Essential Research leadership ratings, ACT poll, Eden-Monaro wash-up

Poll respondents continue to rate incumbents generously in their response to COVID-19; an ACT poll points to a status quo result at the election there in October; and the preference distribution is finalised from the Eden-Monaro by-election.

The Guardian reports the latest fortnightly Essential Research poll includes its monthly leadership ratings, showing further improvement in Scott Morrison’s standing. He is up three points on approval to 66% and down four on disapproval to 23%, while Anthony Albanese is respectively steady at 44% and up two to 30%, and his lead as preferred prime minister is at 52-22, out from 50-27.

The small-sample breakdowns on state government performance finds the Victorian government still holding up reasonably well, with 49% rating it good (down four on a week ago, but well down on a 75% peak in mid-June), while the New South Wales government’s good rating is down a point to 61% and Queensland’s up a point to 68%. Results for the federal goverment are not provided, but will presumably be in the full report when it is published later today.

Fifty per cent now rate themselves very concerned about COVID-19, which is up seven points on a fortnight ago and has been progressively rising from a low of 25% in mid-June. Fifty-six per cent of respondents said they would seek a vaccine straight away, 35% less immediately and 8% not at all. Twenty per cent believed that “hydroxychloroquine has been shown to be a safe and effective treatment”.

UPDATE: Full report here. The federal government’s good rating on handling COVID-19 is down a point to 63%, and its poor rating is steady at 16%.

Other news:

• We had a rare opinion poll for the Australian Capital Territory, which holds its election on October 17, conducted by uComms for the Australia Institute. It offered no indication that the Liberals are about to break free of their status as a permanent opposition, with Labor on 37.6%, Liberal on 38.2% and the Greens on 14.6%, compared with 2016 election results of 38.4%, 36.7% and 10.3%. This would almost certainly result in a continuation of the present state of affairs in which the Greens hold the balance of the power. The poll also found overwhelming support for “truth in political advertising” laws, with 88.5% supportive and 4.9% opposed. The poll was conducted on July 20 from a sample of 1049.

• The preference distribution from the July 4 Eden-Monaro by-election has been published, offering some insight into how much Labor’s narrow victory was owed to a Shooters Fishers and Farmers preference recommendation and a higher than usual rate of leakage from the Nationals. The former was likely decisive: when Shooters were excluded at the final count, 5341 (56.61%) went to Labor and 4093 (43.39%) went to Liberal, which includes 5066 first preference Shooters votes and another 4368 they picked up during the preference distribution (including 1222 from the Nationals). When the Nationals were excluded earlier in the count, 4399 votes (63.76%) went to the Liberals, the aforementioned 1222 (17.71%) to Shooters, 995 (14.42%) to Labor and 283 (4.10%) to the Greens. This includes 6052 first preference votes for the Nationals and another 847 they picked up as preferences earlier in the distribution. That would be consistent with maybe 20% of Nationals votes ending up with Labor compared with 13% at the 2019 election, which would not quite account for Labor’s winning margin. At some point in the future, two-candidate preferred preference flow figures will tell us precisely how each candidate’s votes split between Labor and Liberal.

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.

2,756 comments on “Essential Research leadership ratings, ACT poll, Eden-Monaro wash-up”

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  1. I don’t disagree Mavis. I am merely stating that the natural order has been upended. There will be a scramble for dominance amongst the Beta predators until a new bad guy can be found.

  2. Confessions @ #2655 Saturday, August 15th, 2020 – 9:07 pm

    Some insight into the woman running Biden’s campaign. She has some pretty good experience.

    Inside Democratic circles, O’Malley Dillon has long been known for her discipline, organizational skills and strategic sense. She ran the battleground-states operation for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential effort and was deputy manager of his 2012 reelection campaign. Her twins were born a week after Election Day.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-jennifer-omalley-dillon-transformed-joe-bidens-campaign/2020/08/14/d49de192-dbdd-11ea-8051-d5f887d73381_story.html?hpid=hp_save-opinions-float-right-4-0_opinion-card-f-right%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

    Not another Gail Kelly/Fiona Wood! 😆

  3. steve davis:

    Saturday, August 15, 2020 at 9:07 pm

    [‘Sounds like Mavis is in mourning. Must have been his only friend.’]

    You’ll get on, cobber?

