Leadership polling, Eden-Monaro latest, yet more on COVID-19

Scott Morrison settles in at a lofty approval rating perch, as hordes of candidates descend upon Eden-Monaro.

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).

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.

2,003 comments on “Leadership polling, Eden-Monaro latest, yet more on COVID-19”

Comments Page 35 of 41
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  2. Rakali

    I would be cheering the LNP on so Labor could win the election. Except the short sighted ideology of the Liberals is going to harm many people. Again.

  3. Barry R McCaffrey @mccaffreyr3 – Four Star US Army General Ret.

    Trump denunciation by former Sec Def Jim Mattis stunning in intensity and focus. We are dealing with a lawless President who has no allegiance to our Constitution or values. Trump is igniting a fire of violence. He is sewing division.

    Steve Schmidt @SteveSchmidtSES

    There must never be a secret police in the United States. Who are the heavily armed men with no identification, no badges, no markings. Who refuse to identify themselves. This is an urgent matter. Who are they ?

  5. Melbourne, Dandenong and Frankston hit with the most COVID-19 fines

    https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/melbourne-dandenong-and-frankston-hit-with-the-most-covid-19-fines-20200604-p54zhg.html

    Victorians have been fined for breaking coronavirus rules at almost triple the rate of any other state or territory, with almost 6000 people each receiving fines, according to reporting by The Age.
    :::
    Greens justice spokesperson Tim Read said there was some evidence certain communities may have been over-policed and there could be a need for a new system of detailed police enforcement data to be released independently.

    He also called for the ethnicity of each person stopped or fined by police to be recorded, to combat the historical over-policing of Aboriginal people and minority groups.

    “This government continues to give more enforcement powers to police and PSOs without any increase in the level of scrutiny and accountability to the public,” Dr Read said.

    “In this day and age we should have the right to know whether there are socio-economic or racial biases in law enforcement in this state.”

  6. Barry R McCaffrey Four Star General

    “ He is sewing division.”
    —————
    Sewing? As in knitting?

    Or does Mr Four Star mean sowing as in casting seeds?

  7. I don’t want to spoil the party, but isn’t the main focus of the scheme announced today on people who are actually building new homes on vacant land? As far as I can see, they are the people mainly expected to benefit. But the design of the scheme is such as also to provide assistance to people undertaking a really major renovation: eg, turning one house into two flats, or turning an old church or small pub into a house, or something like that.

    I think perhaps the mistake in the scheme as announced is that it gives the suggestion (rightly or wrongly I’m not sure, I’ll have to see the rules of the scheme) that someone putting in a luxury kitchen would also be eligible, when it is likely that the idea of the high cost threshold for eligibility was really meant to rule all minor renovations out.

    I don’t expect many to agree with me.

  8. Baba

    The LNP can prove they have ditched Austerity.

    Keep JobKeeper as the rate for all Welfare Recipients. Good stimulus to the economy and real empathy. Morrison could think about ditching the empathy consultants.

  9. Meher baba
    Yes it is happening. It has nothing to do with taxes. Your group,certificate is annualised income, unless you have separated from the employer and they correctly date your employment period rather than nominate the period you actually worked for. Many businesses who use casual workers will review at tax time whether to seperate an employee, so although you may not have worked there since January the certificate will show you as employed from July to June.
    With income averaging if you earn 100k per annum but only worked 6 months July to December they would average yor weekly income as around 900 per week, and therefore not eligible for Centrelink. In reality you have had no income from Jan to July and are eligible.
    Human oversight would pick this up , if it occurred 6 years ago how would you prove it, especially if the company is no longer in business

  10. Peg: “He also called for the ethnicity of each person stopped or fined by police to be recorded, to combat the historical over-policing of Aboriginal people and minority groups.”

    I don’t think that the police demanding to know the ethnicity of people who they have stopped, but in relation to whom they intend to take no further action, is going to be very popular with the punters.

  11. Australia will ‘continue to welcome’ Hong Kong residents as calls mount to match UK’s offer of safe haven

    MPs urge the government to help people fearing China’s planned security laws

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/04/australia-will-continue-to-welcome-hong-kong-residents-as-calls-mount-to-match-uks-offer-of-safe-haven

    Australian parliamentarians from across the political spectrum are urging the government to help the people of Hong Kong, amid growing international concern about the impact of Beijing’s decision on the city’s rights and freedoms and on the stability of the international finance hub.
    :::
    The leader of the Greens, Adam Bandt, called on the government to follow the lead of the UK and offer safe haven for those “who are concerned about the growing risk of authoritarianism in Hong Kong”.

