The fortnightly Sky News Pulse poll by YouGov has Labor up a point to 30%, the Coalition up one to 20%, One Nation down two to 25% and the Greens steady on 13%. Labor holds two-party leads of 55-45 over both the Coalition and One Nation. Anthony Albanese is up a point on approval to 39% and down two on disapproval to 55%, while Angus Taylor improves not inconsiderably with a four-point increase in approval to 38% and a three-point drop in disapproval to 39%. Albanese leads 44-36 on preferred prime minister, out from 43-37. The poll was conducted last Tuesday to this Tuesday from a sample of 1500.
The weekly Roy Morgan poll has Labor up half a point to 30.5%, the Coalition up one-and-a-half to 24%, One Nation down two to 21.5%, and the Greens down one-and-a-half to 12%. In Labor-versus-Coalition terms, the poll finds Labor leading 56-44 based on previous election and 53.5-46.5 on respondent-allocated preferences (the latter measure has on average had Labor a point higher since the last election). The poll was conducted last Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1411.
Roy Morgan also had an SMS poll recording an 83-17 split in favour of the government’s decision to cut fuel excise on petrol and diesel, although there was a 64-36 split against the government on satisfaction of its management of the shortage. Respondents were also invited to provide open-ended responses as to who they blamed and why, which you can read about in very great detail in an accompanying report. This poll was conducted March 26 to April 1 from a sample of 2514.
A poll I missed last Thursday was a RedBridge Group/Accent Research “super-poll” of 5563 respondents in the Financial Review. It was slightly dated in having been conducted from March 6 to 19, and did not feature a national headline result, its raison d’etre being breakdowns with significant samples. I will add the results later today from the four largest states and by age, gender, language, housing tenure and past vote to the BludgerTrack poll data archive, and stick here to the bits it’s unable to accommodate. Kos Samaras of RedBridge Group has published a cross-tabulation for generation by financial stress to illustrate the point that stressed older voters are voting One Nation while their younger equivalents are voting Greens, a point he elaborated on in an accompanying analysis piece.
My own favourite cross-tabulation is age-by-gender, which offers a too-rare look at one of the most striking electoral phenomena of our time, namely the pronounced gender gap that has developed among young voters. Among “Gen-Z” men, Labor is on 39%, the Coalition 12%, One Nation 19% and the Greens 24%; among women, Labor is on 26%, the Coalition 14%, One Nation 11% and the Greens 38%. The pattern is reflected in lesser degree among “millennials”, the result for men being Labor 36%, Coalition 16%, One Nation 26% and Greens 13%, and for women Labor 28%, Coalition 19%, One Nation 27% and Greens 15%. For “Gen-X” men, Labor is on 32%, the Coalition 18%, One Nation 35% and the Greens 6%; for women, Labor 29%, the Coalition 21%, One Nation 31% and Greens 9%. Among “baby boomer” men, Labor is on 27%, the Coalition 30%, One Nation 31% and the Greens 4%; among women, Labor 33%, the Coalition 24%, One Nation 32% and the Greens 3%.
The poll also asked four questions of the 491 respondents who said they would vote One Nation. Seventy per cent agreed their choice was a “tactic to make the major parties listen to ordinary Australians”, with only 18% disagreeing. However, 65% felt it “important to elect qualified leaders, even if we don’t always agree with them”, with 14% disagreeing. Fifty-four per cent felt “almost anything is better than the way things are going now, I just want to vote for change”, with 24% disagreeing.
The Australia Institute has an unrelated YouGov poll (hat-tip to Nadia in comments), conducted March 12 to 19 from a sample of 1502, as part of its campaign for a gas exports tax but encompassing voting intention. The result includes an undistributed 8% “don’t know” component, with the rest being Labor 26%, Coalition 19%, One Nation 24% and Greens 12%. The full report features breakdowns by state, age and gender. It also finds 60% agreeing that Australia exports too much gas, with only 10% disagreeing.
Anyone remember that weirdo who forcibly involved himself in the Schapelle Corby case (back when the trial was still going and it was the biggest thing on TV) while simultanously hawking cheap mobiles back here in Aus in the sort of ads you would only ever see after midnight?
