Newspoll: 55-45 to Labor (open thread)

A steady lead for Labor, a softening of approval for Anthony Albanese, and solid support for an Indigenous voice to parliament.

The Australian reports the first Newspoll for the year has Labor’s two-party lead unchanged at 55-45, from primary votes of Labor 38% (down one), Coalition 34% (down one), Greens 11% (steady) and One Nation 6% (steady). Anthony Albanese is down five on approval to 57% and up four on disapproval to 33%, while Peter Dutton is steady at 36% and up one to 46%. Albanese’s lead as preferred prime minister narrows from 59-24 to 56-26.

There were further questions on the Indigenous voice to parliament, which found 56% in support (28% strongly and 28% partly) and 37% opposed (23% strongly and 14% partly). Extensive further detail on why respondents felt the way the did. The most favoured among listed of reasons for those opposed was that “it won’t help the issues facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians”. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Saturday from a sample of 1512.

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.

1,539 comments on “Newspoll: 55-45 to Labor (open thread)”

Comments Page 31 of 31
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  1. Bob Hawke opened our specially created Bicentennial Garden and place to sit in the shade and eat lunch and outdoor teaching area pre Kola, at Strathfield North Primary in 1988. His minder and mate Peter Barron’s children attended the school, as did a couple of mine at the time. I was the organiser of the Bicentennial Garden Committee, and got to have a cup of tea and short conversation with the great man in the assembly hall. He did not appear to be particularly delighted to be there, but he came, and smiled and gave a nice little speech. What a good bloke!

    I also met Isaac Stern in the green room at Sydney Town Hall long ago. Ah! Memories.

  2. Snappy Tom says:
    Tuesday, February 7, 2023 at 9:07 pm

    Upnorth says:
    Tuesday, February 7, 2023 at 7:16 pm

    Simon Henny Penny Katich says:
    Tuesday, February 7, 2023 at 6:49 pm

    poroti @ #1420 Tuesday, February 7th, 2023 – 6:18 pm

    Simon Henny Penny Katich at 6:43 pm

    The Emperor of Lang Park none the less.

    I thought even QLD’ers turned off that Wally after recent events.

    He’s been caught drinking Tooheys?

    Something like that.
    中华人民共和国
    Even Hawkie was not perfect in “matters of the flesh” and I still reckon he is Bonza. Wally will always be the Emperor and has the statue to prove it!
    ____________

    Remember HG & Roy in commentary calling Allan Langer “Deborah Kerr” (The King and I)?
    中华人民共和国
    Do they still call State of Origin? “Three Knees” Mick Hancock was a favourite.

  3. “Shoigu: Nato involvement in Ukraine risks ‘unpredictable level of escalation’
    Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, has warned that western arms supplies to Ukraine are effectively “dragging” Nato into the conflict and that could lead to an “unpredictable level of escalation”.”

    Veiled threats of nuclear escalation aside, which are completely unrealistic, what kind of threat is Shoigu referring to, given the utter failure of the Russian army to overwhelm the numerically inferior Ukrainian army in Eastern Ukraine?… Is Shoigu planning to extend the conventional war to Nato countries, like the Baltic states?… With what expected consequences?… Moreover, why has Russia’s ally Belarus avoided fully entering the war?

  4. Rossmcg @ Tuesday, February 7, 2023 at 8:54 pm
    “Steve

    I “met” Bob Hawke at the Bunbury races in the mid 70s. He walked past the bar and I said “Gidday Bob” and he said “Gidday” and walked on to a chorus of friendly greetings from the other punters.
    In those days I’d say a majority of the blokes at the bar would have been union members.
    The local Liberals were up in the members.
    I recall being struck by how short he was.”

    I met Gough Whitlam in the late 90’s. Maybe 2000. Even at the age he was at the time, I was struck by how tall he was 🙂

  5. Met Hawkie a couple of times. First was the Centenary Celebrations of the Birth the ALP that were held in Townsville in 1991. The local Branches then hired a bus to Barcaldine for the big celebration and Bob stayed for a night and sang Waltzing Matilda. There was a big march through Barcaldine and we all visted the site of the Great Shearers Strike -had tea and damper with Golden Syrup.

    Bob and Wayne Goss opened the Workers Heritage Centre in “Barky” on that visit. A young Upnorth was inoculated for life (take that Pfizer and Moderna)!

  6. Earlier this evening I caught up with an engineering friend who work(ed) in the Adelaide office of the same consulting firm I worked for a few years ago.

    He had just been retrenched along with much of his section. He is a senior rail engineer, married with school aged kids and mortgage. I was a bit shocked.

