Firstly, as per the above post, don’t forget to give generously to the Poll Bludger’s bi-monthly donation drive. Now to an assembly of recent events in the worlds of polling and Eden-Monaro:
• The Guardian reports the latest Essential Research poll includes the pollster’s monthly leadership ratings, which find Scott Morrison’s approval up a point to a new high of 65% and disapproval down a point to a new low of 26%, reflecting continuous improvement since a nadir of 39% and 52% in February. Morrison’s lead as preferred prime minister is 53-23, compared with 50-25 last time. Albanese stands at 43% approval, up one, and 30% disapproval, up three. These numbers have been used to update the BludgerTrack trends, which can be see on the sidebar or in detail here, showing Morrison now at a plateau after his recent ascent.
• The Essential poll also finds 41% saying Jobkeeper reporting bungle reflected negatively on the federal government, compared with 43% saying it did not. “A third” wanted Jobkeeper broadened in response, along with another 20% who wanted the eligibility criteria broadened, while 45% preferred that it go to reducing the debt. The poll also featured a semi-regular suite of questions on the leaders’ attributes, which have become more favourable for both leaders across the board since January. This is especially so in the case of Morrison, and still more especially in the case of his ratings for good in a crisis (66%), leadership capability (70%) and trustworthiness (66%), which have yo-yoed between the bushfire and coronavirus crises. These ratings will be available to review in detail when the full report is published later day. UPDATE: Full report here.
• A poll by the Australia Institute finds 77% support across the country for state border closures. Labor and Greens supporters are somewhat more in favour, One Nation supporters somewhat less so. The poll was conducted online on May 27 and 28 from a sample of 1005. Small-sample state breakdowns suggested Western Australians were particularly supportive, at 88%, a finding consistent with …
• The West Australian ($) had a poll yesterday that recorded a remarkable 89% in favour of keeping the state’s borders closed, with which the state government is persisting in the face of criticism from the federal government and New South Wales government. Presumably the poll had more to it than that, but that’s all there is in the report. The poll was conducted online by Painted Dog Research on Thursday from a sample of 1000.
Eden-Monaro latest:
• With a week still to go before the closure of nominations, the ABC by-election guide records ten candidates and counting, including Cathy Griff for the Greens, Matthew Stadtmiller for Shooters Fishers and Farmers, sundry candidates for the Liberal Democrats, Science Party, Christian Democrats and Sustainable Australia, and two independents. The Nationals have also opened nominations, although they have not traditionally polled strongly in the seat. The deluge has prompted Antony Green to argue that all candidates should be required to produce 100 locally enrolled nominators. This burden is currently imposed only on independents, exemption being a perk of party registration.
• The Australian Electoral Commission has announced its service plan for the by-election, detailing special measures arising from COVID-19. A familiar set of social distancing rules will apply at polling booths, and mobile polling will not be conducted as normal at hospitals and aged care facilities, where “support teams” will instead assist with postal and telephone voting (the latter still only available to the visually impaired).
Is that what you want Bucephalus?
nath says:
Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 10:57 am
That is available through the ACAT system.
Bucephalus @ #1550 Thursday, June 4th, 2020 – 11:26 am
We don’t know, because the cops never tried murdering one of them to see how the rest would respond.
Scout – you’ll have to be more specific. What are you referring to?
Bucephalus @ #1548 Thursday, June 4th, 2020 – 9:26 am
Were those protests anywhere near the size of these?
And of course not all the rioting, looting, vandalism and burning is by legitimate protesters, there is evidence of infiltration by elements looking to disrupt and inflame proceedings.
Just today the FBI arrested 3 men looking to do so in LA.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/jun/03/george-floyd-protests-us-live-news-updates-donald-trump?page=with:block-5ed82af48f08cadb60400a09#block-5ed82af48f08cadb60400a09
a r says:
Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 11:34 am
Utter bollocks. I completely understand the reasons for the different protests. Police at the protests didn’t try to murder protestors. There is no excuse for rioting, vandalism, looting and burning.
https://apple.news/Ap3EWJv7USyuRNIP39ue2Xg
… oh dear.
Apparently after heading to a bunker for a look-see it was time to do a Churchill during the Blitz across Lafayette to the Church of Presidents in this assertion.
Barney in Tanjung Bunga says:
Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 11:36 am
So all of the rioting, vandalism, looting and burning has been caused by everyone else- nothing to do with the protests?
This is your leader. If the law doesn’t support Scotty, he will fire the judge. Robodebt was defended against all comers.
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6775350/robodebt-was-an-algorithmic-weapon-of-calculated-political-cruelty/
Bucephalus @ #1560 Thursday, June 4th, 2020 – 9:41 am
Comprehension fail.
