Another pollster returns from the naughty corner today to chance its arm at voting intention, which now makes three if you count the erratically published Roy Morgan series (which I incline not to myself). That pollster is Essential Research, which has remained prodigious with attitudinal polling since the May 2019 federal election, and has maintained its monthly leadership ratings, while offering no clue as to its voting intention numbers beyond the inclusion of raw figures in reporting its sub-samples.
Unhappily for we salivating dogs in the psephoblogosphere, these figures will only be published on a quarterly basis. This appears to mean that every sixth or seventh fortnightly Essential Research release will provide the fortnightly voting intention results of the preceding period. This, the pollster says, will “mitigate the tendency to report on minor movements as some sort of political horse race”. This latest release confuses the issue by providing weekly numbers through June, but I believe this is an artefact of a temporary move to weekly polling to track reactions to COVID-19.
Essential will also make a point of not excluding the undecided from its headline results, arguing the conventional practice entails a “lack of nuance”, though no doubt rivals will accuse the pollster of hedging its bets. The pollster still follows the conventional practice of prodding the initially undecided with a follow-up that asks who they are leaning towards. A proportion of these persist in declining a response, but remain in the sample with responses included for the other survey questions.
The latest primary vote numbers show the Coalition on 38% (up one), Labor on 35% (up one), the Greens on 9% (down one), One Nation on 4% (steady) and others on 6% (steady). If the undecided were excluded, the results would be Coalition 41.3%, Labor 38.0%, Greens 9.8% and One Nation 4.3%, and 51-49 to Labor on two-party preferred (for the sake of consistency with other pollsters, it’s the latter figure that I will continue to use in my headlines). Compared with the 2019 election result, this leaves Labor up nearly five points but the Coalition hardly changed, with the slack taken up from smaller parties and independents.
Labor with 47% of the decided two-party vote (up one on a fortnight ago) to the Coalition’s 45% (steady), leaving an outstanding 8% potentially to be called on to fill the gap between the reported numbers and an actual result. The pollster’s two-party numbers look to be consistent with a 2019 election preferences allocation, although the report is not specific as to whether this method or respondent allocation was used. In his piece in The Guardian, Peter Lewis of Essential Research explains: “We will now be asking participants who vote for a minor party to indicate a preferred major party. Only when they do not provide a preference will we allocate based on previous flows.“
These results are obviously a lot better for Labor than what has come through from Newspoll and Morgan, and are clearly an established peculiarity of the series. Where headline results over the past two months have shown Labor matching or exceeding their primary vote at the election despite the inclusion of a 7% to 9% undecided component, the Coalition have been coming in two to four points lower. The Greens are reckoned to be about where they were and the election and One Nation a little higher, though the latter is complicated by their tendency to only run in selected seats.
Also featured in the latest poll:
• The federal government’s ratings for COVID-19 response are unchanged at 64% good and 16% poor, and the combined response for state governments has shifted only negligibly, with good and poor both up a point to 65% to 18% respectively.
• The small-sample results for individual state governments show the Victorian government up four points on both good and poor, to 53% and 30% respectively. This still leaves it with the weakest figures out of the mainland state governments, with the Western Australian government recovering its title of strongest performer (up five to 82%) from South Australia (down three to 76%).
• On JobKeeper and JobSeeker, 69% supported businesses being retested for eligibility, with 9% opposed; 66% supported continuing payments for six months, with 12% opposed; 54% supported reducing the amount of the payments, with 21% opposed; but only 29% supported excluding casual workers, with 40% opposed.
• Forty-three per cent rated themselves very concerned about COVID-19, up seven on a fortnight ago, with quite concerned down four to 44%, not that concerned down three to 9% and not at all concerned up one to 4%.
• Fifty-six per cent favour a “suppression strategy” and 44% an “elimination strategy”.
• Sixty-eight per cent support mandatory face masks. with 13% opposed; 19% believe them very effective, 46% quite effective, 20% not that effective and 5% not effective at all.
The poll was conducted Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1058.
nath
Keep plugging away. Tim Smith would be proud of you.
