Josh Butler of the New Daily reports Barnaby Joyce has “dropped hints to an election being called in January, to be held in the first quarter of next year”, while Scott Morrison apparently told the Liberal party room the election would “come around sooner than we think”. However, it appears to have been made clear that this doesn’t mean the election will be this year, consistent with Joyce’s prognosis.
Here’s what we do know, specifically regarding the parties’ recent candidate preselection efforts:
• The West Australian reports Vince Connelly, the Liberal member for the soon-to-be-abolished northern Perth seat of Stirling, will challenge fellow incumbent Ian Goodenough in the neighbouring seat of Moore, rather than pursue Labor-held Cowan as previously indicated. Goodenough is noted for his successes in recruiting members of Pentecostal churches to local party branches and featured heavily in the machinations of the factional grouping known as “The Clan”, whose extensive WhatsApp discussions have now been published in full by The West Australian. The Sunday Times reported yesterday that Connelly’s move had angered unidentified “senior” Liberals, who must be privy to polling remarkably different from any available to the public, since they appear to believe he should be able to win Cowan from Labor.
• A Liberal National Party preselection held last weekend for Dawson, which will be vacated with the retirement of George Christensen, was won by Andrew Willcox, former tomato farmer and mayor of Whitsunday. Willcox won a local party ballot ahead of Chris Bonanno, a Mackay councillor and unsuccessful candidate for the state seat of Mackay last year, and Charles Pasquale, a Burdekin farmer. Meanwhile, the Courier-Mail reports Henry Pike has been endorsed by the LNP state executive to succeed Andrew Laming as candidate for Bowman, which would appear to put to rest suggestions he might be elbowed aside despite having won the local party ballot.
• Labor has finalised candidates in several of the theoretically winnable Queensland seats currently held by the Liberal National Party: Rebecca Fanning, a Queensland government health policy adviser, in Longman (margin 3.3%); Elida Faith, local president of the Queensland Council of Unions and unsuccessful candidate in 2019, in Leichhardt (4.2%); Madonna Jarrett, a director at Deloitte Australia, in Brisbane (4.9%); Mike Denton, Australian Workers Union delegate and Caltex Lytton oil refinery worker, in Petrie (8.4%); and Rowan Holzberger, electorate officer to Senator Murray Watt, in Forde (8.6%).
• Labor also has candidates in place for the two Liberal-held seats in Tasmania, both of which it held before 2019. Bass will again be contested by Ross Hart, who held it from 2016 to 2019 and has since been the principal of a Launceston law firm, while Braddon will be contested by Chris Lynch, Burnie councillor and project co-ordinator at the St Giles Society, a charity assisting the disabled.
• Tracey Roberts, who has spent 10 years as the mayor of Wanneroo, has been endorsed as Labor’s candidate in Christian Porter’s northern Perth seat of Pearce.
• Tom Richardson of InDaily reports Louise Miller-Frost, state chief executive of the St Vincent de Paul Society, is “set to receive cross-factional support” to become Labor’s candidate for the marginal Adelaide seat of Boothby, which will be vacated with the retirement of Liberal member Nicolle Flint.
Finally, as we head into what will likely be a quiet-to-silent week on the opinion poll front, a fair and balanced selection of privately conducted polling:
• Polling on the importance of climate change as an election issue and the future use of fossil fuels, conducted for the Australian Conservation Foundation by YouGov from a sample of 15,000, has been published in the form of interactive maps by the Age/Herald. These show results at electorate level, presumably from around 100 respondents each.
• The Centre for Independent Studies has published a survey it commissioned from YouGov concerning “attitudes to a post-Covid Australia”, conducted in early August from a sample of 1029. The libertarian think tank’s take on the results, which are in line with those of a similar exercise conducted by the same pollster for The Australian last week, is that “we are a nation of ‘Karens’ tut-tutting over people not following ‘the rules’”. While it took fine parsing of small sub-samples to get there, the report observes that Coalition voters were the most likely to support “government restrictions on civil liberties because of the pandemic” in New South Wales, whereas Labor voters were markedly more so in Victoria.
Well…
As expected, Gladys is going to do substantial easings of restrictions when we reach “70%” (despite ignoring her own health advice that this should be 85%).