    Declaring the national security law a “dangerous” attempt to silence the people of Hong Kong, Bandt called on the prime minister, Scott Morrison, to “follow the lead of Bob Hawke, who after the bloody Tiananmen Square massacre showed tremendous compassion by opening Australia’s arms to Chinese people fleeing tyranny”.

    “If Boris Johnson is opening the door to potentially millions of people fleeing Hong Kong, it’s unacceptable that we’re not offering anyone refuge,” Bandt said.
    :::
    With the Australian government’s relationship with China already under strain over early calls for a coronavirus inquiry, the Coalitio has appeared to tread carefully on the Hong Kong developments, issuing statements of concern jointly with likeminded countries including the US, the UK and Canada, rather than speaking out on its own.

    But Australian politicians say there is precedent for the government to respond with special programs in times of particular need.

  12. Greens Tim Read should stop astroturfing Frankston and Dandenong residents and lift his eyes above the here and now.

    Read should focus on the long term big picture and not the penny ante vote grubbing.

    Doubling the population without first fixing huge geographical and/or race-based pockets of socio-economic disadvantage is contrary to the justice and human rights of people who live in places like Frankston and Dandenong right now. Pretending that we can double the population while also fixing these human rights injustices is bullshit.

    Fix the massive social and environmental sustainability deficits and Then maybe look at doubling the population.

    Read should just get on the phone to Adam Bandt and tell him to implement the Greens policy to start a community debate on population and migration right now.

    No more excuses!

  13. Assantdj: “Human oversight would pick this up , if it occurred 6 years ago how would you prove it, especially if the company is no longer in business.”

    Yes, but is Centrelink really chasing cases from as long as 6 years ago, or even 8 years ago?

    If they are, then they deserve every brickbat that could possibly be thrown at them. And, as someone posted earlier, the public servants responsible for this scheme will have really let the Government down by ever suggesting to them that it was a good idea. Which goes back to my point that this was more of an administrative stuff-up than a legal problem. (The legal problem being something that had existed for decades, but was only picked up by the Federal Court in 2020.)

    (Of course, I would fully support Centrelink chasing old cases where there is suspected fraud and the amounts of money wrongly received are in the tens of thousands of dollars or more.)

  14. The G

    “t is not just NSW having problems with the pay freeze policy.

    Queensland’s Labor government is having a moment as well.”
    ———

    Teachers v nurses: State’s pay freeze threat now dividing the professions

    https://inqld.com.au/news/2020/06/04/teachers-v-nurses-states-threat-of-pay-freeze-now-dividing-the-professions/

    The Palaszczuk Government is under pressure to clarify its intentions for wage freezes only weeks before negotiated pay rises are due to take effect.

    The Queensland Teachers’ Union has not received a response to its letter last month asking the Government for clarity. President Kevin Bates said that, given the timing, he expected the agreed 2.5 per cent pay rises to already be working through the system, and have to be abruptly cancelled by order of legislation if the Government goes ahead with the freeze.

    :::
    Bates said the pay freeze was dividing the professions, because the timing of agreements differed – for example, police and nurses have already been paid their increases – and required the government to draw an arbitrary line in the sand. Not only would that lead to inconsistency in pay and superannuation entitlements in Queensland, but an uneven playing field nationally, he said.

    “When you consider the differences that are occurring interstate, with Victoria honouring increases for its public servants and the NSW upper house blocking moves (for a wage freeze) there, that’s really heightened the sense of hurt for our members.”

  16. The G

    Adam Bandt has responded to the $688m (forecast) homebuilder program:

    “Public money should be used to create construction jobs and tackle homelessness by building public housing, not to lift house values for people who can already afford large renovations.

    We should build homes for the hundreds of thousands of people who are homeless or on public housing waiting lists, not hand out granite benchtop grants.

    More than a million people are in housing stress, about to default on their mortgage, or on public housing waiting lists, but Scott Morrison is using public money to make the problem worse.

    Everyone deserves the dignity of a safe and secure home. However, this package will make that a more distant goal for millions of people. It will make housing inequality worse in Australia.

