Polls: federal Morgan, YouGov on COVID-19, WA miscellany

Morgan finds the federal Coalition keeping its nose in front; YouGov records a thumbs-up for COVID-19 restrictions; and some striking (if somewhat dated) measures of Mark McGowan’s ascendancy in the west.

Three bits of polling news from around the place, including some rare intelligence from Western Australia, which has still only had one public poll of voting intention in the three-and-a-half years since the 2017 election:

• Roy Morgan made one of its occasional random drops of the federal voting intention polling it conducts weekly, crediting the Coalition with a lead of 51.5-48.5, out from 50.5-49.5 when it last published figures a month ago. On the primary vote, the Coalition is up a point to 43.5%, Labor is down one to 33.5%, the Greens are up half to 11.0% and One Nation is down 1.5% to 2.5%. Also included are state two-party breakdowns with the Coalition leading 52.5-47.5 in New South Wales, 58-42 in Queensland, 53.5-46.5 in Western Australia and 53-47 in South Australia, and Labor leading 53.5-46.5 in Victoria and 58-42 in Tasmania. The poll was conducted online and by phone from a sample of 2589 respondents over the weekends of July 11-12 and July 18-19.

• Today’s News Corp tabloids ($) have results of a national YouGov survey of 2307 respondents concerning COVID-19, of which the most interesting finding is that only 6% consider current restrictions too tough, compared with 33% for too lenient and 60% for about right. Despite variable national experience of COVID-19 at the present time, results were fairly consistent across the states, with Victoria only slightly outperforming the national “too tough” response at 11%. The poll was conducted from July 15-20.

• The West Australian reported that polling conducted for “a prominent business group” by Utting Research, which has conducted much of Labor’s internal polling over the years, producing the remarkable finding that Mark McGowan’s state Labor government held a 66-34 lead. The poll was conducted back in May, but there is little reason to think the McGowan balloon would have burst since then. The poll recorded approval ratings of 86% for Mark McGowan, 64% for Scott Morrison but only 25% for state Liberal leader Liza Harvey, though the latter would have a much higher uncommitted rating.

• Staying on the subject of WA polling that’s perhaps not as fresh as it might be, Painted Dog Research published leadership ratings early last month that escaped this site’s notice at the time. These showed Mark McGowan with a satisfaction rating of 87% (including 63% very satisfied) with only 4% dissatisfied (2% very dissatisfied); Scott Morrison on 67% satisfied (33% very) and 19% dissatisfied (7% very); Anthony Albanese on 27% satisfied (7% very) and 29% unsatisfied (12% very); and Liza Harvey on 19% satisfied (4% very) and 37% dissatisfied (17% very) (UPDATE: For what it’s worth, this is metropolitan only). The poll was conducted June 5-7 from a sample of 800. The West Australian reported at the time that it understood Labor internal polling showed similar results.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,359 comments on “Polls: federal Morgan, YouGov on COVID-19, WA miscellany”

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  5. Reagan and Thatcher are the last examples we should be following now. I would hope that Covid could lead to the start of expunging their legacy.

  6. Wayne Swan
    @SwannyQLD
    ·
    6m
    Thatcher and Reagan drove inequality through the roof & screwed workers – Frydenberg says that’s his ambition #insiders

  9. Lenore says correctly that every dollar spent now should work hard to the recovery (sub text: not money for mates).

  12. After World War 2 we cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy, removed protection for workers and sold off everything that wasn’t nailed down (or was)… er no, wait…

  13. Qanda tomorrow looks interesting.

    Coming Up: Monday, July 27

    Bill Bowtell, Adjunct Professor, UNSW and Strategic Health Policy Adviser

    Gigi Foster, Economist, UNSW

    George Megalogenis, Author and journalist

    Cassandra Goldie, CEO of Australian Council of Social Service

    Karen Soo, Executive Officer at the Haymarket Chamber of Commerce

    With a live cross to:

    Simon Birmingham, Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment

    and

    Katy Gallagher, Shadow Minister for Finance

  14. I think maybe less of a focus on how unpopular Reagan and Thatcher are tk the union movement and more on how relevant their examples are in this situation is needed. Surely Curtin, Chifley, Hawke and Keating would apply more to this situation?