Far more interaction. Far more mobility. More non vaccinated people mixing in the crowd. All I can say is, the response in the R value won’t be subtle.
Sad thing is, this will come at a point where R will be below 1.0 and we would have had a chance to bring cases back into a range (under 200) where contact tracing could become effective again.
“we’re fucked”..
enjoy 🙂
“$16 billion dollars = the cost of Berejiklian and Morrison buggering up the NSW outbreak.”
Yep, $16 billion dollars = the cost of not adequately training, resourcing and supervising one limo driver.
Makes you wonder if this wasn’t quite deliberate.
Its a fair question – i presume everyone is calling for Ardern to resign or condemning her vaccine incompetence. Or not, because she never said she would vaccinate people… which is absolutely exculpatory policymaking.
no?
Expat
I see NZ has followed a good strategy and executed it well.
Their only mistake in recent times has been being too trusting of NSW.
Grayndler ( Albo’s electorate) volunteers prepping for phone banking yesterday – calling teachers to thank them for their exemplary efforts in the GladMo lockdown…
“Gladys intends to use the misallocation that ScoMo has presented her with, to justify her stupid decision to ‘open up’ prematurely, based on a ridiculous 56% vaccination level, which she deliberately misstates as 70%.”
Plus the fact that she intends to open up on the Monday following that magic “70%”, notwithstanding that full efficacy of the vaccine doesn’t kick in for two weeks after the second jab.
Also, given that a very large number of those vaccinated with AZ have been encouraged to bring forward the second jab to as little as six weeks after the first, does this not also reduce that percentage? I was under the impression that a twelve week separation gave the fullest protection and that it dropped for each week shy of that period. Or has the medical advice changed?
backfilling any kind of intellectual gymnastics as long as it promotes the case for your team
thats modern tribal politics
Hugoaugogo @ #2373 Thursday, September 9th, 2021 – 5:53 pm
He always looked like he was buggered too! 😆
Expat Follower @ #2395 Thursday, September 9th, 2021 – 6:41 pm
O. Such wit. Such erudition. I am cut to the quick. My mama died in 1995.
I notice that you totally ignore my completely valid point. See if you can think it through, fuckwit. I suspect that you are incapable of learning anything.
There was a time when every right-ish leaning commenter on PB would “independently” bring up NZ in comparison with Australia. Obviously PB is not the only echo chamber around :P.
That aside, a couple of points:
1) NZ’s vaccination rates don’t seem all that ambitious, but their planning and implementation appear far more competent than ours. I don’t know if it’s been trouble free, but certainly they didn’t get off to the same rocky start we did, with supply coming months late.
2) We had procurement and supply issues, where our government could not supply what our government promised. Their recent problems are demand based. They have been supplying what they promised, but now more people want to be vaccinated due to the recent outbreak. Kind of two sides of the same coin but not exactly symmetrical.
“Joe Biden is at 62.7% 1st dose.
Gladys is at now 61.5% 1st dose.”
The difference is that Berejiklian doesn’t have 20% of the population flat out refusing the the vaccination. In the US, they have a combination of Trumpism (he only very grudgingly recommends vaccination – perhaps if they named it after him as he wanted, he may be more responsive), extreme evangelism and outright stupidity to deal with. In Australia – all of it – most vaccination hesitancy, already quite low in comparison, will disappear when they realise they can’t go to the pub. Or anywhere.
So we will win that race. It’s a pity, though not surprising, that none of our owned media chose to pick up on Morrison’s most obvious lie in months. The one where he claimed to be in constant contact with Pfizer but other countries where people were dropping like flies (sniffle, hold back tears) and they needed it more. Right there and right then would have been a good time to remind Morrison that we “were at the head of the queue”. But they didn’t. Because fucking hopeless.
Ballantyne
The interval between AZ jabs has been 8-12 weeks as per the label https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/the-oxford-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine-what-you-need-to-know
In my case I got the 2nd jab at 7 weeks, though if you are in a hotspot, the intervals are down to 4 weeks. Assumptions with the shorter intervals is that:
– 2 shots are infinitely better than 1
– booster shots are on the horizon (sic) when supply exceeds demand *
* cf Greg Hunt (2021)
Not to mention I have just been duly elected Treasurer of the NSW Fabians. Phew! Big day. 😀
Again, this “Woddabout other world leaders?” line of spin is coming off as pathetic, shamelessly buck-passing and desperate.