My sentence was;
But you certainly wouldn’t want to focus on what I actually said, it might show you up as the shallow, noxious person that you are. 🙂
Interesting comment from the Guardian Live story today on the Reno money
So if my partner and I together earn $190,000 p.a. and currently own a nice 4 bedroom house in the burbs of western Sydney that’s worth $900k, the govt will give us $25k to ‘renovate’ the double garage and turn it into a studio/flat with a nice ensuite and kitchenette so we can rent it out and make about $250 per week.
And meanwhile my neighbour across the street has recently lost his job, can’t manage his mortgage repayments that his bank locked him into with a mortgage far too high for his ability to financially handle, and he’ll soon see his home being sold off by the bank due to his default.
Yes… that scenario sounds so wonderfully fair and decent and a familiar example of the thinking of our kind, considerate god-fearing PM and his governmental cluster of turds whereby grants are given to those who need it least (as in prosperous sports clubs, businesses and corporations) but because they’re all ‘aspirational’ they get the handouts.
This plan is of course being fully backed by Labor who are jostling for the 2020 award of prime LNP butt kissers.
Apparently all is now forgiven in regards the LNP blaming Labor for the deaths caused by a few unscrupulous tradies during the Pink Batts stimulus.
lizzie says:
Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 11:43 am
The writer is being very loose with the truth. His contract came to the end. He wasn’t offered a new one. It’s not a life tenure position.
The ALP do exactly the same at State and a Federal level.
I would suspect that most of the looting and burning is being done by common criminals, who see the riots as a golden opportunity to get their hands on some stuff. The burning is a means of covering their tracks.
The vandalism and violent responses to law enforcement officials are more likely to come from genuine protesters.
That’s been the experience in past riots over more than two thousand years of history (as far back as late republican Rome if not earlier).
Barney
Why bring up the isolated incident?
Bucephalus @ #1562 Thursday, June 4th, 2020 – 11:41 am
Yep. It was caused by four cops who decided to murder a helpless person in the street, three of whom are still walking free. They’re the root cause.
No one is saying condone rioting/looting/vandalism. The thing most worthy of condemnation, however, are those four police officers and what they did.
meher baba says:
Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 11:52 am
The original post was a cartoon about the names applied to the different protestors. Peaceful protestors are mocked yet calling violent protestors thugs is bad? Give me a break. What would you call people who burnt your car, stole your business stock and burnt your shop? Friends? But let’s mock peaceful protestors who exercised their rights to assembly and protest without rioting, vandalism, looting and burning and organise cleanups of the protest area afterwards. They’re probably the same people going out and helping clean up the Businesses and streets now in their own time.
Bucephalus @ #1566 Thursday, June 4th, 2020 – 9:53 am
It’s called an example, with a reference, to support my point.
Unlike your rhetoric which seems to solely come out of you backside and deflates like a the fart filled balloon it is when challenged with supported facts.
a r says:
Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 11:57 am
Who isn’t condemning those Police Officers? They have been charged and the legal process is occurring. Would you prefer a public lynching?
The most corrupt government since Federation does not need conflict of interest statements from its advisory pals since conflict of interest is de rigeur.
It does not need probity plans for grants because it already knows that there is no probity with the grants.
It does not need transparency in its funding decision making because it already knows that the grants are going to shonks.
It does not need accountability for its funding decision making because accountability is just so much red tape.
The Trump family are the single biggest looters in the US.
Perhaps I just don’t rub shoulders with the right people but I personally know exactly no one who has a lazy $150k to $750k sitting around for home reno’s.
A $150k home reno isn’t a kitchen and bathroom which are typically $25k and $15k each. $150 is about 60 to 70% of the cost to build a typical suburban house (not including land). I could change my kitchen, replace all flooring, replace the doors, bathrooms and repaint and STILL HAVE CHANGE and my house is significantly bigger than a typical suburban house.
As for having more than $150k sitting around. I call bullsh*t when I see it. I suspect a lot of politicians wives and families will be doing renovations shortly but not many other people and certainly not your average guy/girl.
Bucephalus @ #1572 Thursday, June 4th, 2020 – 12:00 pm
Recent development. And about damn time. 🙂
Hammurabi would rule it fair, given the context.
a r @ #1553 Thursday, June 4th, 2020 – 11:34 am
Boo yeah!
No kneeling on necks, no nothing.
We do not want, nor can we afford $150,000 worth of renovations on our 28yo house.
However the rear pergola (about 3.5m by 2.5m) does need replacing as the timber is slowly rotting despite regular coats of Solargard paint.
Any chance that Messrs Morrison and Frydenberg might give, say a $200 grant to help us keep a small pergola builder in business? Thought not.
I am so very pleased that you are all now fans of General “Mad Dog” Mattis who you all so roundly denigrated previously.
I look forward to your conversions on McChrystal and Flynn in the near future.