  15. I was so annoyed by the beatification of ScoMo that I gulped a cup of coffee too fast and now I feel physically as well as mentally sick!

  17. There are a few odd but interesting things in Nate Cohn’s analysis of recent polls. For example, Joe Biden is now close to erasing the Republicans’ traditional advantage with white voters, but he’s underperforming with Black and Hispanic people compared to Hillary Clinton. While it’s been widely reported that Biden is winning with voters over 65, ordinarily the GOP’s strongest demographic, he actually hasn’t made any new ground with them since May. His recent gains are coming from improvement with younger voters.

    This last point doesn’t surprise me and I predicted that young supporters of Bernie Sanders would get over their hurt feelings well before November. They are still more reluctant than older voters to give Biden positive favorable numbers, but that should also continue to improve. As for the over 65 crowd, it could be that Biden just maxed out. If I have a possible explanation for why Biden isn’t doing as well with minorities, it might be that polls show they simply aren’t as engaged or “paying attention” at the same rate as white people. As Election Day nears, everyone will be engaged, and it’s likely that undecided Black and Hispanic people will solidify behind the former vice-president.

    What appears to be the most consequential change is Republicans’ dwindling advantage with white voters. As Cohn points out, this could lead to previously unimaginable losses for the GOP in congressional and Senate races. It could turn states like Texas, Kansas, and Alaska blue. But I also think it’s part of the reason we’re seeing a mood change on white supremacy in general. It helps explain why Confederate statues are coming down and Congress just passed a defense spending bill mandating that Confederate names are removed from military bases and ships. It helps explain why police unions are suddenly on the defensive against demands for reform. And, I think, it also behind a lot of folks feeling that they’re being “canceled.”

    https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/07/24/a-dam-breaks-as-whites-abandon-the-gop/

  18. lizzie @ #64 Sunday, July 26th, 2020 – 9:47 am

    I was so annoyed by the beatification of ScoMo that I gulped a cup of coffee too fast and now I feel physically as well as mentally sick!

    I say that story in the qualities (The Australian, The Daily Telegraph) this morning and swiftly retreated in search of my finest pair of kaleidoscope glasses ————

    Which my birthday party granddaughter tells me are all the go at rage parties – whatever they are; or were, in the good old days of yore. 😎

  19. According to Chinese government statistics, 45.2 million people have been affected by the floods that have ravaged 27 provinces along the Yangtze River, Huai River, and Yellow River, as well as southern China since the start of June. Many have cast doubt on the integrity of the Three Gorges Dam as it faces the greatest test in its history, while others have questioned the structure’s purported purpose of flood control, given the extensive flooding recently seen both above and below the dam.
    https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3973169

    There are shots of levees being deliberately broken to allow waters to flood fields to take the pressure off the dams, and some say the flooding is done without warning and even at night.

  21. I understand that the “Snap Back” will be lead by construction of a series of multi story buildings to house the various reports into Aged Care”.

    Recruitment of guards, sentries and snipers should gather another huge swathe of the currently unemployed and underemployed. 😈

  22. A bit of detail about meatworks, past and present.

    Mr Conway said that in some families, a spouse worked a day shift while their partner started in the afternoon, meaning infections could quickly spread within the same business.

    “A lot of people didn’t adhere to the requirements and it’s that community contact from outside which is bringing it into the abattoirs,” he said.

    “We know there are groups of people who are still not socially distancing. They’re carpooling with other workers or family members, dropping some off at different sites on the way.

    “One of them gets it and it’s just a domino effect.”

