The Australian has published Newspoll’s quarterly geographic and demographic breakdowns, which are notable in having both major parties well down on the April-June aggregation in Queensland (Labor down five to 25%, the Coalition down three to 19%, the Greens up three to 12% and One Nation up four to 36%) and the Coalition running fourth in South Australia (Labor steady on 32%, One Nation down one to 31%, Greens steady on 14%, Coalition down three to 13%), albeit that the sample in the latter case is only 369.
As well as being well ahead of both major parties in Queensland, One Nation is one point clear in New South Wales and only one point behind Labor in Western Australia and South Australia. Labor is down five among the 35-to-49 age cohort, compared with one to three among the other three, and One Nation is up four among 18-to-34 and three among 35-to-49, while being little changed among the older cohorts, although the party’s support is still by some distance weakest among 18-to-34. Labor is down six points among those on incomes below $50,000 and, no doubt relatedly, eight points among renters, while One Nation is respectively up four and five.
The results are combined from four polls conducted between July 13 and September 18 from an overall sample of 4967.
Michelle Bullock is a RBA careerist, she is clueless about struggling financially and facing unemployment but she was right to raise interest rates, there is no choice but raise when global bond yields are going higher.
Nope, I won’t say it. Too easy.
Ashasays:
Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 9:26 pm
Nope, I won’t say it. Too easy.
—————-
Say it.
SP2000says:
Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 9:24 pm
I think Shoebridge was a shrewd appointment for the times we are in.
His previous work in senate estimates and hearings have been very good.
His ability to communicate clearly on key issues impacting voters and the ineptness of some of the policy decisions being made across a wide range of areas will hopefully lead to some cut through for the Greens.
——
Yeah I think Shoebridge is definitely an astute and insightful operator. It will be interesting to see whether he can make any impact electorally.
The ON voters whom Shoebridge is going to draw away from Hanson are probably to a man and a woman impressed by Shoebridge’s magisterial work in senate estimates.
It is exactly the sort of thing that is missing from their lives.
Add the way in which he communicates clearly how he personally feels their CoL pain all the way from the poverty-stricken rural backblocks of Woolhara, and they will leave Hanson in droves to vote for the Greens.
The Greens are at a crossroads. They have been a Balance of Power party on and off in the Senate for some time, and had prospects of staying that way. At least before the rise of One Nation. Now they seem to want to make a play to be the party of government – at the same time as One Nation also aspires to do that.
I think their aspirations are misplaced. And I also wonder whether they will retain a sole Senate BOP over the next two elections.
I’ll put my money on ON taking their BOP place in the Senate over that timeframe. I look forward to there being another option for a lower house government to court in the Senate.
Steve777
That is the conclusion I have come to. It will be a really interesting time in politics for us political junkies.
I would have liked SH-Y, because I think she would have worked to improve legislation, as the Democrats did before the Greens replaced them.
Over the last two decades, I have come to the conclusion that the ability of the Hawke/ Keating government to get the legislation through that changed the trajectory of Australia from the “Government getting out of people’s lives” trajectory of Malcolm Fraser, was very much down to the Democrats holding the balance of power. They were honest brokers, and although there was argy bargy, you knew a compromise would be forthcoming eventually.
For those who missed it, I commend Sarah Fergusson’s 7 30 interview of Shoebridge yesterday. Two things struck me: Fergusson’s evident pleasure in baiting Shoebridge, and Shoebridge’s passion about the CFMEU.
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/7-30/series/0/video/NC2601H155S00
LS
Yep.
Try some Vogon poetry on him.
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Vogon_poetry
Israelis carried out another genocide through disproportionate use of force in the cockpit of the FlyDubai aircraft. It was clearly an act Apartheid Occupation to apply Jewish law on a plane that wasn’t in Israel.
I look forward to Penny Wong recognising FlyDubai aircraft as a part of the state of Palestine.
Boerwarsays:
Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 9:32 pm
The ON voters whom Shoebridge is going to draw away from Hanson are probably to a man and a woman impressed by Shoebridge’s magisterial work in senate estimates.