    There has been a noticeable slow down in consulting engineering work in Adelaide since about 3rd quarter in 2022. It is partly understandable given the number of dodgy projects Morrison funded that needed to be cancelled. Still…

    I hope State and Federal Labor will get the new things planned with the saved money moving soon. Engineering design is only around 8 to 10% of rail projects costs. So if there is not enough engineering work now, a lot of tradies will be out of work in six months time.

  7. Hawke had his profile and his associations thru his positions with the ACTU

    He was well met

    I first met him when on secondment at the Uni of Adelaide and he visited the Campus, so circa 1975

    We finished up in the Union Bar, famous then for its “Green beer” and when I learned Bob could out drink me, very, very easily

    He was a celebrity of note at that time

    And was a pm in waiting – only needing to enter the Parliament and where the timing was his (and serve some time in the Parliament for credibility in that forum)

    Throughout his life he would do anything to promote the Labor cause. This included attending campaign launches for any candidate who asked, even very late in his life

    “Bloody Tories”

    “Why did we cop the First Global Oil Crisis, Stock Exchange crashes in 1973 and 1987 and the GFC – and not those bloody Tories”

    Well Bob, it was just as well Labor were in government thru those challenging Global events

    And to digress, look at where support went to with the Pandemic – Balance Sheets of Companies (who then complain at paying tax on the windfall!!)

    And other Companies were allowed to trade whilst insolvent!!!!

    That Hockey said Hawke would have voted Tory was the greatest nonsense of our lifetimes

    Yes, Bob loved a punt

    As he loved his cricket

    And life

    Height? Same as me so go easy on the “short”!!

    But he had hollow legs – as I found out

    There is a statue to him at Bordertown in SA

    The Liberals had Billy Snedden – among others

    But that is another story

    Having spent time on secondment to Treasury in Canberra from 1971 until 1973

    When Margaret and Gough had accounts with every bank, “Comrade”

    Now they were both tall – very tall

    It was an experience to go to Parliament to see Gough in action – sitting in the Guests row on the floor of the House

    And invitation to the Members Bar

  8. The Cash Rate has had 9 consecutive hikes, from 0.1%

    To 3.35%

    In 2008, courtesy of inflation delivered by a “bloody Tory” government transitioning the proceeds of the First Mining Boom of 2004 until 2007 (both inclusive), the Cash Rate had a 7 in front of it

    And what we owed to our home mortgage lenders had increased from $335 Billion in 2000 to a lazy $1.226 Trillion when the GFC hit

    The GFC and the response of government (and Treasury and the RBA) reducing the Cash Rate to 3% took pressure from servicing a mortgage

    Look at the 30 year graph of the Cash Rate, then superimpose the GDP line and another line for home mortgage debt

    The consideration in 2008 was the collapse of the housing market as happened elsewhere around the World

    Hence go hard and go fast

    And it worked

    3.35% people

    Money is still very, very cheap

    I note there is no question on the inflation band the RBA refers to

    Even at 2/3% we have inflation plus the cost of funds as the borrowing rate (in broad terms)

    Then banks have their Treasury functions

  9. “Money is still very, very cheap”

    While this is true, observa, if you’d just overseen the blow-off top of a 30 year bubble in housing prices, I don’t think that approaching it with the sharpest increase in interest rates in history is the best way to deflate it.

    Perhaps something more controlled, gradual and better communicated would be appropriate?

  10. Past time for a purge of the upper ranks at DFAT, it seems:

    ‘Penny Wong overruled her department and insisted on sending an observer to the first meeting of countries that support a landmark United Nations treaty banning nuclear weapons, new documents reveal.’

    ***

    ‘Wong’s spokesperson said the government was “engaging constructively to identify realistic pathways for nuclear disarmament” and that was why the minister had signed off on Templeman’s attendance as an observer.’

    ***

    ‘The documents also reveal Dfat officials warned in August against uniting with other countries to sign a statement of concern about the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/07/penny-wong-overruled-department-by-sending-observer-to-anti-nuclear-treaty-meeting

  11. I was just about to post the same piece of news posted by Oliver Sutton on
    Wednesday, February 8, 2023 at 5:23 am. So, I will just briefly comment on that:
    It is now clear that the “I wonna more details” position of Peter Dutton is just the classic “sitting on the fence” ploy dictated by fears that anything he says that’s more decisive will be a disaster. An open position for NO will alienate the few remaining soft-Liberals who will vote for the Teals (or the ALP) next time around; whereas an open position for YES will alienate the hard-Liberals who Dutton surely believes are the fundamental core of the Liberal party.

    Conclusion: As demonstrated at the 2022 federal election, the Liberal party is in deep shit. This won’t be a matter of just getting an “Abbott-style” character back to start a stupid Murdochite campaign that (unfortunately) did finally work between 2007 and 2013. This is completely different, because the country is completely different!

