Newspoll: 50-50

Even stevens from Newspoll, which has a further poll finding Barnaby Joyce hanging on for dear life in New England.

With a fortnight to go, Newspoll finds two-party preferred steady at 50-50, from primary votes of Coalition 41% (up one), Labor 36% (up one) and Greens 10% (steady). We are also informed that the Nick Xenophon Team is at 29% in South Australia. On personal ratings, Malcolm Turnbull is down one on approval to 36% and steady on disapproval at 51%, while Bill Shorten is up two to 35% and down one to 51%. Turnbull’s lead as preferred prime minister shifts from 45-30 to 46-31. The poll was conducted Thursday to Sunday from a sample of 1805.

The Australian also has a Newspoll result showing Barnaby Joyce with a lead of just 51-49 in New England, from primary votes of 48%, 36% for independent Tony Windsor, 7% for Labor and 3% for the Greens. This was part of the same marginal seat polling that was mostly released on Saturday, being conducted Monday to Wednesday from a sample of 523.

Highlights of week six

A weekly summary of pork barrelling, campaign mishaps and intelligence on the state of the horse race.

Some news items from the past week of local tactical significance, plus, for your convenience, a revised version of yesterday’s electorate seats table incorporating corrections and a few things I’d missed, and the latest reading of BludgerTrack inclusive of Friday’s Ipsos and ReachTEL polls (see below).

• In a corrective to recent published marginal seat polling and the resulting impression that Labor is not getting the swings where it needs them, Laurie Oakes reports Labor polling shows them picking up 6% swings in the Hunter region seat of Paterson, giving them a lead of 57-43; the Central Coast seat of Robertson, for a lead of 53-47; and the Perth seat of Hasluck, putting them at 50-50 (compared with a 53-47 to the Liberals in the ReachTEL poll). In the Perth fringe seat of Pearce, which Christian Porter holds for the Liberals on a margin of 9.5%, the swing is said to be 9%.

• Bill Shorten yesterday promised the federal government would contribute $400 million to a north-south rail link in western Sydney accommodating the proposed site of the Badgerys Creek airport, which would be particularly advantageous in the seats of Macarthur, Werriwa and Lindsay.

• Malcolm Turnbull travelled to Townsville on Monday to promise $1 billion of Clean Energy Finance Corporation funding would be devoted to supporting the Great Barrier Reef, through concessional loans to agricultural projects and sewage treatment plant upgrades. Target seats include Leichhardt, Herbert, Dawson, Capricornia and Flynn.

• The Nationals are taking Cowper seriously enough to have had Barnaby Joyce visit the electorate on Tuesday to promise $1.25 million on an upgrade of the Port Macquarie airport.

• The Liberal candidate for the winnable Melbourne fringe seat of McEwen, Chris Jermyn, was in the news for the third time during the campaign on Thursday, when The Age reported the Christmas Hills address at which he was enrolled was an “empty block of land”. The Australian reported yesterday he was actually enrolled at a house in Wallan, but it appears he was enrolled at the Christmas Hills address when he voted at the 2013 election.

bludgertrack-2016-06-18

2016-06-19-marginal-seat-polls

ReachTEL: 51-49 to Coalition; Ipsos: 51-49 to Labor

More evidence of a fine balance of support on the national two-party preferred, but with Labor falling short where it matters most.

The latest weekly campaign poll for the Seven Network from ReachTEL has the Coalition hitting a lead of 51-49, following headline results of 50-50 in the last two polls and a 52-48 in favour of Labor three weeks ago. This week’s forced preference primary vote totals are Coalition 43.5% (up 0.8%), Labor 33.6% (up 0.4%), Greens 9.1% (down 0.8%) and Nick Xenophon Team 9.1% (down 0.8%). Malcolm Turnbull’s lead as preferred prime minister is out from 55.4-44.6 to 57.6-42.4, but both leaders’ personal ratings are little changed: Turnbull goes from 28.3% to 27.4% on very good plus good and from 37.4% to 36.3% on poor plus very poor, while Shorten goes from 27.5% to 29.6% favourable and from 38.6% to 39.7% unfavourable. The automated phone poll was conducted last night from a sample of 2576.

