Winding down

With the end of the year in view, I offer a Tasmanian state poll and not much else.

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.

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.

1,814 comments on “Winding down”

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  1. When I first joined the Labor party, everyone was still being addressed as ‘Comrade’.

    Non sexist, for starters, but the communist implications killed it off.

  2. Itza.
    I realise now why the tone of the AAHMC report was so reasonable, considered – and familiar. The authors were Ian Frazer (of HPV vaccine fame) & Tania Sorrell. Tania was my PhD supervisor.

  3. boerwar @ #1633 Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 – 1:30 pm

    The fix is in for ScrewForce: Ag Visas.
    We have a had a slew of newsfeeds on how crops are rotting, fruit and vegie prices are going through the roof, and on how Australian dole bludgers won’t work for umpteen thousand a week.

    Ah! This would explain why the farmers would not employ any of the Australians who actually applied for the fruit picking jobs. They were probably warned in advance not to do so.

    What a despicable act 🙁

  4. lizzie @ #252 Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 – 1:52 pm

    Dr SWIFT PARROT
    @teamswiftparrot
    ·
    33m
    The eastern tiers are a critical swift #parrot breeding area that has been severely affected by deforestation. People are protesting because it’s legal to destroy the habitat of a critically endangered species for profit. #Extinction of swift parrots is a policy choice

    ***
    Bob Brown Foundation
    @BobBrownFndn
    · 1h
    Breaking news – Bob Brown arrested in Tasmania’s Eastern Tiers, defending critically endangered Swift parrot habitat. #politas #auspol

    Don’t tell me, Bob Brown thought they were going to build a wind farm nearby. 😐

  5. Stephen Miller outlines Trump’s next move. Yes, there is one:

    Travis Akers
    @travisakers
    ·
    13h
    Stephen Miller on Fox & Friends says “an alternative” group of electors is also voting today:

    “As we speak, an alternate slate of electors in the contested states is going to vote and we are going to send those results to Congress.”

  10. Just on Mitch McConnell and the senate. He may only control for the next two years as Republican Senators in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina are due for re-election in 2022 and should Democrats flip one or more then Democrats would control the Senate in the last two years of a Biden Presidency.

  14. It always makes me laugh (or sigh) when I hear the PM dismiss probing questions about important issues saying he’s too busy managing the pandemic only to see him drive around a track in a tank for a photo op or appear on some infotainment show talking about odd ball rubbish.— Peter van Onselen (@vanOnselenP) December 15, 2020

    Are there any other senior MSM political journo’s that have the backbone to call out SfM like PvO regularly does ?

  16. Morrison is an example of an earlier point, that the only change in a post Trump world is the speed not the destination. Where Trump says “fake media”, Morrison says “media speculation”. The intent is the same.

  19. poroti @ #1640 Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 – 1:48 pm

    KayJay
    Are both of those trees certified as being pine bark beetle free ? Boerwar is very particular about that.

    May the good ……..(Apollo, Cronos, Smoko, Posidon, Moronosson – take yer pick) bless and keep you..

    The various feel good Christmas movies never talk about this. Cripes – if William hears about this I look set for a runner up award. Best I duck below the parapet again. 🎈


  20. Dandy Murray says:
    Tuesday, December 15, 2020 at 1:37 pm

    C@t, that’s in addition to access to this monster: https://rcc.uq.edu.au/wiener

    I have one student who is running computations on 16 GPUs and over 600 CPU cores simultaneously, pretty much non-stop since September. He’s only just going to complete his runs in time for a conference deadline in January! Deep learning research is nuts!

    Have you ever looked at the error rate of these things. If you have 600 cores and no error recovery of some sort it is not going to make it.

  21. “Breaking news – Bob Brown arrested in Tasmania’s Eastern Tiers, defending critically endangered Swift parrot habitat. #politas #auspol”

    Bob Brown was difficult to find, among all the other dead wood.

  23. If you have 600 cores and no error recovery of some sort it is not going to make it.

    Don’t most of these big-data applications use heavy parallelization and some flavor of MapReduce? If one thread of execution dies the controlling process should just restart it on a fresh core for minimal losses.

    Course if the controller dies and the computation status hasn’t been incrementally stored somewhere or you never bother coding a way to resume processing an incomplete dataset, you’re in trouble.

  24. Kakuru @ #1425 Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 – 3:02 pm

    “Breaking news – Bob Brown arrested in Tasmania’s Eastern Tiers, defending critically endangered Swift parrot habitat. #politas #auspol”

    Bob Brown was difficult to find, among all the other dead wood.

    Would that you had Brown’s passion and commitment KooKoo.
    Still I suppose sneering takes a certain courage.

  25. I heard Ed Husic on ABC 24. It was about coal. His first few sentences were all about how important it was as an export. It wasn’t until he was well into his paragraphs that he began to talk about the need to provide alternative employment as coal was phased out.

    It struck me that when Labor figures start in this way, their first sentence(s) are always quoted and any later nuances do not appear, leading to much disappointment from potential supporters. Perhaps they need to get their “transition” message moved to the front.

  27. Alex Turnbull last October.

    Wishing for simpler, more liberal times when China was more committed to honouring trade agreements and growing rapidly is not an effective strategy.

    To that end we need to start a discussion of how best to allow communities and workers in the coal sector to deal with this transition. The pressure is being felt already and reduced hours and job losses are impacting workers in the Hunter Valley and elsewhere. It is disingenuous to tell people that everything is fine when they know it is not.