  4. Mavis @ #2657 Saturday, August 15th, 2020 – 9:08 pm

    C@tmomma:

    Saturday, August 15, 2020 at 8:59 pm

    Do you have company tonight, cat? Please stop being so acidic.

    Yes I do. As I said, that’s where I’ve been up until now. Unlike, it looks like, you have had.

    Oh, and btw, I’ll keep being ‘acidic’, for so long as you keep spewing crap like, I suck up to BB and GG for their approval. That’s just a complete fabrication on your part as I have had run-ins for the ages with both of them. They both know I don’t do ‘suck-up’ (with all the sleazy connotations that implies).

  5. Taylormadesays:
    Saturday, August 15, 2020 at 8:06 pm
    So Mikakos was not responsible for hotel quarantine but has been stripped of her responsibility for hotel quarantine.
    Work that one out bludgers.

    So the federal govt is responsible for quarantine and borders and aged care but they’re not at fault when something goes wrong.

    So ScoMo will co-operate fully with the enquiry but will not co-operate when asked to co-operate and will threaten court action to ensure he doesn’t co-operate but will co-operate except when he won’t co-operate.

    Work that one out (right wing) bludgers.

  6. Oh, and nath was NEVER ‘alpha’. He was krappa, right from the start. You could probably go through the archives and extract the words, ‘Walter Mitty’ from my posts about him. I smelled a rat from the get-go. The way he conveniently turned up with his ‘Get Bill’ jihad. The only people that would have respected that or thought it was amusing would have been fellow Liberals. Or easily bamboozled numpties.

  7. Lord of Misrule:

    Saturday, August 15, 2020 at 9:07 pm

    [‘I don’t disagree Mavis. I am merely stating that the natural order has been upended. There will be a scramble for dominance amongst the Beta predators until a new bad guy can be found.’]

    I put my hand up; anything in lieu of the natural order.

  8. Lars Von Trier @ #2663 Saturday, August 15th, 2020 – 9:15 pm

    C@t Disappointing post from you about Mavis.

    Oh, I see. mewling Mavis can get away with imputing that I ‘suck up’ to Bushfire Bill and Greensborough Growler, and all YOU can do is lay your passive aggressive, ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ schtick on ME!?! Go away, and come back when you have decided to play fair.

  9. I think that calculus may have shifted now Republican voters have been told by Trump and Fox News for the past few months that if they vote by mail their votes will be stolen and handed over to the Democrats.

  10. C@tmomma:

    Saturday, August 15, 2020 at 9:18 pm

    Oh, I see. mewling Mavis can get away with imputing that I ‘suck up’ to Bushfrie Bill and Greensborough Growler…

    Yes, that’s the way I see it.

  11. William Bowe @ #2664 Saturday, August 15th, 2020 – 9:18 pm

    I think that calculus may have shifted now Republican voters have been told by Trump and Fox News for the past few months that if they vote by mail their votes will be stolen and handed over to the Democrats.

    Their calculus is that Republican voters will turn up in person to the polls and more polling places will be provided for them to vote at, their votes will be counted on the night, it will look like a Trump win, may even be announced as such by the TV networks, then when the mail votes come in and turn the race blue (if they ever do), then the Trumpists will cry, fraud and run to the courts and in the ensuing chaos Trump will prevail.

  12. Mavis @ #2666 Saturday, August 15th, 2020 – 9:23 pm

    C@tmomma:

    Saturday, August 15, 2020 at 9:18 pm

    Oh, I see. mewling Mavis can get away with imputing that I ‘suck up’ to Bushfrie Bill and Greensborough Growler…

    Yes, that’s the way I see it.

    And you would be wrong.

    But don’t believe the actual person you are referring to. I mean, what would I know? I should believe some old trailer park maven instead of knowing myself.

    Do you know how ridiculous that looks? Apparently not.

  13. WB:

    Saturday, August 15, 2020 at 9:20 pm

    [‘I think that will do for the Mavis and C@t exchange.’]

    Hokey Dokey, but can I return to old BB & old GG? Nah!

  14. C@tmomma:
    Saturday, August 15, 2020 at 9:29 pm

    William Bowe @ #2665 Saturday, August 15th, 2020 – 9:20 pm

    I think that will do for the Mavis and C@t exchange.

    Yes, it has become entirely pointless.

    One for the road, I’m in earnest agreement thereof.