A rather different set of results emerges this evening from the latest fortnightly campaign poll by Ipsos for the Fairfax papers. It records a dramatic increase in the minor party vote, with both the Coalition and Labor down three points, to 39% and 33% respectively. Most of the yield goes to “others”, up four points to 14%, with the Greens up one to 14%. This cancels out on two-party preferred, which is unchanged at 51-49 in Labor’s favour on both the respondent-allocated and previous-election two-party preferred measures. The major parties’ loss of support isn’t reflected in the personal ratings, with both leaders up two on approval (47% for Malcolm Turnbull, 43% for Bill Shorten) and steady on disapproval (42% for Turnbull, 47% for Shorten). Turnbull’s lead as preferred prime minister narrows from 49-31 to 48-34. The live interview phone poll was conducted Tuesday to Thursday from a sample of 1437.

ReachTEL’s weekly marginal seat poll is a disappointing result for Labor, showing Liberal member Ken Wyatt retaining a 53-47 lead in his eastern Perth seat of Hasluck, suggesting a modest swing to Labor of 3%. Forced preference primary vote results are 46.1% for Ken Wyatt (46.2% at the 2013 election, post-redistribution) and 32.6% for Labor candidate Bill Leadbetter (29.2% for Labor in 2013). The Greens are on 13.5%, up from 10.7% in 2013, much of which comes from the forced response follow-up question asked of the undecided. The Greens got 10.9% on the first round question, but 21.1% of those who responded as undecided favoured the Greens on the follow up. The two-party headline is from respondent-allocated preferences, but 2013 election preferences would have produced the same result. The poll was conducted last night from a sample of 753.

Also:

• A ReachTEL poll commissioned by GetUp! suggests Rob Oakeshott is looking competitive in his bid to unseat Nationals member Luke Hartsuyker in the seat of Cowper in the Mid North Coast region of New South Wales. Inclusive of forced preferences, the primary votes are Hartsuyker 42.6%, Oakeshott 25.6%, Labor 14.0%, Greens 8.4%, Christian Democrats 4.5%, others 4.9%. Hartsuyker would likely get over the line after preferences on those numbers, but only by a few per cent. The poll was conducted on Monday from a sample of 842.

• Roy Morgan has released details results of its polling conducted from April to June in South Australia – a little too detailed in fact, since results are provided at electorate level from samples of only 180 each. Taken in aggregate, the Nick Xenophon Team is at 21.5% statewide, which would score them three seats based on Kevin Bonham’s modelling. There is no clear indication of major geographical variation in the NXT vote, as was the case with Xenophon’s Senate vote in 2013.

Another Morgan report repeats the electorate-level voting intention exercise for the seven seats recording the highest levels of Greens support, which suggests their primary vote to be slightly higher than Labor’s across Melbourne, Batman and Wills, but a) it’s hard to read much into this given the sample size, and b) Morgan has long been reporting excessive-looking results for the Greens. The report also tells us that Labor led 51-49 in Morgan’s regular polling over the fortnight, unchanged on the previous result, which didn’t get the usual published result this week for some reason.

UPDATE: Here is an update of BludgerTrack with the two latest polls, whose peculiarities have essentially cancelled each other out. The Coalition is up a seat in Queensland, but down two in New South Wales.

bludgertrack-2016-06-18

2016-06-16-marginal-seat-polls

BludgerTrack: 50.5-49.5 to Coalition

Essential Research’s latest result records the gentlest of nudges in favour of Labor, but the BludgerTrack poll aggregate has gone the other way.

It’s been an oddly quiet week on the national polling front, though no doubt the coming fortnight will more than make up for it. Besides the regular weekly campaign ReachTEL poll for Seven, the only new result is the latest fortnightly rolling average from Essential Research, out a day later than usual due to the Monday public holiday. This records Labor with a 51-49 lead, returning it to its position before a sudden two-point shift to the Coalition a fortnight ago. The primary votes are Coalition 41% (steady), Labor 37% (up one), Greens 10% (steady) and Nick Xenophon Team 4% (steady). Also featured are personal ratings, which Essential usually does on a monthly basis, but it seems to have picked up the pace to fortnightly for the campaign period. Malcolm Turnbull is down three on approval to 38% and up one on disapproval to 40%, while Bill Shorten is steady on approval at 34%, but down four on disapproval to 40%. Turnbull’s lead as preferred prime minister narrows slightly, from 40-27 to 40-29.

