Essential Research leadership and COVID polling

The shine continues to come off Scott Morrison’s COVID-boosted personal ratings, plus new evidence of a softening in support for the Coalition among women.

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.

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.

3,546 comments on “Essential Research leadership and COVID polling”

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  1. lizzie @ #2196 Saturday, July 10th, 2021 – 7:40 am

    Assistant Police Commissioner Cook has said police will question shoppers and the only test for what items are “essential” will be “whether you really need this item today and most often the answer is no”. This leaves huge discretion in the hands of police to act on their bigotry

    This is silly. On this principle you might visit the shops every day instead of once a week.

    Yep, one person shopping once a week makes much more sense.

  2. Victoria

    Yes, but the number of shops open was limited to what were termed essentials such as food, medication, etc. It wasn’t up to police to decide what was an essential item.

  3. It’s all about limiting the movement of people as well as not having too many people exposed in one area.
    Therefore stating that one person from household can shop for essentials every day in their local limits, makes it easier to control transmission and track it as well.

  4. Vic:

    You only have to look at how WA and Qld responded to this Sydney outbreak (going hard, going early) to see how Berejiklian should’ve handled this. Both states have or are easing restrictions even further as a result of the case numbers.

  5. Lizzie

    Agree re essential shopping. As I have been saying from the outset of this outbreak, they should have started the online and click and collect model for non essential items from the get go.

  6. Victoria @ #2202 Saturday, July 10th, 2021 – 7:47 am

    It’s all about limiting the movement of people as well as not having too many people exposed in one area.
    Therefore stating that one person from household can shop for essentials every day in their local limits, makes it easier to control transmission and track it as well.

    One person going out once, limits the opportunity of infection more than one person going out 7 times.

  7. And of course, only allowing essential suppliers to open is critical to stopping people gathering in public places.

    There is no reason why car dealerships, gyms, florists or beauty salons should be open to the public.

  8. Poroti

    As a Victorian, I have expressed many times here on this blog, the triggering effect we have had by NSW sniping from the sidelines at every opportunity.

    And when I saw how GladysB handled it from the outset compared to every other state as fess has pointed out. Yes one cant help this outbreak of Schaudenfradue.

    There is also real concern that we will have another outbreak sooner than later here in Victoria.

    Of course, we know the drill, but we would like a break from it all.

  9. Confessions @ #1647 Saturday, July 10th, 2021 – 9:50 am

    And of course, only allowing essential suppliers to open is critical to stopping people gathering in public places.

    There is no reason why car dealerships, gyms, florists or beauty salons should be open to the public.

    There are reasons, but they are not good. “I’m a spiv and I vote.”

  10. Barney ITG

    I can say from experience, that every trip we did during lockdown was planned.
    It was done with the mindset of limiting exposure.
    I have two elderly parents that I have to care for, and our household had to be vigilant.
    Common sense is the way to go.

    Of course I would also posit that common sense isnt always that common. Lol

  11. poroti @ #679 Saturday, July 10th, 2021 – 9:27 am

    frednk
    The Hun had one mention of Crown. It was a sob story in the beesknees section………… or maybe it was a threat rather than sob?
    .

    Threats of job losses if Crown defaults

    Crown warned the Victorian government it is at risk of defaulting on its debt if its casino licence is revoked, putting thousands of jobs at risk

    It’s called emotional blackmail. The Liberals are past masters at it.

  12. rhwombat:

    I gathered from Gladys’ incoherent answers to questions about why these shops are still open, to the reported cabinet disunity over the emergency response that the approach to lockdown is pure ideology.

    The Health Dept advisors must be tearing their hair out.

  13. Sad to say but I think sydneysiders will start to take this seriously, if the hospital system is stretched as a result.

  14. Kmart in Bankstown Square seems to be open – an essential service?
    Some of the Bondi people seem to think that they’re immune from the cold as well as the Virus.

  15. The NSW experiences with covid are like a layered cake. There’s a layer of failed quarantine covered with a layer of failed lockdown and another layer of failed vaccination procurement and delivery. It’s a gateau of failure.

    It has been prepared by the Patisserie called Wishful Thinking.

  16. Victoria @ #2210 Saturday, July 10th, 2021 – 7:54 am

    Barney ITG

    I can say from experience, that every trip we did during lockdown was planned.
    It was done with the mindset of limiting exposure.
    I have two elderly parents that I have to care for, and our household had to be vigilant.
    Common sense is the way to go.

    Of course I would also posit that common sense isnt always that common. Lol

    But every time you do go out increases your risk of exposure, so common sense would suggest that you minimise the number of times you do so.

  17. c@t

    Has Taylormade mentioned the fact that liberal luvvie Helen Connan has been on the board of Crown throughout the duration?

    The notion that the liberals want Crown punished is quite hilarious actually.

