Federal election minus 30 days

An audience of undecided voters offers a fairly even verdict following last night’s leaders debate, plus sundry other pieces of polling news and campaign detritus.

Polling and other horse race news:

• The 100 undecided voters selected to attend last night’s Sky News People’s forum included 40 who rated Anthony Albanese the winner compared with 35 for Scott Morrison, leaving 25 undecided.

• A uComms poll conducted for independent Kooyong candidate Monique Ryan credits her with a credulity-straining 59-41 lead over Liberal incumbent Josh Frydenberg. A report in the Herald-Sun relates that primary votes of 35.5% for Frydenberg, 31.8% for Ryan, 12.8% for Labor and 11.7% for the Greens, but there would also have been an undcided component. The poll was conducted last Tuesday from a sample of 847. Conversely, Greg Brown of The Australian reports the Liberals concede a more modest drop in Frydenberg’s primary vote from 47% to 44% over the past three months.

The Guardian reports a Community Engagement poll for Climate 200 in North Sydney found independent Kylea Tink, whose campaign Climate 200 is supporting, with 19.4% of the primary vote to Liberal member Trent Zimmerman’s 37.1%, with Labor on 17.3%, the Greens on 8.7%, the United Australia Party on 5.6% and others on 3.8%, with 8.2% undecided. Respondents were more likely to rank climate change and environment as their most important issue than the economy, at 27.2% and 19.7%, with trust in politics not far behind at 16.2%. The poll was conducted by phone on April 11 and 12 from a sample of 1114.

• The Age/Herald has further results on issue salience from its Resolve Strategic poll, showing cost of living the most salient issue for those under 55 and health and aged care leading for those older.

• I had a piece in Crikey yesterday on the recent history of the gender gap as recorded by opinion polls, and the threat posed to the government by the loss of support by women. Right on cue, Peter Lewis of Essential Research writes in The Guardian today that Scott Morrison’s “low standing with female voters … could well determine the outcome of this election”. It is noted that the gender breakdowns from Essential’s current poll have Morrison at 50% approval and 44% disapproval among men, but 39% approval and 51% disapproval among women. There is also a ten-point gap in its latest numbers for the Coalition primary vote.

Michelle Grattan in The Conversation relates detail on focus group research conducted in Wentworth by Landscape Research, which finds participants tended to rate the government highly on management of the economy and the pandemic, but took a dim view of Scott Morrison and favoured a leadership change to Josh Frydenberg.

Nice-looking things on other websites:

• The University of Queensland offers an attractive Election Ad Data Dashboard that tracks the various parties’ spending on advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Through this medium at least, Labor has thus far led the field with 44.5% of spending since the start of the campaign compared with 26.5% for the Coalition, 12% for the United Australia Party and 10.2% for independents, the latter being concentrated in Kooyong, North Sydney, Wentworth and Mackellar. The $15,000 spend on Josh Frydenberg’s campaign in Kooyong is around triple that of any other Liberal seat. The Financial Review quotes Glenn Kefford of the UQ political science department saying Labor’s 2019 election post-morten was “damning of the digital operation and made it clear that they needed to win the share of voice online if they were going to be successful”.

• Simon Jackman of the University of Sydney is tracking the betting markets in great detail, and translating the odds into “implied probabilities of winning” that currently have it at around 55-45 in favour of Labor. Alternatively, the poll-based Buckley’s & None forecast model rates Labor a 67.2% change for a majority with the Coalition at only 11.1%.

• In a piece for The Conversation, Poll Bludger contributor Adrian Beaumont offers a colour-coded interactive map showing where he considers the swing most likely to be on, based on various demographic considerations.

• A report in The Guardian identifying electorates targeted with the most in “election campaign promises and discretionary grants” since the start of the year had Bass leading the field, with the marginal Labor-held New South Wales seats of Gilmore, Dobell and Hunter high on the list, alongside the seemingly safe Liberal seats of Canning, Durack and Forrest in Western Australia.

Everything else:

• The Liberal candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, is standing firm against calls for her to withdraw after her social media accounts turned up considerably more radical commentary on transgender issues than suggested by the initial promotion of her as a campaigner for strict definitions of sex in women’s sport. In this she has the support of Scott Morrison, who decried “those who are seeking to cancel Katherine simply because she has a different view to them on the issue of women and girls in sport” (though Samantha Maiden of News Corp notes she has gone rather quiet of her own accord), together with many of the party’s conservatives. Those who have called for her to withdraw include North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman, New South Wales Treasurer Matt Kean and state North Shore MP Felicity Wilson. A Liberal source quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald dismissed the notion the party had been unaware of her record when it fast-tracked her for preselection last month with the support of Scott Morrison. Barring action by noon today, Deves will appear as the Liberal candidate on the ballot paper.

