Miscellany: Morgan, Guardian poll tracker, preselection latest (open thread)

Another week, another Morgan poll. Plus sundry preselection news, new federal boundaries for the Northern Territory, and an unorthodox new aggregated polling result.

Newspoll did not grace us with its usual three-weekly presence on Sunday evening, but the weekly Roy Morgan can always be relied upon – as presumably can the fortnightly Essential Research, which should be reported tomorrow and previewed by the time most of you read this in The Guardian. Roy Morgan finds the Coalition opening up a 51-49 lead on two-party preferred, after trailing 50.5-49.5 last time. However, this is down to changes in the respondent-allocated preference flow rather than the primary vote, on which both Labor and the Coalition are up half a point, to 30.5% and 38% respectively, with the Greens steady on 14% and One Nation up half a point to 6%. The alternative two-party measure based on 2022 election flows has Labor leading 51-49, in from 51.5-48.5 last week. The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1651.

The Guardian has also launched a federal poll aggregate, devised by the publication’s data journalists Josh Nicholas and Nick Evershed together with Luke Mansillo of the University of Sydney, based on a model developed by the latter together with political science doyen Simon Jackman. Strikingly, it credits the Coalition witha two-party lead of 51.4-48.6, based on polling data up to and including last week’s Roy Morgan result. That the Labor primary vote of 27.5% is half a point lower than any poll published during the past term presumably reflects the fact that Labor significantly underperformed the polls at both the 2019 and 2022 elections. However, recent state elections have offered no further evidence for bias on such a scale.

On this point, a comparison of performance at the Queensland election by Resolve Strategic, presumably intended to blow the pollster’s own trumpet, demonstrates that the industry did rather well across the board. The national figures from The Guardian aggregate are also worse for Labor than the accompanying state breakdowns, although the latter only track as far as September.

Further:

• Proposed new federal boundaries for the Northern Territory were published in October 18. These predictably dealt with the need for the Darwin-based seat of Solomon to gain voters, and Lingiari to lose them, by transferring the outer suburbs of Palmerston, inclusive of Yarrawonga, Farrar, Johnston and Zuccoli, to Solomon. Antony Green calculates that this increases Labor’s margin in Lingiari from 0.9% to 1.7% and reduces it in Solomon from 9.4% to 8.4%.

Matthew Denholm of The Australian reports Brian Mitchell, who maintains Labor’s increasingly tenuous grip on the central Tasmanian seat of Lyons, is “being strongly urged by federal figures” to make way for former state party leader Rebecca White, who has been a member for the corresponding state electorate since 2010. It is further reported that Mitchell would be willingly to go quietly, and that White is “understood to be willing to switch”, but “does not want a preselection stoush”.

Matthew Denholm of The Australian also reports Anthony Albanese “blindsided” the Tasmanian branch of the ALP by announcing that Richard Dowling, adviser to state Labor leader Dean Winter and former director of public policy with Meta, would succeed Catryna Bilyk at the top end of the party’s Senate ticket at the next election. The report quotes Bilyk saying she had not said she was retiring as of yet, and that state MP Shane Broad and former Forestry Australia president Bob Gordon had been floated as potential successors if she did. However, Dowling was “assured the position as the choice of the Right faction’s Australian Workers Union”, a fact which was “not widely known within the party” until Albanese made it so.

Andrew Clennell of Sky News reports a Liberal preselection vote for the Hunter region seat of Paterson, held for Labor by Meryl Swanson on what I calculate to be a post-redistribution margin of 2.5%, was won by Laurence Antcliff, operations manager at the Housing Industry Association. Antcliff reportedly won a preselection vote by 24 to 16 ahead of local doctor Owen Boyd.

• The above report further notes that Lucy Wicks, who lost the Central Coast seat of Robertson to Labor in 2022, is considered the front-runner in a preselection ballot for the seat to be held on November 16. She is opposed by Michael Feneley, a cardiologist who has run for the party five times in various seats, most recently in Dobell in 2022, and Bernadette Enright, a banking executive.

• David Gillespie, who has held the New South Wales Mid North Coast seat of Lyne for the Nationals since 2013, announced a fortnight ago that he will not recontest the next election.