  18. mundo says:
    Saturday, July 10, 2021 at 9:28 am
    Two ABC Liberal lasses hosting the news running interfernce for Tim Wilson.
    They call him, ‘Tim’ they call the Labor spokesperson Aneka Wells.
    No bias there.
    None at all.
    One of them now explaining to Wells how well the government has done comparatively speaking.
    It’s their ABC.
    FMD
    No way are they gonna let their boy Scotty carry the can.
    _______________________________________________
    What is happening with the Tasmanian ALP? Rebecca White – three times a charm?

  19. BarneyITG

    Which is what we did.
    We did all our shopping online, including our groceries.
    I only went to local pharmacy to get my parents meds.

    The joke in our household was how much cardboard box recycling we had to sort each fortnight.

  20. It got to the stage in my household where the delivery guy would yell at front door.
    Delivery!
    I would approach and see him from window and do a thumbs up.
    Still happens now, as it is contactless delivery.
    No signing.
    They take an image etc.

  21. Confessions says:
    Saturday, July 10, 2021 at 9:56 am
    rhwombat:

    I gathered from Gladys’ incoherent answers to questions about why these shops are still open, to the reported cabinet disunity over the emergency response that the approach to lockdown is pure ideology.

    The Health Dept advisors must be tearing their hair out.

    They subscribe to covid exceptionalism. Idiotic, really.

  22. Victoria @ #2220 Saturday, July 10th, 2021 – 8:00 am

    BarneyITG

    Which is what we did.
    We did all our shopping online, including our groceries.
    I only went to local pharmacy to get my parents meds.

    The joke in our household was how much cardboard box recycling we had to sort each fortnight.

    I’m confused.

    Why did you suggest that going out to the shops everyday was ok?

  23. Kmart in Bankstown Square seems to be open – an essential service?

    They should move their trade model to click and collect. Was it only a week ago I suggested this of stores like Bunnings, Harvey Norman etc as not only does this reduce an individual shopper’s exposure, but it also denies a public gathering opportunity to tyre kickers whiling away a weekend.

    The govt wouldn’t need to introduce a no browsing rule if they remove the opportunities for browsing.

  24. Barney ITG

    It is okay to allocate one person from each household to go out for essential items on any given day.
    In practice, people dont do it. Mainly because it is not a shopping experience.
    It is a lonely task and when you are concerned about transmission, people automatically change their behaviour.
    As I said, we rarely did it even though we could.

  25. VCT Et3e, One thing you could do is make sure your previous GP uploads a summary to your Online record [PCEHR], which you can then give permission to your new GP to access.
    Don’t be deterred by a fee at a GP if you like them, as it may be what allows then to afford to spend more time with you. The bulk billing system provides a perverse incentive to shove patients through too quickly and overservice.
    If you really prefer to move, it is not unusual at all for a practice to have a fee for transfer costs – but most history is captured in a simple summary.

  26. Fess:

    You only have to look at how WA and Qld responded to this Sydney outbreak (going hard, going early) to see how Berejiklian should’ve handled this. Both states have or are easing restrictions even further as a result of the case numbers.

    If it wasn’t for the masks, you’d barely even know Covid was a thing in Queensland right now. The occasional three day lockdown, a few weeks of masks, and having to scan QR codes whenever you visit a business, but otherwise life has been pretty much normal for about a year now.

    But you still get people bitching about it being “over the top” whenever a snap lockdown happens. I know which I prefer.

  27. Depending on how the virus is tracking. Sydneysiders will change their behaviour if they can see that the virus is not under control.

    I stand to be corrected, but it appears that the last three weeks, the restrictions in place were not taken seriously.

    And I would say mainly due to the belief that NSW was exceptional is some way.

    And we know who we can blame for that.

  28. Victoria @ #713 Saturday, July 10th, 2021 – 9:59 am

    c@t

    Has Taylormade mentioned the fact that liberal luvvie Helen Connan has been on the board of Crown throughout the duration?

    The notion that the liberals want Crown punished is quite hilarious actually.

    Well, no, of course not. It’s a failure of the Regulator according to Taylormade. Anyone but a Liberal! 😆

  29. C@tmomma says:
    Saturday, July 10, 2021 at 10:13 am

    The notion that the liberals want Crown punished is quite hilarious actually.
    __________________
    Yes it was the Liberals. Daniel Andrews was completely innocent of everything. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise if it was Daniel Andrews who was ultimately behind the 4 corners story.

  30. Quote

    My friend lives in casula and she says that police are bag checking at Kmart to make sure that all purchases are essential

    This is ridiculous, surely.

  31. When my dad’s GP ( who he had be seeing for 40+ years ) retired he sent everyone a letter saying he was retiring and if they wanted he would give ALL the patients a CD with their medical records on them for free.
    He had provided a tear off strip at the bottom with patient name details which could be left at the surgery and the records would then be available after 7 days for pick up. Brilliant service for free.