An occasional question on the parties’ attributes records positive movement since March for Labor, whose ratings are up from three to nine points on favourable indicators (the biggest gain being from 30% to 39% on “has a good team of leaders”), and lower ratings on all the negative ones, with the exception of “will promise to do anything to win votes”. The movements for the Liberals are more of a mixed bag, with both positive and negative indicators going up. The one exception is “divided”, something the Liberal Party is now deemed to be by 52% of respondents compared with 61% last time. Other results from the Essential survey include a finding of 47% approval for the superannuation changes in the budget, with disapproval at 22%.

The only other bit of poll news from the last few days has been a Greens-commissioned Lonergan Research poll from the traditionally blue-ribbon Melbourne seat of Higgins, where the Greens appear to be giving Kelly O’Dwyer something to think about. The Greens were on 24.2% of the forced preference primary vote, which would put them in second place for the first time, with O’Dwyer on 44.6%, Labor on 18.5% and the Nick Xenophon Team on 7.9%. O’Dwyer leads 53-47 on respondent-allocated preference. The poll had a large sample of 1118, and unlike ReachTEL’s polls was conducted over two nights, on Friday and Saturday of the weekend before last.

The BludgerTrack aggregate records a reasonably solid tick to the Coalition this week, which is mostly down to a ReachTEL result that would have come out at 52-48 in favour of the Coalition if previous election preference flows had been used, as opposed to the headline result of 50-50. BludgerTrack now shows a more plausible result in Western Australia, although it’s still on the sunny side for Labor compared with what’s coming through anecdotally and in individual seat polls. Since last week’s reading, the Coalition is up two seats in Western Australia and one in Victoria, but they’re down two in Queensland. They are also recording a favourable swing in South Australia, which possibly just shows the two-party model isn’t working there any more. It’s worth noting that the Greens have been losing steam nationally over the past few months, presumably because some of the loose anti-major party vote is being gathered up by the Nick Xenophon Team.

bludgertrack-2016-06-15

Highlights of week five

A mixed assortment of public holiday reading concerning the last week or so of the federal election campaign.

With nominations having closed on Friday and pre-polling opening tomorrow, there has been a frenzy of activity with preference negotiations:

• The Australian reports that Labor will not direct preferences in South Australia, and the Liberals will do likewise in South Australian seats safely held by Labor. The purpose of this is to clip the wings of the Nick Xenophon Team, and add some measure of credibility to Malcolm Turnbull’s and Bill Shorten’s insistence that they will not emerge from the election pleading for the support of cross-benchers in a hung parliament.

• In a similar spirit, Malcolm Turnbull has pulled rank on the Victorian Liberal Party organisation by announcing that the Greens will be placed behind Labor on all how-to-vote cards. This maintains a policy that was first adopted at the 2013 election, which slashed Liberal preference flows to the Greens from at least three-quarters to around a third.

• Labor’s part of this apparent bargain is that it will direct preferences to the Liberals ahead of the Nationals in the three-cornered contests of Murray in Victoria, and Durack and O’Connor in Western Australia.

News from the Victorian front:

• Daniel Andrews’ government in Victoria is at the centre of an ill-timed controversy over the state’s Country Fire Authority, which led to the resignation on Friday of his Emergency Services Minister, Jane Garrett, and the sacking of the board of the authority. At issue is a proposed enterprise agreement which would grant the United Firefighters Union powers over the management of the authority, such as it exercises over the non-volunteer Metropolitan Fire Brigade. The CFA board refused to sign the agreement on the basis that the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission has ruled its effective bans on part-time work to be discriminatory. The issue is of heightened sensitivity in each of Victoria’s most marginal seats, since the boundary between the CFA and MFB zones runs well inside Melbourne’s suburbs, having been drawn in the distant past. Issues involving the CFA are acutely important in Corangamite, scene of the Surf Coast bushfires between Christmas and New Year; McEwen, which takes in some of the area affected by the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009; and La Trobe, which consists of urban fringe and semi-rural hinterland in Melbourne’s east. The issue is somewhat less pressing in the eastern Melbourne marginal of Deakin, but it nonetheless falls within the zone of the CFA. Corangamite, La Trobe and Deakin were the three seats won by the Liberals in 2013, and McEwen for Labor by a margin of 0.2% in the face of a 9.0% swing.