It is exactly the sort of thing that is missing from their lives.
Add the way in which he communicates clearly how he personally feels their CoL pain all the way from the poverty-stricken rural backblocks of Woolhara, and they will leave Hanson in droves to vote for the Greens.
——
The way you are saying it suggests you perceive him as a threat to Labor.
I feel in this climate things are not going to get better for Albo. If that turns out to be true it’s better to have some left of centre alternative to Labor .
FUBAR at 9:18 pm
Nooo!!! Black Labs are the loveliest and best of dogs.
Of course, I have no idea of the context 😉
That’s stupid, Fubar.
“The ON voters whom Shoebridge is going to draw away from Hanson are probably to a man and a woman impressed by Shoebridge’s magisterial work in senate estimates.”
They put senate estimates on tiktok now?
FUBAR
All’s fair if genocide is your vision thing. Iran, Heshbollah, Hamas and the Houthis have that vision thing. So does Israel.
A stray plane load of passengers is neither here nor there in the big picture of the Forever War.
Sure, it is useful for propaganda as we have seen and as you are trying to demonstrate perhaps inadvertently but its substance is a mere mote in the mountain of ME death.
D&M
I thought of you today. A friend of our’s had to put down a long-lived dog, a faithful friend and companion. Hugs and tears all round.
porotisays:
Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 9:39 pm
Try some Vogon poetry on him.
——————-
I was trying to be nice.
I know that that is the Greens wet dream. Any port in a storm.
My suggestion for the real threat to Labor was S H-Y but even that was relative.
Shoebridge is such a doctrinaire class warrior that he is stupid enough to ardently believe that the ADF should be destroyed – by australians. This alone ensures that Shoebridge will never be prime minister.
No, as should be blindingly obvious to anyone, the real threat to Labor is ON and not the Greens.
It would be nice to think that this might motivate the Greens to spend 100% of their time slagging Hanson and her horrific policies. But, no.
The poor Copilot was trying to Globalise the Intifada but was misinterpreted. Apparently.
Our thoughts are with all those Islamicist Airline employees who will now be discriminated against.
Moi, a muse?
I despise mere doggerel penned by wannabe scribblers.
Give me an iambic pentameter and maybe we could talk turkey.
A lot of voters probably don’t see the Greens as a credible alternative but if ON is a threat to Labor then that suggests Labor is not governing well. So if there is a credible alternative Labor’s vote could sink further among its more progressive minded voters.
It’s better left of centre voters if lost are lost to a party with actual prosocial values then some random protest vehicle.
Boerwar says:
Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 9:44 pm
Israel does not have a genocide vision nor policy.
The Cambodians and Rwandans are laughing at how incompetent Israel is at genocide. They say they’re not even trying.
All’s fair if genocide is your vision thing. Iran, Heshbollah, Hamas and the Houthis have that vision thing. So does Israel.
A stray plane load of passengers is neither here nor there in the big picture of the Forever War.
Sure, it is useful for propaganda as we have seen and as you are trying to demonstrate perhaps inadvertently but its substance is a mere mote in the mountain of ME death.
Boerwarsays:
Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 9:55 pm
Moi, a muse?
Give me an iambic pentameter
—————–
I did.
Any decent person, including from Cambodia or Rwanda, would take one look at the progressive state violence-driven ethic cleansing of Palestinian lands and recognize it instantly for what it is.
If you are too stupid to realize that Israel will NEVER have peace while it continues it violent grabs of arab land then there is no use discussing it with you.
You didn’t seriously think I would read your ‘poetry’?
Boerwarsays:
Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 10:03 pm
You didn’t seriously think I would read your ‘poetry’?
—————-
I’m quite certain that you did. Now give us a kiss, big boy.
Currently 87% of Australians don’t see the Greens as a credible alternative. Australians have had four decades of Greens selling their wares on which to base that view. Shuffling leaders won’t change that much at all, IMO.
OTOH, there is no ‘if’ at all about ON being a threat to Labor. It IS a threat. ON has swallowed in two years more Labor voters than the Greens have managed in the past ten years.
