Federal Politics 2010-2013 – Page 39

Newspoll: 57-43 to Coalition

The Australian reports the latest Newspoll (the first in three weeks, following a break for the long weekend) has Labor recovering three points from their record low primary vote last time, but continuing to languish on 29 per cent. The Coalition also picked up a point on the primary vote, to 49 per cent, and maintains a two-party preferred lead of 57-43, down from 58-42 last time. The Greens have dropped a point to 12 per cent, with “others” taking most of the damage from the higher major party vote. The Prime Minister’s personal ratings remain dismally low, with approval up a point to 28 per cent and disapproval down one to 60 per cent. Tony Abbott is up slightly, by two points on approval to 36 per cent with disapproval down a point to 53 per cent. The preferred prime minister is unchanged with Abbott leading 40 per cent to 35 per cent. Newspoll has also has responses for best party to handle various issues: these have Labor going back on all measures since the question was last asked before the election, which is entirely predictable given the normal pattern of these responses following in the direction of voting intention.

This follows today’s Essential Research poll which had the Coalition lead steady at 55-45, from primary votes of 33 per cent for Labor and 48 per cent for the Coalition (both steady), and 10 per cent for the Greens (down one). Further questions suggest the public has trouble distinguishing between the four independents: those who back the government, Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor and Andrew Wilkie, all have approval ratings of 23 per cent or 24 per cent and disapproval ratings of between 32 per cent to 34 per cent. Bob Katter performs slightly better, with 27 per cent approval and 36 per cent disapproval. The broad hostility to the independents individually is reflected by the unpopularity of the balance of power arrangement overall. Only 22 per cent consider it to have been good for Australia – a substantial worsening since polls in the early part of the year, the more recent of which (on June 6) had it at 28 per cent. The bad rating is up from 39 per cent to 50 per cent.

Questions on poker machine reform suggest that while Clubs Australia’s grand finals advertising blitz may have had some impact, the public remains strongly in favour of mandatory pre-commitment on poker machines. The level of support is down to 61 per cent from 67 per cent four weeks ago, which opposition up five points to 30 per cent. Respondents were also asked to nominate a figure which “reflects the social cost of problem gamblers in Australia”, and opponents seemed reluctant to do so: 42 per cent opted for don’t know compared with 25 per cent among supporters. Those that did name a figure tended to come in at well below the $4.7 billion indicated by the Productivity Commission, with options of $1 billion or lower chosen by 44 per cent ($100 million being the most favoured), compared with 9 per cent for $5 billion and 5 per cent for $10 billion. Once appraised of the Productivity Commission result, support for pokies reform returned roughly to the level it was at four weeks ago. Respondents were also advised that 2.7 per cent of poker machine revenue was invested into the community, and it seems that for some this was enough: support for reform then came down to 57 per cent, with opposition at 31 per cent.

Misha Schubert of the Sydney Morning Herald has also brought tidings of a Galaxy poll of the electorate of Melbourne which shows Greens incumbent Adam Bandt headed for an easy victory regardless of what the Liberals do with their preference recommendation. Bandt’s primary vote is at 44 per cent against 29 per cent for Labor and 23 per cent for the Liberals, which compares with respective results at last year’s election of 36.2 per cent, 38.1 per cent and 21.0 per cent. This would translate into a 65-35 win for Bandt if Liberal and other preferences were allocated as per the 2010 election result: an anti-Labor swing of 9 per cent in Labor-versus-Greens. We are told that if the Liberals put Labor ahead of the Greens on their preference recommendation, as they did to such devastating effect at the Victorian state election, Bandt would still emerge 56-44 in front – exactly the result he achieved at the election. This result appears to have been arrived at by splitting Liberal preferences 60-40 in Labor’s favour rather than the usual 80-20, which seems soundly based on results from the state election. The poll was conducted two weeks ago from an unspecified sample size, and I’m guessing was conducted for a corporate or peak body client (UPDATE: It’s been pointed out to me that the article notes it was conducted for the Greens).

