The fortnightly Essential Research poll includes the pollster’s monthly leadership ratings, which gives Scott Morrison his weakest results since the onset of COVID-19 – down six on approval to 51% and up four on disapproval to 40%, with his lead as preferred prime minister narrowing slightly from 48-28 to 46-28. Anthony Albanese is up two on approval to 41% and down one on disapproval to 35%. These numbers have been fed into the BludgerTrack poll aggregate, sharpening Morrison’s established downward trend.
Approval of the federal government’s response to COVID-19 has also deteriorated, with a nine point drop in the good rating since last month to 44% and a six point increase in poor to 30%. Among respondents in New South Wales, the good rating for the federal government has slumped from 62% to 44%, and that for the state government is down from 69% to 57%. A range of other questions are featured on matters relating to COVID-19, including findings that 36% would be willing to get the Pfizer vaccine but not AstraZeneca (5% said vice-versa); that 40% believe the vaccine rollout is being down efficiently, down from 43% a month ago (and 68% earlier in the year); and that 64% believe it is being done safely, down from 67%.
The poll was conducted Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1099; full results can be viewed here.
Elsewhere, the Age/Herald yesterday published results aggregated from the three monthly Resolve Strategic polls which compared current voting intention with how respondents recalled having voted in 2019, and found women were more likely to have shifted away from the Coalition (down four points to 37%) than men (down one to 41%). On the subject of Resolve Strategic, Macquarie University academic Murray Goot casts a critical eye over its (and to a lesser extent Essential Research’s) attitudinal polling in Inside Story and takes aim at its refusal to join the Australian Polling Council and adhere to its transparency standards.
billie
Ley demanding a ‘visit’ is a unicorn. The endangerment of the Reef is not a point-in-time thing.
It is about whether threatening processes are being managed effectively.
The Government has essentially been saying that as long as COTs, acid water runoff, nutrient pollution, tourism impacts and fishing are managed, the Reef is OK. On these threats, Australia is managing its reefs better than almost every other country in the world.
The problem is that all these sit under global warming’s rising water temperatures, acidification, increase in extreme weather events and rising ocean levels. Australia is not doing enough to eliminate the driver: CO2 emissions and to this extent it is exposed in terms of the Reef’s future.
But the really substantive problem here is that the world’s biggest CO2 polluter is intent on increasing its CO2 emissions.
The REAL answer to the Reef’s future is essentially being decided in Beijing. It says something about the corruption of the UN and of UNESCO that this will be avoided entirely in any assessment of the Reef’s future.
‘invisible’
Not sure if this is what Banks intended.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Wallpaper
The PB Death Riders are locked and loaded! Happy Sydney COVID Lockdown extension!
Yesterday, someone (Chant?) was thanking people who provided links themselves because the contact tracers couldn’t keep up. No comment.
LVT
It’s not a REAL lockdown until the whole of NSW is paralysed. 😉
Your capacity for projection is breathtaking.
Belinda seems to be at a loose end
https://www.smh.com.au/national/neal-notches-up-a-hat-trick-losing-out-at-amnesty-20210706-p587em.html
Has the candidate for Robertson been decided yet?
Lars von trier
Morrison needs to come out of hiding
Scotty would love to be able to wheel out a couple of Russian WWII veterans to front Operation Scovid Arse Save. Sooo many medals to dazzle with.
Good Morning
The right is not happy. All that rhetoric rebounding on the LNP
@bengrubb tweets
2GB callers particularly angry
@newscomauHQ tweets
Talkback radio callers have unloaded on @GladysB over the lockdown extension, with host Ben Fordham saying the community is at “breaking point”.
lizzie @ #54 Wednesday, July 7th, 2021 – 9:21 am
As I heard it, Chant said she really appreciated that positives were upfront about where they’d been and when, and who their known contacts were, and that was helping and speeding up tracing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say “couldn’t keep up”, but certainly helpful, yes. It was all part of the encouragement to come forward and be honest. Best keep Hazzard away from that public messaging.