• An increasingly assertive Australian Electoral Commission has expressed concern about the parties’ practice of sending out postal vote applications and advised voters against making use of them, and establishing a disinformation register responding to conspiracy theories about voter fraud, a number of which are being peddled by One Nation and the United Australia Party.

• Perth’s centrality to Labor’s election hopes has been emphasised by Anthony Albanese’s announcement that the party’s national campaign launch will be held in the city on Sunday, May 1.

Also:

• David Speirs, factionally unaligned Environment Minister in the Marshall government, is the new South Australian Opposition Leader after winning 18 votes in a Liberal party room ballot ahead of moderate Josh Teague on five and conservative Nick McBride seemingly only securing his own vote. Liberal veteran Vickie Chapman has announced she will resign from parliament by the end of May, which will result in a by-election for her safe seat of Bragg.

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.

1,162 comments on “Federal election minus 30 days”

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  1. A-E: Unauthorised boat arrivals is a guaranteed loser issue for Labor. The only sensible strategy is for the Labor leader of the day to say over and over again that Operations Sovereign Borders is wonderful and Labor will just keep it rolling it out.

    FWIW, here’s my potted version of the history of policy on unauthorised boat arrivals. Happy to stand corrected on any point.

    1. There was a time when the Libs were more sympathetic to them than Labor. Fraser was far more sympathetic than Labor towards Vietnamese boat arrivals (or “fucking Vietnamese Balts” as Gough was supposed to have referred to them in private). But these boats had come all the way from Hong Kong or Vietnam itself, so were a little different to what showed up later on.

    2. The development of people smuggling schemes out of Indonesia – through which people wishing to claim refugee status in Australia would fly from their home country to Indonesia and then pay tens of thousands of dollars for a boat trip to Ashmore Reef or Christmas Island or wherever) – began under the Hawke-Keating Government. Ministers Robert Ray and Gerry Hand took a tough line against these people, mandating their onshore detention (or “reception and processing” as it was euphemistically called) and deporting those who were unsuccessful after exhausting all avenues of appeal. These arrangements faced criticism from the bleeding heart faction of the Libs and the Labor left faction but, interestingly, when a left faction Minister of Immigration was appointed in the form of Nick Bolkus, he was persuaded by his department not to muck around with the detention system.

    3. A series of unhelpful court decisions eventually made the onshore detention system unworkable. And that’s when government officials under Howard came up with a clever mixture of strategies involving excising some parts of Australia for migration purposes, establishing offshore processing centres on Pacific Islands, and providing only temporary protection for the small number of people who could get through those barriers.

    4. The Rudd Government – reflecting both Rudd’s personal views and also perhaps the growing internal power of the left faction – tore this framework down, on the basis of the totally false argument that asylum seekers were driven by “push” factors rather than “pull factors” which meant that, the world allegedly being less war-torn than it was under Howard, it was safe to relax things. Of course, this approach came terribly unstuck and has placed an indelible black mark on Labor’s record in this area in the minds of many voters.

    5. After they failed to get the Malaysian Solution through the Senate, the Gillard Government began to re-establish the offshore detention centres. And then Rudd Mark 2 made his celebrated comment that the people in those centres would never come to Australia. That sounded good, and clearly had an effect in dampening the efforts of the people smugglers, but Rudd has subsequently walked back from that comment and now seems to claim that he didn’t really mean it.

    6. The Abbott Government introduced the current set of policies, which included turn backs and the extremely clever orange lifeboat idea. These policies have been almost completely successful (I think there might have been two boats arrive in the past 7 or 8 years, and these were from Sri Lanka, which made them impossible to turn back).

    Labor, if it likes, can choose to start quibbling over who succeeded in stopping the boats. But that will simply provide the Libs with the opportunity to re-hash the whole story of how badly Labor stuffed everything up in the 2007-10 period and also Rudd’s later denials that he ever meant to keep people in offshore detention forever.

    I was actually surprised last night that ScoMo didn’t interrupt Albo when the latter said “we introduced offshore processing” and point out that what Labor did was bring it back after they had made an utter mess by abolishing it in the first place. ScoMo didn’t bother quibbling about this because he knows what voters think about the issue.

