First up, there are two lengthy and highly substantive new post beneath this one which I like to think warrant your attention: my own review of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters’ newly published report of its inquiry into the 2019 election, and Adrian Beaumont’s concluding review of Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.
So that the comments sections for those posts might remain on topic, I offer this post as the latest open thread. I’m not exactly sure what the imminent festive season means for the schedule of the pollsters – Newspoll might or might not have one last poll under its sleeve just before Christmas, and I’m pretty sure there will be an Essential Research next week, which should feature leadership ratings though not voting intention. We will also presumably get one of Newspoll’s quarterly geographic and demographic aggregations at some point during the silly season.
There is one poll that slipped through my net: the latest effort on Tasmanian state voting intention from EMRS, which continues to find Premier Peter Gutwein in almost as commanding a position as Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan, the other leader for whom COVID-19 has been nothing but good news. The Liberals are credited with 52% of the vote, down two from August, with Labor up one to 25% and the Greens up one to 13%. However, Gutwein’s lead over Labor’s Rebecca White as preferred premier has narrowed from 70-23 to 61-26. The poll was conducted by telephone from November 17 to 23 from a sample of 1000.
Australians want a lot of things when asked in surveys.
Not so much when pencil hits the ballot sheet in the privacy of the election booth. Action on climate change is a perfect example.
Relying on feel good surveys in many cases worded a specific way to get a particular response is useless. Respondents may think a particular issue sounds good but is it a vote changer for them and how important is it to their everyday life ? Not so much.
Doyley
You run a good argument for the LNP attacking workers pay and conditions.
They will take your UBI attack and use them on unions and pay and conditions.
Edit: Also such a feel good survey was backed up in a national vote survey on Equal Marriage for LGBTI people.
Guytaur
If the majority of Australians want this policy, job guarantee, then shouldn’t the party in power be acting on it and then the opposition can decide wether to support it.
If Labor puts forward a policy of this type the howls from the Liberals re labor spending your money, big taxers, economy killers would be next level. Labor need to make sure they don’t fall into the trap of having too many policies needing voter education. IR , aged and health care and Childcare are all areas that the voters trust labor more than liberals and should be front and centre.
On the subject of greens voters, no one I know talks about them or their policies, I don’t know that I have ever had a political discussion with a green supporter.
What doyley said.
I’ll take the survey with a grain of salt.
Assantdj
Point the conservatives to Alaska. Universal Basic Income for decades.
That’s the thing about UBI. Fox News got Andrew Yang on to promote it because Trump supporters like it too.
Like Marriage Equality progressives can win on the issue. Who cares if it’s the LNP that introduces it.
Workers that have aneconomically secure base have concrete not sand to stand on at the negotiating table on workers pay and conditions.
PM announces at fed cabinet that “Australia is now coming back from coronavirus pandemic.”
He has never really believed in protecting us, urging open borders. I wonder what his donor/lobbyists are saying.
guytaur,
Thanks for the warning.
I did not realise I had so much influence on the LNP. Now that you have warned me that the LNP is monitoring every single word I post here I will be very careful in what I say !
You really do live in a strange world.
Barney in Tanjung Bunga:
Friday, December 11, 2020 at 10:23 am
[‘Does Australia have any friends left?’]
We won’t if the fossil fuel adherents in the Tory & Country parties continue with their aberrant ways, with even bumbling Boris appearing to have jettisoned us.
_________________________________
Non:
Friday, December 11, 2020 at 10:32 am
[‘Perversely, this will likely only improve Morrison’s standing among the coal-minded.’]
Maybe, though most of the world’s moved on. Labor needs to plan the transition from coal to renewables, showing that there will be plenty of jobs in the latter, Australia of all countries the best placed to take advantage of its place under the Sun.
non @ #81 Friday, December 11th, 2020 – 12:09 pm
It is incredible that a supposedly Labor person as the gall to say something like this, when Labor has … is it three times now? … tried to adopt the LNP policies on climate, only to have the LNP laugh in their faces each time.
Doyley
Hey it’s what you Labor people say about the Greens every day of the week. Turnabout is fair play.
Don’t trash the survey. Sure it’s a Greens commissioned poll that introduces caveats. It certainly shows the unions hit big with Australians on JobKeeper/Jobseeker with no mutual obligations.
Metta Bhavana, Diarist Of The Plague Year
@MettaBhavana1
Lesson of the day. Australians (a) Love free shit (b) Love complaining about websites that crash when everyone rushes to get the free shit. #travelvoucher
“The $28 million Regional Travel Voucher Scheme will provide eligible Victorians an incentive to explore the state.”