I must say if I was Premier of WA, whatever party, I couldn’t ask for a greater political gift than a high-profile “Commonwealth v WA” court case. Especially one that directly affects the health and safety of West Australians.
I like McGowan, but let’s be honest he’s no superstar. He’s just been handed the next couple of elections on a plate. Let’s hope Labor can parlay that into a few federal seats as well. Time for Albo to come out from under the doona.
Nath
One of the principles of infection control is you don’t allow staff who have had ongoing contact with infected people to then work in any other area.
Committing a large police contingent to managing hotel quarantine would have meant releasing those police from all other duties.
As Biosecurity and quarantine are both federal responsibilities Morrison should have been responsible for managing and financing this situation. Border force should have been responsible for this but I don’t know if they are allowed to police Australians. Furthermore the reason Morrison didn’t take control of this initiative is because he not only wanted the borders to remain open, he also didn’t want to wear the responsibility if it all went wrong.
Taylormade……………..Labor lost the election in Queensland……..A very disappointing effort….I suspect at the end of the day, Labor will hold in Victoria….The Liberal party in Victoria is a shambles.
The hope for Labor in WA was to change the 5/15 or whatever to 7/13 and perhaps one more Senator….Never happened.
At the end of the day, WA tends to swing like the rest of the country. To pretend the weeks and weeks of Palmer advertising did not have any impact on WA voting or elsewhere such as Queensland is quaint….His millions plus the huge amount the Liberals spent (so-say “broke” Liberals at the time) certainly made a difference especially as it was mainly “Stop-Labor-they-are-coming-to-get-your- pensions” stuff.
Labor should never be afraid to use scare/negative advertising. As the conservatives demonstrate, time and time again, it works…..
I give up. I’ve finally been worn down by stupidity..
Joe Biden
@JoeBiden
Level 1:
You won’t have to worry about my tweets when I’m president.
9:30 AM · Jul 31, 2020·TweetDeck
25% of people with COVID weren’t at home when the police visited them?? WTF!!
And who is to say the other 75% were home all the time.
nath @ #1105 Friday, July 31st, 2020 – 9:36 am
Your own?
nath @ #1105 Friday, July 31st, 2020 – 11:36 am
Just wait until delusional and abusive arrive…
Tamil Tigers did I hear mentioned? Were they the group who, after they actually put their arms down, saw the Sri Lanka army slaughter their women and children? Maybe an urban myth…The winners get to write the history…………………….
Must be a % who refuse to answer door – are you obliged to answer?
Quarantine is the responsibility of the Federal Government. Therefore Morrison is responsible for the security companies failures, not Daniel Andrews. We are lucky we have him.
Spray says:
Friday, July 31, 2020 at 11:32 am
“I must say if I was Premier of WA, whatever party, I couldn’t ask for a greater political gift than a high-profile “Commonwealth v WA” court case.”
There is no Commonwealth v WA case currently relating to s92 of the Constitution.
nath: “I give up. I’ve finally been worn down by stupidity..”
It’s not stupidity, it’s faith. There are some posters on here who are simply never going to accept that the Andrews Government has ever done anything wrong at all.
It’s no good arguing against people’s faith. It gets you precisely nowhere. It’s why I haven’t been around much lately.
https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/us-family-dog-named-buddy-dies-after-being-diagnosed-with-coronavirus-c-1207152
The first dog to be diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States, a Staten Island family dog named Buddy, has reportedly died.
The German Shepherd started to have trouble breathing in mid-April, at the height of the coronavirus crisis in New York.
A month and a half later, the six-year-old dog tested positive for COVID-19, the first dog in America known to do so.
He died on July 11, National Geographic first reported on Wednesday.
Socrates
The wrong behaviours by individuals should have been predicted by the government. Any risk assessment of viral spread would have shown up the likelyhood of people with no financial security continuing to work. But the federal government choose not to provide even a hardship allowance to assist these people.
Also some of the wrong behaviours may have been unintended as in asymptomatic cases or massive spread into communities by this highly mobile workforce prior to becoming symptomatic.
Did you read about the spotless laundry case, the workers tried to do the right thing and the employer went to FWC to try and make them work.