There have been many discussions about what Labor might do about the situation and we might see some stuff unfold over the next couple of budgets but I am quite sanguine about what is unfolding. At this stage I expect to see a Hanson/Taylor government in place in two year’s time.
The social media hate fest has replaced rational policy discussion and there is bugger all incumbent governments can do about that. The latter are on the nose virtually around the world.
My view is that a combination of war, climate destruction, trade destruction by way of tariffs and counter tariffs, ageing populations, social media millenial madness, and increasingly onerous debt servicing, are going to make things worse and not better for the next decade.
BW
Yes, hugs and tears.
If you have dogs and cats (and probably horses) you become very good at “end of life care”.
I love doggerel. I might try and find some of my favourite pieces!
SF
No, what your poem was Iambic Tetrameter.
Pentameter has 10 syllables per line, whereas you poem has eight.
For the Iambic bit, your poem has four beats per line, compared to the five beats per line for iambic pentameter.
Also, it is none of my business, but you could have economised words (but maybe not effort) by producing a Kaku conveying the same meaning.
Doggerel is fine but catterel is not.
I gave the muse the following prompt:
‘write a poem in iambic pentameter in praise of shoebridge’.
And Lo! When he becomes prime minister we have the new national anthem ready to roll!
He stands to guard the forests and the trees,
He speaks for justice with a steady voice,
And brings a message on the summer breeze,
To make the hearts of working folk rejoice.
A lawyer who will fight to clear the air,
The leader of the Greens now takes his stand,
To challenge power with a steadfast care,
With courage in his heart and truth in hand.
From New South Wales he rose to serve the state,
He speaks for peace where bitter war is found,
To challenge giants and to change our fate,
And plant the seeds of hope upon the ground.
Now Shoebridge leads the way with steadfast grace,
To build a fairer world for every race.
BW
I will have to google catteral!
There was a bit of a hullabaloo a while back about the Member for Solomon and the NT Administrator.
AAP has an update;
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/no-evidence-federal-mp-assaulted-administrator/ar-AA2dfq3V?ocid=nl_article_link
Note that so far there has been a shortage of witnesses and CCTV reveals nothing. The Administrator’s wife gave conflicting evidence about the affair.
This will cost the taxpayers a fortune, and it’s starting to look like nothing will come of it.
And the sandman calls. Good night all and may your dreams be peaceful and sweet.
So, some of me favourite doggerel, used in me presentations, from times to times.
A rhyme by Augustis De Morgan from circa 1872:
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on
Taken beautifully and turned onto doggerel that explains turbulence elegantly, by Lewis Fry Richardson on the topic of meteorology:
Big whirls have little whirls
That feed on their velocity,
And little whirls have lesser whirls
And so on to viscosity …
Douglas and Milkosays:
Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 10:20 pm
No, what your poem was Iambic Tetrameter.
Pentameter has 10 syllables per line, whereas you poem has eight.
For the Iambic bit, your poem has four beats per line, compared to the five beats per line for iambic pentameter.
Also, it is none of my business, but you could have economised words (but maybe not effort) by producing a Kaku conveying the same meaning.
—————-
Your are correct, 4 da-dums instead of 5. I didn’t write it either, AI did. Just thought Boerwar needed lifting out of his latest Green’s induced funk.
Re doggerel:
There once was a man from Darjeeling
Who boarded a bus bound for Ealing,
The sign on the door,
Said “don’t spit on the floor”,
so he stood up and spat on the ceiling.
Actually it rhymes, it has rhythm, could be set to music, has a coherent story line and a conclusion, so maybe doesn’t fit the definition of doggerel. Maybe it’s catterel. Possibly a bit racist, although the man in question may have been an English colonist, a tea plantation manager on holiday…
The blog tonight (pentameters and all that) is a bit like the following Soviet era joke.
I first heard it in 1994 from a young Serbian college of mine, and his version was longer and a bit funnier, but here is how it basically goes:
Two Soviet mathematicians are exiled to a forced labor camp in Siberia, desperately trying to blend in as ordinary construction workers.