    Through this scheme, a couple on $200k a year with no mortgage could turn their $1.4m home into a $2m+ mansion. Meanwhile, a single parent on the public housing waitlist will see the median house price drift further out of reach.

    Over 116,000 people face sleeping rough each night, but instead of putting a roof over their heads, Scott Morrison has decided to hand out granite benchtop grants to people with incomes and wealth high enough to weather the corona crisis.

    Perversely, Labor’s saying the grants are too restrictive and don’t allow people to upgrade their swimming pools. Instead of backing big government investment in public housing, Labor is calling for the superannuation industry to build homes, which will do little to address the growing public housing waiting lists.”

    If Labor’s only contribution to fixing this appalling policy is to secure the inclusion of lap pool grants, they will have comprehensively abandoned working class people in Australia.”

  17. The homebuilder scheme will probably appeal to people who see flipping houses as wealth creation as seen on TVprograms such as flip or flop. Of course you would be stupid to do it in this market but if you had already purchased the property you might want to go ahead and finish the project.

  18. The G

    The Australian Council of Social Services is also not thrilled with the homebuilder program:

    The Australian Council of Social Service rejects the federal government’s plan to provide large grants to home builders and renovators as a wasted opportunity to address the backlog of urgent social housing repairs and the shortfall in social housing stock.

    Australian Council of Social Service CEO Dr Cassandra Goldie said:

    There is no argument that the construction sector needs a shot in the arm, but this money will not go where it is most needed. It will largely benefit those on middle and higher incomes undertaking costly renovations, without any related social or environmental benefits.

    The risk is that it will saddle people with huge debts that they may not end up being able to afford, especially given the uncertainty of the job market.

    We are in a recession, with more and more people struggling to pay rent, which will only lead to greater homelessness.

    We should be focusing on ensuring everyone has a roof over head, not on government support for people who are relatively well off to upgrade their roofs.

  19. MB
    Maybe it is aimed at first home buyers then why say they much spend $150k to get $25k back. It doesn’t sound like its aimed at new builds.

  20. Michael Sukkar going to be on 774 ABC Melbourne with Raph Epstein to go through the details of RenoRorts (the program he personally designed). Hope the switchboard gets bombed…

  22. Guytaur
    Jobkeeper wont be kept and $1500 a fortnight tax free is too high for a welfare payment. Jobseeker could be kept at $1100 or fall back to $1000 a fortnight and be perfectly fine.

  23. If US military personnel were to refuse to obey orders from Trump the consequences would be disciplinary and political. But they would not necessarily be constitutional. Disobedience would not imply constitutional failure or collapse. But it would threaten Trump’s tenure. If faced with such defiance what would he do? Would he resign? Would he back down? If his legitimacy were called into question by his subordinates his leadership would be finished. But this would not threaten the constitution, which will continue to operate.

    He must know such a risk exists.

  24. guytaur: “Nice try at deflection on Robodebt.
    The buck stops with the Prime Minister.”

    Quite possibly. But all we have so far is a court judgement about income-averaging, which has been around for decades, and for which therefore both sides of politics could be said to be equally culpable. (Although I’m certain that public service lawyers would have advised Ministers on more than one occasion that the practice was legal.)

    For Robodebt, there are more court cases and, most likely, a number of other reviews to come. When these are complete, we’ll see what the extent of the wrongdoing was, and where the blame should lie.

  25. Alpha Zero says:
    Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 3:43 pm

    Michael Sukkar going to be on 774 ABC Melbourne with Raph Epstein to go through the details of RenoRorts (the program he personally designed). Hope the switchboard gets bombed…
    __________
    Funny that. Deakin is just the kind of electorate when spending a well targeted 125k on a renovation might just do wonders to the capital growth of your property. It might put 200-300k onto its value.

  27. Other MB:
    “Maybe it is aimed at first home buyers then why say they much spend $150k to get $25k back. It doesn’t sound like its aimed at new builds.”

    Maybe I’m insufficiently grounded in life in the outer suburbs, but I would have thought that most new builds these days cost $150k or more.

    Of course, some people with limited financial resources build their houses in stages, as funds become available. I’m not quite sure how the new scheme will manage that, but my recollection is that the various first home buyers’ schemes we’ve had over the years made some sort of allowance for those people.