Thankyou William.
The polling suggests the trend is to Albanese ..!
Thought I’d tune into 2gb to see how their mental health is at the moment.
Fair to say they’re struggling and finding it difficult to stick to a consistent narrative.
“War gaming” it. Who do they think is the enemy they’re fighting?
The Chaser joins the MSM/ABC version of reality (not really).
https://chaser.com.au/national/dictator-dan-strikes-again-as-sydney-lockdown-is-extended-for-another-week/
“menacing controlling wallpaper”
Reads to me as a person that does their evil work in the background.
ItzaDream
Thank you. I couldn’t trace the original comment and it did sound out of character.
On a related note
@MrKRudd tweets
Surprise, surprise! Not one word in today’s Murdoch media about Rupert’s long-serving former executive, Preston Padden, slamming Murdoch’s complicity in spreading deadly anti-vaccine, anti-mask propaganda while personally masking up and getting vaccinated.
billie @ #44 Wednesday, July 7th, 2021 – 9:00 am
“demands” is getting it wrong at the outset, something this government has well mastered.
If they said they would welcome and facilitate a visit, and put all their resources at the disposal of the inspectors (after quarantine, in a reef resort?, ha ha), then they might find out how a bit of diplomacy outbids bullying.
I think Uhlman is both right and wrong.
I believe he’s right in predicting that COVID-19 will become endemic to human populations, no matter how well we vaccinate our population.
There are many other populations that don’t have the resources or the infrastructure to ensure high vaccination compliance. Eventually the virus will leak out of them and get here. It’s not just poorer countries either. Even developed countries in Europe and the Americas have had horrific death tolls.
Then there is the virus itself. We already have at least “COVID-20” and “COVID-21” in the form of the Alpha, Gamma, Delta and now Lamda variants. Can “COVIDs-22-23-and-24” be far behind? This is a new virus to the human species that infects us via a relatively novel pathway. I fear it’s only just begun to flex its muscles.
The fairy stories we hear about “elimination” require total isolation. That just cannot be regarded as any kind of long-term proposition for a modern nation state. Given SARS-CoV-2’s infectiousness at present, total elimination in anything short of a period of decades, perhaps even centuries (as has been the case with other endemic diseases) is unlikely.
And let us not forget that an essential precursor to “herd immunity” is the actual death of a sizeable proportion of the herd before vulnerable individuals are weeded out, with the stronger ones remaining to replenish numbers. Vaccination intervention can temper the death rate, but not eliminate it; certainly not in the period of a few years. Vaccination, never perfect, in one way actually weakens the herd by preserving the lives of susceptible individuals, who must remain on guard forever against re-infection.
But we humans are not a “herd” out in the grasslands of Africa, where Nature, red in tooth, claw and viral virulence, picks us off one by one . We regard ourselves as a better kind of “herd” than that. We call it “society”.
One of the places where Uhlmann is wrong is in ignoring the role politics – low-down dirty, gutter politics – has played in all this. Perhaps if Uhlmann and his mates in Big Media had been a little less keen to score cheap political points off Daniel Anderson’s early errors (some real, some not), and conversely to boost the virus-busting credentials of the sainted Gladys Berejiklian (“The Woman Who Saved Australia”? Really?) we might have been able to avoid the arse-covering we see now among CHOs and the Premiers they serve in state capitals around the nation.
Egged-on by their proprietors and by a Prime Minister whose reputation for competency is almost totally a fabricated product of Big Media huckstering, the journalists, in seeking to sensationalise their daily output, have amplified minor errors into existential threats, and (probably even worse) boosted middling standards of management into Churchillian-level statesmanship.
Hence we see millions locked down at the drop of a hat for fear that jackals in shiny suits exactly like Uhlmann (including Uhlmann himself) will pounce on any Labor Premiers mercilessly, but if they are Liberals, beatification will follow on a fast track.