• In McEwen, however, the Liberals’ job is being complicated by their candidate. Chris Jermyn is back in the spotlight after Adam Gartrell of Fairfax provided a fascinatingly detailed account of his role in a social media project that emerged with nothing to show for $15 million in venture capital funding. The Liberal Party passed up an opportunity last weekend to disendorse Jermyn ahead of last Thursday’s nominations deadline.

• The Liberals are down a candidate in the unimportant northern Melbourne seat of Calwell, held for Labor by Maria Vamvakinou on a margin of 13.9%. This follows the resignation from the party of John Min-Chiang Hsu over a failure to declare a business interest on his preselection nomination form, namely an establishment that purports to be nothing less than the “best brothel in Frankston”. Since nominations close, Hsu will continue to be listed on the ballot paper as the Liberal candidate.

Elsewhere:

• After bowing out in Lyne at the 2013 election, Rob Oakeshott seeks to re-enter the fray in the seat of Cowper, which post-redistribution encompasses Port Macquarie, where his political career began in state parliament. Cowper is held for the Nationals by Luke Hartsuyker. Oakeshott says he would give Malcolm Turnbull “first go” at forming government if he again found himself holding the balance of power.

• Penrith councillor Marcus Cornish is running as an independent in Lindsay and directing preferences against the Liberal member, Fiona Scott. Cornish quit the Liberal Party in protest against the removal of Tony Abbott, and said Scott had “stabbed him in the back” by supporting Turnbull.

Phillip Coorey of the Financial Review reports that Coalition internal polling has Tony Windsor’s primary vote in New England at just over 30%. The report says this would be “enough to topple the Deputy Prime Minister if preferences go Mr Windsor’s way”, but it’s difficult to say exactly how troubling the result would be for Barnaby Joyce without knowing his own primary vote.

• One parliamentarian and two candidates ran into trouble last week over Australian Defence Force guidelines against use of military uniforms in election campaigning. Andrew Hastie, who won the Canning by-election for the Liberals in September last year, refused to desist from using an image of himself in army fatigues on billboards that sold him as “not another politician”, which resulted in his dismissal this week from an army reserve unit. A similar threat has been made to Pat O’Neill, Labor’s candidate in the seat of Brisbane, and attention has been drawn to Labor candidate Mike Kelly’s use of such images in a pamphlet, which he claims to have been permissible by virtue of being “low key”. Fairfax reports that the ADF is considering asking the government to prohibit campainging in uniform under the Electoral Act.

• It has also emerged that Andrew Hastie did not declare his purchase of a home on March 27 before the dissolution of parliament in May 9, when parliamentary rules required he do so by April 24.

Pork-barrelling:

• Labor’s confidence about Herbert is said to relate to a promise made on May 10 to contribute $100 million to a 25,000 seat home stadium for the North Queensland Cowboys in Townsville.

• Barnaby Joyce has been able to shore up his position in New England this week by announcing $8.5 million in funding for a sports precinct in Tamworth, followed by a promise that the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority would be relocated from Canberra to Armidale. Phillip Coorey of the Financial Review reports that the latter initiative has displeased ACT Liberal Senator Zed Seselja and the National Farmers’ Federation, “which fears the valuable work done by the agency will suffer because many staff won’t go”.

Phillip Coorey in the Financial Review dissects “$1.7 billion worth of relatively minor announcements” since the campaign began, including a series of major road announcements last Monday. This included $42.6 million in funding for an upgrade of the Hann Highway in north Queensland, which forms part of a direct inland route from Cairns to Melbourne, and is thus of particular interest in Warren Entsch’s electorate of Leichhardt. In Tasmania, the battleground seats of Braddon, Bass and Lyons were respectively promised roads funding worth $4.5 million, $3.0 million and $1.1 million.