    Labor’s ongoing approach to this issue should be “here be dragons.”

  2. Peter Hartcher is ‘Not happy, Scott!’:

    In a few days, Australia’s leaders will stand solemnly, heads bowed, to honour the nation’s war dead on Anzac Day. They should hang their heads in shame.

    Australians fought and died to prevent a hostile power from establishing a base in Solomon Islands in World War II.

    Now we discover that a hostile power has established a political foundation for military patrolling and a potential base in Solomon Islands.

    China has stolen a march on Australia, a 4000-kilometre advance from its nearest existing military base, without firing a shot. Merely by signing an agreement with Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.

    … The military historian Peter Dean points out that the South Pacific “has always been our number one focus and area, all the way back to the 1800s”.

    He acknowledges Scott Morrison’s defence – that Solomons is a sovereign nation that makes its own decisions – “but the question is, did we use all resources available? It doesn’t look like it.”

    https://www.smh.com.au/national/leaders-should-hang-their-heads-in-shame-over-solomons-china-deal-20220420-p5aewq.html

  3. What does this mean…
    The last Newspoll breakdowns for the March quarter gave the Coalition a 54-46 lead in Queensland, and this is likely closer to Queensland’s voting intentions than current breakdowns, as Newspoll now weights by education.”

    Does it imply that QLD is less well educated than previously assumed in polling at the last election?

  4. Always better to be more cautious than blindly optimistic (particularly when the caution is based on evidence of the past), but I suppose that’s an area I often disagree with people on here about!

  5. Morning all. Even David Speers is calling it a “slim win” for Albo last night.
    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-21/first-election-debate-morrison-albanese/101003860

    This won’t mean much ot the Scomo spruikers in the MSM. But certainly Albo gave them no ammunition to fire at him last night. It was a good performance.

    Whereas our foreign policy remains in a big fat mess. Somebody should give Scomo a Chinese warship trophy inscribed “I started these”.

  6. The truth is, it was a lot harder mountain for Albanese to climb to a win in the debate last night than that for Morrison.

  7. I never thought about this angle to Morrison’s Autism comment:

    Max Heerey
    @max_heerey

    My incredible Fiancée
    @TamePunk
    is autistic and I am more than BLESSED to know her let alone be engaged to her.

    @ScottMorrisonMP
    shame on you.

  8. Simon Birmingham must be the most boring speaker in Australia..

    ..his droning voice almost put me back to sleep even after waking from 8hrs in dreamland..

    ..keeps droning on even as PK tries to interrupt in order to bring him back to the question..

    ..don’t know what the feck he’s talking about, but..

  9. A point well made by David Speers:

    Morrison usually has a strong command of facts and figures, which is handy in a debate.

    He can cite all sorts of numbers to get himself out of most tight spots and look like he has a good handle on what he’s doing.

    This mostly worked for him on Wednesday night, although repeatedly citing the exact number of pages involved in his draft National Integrity Commission bill — 357, in case you’re wondering — doesn’t appear to have satisfied anyone who just wants an anti-corruption body with teeth.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-21/first-election-debate-morrison-albanese/101003860

  10. sprocket_says:
    Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 8:18 am

    “Birmo’ s job is to run down the clock”

    No point having him on then..

    ..unless Coalition plan is to bore us all into submission..

  11. He also makes another good point. How many of those Undecided Voters in the room last night actually prefer to give their vote to PHON or the UAP and neither of the major parties? 😯

  12. @Sceptic
    ‘Does it imply that Qld is less well educated than previously assumed?’

    Well, now, I’s a Queenslander and, I gotta’say, Pa never was one fer all that fancy book learnin’!

  13. “An Old Man Streaming
    @AnOldManStream1

    “Hollie Hughes has just blamed disabled people for the problems in the NDIS. F*ck me.”

    #auspol #ausvotes2022 #breakfastnews

    Suspect this has a long way to run yet..

  14. Re Meher Baba @7:15. Good post.

    ”…do you want to take a risk and vote for the nice dreamers, or hold your nose and vote for the a***hole you can hardly stand, but who you know is competent and won’t stuff everything up?”

    Good point and something that Labor needs to counter. Of course aside from the part about the PM being a rectum, this particular premise upon which he is pitching for reelection is utterly false. The PM and his Government have proved incompetent and total stuff-ups in responding to all of this term’s challenges – the Fires, the pandemic response (vaccine acquisition, stroll-out, Jobkeeper, RATs) and lately Flood. Heaven help us if there is ever a war while the Coalition are in office.