Uhlmann complains about the very low chance of death from the Astra-Zenica vaccine. Apart from ignoring what is happening in the Astra-Zenica’d UK – still cursed by rampant infection rates and hundreds of weekly deaths – he also ignores the easy sensationalization of the minuscule risk by, once again, himself and his mates. Complain about your colleagues Chris, not your readers.
The same beat-up mentality that turned Berejiklian into a saint, Anderson into Kim Jong-Un, Rugby fanatic Morrison into a League lovin’ Daggy Dad, and a coffee cup into a Budget Surplus, turned Astra-Zenica into a deadly poison, and the entire population into vaccine snobs.
Suck it up, Princess Christine, and take a look in the mirror.
Griff @ #65 Wednesday, July 7th, 2021 – 9:41 am
I see it as – all around you, all the times, everywhere you look, whether you like it or not, you can’t easily change it, an element of entrapment. Put menacing in front, et voilà: Morrison
As Oscar Wilde said, dying in a Paris hotel, staring at the wallpaper – one of us has to go!
I think Uhlman is both right and wrong.
I believe he’s right in predicting that COVID-19 will become endemic to human populations, no matter how well we vaccinate our population.
__________
BB
I thought the same as I battled through Uhlmann’s strange essay.
Thanks, BK and AZ.
Having already deferred my flights and car hire to NZ by 2 weeks, I now need to rebook again. Am starting to think that rebooking late August may still be too soon. Have a couple of old school friends who are touch and go in the health stakes …am so cranky about this farce of a lock-down.
(Only a fleeting thought but I can understand why the Chinese in Wuhan hammered planks on doors to keep people in!! )
I assume the military man has been brought in to take the heat off Morrison, and to be blamed for any failures. Morrison can no longer hide the stuff-up so he has to pass it on to someone else.
BB,
You have an Old Testament definition of herd immunity 🙂 We wont eradicate COVID a la smallpox. But we can safely say that we have herd immunity for many childhood infections due to the national vaccination schedule. What we don’t know yet is whether the COVID vaccination could potentially be added to the schedule in time, or will it be similar to the influenza vaccination regimen, due to mutation characteristics. The later will require significant surveillance and production infrastructure.
PB war correspondents have so many tales to tell about past mistakes. 😆
@AnnastaciaMP tweets
Wednesday 7 July – coronavirus cases in Queensland:
One new case recorded overnight, locally acquired and detected in home quarantine.
The case is linked to the Alpha cluster.
#covid19
I can understand that the military has the skill set to do things in an organised way, but I find the whole concept that our health system can’t do what it should have been well prepared for (I think Abbott defunded pandemic planning), and god knows what other departments can’t do what they’re meant to (social services, hello), and that the military are some backstop and front men for failed leadership and public service, a bit, mmm, third worldy.
https://www.pollbludger.net/2021/07/07/essential-research-leadership-and-covid-polling/comment-page-2/#comment-3645457
Frontier Wars militia, Boer War by way of Gallipoli, Singapore, Vietnam to GWOT … tomorrow, when the war began?
Given the 2019/ 2020 flooding and fires, extreme weather impacts on taxpayers/ citizens/ demand, 2019 onwards Wuflu as a dress rehearsal for the climate emergency/ change showing up the hollowing out of public institutions and organisational JIT supply chain limitations, the fed gov[ernance with COAG, not a national cabinet with junta] is going to have to extend ADF/ emergency services through a civil defence agency.
Washminster is a broken system, in terms of advancing Australia, fair.
Changing the puppets in Versailles on Lake Bloody Griffin won’t change the show in the theatre.
Bring on a federal ICAC/ CIC, campaign finance reform, useful freedom of information, mandatory and binding referendums …
In the meantime votes of no confidence, protests, petitions, civil disobedience, … because revos/ diplomacy by other means tend to suck for the common people?
So it looks like both Victoria and Queensland have nailed their last two Delta outbreaks.