An article on The Guardian caught my eye because of this image. Something’s missing…
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2026/apr/10/what-australians-and-other-international-travellers-need-to-know-about-the-new-eu-travel-rules
(Several somethings, I suppose. But one definitely appears by its absence.)
Asha: it’s been a while since I heard the name Jack Chick. A bunch of his hateful little comic pamphlets used to be out the front of a church I went to as a kid (and I’d read them, because comics are for kids, aren’t they?). In the same town, the local library had “When The Wind Blows” by Raymond Briggs in the kids section, next to Asterix, Tintin and Footrot Flats. No wonder I turned out a bit odd.
Asha – Ron Bakir. He ran Crazy Ron’s or Mad Ron’s phones. The “Crazy Ron’s” brand was sued by “Crazy John’s” for trademark issues (Mental illness in the phone reselling business was a feature).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Bakir
Now in the Queensland Property game which seems about right.
Oh, wow, I actually found him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Bakir
Turns out he is now a property developer on the Gold Coast, which is… unsurprising.
B.S. Fairman:
Snap, just beat me to it!
Funny we both thought the same thing about the Property developer angle.
Well, shit:
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/two-strong-hearts-john-farnham-song-to-be-banned-in-australia/106550130
I mentioned this song last month just to get a rise out of TPOF (I got one). Turns out the Qld cops are actually hassling some guy over it. Why do I have to live on the fuckin’ dumb timeline…
@Bird of paradox at 11:15pm
(nervously grips necktie) well, this is what happens when people vote LNP…
Ah, the good old Liberal Party, those proud champions of free speech and limited government.
There is an important and substantive difference between the banned term and that line from Farnam’s song “like a river to the sea”. One term refers to an area and the other to the course of a stream. In context the banned term has a more specific meaning which has been discussed here ad nauseum
Don’t believe for a second Farnam’s song will be banned.
Someone oughta go to David Crisafulli’s office and paint a huge map of Broadwater (his seat) on it, pointing out the major geographic features of its boundary. The Coomera River on the west, the Pacific Ocean on the east. From the river to the sea.
Wow, a while ago we had some youngsters reminiscing about 6 or 8 digit phone numbers.
When I was young, one, two, and three digit numbers were the norm, and phone calls were switched by delightful young ladies in the Post Office.
Of course those same young ladies were the best sources of gossip in the community as well.
Crisafulli is too busy dodging accountability for his LNP Crime Wave that he said would make him resign if it happened.
Bird of paradoxsays:
Friday, April 10, 2026 at 11:15 pm
Well, shit:
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/two-strong-hearts-john-farnham-song-to-be-banned-in-australia/106550130
_____________________
Can you believe the police contacted the artist about this shit?
The US has a lot of problems but I sure do envy their 1st Amendment. (and their 4th)
Those delightful young ladies were telephonistes. Note the spelling, in the old days male and female switchboard operators were spelt differently. Male telephonists were rare and didn’t have an “e”.
In country towns the telephonistes provided a service that no AI powered data centre could now. They knew where everyone in town was and what they were doing. One lady would call and say the name of who they wanted to speak to and the telephoniste would know where that person was and what they were doing. Local calls were recorded by a pencil stroke on a tally sheet. At busy times they were too busy to make a mark for friends and relations and arseholes would be met with a dose of the shakes causing two strokes.
When the dastardly PMG announced a town was going to be converted to automatic working, petitions were circulated to try to stop it.
Granny Anny, I think it was you who mentioned Dalwallinu last week? I lived there for a couple of years in the late 90s (when we got the eight digit phone numbers). Weirdest town I’ve ever lived in. The churches with cyclone fence around them, more fortified than the local cop shop (no windows, to prevent people looking outside at worldly things); half the school dropping out after year 7 to get homeschooled (to avoid sex ed – that would be worldly), and the boys walking around in ties; hearing the word “worldly” every 10 minutes; and of course the messed up stories about the Exclusive Brethren. I don’t miss it at all.