  15. Whilst attending to my morning ablutions I had the misfortune to catch 10 minutes of Birmingham trying to run down the clock on a dogged Karvelas who had the last word in saying that his lack of a proper response indicated that he supported Deves’ candidature.

  16. “Hollie Hughes has just blamed disabled people for the problems in the NDIS. F*ck me.”
    ______
    Said person admirably fits the mould of Nasty Liberal Woman admirably.

  17. This is utter 100% bullshit, Meha:

    “ And then Rudd Mark 2 made his celebrated comment that the people in those centres would never come to Australia. That sounded good, and clearly had an effect in dampening the efforts of the people smugglers, but Rudd has subsequently walked back from that comment and now seems to claim that he didn’t really mean it.”

    ____

    Rudd hasnt walked back a bit of it. The point HE made was that the 2,000 asylum seekers caught between his announcement and the boats finally stopping were to be processed to a third country asap. For reasons of domestic politics (ie. appearing to be tougher than Labor) this is something that ScoMo and Dutton simply refused to do, and then later dragged the chain on. Only Trumble made any effort to remove them from was was turning out to be indefinite detention without hope, via his sub Rosa deal with Obama.

    There is no doubt that at re-elected Labor would have taken up NZ’s offer to resettle 150 asylum seekers per year from those folk stuck in our offshore detention centre from late 2013. The LNP should have done likewise. there seems to be little doubt that upon the election of the Trudeau in Canada in 2015 that a similar deal would have been struck. Moreover it is worth speculating that a re-elected Labor Government would have been able to negotiate a deal with the Americans to take effect much earlier than 2017. In fact under a re-elected Labor Government one could well imagine that at least half of those 2,000 souls would halve been resettled by the 2016 election with the balance being resolved shortly thereafter (I note that Rudd claimed to have been able to do the lot within a year of re-election, but THAT is something that I call shenanigans on, unless he was able to leverage his relationship with Obama such that America took say around 1,500 to 1,800 as one ‘job lot’).

    Whilst would still have taken time, it would have taken far less time than under the liberals to resettle these asylum seekers in third countries. Better still, those in detention would have not been left is soul crushing limbo – they would have known that there was hope and that would be resettled.

    THAT, however is a long way from Rudd ‘claiming he never meant it’. Further: his ‘comments’ weren’t just a press conference ‘announceable’: they were actually policy.

    Whilst there is no doubt Labor can’t ‘win’ on Asylum seekers, there is no reason why it has to lose so badly. Calling out ScoMo’s lies and exaggerations and reminding folk that the centrepiece of Australia’s policy framework remains the Rudd-Albanese ‘no visa for boat arrivals’ policy is a very good way to lessen this loss, and perhaps even neutralise it. Given that the presstitutes are going to keep asking, and ScoMo is going to keep bullshitting on this issue, there is no point Labor sticking its head in the sand and allow for these free hits.

  18. Hughes is actually a pretty strong defender of the NDIS. She was one of the few that spoke out against independent assessments.

  19. Re BK @8:27. “… I had the misfortune to catch 10 minutes of Birmingham trying to run down the clock on a dogged Karvelas who had the last word in saying that his lack of a proper response indicated that he supported Deves’ candidature.”

    We need to see more of this from journalists. When a politician refuses to answer a question it’s because they know that the answer they could give, or maybe the fact that they don’t know the answer, would reflect badly on them and/or their side, so they’ll waffle on about something else. When they do, it shouldn’t just be allowed to go to the Keeper. We are entitled to put the worst possible construction on what their answer might be. This should be pointed out.

  20. @BK “Blessed” is a translation of the greek word makarios. It is tough to translate in how its used. Some translations use happy, but this is limited since it says “makarios are those who mourn for they will be comforted” (happy are the unhappy?).

    Lucky is another possible translation, but there are non-trivial questions about God’s sovereignty, what God allows vs causes and what can be attributed to luck.

    So I think “I’m blessed” translates roughly to “I’m lucky but don’t know what the role of luck vs God’s intervention plays but I want to give thanks to God for this”

    The sermon on the mount/plain is all about counter intuitive blessings (blessed are those who mourn, the poor, the poor in spirit, meek, persecuted for justice, persecuted for Jesus, peacemakers)

    I guess a pentecostal would interpret this as blessings on top of the usual blessings (I’m blessed I have nothing to mourn about right now!)

    For those curious I’m a pentecostal labour voter

  21. Hollie Hughes following the Basil Fawlty School of Management. He reckoned the place would be a decent hotel were it not for the guests.