How far off NSW is we are quite some way off knowing.
alfred venison says:
Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:16 am
Inuk leader Mary Simon named as Canada’s 1st Indigenous governor general
Simon is from Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, and has spent decades advocating for Indigenous rights
—————————————————————-
Progressive, inclusive Canada does it again, appointing its first indigenous Governor-General.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-gg-mary-simon-1.6091376
Canada’s new Governor General, Mary Simon, is Inuit, the fourth woman to be head of state in Canada in the past 20 years. Two of the others were refugees to Canada, the other an astronaut.
Ms. Simon is a former public broadcasting announcer-producer, diplomat and expert on the Arctic and circum-Polar affairs.
A former Canadian ambassador to Denmark, she is an advocate for Inuit (formerly known as Eskimo) rights and culture in Canada. She has represented the Inuit to the Canadian government and the United Nations, including work that led to the Inuit people’s inclusion in the Constitution in 1982.
Born in Kangisualuujjuaq, Nunavik (Arctic Quebec), Mary moved with her family to Kuujjuaq, where she attended a federal day school. Mary’s father was an Englishman and a fur trader with the Hudson’s Bay Company and her mother was an Inuk. After Mary completed the sixth grade, she was homeschooled by her father.
In the 1970s, Mary worked for the CBC’s Northern Service. Seeking an opportunity to express her personal and political views more openly, she left to work with the Northern Quebec Inuit Association (NQIA) which is dedicated to supporting Inuit rights and interests in Nunavik. After the signing of the 1975 land claims agreement, the NQIA was renamed the Makivik Corporation. Eventually becoming president of the Makivik, Mary was involved in the implementation of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement.
She has worked with the Inuit Circumpolar Council and the Arctic Council. She was also Canadian Ambassador for Circumpolar Affairs and Canadian Ambassador to Denmark.
Beginning in 2006, Mary served two terms as the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), which focuses on the advancement of Inuit rights, where she advocated for more attention to health and education issues among youth in the North. She has acted as chairperson for the Arctic Children and Youth Foundation and until 2014 Mary was the chairperson of the National Committee on Inuit Education.
Among many other distinctions, Mary is an Officer of the Order of Canada, Governor General’s Northern Medal, Recipient of the National Order of Québec, the Gold Order of Greenland, the National Aboriginal Achievement Award, the Gold Order of the Canadian Geographical Society and the Symons Medal. She has been inducted into the International Women’s Forum Hall of Fame. She is a Fellow of the Arctic Institute of North America and of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
————————————————————————-
We are delighted by this appointment. My wife, who was the head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Northern Radio Service, got to know Mary and her parents very well. Her husband Whit Fraser is an old journalistic colleague of mine and an expert on Arctic Canada in his own right.
BK @ #79 Wednesday, July 7th, 2021 – 10:06 am
The ‘can I please start by ‘ lady at 1100 ?
I feel like screaming
– yes you can
– you don’t have to ask
– and that start starts when you start
lizzie @ #73 Wednesday, July 7th, 2021 – 9:23 am
So…….. just a distraction? Why isnt this seen by all and sundry as a complete failure of both operation and messaging by Morrison. If he cant manage those two things on something even Boris Johnson managed to do then – what is he good for? Chicken coops and curries? His mask has been removed and what we see is a clown.
People expressing confusion about why the Liberals go to the military are perhaps forgetting that the Liberals see the military as part of their base.
Itza
It’s her respect for individual freedoms showing. I mean, what if a journalist doesn’t want to listen to what she has to say – surely that’s their right?
Shocking, shocking news from NZ. There is of course wails from “business’ but who’d a thunk it, without the river of cheap labor brought in from overseas supply and demand kicks in.
The restaurant worker exploitation industry particularly ‘wailful’. Guess where the “savings” have come from ? “A customer’s bill for dining out hasn’t increased for more than 10 years but the costs have escalated hugely,” he said.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/125668580/catering-firm-owner-people-wont-pay-enough-to-keep-up-with-wages
BH says:
Tuesday, July 6, 2021 at 2:48 pm
beguiledagain
Thnks for the history reminisces. They are so enjoyable.