Betting markets:

• Sportsbet has responded quickly to the Liberals’ preference announcement by revising the Greens’ prospects downwards in all seats where it is thought to be competitive. In Batman, the payout on a Labor win has been slashed from $2.50 to $1.15, while the Greens are out from $1.50 to $4. The Liberals are now credited with favouritism in Murray, coming in from $2 to $1.50 while the Nationals are out from $1.70 to $2.50

• More generally, there has been fairly substantial movement to the Coalition on betting markets over the past week. On the Betfair exchange, the Coalition is in from $1.34 a week ago to $1.23, or from 75.2% to 81.3% in implied win probability terms. Labor is out from $3.85 to $4.80, or from 27.0% to 22.2%. In Sportsbet individual seat markets, both parties are now on $1.87 in Page, after Labor had $1.65 to $2.15 favouritism a week ago; the Liberals are in from $1.75 to $1.50 in Deakin, while Labor is out from $2 to $2.50; Peter Dutton is in from $1.35 to $1.10 in Dickson, with Labor out from $3 to $6; and Christian Porter is in from $1.20 to $1.01 in Pearce, with Labor out from $4.20 to $12. The chart below provides a measure of three agencies’ implied win probabilities for the election overall, derived from a composite of their odds on the Coalition and Labor.

2016-06-13-betting-markets

Election minus three weeks

A flurry of individual electorate polls suggest a patchy swing, with Labor struggling in a number of key areas.

My seat-by-seat election guide is finally up, but I’m afraid at this stage that it’s a vanilla version without the embeddled tables and booth results mapping, which I will hopefully be able to add later. Meanwhile, the Fairfax papers have kept the polling mill turning with seven ReachTEL marginal seat polls. These are related in the following situation report, along with a further result for GetUp! which I don’t believe has been published anywhere else, and The Weekend Australian’s accounting of how party insiders are reading the breeze. While indications are patchy overall, by no reading is it easy to see where the Coalition might lose the 15 seats (or 13 going off post-redistribution accounting) – unless the Nick Xenophon Team achieves something extraordinary in South Australia, which certainly can’t be ruled out.

New South Wales

Fairfax’s ReachTEL polls record next to no swing in Lindsay, which the Liberals hold with a margin of 3.0%, or Dobell, a Liberal-held seat with a notional Labor margin of 0.2% after the redistribution. The respective results are 54-46 in favour of the Liberals and 51-49 in favour of Labor. The Weekend Australian reported yesterday that Labor was hopeful about Dobell, but doubtful about neighbouring Robertson. The report also related diminishing expectations for Labor in Sydney, to the extent that resources were being put into three seats it already holds: Parramatta (margin 1.7%), Greenway (2.8%) and even Werriwa (5.9%). Sources from both parties were cited saying the Liberals were expected to retain Reid, Lindsay and Banks, and Labor was even said to be “far from certain about taking the seat of Barton”, which has a notional 5.2% margin in Labor’s favour after the redistribution. Despite all that, Labor was said to remain hopeful about Macarthur on the city’s south-western fringe, where the post-redistribution Liberal margin is 3.3%, and Eden-Monaro, where it is 2.6%.

Victoria

Fairfax’s ReachTEL polls find the Liberals leading 52-48 in Deakin, which they hold with a margin of 3.2%, and 51-49 in Corangamite, which compares unfavourably with a 54-46 result in ReachTEL’s poll for the Seven Network a fortnight ago. The Weekend Australian suggests Labor is more confident about Dunkley than other Victorian marginals, with Corangamite recognised as being extremely difficult. The Country Fire Authority issue is cited as problematic in McEwen, which Rob Mitchell narrowly retained for Labor in 2013, despite the travails of Liberal candidate Chris Jermyn. The Greens are “increasingly confident” about Batman.