$668 million for rich renovators but no money for the homeless.
The Liberals are nothing if not consistent in their support for cruelty.
Supporting the Liberals should be defined as a pathology!
Clearly there will be a low take up of HomeBuilder as it currently is.
Wait for the next programs to be released with soundbite names
HospitalBuilder
SchoolBuilder
Tax ShelterBuilder
Has Joyce still got his ‘mongrel’ bit of land that he just happened to buy out near the line of the Inland Rail?
Why buy a ‘mongrel’ bit of land in the first place?
(When) will Minister Ley sell out the environment and let Taylor get away with spraying some native grasslands with poison?
Will the illegal role of Cash’s Office ever be cleaned up by Cash actually answering AFP questions?
Will the AFP investigate the lack of Constitutional authority (aka theft) for over $100 million decisions by Morrison and McKenzie?
Will Taylor ever actually answer the AFP’s question in relation to illegal forgery in his Ministerial Office?
Will Porter and Robert ever be investigated for the deaths occasioned by the illegal Robocop Scheme?
Will the Ministers who stole there quarters of a billion dollars from 400,000 ordinary Australians even have the decency to resign. Will the AFP investigate this massive theft.
The Coalition’s favourite: CorruptionBuilder
a r says:
Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 12:08 pm
“Recent development.”
Utter rot.
Hammurabi? WTF?
Buce “There is no excuse for rioting, vandalism, looting and burning.”
Who is excusing it? Got any links? Can you tell the diff between understanding and explaining cause and effect and making excuses and explain clearly what or who you consider to be excusing bad behaviour?
I’ve read a lot of excusing and/or not condemning those Police Officers. All these excuses are along the lines of the excuse or explanation about why it was ‘understandable’ that the cop in Sydney reacted with such over the top aggression to a young male child and why this young male child ‘deserved?’ this response..
I can link you to a right wing blog on which it is clear that the commentators support the idea that Police can do no wrong if it a bad person they are targeting and of course these commentators just like you accept without question that they have some sort of ability to discern a bad person from a good person or perhaps they rely on their unexamined and flawed internal biases.
Re robodebt, Asher Wolf, etc.
I’m sure what I have to say won’t go down well with those like BW who keep droning on about how Porter and ScoMo and others are criminals stealing money off Australians.
As far as I can work them out, the facts of the matter are these:
Robodebt, along with the much older (I think it was early 1990s, under Hawke PM) income-averaging process which informed it, were established in an effort to recover welfare payments from people who were not entitled to receive them. People could sometimes inadvertently end up in the sights of Centrelink/ATO, but more often it was because they had not advised Centrelink about a change in their circumstances.
If, during the course of a financial year, someone works for a bit, then is unemployed for a bit, and then works again for a bit, and earns different amounts of money each week, and doesn’t keep Centrelink properly informed about this, it can be extremely difficult to work out the exact amount of benefit they might have been overpaid. But, in most cases, they will have been overpaid. And we are talking about people here who might have earned a lot more than the minimum wage during a financial year. So, if anyone wants to suggest that Centrelink shouldn’t pursue these debts, then they are saying that – in some cases – it would be fair to say that someone who earns a lot more than the minimum wage or more during a year should also get an added bonus of welfare payments to they are not entitled: something not available to the poor old minimum wage person who has worked all 52 weeks of that year.
So income-averaging was an attempt to make the task of recouping overpaid money easier. It used to have bipartisan support (indeed, it still might, as Labor seems to have been deliberately blurring the lines about what they it is they are attacking, ie: is it “robodebt” or “income-averaging? It’s a bit unclear.)
The Federal Court has now ruled that income-averaging is not lawful, seemingly on the basis that an average cannot be proven in law to be the precise income someone earned. As far as I can see from all documents I have perused, the court’s ruling was entirely about income-averaging and not about the legality or otherwise of Robodebt. Where Robodebt comes into it is that it is a much more aggressive and relentless way of collecting the debt calculated by income-averaging. So, while it is certinaly open to criticism as representing a botched job of public administration, it doesn’t seem to be correct to describe Robodebt itself as “illegal” or “unlawful.”
I find Labor’s strategy around Robodebt to be vaguely reminiscent of the “Mediscare” strategy of 2016, in that it features a lot of blurred lines: “Mediscare” deliberately blurred the lines between a proposal to outsource the administration of Medicare and some sort of inchoate concept of outsourcing the entirety of Medicare (which, of course, was already completely outsourced in the sense that none of the medical services supplied under Medicare are provided by the Federal Government.
Likewise, the current ALP attack on Robodebt is deliberately confusing the unlawfulness of income-averaging (which existed long before the current Coalition Government came along) with the Robodebt initiative.