    Similarly we need to seriously consider the impacts of China’s more self-sufficiency-driven economic program and what it means for the rest of the economy. For some the developments in coal may be an unpleasant surprise but we should endeavour to not be surprised similarly again. Milk powder at some point will have to reconcile itself with China’s low fertility rates. Iron and bauxite industries will need to keep an eye on both lower growth targets and China’s efforts to reduce emissions and imports via recycling as well as efforts to second source from African mines.

    Perhaps more poignantly we need to understand that wearing a high-visibility vest and helmet does not make work or employment more real or stable. Just because you can pick up a piece of coal and hold it in parliament does not make it more real and stable than working behind a screen.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/15/china-losing-interest-in-australian-coal-isnt-about-diplomacy-its-simply-market-dynamics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

  28. Relax, peeps, it’s a very large deep reinforcement learning ablation study, i.e. large batches of many test cases, which is required for statistical significance – not a single process!

    FWIW, each process takes about 40 hours, and beyond that they are “embarrassingly parallel”.

  29. mundo
    “Would that you had Brown’s passion and commitment KooKoo.
    Still I suppose sneering takes a certain courage.”

    I wish I had the bravery to join that ultimate ‘caravan of courage’: the Adani Convoy!

  31. Bruce Haigh
    @bruce_haigh
    ·
    11m
    #auspol #ABCNews #Labor This may sound radical to #LNP but China wants to be treated exactly the same way we treat the US. Can you imagine directing the Wuhan question to Trump with the same sneer and condescending tone. Morrison has not been critical of Trumps criminal neglect.

  32. lizzie @ #1675 Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 – 3:11 pm

    I heard Ed Husic on ABC 24. It was about coal. His first few sentences were all about how important it was as an export. It wasn’t until he was well into his paragraphs that he began to talk about the need to provide alternative employment as coal was phased out.

    It struck me that when Labor figures start in this way, their first sentence(s) are always quoted and any later nuances do not appear, leading to much disappointment from potential supporters. Perhaps they need to get their “transition” message moved to the front.

    I think you will find they know exactly what will be reported, and that’s why they do it.

    I reckon Labor is probably dumbstruck wrt China and Coal. They probably don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so they will probably just stay quiet.

  36. On GPUs, my teams is about to drop a stack of cash on 8x NVIDIA Titan RTX 6000 series, but that’s a touch out of reach of the average user.

    I think that applies to any of the current generation nVidia and AMD graphics cards…

    “Siri, define ‘unobtainium’.”

  37. There is one thing for sure.Smoko will claim that he is totally blameless on the Chinese diplomatic front and the MSM will back him all the way. It will be China and ONLY China to blame for the loss of trade.What a hero he will be once again. End of story.

  39. steve davis
    Yep, it will be all big brave Scrott standing up for Strayan values , unyielding in the face of those commie Chinese.Brave brave Sir Scrott.

    Battling ‘The Yellow Peril’ always plays well here.

  44. Kakuru @ #286 Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 – 3:18 pm

    mundo
    “Would that you had Brown’s passion and commitment KooKoo.
    Still I suppose sneering takes a certain courage.”

    I wish I had the bravery to join that ultimate ‘caravan of courage’: the Adani Convoy!

    Nay, it is mundo who has courage. The courage to stick his nose in Scrott’s rear end on a regular basis and emerge with the most beautiful brown nose. 🙂

  45. lizzie @ #282 Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 – 3:11 pm

    I heard Ed Husic on ABC 24. It was about coal. His first few sentences were all about how important it was as an export. It wasn’t until he was well into his paragraphs that he began to talk about the need to provide alternative employment as coal was phased out.

    It struck me that when Labor figures start in this way, their first sentence(s) are always quoted and any later nuances do not appear, leading to much disappointment from potential supporters. Perhaps they need to get their “transition” message moved to the front.

    Maybe they’re trying to get their message out to two different audiences?

  46. Some people would ‘Yellow Peril’ those who question China’s motives until they weren’t allowed to use that saying any more.

  48. The words of Morrison and Birmingham quoted in this ABC article demonstrate that they are totally out of their depth in knowing how to respond to China. At least Payne is speaking in diplomatic language, even if she is saying nothing.

    If a Chinese spokesperson is quoted in the Global Times, it is not “media speculation” as Morrison claims but a statement that represents the official CCP attitude. Guff about China “losing” by buying coal from other countries is just salesman talk – “You’ll be sorry of you if you buy from another dealer”.

    Birmingham just seems bewildered that nobody in China will apparently talk to him. Hopefully the professional diplomats in Payne’s department can make some progress.

    Husic is on the money – professional diplomacy is of utmost importance at this juncture.

    <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-15/scott-morrison-china-trade-tension-coal-bans/12984322"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-15/scott-morrison-china-trade-tension-coal-bans/12984322

  50. Debt and deficit disaster is dead in the water.
    Asylum seekers? Even Dutton is having difficulty figuring out news ways of screwing them to the wall.
    There is not much left for the Coalition by way of screwing workers.
    Marriage equality is dead in the water.
    Coal is a stranded political asset. Dandling lumps of coal in the House and the Adani Convoy were the last hurrahs for that wedge. Morrison is down to pretending that Australian coal is a win for China because it has 50% less emissions. Uh huh. Brown is down to Swift Parrots. The Canavan has passed on but the dogs are whimpering.
    The environment is dead in the water. Who really cares about Swift Parrots?
    Gross tax cuts for the undeserving is done and dusted.
    Wildfires are old hat.
    Routinely attacking Labor leaders by all and sundry won’t change. Same same on that front.
    So, what wedge next for Labor?
    Any predictions?
    An increase in the GST to pay for the Covid splurge?
    OTOH, could Labor do the reverse ferret and wedge the Liberals and the Greens and the Nationals on China?
    Remember: Under the new rules the substance does not matter.

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