Victorian poll, Queensland election, Groom by-election

A good poll result from Labor in Victoria, an even better election result for Labor in Queensland, and only four candidates come forward for the Groom by-election.

The Herald-Sun reported on Monday on a “privately conducted” Victorian state poll by YouGov that showed Labor maintaining a commanding 55-45 lead on two-party preferred, from primary votes of Labor 44%, Coalition 40% and Greens 11%. This compares with 57.3-42.7 at Labor’s landslide win in 2018, when the primary votes were Labor 42.9%, Coalition 35.2% and Greens 10.7%. Personal ratings are good for Daniel Andrews (65% approval and 32% disapproval) and disastrous for Liberal leader Michael O’Brien (26% approval and 53% disapproval).

The poll nonetheless found that 55% thought it fair to hold Daniel Andrews responsible for the second COVID-19 wave, compared with 40% for not fair. Fifty per cent believed Andrews had been honest and transparent about the hotel quarantine failure against 43% for not honest and transparent; 53% said Victoria was heading in the right direction versus 39% who said it is “time for change”. The poll was conducted from October 29 to November from a sample of 1241.

UPDATE: Now a Roy Morgan poll gives Labor a lead of 58.5-41.5, up from 51.5-48.5 a month ago, from primary votes of Labor 45% (up five), Coalition 34.5% (down 5.5) and Greens 11% (up two). Daniel Andrews’ approval rating split is out from 59-41 to 71-29. The poll was conducted by SMS on Monday and Tuesday from a sample of 818.

In real election news, the Electoral Commission of Queensland has been completing preference distributions for the October 31 state election, and while the numbers haven’t been officially published, Antony Green relates that luck has favoured Labor in the final preference distributions in Bundaberg and Nicklin. These seats have been gained from the LNP with respective margins of 11 and 79 votes, pending LNP requests for recounts.

Confirmation of these results would leave Labor with 52 seats in a parliament of 93, a net gain of four compared with the 2017 result. South Brisbane was lost to the Greens (6.0% margin, 9.5% swing), while five were gained from the LNP Bundaberg (by a 0.0% margin with a 4.2% swing), Nicklin (a 0.1% margin and a 5.4% swing), Caloundra (a 2.5% margin and a 5.9% swing), Hervey Bay (a 2.2% margin and an 11.3% swing) and Pumicestone (a 5.1% margin and a 6.0% swing). These are Labor’s first ever wins in Nicklin and Caloundra, both of which are on the Sunshine Coast.

The LNP is duly reduced from 38 seats to 33, unless you count their recovery of Whitsunday after its previous member was expelled from the party mid-term. Their one piece of good news from late counting was that they managed to retain the Gold Coast seat of Currumbin by 310 votes, a 0.3% margin against a swing to Labor of 3.0% (David Crisafulli will be chosen as the party’s new leader unopposed at a party room meeting today). South Brisbane increases the Greens from one to two, with the party having easily its 2017 gain of Maiwar from the LNP, while Katter’s Australian Party and One Nation achieved status quo results of three seats and one respectively, as did independents with Sandy Bolton comfortably retaining Noosa.

Official results are naturally available from the ECQ; the numbers on my live results facility are emphatically not official, in that I have preserved them as they were a week ago before the ECQ removed the indicative two-candidate preferred counts. This means both the booth-level two-candidate preferred results and preference flow by candidate breakdowns are preserved, albeit in not entirely complete form.

Finally, while the attention of most of us has been firmly elsewhere, the process for the November 28 Groom by-election has continued chugging along, with nominations having been declared last Friday. The by-election has attracted a remarkably thin field of four candidates, which somewhat to my surprise includes one from Labor: Chris Meibusch, a community lawyer and unsuccessful candidate for the Toowoomba mayoralty in March. The preselection of LNP candidate Garth Hamilton was related here. The other two candidates are from the Liberal Democrats and Sustainable Australia – as well as there being no One Nation presence, this must be the first time a while that the Greens have left a federal contest uncontested.

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.

635 comments on “Victorian poll, Queensland election, Groom by-election”

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  2. Late Riser,
    Thje equivalent Antipodean story to relate about Christmas is that we all usually have somewhere to go, like Bali or Thailand, or at the very least Queensland for our holidays. Some, of course, perversely, 😀 (as I’ve never understood why you would want to go through winter here and then go there for more of it), prefer to head off to the Northern Hemisphere in order to go skiing.

    It is for this reason that we, too, are going through our own aching longing for what we usually do at Christmas, as a young lad who I was speaking to today as he replaced our hot water heater, was opining, missing being able to do those very things. 🙂

  3. Lars
    Biden would be aware of how Australia is performing with the virus and he probably doesn’t need the state department to tell him because it is fairly common knowledge among the global medical community.

  5. MeidasTouch.com
    @MeidasTouch
    BREAKING: China has congratulated President-elect Joe Biden on winning the election

    That’s going to really piss someone off.

  9. Friends of mine had a top floor apartment in Alaska. Never turned their heating on, because the hot air from the floors below them kept their apartment toasty.

  14. I discovered the benefit of good insulation and central heating when staying in Saariselkä in Finland two years ago. Saariselkä’s well inside the Artic Circle, so even in October it was a bit chilly. Inside though was warm as toast.

    Great auroras too.

  16. Late Riser @ #1523 Friday, November 13th, 2020 – 7:59 pm

    CC Yep. And huddles. 🙂 (My cold weather stories go down to -36C.)

