Two new federal polls, plus the detritus of a third:
• The fortnightly Sky News Pulse poll by YouGov has Labor steady on 26%, One Nation down one to 28%, the Coalition up one to 21% and the Greens steady on 13%. Labor holds 52-48 respondent-allocated two-party preferred leads over both the Coalition and One Nation, which are respectively unchanged and in from 53-47. Anthony Albanese is up one on approval to 35% and steady on 60% disapproval, while Angus Taylor is down one to 37% and up four to 47%. Albanese holds a 48-41 lead over Pauline Hanson, out from 47-41. The poll was conducted last Tuesday to yesterday from a sample of 1492.
• The weekly Roy Morgan poll has Labor up two to 28%, One Nation steady on 29.5%, the Coalition down half a point to 17% and the Greens down one-and-a-half to 14%. Labor leads the Coalition 54.5-45.5 on both measures of two-party preferred, where the previous poll had them leading 56-44 on respondent-allocated preferences and 54-46 using previous election flows. Labor leads One Nation 53-47 on a respondent-allocated two-party measure, in from 53.5-46.5.
• Nine Newspapers provides further results from the Resolve Strategic poll suggesting strong support for the various policies announced by Angus Taylor, including 42% in favour of linking immigration to completed house builds, with 18% opposed, and 42% in favour of scrapping the capital gains tax and negative gearing changes, with 17% opposed. Jim Chalmers has a 34% approval rating, steady on a month ago, with 39% disapproval, down one.
Also some non-poll related electorally relevant news:
• Sarah Ison of The Australian reported on June 8 that questions surrounded the eligibility of Western Australian One Nation Senator Tyron Whitten to sit in parliament. At issue is whether his shares in a family civil construction company that has a contract with a firm working on the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project falls foul of Section 44(v), which disqualifies those who hold “direct or indirect pecuniary interest in any agreement with the Public Service of the Commonwealth”. Matters for judgement identified by constitutional law expert Anne Twomey include whether the family firm qualifies for the exemption for “an incorporated company consisting of more than twenty‑five persons”; whether Snowy Hydro 2.0, which has a legal existence separate from the Commonwealth, counts as “the Public Service of the Commonwealth”; and, for the Senate’s judgement, whether Whitten had failed to properly disclose the matter.
• Two vacancies loom in Tasmanian Senate seats held by the Liberal Party, most imminently in the case of Shadow Home Affairs Minister Jonathan Duniam, who announced on Sunday he will leave politics once work on the Coalition’s immigration policy had been finalised. Wendy Askew also announced last week that she will not stand at the next election, and will thus retire when her term ends in mid-2028. The ABC reported Brad Stansfield, newspaper publisher, managing director of polling firm EMRS and former chief-of-staff to Premier Will Hodgman, will seek preselection, presumably suggesting he will be in the running to fill Duniam’s casual vacancy. Stansfield boasted support from Jeremy Rockliff, Peter Gutwein and Peta Credlin as well as Hodgman. Sue Bailey of The Mercury further reported former state Education Minister Sarah Courtney, who served in parliament from 2014 to 2022, was “also believed to be considering”.
• Yet another disturbance to the Senate’s Tasmanian contingent unfolded on May 14 when Tammy Tyrell joined Labor, increasing its representation in the chamber to 30 seats out of 76. Tyrell was elected for the Jacqui Lambie Network in 2022, broke with the party in March 2024, and established her own Tammy Tyrell for Tasmania party in September 2024. Jack Quail of The Australian reports Tyrrell will sit with Labor’s Right faction, meaning she will have to overcome colleague Helen Polley to score a winnable spot on the Senate ticket at the 2028 election.
• I made a lengthy appearance with Tim Lester on the Seven Network’s The Issue podcast to discuss you-know-what, which I’m told was quite good.
Rossmcgs I mean do they realise the difference between Labor and Australian UK labour I mean Tron compare UK labour to what’s happening with Australia Labour stupid one of them is doing better God repeating myself
India also had similar perspective as Ireland.
30 years ago, I had a boss, who was Irishman. He was big Man U fan.
He told me that Ireland and India are kindred spirits when it comes to their shared history with Britain.
Can someone remind me what state premier went to an election promising to “Fix the ramping crisis!”
New data from the AMA Ambulance Ramping Report card has shown the ambulance ramping situation isn’t getting any better.
More patients needed an ambulance in 2024-25 than ever before with 4.5 million incidents requiring an ambulance and 2.4 million people arrived at hospital via ambulance. With population growth, these numbers are set to grow.
The report also found more people were sitting in ramped ambulances outside hospitals than they were five years ago. This reduces the availability of ambulances to respond to other emergencies and contributes to dangerous delays in treatment.