Congratulations!
Sure, if I was living in NZ, I’d probably be saying that it’s too slow, but I’m not. Different countries are free to go as slow or as fast as they like. Some are more tolerant of adjusting their behaviour (e.g. working from home, quarantine, etc) than others.
Analysis of Australia’s situation requires recognition of what Australians want. Analysis of New Zealand’s requires recognition of what the people of New Zealand want. Anything that doesn’t take that into account is nonsense.
I mean, we might poke fun at the US and the UK and whatnot, but in some sense they are just getting what they want. (and really, we’re just debating whether we want the same thing or not, based on what we can see that they’re getting)
Not to mention the USA has a population of ~330 million and NSW ~8 million.
So, apples and bananas, michael. And you’re the one who gets to eat the banana.
C@t, as someone who does/has done volunteer treasurer for a number of worthy causes, my humble advice is:
‘Don’t let the fuckers welch on their dues’
Thank you, Wat Tyler. I like to keep busy. I may also be writing some things for them in future. For the bi-annual magazine. I used to write but I began to resent deadlines. Twice yearly is more my speed now. 🙂
C@t
Who?
(duck)
One wonders who is advising Scott ™.
Today’s threat blurted out to WA voters would send shivers up the spine of even the blue rinse set..
“My advice to Western Australia is get vaccinated and get ready, get your hospital system ready, get your health system ready, and push through” Scott Morrison
sprocket_ @ #2417 Thursday, September 9th, 2021 – 7:04 pm
If they do, they don’t get the Fabians Review. So there’s an incentive there. It’s a fine piece of work. You can’t leave it casually lying around to look cool otherwise. 😀
Also, NZ seems to be dealing better with the delta outbreak than we are. They certainly are not talking of opening up. I’m also not aware of what their quarantine strategy is. Their latest outbreak crept in through the NZ-Aus bubble, didn’t it? You can’t separate vaccination strategy from the rest of the pandemic strategy. They need to be taken together.
I’d be fine with slower vaccination in Australia (though others wouldn’t :P) if we:
– weren’t talking of opening up all the time,
– had tougher quarantine,
– all agreed to go early and hard, and
– had a better handle on the latest outbreak (or knew we could count on high compliance with restrictions)
New Zealand appears to have those things. We don’t. The last might be luck, but the rest are all consistent with not rushing vaccination. Part of the criticism of the Australian government is that they say one thing and act another way. e.g. “It’s not a race” when they can’t be stuffed implementing proper quarantine.
sprocket_ @ #2420 Thursday, September 9th, 2021 – 7:08 pm
He should have just said, ‘get ready to bring out your dead!’
‘Expat Follower says:
Thursday, September 9, 2021 at 6:53 pm
backfilling any kind of intellectual gymnastics…’
________________________
So, stop lying.
michael at 6:33 pm
Their rate has gone berserk in recent weeks, 160% of Australia’s. They’d ramped up supply but there would be SFA people assigning “blame” for not foreseeing ‘world’s highest’ .
This will hurt Morrison politically. Iron ore price falls are triggering an ASX retreat.
Rather amusing seeing michael unwittingly drawing attention to the relationship between Trump and the extremist Republicans and low vaccination, high death rates.
Part of the criticism of the Australian government is that they say one thing and act another way. e.g. “It’s not a race” when they can’t be stuffed implementing proper quarantine.
They craft a sound bite to disguise their behaviour and true intent. They do it every day and they are constantly taking the temperature of any reaction to what they are doing/have done and are modifying their message accordingly to deal with it.
Honesty and fair dealing with the nation doesn’t come into it.
Old man: I’m not dead yet!
Scomo: You soon will be..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcbR1J_4ICg
cud chewer
It’s times like these I truly appreciate the beauty of the Nullarbor 😆
There’s no “backfilling” or “mental gymnastics”.
You can’t blindly transfer the Australian debate into the New Zealand context without proper justification. What’s similar and why is it important? What’s different and why isn’t it important?