Assantdj says:
Friday, July 31, 2020 at 11:34 am
“As Biosecurity and quarantine are both federal responsibilities”
Wrong. They are both shared responsibilities.
“25% of people with COVID weren’t at home when the police visited them?? WTF!!
And who is to say the other 75% were home all the time.”
I’ve seen this reported. I am not sure of the source or credibility. Accepting that it’s true, it could mean anything between “all people [under self quarantine] with COVID were away from home 25% of the time” or that 75% are staying home all the time while 25% are away from home all the time. Are checks done only in working hours? It could mean that a big percentage are going to work.
From any interpretation, it’s got to be a big worry. It means ‘self isolation’ isn’t working.
Diogenes says:
Friday, July 31, 2020 at 11:38 am
“25% of people with COVID weren’t at home when the police visited them?? WTF!!
And who is to say the other 75% were home all the time.”
Clearly there is little concern about the compliance regime or the penalties.
Bucephalus @ #1113 Friday, July 31st, 2020 – 11:44 am
Ah, we’re playing this game again. You’ve chosen to ignore my quotation marks, but that’s ok.
I suspect that in the minds of West Australians, it’s very much Commonwealth v WA, which is all that matters.
Actually, it’s even better. It’s filthy infested Eastern Staters against the good clean folk of WA. McGowan, Premier for life.
Assantdj
“Did you read about the spotless laundry case, the workers tried to do the right thing and the employer went to FWC to try and make them work.”
No thanks I had not read that one. Obviously we agree it is the same sort of problem – unjust conditions leading to inevitably harmful behaviours.
Buce, stupid question.
How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-secret-testing-plan-went-poof-into-thin-air
Tricot says:
Friday, July 31, 2020 at 11:40 am
“Were they the group who, after they actually put their arms down, saw the Sri Lanka army slaughter their women and children?“
They were Marxist Nihilists who believed in the same Year Zero ideology as the Khmer Rouge.
They were the first to use suicide bombers against civilians as an act of terror.
They used child soldiers.
They never put down their arms. They deliberately herded civilians into the final battle box area using them as human shields and killing any that tried to flee.
Bucephalus
The federal government can delegate duties to the states but it cannot delegate responsibility.
Bucephalus @ #1124 Friday, July 31st, 2020 – 11:53 am
At least they didn’t support Collingwood.
Assantdj says:
Friday, July 31, 2020 at 11:54 am
I know you don’t like the LNP but even if the ALP were the government it remains a shared responsibility.
United States :
Coronavirus Cases:
4,634,985
Deaths:
155,285
– 68,569 new cases and 1,465 new deaths in the United States
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Assantdj
Regarding Spotless, I take it this was the case. Appalling behaviour by management if as alleged. I am not a lawyer but this alleged behaviour seems a clear breech of WH&S obligations by management, in risking the safety of their workers and the community. Those laws cover any form of environmental or biological harm. Covid19 surely fits in that category.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-31/melbourne-laundry-business-shut-down-due-to-coronavirus-outbreak/12510774
Mr Andrews, it is time to start prosecuting the causers of the problem.
Buce
The West Australian is not the friendliest of media outlets for Labor but they have been working hard to ensure that their readers think just that. Even in editorials.Just a couple of headlines from today.
.
.
Poroti, that’s interesting about the West Australian’s coverage. They’re obviously torn between their conflicting biases. In this case I think “Liberal v Labor” is trumped by “WA v The East”.
Lovely to see so much support for the fine journalism of The West Australian.
I don’t read it even for the footy anymore. Haven’t for over a decade.
What the corrupt foreign own media , Libs/nats and libs/nats supporters are trying to get the public to forget is
1-Morrison and his cronies wants all of the borders in Australia to reopen
2-The media attacks the states/territories who closed the borders
Just imagine what position Australia would be in if the media , Morrison and his cronies got their way
The out break would not be only in Victoria but be another ruby princess (federal and nsw libs/nats ) incompetence , this time worst
Australia would be in a deadly 2nd wave
It isn’t believing that the Andrews government has done nothing wrong. There was no deliberate, reckless or intentional actions to deliver an outbreak. (Bugger me, I sound like the AFL match review panel). There was no “Let it Rip” or must open everything at once attitude…
There is faith among us who continue to support him in his governments potential to arrest this current outbreak and that they are trying everything within their power to get the numbers down. They are fighting against a deadly, invisible virus and Covid 19.
