorical question in the title from ~18 months ago, probably without even viewing any of it.
Are We Ready for the Next Pandemic? – with Peter Piot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en06PYwvpbI
There is no shortage of LNP Queensland MPs to write to…
“FORMER premier Peter Beattie says domestic tourism in Queensland will “fall by the wayside’’ if Virgin Australia collapses and Qantas assumes a monopoly.
“Make no mistake, places like the Gold Coast, Cairns and Whitsundays will never recover unless there’s a (aviation) duopoly,’’ he said.
“Australia needs two airlines. I know it’s tricky from a government perspective, especially at Commonwealth level, but I’m urging every Queenslander to write to their local federal MP and ask them to ensure Virgin does not fold.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/business/peter-beatties-grim-warning-if-virgin-folds/news-story/b591faf93c352b5cb36e0a0eeffc1217
So friendly they used the word twice.
“Ketan Joshi
@KetanJ0
South Korea to implement Green New Deal after ruling party election win”
I hope this forces some other governments down a similar path
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/04/16/south-korea-implement-green-new-deal-ruling-party-election-win/
Quoll
Seems blaming the other for calamities real or imagined is the go to default for many humans. LNP blaming Labor, Labor blaming ‘teh Greens’, you get the idea.
________________________________
…The Greens blaming Labor….
Yep. I get the idea.
frednk @ #589 Monday, April 20th, 2020 – 7:25 pm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0pjq3ZzHUs
If it’s good enough for the Federal Government it’s good enough for a State government that has at least 5 000 jobs.
Albanese has been calling for an equity stake.
Maybe QLD doesn’t have the budget. If they can and I am not saying they can, then that’s a likely election win for Queensland Labor.
“Now would be a time for all those Industry Funds to put their Union Money where their mouth is and buy an airline. ”
Spend peoples super money on buying a business that habitually makes a loss?? buce…you are an idiot.
Whos going to watch Turnbull?