Around the traps

As the government approaches the middle of its term, the first sighting of early election speculation in the wild.

Dennis Shanahan of The Australian reckons “two basic assumptions are driving the economic and political debate in 2021”, and that one of these is that there will be an election late next year. The other is that COVID-19 restrictions will start to ease in the coming months; “neither is certain”. The government’s election window opens in the middle of the year, at which point the Senators given six-year terms after the 2016 double dissolution will enter the final year of the terms, the period in which the half-Senate election to replace them may be held.

That will do as a kick-off for a new open thread, which is needed because there are so many other posts flying around at the moment. For convenience, these include:

• Adrian Beaumont’s New Zealand live election count post, which will begin in earnest when polls close at 7pm New Zealand time and 5pm Australian eastern daylight time – to be followed an hour later by my own live commentary post on the Australian Territory election. And if you’re a Crikey subscriber, you can read my collective preview of the two here.

• Also from Adrian Beaumont, a review of the US situation.

• A post on a Newspoll result showing Labor leading 52-48 in Queensland.

• Another post on the Queensland campaigning detailing relevant recent developments.

• A post on a Ten News uComms poll from New South Wales showing strong support for Gladys Berejiklian.

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.

1,345 comments on “Around the traps”

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  3. What a shame boerwar is not around anymore – he would have seen the Gladys story for what it was – a greens plot masterminded by the Chinese communists !

  5. “ Couldn’t the Telegraph find any achievements of hers to boost?”

    – Losing 13 colleagues to an ICAC Developer donation Scandal

    – cravenly giving in to the Nats, rural developers and ‘let it rip’ brigade with the most regressive laws we have seen in native vegetation clearing. Thereby ensuring that the koala will be functionally extinct in a decade and over a 1000 vulnerable species at risk of following the koala

    – demolishing perfectly good stadiums, convention centres, exhibition halls, more stadiums, world class museums for developer maaates

    – privatising just about everything she could. Then promising to not privatise anything more then privatising a bunch of other stuff she said she wouldn’t …

    – $2 billion blow out on a $1 billion light rail vanity project

    – Westconnex

    – the absurd Bankstown metro conversion project

    There. But some of #guiltygladys’s achievements.

  8. Channel 9 running polls in MacQuarie and Dobell with the coalition primary in the 50s and Labor in the 20s. Didn’t catch any details of who did the polling and how many polled.

  9. Lizzie

    I was first drawn to the ankle boots!
    Then I noticed the lacy top with white bra underneath

    Lacy top is not a good look on Nikki Savva and it’s worse on a matronly figure

    I pine for the sensible dress of Laura Tingle who favours Sportscraft. Her views are more measured also.

  11. billie

    Yes, the boots were a bit of a shock. Oh, and to keep the genders equal, I noticed that David Speers was all in dark grey. No doubt in mourning for Jacinda’s victory.

  12. Gladys

    How could you fall in lerve with a former Harvey Norman franchisee holder?

    How did Maguire get a $1.5m debt?

    As Zoomster said yesterday, you look like a couple.

    Who else are you involved with?

  13. GG seat polls are unreliable at the best of times but thought I should fill my psephological quota.
    Doesn’t really gel with the published polls.

  14. Andrew_Earlwood

    When you collect all those actions into one, it makes me wonder who, except real estate sharks and developers, could possibly think Glad had done well.

  15. The Telecrap today certainly went above and beyond the call of duty today with the foot massage and back rub it gave Gladys.
    As hard hitting interviews go it has now gone to the top of the charts surpassing the take no prisoners interview of John Howard by Janet Albrechtsen.

  17. Has Albanese commented on Tudge’s shambolic ‘bubble’ management ?

    or does Andrews and McGowan have to do all the heavy lifting ?

  18. To Alan Tudge, who is arguing that states have complete control of their borders.

    RonniSalt
    @RonniSalt
    ·
    1m
    Your story’s wandering around like a new-born foal on crack.