Spray
The ‘Lib v Lab’ was road kill for the ‘WA v Over East’ road train. People in places like WA who have been able to return to fairly normal living tend to turn feral when someone or something is perceived to jeopardize such normality. With good reason I should add.
It is the height of hypocrisy and irony to observe the current behaviour of the fiberals and the MSM at this moment. Remember they created the dictator Dan moniker. But now he is not strict enough. Y0u cant make this absolute shit up.
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This virus has gripped literally the entire world, but I can’t find a comparable example in a developed nation that has a) dealt with it so punitively b) is stacked with media figures demanding even more punitive responses. It’s extraordinary.
Griff @ #1067 Friday, July 31st, 2020 – 10:38 am
The usual Greenite way. Cutting off their nose to spite their face, ie voting Labor out.
As I keep saying the virus does not discriminate
The HC might well think they’re being used to make political mischief. If the matter were resolved today Palmer’s claims would be refused without ceremony.
States have the authority to regulate their borders on public health grounds. This has not been in doubt. It’s just inconceivable that the HC would jeopardise the health of the public to satisfy the Trumpy political games of a Lib Trojan Horse.
I have always read PB as a source of sensible, informative comment on the news, but I am losing confidence in it.
…Remainder of thought deleted…
Alpha Zero says:
Friday, July 31, 2020 at 12:14 pm
“they are trying everything within their power to get the numbers down.”
No, they aren’t trying everything within their powers – let’s not over-egg the cake on that. They have made a limited response that they politically assess as acceptable to the voters. They could do a whole lot more if the politically wanted to.
The numbers aren’t going down.
These aren’t criticisms – just statements of facts.
Once this wave diminishes there will be less Victorians to get the virus in the future.
Bucephalus
It’s not that I don’t like the LNP its that I don’t like their behaviour. If they could act in the countries best interests for the duration of the pandemic it would be appreciated.
Bucephalus @ #1117 Friday, July 31st, 2020 – 11:47 am
Not really. The Commonwealth has the predominant power and therefore the ultimate responsibility
nath @ #1093 Friday, July 31st, 2020 – 9:25 am
If Andrews had dealt with the pandemic in the same denialist way that we’ve seen in some parts of the US you might have a point, but he has been as strong as any leader in his approach towards it.
You seem to be in complete denial of the way the virus can spread and are just venting your frustrations in your usual irrational way.
Bucephalus
The support of WA Labor’s position is the !! ,meanwhile the quality of the newspaper remains as high as it has ever been 😉
nath @ #1082 Friday, July 31st, 2020 – 10:54 am
Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott may well have ‘Stopped These’ but they would never dare stop the boats of their donors and paymasters and all the wealthy Liberal-voting SMSF Retirees who sail in them.
Tricot….sad facts are that Labor failed to make gains in WA because:
It’s own campaign was dreadful
The Lib campaign hurt us where it mattered
We were beaten by our own ineptitude and Lib toughness, not by Palmer.
The Lib campaign last year was one of the best I’ve seen. They nailed it.
The West is a very boring publication. I gave up on it during the last millennium.
Barney in Tanjung Bunga @ #1144 Friday, July 31st, 2020 – 12:23 pm
Yep and not one cross word about the Victorian numbnuts who were busy spreading the virus with house parties and the like, even as the Quarantine Hotels issue was receiving bad press.
Buce,
What would the response be if they did everything in that regard and went full lockdown straight away?
The Tim Smith bot has already told us…
We will keep going one step at a time until we start seeing the numbers drop. We see stability in the numbers with the current settings. Not too much needs to be tweaked to get the numbers down. It’s a matter of getting to that level with the minimum impost. There is no other publicly acceptable alternative…