Morgan: 57-43 to Coalition

The headline figure might not look anything to write home about, but the latest Morgan face-to-face poll offers Labor a relatively encouraging result: their primary vote is up 3.5 per cent on the previous fortnight to 35.5 per cent, their best result since May. The Coalition is down 1.5 per cent to 46.5 per cent and the Greens one to 10 per cent. To any Labor supporters who might feel like reaching for the champagne bottle, it has to be said that due caution is required for any poll which is half conducted over a long weekend that included grand finals for both major football codes.

Using the industry standard measure of allocating minor party preferences as per the result of the previous election, the Coalition lead is down from 55.5-54.5 to 53.5-46.5, which is only Labor’s best result since late July and early August (when consecutive polls had their primary vote at 34.5 per cent). The bad headline figure for Labor is a result of the highly idiosyncratic results Morgan is getting on respondent-allocated preferences. This poll has nearly 60 per cent of minor party and independent voters directing preferences to the Coalition, a result without any precedent since at least the mid-1990s. The other pollster that publishes respondent-allocated figures, Nielsen, has also shown Labor’s preference share declining since the 2010 election, but not to anything like the same degree.

Newspoll quarterly breakdowns

Can’t see full online results anywhere at this stage, but GhostWhoVotes and The Australian relate the publication of the latest quarterly Newspoll figures providing breakdowns by state, gender and metro/regional from the past three months’ polling. The state figures are always the most interesting from my perspective, and it’s only Newspoll and Nielsen which offer this level of detail. Nielsen publishes full breakdowns for its monthly polls, but these are from much lower samples than the quarterly Newspoll. To even the playing field, the following discussion uses quarterly averages of Nielsen’s results.

The resulting samples are substantial for the biggest states – over 2000, in the case of Newspoll for New South Wales – but correspondingly smaller for Western Australia and especially South Australia. It is presumably no coincidence that for the two biggest states the two pollsters are currently in agreement, with swings of 8 per cent in New South Wales and 6 to 7 per cent in Victoria (although as the charts below show, it was a different story in the previous quarter). It is also agreed the swing in Western Australia is around 4 per cent. With Queensland however, a gap emerges: Newspoll says 6 per cent, Nielsen says 10 per cent. There is a still bigger gap in the case of South Australia, but this can be put down to small samples and the latest obviously anomalous result from Nielsen.

To establish whether there has been any consistency in these distinctions over time, the charts below show the Labor swings recorded in each quarter since the election. Despite poll-level peculiarities, both broadly suggest that Labor enjoyed a post-election dead cat bounce in the resource states. In the case of Western Australia, this gave Labor a buffer which is still evident in the relatively slight current swing. On the Nielsen chart however, the most recent result sees the lines for New South Wales and Victoria cutting across Queensland’s – remembering that the prevous quarter’s results for these states were very different from Newspoll’s, the only serious interruption to a broadly similar picture for these two states since the election.

Conveniently, Galaxy has also conducted one poll of 800 respondents in each quarter in Queensland, and these accord perfectly with the Newspoll and Nielsen results from this state. In each period, Labor is slightly higher in Newspoll and slightly lower in Nielsen with Galaxy in between, and there’s not much in it in any case. In the current quarter, Galaxy’s 63-37 two-party preferred splits the middle of the previously noted four-point gap between Newspoll and Nielsen. The only other state-level results I’m aware of are two Western Australian polls of 400 respondents conducted by Patterson Market Research. One of these was as long ago as October last year, which accorded with Newspoll and Nielsen of that time in showing a Labor recovery. However, an unpublished poll from two months ago was solidly worse for Labor than either, pointing to a swing of about 7 per cent.

What the polls would appear to indicate then is a big enough swing in New South Wales to account for Greenway, Robertson, Lindsay, Banks, Reid, Page, Eden-Monaro, Parramatta, Dobell, Kingsford Smith, Werriwa, Barton, Richmond and McMahon, and a slightly smaller swing in Victoria that would take out Corangamite, La Trobe, Deakin and possibly Chisholm (UPDATE: I originally included McEwen, but as noted in comments, the redistribution has made this safer for Labor). Since Galaxy splits the middle in Queensland, it seems best to apply its 8 per cent swing there – which, as was noted at the time the poll was published, would leave only Kevin Rudd standing in Griffith. Gone would be Moreton, Petrie, Lilley, Capricornia, Blair, Rankin and Oxley. In Western Australia, Labor currently holds Brand on 3.3 per cent, Fremantle on 5.7 per cent and Perth on 5.9 per cent: the Newspoll and Nielsen poll swings would put the first in danger while sparing the second and third.