1:10 PM · Dec 11, 2020·Twitter Web App
Metta Bhavana, Diarist Of The Plague Year
@MettaBhavana1
·
3m
Replying to
@MettaBhavana1
Should I describe many of my fellow Victorians as spoilt, greedy fuckers with little sense of shame or perspective? No, I’ll just leave it at a hashtag… #travelvultures
Guytaur
You have to win the election to implement policies and Labor doesn’t need to waste time, money or political capital on this issue at this time.
United States :
Coronavirus Cases:
16,039,393
Deaths:
299,692
– 217,779 new cases and 2,974 new deaths in the United States
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
lizzie:
Friday, December 11, 2020 at 11:27 am
[‘It would help if the ones on PB would stop accusing us all of being right-wing.’]
I’m with you on this one. I find it annoying to be at least indirectly associated with the Right. My politics are Left but not the radical-Left, some of whom have a penchant to take the high moral ground – no names, no pack drill. I dismay at the ongoing culture wars on the site.
Anyone else having trouble with dropbox today ?
If so, I fixed mine by downloading a beta update from them –
https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-desktop-client-builds/Beta-Build-112-3-254/td-p/476277
It took a while to install but fixed the problem.
From Phoenix Red’s numbers:
– About 5% of the US population have caught the Virus (official numbers – real number is believed to be much higher)
– Nearly 1/1000 Americans have died from it.
– Number of deaths ~ one 9/11 daily
– Case(?) mortality rate ~ 1.9% (deaths / reported cases)
“I’m increasingly of the suspicion that the reason you identify with the Greens is that you know that you’re not as smart as you’d like to think you are, or as principled, but you think that copying and pasting Greens tweets makes you look as if you are.
I gave you a chance to show some moral fibre. You don’t have any, so you failed to step up to the plate.”
***
Oh please. You lash out in bitterness at the Greens and the left like this to make yourself feel better. It’s obviously not working – your posts are dripping with hatred. Keep using me as a punching bag if you wish but I’m not the one who you should be directing your anger at.
I find it incredible how worked up the Labor Right get over a few tweets and news stories. You lot are so insecure! You seriously remind me of Trump’s supporters when they cry “fake news” about anything they don’t agree with. Frankly, it’s pathetic.
Oh and I don’t need you to “give me a chance” to do anything lol. This may be a shock to you, I’m not here to post to your standards, or live by your standards either for that matter. I really couldn’t give a rats what conservative tut-tutters think about me or whether they approve or not.
By the look of the questions on that UBI survey, it was asking for attitudes largely disconnected from the details of implementation. i think that does indicate that if Labor in government took incremental steps towards a UBI it would likely maintain support. This is encouraging.
However, to go to an election promising an unconditional and universal UBI above the poverty line, together with large increases in taxes, would be like wearing a sign with “Hit Me” written on it.
No amount of theorising or detailed argument would get through the political noise generated.
A vaguer policy – something like “Ensuring all Australians have the resources they need to live securely” would be more the go.
Kakuru @ #103 Friday, December 11th, 2020 – 1:02 pm
These days it’s more a case of, lies, lies and damn self-serving surveys.
I can’t imagine a much more effective strategy for a right wing troll on this board than to pose as a superior-sounding and aggressive Green posting slabs of Green propaganda to disrupt discussion. Just saying.
An email from Coles, arrived a few minutes ago. Opening and closing sentences below. According to Coles Covid is behind us. All is back to normal.
I still dont see how a UBI is progressive. If anything it is regressive and could be extremely regressive. Future governments could easily wash their hands of responsibility for people – saying ‘you have your UBI, now fend for yourself’.
There is great benefit in society of having shared public institutions like health and education beyond just the safety net aspect. A UBI might see a decline in those institutions to a model of pay for use with expensive member only groupings that will obtain greater service.
A UBI may be part of a solution but it is not the answer to the big questions of our society.
LR
Coles did bloody well out of the pandemic.
A majority of Australians would welcome a universal basic income, survey finds
Nearly two-thirds of Australians say they would support the introduction of a universal basic income (UBI), according to a new poll.
The finding comes after millions of Australians were forced to rely on some kind of regular welfare payment this year to survive the COVID recession.
According to Stanford University’s Basic Income Lab, at its core, a UBI is a cash payment given to all members of a community on a regular basis (for example every month) regardless of income level and with no strings attached.
More than 3.6 million workers received JobKeeper payments between March and September (totalling nearly $70 billion), and 1.5 million were still receiving the payments after the program was revised in October.