Post Offices employed two young lads as JPO’s. (Junior Postal Officers) They would spend one week delivering telegrams on a pushbike, and the next week doing a sleep shift in the Post Office to connect any calls that might be made between midnight and dawn. Often there would be no calls so they got paid to sleep.
If there was a call, a buzzer would sound and if there was no response after 1 minute a loud hooter would go off. One morning I was acosted by an indignent Post Master who had been abused by a prominent business man because he couldn’t make a phone call at 3am. “There’s something wrong with the hooter he said”. Inside the hooter I found a pair of socks.
Bird of Paradox, the weirdness has spread. There is quite a few now in Northam as well.
https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/tragic-12yearold-boys-building-site-death-shocks-wa-wheatbelt-town-20171206-gzzugj.html
This article doesn’t mention that before they notified the cops, they made sure their lawyers were available to deal with it.
It was about 1980 before we got an automated exchange in the backwater where I spent a fair chunk of my childhood. Until then we had a 3 digit number, and a wind up phone to get the operator’s attention. If you wound it backwards they’d answer quicker, but weren’t happy about it, a bad noise. A few years earlier, up the road we were on a party line (EDIT: a single connection with a bunch of subconnections, on a rural property or 3, where any member of the ‘party’ could listen in to the calls, as the operators did too, they were THE prime source of local gossip)
I remember them having a presence in Cunderdin – those furniture making places are all Brethren. Any small town with a weirdly large amount of manufacturing going on, it’ll be them. Also any small town where the population isn’t collapsing, since they seem to consider a woman who has less than six children to be barren. I guess they outgrew that town if they’ve ended up in Northam.
Also Gnowangerup, down south – another small town, same deal. There’s branches of them in NSW and NZ. They probably move people of breeding age around every now and then just so they don’t end up like the Habsburgs.
That’s a bit of a myth sub, it made no difference which way you cranked the handle., although on some you could unscrew it off the generator if you wound it backwards. When you turned the handle it operated a switch to disconnect the phones bells and connect the generator to the line.
If you gave the generator a good brisk turn it would produce about 120 Volts, enough to give you a good jolt if you were touching a line when someone initiated a call. I went to a job at a remote sheep station once where the cocky had a long party line between him and the exchange. He had removed the generator handle and used an electric drill to turn it. A new phone solved his problem.
In those days, long before TV had been invented, whenever you did a job in the street outside of school hours you would end up with an audience of small boys. We were looking for a cable fault using a gadget called a bridge megger. This also had to be cranked and at full revs would produce 500 Volts.
I had a rather obnoxious accomplice who lined up the small boys and told them to hold hands tightly. He gave the kid at each end one of the megger leads and slowly started to crank. Apparently the first to let go was going to be a bit of a wimp, and the first was the smallest boy of all. They picked on him mercilessly and made him cry.
In those days we all had a water bag hanging on the roo bar. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the small boy standing on tip toe, pissing into the obnoxious blokes water bag. I didn’t tell him but threw my water bag away and ordered one of those new fangled polystyrene covered water bottles.
New thread.
Nicholas saysFriday, April 10, 2026 at 7:08 pm
Nicholas, How Dare You?
None of what you say above about TPOF is true. He certainly never said anything to suggest he saw Palestinians as subhuman. If he actually had said this, I am sure you would have provided chapter and verse.
So please stick to the facts. I did not agree with a lot of what TPOF said (I am really, really pissed off with Israel), and he let himself get pushed into a slanging match where he said things he should not have, but quite a bit of what he said was not unreasonable, if you took the time to understand where he was coming from.
So, some may say you have positive attributes in this forum. One Dr Doolittle said so (see below). But on this I disagreed with the good Dr D, that your positive contribution outweighs your horrible (and totally un-self-aware) misogyny
If we want to talk about personal slagging (and just making up shit about me), you have done this to me on a number of occasions, and given that I had not ever interacted with your comments on PB, I still find it bizarre. I think you really need to check your white middle-class privilege.
