The Australian today brings us the Newspoll quarterly aggregates, which combine all the Newspoll surveys between July and September to produce state and demographic breakdowns from credibly sized samples. As such, the headline national figure of 53-47 to Labor tells us nothing we didn’t know already, with the juiciest meat instead to be found in the state breakdowns:
• The demarcation between this quarter and the previous quarter aligns fairly neatly with the onset of New South Wales’ COVID-19 crisis in late June, so the results here are particularly noteworthy. Labor is credited with a 52-48 lead after a 50-50 result last quarter, a movement that skirts a 2.2% margin of error from a sample of 2057. This amounts to a swing to Labor of 3.8% compared with the 2019 election result, which if uniform would gain them the seat of Reid on a margin of 3.2%.
• The biggest movement since the previous quarterly poll is in Victoria, where Labor’s lead has blown out from 53-47 to 58-42. This is a 4.9% swing from the 2019 result, which if uniform would bag Labor the seats of Chisholm (a post-redistribution Liberal margin of 0.5%), Higgins (3.7%), Casey (4.6%) and Deakin (4.7%). The sample in this case is 1731 for a margin of error of 2.4%.
• Queensland provides the Coalition with its one ray of sunshine, with the Coalition credited with a two-party lead of 55-45, out from 53-47 last time. This nonetheless amounts to a 3.4% swing to Labor compared with their disastrous result in 2019, just barely enough to win them Longman (margin 3.3%) if uniform. The sample here is 1536, the margin of error 2.5%.
• Conversely, Western Australia remains the Coalition’s biggest headache, with Labor’s two-party lead edging out to 54-46 compared with 53-47 last quarter. This amounts to a swing to Labor of 9.6%, which would win them not only the relatively low-hanging fruit of Swan (post-redistribution Liberal margin 3.2%, with incumbent Steve Irons having announced on the weekend that he will not seek re-election), Pearce (5.2%) and Hasluck (5.9%), but push them up to the level of the rarely discussed seat of Tangney (9.5%). However, the sample here is notably smaller at 602, for a margin of error of 4%. This is because Newspoll juiced up its samples from the three largest states in last week’s poll to provide leadership and COVID-19 management ratings for the premiers.
• Labor leads 53-47 in South Australia, down from 54-46, for a swing to Labor of 2.3%, which exceeds the 1.4% margin in Boothby, the state’s one Liberal marginal. Here the sample was a modest 472, and the margin of error about 4.5%.
From the other demographic breakdowns, the big eye-opener is movement to Labor among older voters. This is reflected in a narrowing in the Coalition lead among the 65-plus age cohort from 65-35 to 59-41, and among retirees from 61-39 to 57-43, from robust sample sizes of around 1500 in each case. The results also show the Coalition holding its ground among those in the $100,000 to $150,000 income cohort while losing it among those poorer and richer.
The results are combined from four polls conducted between July 14 and September 18, with a combined sample of 6705.
How much is USA paying Thailand ?
https://thediplomat.com/2021/08/us-breaks-ground-on-massive-thai-embassy-annex/
Contractors have broken ground on a large annex to the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, already one of America’s biggest in the world, a move that is intended to “support the continued expansion of U.S.-Thai diplomatic, security, and commercial relations.”
According to a statement issued by the U.S. Embassy today, Washington will spend $625 million dollars on the annex, which will keep approximately 2,000 local workers busy between now and its expected completion in 2025.
“The new annex will house U.S. agencies currently located in different facilities across Bangkok, centralize our existing operations, and further strengthen bilateral cooperation,” the statement said.
One for history buffs:
[‘London: Sometimes you just hit lucky. In 2010, six years after I finished my biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, Sotheby’s invited me to examine a cache of Elizabeth I documents they were offering for sale. Intrigued, I paid a visit to New Bond Street, where, breathtakingly, 43 documents in pristine condition – more than half signed by Elizabeth or her leading courtiers – were laid before me.
All shed fresh light on the penultimate phase of Mary’s 19-year imprisonment in England, many illustrating a mounting obsession over the possibility of her escape, as the threat of foreign invasion grew. One thrilling letter changes our view of history.
Missing since 1762, the documents had clearly been purloined around that time from the papers of Sir Ralph Sadler, Mary’s jailer in 1584-5, to whom most of them are addressed. As an ambassador to Scotland in the early 1540s, he’d held the baby Mary in his arms.
The documents had been hastily ripped out of a bound volume. They passed through the trade, until purchased by the late Lord Hesketh, whose estate sent them to Sotheby’s. Sold for £349,250, they promptly disappeared again.
Now, miraculously, all 43 items are on long loan to the British Library. Several will star in a landmark exhibition, Elizabeth and Mary: Royal Cousins, Rival Queens, which opens next week and closes in February. It’s the first major show to consider Elizabeth and Mary together, putting both women centre stage and giving them equal billing, each on her own terms. It tells their stories from their autographed letters, state papers, drafts of speeches, portraits, drawings, jewels, textiles, cipher codes, maps, and woodcut engravings.
Highlights include Elizabeth’s handwritten translation of her stepmother Katherine Parr’s “Prayers and Meditations” – a gift for her father Henry VIII – together with her personal crib for a fiery speech dissolving Parliament in 1567, and a treasured locket ring, which opens to display miniature portraits of herself and her mother, Anne Boleyn.’]
https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/lost-for-centuries-queen-s-letter-imitates-fiction-and-rewrites-history-20210929-p58vmh.html
What are the chances of this Government refusing him permission to leave the country.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/29/malcolm-turnbull-excoriates-scott-morrison-over-appalling-episode-with-french-submarine-deal
Firefox2 says:
Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 7:23 pm
“Biden was the choice of the Democrat-voting community in the US from Feb 2020…when the pandemic was in its earliest phase. Even then, Trump was in trouble.”
***
Not sure how you figure that considering the Iowa (first) Democratic Primary – which was won by Sanders – was only held on February 3rd. During that time Sanders was the front runner. Bloomberg was still the establishment’s pick at that stage. It wasn’t until weeks and months later that Biden was considered the favourite.
Biden was the come-from-nowhere surprise winner in South Carolina on 20 Feb. He was the runaway winner among black Americans, who really propelled him to the nomination from then on.
Biden’s strategy in the early 2020 primaries was to skip the crowded fields of the early primaries and put all of his eggs in the South Carolina basket because his people knew that primary was the earliest one with a high African American population (a demographic they knew was key to winning the nomination.) His team signalled well in advance that was his strategy, much to the mockery of the better-than-the-rest-of-us politics-kn0wers and it paid off for him in the end.
New thread.