    Been there(abouts) -30C(?). Try getting dysentery at 03:00 at 6000m in the Nepal Himalaya in December. Mind you, I’ve spent a few ok nights in snow caves – with the help of a good expedition bag. You had to wear your outer boots inside the inner bag otherwise they’d be too frozen to get on in the morning. Looxury.

  17. Cud Chewer @ #581 Friday, November 13th, 2020 – 7:33 pm

    A couple of observations here. If you go back over all the data, you’ll see that NSW had 21 days without cases from 22/05 to 11/06. That’s the closest we got to elimination. It was enough for me to relax a little – but not want to go anywhere near Sydney. The next untraceable cases came on 12/06 and 15/06. Again relatively quiet period. Then in the next week or so things went downhill and we had several Victorians and the infamous Crossroads hotel clusterfuck.

    I can’t prove this, but it feels to me that there was already a large pool of infections in Melbourne by this stage (many of them hidden) and of the 5 untraceable infections between 15/06 and 03/07, at least some may have originated from Victorian visitors. The upshot of this is that in an alternate universe where Melbourne had eliminated the virus in May, Sydney may have also followed suit – or at least sputtered along at a very low rate for a few months. Its also clear to me that Sydney closing its border to Victoria on July 6 was already 2 weeks too late. Another mistake was not testing travellers.

    Now, the thing that surprised even me is that in the following few weeks, there were 3 examples of a 20 something from Sydney, going to Newcastle, going on a pub crawl and starting a cluster. If you think about the probabilities and the usual rate of flow of people between Sydney and Newcastle, that’s actually above the odds. Probably just bad luck more than anything, but it shows you just how much the virus loves travel.

    I don’t think the current run of 6 zero case days in Sydney is terribly significant. Its nice. It’ll be even nicer when we get to 16. I might even crack a smile when we get to 26. But its really a case of the further you go, the more the probability of there existing a hidden infection decays. It just decays agonisingly slowly. Its why I get the shits with politicians opening borders and running sports stadiums at full capacity, very prematurely.

    CC:
    At low rates, the detected numbers don’t mean much as far as “elimination”goes. COVID-19 disease is a much smaller fraction of SARS-CoV-2 infection and carriage than we originally thought (probably less than 20%). It may well be that SARS-CoV-2 is more like the 4 non-SARS human coronavirus species that continue to circulate as asymptomatic and minor URTI diseases, and we now know that SARS-CoV-2 survives intact in most cold chains. Elimination is unlikely for years, even with multiple effective vaccines. There will be re-introduction and sporadic (small and potentially containable) outbreaks in places like Australia & NZ for years – including next winter. The old world of unfettered capitalist travel has gone.

  18. wombat we’ll have to revisit this in a year or so.

    As for the potential for eradication. The main reason I think this is hard is politics and poverty. But I wouldn’t bet against it either.

    Also, my mum is scholar and an expert in the works of Christopher Marlowe (a playwright and contemporary to Shakespeare). The Marlowe Society of American holds a conference every 5 years. (The last in 2018 was in Wittenberg). The next will be in 2023 (probably London). Despite the fact that she is 80 something, I’m feeling somewhat confident it will be safe.

  19. Also if you have any recent papers that would add to my understanding of the proportion of asymptomatic cases, please feel free to link.

  20. Cud Chewer @ #618 Friday, November 13th, 2020 – 10:49 pm

    wombat we’ll have to revisit this in a year or so.

    As for the potential for eradication. The main reason I think this is hard is politics and poverty. But I wouldn’t bet against it either.

    Also, my mum is scholar and an expert in the works of Christopher Marlowe (a playwright and contemporary to Shakespeare). The Marlowe Society of American holds a conference every 5 years. (The last in 2018 was in Wittenberg). The next will be in 2023 (probably London). Despite the fact that she is 80 something, I’m feeling somewhat confident it will be safe.

    I also think that your mum is likely to be fairly safe in 2023 UK (as long as Boris hasn’t sold it to Putin or Xi). I don’t think it’s either politics or poverty which will prevent eradication (though that’s how we will rationalise it) – I think that it’s the biology of SARS-CoV-2. MERS is still around, and that is orders of magnitude less transmissible.

  28. The site’s been hacked and is experiencing ongoing difficulties, like the fact that all comments are going into moderation. I think I’ve worked out what the problem is here and hope to have it rectified soon. Other issues include the fact that I had to restore the site to a backup point from yesterday morning, meaning most of yesterday’s comments action is lost forever; and we appear to have lost the comments page navigation and just have “older comments” and “newer comments”, which I hope to be able to fix in due course.

  30. And in other news..

    https://www.businessinsider.com.au/elon-musk-symptoms-of-cold-positive-negative-coronavirus-tests-2020-11

    Musk has repeatedly downplayed the severity of the coronavirus threat and, at times, spread misinformation about COVID-19.

    He said in a September interview on the podcast “Sway” that he would not get the COVID-19 vaccine for himself or his family because he was “not at risk for COVID, nor are my kids.”

    “Essentially, the right thing to do would be to not have done a lockdown for the whole country but to have, I think, anyone who’s at risk should be quarantined until the storm passes,” Musk said during the podcast episode.

    Not to mention Elon’s lack of regard for his workers (I could quote extensively there).

    And there are legions of Elon fanboys who think that a Mars colony should be run by Elon.

  32. I believe the all-comments-in-moderation problem is now fixed. Other problems will have to wait. Thanks though to CC for pointing them out, and do please everyone keep them coming if you notice anything further.

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