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-26/coronavirus-covid-19-meatworks-abattoirs-victoria/12490178

  23. Redlands Mowerman @ #69 Sunday, July 26th, 2020 – 7:57 am

    According to Chinese government statistics, 45.2 million people have been affected by the floods that have ravaged 27 provinces along the Yangtze River, Huai River, and Yellow River, as well as southern China since the start of June. Many have cast doubt on the integrity of the Three Gorges Dam as it faces the greatest test in its history, while others have questioned the structure’s purported purpose of flood control, given the extensive flooding recently seen both above and below the dam.
    https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3973169

    There are shots of levees being deliberately broken to allow waters to flood fields to take the pressure off the dams, and some say the flooding is done without warning and even at night.

    Flooding both above and below the dam suggests large amounts of rain over a wide area, which would have resulted in flooding dam or no dam.

  25. Barney, you are assuming widespread rain downstream, but that may not be the case. If the rain was mostly upstream of the dam, Then the purpose of having the dam stop the extra water from heading downstream has not worked. The flooding downstream may be due to dam being full and
    having to release excess water.

  26. So we are going to get out of this with a bit of union bashing and further destruction of the environment. Together the Liberals don’t have the intellectual furniture to get the job done.

    In the long term Labor was lucky to lose the last election it will expose the Liberals for what they really are. A bunch of twats that can run a function in economy into the ground, but are in capable of making changes when they are needed.

    Almost zero union unrest and they invoke Thatcher, how bloody stupid can you get.

  27. PeeBee @ #75 Sunday, July 26th, 2020 – 8:14 am

    Barney, you are assuming widespread rain downstream, but that may not be the case. If the rain was mostly upstream of the dam, Then the purpose of having the dam stop the extra water from heading downstream has not worked. The flooding downstream may be due to dam being full and
    having to release excess water.

    In that case the dam would have been used to mitigate the flow downstream.

    The fact it couldn’t still suggests that the flooding would have occur dam or no dam.

  28. @bazscott
    ·
    37m
    Replying to @ProfPCDoherty

    In industrial Scotland, as a schoolboy, I lived off aid packages from trade unions due to Thatcher’s assault on her people. She costs millions of “lives and livelihoods”. But, the bankers got rich so “successful”

  29. Sally McManus
    @sallymcmanus
    · 37m
    Margaret Thatcher’s policies were about crushing worker rights. Now in the UK there are “zero hours contracts” where you are tied to an employer with no guaranteed hours. Inequality soared. Is this really what Josh Frydenberg wants for Australia? #insiders

    The answer is yes.

  30. Wow, Gideon Haigh just gave the Morrison government an almighty whack over Sports Rorts on Offsiders on the ABC. He said that Morrison had forver tarnished Community Sport in Australia in its tawdry chase for votes!

    Well played.

  32. lizzie @ #74 Sunday, July 26th, 2020 – 10:07 am

    Phil Coorey gave Tim Wilson’s book a bit of a push. Unsurprising.

    He did point out that, contrary to Neoliberal orthodoxy, Tim Wilson was suggesting a change to the Capital Gains Tax regime.

    Also a change to Stamp Duty. And we should all have realised what that means without Coorey pointing it out. A Land Tax. Another idea that has been kicking around the Labor Party.

  34. Land tax looks like a wealth tax. But it is frequently passed on by land owners to their tenants, where it works as a flat tax on the incomes of businesses and those who rent their dwellings. It rests as a tax on the landless.

    The Commonwealth raised land tax before WW2. It was abolished to universal relief.

  35. Brilliant Rick Wilson on fire about Donald Trump:

    MSNBC
    @MSNBC

    “There’s nothing about Donald Trump that won’t stick on these folks. When the Republican Party tries to emerge from this and run to the showers, it’s not going to work,” Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson says about the GOP. “This is an authoritarian personality cult.”
    https://twitter.com/i/status/1287075520417497088

  37. I see briefly is all for keeping Stamp Duty, which prevents young people from purchasing their first home, the elderly from being able to move out of their homes, and the middle aged from moving house to downsize in order to free up housing stock.

    How very Liberal of him to want to entrench the status quo.