  32. Oakeshott Country @ #2167 Saturday, July 10th, 2021 – 8:51 am

    Someone asked about ownership of medical records. There is a legal precedent that while patients have a right to their records, practices have intellectual property rights over records and can charge for their transfer. However, most practices charge only a small amount of money to cover the cost of processing. Anything greater than $50, would strike me as excessive

    Interesting that you can be charged for the cost of “transfer” of your medical records even though you already have a right to them. When one of our previous GPs retired, he claimed not to be able to find another GP to “transfer” his records to so he offered to sell the records directly to each patient instead. I refused because I thought it was an unethical thing to do, but also because at the set fee per patient, it was too expensive for our family to contemplate at the time. I didn’t understand there was a difference between selling our records vs “transferring” them, but this perhaps explains how he could get away with what essentially seemed to be just a final rort on all his patients as he retired. He was a popular doctor and would have had many hundreds of patients, so it would have been a nice little earner. I suppose most of them just paid up, but I presume our records were “transferred” to the bin instead 🙁

  33. Good news!

    Rick Morton
    @SquigglyRick
    Hearing very good things for NDIS participants out of the disability meeting this evening. Feds have lost on every point by the sounds. No detail yet.

    Here we go:

    Independent assessments are GONE

    What an absolutely appalling process to get to this point. So much hurt, misinformation and bad faith.

    Luke Henriques-Gomes
    @lukehgomes

    Although Victoria’s disability minister Luke Donnellan is slightly less categorical about it in his statement.

    Independent assessments scrapped, says ACT minister Emma Davidson.

    WA Minister Don Punch says the plan was based on “unsubstantiated financial assumptions”

  34. lizzie @ #2237 Saturday, July 10th, 2021 – 10:17 am

    Quote

    My friend lives in casula and she says that police are bag checking at Kmart to make sure that all purchases are essential

    This is ridiculous, surely.

    Sure is. I’ve been into Kmart. The police wouldn’t need to check bags – they could just arrest everyone as they come through the checkout.

  35. I see Socrates has already posted this link, but this jumped out at me

    From his home in Connecticut, Pfizer’s former president of global R&D, John LaMattina, has been closely observing the global rush for vaccines, including Australia’s efforts to procure doses.

    He says Australia’s delay in securing a deal with Pfizer, while “unfortunate”, was understandable, because the success in containing Covid-19 had afforded it more time than others.

    But the amount Australia eventually secured in November was “clearly lacking” and “unconscionable”.

    “Once the amazing and unprecedented efficacy of the mRNA vaccines was established, ordering a mere 10m doses was unconscionable,” he says. “When both Pfizer and Moderna demonstrated the potent efficacy of their vaccines, every country should immediately have reached out to these companies to place their orders.

    “In the case of Australia, enough vaccine to inoculate its entire population over the age of 18 should have been done at once. Assuming that is about 20m Australians, this would have cost about US$780m … How much has Australia spent on Covid-19 relief packages?”

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/10/stuffed-how-australias-unconscionable-gamble-on-covid-vaccines-backfired

  36. ItzaDream says:
    Saturday, July 10, 2021 at 10:29 am

    I see Socrates has already posted this link, but this jumped out at me
    _________________
    Nails the Morrison government good and proper.

  37. C@t, watched Hamilton (Broadway production) on Disney channel last night. I nearly made it to the end of Act 1.

    ( I cancelled our tickets and got full refund)

  38. Oakeshott Country @ #2167 Saturday, July 10th, 2021 – 8:51 am

    There is a legal precedent that while patients have a right to their records, practices have intellectual property rights over records and can charge for their transfer.

    Hang on, what IP rights does a practice assert over medical records? That they own the formatting that the notes are kept in?

    Certainly they can’t assert ownership over the content itself, any more than the BOM can assert intellectual property rights over temperature and humidity observations? It would make no sense.

  39. @MrKRudd tweets

    A message to the boneheads in the Murdoch media trying to undermine Premier Berejiklian: stop it. This is a public health emergency, not another front in your stupid bloody culture war. We must stop the spread to protect jobs, save lives and to spare people from long Covid.

    Edit: video of Alan Jones was included in the tweet.

  40. Rick
    @colonelhogans
    ·
    45m
    Here is the stupidity on the NSW lockdown laws. Central Coast border is 5 kms up thru the Bush from us. 5 kms. They’re locked down. We aren’t. Does @GladysB think the virus won’t cross the Central Coast/Lake Macquarie border? NSW should be locked down much further than it is.


  41. Confessionssays:
    Saturday, July 10, 2021 at 7:48 am
    But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment.

    American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.

    Confessions

    That means that the victory of Biden in 2020 Presidential election by about 45000 vote looks even more terrible for USA because all the progressives blamed the religious right for their failure to win elections. And it appears that is not the case. It is just that evangelical and lot of non-religious people voted for a person like Trump ( that means either they are losing their minds or becoming like Trump(.

  42. Ven

    The Trump win of the Presidency was a coalition. Evangelical Church’s bet big on Trump. In the long term they have lost the bet.

    They allied themselves with the likes of the KKK and neo nazis and conspiracy theorists for the political expediency of the now.

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