  15. Bushfire Bill @ #2988 Saturday, August 15th, 2020 – 8:31 pm

    Yeah William,

    well for 6 months you let people here call me “racist”, which is a typical drive-by, hateful thing to say (especially when it isn’t true), and I didn’t see you exactly jumping to my defence, despite virtually every single point and argument I made throughout the period ultimately being proved 100% factual, accurate and/or prescient.

    These ranged from my early promotion of the virtues of total lockdown, to the dangers of aerosol transmission, both of which were condemned as either ignorant or non-existent, and used to label me as “racist”.

    I have also been accused of being “old”, “white”, and “male”, however they are defined (and as if I’d have any choice in any of them), and of having pus dripping from my penis due to an obvious prostate infection, which apparently was affecting my mental health. I’m not the only one who’s copped that shit or similar on YOUR blog (hint: it’s got your name on it).

    Didn’t see or hear you say “Whoa there!” then, either.

    Two things BB:
    (1) you were, and still are, wrong about airborne spread of SARS-CoV-2 outside specific aerosol generating procedures – which are extremely rare outside hospitals. None have been proven (in humans) yet. Transmission is by inadvertent direct inoculation of your mucous membranes with virus- which can be avoided by not sharing saliva and by gelling your hands before picking your nose.
    (2) I never called you (or implied that you were) racist on this blog. That was others – and your own guilty conscience. Stop conflating me with that false meme.

    You were one of the reasons that I avoided this blog for a while, but not the only one. You have some wit and insight – but insufficient of either to make your hubris and insecurity worth wasting time on.

  16. This is a very good conversation between Benjamin Law and Mark Seymour of Hunters and Collectors fame, covering life, the universe and everything, including his politics:

    If an election was called right now, how do you reckon you’d vote and what would your vote be based on? Well, the Labor Party – and this sounds like a cliché – speaks to wage-earners, who aren’t entrepreneurs, who aren’t running businesses. People who just have jobs, are saving up superannuation, have mortgages. There’s this whole massive community of Australians who aren’t capitalists, and a majority of the people who aren’t running business. Labor speaks to them.

    https://www.smh.com.au/culture/music/mark-seymour-i-do-struggle-with-hunters-and-collectors-20200626-p556nf.html

  17. C@tmomma @ #2667 Saturday, August 15th, 2020 – 7:25 pm

    William Bowe @ #2664 Saturday, August 15th, 2020 – 9:18 pm

    I think that calculus may have shifted now Republican voters have been told by Trump and Fox News for the past few months that if they vote by mail their votes will be stolen and handed over to the Democrats.

    Their calculus is that Republican voters will turn up in person to the polls and more polling places will be provided for them to vote at, their votes will be counted on the night, it will look like a Trump win, may even be announced as such by the TV networks, then when the mail votes come in and turn the race blue (if they ever do), then the Trumpists will cry, fraud and run to the courts and in the ensuing chaos Trump will prevail.

    The first person I heard suggest this was Charlie Sykes and whoever it was he was interviewing a week or so ago. Since then many more commentators are making the same claim. Hopefully this means the election night coverage commentators will be onto this from Trump and be constantly cautioning that the result may be unknown for weeks – if it isn’t a thumping Biden victory, that is.

  18. ‘fess,
    I’m concerned that the thumping Biden victory might be muted by the vote suppression shenanigans, which then gives cause to Trump and his media vuvuzelas to try and brazen their way to, another (in my mind), illicit victory.

  19. I am tentatively hopeful that the Democrats have at least got great lawyers prepared to go to the mat and fight it out with the Repug lawyers this time. Plus they have had some good victories recently that have made them match fit.

  20. [‘You were one of the reasons that I avoided this blog for a while, but not the only one. You have some wit and insight – but insufficient of either to make your hubris and insecurity worth wasting time on.’]

    Et alia!

  21. To me Aged Care , child care and education should never be privatised. Very disturbing that aged care profitability is enhanced by “bed turnover” that is re-selling beds/rooms when patients are deceased. Aged care and child care for profit motives drive the desire to minimise wages expense so minimise service levels by minimising staff. Profit motive works entirely against the purpose in the above 2 areas. Education .. well .. our kids struggle to earn and afford a uni place in courses occupied by 50% + overseas students. Many of these students stay on and take positions that cannot be filled by “unskilled” Aussie kids. Go figure. Oh that’s right.. economic growth .. education is our big export earner ..