  12. OS,
    You can be sure that DFAT had been stuffed full of supporters with a like mind to the Coalition, over their 10 odd years in power.

  13. I can see why the Greens preselected Thorpe over Burnside – the party has been accused of being the party of white people, lacking cultural diversity among its MPs. But as so often happens when you preselect someone to be That Diversity Candidate, it often backfires because the person was never a suitable choice to begin with. Far better to do what Labor has done and have structural processes embedded within the party that allows diverse candidates to be preselected.

    And so it is no surprise to hear Burnside who lost to Thorpe with sour grapes.

    Human rights activist and barrister Julian Burnside, who sought the Senate position in a ballot against Thorpe two years ago, said she had treated Greens supporters badly when their work had won the seat for the party last year.

    Thorpe hit back at her critics late on Tuesday by declaring they should stop “demonising” her when she was giving Aboriginal people a say and drew her support from a grassroots collective of sovereign black people.

    Greens members privately admitted the “catastrophe” for the party from her defection and said the outcome raised questions over the preselection ballot in June 2020 that elevated her to the Senate rather than naming Burnside.

    While some defended the process as a fair fight – Thorpe won the support of 58 per cent of the 2342 members who voted – others said the membership had taken a gamble on the outspoken candidate and discovered it had not paid off.

    https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/hand-back-your-seat-says-greens-candidate-who-lost-to-thorpe-20230207-p5cilt.html

    The challenge for the Greens is not to go back to their pale precedents just because they got a bad egg, but to continue to embrace diversity and recognise the benefits to the party of having MPs who are representative of Australia at large.


  14. Socrates says:
    Tuesday, February 7, 2023 at 11:37 pm
    ….
    There has been a noticeable slow down in consulting engineering work in Adelaide since about 3rd quarter in 2022. It is partly understandable given the number of dodgy projects Morrison funded that needed to be cancelled. Still…

    There are Electrical Engineering jobs in Victoria at the moment, I am turning down about one a week. Trains I don’t know.

  15. Alpo,
    The country IS completely different, demographically. The Rise of the Millennials and the Fall of the Baby Boomers has occurred. Generations with a social and environmental conscience have been brought up, the internet has allowed groups with a like mind to communicate and organise globally and new heroes and heroines, like Greta Thunberg, have stood up to the entrenched interests and prevailed. And influenced hearts and minds. It’s so good to see and it gives me hope for the future.

  16. It is now clear that the “I wonna more details” position of Peter Dutton is just the classic “sitting on the fence” ploy dictated by fears that anything he says that’s more decisive will be a disaster.

    I’ve said all along it’s just a way for him to have a bob each way without committing one way or the other, thereby appeasing both sides within his partyroom.

    Pretty weak really, when you think about it.

  17. Thorpe hit back at her critics late on Tuesday by declaring they should stop “demonising” her when she was giving Aboriginal people a say and drew her support from a grassroots collective of sovereign black people.

    And that’s the main problem with Lidia Thorpe in one sentence. She wasn’t elected to be the BlakGreens Senator. She was elected to be a Greens Senator and represent the views of the Greens’ voters in Victoria. The majority of which want to support The Uluru Voice From the Heart and the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

  18. Andrew Earlwood @ 9.00pm
    The common feature, connecting all of these Senators or Senate candidates, is failure.
    They have all been turfed out of their respective HOR Seats or State seats by their former electorates.
    At least Lucy Wicks (not Weeks, although she was a rather lame and weak local member) and Deb O’Neill can reminisce about their respective failures as former members for Robertson. Deb can also join Brian McGowan in Central Coast folklore as a person responsible for losing two seats. Her own in 2013 and Fowler in 2022.
    Her machinations led to the ALP dumping a hardworking and vital Senator, KK, and the stupid decision to attempt to parachute KK into Fowler.

  19. “Here we go again says:
    Wednesday, February 8, 2023 at 12:14 am

    3.35% people

    Money is still very, very cheap”

    On the one hand I agree, on the other think about the size of the average mortgage:
    $725,000 in NSW
    $623,000 in VIC
    $523,000 in QLD

    at an interest rate of 6% p.a., the repayment of interests alone is about:
    $43,000 in NSW
    $37,000 in VIC
    $31,000 in QLD

    This will eat away a big chunk of the salary earned by one member of a couple… if you are lucky enough to have a couple! If you are on your own, you better have a well-paid job or else….

    The Reserve Bank should stop this madness, they are hurting people big time to chase an inflation rate that’s naturally going to decrease, given that Covid is going down as a factor.

  20. C@

    By the sounds of it, one of the reasons she quit was that the BlakGreens disagreed with her on the Voice.