They are out in the freezing cold, digging a massive trench alongside the other laborers. One mathematician stops, leans on his shovel, and stares intently at the side of the trench.
He turns to his colleague and whispers urgently, “Comrade, you have made a mistake in line 15!”
There was a young man of Darjeeling
Whose cock reached up to the ceiling.
In the electric light socket,
He’d put it and rock it–
Oh God! What a wonderful feeling!
Steve777
I love limericks!
I only realise when I was well into my adult years that there was a certain innuendo involved. And that was none of the in the Edward Lear collection my uncle gave me one Christmas!
But I loved the story from my friend who taught in the Catholic primary school system in Melbourne, in the late 1970s. And, the other teachers were mostly nuns.
So, the teaching unit for year 5 was limericks. And being a young an enthusiastic teacher she went to the local library (Pascoe Vale I believe) and got out two books on limericks, which she left at the front of the classroom for the students to look at during recess and lunch.
She was delighted that the students were very enthused, and spent a lot of time reading the two books of limericks. It was only at the end of the week, when she was taking the two limerick books back to the library that she decided to look through the books to see what had captivated the kids. They were dirty limericks, although I suspect they were very tame by our standards.
Anyway, she expected over the next few weeks to get the sack act any moment, after parental complaints. But the kids never said a word, or if they did their parents just chuckled.
I guess kids do not tell their parents everything. I remember dropping my oldest off to primary school, and he observed that it was raining. He is the sporty one: league (Penrith), union, basketball, softball ..
So I said “I guess you will have to stay inside at lunch”. His reply surprised me: “Oh that’s OK, we have been spending a lot of time on the library at lunchtime recently”. Just as I puffed myself us as having raised an intellectual, he said “You would not believe the words they have in the really big dictionaries”.
And just to add, the fears that the USA debt is at unsustainable levels has again spiked Bond Yields, with the UK 10 Year Yield now at its highest since 1998
So 28 years ago
Staggering
And all down to the USA and the debt they are running up being assessed as unsustainable hence Yieids up and price down looking for buyers
Trump, hey?
Stability has gone out of the window and the Globe is paying the price
Not that you will read this in Australian media which is too busy pinning fault on government, being Labor governments
nath says at 10:50 pm
I wonder if that was the stuff that was in the books my very young teacher friend got from the Pascoe Vale public library in about 1975.?
I really should have asked for graphic details when I was told the story!
The chemical paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde is a dactylic tetrameter. I know this thanks to Isaac Asimov, one of my heroes. I don’t know why it stuck in my brain, but it did.
Yeah, I thought you’d be fascinated.
AM
Synchronicity!
I have just written this for my blog / course tonight:
The History of the Future by Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov is on of the greats of the era of “Hard”science fiction, along with Arthur C Clarke, Ursula Le Guin and Robert Heinlein.
Asimov is definitely my hero. I have read an awful lot of what he has written Ove many genres and many decades.
I included Heinlein grudgingly, but I suspect that my audience, who are likely even older than I am, will want it.
LS
Read what the RBA Governor has said today about who is at risk by the RBA doing what Central Banks do to contain (only) inflation
The RBA executive are privy to data over and above any data available to anyone else
For starters they know exactly what the status of the loan books of our banks is – and on a daily basis
They monitor everything to the absolute degree because that is their job and their responsibility
Who dropped rates in the face of the GFC and in the face of the pandemic- and why?
To expect that the Cash Rate would maintain at 0.1% was a nonsense
As borrowers that was an unique opportunity to pay down debt – not accrue more debt on the basis you can service at that extraordinary low rate
The banks assess before lending – including margins for contingencies
And they (generally) lend across 25 year terms to full repayment by monthly principal plus interest repayments
In his true science essays, Asimov always mentioned the nationality and background of those who contributed to the story of discovery, to emphasise that scientific endeavour is a global effort. That’s the thing I remember most about his work.
New thread.