The number of Australians receiving JobSeeker unemployment payments almost doubled this year, jumping from 724,000 in February to 1.46 million in May, and by October that figure had only retraced a little to 1.35 million.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-11/survey-says-most-australians-welcome-universal-basic-income/12970924
No doubt someone from the Labor Right will be along momentarily to abuse me for sharing something on the blog…
guytaur
“Point the conservatives to Alaska. Universal Basic Income for decades.”
Actually, the Alaska PFD (Permanent Fund Dividend) is NOT the same as a UBI. Among other things, the PFD is linked (or was originally linked) to dividends from the state’s fossil fuel & mining royalties. It doesn’t come from taxes. Alaska has no state income tax or sales tax.
The current governor of Alaska (a Republican) increased the PFD, but the state can only afford it through deep cuts to services – especially health care (including Medicaid), education, and infrastructure. So the PFD isn’t exactly a raging success. And it is NOT (I repeat NOT) the same as a UBI.
Mavis @ #113 Friday, December 11th, 2020 – 1:24 pm
And I’m also like, how dare a bunch of well-paid ‘Knowledge Economy’ professionals, doctors and lawyers, tell me what is Right or Left! Most of them only encounter a homeless person if they trip over them on the street on the way to their high paying jobs in the city. Or they live the comfortable life working from their home office in their haciendas in the bush or on the coast somewhere.
Most of them would have no idea what it was like to be exploited by unscrupulous employers, or to be a gig economy worker in the Precariat.
So excuse me if I just laugh in their faces when they try and ascribe to me the epithet of Right Wing.
Firefox
“No doubt someone from the Labor Right will be along momentarily to abuse me for sharing something on the blog…”
I’m here to oblige. The UBI survey is shit. Next.
Late Riser,
Coles got the message straight from Scotty from Marketing & the PMO it seems.
However, and I was just down at my local Coles, how come they still have hand sanitiser at the front door?
Vale Barbara Windsor ( Carry On movies etc)
https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/celebrity-deaths/actress-barbara-windsor-dead-at-83-after-alzheimers-battle/news-story/2bd5f5d759214883cf0d21e70a825521
Kakaru,
Word to the wise, don’t buy into the Greenites’ framing. You aren’t from the Labor Right (and even if you may be, so what, it’s at least Left of Centre, just not a part of the Lunar Left), you are simply a Labor supporter. What they want to try and hang around your neck like an albatross is fanciful framing and pathetic gaslighting.
I mean, how ‘Left’ is a party that thinks Wind Farms as a part of a Renewable Energy suite, are anathema?
Steve777 @ #115 Friday, December 11th, 2020 – 12:28 pm
Artificially deflated. You’ve got to knock off the last ~30 days of reported cases before you do the division (because that’s, in general, how long it takes covid to progress from infection to death in the cases where it’s fatal).
There are a lot of ‘walking dead’ in the 4.5+ million cases added to the US in the past month. Set those to one side, and the computed mortality rate is more like 2.7%.
C@tmomma @ #127 Friday, December 11th, 2020 – 1:21 pm
It is not sanitiser. They are implanting you with a tracking and listening device.
“And I’m also like, how dare a bunch of well-paid ‘Knowledge Economy’ professionals, doctors and lawyers, tell me what is Right or Left! Most of them only encounter a homeless person if they trip over them on the street on the way to their high paying jobs in the city.”
***
Here we go, now we’re getting condescending lectures on what it’s supposedly like out in the real world from someone who spends their entire life in the echo chamber that is the Bludger Bubble.
steve davis @ #128 Friday, December 11th, 2020 – 1:51 pm
A sad day indeed. Tears 😢
With people still being affected by the covid recession and the negative consequences of insecure work I would love Labour to look at the costs associated with all the external consultants, labor hire firms, audit companies and the like and present a plan for increasing public service jobs with the savings being diverted to programs that are to societies benefit.
The arguements that private companies are able to deliver services cheaper doesn’t make sense, they only do this by cutting wages and entitlements, undercutting on service delivery and offloading to the public service anything that will increase costs.
My feeling is that people have discovered that the rhetoric around programs like Jobseeker and mutual obligations doesn’t stack up when people become exposed to these programs. The welfare card is another example of business making a profit at the expense of the welfare recipients. Of course the Libs and their mates will go into overdrive but the voters might not be buying the arguements.