Brisbane

ReachTEL finds the Liberals leading 56-44 in Bonner, which they hold with a margin of 3.7%, adding to the impression that voters in inner Brisbane are responding well to Malcolm Turnbull. The Australian went so far as to report yesterday that Griffith, where Terri Butler succeeded Griffith at a February 2014 by-election, was “said to be in play”. It appears to be a different story on the city’s northern fringe, with Labor said to be genuinely hopeful in Dickson, which they last held before Peter Dutton unseated Cheryl Kernot in 2001, and Longman, which they gained in 2007 then lost to Wyatt Roy in 2010.

Regional Queensland

A ReachTEL poll conducted for GetUp! on Tuesday showed Nationals member George Christensen under pressure in the northern Queensland seat of Dawson, which he holds on a margin of 7.6%. The survey of 631 respondents found Christensen tied with Labor candidate Frank Gilbert on two-party preferred, from primary votes of 43.7% for Christensen (46.2% in 2013), 34.7% for Gilbert (29.7% for the Labor candidate in 2013) and 9.1% for the Greens (5.0%). However, Christensen would hold a 53-47 lead if preference flows from 2013 were applied. Labor is also said by The Australian to be “increasingly confident” about the Townsville seat of Herbert. Conversely, Labor is said to be struggling in Capricornia, which it usually holds, contrary to the impression that Labor is performing better in the regions than the city. The report suggests that the regional economic downturn has not been of advantage to Labor in the mining-intensive seats of Dawson, Capricornia and Flynn, because many blue-collar workers have left the electorate with the end of the boom.

Western Australia

Wildly mixed signals continue to come through, as ReachTEL’s polling for the Fairfax papers finds a 50-50 result in the northern suburbs seat of Cowan, where the Liberal margin is 4.5%. While this is at odds with the state polling aggregation produced by BludgerTrack, it accords with an account in The Australian yesterday of the Coalition being “more confident of holding all its seats in Western Australia and taking the new seat of Burt”. A report from Fleur Anderson of the Financial Review on Thursday gave credence to both views, with Labor said to be expecting four gains in the House (presumably Cowan, Hasluck, Swan and Burt) on top of two in the Senate, while Liberal sources indicated they were by no means giving anything away.

South Australia

ReachTEL provides a further indication that Rebekha Sharkie of the Nick Xenophon Team is likely to unseat Liberal member Jamie Briggs in Mayo. The poll has Briggs on 37.6% with Sharkie on 24.4%, a gap she would surely close with preferences from Labor (19.5%) and the Greens (10.4%). On Friday, the Financial Review cites unidentified Liberals, variously designated “worried” and “senior”, saying Jamie Briggs has abandoned hope of defending Mayo from Rebekha Sharkie of the Nick Xenophon Team. Briggs himself says this is “scurrilous gossip” and “completely untrue”.

Elsewhere, The Australian reports that Labor remains confident in the Darwin seat of Solomon, while Lyons “remains the Coalition’s most difficult seat” in Tasmania.

The other big campaign news of the past few days has been the closure of candidate nominations, revealing that 994 candidates have nominated for the 150 House of Representatives electorates, the second lowest number since 1998 (the first being 2010, when the somewhat early election announcement appeared to catch some unprepared). Despite Senate electoral reform, a record number of candidates have nominated, although ballot papers will tend to be slightly smaller as there will be many more ungrouped candidates this time, who do not have their own column on the ballot paper. This has been encouraged by the fact that below-the-line voting has now much easier than it was before, although ungrouped candidates will no doubt remain as marginal a factor as before. South Australia has substantially fewer groups on the ballot paper than last time (24 compared with 34), but Queensland is actually up slightly, from 36 to 40. The biggest winner out of the Senate ballot paper draw would appear to be Derryn Hinch, who has been given a tremendous boost in his bid for a Senate by drawing first out of 39 columns on the Victorian ballot paper.

ReachTEL: 50-50

Movement in the Coalition’s favour on the primary vote from ReachTEL, but their enthusiasm will be tempered by an alarming result from the South Australian seat of Grey, where Rowan Ramsey is under the pump from the Nick Xenophon Team.