  22. BB:

    Didn’t see or hear you say “Whoa there!” then, either.

    My recollection is that “Basher” Bowe (the enforcer) pointed out that what people (principally you) were saying wasn’t racist. The racism police (principally Zoidlord) objected and when their objections were overruled, they left.

  23. The Melbourne Murdoch organ have run a Facebook poll on Dan Andrews – the result so overwhelming that they snuck it on p13..

  24. Lord of Misrule:

    This is what happens when an Apex predator (Nath) is removed from an ecosystem.

    I seem to recall that Nath expressed a fondness for the works of Julian May, one of of one book (“The Nonborn King” is “The Lord of Misrule”

  25. E. G. Theodore @ #2683 Saturday, August 15th, 2020 – 9:56 pm

    Lord of Misrule:

    This is what happens when an Apex predator (Nath) is removed from an ecosystem.

    I seem to recall that Nath expressed a fondness for the works of Julian May, one of of one book (“The Nonborn King” is “The Lord of Misrule”

    I was wondering just a little while ago whether the obsessive ‘nath’ may have already knitted a new sock puppet?

  26. Gosh …

    Quite a bit of heat tonight, with my name in some of it. Thanks Mr Bowe for your defence. There was indeed a prickly unpleasant time, and confusion about to whom strong judgements were levelled, and then some.

    On the premise that ‘fear’ is the basis of ‘attack’, and that ‘understanding’ is the emollient, I’m up for trying to follow zoomster, who has the patience of Job imo, with her exhortation to leave the past in the past.

    This is a terrific blog, full credit to Mr Bowe, with the only downside that it can become all consuming.

  27. Trump’s biggest strength is also his biggest weakness: he doesn’t know when to shut up. While this serves him by making him look “authentic” and “brave” when he says the quiet parts of people’s beliefs loudly and make the “wimps” on the other side scoff in disgust, it also him because he has a habit of telegraphing his intent way ahead of time. He thinks his strategy is so clever that he can’t help but boast it as early and audaciously as possible, giving his opponents time to react and counter him.

  28. Dan Andrews .. Has to be respected and praised by any reasonably minded person . Even some journos are asking liberal-like questions now. That is simple questions supporting his efforts.

  29. Rhwombat (and Itza):

    I have quite strong views on this stance being unjustified by the actual clinical evidence extant for SARS-CoV-2, for which there is still no confirmed evidence of actual (as opposed to theoretical) exclusive airborne transmission in humans (curiously enough, there is for ferrets & cats), but the precautionary principal prevents me from decrying it. The clinical epidemiology suggests that it’s droplets/contact (and sharing saliva) all the way down.

    I think I understand, but in bringing this up, you risk restarting the interminable confusion, which annoyed virtually everyone.

    Now by “exclusive” does it mean:
    1 – exclusive droplet can and does happen
    2 – droplet and aerosol in conjunction can and does happen?
    3 – exclusive aerosol (in the absence of a high “delivery rate” aerosolizing procedure) can happen but there’s not evidence that it has / does?

    By high “delivery rate” aerosolizing I mean high “virus unit doses” per second.

    I take high “delivery rate” to be the case for:
    – intubation – very large amount of virus at quite high speed = high delivery rate
    – breach in NIV mask interface – large amount of virus at very high speed = high delivery rate

    Product is the same but the factors (which are multiplied to form the product) are different.

    Hence my obsession with helmet NIV interfaces, and the paradigm of portable negative pressure, in which it is (in the event of a breach):
    – large amount of virus at moderate? speed = moderate delivery rate (less than is required for aerosol transmission)

    Also I think helmets are less likely to breach, so reduce risk at the population level by that means too.

    It now occurs to me that given negative pressure room principally protect those outside and are thus an infection control thing, so too helmet interfaces (cf. mask interfaces) are substantially an infection control measure, and hence within the infectious disease medicine baileywick as much as within that of anesthesiology.

  30. Wombat, you stick with the “not proven yet” line to then go ahead to use it to “prove” I was wrong.

    How many more lives need to be lost to the egos of medicos who just can’t face up to the dangerous advice they uttered being ill-informed.

    We were told masks were useless. Now they’re vital. We were told young schoolkids couldn’t spread the disease. Now that’s a no-brainer. We were told it’s a lung infection. Now we know it’s systemic.