South Australia has seen the starkest deterioration. The total hours ramped outside hospitals have more than tripled since 2019-20, and are now sitting at over 49,000 hours. In the 2024-25 financial year, only 45.7% of patients were transferred within 30 minutes, well below their target of 90%.
https://www.healthservicesdaily.com.au/ambulance-callouts-reach-record-high/47705?utm_source=CM&utm_campaign=paid-26062206-template&utm_medium=email&utm_content=paid-26062206-template&utm_term=Ambulance%20callouts%20reach%20record%20high-headline&nlul=2sBNkVLD&nlid=73947818
Ramping is a problem that won’t be solved without the feds doing more about aged care places. Elderly discharges stuck in hospital remain the big cause of access block. More ED beds, ambulences and ambos won’t solve it.
The world has become so very bitter.
Caged eggs are a barbarity.
Yeah I wouldn’t be buying caged eggs either. Total barbarity.
Free range aren’t necessarily much better, especially at high stocking densities. I recommend reading Peter Singer’s ‘The Ethics of What We Eat’.
Mostly Interested says:
Monday, June 22, 2026 at 9:19 pm
Caged eggs are a barbarity.
Ya. This is why the industry is in such a mess.
You nailed it, JM from Qld
JD Vance one year ago today:
“I empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East. I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents”
Luke Oliver says:
Monday, June 22, 2026 at 9:37 pm
Free range aren’t necessarily much better, especially at high stocking densities. I recommend reading Peter Singer’s ‘The Ethics of What We Eat’.
We are about to see entire flocks wiped out, many in a desperate attempt to stop the spread. You cannot separate free range chooks from the environment. All that will be left will be properly managed caged birds.
JM
The Feds have been awful on aged care. They will never catch up.
Fred
No way we can stop H5 flu?
Tasmanians had 50 years of Pam Clarke telling us about the horrors of caged eggs.
Great job Butler!
Private health insurers. $2.7 B profit
Private hospitals. $750 M loss
Is he owned by the insurers or something?
Diogenes
All started by John Howard, the great privatiser.
https://cdn.getup.org.au/2769-The_collapse_of_aged_care_(part_one_and_two)___The_Saturday_Paper.pdf
Been There
Aged care was horrible before Howard.
100 years ago today, the Duke of York (later King George VI) played in the doubles at Wimbledon losing in the first round.
Undoubtably Landlord, but the privatisation didn’t solve the problem, just made it worse.
Luke Oliver says:
Monday, June 22, 2026 at 9:37 pm
Free range aren’t necessarily much better, especially at high stocking densities. I recommend reading Peter Singer’s ‘The Ethics of What We Eat’.
—————
No. Don’t read it. You’ll never eat again.
————–
Re the pedant from a few days ago – yes the 1977 amendment to the constitution does in fact mention political parties! Touche. The interesting part is that the constitution was drafted as a Washminster system decades and even centuries after the evolution of political parties but they were not mentioned in the unamended constitution. I find that quite fascinating.
Any failed promise by a Labor PM/Premier is ultimately the fault of a Liberal.
frednk
I did not know this. How do barn eggs compare? Where the hens are not caged, but live mostly in a barn.
Where I live in rural France, which is no doubt very different to Australia, many people keep their own chickens, and I often get given eggs.
At the market the local producers come each week, with a few hundred eggs, and pack up and go home once they are sold.
And the French authorities now give free chickens to household with a bit of land, hoping to decentralise the means of egg production.
Is France intrinsically different to Australia, or is it just that we have lost the way of life of producing eggs more locally?
I grew up in the Blue Mountains, and many people had chickens. I fear that had mostly disappeared by 1980 or so.
Musings, but would love your thoughts.
Love to see an in-depth multi series tv investigation in ramping. There is so much anecdotal stuff about causes.
So who and what is driving the rise in emergencies? What are the emergencies? Are we too risk averse to sending people home or pushing them to primary care? Is primary care part of the problem? Is there a period of the day that is worse? Time of year? What are the push factors? What are the bottle necks?
Many years ago Mrs Katich got sent home from ED twice on a weekend when she should have been attended to and admitted. It was only an early Monday morning squeezed in appt at the GP and a very good GP and a rushed, out of pocket brain scan that afternoon that saved her. Admitted immediately after the scan. Emergency brain surgery two days later. A Triage near miss.
A deep dive into this has many tangents to weave together. I think it would be riveting tv. And touch on some thorny social ethical/moral dilemmas.
B. S. Fairman says:
Monday, June 22, 2026 at 9:09 pm
The world has become so very bitter.