As for concerts. You are all Spring chickens. 1st one for me was Johnny Ray 1954ish. Then Gene Krupa, Louis Armstrong.
————————————————————————————————————–
Thank you BH. I’m glad to have some company from the 1950’s as we wallow in nostalgia. And speaking of concerts……..
When you showed up at the Sydney Stadium at Rushcutter’s Bay in the mid-50’s, you might have bought a program for those Stadium concerts from me. As a teenager, I accosted patrons and spruiked the program at two shillings a pop.
I did such a good job for Lee Gordon at the Johnny Ray concert that I was added to the entourage and went up to Newcastle for his gig there. After the concert we, the whole Ray entourage, piled into a charter aircraft and flew through the night to Melbourne, arriving at dawn. His concerts were in the old Victorian Festival Hall as I remember.
You didn’t mention the first Sinatra concert in early 1955. It was the main event in those days when Gordon started bringing American movie and recording superstars to Australian audiences for the first time.
As a young cadet journalist and a member of the Australian Sinatra Organization, I also managed to get an interview with the media-shy singer. I had to come up with a novel twist to get the interview. I told his manager Hank Sanicola that I wanted to talk about his involvement and interest in sports.
The interview was conducted, before one of his shows, appropriately enough in a shabby boxers’ locker-room at that long-gone Rushcutter’s Bay venue. Sinatra indicated that he was a big boxing fan (his father was a sometime professional boxer), and supported his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers soon to shift to Los Angeles. He later supported an elderly Joe Louis when the former world heavyweight champion was down on his luck and was often seen ringside at big bouts.
I asked him what musical role he wished he had played and he answered quickly: “Billy Bigelow,” the flawed hero in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel.” Ironically, he was cast in the part in the movie version a year later, but pulled out of the film when shooting was scheduled to begin at Boothbay Harbour, Maine and was replaced by Gordon Macrae.
He signed a personal message to me on a couple of 10-inch LP’s that I’d brought along, including his greatest album “Songs for Young Lovers”. LP’s were moving to the 12 inch version at the time.
As the overture to the show started, Sinatra said : “so long Kid, enjoy the show” and I walked with him to the runway leading down to the boxing ring. Sinatra climbed quickly up through the ropes and with a look for a downbeat from accompanist Bill Miller, launched into “I’ve Got the World on a String.”
That was a pretty memorable night. But for memorable concerts, I topped it three years later, which I’ll share some other time. You really shouldn’t have gotten me started!
And now, Ladies and Gentleman, the Chairman of the Board:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5SSWxuFrzc
Alpha,Torch, Griff, Itza
Thanks for thoughts.
Back in another life, studied English at Uni and taught it in high school.
A large part of it was analysing writers, poets etc and trying to get into their heads via the words they’d written.
Was in the late 1970’s that the cynical part of me thought I’d become part of an academic industry.
Yes there is a huge benefit in trying to understand why a writer uses particular words and phrases but maybe it can go too far.
I was teaching Catch 22 to what was then called level 1 English for NSW HSC.
The inevitable question arose as to the significance of the title. I’d research papers written, interviews etc to come up with explanations .
I had wonderful theories until I was driving home one arvo and Joseph Heller was being interviewd on the radio.
Inevitably that question came up.
His response to the significance?? It was nothing. He was going to call the book Catch 18 but had to change it for copyright reasons because a book had just been published with 18 in the title.
So much for my grand theories which the students regurgitated in their exams and from memory were quite successful in their answers.
To Alpha, Torch , Griff and Itza and I suppose to myself. That’s not a criticism of our theories as I do want to try to understand where Julia Banks was coming from.
But I thought you’d appreciate the anecdote
“menacing controlling wallpaper”
Reads to me as a person that does their evil work in the background.
Interesting expression. I cannot find any definition of “wallpaper” that fits what Julia Banks seems to be saying. It must be an original.