Someone who puts in that effort is doing an appropriate amount of work. Someone who doesn’t is just being intellectually lazy. If you think NZ is a valid comparison, you need to be be able to explain why instead of just throwing around snark.
poroti
I’m (quite seriously) planning a very long hike (from Newcastle to Red Rock)
If you want to know the kind of questions that NZ journos ask, try this one.
Oh, oh. Xi will not be pleased.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202109/1233708.shtml
Where is the Minister for Aged Care? There are hundreds of residents of Aged Homes who are suffering physical and mental deterioration through being shut off from family visitors, even when fully vaxxed. Ref: The Drum.
‘poroti says:
Thursday, September 9, 2021 at 7:18 pm
cud chewer
Sad thing is, this will come at a point where R will be below 1.0 and we would have had a chance to bring cases back into a range (under 200) where contact tracing could become effective again.
“we’re fucked”..
enjoy
It’s times like these I truly appreciate the beauty of the Nullarbor ‘
________________________________
habloodyhaha
citizen at 7:21 pm
She was copping a fair bit of flack over the ‘slow’ roll out of the vaccine for a while but with the delivery of the promised surge that has disappeared. The question itself was actually part of some serious questions being raised about visitors and the apparent flouting of rules by them . Or rather the lack of enforcement.
.
.
Staff are reporting that many visitors are not wearing masks or not wearing them correctly, some are moving between wards, and mingling with staff and other patients. It is also alleged a visitor and a patient had sex, which a union spokesman said is not an uncommon occurrence.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/300403214/covid19-auckland-dhb-visitor-policy-leaves-staff-unsafe-national-guidance-to-be-updated
What is interesting is that this report is from channel 7
COVID-19 Lockdown: 7NEWS understands that Crisis Cabinet was not presented with any modelling about the consequences of opening up before making its decision, and the NSW Chief Health Officer has serious concerns. https://t.co/V4lPDNRjxU #Coronavirus #7NEWS https://t.co/uPuZ7llCVM
Victoria
Yep.. watch that R value carefully
The response of R to the changes will be fairly quick (a couple of weeks) and if it pushes R over 1.. well.. that won’t look good for Gladys.
Andrew Earlwood:
[‘It’s depressing that despite everything, the Libs are likely to win. The middle ‘swinging voter’ has been well conditioned over the past 25 years since the Howard ascension.’]
With a batch of quite reasonable polls for Labor, this from Andrew, Mundo, N, et al. It’s defeatist and does not equate with polling and anecdotal evidence gleaned from a number of fairly credible sources – eg, the letters section in the non-Murdoch rags – leading to a reasonable conclusion that the Morrison Government is very much the nose. Just what sort of TPP polling would convince them – 60/40?
As I’ve previously said, fancy walking into a Labor branch meeting with this lot of pessimists, not that I’ve ever been to one but I did assist at Sussex Street in ’75, maintaining the rage to this day. In days of yore, they’d be known as dissenters in the ranks, fifth columnists, forced to walk the plank.
Cud chewer
GladysB is playing the obliging media like a fiddle.
There are so many holes in her road map
Gladys and Morrison don’t care. They realise that only the living vote.
Very good point.
MFW
Has it occurred to anyone else in Australia that the person we all previously thought was the worst human on the planet – DONALD TRUMP – ordered enough vaccines last year for his citizens … yet Scott and Greg, ah, didn’t?
#SackHunt
Victoria
Yep, seduced by the Devil..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY9Dg-OlA3E
AE,
And when we win they’ll claim it was them that dunnit!
They’ll be the first to tap the keg of victory!
With the usual monitions from Cud & Steve:
Vaccine rollout:
NSW
43.6% fully vaccinated; 76.4% first dose
State target: 70%
National
40.4% fully vaccinated; 65.4% first dose
National target: 70%
Of the estimated population aged 16 and over – SMH.
Watching Ch10 News on replay, PVO is blowing smoke up Scott’s arse…
Cud chewer
Lol
Anyone surprised about this from The Rum Corp State ?
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/one-person-s-freedom-is-another-person-s-going-to-hospital-20210909-p58q8t.html