Big day for COVID vaccine reporting (forwarded in full technical glory for those interested and not too insecure. Others may wish to wait for the pop/commercial spins.):
The Ox/AZ (chimp adenovirus) vaccine in Lancet – which is the cheap, robust and pretty adequate version that we will be getting most of. The paper describes the primary prime/boost trial in ~11,600 adult (>18) recipients in Brazil, UK & South Africa, ~ 5,800 receiving active vaccine . The overall efficacy was reported as ~70%, but with the anomalous ~90% (vs ~60%) in those who received a lower first dose. They report 3 cases of transverse myelitis – one in a vaccine recipient, one in a placebo recipient, and one in whom the blinding has not yet been broken. I’d have this vaccine if offered.
The BNT/Pfizer mRNA vaccine primary trial result was reported in the NEJM . This is the novel, expensive mRNA vaccine that requires a -70C cold chain. The paper describes the primary prime/boost trial in ~21,700 active vaccine recipients (>16) in USA, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, South Africa & Turkey. Overall efficacy was an impressive 95%, with few serious side effects, but quite a lot of discomfort from the initial reactogenicity. I’d also have this vaccine if offered.
The USA is a covid disaster zone. US covid deaths will exceed 300,000 within the next 24 hours.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Projections show 500,000 by April.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view=total-deaths&tab=trend
And worse, I think that’s a low estimate. If you scroll down the page a little on the second link you’ll see projections of daily deaths, running at about 2,000 per day currently, and we know it has been 3,000 per day for several days now.
There is no way “COVID is behind us.”
Doug Cameron
@DougCameron51
The myth of Coalition superior economic management is laid bare by their incompetent handling of our relationship with our biggest trading partner. Barley, beef, coal, cotton, lobster, timber and wine under the pump. Jobs under threat, how good is this?
Grants! So many grants. It is not just the dodgy nature of many of them (going to mates, pork barrelling etc) but they also tend to make companies and NGOs that rely on them use casual staff due to the boom/bust uncertain nature of the income/work. Many of these staff will have come from previously secure work in government.
C@tmomma:
Friday, December 11, 2020 at 1:47 pm
Points taken. I have seen some accuse you of being a Right-wing partisan or words to that effect, but that’s absurd. As I’ve said before, your defence of Labor principles is unwavering, even in the face of sustained criticism.
Late Riser
The Thanksgiving “wave” has not hit yet, so 4,000 here we come ?
C@tmomma
I don’t think it’s a source of opprobrium to be a member of the Labor Right, so I don’t mind being called that (even if intended as a slur by denizens of the radical/extreme left).
rhwombat @ #135 Friday, December 11th, 2020 – 1:06 pm
Yeah, but aren’t you the guy who climbs mountains for fun?
(I’d have the vaccine too, if offered. But I’m happy it’s not nearly as urgent right now.)
poroti, it’s just horrible.
Kakuru
Even the NSW Right ? 🙂
poroti @ #140 Friday, December 11th, 2020 – 1:17 pm
5,000 almost certain within the next 30 days. 6,000 a possibility.
steve davis says:
Friday, December 11, 2020 at 2:14 pm
Doug Cameron
@DougCameron51
The myth of Coalition superior economic management is laid bare by their incompetent handling of our relationship with our biggest trading partner. Barley, beef, coal, cotton, lobster, timber and wine under the pump. Jobs under threat, how good is this?
Morrison attempted to assign the “blame” for COVID to China, having clearly bought into the sensationalist (and entirely misleading) reporting of the Wuhan wet market and as means of ingratiating himself with the idiot, Trump.
There’s no doubt whatsoever that Morrison is – and has been read as – a Sino-phobe. We’re all going to the pay the price for his stupidity and his prejudice. He has made every mistake that could be made….mistakes born from arrogance and incompetence.
poroti
“Even the NSW Right ?”
I don’t mind Kristina K.
The Gummint has given me (direct, I imagine, from LNP coffers) the princely sum of $250..00
Dear Abby,
Do I now have to vote for the bastards ❓
Signed
Anxious old codger. 😁
It sounds like what people want is not so much a UBI but more time away from work.
The ABS regularly reports underemployment; it rarely reports on over employment, but when it does, the figures consistently show that a far greater number of people than those who are under/unemployed would like to shift to lower hours, even if it means less pay.
Discussions around the UBI seem more about making being on benefits more acceptable rather than solving an actual burning problem.
Shifting the culture to one where employees are able to access secure part time work (regardless of their field) and where the various benefits are (a) raised to reasonable levels; (b) destigmatised and (c) – part of (b) – the ‘mutual obligations’ are made less rigorous is perhaps (note the p word) a better solution all round.