———-
Indeed it has, but it is by design.
Left wing (or at least any not extreme right wing party) must be removed at all costs and the way to do this is to sew discord. Hitler did it. It is happening again.
Welcome to late stage capitalism. They fiddle. We burn.
@B. S. Fairman says: Monday, June 22, 2026 at 5:57 pm
“Fresh Morgan Poll
https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10261-federal-voting-intention-june-22-2026
Following Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club speech One Nation primary support is up 2% to 31.5% – clearly ahead of the ALP, down 1% to 27% and L-NP Coalition, up 0.5% to 17.5% – Liberals on 15% (unchanged) and Nationals 2.5% (up 0.5%).
Support for the Greens was down 0.5% to 13.5%, and Independents/ Other Parties were down 1% at 10.5% according to the Roy Morgan survey conducted from June 15-21, 2026, with a representative Australia-wide cross-section of 1,575 electors.”
~~~~
A lot of what Pauline Hanson has proposed and heavily implied in her speech such as removing paid maternity leave, abolishing the SBS and opposing childcare support are things which would normally tank a political party’s polling. However, ONP just gained 2% in Primary voting and has narrowed the 2pp results. Also, ONP has finally surpassed ALP in Bludgertrack.
I might need more polls (releasing tmw hopefully) to accurately gauge the true effects of last week’s National Press Club Speech on ONP’s popularity. However, I believe we might be going into territory where Pauline Hanson can literally “go Kristi Noem on puppies” and leave unscathed.
On a side note, I wonder how a Teal party will affect polling, assuming it does get launched this week. Part of me feels like they will draw more support away from ALP than ONP.
JM from QLD@9.07pm
I am guessing that this is a problem that can be solved, but only over a period of time, as “Support at Home” ramps up, and (whelp!) Australia figures out how many more aged-care places are needed to unclog the hospitals.
I am going through the “Support at Home (SAH) ” for my mother at them moment, and it has given me some insight.
I actually managed to get my mother enrolled in the (precursor?) program in 2020, but she did not like the care worker who helped her for 1.5 hours per week, and so she got rid of her.
Anyway, in February this year, mum suddenly decided she needed SAH – possibly because her GP said he did not think she should be living by herself.
I rang aged care, and they were great. Because of the 2020 contact, they were able to do it as a reassessment, and we have funding now (as of two days ago), after a 3 months wait.
But while waiting for mum’s funding to come through, several of my elderly neighbours (all women) have got the same funding after three weeks. They got it so quickly because they broke hips etc. or had strokes, and of course they were funded above my mother, who was living quite well at home, albeit with a lot of help from me and my daughter. But the local women all managed to get home, and they are staying there with aged care support.
So, is the answer a lot more SAH support, with only people who really need it going into aged care? Certainly all the people around me want to stay in their own homes, which is far cheaper for the government.
So who and what is driving the rise in emergencies? Mainly population growth esp more elderly. Per capita it isn’t going up hugely
What are the emergencies? More people with multiple chronic diseases being kept alive by better care
Are we too risk averse to sending people home or pushing them to primary care? No, hospitals push the meet ‘em and street ‘em approach. So much so there are lots of readmissions within a month
Is primary care part of the problem? Definitely. People can’t get in to their GP, don’t have a regular one so manageable problems get worse and they end up in ED
Is there a period of the day that is worse? Late afternoon to evening
Time of year? Winter is worse due to exacerbations of chronic lung conditions
What are the push factors? Resp viruses
What are the bottle necks? The biggest is aged care beds as mentioned above
@Bludgeoned Westie,
Thank you. And thank you for the excellently phrased -“Go Kristi Noem on puppies.”
You are indeed correct. People aren’t listening to Hanson – she can say whatever she likes.
It is the urge to blow up the system that attracts people to her. Usually closeted racist entitled wingers – but of course we are not allowed to point that out to them – poor little snowflakes.
I heard two old men I know talking yesterday. They were carrying on about how hard they’ve got it and talking about how lazy greedy young people should be force to do “Nasho” (National service). I was stunned. Both seemed unable to acknowledge that they were self funded retirees living on their lazy financial planners’ franking credits.
They were both up in arms about immigration.
The younger one’s wife took great pride in reminding her partner that he was a refugee himself, albeit from a southern European country. He’s white now, but back then he was a stinking immigrant himself.
We live in interesting times.
Oh, and we’ve fucked the planet, but at least the rich have all that money. (And yes, Oh Lord, I’m one!)
I think the core fundamental difference between the Trump elections, and the current One Nation surge is that the former had very much not been picked up in polls at all, whereas the latter has very much so been picked up in the polls and in the case of the South Australian state election were extremely accurate in doing so.