ReachTEL has produced another lineball result on two-party preferred for the Seven Network, which stays at 50-50 after moving from 52-48 in Labor’s favour the week before. However, the poll offers some encouragement for the Coalition in having them up and Labor down on the primary vote for the second week in a row, and the two-party result would have rounded to 52-48 in their favour if 2013 election preference flows were applied, as ReachTEL did until quite recently. Labor was able to retain parity in the headline result through a still greater flow of respondent-allocated minor party and independent preferences, which already looked stronger than plausible.

Labor did particularly poorly this week (and to a lesser extent last week) on the forced response follow-up question for the undecided, on which they failed to crack 20%. With the result of the follow-up question integrated into the total, the primary votes are 42.7% for the Coalition (up 1.2%), 33.2% for Labor (down 1.7%), 9.9% for the Greens (down 0.2%) and 4.5% for the Nick Xenophon Team (down 0.5%). On personal ratings, Malcolm Turnbull’s combined very good and good rating is up from 26.3% to 28.3%, and poor plus very poor is down from 40.8% to 37.4%. Shorten is down on both measures, from 29.0% to 27.5% on the former and 39.6% to 38.6% on the latter, and Turnbull’s lead on preferred prime minister is effectively unchanged, down from 55.6-44.4 to 55.4-44.6. The automated phone poll was conducted last night from a sample of 2175, which is on the low side by ReachTEL’s standards.

Of perhaps even greater interest than the national result is the regular weekly supplementary marginal seat poll, which credits the Andrea Broadfoot of the Nick Xenophon Team with a 54-46 two-party lead over Liberal member Rowan Ramsay in the electorate of Grey, which covers South Australia’s “iron triangle” of Whyalla, Port Augusta and Port Pirie, together with the state’s remote areas. Inclusive of the forced preference results, the primary votes are Liberal 39.4%, Nick Xenophon Team 32.7%, Labor 14.5% and Greens 5.5%, with around three-quarters of preferences flowing to Broadfoot. The poll was conducted last night from a sample of 665.

UPDATE: BludgerTrack updated with the ReachTEL result below. As BludgerTrack is going off 2013 election preferences, it’s treating this poll as being close to 52-48 in the Coalition’s favour, and there has accordingly been a significant shift in that direction on two-party preferred. However, it’s only yielded one extra seat on the seat projection because of some fairly substantial changes in the state-level results. This is because I’ve only just now added the state results for the last two ReachTEL polls, because their new practice of reporting undecided results presented an accounting difficulty that I’ve only now attended to. The inclusion of these numbers has makes little difference in New South Wales, pares the Coalition back in Queensland, and inflates them in the other four states. In seat terms, this knocks three off their tally in Queensland, and adds two in Western Australia (corrected what looked like an excessive result there earlier) and one each in Victoria and Tasmania.

bludgertrack-2016-06-10

BludgerTrack: 50.1-49.9 to Labor

Newspoll’s 50-50 was matched yesterday by Essential Research, and the BludgerTrack poll aggregate continues to say much the same.

BludgerTrack is now updated with all of the federal polling published over the past few days, results of which are displayed at the bottom of this post. As has been the case since at least the start of the campaign period, the tracker is resolute in recording an effective dead heat on two-party preferred, with the seat projection continuing to point towards a slender absolute majority for the Coalition. The latest addition to the aggregate is the weekly reading of Essential Research’s fortnightly rolling aggregate, which echoes BludgerTrack in coming in at 50-50 on two-party preferred. This follows a two-point movement the previous week that turned a 51-49 Coalition deficit into a 51-49 Coalition lead. On the primary vote, the Coalition is steady at 41%, Labor is up one to 36%, the Greens are up one to 9%, and the Nick Xenophon Team is steady on 4%.

Further questions offer some encouragement for Bill Shorten with respect to perceptions of the two leaders during the campaign, although I wonder how good respondents are at isolating that period specifically. The results find 20% saying they have become more favourable towards Shorten versus 21% for less favourable, but these are much better than Malcolm Turnbull’s respective figures of 7% and 33%. Another dose of Essential’s “party trust to handle issues” records a big drop in the Coalition’s lead on managing the economy since a month ago, down from 20% to 12%, with most other measures remaining fairly stable. An occasional question on climate change records a four point drop since March in those attributing it to human activity to 59%, and a one point increase in those favouring the alternative option of it being “a normal fluctuation in the earth’s climate” to 28%. Most of the survey period was before large parts of Sydney’s northern beaches crumbled into the sea. Further questions confirm the impression that the electorate has been less than fully switched on during the first half of the campaign marathon, with only 14% claiming to have shown a lot of interest in the campaign, compared with 39% for some interest, 27% for very little interest and 18% for no interest.