Results from South Australia are small-sample and inconsistent, except that they have broadly been at the higher end of the national spectrum – perhaps around 8 per cent. However, this is coming off the high base of last year’s election, which gave Labor very handy buffers in a swathe of traditionally marginal seats. The lowest Labor margins are 5.7 per cent in Hindmarsh (where Labor has weakened relatively over the last two elections), 7.7 per cent in Adelaide, 12.0 per cent in Wakefield, 12.2 per cent in Makin and 13.9 per cent in Kingston. The last three seats, remarkably, were all in Liberal hands as recently as 2007.

Owing to insufficient sample size, neither Newspoll nor Nielsen provides state-level breakdowns for Tasmania. We did however have an EMRS poll from Bass a month ago which pointed to a 9 per cent Liberal swing, but this was from a small sample of 300 and there were questions raised about its methodology. A swing of that size would nonetheless be enough to take out Bass (6.7 per cent) and its neighbour Braddon (7.5 per cent). The territories of course are pretty much excluded from the polling picture altogether, although Warren Snowdon’s hold on Lingiari in the Northern Territory would have to be open to question given its margin of 3.7 per cent.

None of this should be read as a prediction: first term governments notwithstanding, its a rare government that doesn’t plumb mid-term polling depths far removed from the result eventually produced by the election. This is especially so in the modern environment, when weakening party loyalties have produced an ever-swelling contingent of swinging voters. Even so, the drumbeat consistency of dire results for Labor since April is hard to ignore, and it has no precedent for any government which lived to tell the tale. Labor’s leads during the early part of Mark Latham’s shooting star trajectory were never higher than 55-45; only once in early 2001 did Kim Beazley get as high as 57-43, and was usually solidly lower; and the relevant Newspolls for the great Houdini act of modern federal politics, Paul Keating’s win in 1993, look fairly benign compared with Gillard’s recent numbers. The Fightback! polls which toppled Hawke at the end of 1991 were in the order of 56-44 and 57-43, and Keating wrestled them back to the low fifties by March. Only from November 1991 to February 1992, after John Hewson remodelled his GST to exclude food and clothing, did the Coalition reach such peaks again.

Another lesson from history is that when the electorate ejects Labor from office, it tends to do with a force which the conservative parties are spared. With few exceptions (a handful of those in New South Wales plus Brand, Lingiari and arguably Oxley, which Pauline Hanson won in 1996 as a disendorsed Liberal), the seats listed as Labor losses on the current results have all been lost to them before.

Essential Research: 56-44 to Coalition

For all the convulsions it has faced on the political front, in one respect the Gillard government has presented a model of stability in recent months: its opinion poll ratings, as measured by the weekly Essential Research report, have been set in stone since the middle of June. This week’s result shows no change at all on the previous week, with Labor on 32 per cent and the Coalition on 49 per cent of the primary vote, and the Coalition leading 56-44 on two-party preferred. The only change is a two-point gain for the Greens, who are up to 12 per cent at the expense of other parties and independents. Respondents were also asked to rate the performance of Tony Abbott as Opposition Leader, with slightly better results than he is used to from his personal approval ratings: 38 per cent agreed he was “performing the role of opposition leader well and is keeping the government accountable”, with 45 per cent taking the commonly heard view that he is “just opposing everything and is obstructing the work of the government”.

Other questions fielded by Essential Research probe the complex area of public opinion on asylum seekers, and as usual they offer little to help guide political leaders through the minefield. Whereas other surveys have indicated surprisingly high support for onshore processing, the latest survey illustrates how dependent such results are upon the options given to respondents. Only 21 per cent were found to indicate a preference for onshore processing when the available alternatives were offshore processing “in any other country” (11 per cent), offshore processing “only in a country where human rights are protected” (31 per cent) and turning the boats around (28 per cent).