    Not to mention the basis of his spurious argument is a crock as landlords from time immemorial have loaded their mortgage costs onto the people who rent their properties.

  38. ”Inequality soared. Is this really what Josh Frydenberg wants for Australia?”

    Thatcherism sees life as a contest, with winners and losers. These have to be clearly identifiable. Inequality is a feature. Thatcherism is favoured by the already rich and powerful because it organises society (which does exist) so that everyone has to play the game that they have already won. In this system, many are motivated by the desire to climb as high as they can, to the top of the heap if possible. Meanwhile others are desperate to maintain their hold, desperate to avoid falling to the bottom of the heap.

  39. Grog on the boundless hypocrisy of the Morrison government and their Finance and Treasury spokesmen:

    And just like that, debt and deficit no longer really mattered.

    On Thursday the treasurer and the finance minster announced that the deficit for 2019-20 would be 4.3% of GDP, and the current financial year would see a $184.4bn deficit – 9.7% of GDP. Consider during the GFC, the biggest deficit was less than half that size.

    Then there was debt. Rather than previous estimate of gross debt levels of $558bn in this financial year, now treasury predicts $851.9bn.

    But who cares?

    Certainly Mathias Cormann is not worried about it.

    He replied to one journalist when asked about debt: “What is the alternative? Are you suggesting that we should not have provided the support we did to boost our health system, to protect jobs, to protect livelihoods? I mean, in the circumstances what was the alternative.”

    It is an excellent point, and one dripping with as much hypocrisy as any statement that has ever been uttered by a finance minister in our history.

    It is exactly the same reasoning that was behind the stimulus undertaken by the Labor government during the GFC.

    What was Senator Cormann saying then?

    In February 2009, he told the senate: “We have got this $42bn cash splash. What is this going to do? It is going to end up with us having $111bn worth of debt for starters, and even up to $200bn of debt, with a $9,500 debt for every Australian. This is absolute panic stuff.”

    The problem with Cormann’s question of “what is the alternative” is not that is it wrong now, but that it was never wrong
    On Thursday, the treasurer while standing next to Cormann said: “Without the government’s economic support, unemployment would have been five percentage points higher.”

    In 2009 Cormann told the Senate, “governments cannot inject new money into the economy. All that governments can do is take money from taxpayers – either today’s taxpayers or, after borrowing money, tomorrow’s taxpayers”.

    He also argued back then that “Senators opposite are going to go down in the history of Australia as having been complicit in taking Australia into the largest debt ever in the history of the commonwealth. In 20 years time people will look back at this chamber’s members and they will say, ‘What did those senators do? Why didn’t they do their job? Why didn’t they hold the government to account? Why didn’t they stop this from happening?’”

    Now – just over 10 years later – when asked about debt, the finance minister is quick to interject and note that the government’s debt is “lower than many other countries”. This, I don’t need to point out was not an argument he ever took back in 2009 or 2010 or 2011 or …

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/commentisfree/2020/jul/26/the-morrison-governments-hypocrisy-on-debt-and-deficit-is-galling?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=soc_568&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1595708431

  40. Steve777 @ #89 Sunday, July 26th, 2020 – 10:59 am

    ”Inequality soared. Is this really what Josh Frydenberg wants for Australia?”

    Thatcherism sees life as a contest, with winners and losers. These have to be clearly identifiable. Inequality is a feature. Thatcherism is favoured by the already rich and powerful because it organises society (which does exist) so that everyone has to play the game that they have already won. In this system, many are motivated by the desire to climb as high as they can, to the top of the heap if possible. Meanwhile others are desperate to maintain their hold, desperate to avoid falling to the bottom of the heap.

    And what has made me innefably sad about all that is the poor, smart young people who have seen that equation and have made the calculation that the only way for them to succeed in this dog eat dog society was to become an aggressively successful part of it.

  41. We’re all gong to have to become used to idea of secular decline in real wages. Trade wars, population losses, monopolisations of supply systems, covid19, climate change, de-globalisation will depress wages for many hundreds of millions of workers. We will not be exempted from this.