So, can you explain the comments you made to me (I have put them into their discussion threads below) as anything other than unfocussed misogyny on you part, given that none of your comments about me on PollBludger bear any relationship to reality?
You decided I had had an early sexual relationship when Bob Hawke was first elected PM, around the time the Australia won the America’s cup? And this is why I vote Labor? And, you played out this full fantasy on PB?
Nicholas, How dare you?
I was pretty cranky, and after about twenty exchanges between us, where you insisted it was not misogyny, it was just my unworthiness as a person (given your completely false assumptions about my life, I thought you might be delusional).
But no, you are just a bad actor, who regards women as only useful if they think the same way you do.
A year or so later, out of the blue, you come up with a comment saying that “even D&M would agree that she would not get tenure now.” WTF!!
You know nothing about me. Why on earth would you make such a comment? And so now you are slagging off TPOF?
So Nicholas, How dare you?
Below are Nicholas’ comments about me, with some sort of sexual overtones, which I found creepy at the time, and I still find creepy.
Why do I find it creepy?
I found it with in my remit during my career, and something I actively pursued, to protect my PhD students against sexual harassment and far worse. I have posted here before about the problems with the ATNF of the CSIRO, as described in a background briefing ABC episode. I, and others, fought hard to change the culture. We have made great progress, but that progress saw the careers of a lot of women fall by the wayside. I was lucky that by that time I was bulletproof in my career, and could call it out without career fallout.
Why do I mention this? Because, Nicholas, by your misogyny, you would have been well placed to turn a blind eye to the sexual harassment, sexual abuse and even, unfortunately rape, that was occurring. But, one of the big warning signs of males who were likely to abuse junior females was the sexualisation of everyday things.
But also “Even D&M would agree that she would not get tenure now?”
WTF – could you perhaps fill in, with you obvious copious knowledge of excellence in research in physics and astrophysics, why I would not get tenure? Because after all, you seem to be the oracle about all things to do with research?
Here is you rsexual fantasy about me:
Douglas and Milko says:
Sunday, May 19, 2024 at 10:20 pm
Dr Doolittle
Dr Doolittle says:
Saturday, May 18, 2024 at 11:19 pm
Entropy at 11.01 pm
“Nicholas is a good contributor, who tries to offer helpful insights and doesn’t slag off on others.”
So, do you think his post about me (below) is OK? I think he is certainly slagging me off.
And he cannot even use the truth defence. I am at least 10 years older than he figures. Hell, my friends and I still have our “Shame Fraser Shame” badges.
And I am also really pissed off about the casual, misogynist way (he definitely calls me “she”), he dismisses what my real experiences have been.
In late December 1994, I had to “calmly” talk my husband out of killing me (I told him “I am not with it – you do not want to spend the rest of your life in jail because you killed someone as worthless as I am.) I watched him, in between me and the wall phone, knowing that he would snap and strangle me if I moved, before I could call triple zero.
My two youngest children watched on. Somehow my cold and derisive tone worked – that was not a foregone conclusion, just my best intuitive hope at the time. He then appeared to leave the house, and I sat with my children, all of us shaking. But after 20 minutes or so, I did not hear his car leave from the driveway, and so I went to look in the garage. My children followed.
I then saw husband trying to hang himself. I went to support his weight, while screaming to my 6-year-old to call triple zero.
Anyway, the Police came, talked to my husband, and then they came and talked to me. They said that all my husband wanted was to get back with me, and as long as I said yes, there would be no problems. I said no, and they pissed off quick smart, leaving me to deal with murderous / suicidal husband.
I was actually lucky that the support systems that the Hawke / Keating governments had put into place allowed me to study for a PhD and support my children (yes, there were four of them).
Why a PhD – well, I guess you play to your strengths, and try and make a living as best you can using them. For me it was mathematics and physics. And you know, I did manage to make a reasonable living (nothing fancy, state schools, but I am also a strong believer in public education, so that was always going to be the case).
We never had a lot of money, but I managed to provide a decent and interesting life for them – a mother with a PhD in astrophysics provides a surprising amount of street cred! And their schools loved having me and my telescopes, showing them the sun (with appropriate solar filters) and the stars.