Respondents were further asked to rate features of a good refugee processing system, and here too the public seems determined to make life difficult for the government: the two features rated most important were “keeping costs down” (rated very important or somewhat important by 81 per cent) and the possibly incompatible objective of “protecting human rights” (80 per cent). It might be thought a surprise that the objective of “stopping the boats” only came in third, at 74 per cent. The least pressing concern was ensuring that asylum seekers were not returned to the country from which they had fled (49 per cent).

A question on trust in various Australian institutions emphasises how much work our churches have to do to recover confidence: only 29 per cent declared a lot of trust or some trust in religious organisations, against 72 per cent for the High Court, 67 per cent for the Reserve Bank and 61 per cent for charitable organisations. Interestingly, federal parliament (55 per cent) rated higher than the ABC (46 per cent), environmental groups (45 per cent) and trade unions (39 per cent). Last but certainly not least, the AFL grand final attracted the most interest out of three looming sports events: 32 per cent declared themselves interested, against 20 per cent for the NRL grand final and 10 per cent for the Rugby World Cup.

The weekend brought another polling tidbit from Adelaide’s Advertiser, which has conducted an in-house poll of 642 respondents from the state electorate of Port Adelaide. The poll is a product of the almost universal anticipation that the seat’s current Labor member, Kevin Foley, will head for the parliamentary exit not long after he stands down from the ministry in October 20, in tandem with Premier Mike Rann. Whereas there is little expectation Labor will be troubled in the resulting by-election for Rann’s seat of Ramsay, Port Adelaide-Enfield mayor Gary Johanson is thought to be a serious prospect as an independent candidate in Port Adelaide. The poll nonetheless shows Johanson attracting only 14 per cent support at this stage, with 37 per cent backing Labor, 31 per cent Liberal and 11 per cent for the Greens. Labor has a two-party lead of 55-45, pointing to a swing to the Liberals of about 8 per cent. The poll’s margin of error is around 4 per cent.

Morgan: 58-42 to Coalition

The latest fortnightly Morgan face-to-face result has the Coalition’s two-party lead steady at 58-42, although this stability is the result of a correction in the respondent-allocated preference flow after a worst-ever result for Labor last time. On other measures, Labor has in fact gone slightly backwards. Their primary vote is down half a point to 32 per cent with the Coalition up half a point to 48 per cent and the Greens down 1.5 per cent to 11 per cent. The Coalition’s two-party lead when preferences are distributed in accordance with the result of 2010 election has widened from 54.5-45.5 to 55.5-44.5. The poll was conducted over the past two weekends from combined sample of 1990.

Newspoll: 58-42 to Coalition

GhostWhoVotes reports that Newspoll shows little change from a fortnight ago, with the Coalition’s two-party lead down from 59-41 to 58-42. However, it wouldn’t be a current opinion poll if there wasn’t an unpleasant twist for the government, and this time it’s a new low on the primary vote of 26 per cent, down a point on last time. The Coalition are down as well, by two points to 48 per cent, with the Greens up one to 13 per cent. Julia Gillard’s personal ratings have recovered from last week’s disaster, although they are still the second worst she has ever recorded: her approval is up four to 27 per cent and disapproval down seven to 61 per cent. Tony Abbott has failed to hold on to an improvement recorded last time, his approval down five to 34 per cent and disapproval up two to 54 per cent, and his lead as preferred prime minister has narrowed from 43-34 to 40-35.

This week’s Essential Research shows no change in voting intention, and indeed the series has not recorded any shifts worth mentioning since mid-June. The current scores are 32 per cent Labor, 49 per cent Coalition and 10 per cent Greens, with the Coalition leading 56-44 on two-party preferred. Further questions find respondents believe to be the world in general and Australia in particular to be less safe than at the time of the September 11 attacks; little change in opinion on the carbon tax, with support down two points since August 1 to 37 per cent and opposition up one to 52 per cent; continuing broad support for the idea when it is specifically tied to compensation and investment in renewable energy; a belief nonetheless that the current scheme has been rushed; and a confused picture on whether governments should control either or both houses of parliament (though it is clear not many would opt for neither).