In the wake of his Cornwall holiday, and quarantine in Canberra and it being school holidays Morrison seems to be taking a break. Working from home?
Unlike most people forced into it by COVID there is nobody likely to check if he’s either at home or working.
Quality time with the family no doubt.
”
”
Good one.
The LNP governments promise tax cuts as far the eye can see but do not want take up reasonable revenue raising measures which will afford that.
That is the reason we will have debt and debit for generations to come.
Probably they want to provide tax cuts from magic pudding they have.
Re: “menacing controlling wallpaper”
Scheele’s Green (pigment):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheele's_Green
I also said to my son this morning, they may say they will tax you less but the quiet part they leave unsaid is that you will pay more out of your own pocket. Even if you are a pensioner or on some other form of Welfare payment. It applies to everyone, working or non-working.
BB
‘
…And let us not forget that an essential precursor to “herd immunity” is the actual death of a sizeable proportion of the herd before vulnerable individuals are weeded out, with the stronger ones remaining to replenish numbers.
…’
_____________________________________________
Indeed. Traditional ecological knowledge tells us that it is the job of wolves to keep the reindeer herds healthy.
I might have found the ‘wallpaper’ inspiration. Jaeger, it is yellow not green 🙂
.
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
…………. She is particularly disturbed by the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom, with its strange, formless pattern, and describes it as “revolting.”
She continues to long for more stimulating company and activity, and she complains again about John’s patronizing, controlling ways—although she immediately returns to the wallpaper, which begins to seem not only ugly, but oddly menacing.
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/yellowwallpaper/summary/
boerwar
Orrrrr the role of the reindeer is to keep wolves well fed and so not so susceptible to disease 🙂
Why the ADF?
1. Years of gutting the APS.
2. When push comes to shove consultants are empty pockets beckoning millions but delivering fuck all.
3. The ADF has spent the last 20 years doing major logistical exercises into, for example, Uruzgan. The latter is now almost completely in the hands of the Taliban but the collateral beneficial outcome is that the ADF has learned very well how to do logistical things.
‘poroti says:
Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 10:35 am
boerwar
Orrrrr the role of the reindeer is to keep wolves well fed and so not so susceptible to disease ‘
________________________________
win win?
Griff, yes I know we’ve moved on from the Old Testament, and I did go put of my way to contrast the human “herd” from a wildebeest convention at the Serengeti Hilton.
But the fact remains there are 7 or 8 billion of us, spread everywhere around the world, living in varying degrees of economic, social and political wellbeing. And we mix together, if not directly, then at 2nd, third or 4th hand.
It’s going to be hard to get an effective vaccine to all of us, and even harder to keep the vaccines current, and even harder to prevent cross-contamination between different nations. I’d say impossible, definitely in the short term that some seem to dream of and given the absolute refusal by some, even in supposedly sophisticated societies, to believe that vaccines aren’t a method of mind control.
Then there is Limo Man. The poor bugger has been stalked and pilloried by the Gutter Media, for something which it is becoming unclear he even did. Who dobbed him? It must have been someone connected to the government or the state Public Service… maybe (gulp) even NSW Health. Why aren’t we hearing who it was? After Limo Man’s experience, who would come forward and fess up to being infected? No wonder those footy players hid under the bed!
If we are to accept that the virus is going to be endemic, then we need the media to back off the cheap shots, the feet in Limo Man’s door, and the political gotchas. Uhlmann, as a supposedly senior member of that species of jackals, would do well to lead by example.
rm
On the other hand, agonising through writing – unpublished, alas – I know that every word is considered (I think that, in the process, I’ve re read every one of them at least ten times). There’s a reason why the curtains in a room are blue rather than pink or green….
Titles one might compromise on.
Rnm1953 @ #24 Wednesday, July 7th, 2021 – 6:28 am
He’s a facade!
He may look nice, but it’s just a cover for all the ugliness hidden beneath.