Federal election bits and pieces:

• Labor’s candidate in Malcolm Turnbull’s seat of Wentworth, Evan Hughes, has provided Fairfax with results of a ReachTEL poll he commissioned showing a 10% swing against Turnbull, reducing his margin from 18% to 8%. The poll was conducted last Tuesday from a sample of 626.

Steven Scott of the Courier-Mail reports Labor optimism about the regional Queensland seats of Capricornia and Herbert is not matched for the state’s capital. The northern suburbs seat of Petrie, held by the LNP on a margin of 0.5%, is identified as a seat where Labor is falling short. A similar prognosis was offered in my own paywalled article in Crikey on Thursday.

• More of my words of wisdom on the campaign can be found on a podcast for The Conversation, and in a review of northern Tasmania’s flood-stricken marginal seats in a paywalled Crikey article yesterday.

Mark the Ballot tracks Sportsbet’s win probabilities for all 150 electorates to the start of the campaign. Sportsbet has substantially revised its odds over the course of the campaign in favour of the Liberals in Banks, Hindmarsh and Lyons, the Liberal National Party in Leichhardt, the Greens in Batman, Labor in Cowan, and Bob Katter in Kennedy.

Fairfax reports the Victorian Liberal Party’s administration committee discussed, but ultimately decided against, disendorsing McEwen candidate Chris Jermyn following his struggles before the news cameras as he gatecrashed a Bill Shorten event in Sunbury last weekend.

• An alleged promise by South Australian property developer Roostam Sadri to donate $500,000 to the Liberal Democratic Party in exchange for the top position on its South Australian Senate ticket has been referred to police by the Australian Electoral Commission, as reported yesterday by Josh Taylor of Crikey. This followed last week’s publication by Fairfax of an apparent written agreement to that effect. Sadri denies having paid such an amount, or that there was ever a “formal agreement”. The section of the Electoral Act pertaining to bribery offences provides, with helpful exactitude, that “a person shall not ask for, receive or obtain, or offer or agree to ask for, or receive or obtain, any property or benefit of any kind, whether for the same or any other person, on an understanding that the order in which the names of candidates nominated for election to the Senate whose names are included in a group in accordance with section 168 appear on a ballot paper will, in any manner, be influenced or affected”. Graeme Orr of the University of Queensland’s TC Beirne School of Law notes that Section 362 of the Act states that candidates forfeit their seats if involved in bribery, and that this requires only the civil rather than the criminal standard of proof. This could equally apply to David Leyonhjelm’s bid for re-election in New South Wales as to Roostam Sadri’s run in South Australia, if the Fairfax report’s assertion that Leyonhjelm “considered entering” an agreement was substantiated.

Further afield:

• The Northern Territory News offers a reminder that a territory election looms on August 27, and the Northern Territory News offers a helpful reminder with a Mediareach poll of 400 respondents in the Alice Springs electorates of Araluen and Braitling. The pollster appears to have failed to ask a follow-up question to prompt the 23% undecided, rendering it of little value, but it’s presumably instructive that less than 40% of decided respondents said they would vote for the Country Liberal Party, compared with 68% at the 2012 election.

• The Sydney Morning Herald reports the NSW Electoral Commission is investigating allegations of vote-rigging during Labor’s American primary-style “community preselection” process for the seat of Ballina ahead of last year’s state election. It is alleged that a party official used details on enrolled voters from the party’s database to fraudulently vote on their behalf during the online ballot, although the unnamed official is quoted saying he had merely “played along” when asked to do so by persons unidentified. The proposed beneficiary was the favoured candidate of head office and the ultimate victor in the preselection, Paul Spooner, with no suggestion that Spooner himself was involved. The formerly Nationals-held seat went on to be won by the Greens.

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