Newspoll: 51-49 to Labor

Labor edges back into the lead on two-party preferred, but very little change overall from the latest Newspoll.

The Australian reports the latest Newspoll has Labor returning to a 51-49 lead on two-party preferred after a tied result last time, from primary votes of Coalition 41% (steady), Labor 37% (up one), Greens 11% (steady) and One Nation 3% (steady). Changes on leadership ratings are likewise very modest, with Scott Morrison up a point on approval to 55% and down two on disapproval to 41%, while Anthony Albanese is up two to 40% and down two to 45%. Morrison’s lead as preferred prime minister is barely changed at 53-33, compared with 53-32 last time. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Saturday from a sample of 1513.

UPDATE (29/6): The Australian has published further results from the poll relating to COVID-19, including a fourth go at the question of how the Prime Minister has handled the situation. This series records a pattern of decline since his debut result of 85% good and 14% poor in April last year, to a current showing of 61% good (down nine over the last two months) and 36% bad (up nine points). Satisfaction with the government’s handling of the vaccine rollout is down three to 50% compared with two months ago, with dissatisfied up three to 46%. A new question on whether Labor would have done better turns up a neutral result, with 25% saying better, 36% no difference and 27% worse.

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.

2,469 comments on “Newspoll: 51-49 to Labor”

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  1. steve davis @ #2448 Wednesday, June 30th, 2021 – 11:41 pm

    The Oz doing their usual on a Labor premier.
    Outrage at Qld Premier’s Covid vaccine scare
    Epidemiologists and doctors accuse the Queensland government of undermining the national Covid-19 immunisation program.

    No surprise. The logic must be interesting though. How do you undermine a program that has run out of vaccines for you to use?

  2. LM82

    I think your maths is off.

    Its about relative probabilities. What you do is you take a sample of people who have tested positive for covid. Now, lets supposed that the sample size was 1000 and of that sample, exactly half were vaccinated and half were not vaccinated (this didn’t happen, but for the sake of exposition).

    In the non vaccinated group, 150 people end up in hospital. In the vaccinated group, 12 people end up in hospital. This means that if you are vaccinated, your odds of being in hospital are 8 percent RELATIVE to your odds if you were not vaccinated but also exposed to the virus. Now, this is also subject to the usual laws of statistics but I won’t go into that.

    So those that get hospitalised is not chosen out of the set of people who are symptomatic. Its chosen out of the set of people who exposed and thus infected.

    Or to put it another way, if you’re not vaccinated and your odds of being hospitalised is 1 in 10 (10%) after you have been exposed (because of who you are, your age etc) and then you get vaccinated, your odds of being hospitalised (as the result of an infection) is now 1 in 250 (Pfizer) or 1 in 125 (AZ).

    That’s 0.1 x 0.04 (Pfizer) or 0.1 x 0.08 (AZ). Again, its relative to what your risk was if you are unvaccinated and assuming you are infected.

    Again, with AZ you have twice the odds of being hospitalised. Reason enough to choose Pfizer if its available.

    Note that there was a limited study that suggested that AZ becomes more effective if the interval between doses is in the 6-12 week range and not 4 weeks. But even then the figures don’t put AZ anywhere near Pfizer in terms of your chances of symptomatic infection.

    A vaccine that reduces the number of symptomatic infections does so by reducing viral load. Reducing viral load reduces the number of people re-infected. When it comes to herd immunity, the higher the effectiveness of the vaccine at reducing re-transmission, the lower the overall percentage of the population that needs to be vaccinated in order to reach herd immunity. Indeed, if your vaccine isn’t good enough, herd immunity cannot be achieved.

    Now, your absolute risk of getting sick or dying from covid is actually more to do with your chance of being exposed at all. That’s why herd immunity matters. If the virus doesn’t reach you, you won’t get sick at all.

    What herd immunity looks like is this…

    Australia steadily reopens its borders. It only reopens to certain countries. It insists on vaccination of travellers. It insists on testing. Now, when someone does arrive into the community with an aggressive strain and doesn’t get detected, you will get a cluster. The virus will be passed on to susceptible people (mainly those not vaccinated). Like a fire in the undergrowth, it will find a path, but it will also fizzle out. And if it doesn’t, ordinary public health measures (tracing, isolation) will have time to stop it becoming a large cluster.

    As a result, we may only see a few thousand cases per year in Australia. This is what I call herd immunity. And its entirely achievable, but yes it may require more than vaccination alone. It will require other measures like at-home testing and anti-viral nose sprays and so on. Every little bit adds to herd immunity.

    Now, what is the flip side? The virus gets in (as surely it will). What might have been small clusters actually spread exponentially. Maybe not as fast as it would without vaccinations, but there’s no limit to growth. We’ve become apathetic. Our public health response no longer takes it seriously. The virus spreads among the susceptible (mainly). But since infections are now happen at the rate of thousands per day, there are actually a lot of (mostly non vaccinated) people getting sick and dying. In fact its going to be far, far worse than at the peak of the Victorian second wave. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of infections per year and thousands of deaths per year.