As a PostScript. In 1996, I was talking to a friend of mine, whose husband was a police prosecutor. Much of his work was prosecuting males who had killed their intimate partners. This latter fact only becomes important after the next few sentences.
I grumbled to my friend that my ex-husband had kicked my eldest son out of his house. My eldest was actually living with my ex for two reasons – 1) He thought at least one of the kids should live with his dad, who he thought needed looking after, and 2) He was sick of living with the youngest two, who were pretty hyperactive.
So, my Ex rang me one Sunday and told me he had kicked out our oldest son. Apparently although he had a sprained ankle, and could not play rugby league, his father insisted that he should go along to the game to “support the team”. Oldest said no – he also had a large number of school assignments due.
So, anyway, Ex only lets me know this after oldest son has left his home. And we are talking before mobile phones.
Three hours later, son turns up at my place, much to my relief. He had had to walk along the railway tracks between Lapstone and Glenbrook, with his sprained ankle.
So, I tell my friend this, just as “I cannot believe what Ex has done to the kids now”. The next day she comes back to me and says “Police Prosecutor says sell your house now. Your Ex has exactly the right profile to kill you, and the jointly owned house will be a trigger. Afterwards, he will be very, very sorry, but you will be very, very dead.”
So, I suggested selling the house, and Ex agreed. When I moved out, Ex actually said to me – it is good you are moving out of this house. I won’t feel so angry at you.
So, while Nicholas thought I was having some “sexual awakening” (I mean who even thinks about another poster in those terms), I was actually trying to escape a violent relationship, and make a life for myself and my kids.
Yeah, doing a PhD may seem like a “privileged” way to do it, but seriously, there were not that many career paths open to women in my situation at that time. And I just happened to be good at maths and physics.
Postcript: In 1998, I remember taking my youngest, the one who had to call triple zero when his father tried to hang himself, after a basketball match in the quaint working class suburb of Werrington NSW, through the Maccas drive through in Emu Plains – another of those quaint working class suburbs that I am sure Nicholas Haines is very proud that he does not know the existence of.
At this stage my mother and my older children were helping me look after the younger two when I had to do “field work”. It was only about four weeks of the year, but god some people made me feel guilty about it, despite the fact that my children were very well cared for.
So, going through Maccas drive-through on the way home from basketball, I said to youngest “I am really sorry, I think I forgot to tell you I need to go to Chile tomorrow for observing for a week. Nana is going to look after you. He said “Mum, you have mad job, but the pay really sucks”.
And now, the kids have “mad” jobs – although their pay is OK, and they respect science and critical thinking, and make a point of telling me how they are passing this knowledge and skills onto their children, my grandchildren.
Anyway, I have made a post where I do not hold back.
I guess I will get my coat, and depart the PB lounge. But in real life, had I had to share a lounge with someone like Nicholas Haines who though it was funny to make sexual fantasies about me, and then also added insult to injury by suggesting that I was just a stupid woman who only got an academic job only because of DEI?
So, sorry about the ad hominem stuff, but I guess Nicholas Haines’ slurs on me – complete fantasy – were something I could write off while he was not posting here, now he is back, I need to leave.
I have no idea why he curses me as a stupid woman and an academic lightweight who should never have got tenure, but I know enough to bow out whe presented with abuse.
D&M, I hope you get this.
You are one of the sanest posters on William’s forum. For one, I will miss your contributions. Take care, wherever you travel.
Christ.
D&M, speaking as someone who often drifts in an out of Poll Bludger and had no idea about Nicholas’ bizarre behaviour towards you, can I just say that this website would be a far lesser place without your contributions, and would lose very little without Nicholas’.
I understand the toll this website can have on one’s mental health and the need to take breaks, but as I said to Nadia a while back when she was chased off by C@t and Omar’s bullying: don’t let the cranks get you down, and please do come back when you are up to it.
I see Angus Taylor is trying to breath new life into the racist / immigration dog whistle, I thought Howard & Abbot had worn it out.
Maybe J D Vance can come out here & show Angus how to do it.