    Your opinion on the aerosol question is as pathetically academic as it is pointless. How many civilians – in stubbies and thongs, not lab coats – do you expect to reconnoitre restaurants, shopping malls, cruise ships, abbatoirs, hospital passageways, age care wards, apartment lobbies, public bars, clubs, pubs, restaurants and the like, a well-thumbed copy of the latest Lancet in hand, with merely the most recent version of what there’s evidence for (or not), surveying the airflow dynamics of the various localities to see if they measure up to TODAY’S definition (but probably not tomorrow’s) of what is an aerosol safe environment?

    Do we need to wait for the WHO to back down before we make decisions as to what’s safe and what’s unsafe? How many more shrugged shoulders from contact tracers do we need to see before we finally get the message that millions have caught this disease through no fault of their own, despite precautions, and that very likely the latest research in COVID-19 is complete and utter bloody guesswork masquerading as “the latest science”, until “the science” apologizes yet again for being wrong?

    “So sad. Too bad. Sorry ’bout your grandad.”

    “Not enough evidence” is not enough evidence.

  31. C@tmomma @ #3035 Saturday, August 15th, 2020 – 9:38 pm

    rhwombat,
    So explain to me the reason why choirs and the like are such particular spreaders of COVID-19?

    Direct inoculation of mucous membranes with fingers contaminated with droplet nuclei with a unique new virus that sheds for about a week from ~ 10% of asymptomatic super spreaders and persist for days on moist (& cold) surfaces. Choirs & wind instruments project the droplet nuclei onto all surfaces (including adjacent skin) very efficiently. Direct contact does the rest. We are mostly unconscious of the fact that we all touch our mucous membranes all the time, even in clinical settings. Aerosols (even the lab generated high density ones using SARS-CoV-2) have not demonstrated transmission of an adequate inoculum of SARS-CoV-2 – that has only been shown with SARS-CoV-1, MERS & 2 of the other 4 human CoVs.

    There is no such thing as never in biology or medicine, but the cumulative clinical & epidemiological evidence of the last 9 months suggests that aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is much rarer than the Aerosol-Industrial complex would have you believe. There is much profit to be made from selling fear of breathing that “only” complex industrial solutions (or universal exclusion) can absolve you of. I can do as well with N95 masks, alcohol gel and personal vigilance – but no one can maintain security indefinitely. There are real world consequences for a lot of real people, some of which I am privileged to be involved with – and some of which I cannot avoid. It may be an abstract debate for most of us at present, but all of us will eventually be touched by it.

  32. Rational Leftist says:
    Saturday, August 15, 2020 at 10:10 pm
    Trump’s biggest strength is also his biggest weakness: he doesn’t know when to shut up. While this serves him by making him look “authentic” and “brave” when he says the quiet parts of people’s beliefs loudly and make the “wimps” on the other side scoff in disgust, it also him because he has a habit of telegraphing his intent way ahead of time. He thinks his strategy is so clever that he can’t help but boast it as early and audaciously as possible, giving his opponents time to react and counter him.

    Trump also wants to attract responses from his opponents. He trolls them all the time. He thrives on outrage, on provocation, on indignation, even on degeneracy. He is a super provocateur. He’s done to politics what world championship wrestling has done to judo or karate.

    Nothing, seemingly, is beyond him. What is astonishing is that more than 40% of voters are still enthralled with him. They might yet get him over the line in a political culture where winning is everything.

  33. It’s ‘comma-la’: How to pronounce Kamala Harris’ name

    “Kamala is pronounced “‘comma-la,’ like the punctuation mark,” according to the California senator. Harris wrote in the preface of her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” “First, my name is pronounced ‘comma-la,’ like the punctuation mark. It means ‘lotus flower,’ which is a symbol of significance in Indian culture. A lotus grows underwater, its flower rising above the surface while its roots are planted firmly in the river bottom.””

    https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/12/politics/kamala-harris-pronunciation/index.html

  34. Useless lying Trump:

    When US President Donald Trump was swept to power in 2016, it was promises about Obamacare, building a wall and taxes that helped convince the American people to install him in the nation’s top job.

    Now, four years later, The Poynter Institute says he has kept just 18 per cent of the promises he made during his campaign in the early days of his presidency.

    Of the rest of his promises, 17 per cent have been outright broken and the rest have either stalled, been compromised or are still in the works.

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