    Which raises some interesting questions – Thorpe always claimed to be ‘speaking for her constituents’ without explaining who these were; she then shifted to being a merely a conduit for the BlakGreens, and thus there was no point asking her questions, to now being the Voice for black activists (but not the BlakGreens). (Maths suggests that, at most, she’s the Voice for less than 100,000 people nationwide).

    It’s also unclear exactly what Thorpe wants. She has been given her guarantees on sovereignty. The Greens were/are still willing to put Treaty first.

    It seems she has reverted, once again, to walking out simply because people disagreed with her.

    Anyway, it’s a good result for the future of the Voice, which has always been my main concern. A few partisan Green stooges have been silly enough to nail her colours to their mast, but even they disagree with her stance on Voice. The Greens themselves can now wholeheartedly back it in Parliament, and are on board well before the real campaign starts, so damage has been minimised.

  21. Slowly, slowly.

    White Australia is not ready to embrace a Treaty….yet. That involves a recognition that the English colonisation was wrong. Coming to that humility will take at least another ten years AFTER the Voice has had a chance to do its work.

  22. zoomster,
    From the reading about Lidia Thorpe that I have done, it seems that she was heavily influenced by Michael Mansell, Paul and Isobel Coe, her mother and her uncle. As you correctly characterise it, they are all from the BlakActivist wing of Indigenous politics. They are the ones who want revolution, not evolution. That never goes well. Their numbers are small and they can be easily ignored and have been. The most influential they have been has been for the government to tolerate the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Though it appears that the forces behind it realised that that wasn’t ever going to achieve the change they desired so they identified a way into the seat of power via getting one of their own, Lidia Thorpe, a position in the Senate with The Greens. But a, ‘my way or the highway’ stance was never going to end well with a political party based upon political consensus and whose voters are mainly of good heart wrt advancing the cause of FN people and who are smart enough to respect what the majority of Indigenous people want, not one small, angry group within the diaspora. The cataclysm was thus, inevitable.

    Also, the FN friends I have are more of the ‘evolution not revolution’ types. Willing to work together with us Whitefellas and not wanting to overthrow us.

  23. Oliver Sutton Tues 7th @7.11pm says:-

    In my student days I played for pleasure and little profit in a covers band. We scored a booking for an in-store promotion of a boutique named Fifi’s Gearbox (well, it was the 1970s).

    ………………………………………………………………………
    I’m still catching up with blogs from days ago, I just read Oli’s mentioning of Fifi’s Gearbox in Brisbane.
    All I can say is that ‘Those were the days, my friend’ when Brisbane was full of clothing boutiques for women and men. Perhaps the trendiest of all was ‘Westminister’ on the corner of Queen and Edward Sts up on the first floor of one of the oldest buildings in Brisbane at the time. Gone now.
    Interesting story of Oli meeting JOK and his punchline ‘Who’s this c**t?

    On meeting PM Bob Hawke.

    I was fortunate to have met PM Bob Hawke at a Labor function a year or two after his election as I accompanied my father in law, who was partially sighted, in an effort for him to request better pay and conditions for the blind workers at their Dutton Park workshops.
    I was surprised at how easy it was for us to simply walk up to his table, wait in line for a minute or two and speak to him. After my father in law finished his request, Hawke turned to Bob Hogg who was seated beside him and said words to the effect of ‘Can you fix this up Bob?’
    And he did.

    On seeing the almighty Gough!

    Brisbane City Hall in 1975, watching this great orator, had me mesmerized and so started my Labor journey and I’m still maintaining the rage.

  24. You can’t really blame Albo for focusing on symbolic policy like Constitutional recognition for first nations etc when he has inherited woeful balance sheet, combine this with rampant inflation worldwide and it becomes a tough gig. We are now closing in on the crazy 10% or more american and british inflation rates at a rate of knots. Sadly alot of these market forces are beyond the control of individual goverments such as ours that are are fully integrated into the global financial and trading systems.

    Jim Chalmers appears to want to make a name for himself in the caucus and as a rare as hens teeth Federal labor sitting QLD mp he has a great opportunity to channel all the finest economic management traditions of the Keating era Labor Right and become the undisputed leader of the Right. If Albo has a good run and does follow through with retiring after two terms Chalmers will be in the box seat. It will be interesting to see if his so far impressive measured and conservative approach can continue favourably for the economy.

  25. ‘Lynchpin says:
    Wednesday, February 8, 2023 at 6:50 am

    Slowly, slowly.

    White Australia is not ready to embrace a Treaty….yet. That involves a recognition that the English colonisation was wrong. Coming to that humility will take at least another ten years AFTER the Voice has had a chance to do its work.’
    ==============================
    You left out Makarrata.

  26. ‘Lynchpin says:
    Wednesday, February 8, 2023 at 6:50 am

    Slowly, slowly.

    White Australia…’
    ———————-
    I didn’t know we had one of those.

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