  28. I have definitely seen tales of Centrelink asking people for details more than three-five years old. This is why it’s almost impossible to defend.

  29. Adam Bandt ‘

    ‘We should build homes for the hundreds of thousands of people who are homeless or on public housing waiting lists, not hand out granite benchtop grants.’

    Greens Classic. The construction industry generates 25% of our CO2 emissions and guess who is calling for the construction of hundreds of thousands of new dwellings?

    No wonder Bandt is running away from the Greens policy of debating population and migration policy.

  30. Nath,

    I would personally benefit from this as you suggest, doesn’t mean that I don’t find the idea of that to be totally repellent. It’s charity to people who don’t need it…

  31. Adam Bandt is talking through his arse.

    Every interview today by labor has strongly condemned the construction package for its lack of focus on social housing whether it be new housing or renovations. Every single interview.

    Weeks ago Albanese and Clare announced a number of priorities for a comprehensive construction package including social housing and labor has pushed for this ever since.

    Bandt can stick his bullshit up his arse.

  32. ‘We should build homes for the hundreds of thousands of people who are homeless or on public housing waiting lists, not hand out granite benchtop grants.’

    that’s a good line from Bandt. Better than Shorten’s zingers!

  33. Meher baba
    Yes they are chasing cases I believe up to 10 years old, yes they were told about the problem and it’s illegality by the public service, the opposition the media. They only stopped when someone with enough resources refused to backdown and accept a settlement because they wanted a court ruling to prove the illegality. In one case they publicly revealed a claimants details to try and prove she was wrong.

    I have no problem with chasing people debts that are legally owed but the government doesn’t get to retrospectively change the rules and then use taxpayers money to extort people with threats and intimidation. Remembering that most of thes people,don’t have access to high paid lawyers and accountants many are so scared of our government they paid up even though they didn’t think they had a legal debt. Iif they were still on benefits they entered into payment plans because the threat was no benefits at all.

  34. Pegasus says:
    Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 3:23 pm

    They should be able to even that up with all the fines from the protests. Apparently.

  35. Steve777: “There are no votes for the Coalition in social housing, which they don’t believe in anyway.”

    I wouldn’t be so certain yet that they aren’t going to announce some sort of social housing construction plan as well. Big construction companies certainly believe in these projects, and the Libs believe in big construction companies.

    I reckon they are working on/have already agreed a whole heap of infrastructure and stimulus measures, and these will be announced progressively over time.

  36. Alpha Zero says:
    Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 3:53 pm

    Nath,

    I would personally benefit from this as you suggest, doesn’t mean that I don’t find the idea of that to be totally repellent. It’s charity to people who don’t need it…
    _____
    Still, you should think about. You have a fiduciary responsibility to yourself to seek advantages even if you don’t agree with them.

  37. Pegasus says:
    Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 3:44 pm
    “Victorian premier Daniel Andrews has said people should not go to the Black Lives Matter protests scheduled for Saturday, citing coronavirus concerns.”

    It means nothing because they’ve already said that they aren’t enforcing the law. He will be ignored. I trust you are all joining them.

  38. Tanya Plibersek this morning :

    Of course, the other missed opportunity in the housing package is the missed opportunity of an investment in social housing. It is great to help people buy or renovate their home but when we were last in Government in the global financial crisis, we built 126,000 new public housing homes, we upgraded about 70,000.

    We started about 80 homelessness programs. We have thousands being turned away every night in Australia from crisis accommodation, mums and kids fleeing violence, veterans sleeping in our parks.

    It shouldn’t happen in a country like Australia and now is the ideal time to be building accommodation for those people.

    Adam Bandt couple of hours later :

    Perversely, Labor’s saying the grants are too restrictive and don’t allow people to upgrade their swimming pools. Instead of backing big government investment in public housing, Labor is calling for the superannuation industry to build homes, which will do little to address the growing public housing waiting lists.”

    If Labor’s only contribution to fixing this appalling policy is to secure the inclusion of lap pool grants, they will have comprehensively abandoned working class people in Australia.”

    Dishonest political hack

  42. Vogon Poet says:
    Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 4:05 pm

    What, greens are politicians ?
    _____
    Yep. and doing a pretty good job of cutting Labor’s lunch.

  43. $688 million….not enough, most likely.

    To be effective the stimulus to construction – could be residential or commercial – should be around 2% of GDP for 2 years.