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.

219 comments on “Miscellany: Morgan, Guardian poll tracker, preselection latest (open thread)”

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  1. So it looks like the orange pee fiend and the couch jabber have won. What a shit-show.
    What a wonderful roll model for all the kiddies. Just act like a pathetic cowardly
    bully and you too can become president. Well, america* has sowed the wind, now they will
    reap the whirlwind. We now enter the darkest stage of history since 1939 and I wish america
    a very very harsh outcome 😡

    * shit hole countries don’t deserve capital letters

  2. The Australian dollar took a beating on Wednesday as early results of the US presidential poll suggested that Donald Trump had an edge in certain key states, lighting a fire under the greenback.
    The local currency was among the biggest losers against the US dollar on Wednesday, on course for its worst one-day drop in five months. It dived almost 2 per cent at one stage to US65.10¢, the lowest since August when it fell as far as US63.46¢.

  3. Holdenhillbilly says:
    Wednesday, November 6, 2024 at 6:09 pm

    A falling AUD is not all bad. It is good for our exporters and Domestic Businesses that compete with international competitors.

  4. FUBAR: Price of imports will go up including petrol.

    Tariffs on all goods will crash Chinese economy and directly and indirectly adversely affect Australia.

  5. FUBARsays:
    Wednesday, November 6, 2024 at 6:51 pm
    The Nats should sack McKenzie from the front bench immediately.
    That’s up to Littleproud, not Dutton.
    Pure guess:
    McKenzie must have a constituency in Victoria outside rural areas that they don’t want to alienate.
    Other than that, she shouldn’t be in the Senate.

  6. The headline at The Age is that the government’s immigration cap has been busted because of the number of Kiwi’s crossing the ditch (in record numbers)
    I wonder why?
    Mind you, if we get Nuclear Pete, they may all return to NZ because his policy set will reflect that of the Conservative government NZ now has (austerity with a side serve of racism)
    And the High Court, having informed that the immigration regime of the previous government was illegal have now ruled that the legislation the government was forced to to have a sustainable position with bipartisan support has also been ruled illegal
    At some point the ALP needs to draw a line under immigration and the politicisation of immigration (including so called illegal immigrants seeking refuge from regimes) and defer to humanitarian as the driver of policy
    Until then the Coalition will seek to prosper on racism (aka the Voice and aka Trump)
    Australia needs to grow up
    And in regards the DJIA Futures being up over 1,000 Points and continuing upward (and European Markets) the 10 Year Bond Yield is up by 12 Basis Points as is the AUD 10 Year Bond Yield – before we get to currency
    God, guns and capitalism, hey?
    With a side serve of racism and sexism
    Time to fly first class again – and speak to Brigit (the very same Brigit so critical of Albanese – but did Bridget ask because she is hardly well known?)

  7. Deepers at 8.56pm

    At some point the ALP needs to draw a line under immigration and the politicisation of immigration (including so called illegal immigrants seeking refuge from regimes) and defer to humanitarian as the driver of policy
    Until then the Coalition will seek to prosper on racism (aka the Voice and aka Trump)

    ——————-

    The problem with this is that Labor doesn’t get to decide to draw a line under immigration policy on behalf of the community. They tried deference to humanitarian considerations under Rudd Mk I – it was a very large part of the reason that he lost skin, ultimately leading to him being deposed.

    Labor can’t run soft on immigration. It will not hold government if it does.

  8. Labor could win on Abortion.
    The campaign goes on for months in America, Trump made a misstep on the issue, but was able to regain balance.
    Dutton’s problem, imo, is plenty of his MPs don’t support it and if asked, might say anything.

  9. Scholz, Macron, Biden, Starmer!!!

    They make Chamberlain seem a rabid jihadist.

    Has the “west” ever been lead (using the term in the loosest possible way) by such a posey of dilettantes? A posey that Trump will easily complement.

    Will history repeat itself, as in 1938, and Ukraine will be dismembered like Czechoslovakia? Poland seems to think war is inevitable.

    I wonder if Biden will be remembered for all the “right” reasons.

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