    CMOs at meetings, not at meetings, Vic controls the Australian borders(?), Vic is/isn’t part of the bubble, 17 NZers, 55 NZers, no they didn’t go to WA, hang on yes they did.

    I think Justice Flick was right about you.

  19. Well I never.

    9News Sydney
    @9NewsSyd
    · 16m
    Leading through a pandemic is proving positive for Scott Morrison’s popularity with polls revealing he’d win in a landslide if votes were cast tonight. @CUhlmann #9News

  20. Bingo

    RonniSalt
    @RonniSalt
    ·
    37s
    “I planned to have a life together with him but it wasn’t an intimate relationship and I was his confidante but didn’t know his confidences and I loved him but stopped as soon as I knew I was testifying before an ICAC hearing,”

    . . . said nobody ever.

    #GladysBerejiklian

  22. Yep. It’s just so ridiculous

    Eddy Jokovich
    @EddyJokovich
    ·
    17m
    How many people would think they loved someone and wanted to marry them, but the relationship was so insignificant they wouldn’t tell anyone else about it? #NSWPOL

  24. @DonnieMountjoy
    ·
    6m
    Replying to
    @RonniSalt
    “WA works with airlines so people in Sydney can’t fly to WA without a permit”

    Bullshit.

    I flew into Perth on that flight with Kiwis yesterday. At least three travellers did not have any G2G pass at all! And there were no checks by Qantas at all before we boarded in Sydney.

    180 of us on the flight – maybe 15% wore masks for the duration. One FA did not use a mask the whole flight.

    Police and Navy processing us did a great job but it took 4 hrs. I was told by them this arrival was the largest single load he had seen in months.

  26. Rex and Lizzie, I’m pretty sure 9 extrapolated that landslide from the 2 seat level polls.
    I’d be taking that with a grain of salt at the moment.

  27. “Mr Burns, you’re campaign has all the momentum of a runaway steam train and you are more popular than ever.” That is a paraphrase of the Simpsons, but Uhlmann basically quoted it about the Scrot… says it all about the depth to his analysis doesn’t it?

  30. I was struggling to believe those 2 seat polls Lizzie.
    I’m happy to accept the newspoll situation but I still reckon smoko will be looking to go early.
    Hubris.

  32. Re GG @6:04.

    If the UK numbers are for the whole UK, divide by 10 to get the equivalent for Victoria. If it’s just England, divide by 8.

  33. Tough competitor. She was taken in by a lowly country MP apparently. Sheesh.

    To survive as just an MP in the Bear Pit you have to be tough, savvy, cynical and have a several litres of mongrel blood running through your arteries.

    Multiply that by 10,000 if you want to have any chance of being an effective Premier.

    So what do we get?

    Gladys “The Head Prefect” Berejiklian: led up the garden path by a country bumpkin with a glad eye, a slick line of patter, a sharp suit and the “debt recovery agents” out to break his balls.

    What hope would she have up against a real operator, aka. your typical, average NSW property developer, tunnel digger, tollway operator and/or member of the Aspen Spivocracy?

    For that alone she should resign, as not being able to discern the difference between a leering lurk merchant and a koala bear from more than the length of a sex kitten’s tail.

    She was going to hook up with Dangerous Daryl once he’d paid of his millions in debt by a means she didn’t want to know anything at all about. It was true love, you see. Very private. You can see how private because it’s all over the Sunday Telegraph.

    Yeah, I’ll believe that.

  34. BB: ”For that alone she should resign, as not being able to discern the difference between a leering lurk merchant and a koala bear…”

    This is what the media is making her out to be. If she’s that stupid, she’s unfit for her job. If she’s not stupid (and she isn’t), then she’s either complicit in dodgy dealings or at the very least she turned a blind eye to them. In either case unfit for office.

    She should go. I make no predictions as to if and when she’ll go – I think she’ll survive for now but as always I could be wrong.

    And I couldn’t give a stuff about her personal life.