  22. Nikki Savva also writes that even now, in the middle of the election campaign, some libs want to give smoko the boot and swap leaders.
    And given her contacts, this would not be a porky

  23. BK at 8:28 am

    What does “blessed” mean, anyway?

    On planet Pentecostal it probably means it is a sign you are in god’s good books. The non blessed are of course sinful types.

  24. poroti @ #72 Thursday, April 21st, 2022 – 8:25 am

    Severe autism is not a blessing , for the person themselves or their loved ones.

    That’s why it’s called The Autism Spectrum. Those on one end are different to those on the other, and there is everything in-between. So to state that they and their families are not blessed is derogatory.

  25. The West newspaper is in semi-sulk mood this morning after suggesting, for days, that Albanese is “Not fit to be PM” or wtte and made its main headline something to do with a local ambulance ramping matter.
    Their cheer-squad are all at it today with local Paul Murray giving of his ancient and one-sided opinion and Lanai Scarr massaging the message in that there was “Nothing to move the dial for voters…”
    There was almost a lament from one of them….Sarah-Jane Tasker…..which reads…”Morrison is known to be a good debater but he appeared almost too comfortable during the forum and failed to go in hard enough on his opponent, except for a heated exchange over boat-turn-backs.”
    And, also begrudgingly Albanese was given a point for “Winning the Day”….
    Of course, it was in the commentary where the true feeling was to be found……
    “The conventional wisdom is that Opposition leaders just have to put up a half-decent performance -with no stuff-ups during leaders’ debates to score a points victory over the incumbent…So the debate, and therefor the day, goes to Albanese”
    This is really sour-grapes stuff….
    Nonetheless Morrison is going to shit it in according to the West as he is leading 7-2 with 2 points for a tie…….
    This will keep the over 60s happy at least………

  26. ltep @ #28 Thursday, April 21st, 2022 – 7:29 am

    Was talking to someone who is out campaigning for Liberals in WA the other day and they are feeling there might be a chance of re-election or hung parliament (they would hope that). They have been shocked Labor’s campaign is so poor. Their ultimate feeling is that Morrison is loathed (they don’t believe the approval ratings in polls) and that the Anyone but Scomo factor might see them defeated.

    As if someone with inbuilt bias can begin to assess how ‘poor’ or otherwise their opponent’s campaign is. Just look at Lars comments on the ‘debate’ last night.

  27. Oh dear.

    WA is yet to indicate whether it will ease close contact rules, while Premier Mark McGowan has been forced into isolation after a family member tested positive (ABC)

  28. Tricot,
    I am appreciating your ‘Comments from the Cave’ every day. It gives us a vital perspective. 🙂

    (No offence intended about the cave quip)

  29. Apparently Steve777 thinks this little vignette from meha constitutes a “Good post”:

    “ ”…do you want to take a risk and vote for the nice dreamers, or hold your nose and vote for the a***hole you can hardly stand, but who you know is competent and won’t stuff everything up?”

    Methinks that at least someone is having a huge cognitive dissonance moment in accepting this proposition. It may ring true for 2019, but NOT for 2022.

    Who – exactly thinks that ScoMo or his team “is competent and won’t stuff everything up?”

    ScoMo seems to get points for JobKeeper because it protected a lot of middle Australia during 2020. That’s fair enough and perhaps explains why people aren’t shitty enough that $35 billion was overpaid. ScoMo gets points for ‘the boats’. Risible as that is. However, for the life of me I cannot see any residual sentiment out there in voter land that ScoMo is generally perceived as competent and not prone to stuff things up. In fact his track record is in and perception is clear: not only is he an arsehole but from bean to cup, he fucks up: an omnishambles.

    I think the actual election equation for the ‘undecided’ is something like this:

    “Albo seems like a nice guy, but a bit of a duffer. I’m scared about inflation. While ScoMo is a dick and likely to fuck things up, we all know that a Liberal is better handling money, so do I take a punt on a bloke who sounds economically clueless or stick with the bloke that we know might still keep fucking up, but might also come through for me in the end like he eventually did with JobKeeper?”

  30. BK @ #75 Thursday, April 21st, 2022 – 8:27 am

    Whilst attending to my morning ablutions I had the misfortune to catch 10 minutes of Birmingham trying to run down the clock on a dogged Karvelas who had the last word in saying that his lack of a proper response indicated that he supported Deves’ candidature.

    Surely an effective treatment for constipation, although a bit extreme.

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