    The LNP have always promoted themselves as the party that can best drive job creation and wage growth by what are essentially policies of fiscal and social income/investment repression. The LNP tax working people more aggressively than Labor does. They spend less on social programs than Labor does. Their ideological reflexes impel policies that will make real wage decline more pronounced.

    The ideological approach to economic policies – the whole suite of factors that condition economic activity and results – is already changing. One of the most striking features of this is the willingness of governments to provide capital support to businesses in the hope this will protect and create jobs.

    This reflects the risk-deflecting settings in the banking sector, which these days works more like a national building society than a commercial finance industry. The declines in private investment reflects the impact of high uncertainty on the willingness/capacity of private capital to mobilise new investment, especially in the domestic-facing parts of the economy.

    Considering the weaknesses in the economy, it is really extraordinary that the parts of the economy that could really benefit from intense new investment – the renewable energy sector and an electrified road transport fleet – are omitted from the agenda of the LNP. This is a glaring ideological failure.

  43. Wow, YouTube is a weird and wonderful place! I stayed up till midnight last night, … so I just kept clicking on YouTubes and watched them as I sewed. Initially it recommended videos that I would normally watch, but as the night wore on I was offered up stuff like, ‘See……

    Whenever I fall asleep in front of YouTube (I often watch it late night on our smart TV after HI retires), I wake up at 3.00am with either university lectures on physics or Neanderthal Man doccos playing.

    I’m sure everyone has their own particular intellectual sump to which YouTube unerringly finds its way.

  44. Land taxes are regressive. They don’t look like they should be. But they are. First home buyers can be exempted from Stamp Duty. But no-one is exempted from Land Tax, which, perversely, mostly fall upon the landless.

    I’ve paid land taxes all my life on land that I don’t own. I remain landless.

  45. Bushfire and C@t

    My Youtube tends to take me to cooking and dog shows. Yes, I’m afraid it does track our preferences.

  46. United States :

    Coronavirus Cases:
    4,315,709

    Deaths:
    149,398

    – 67,413 new cases and 908 new deaths in the United States

  48. Howard breathed in the intoxicating fumes of hubris after winning the senate in 2014 resulting in Workchoices.

    Millions of words and hundreds of articles and books have been written dissecting the reasons behind the fall of Howard and the rise of Rudd in 2007. Climate change, old stale government, Rudd being a great campaigner etc etc have all been pushed as the main reasons. I have a slightly different take on 2007.

    Howard succeeded for so long by leaving Australians alone and interfering as little as possible in their daily lives. Then, just before each election and as a result of the ongoing mining boom, the purse strings would open and money would gush out to the voters. Yes, he implemented the GST and he just got over the line but that was the exemption rather than the rule and compensation was promised to all and sundry. Work choices was different in every way.

    With Workchoices Howard ignored his own successful game plan and went for the voters hip pocket. No compensation or pot of gold offered but simply a whole new world of IR that threatened the income and working conditions of millions of Australians. Not one or two groups but every working Australian. The labour movement ran one of the best campaigns ever seen in Australian politics to destroy the Howard government.

    The success by labor in 2007 was driven by this fight against Workchoices. Climate change etc did bite around the edges but Howard went for the hip pocket of working Australia and he paid the penalty.

    2020 is of course a different time. I do not know how voters will react to the upcoming ideology led push byMorrison to change the IR system in this country that will hit job security and incomes very very hard.

    Morrison is on a roll. He, and his supporters in the media, business etc, believe he is invincible. Will that hold up once he goes the whole hog on IR ? Will hubris get Morrison just as it got Howard and will Morrison, just as Icarus did, fly too close to the sun and crash and burn ?

    I have no idea. But it will interesting watching.

    Cheers.

  50. No sign of improvement in Victoria, in fact it still seems to be trending up.
    Deaths in Victoria will get worse, given the high numbers of recent new cases.
    NSW is still holding the line, in spite of outbreaks.

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