    Ideally, the stimulus would commence with a low floor and be paid as a credit against tax payable. So it would be a form of tax expenditure. The amount of the grant could be, say, 33% of the cost of a project. The expenditure would have to be verified by records – invoices, council approvals, bank records.

    Projects could be quite small – say, from $15,000 total cost, of which $5,000 would be eligible for a rebate. The cap on project size could be quite high – say $500,000 – but the amount claimable in any tax year could be limited to $20,000 pa and a total grant value of $150,000. This would mean the stimulus charge would be spread into future years but the work would be brought forward into the immediate 2 years.

    If this was also tied to:

    training and recruitment in design and construction work, including in environmental and landscaping work
    write-offs for new investment in digital systems
    investment in renewables and storage…

    there would be a very high chance it would succeed.

    As well, there could be direct grants to local governments for design and construction work in roads, cycle ways, community service facilities and environmental projects. These could be capped at 1% of GDP and be subject to a competitive tender process, in which the labour intensity of projects would give them higher ranking.

    This would put a lot of stimulus spending into very wide sections of the community and produce assets of lasting value in both the public and private sectors. It would help leverage even smallish sums available in the private sector. Because of the multiplier effects of such spending, the net cost to taxpayers over the life of the scheme would be less than half of the grant amounts – probably a lot less than half when the savings in JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments are taken into account.

  44. I am not an economist but it seems to me that the number 1 overarching objective should be to stop the massive loss of wealth should the nation’s housing stock suddenly be worth, say, 30% less.
    That is partly a matter of ability to pay and partly a matter of the difference between supply and demand.
    Around 200,000 dwellings were vacant before the Virus.
    Perhaps half of 400,000 o/s students are o/s, leaving another 200,000 units empty.
    Around an additional 100,000 young people have gone home to stay with mum and dad.
    Tourists occupy on average around 150,000 units at any one time.
    Let’s say that the scale of vacant dwellings in Australia is somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000.
    Around 1.4 million people face mortgage stress.
    Around 100,000 are likely to be forced into default.

    It seems to me that adding a mix of 30,000 new dwellings or expanded dwellings to a massive stock of empty dwellings is a peculiar response.

  45. Meher baba
    The court ruled that robodebts based on income averaging only were illegal. It wasn’t about one particular person, it ruled the scheme was illegal. The original scheme used averaging to identify potential debts, they were then investigated and proven. Only then was a debt letter sent. Under robodebt, the averaging says you have a debt, you get a debt notice and a visit from the debt collectors. You then have to prove your innocence.

    The current government caused this problem and having now been proven to be in the wrong want to just say, My bad, we’ll reduce the debts to zero and refund the money including the interest we charged you. The class action is about getting the government to pay much deserved compensation.

  46. The cheapest and quickest way to soak up the oversupply would be to spend the missing Jobkeeper $60 billion on buying around 200,000 units, and allocate them to social housing.

    This would get the balance between supply and demand into something like a kilter.
    It would maintain the buying power of existing home owners with some potential for consumer demand to start ticking over again.

  47. There is no clusterfuck fucked enough that this government kind find a way out of.

    And Australia’s oldest and most effective party in government – the Labor party – is reduced to the margins.

  49. Assantdj

    Under robodebt, the averaging says you have a debt, you get a debt notice and a visit from the debt collectors. You then have to prove your innocence.

    Don’t forget the scum were also ‘demanding money with menaces”. Putting a large AFP logo at the top of the “threat”.
    …………………………………………………………………………………………….
    CENTRELINK’S threatening letters have ramped up a level, using the AFP logo to chase debts.

    The notes sent to people in selected locations now feature the Australian Federal Police logo at the top and warn recipients they could face losing their payments, a criminal record or a jail sentence.

    “These letters are being received by people who have done nothing wrong,
    https://www.news.com.au/finance/money/centrelink-users-monstered-by-their-own-government-in-fresh-debt-recovery-letters-scandal/news-story/eb2905e2712f6bb5aee5a75432b2c3f7

  50. The Commonwealth could also put investment into the marine and riverine environments- into the protection and restoration of degraded and threatened sites and species, with a particular focus on spending in projects that are

    – labour intensive
    – carbon positive

    The Commonwealth wants to commit funds to carbon capture and sequestration. That can be done by investing in the environment. The returns to such investment will endure for millennia.

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