I’m sure the ALP insiders who come up with these strategies think they are clever dicks for doing this, in the same way that Peta Credlin thought that “big new tax on everything” was pretty cute stuff. Personally, I would prefer to see policy debates based at least loosely on the facts of the matter. But it seems those days are over.
Rakali says:
Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 12:10 pm
$668 million for rich renovators but no money for the homeless.
https://amp.abc.net.au/article/12215276
Over half of the homeless put up in a hotel left within a month. They probably had nicer rooms than most on this site.
The worst thing that Mattis ever did was to get sucked in by Trump by accepting an appointment.
The second best thing Mattis ever did was to get sacked by Trump.
The first best thing Mattis ever did was to sink the slipper into Trump.
Every thing that Trump touches dies.
Shadow Housing Minister Jason Clare has hit out at the government’s $688 million HomeBuilder Scheme labelling it “a floatie” when the sector needed a “lifeboat”.
Mr Clare said instead of working on the tools, a lot of tradesmen would be “building longer lines at Centrelink” under the government’s scheme.
Labor expressed concerns about the “targeting” of the government’s $688 million HomeBuilder Scheme arguing “not everyone has $150,000” to throw around, referring to the strict guidelines to be eligible for the $25,000 grant.
“We know the housing industry is in crisis. Before the coronavirus there were supposed to be 160,000 homes built this year, now it’s predicted to be about 100,000,” Mr Clare said.
“The Prime Minister’s announcement will only inflate that by about 10,000 homes.”
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese said while there was “nothing wrong with supporting private housing”, the package would require significant spending from households “at a time of economic uncertainty”.
Mr Albanese spoke of the benefits of social housing, revealing he used to live in social housing with his mother when he was a child.
“The government needs to have a comprehensive plan that also deals with social housing. That’s the big weakness in the package,” he said.
It will be interesting to see the eventual distribution of funds from the HomeRorts Programme by electorate!
There wont be much in the poorest areas. Some of which are National Party.
It is unusual for a National to miss out on a rort. Maybe there will be a Bridgit McKenzie amendment to overcome that oversight.
The homeless were housed while they were a weak link in the Virus containment strategies.
That having passed, they are busy ejecting the homeless from hotels.
Bucephalus
Over half of the homeless put up in a hotel left within a month. They probably had nicer rooms than most on this site.
————
Oh, I didn’t know the Government was going to provide ongoing hotel accommodation for the homeless. I haven’t seen a slick Marketing slogan on that one yet.
The residential construction industry is worth around $150 billion a year.
Well, it used to be.
With 50,000 fewer starts than the previous year, the sector was already declining significantly in 2019 under the Coalition’s dead economic hand.
Given the scale, the trend crisis and the Virus crisis, half a billion is nothing much more than Scotty from Marketing’s habitual smoke and mirrors.
We have a national crisis on our hands, not a fucking marketing opportunity.
Where the fucking hell are you, Scotty?
Bucephalus @ #1582 Thursday, June 4th, 2020 – 12:12 pm
Story reported by CNN just 30 minutes ago. Most other outlets reported around the same time. There’s one subscriber-only live feed that may have had the story a few hours ago.
Prior to this only one of the 4 officers had been charged (his charges have been upgraded, in addition to the other 3 now facing charges themselves).
He had a rather famous code. 🙂
Rakali says:
Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 12:24 pm
If you read the article you would have seen that the WA State ALP government abandoned the scheme because it was such a failure. I would love a room at the Pan Pacific paid for by someone else.
Trespass and property damage – oh how we laughed.
a r @ #1592 Thursday, June 4th, 2020 – 10:26 am
Alex’s nag has his finger on the pulse. 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆
boerwar
My the feral Beetroot is a lucky chap when it comes to buying crap land. He was also lucky enough to have purchased “marginal land” here.
……………………………………………………………………………………
Feb 15, 2018 – Barnaby Joyce owns land near a coal-seam gas project he promoted as resources minister, despite admitting it could be seen as a conflict of …
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/barnaby-joyce-holds-onto-land-he-vowed-to-sell-near-big-gas-project/news-story/9397b0b85f10a07f4f1829779bec53db
a r says:
Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 12:26 pm
Pretty sure that the Hammurabi Code doesn’t form part of the US Justice system. Happy to be corrected.
meher baba @ #302 Thursday, June 4th, 2020 – 12:16 pm
Income averaging can be useful in identifying the POSSIBILITY that someone has received benefits they are not entitled to but requires human investigation to finally determine the fact and the quantum, which was the situation before Robidebt .
If outsourcing the administration of Medicare isn’t tantamount to privatising it I’m buggered if I know what would be.
As I’ve been suspecting for a while you’re nothing but an LNP shill. Thanks for revealing it so clearly.
Just imagine the reaction if the current protesters practised their Constitutional Right to bare arms?
…and wore short-sleeved shirts.