    And since these susceptible people will be friends, family etc of people who are vaccinated, some of the vaccinated community will also get sick and end up in hospital. And here’s the rub. This will happen at a rate far larger than many would expect. In essence, we can argue about the fine details of how protective a vaccine is relative to another, but it means nothing if the overall absolute rate of infection in the community is at the hundreds of thousands per year level.

    And that is a likely scenario if Australia doesn’t come to terms with the fact that herd immunity matters and the way to get there is through getting everyone the best possible vaccine (even if its a booster).

  3. Ven

    Yes. When I first learned of global warming I was naively excited by what it meant for the world having to work together. I was young then. I’m totally disillusioned now.

  4. Ven

    “I read somewhere that The death rate for a person vaccinated with AZ is .004%”

    I’d suggest whoever wrote that was being creative with the maths. For me personally the risk of death from covid is (iirc) about 5%. AZ might cut that to 0.5% (with the Delta strain). I’d say that 1 chance in 200 of dying a horrible death is something to be alarmed about.

    And more importantly, what alarms me even more is the thought of hundreds of thousands of cases per year in Australia being treated as “covid normal”. Its not just your odds, if you are infected.. its also your odds of being infected in the first place. That’s a much larger factor in the overall scheme of risk.

  5. Yes, Zerlo.

    My point was that the lady is being characterised as a student, which, if she’s actually staff, gives NSW Health some cover.

    LR,

    “The logic must be interesting though. How do you undermine a program that has run out of vaccines for you to use?”

    Yes, Yvette D’Ath was on that during the presser. WTTE “We have very little vaccine left, yet those numpties keep letting more people in (and out and back in again) of the country.”

  6. Chewer:

    So those that get hospitalised is not chosen out of the set of people who are symptomatic. Its chosen out of the set of people who exposed and thus infected.

    I’ll take a cheap shot – how do people who are not symptomatic get hospitalised?

  7. Finally!!!!!!!!!!!!
    @kylegriffin1 tweets

    NBC News confirms: Two representatives of the Trump Organization tell NBC News they’ve been told to expect charges to be filed against the Trump Organization as soon as tomorrow afternoon. @NBCNews @MSNBC

    It seems like this has taken forever.

  8. guytaur says:
    Thursday, July 1, 2021 at 12:36 am

    Wheel moves slowly in the government.

    Dandy Murray says:
    Thursday, July 1, 2021 at 12:17 am

    Quiet possibly.

  9. EGT

    That was awkwardly phrased. I was trying to explain that you can’t concatenate the results from two different types of study together.

    One study says that if you’re vaccinated you’re 60 percent less likely to develop symptomatic covid.
    Another study says that if you’re vaccinated you’re 92 percent less likely to end up in hospital.

    You can’t just multiply through those percentages. Because the study that says you’re less likely to end up in hospital is relative to a sample group of people who are symptomatic. Not a sample group who are symptomatic but only after having had the vaccine.

    I’ll try to be a bit more precise. However, the most important part (still) is pointing out that your absolute risk has far, far more to do with the overall rate of infection among the people you are exposed to and the best way to lower your overall personal risk is to ensure that everyone gets the best possible vaccine and the country as a whole has herd immunity.

  10. LR

    https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/trump-organization-indictments-are-coming-tomorrow-and-more-indictments-are-already-being-hinted-at/39872/
    We’ll see if this is accurate 🙂

    “Tomorrow will represent the first serious test of Weisselberg’s stated intention not to flip on Trump. It’s not clear if he’ll be perp walked in handcuffs or if he’ll merely be required to report at a certain time, but either way, he’ll be arrested tomorrow. He’ll have to appear in front of a judge. He’ll see just how ugly the indictment language is against him, and how many years he’s looking at serving in prison. And he may get a taste of whether his kids will also end up indicted. So we’ll see what the experience does to his resolve.

    Meanwhile a criminal indictment of the Trump Organization would shatter it. Loans would be called in. Business ties would be severed. Assets could be seized by creditors. Trump’s name could quickly start coming off buildings. Trump would lose his ability to keep people like Weisselberg and Matthew Calamari on the payroll, at a time when they’re being pressured to flip on him.”

  11. Late Riser.

    Yeah they are on top of it.

    @PalmerReport tweets

    Donald Trump’s day so far:

    – Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg will be indicted TOMORROW
    – Will Weisselberg finally flip?
    – Trump’s entire company about to be dismantled
    – Obvious precursor to Trump’s indictment
    – Donald Trump is going to prison
    – It’s still only 10:30am

  12. Zerlo, when are those front pages from? There’s no lockdown in SA (yet), so that Advertiser one can’t be recent, and the Herald Sun one looks like it’s from the big Melbourne lockdown last year. Clarity?

  13. This “go talk to your gp” buck passing by Birmingham and others regarding Morrison’s az bombshell for under 40s is frankly a copout. What is this magical consultation supposed to achieve apart from the gp saying “err, yeah there’s a risk”? Any information a gp could give about az they can find out for themselves. Most under 40s wouldn’t even have a personal gp to go to.

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