Thanks Dio.
How we deal with (and pay for) the aging population in this is one of those very thorny issues a good multi part 4 corners thing could try to address sensitively. I argue with myself about it.
But it isn’t just them causing ramping.
And recently, Primary care has gotten very hard to impossible to get in on short notice round here.
I read Peter Singer’s original book Animal Liberation years ago when I was studying philosophy (when I met Xanthippe). I have been vegetarian ever since and not regretted it.
We still eat eggs if we know they are from a healthy and humane source. In SA I recommend the free range or barn laid eggs from Kangaroo Island. I have seen the farms and they take good care of the hens with reasonable space and warm shelter for when it is cold in winter.
D+M
That’s how we used to get eggs when I was a child out in rural NSW. Half our neighbours used to have chooks, as did my grandparents. One of my jobs when staying was to go pinch their eggs in the morning from the spots they laid in. Our neighbours in Leichhardt are keeping chooks now which is pretty nostalgic. And Omar has a flock as well.
It’s going to be pretty tough the next couple of years especially for wild birds, but like you say there are still small flocks, I’d assume free range, in France, and its had H5N1 for years now
This story is remarkable for exposing the parlous state of the Russian Navy.
There was a story a few days ago about a Russian frigate firing on a private yacht in the English Channel. It seems the frigate is drifting about low on fuel and without a helicopter.
https://maritime-executive.com/article/low-on-fuel-russian-frigate-drifts-in-the-english-channel
The Ukraine war has exposed the greatly exaggerated threat of the Russian army and air force. If their navy is in the same boat it makes me wonder what else is a bluff to preserve the image of Russia as a “great power”? Do all their nukes still work?
The aged in hospital – one contributing factor I have seen multiple times. When an aged person is in hospital their pension continues to be paid and is in the control of the person with power of attorney, when they go to a nursing home the pension contributes to the n.h. fee. Some relatives will strongly resist attempts to place their relatives because of the extra income that their hospitalisation brings in.
When this is obvious the hospital only has 2 tools. One, a maintenance charge can be applied but this is a nominal amount and usually ignored by the relatives. Two, the hospital can apply to the guardianship tribunal to gain guardianship- this usually takes 3 months.
A simple but impolitic solution would be to suspend at least part of the pension on admission (the costs of daily living are already paid for by the hospital)
Socrates at 11.10 pm
“The Ukraine war has exposed the greatly exaggerated threat of the Russian army and air force. If their navy is in the same boat it makes me wonder what else is a bluff to preserve the image of Russia as a “great power”? Do all their nukes still work?”
The Russian navy is worse. The Ukrainians defeated the Russian Black Sea fleet fairly comprehensively, even before their current advances with drones.
The Russian navy has been inferior for yonks. Admiral Gorshkov was a bit of a bureaucratic imperialist in the 1970s expansion of the Soviet navy, but it’s been in decline ever since.
Over 20 years ago I remember a chat with an Australian poet, Subhash Jaireth, a geologist from India who studied in Russia for nearly 10 years until 1978. He was very concerned about the environmental hazards from the decline of the Russian Far East fleet in the 1990s. For his poetry see:
https://gazebobooks.com.au/authors/subhash-jaireth/
Putin is in essence a spy who outgrew his boots. As for the Russian navy, it provided Putin with his first major crisis in August 2000 when the biggest and best Russian submarine, the Kursk, sank, because “hydrogen peroxide fuel – which most navies had abandoned because it is unstable – had leaked from a faulty seal on a dummy torpedo as it was being loaded for test firing”. (P Short, Putin, 2022 p 330.)
Because of his costly stalemate in failing to conquer Ukraine, Putin has been spending less on nukes:
https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2025/01/russia-nuclear-arsenal-modernization
Thomas Brian Mutter at 10.58 pm
Wait until the Victorian election before pronouncing upon the enduring success of the Hanson roadshow.
The most intelligent analysis, based on transposing the SA results to Victorian seats, suggests that the VIC Libs, hitherto known for a continual string of own goals, will get many more seats than the cult.
See Alison’s rambles linked by Leroy a few weeks back.
Then there will be NSW, where the Hanson cult will be up against the nastiness of a Latham spurned. The likely impact of the cult on the NSW election will be to ensure a Labor majority (via vote 1 exhaust).
Ramping is complex- it has 100 causes. The big 2 are Aged Care and NDIS patents taking up beds in major hospitals when they should be dealt with in other less acute residential care settings. I know in SA they are building big new facilities for this issue, but it takes time.
New thread.
The weird thing is; there are people who believe climate change isn’t happening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV-C2EGfocE