  35. Bushfire Bill

    To survive as just an MP in the Bear Pit you have to be tough, savvy, cynical and have a several litres of mongrel blood running through your arteries.

    Multiply that by 10,000 if you want to have any chance of being an effective Premier.

    +100 Bambi or Babes in the Wood do not end up at the top of the cesspit that is NSW politics. Gladdie and the journos trying to portray her as one = 24k Bullshit

  37. davidwh @ #690 Sunday, October 18th, 2020 – 4:48 pm

    Miles may be a bit too left to replace AP.

    It seems as though Cameron Dick might be next in line:

    Mr Dick has been friends with Ms Palaszczuk for decades, the pair having met at university.

    His brother Milton Dick was a Brisbane City Councillor before being elected to the federal seat of Oxley.

    The former barrister has a masters degree in Law from Trinity College, Cambridge, and now lives in Logan with his wife and two sons.

    Insiders say Mr Dick has long held ambitions of becoming premier and was even tipped to become Labor leader in 2015 if Ms Palaszczuk failed to make a dent during the election.

    Even though Steven Miles is well-qualified too:

    Mr Miles was elected to the Queensland Parliament in 2015 and became environment minister in his first term.

    Following a redistribution of electorate boundaries, he moved from a seat in Brisbane’s inner-western suburbs to the seat of Murrumba, north of the city, in 2017.

    He was sworn in as health minister after the 2017 election.

    The 42-year-old has a PhD in political science and his thesis was on rebuilding worker participation in trade unions.

    He also worked as a policy adviser to former Treasurer Andrew Fraser and at United Voice, the ambulance union.

    https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/queensland/queensland-has-a-new-deputy-premier-and-treasurer-who-are-they-20200511-p54rrp.html

  38. Gladys, Top Koala Killer and current Head of the NSW Corp, must be hanging on because she’s found a public asset that has escaped spivisation.

  39. “To survive as just an MP in the Bear Pit you have to be tough, savvy, cynical and have a several litres of mongrel blood running through your arteries.”

    This is not really true. No rougher than here.

    The only premier to survive since 1995 is Bob Carr who did not/does not have those features and there are plenty of journeymen who just hang around eg Hazzard sat on the opposition benches for the whole of the 16 years and who is the member for Cabramatta, again. He will have to be carried out.

    On that point, to some extent (maybe a lot), Mark Latham may be important. I know he kind of hates everyone, a lot, but he has the Premier lined up and he can articulate a case (not only as
    mere comparison to the RW rump in the Council) including to the Premier’s supporters.

    He has the other ON by the pubes, the Elephant Killer and his team are on board and the Greens. How he works, if bothered, with the independent and the Animal Justice Party (and Shoebridge who is eloquent and thoughtful) could be decisive.

  45. Look, Macquarie and Dobell are 2 heavily-targeted Labor seats the Liberals think they’ve got a chance of snatching from Labor. Those polls could have been of every Liberal Party member in the 2 seats, who knows the truth? It just sounds like expectations management in the run-up to the next election to me. Repeat a lie for long enough and people will come to believe it to be the truth.

  46. They have been the pits

    David Milner
    @DaveMilbo
    ·
    9h
    @theheraldsun
    you guys know you’re just an open joke now, right? A dangerous, stupid, hate-spewing joke that toyed with our lives and mental health because you failed to realise this was an unusual moment and you stuck to your usual script. You will not be forgiven

  49. On the Koala theme, I was surprised today to see a flyer in our letterbox in the Maiwar electorate, the one held by the Greens. The flyer started with these words, all in caps.

    KOALA, POWERFUL OWL AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROJECTS FUNDING

    It was an LNP flyer promoting Lauren Day. It went on to promise spending on “key environmental projects” including a new wetland in Indooroopilly, rehabilitation in Fig Tree Pocket, and Brisbane River rehabilitation. Cynics might say that terms like “wetland” might need to be defined, but Koalas…hmm.

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