Further:

• A by-election looms in the north coast NSW state seat of Clarence following the resignation of Nationals MP Steve Cansdell. Cansdell has admitted to signing a false statutory declaration so that a staff member could take the blame for a 2005 speeding offence, which would otherwise have cost him his licence. The last time there was a by-election in the Grafton-based seat, in 1996, the result was a triumph for Labor: months after losing his seat of Richmond at the federal election, Labor candidate won the seat from the Nationals with a swing of 14.0 per cent, adding a handy buffer to what had previously been the one-seat majority of Bob Carr’s government. This time, Labor need not bother fielding a candidate: after winning the seat on Woods’s retirement in 2003, Steve Cansdell consolidated the Nationals’ hold in 2007 before picking up a swing of nearly 20 per cent in the electoral avalanche that was the March state election, pushing his party’s margin above 30 per cent.

• The Prime Minister has flagged support for trials of American-style “primaries” as part of its preselection process for some Coalition-held seats ahead of the next election. In keeping with the recommendation of the post-election review conducted by Bob Carr, Steve Bracks and John Faulkner, 20 per cent of a preselection ballot will be determined by those willing to register as official party “supporters”. Sixty per cent will be determined by branch members and 20 per cent by affiliated trade union members. The NSW Labor Party has resolved to follow a more radical path in five electorates before the 2015 state election, with 50 per cent determined by primaries and the remainder determined by branch members and unions. Two such experiments were conducted last year, by the NSW Nationals in Tamworth and Victorian Labor in Kilsyth. The former was a highly successful effort in which 4293 voters participated in the selection of Kevin Andrews, who duly unseated independent incumbent Peter Draper; the latter was something of a damp squib, attracting only 170 participants and selecting an electorate officer who did nothing to hold back the anti-Labor tide. The lesson seems to be that a degree of community enthusiasm is requried for the procedure to be worth the effort. This is least likely to be forthcoming when the party is not a serious prospect of winning the seat, and most likely in areas where the party is traditionally strong. Herein lies the catch: it is not in such areas where party branches are moribund, which is the very ill that primaries presume to cure. All that being so, trials in Coalition-held seats do not seem greatly promising at a time when every indication suggests seats will be swinging the other way.

• Antony Green has published analyses of the New South Wales election in March and the Queensland election of October 2009. Among other things, these tell us that the respective two-party splits were 64.2-35.8 to the Coalition, with exhausted minor party votes accounting for 12.9 per cent of the total formal vote; and 50.5-49.5 to Labor, with 7.7 per cent exhausting. In New South Wales, Labor’s primary vote of 25.6 per cent was its worst result since 1904, while the Coalition’s 51.8 per cent was its best result since 1932.

• The delicate balance in the Northern Territory’s Legislative Assembly shifted a fortnight ago when Alison Anderson, who won her outback seat of MacDonnell as a Labor member in 2008 and quit the party the following year, joined the Country Liberal Party. The numbers in the chamber are now 12 each for the Labor government and CLP opposition, with Nelson independent Gerry Wood continuing to provide Labor with a decisive vote on confidence and supply.

• The New South Wales government has introduced a bill that will ban donations to political parties from organisations of any kind, and include spending by affiliated unions within caps on party spending during election campaigns. One of the Keneally government’s final acts was to set caps of $9.3 million on electoral communications spending by parties and $100,000 for each candidate, and to ban donations from the alcohol, gambling and tobacco sectors.

Nielsen: 58-42 to Coalition; 52-48 to Labor under Rudd

Dreadful though the headline figures are for Labor, the latest monthly Nielsen poll might have offered them cause for relief, with no change to the Coalition’s two-party lead of 58-42. Labor is down a point on the primary vote to 27 per cent, with the Coalition steady on 48 per cent and the Greens up one to 13 per cent. However, the poll offers new torment for Julia Gillard by finding Labor would be ahead 52-48 if it were led by Kevin Rudd. The primary votes, we are told, would be 42 per cent to Labor, 43 per cent to the Coalition and 9 per cent to the Greens. Rudd has 44 per cent support as preferred Labor leader, against 19 per cent for Gillard, 10 per cent for Stephen Smith, 8 per cent for Simon Crean, 5 per cent for Bill Shorten and 4 per cent for Greg Combet. There has also been a sharp drop in Julia Gillard’s already miserable personal ratings: approval down six to 32 per cent, disapproval up five to 62 per cent. Tony Abbott is steady on both approval (43 per cent) and disapproval (52 per cent), and now leads as preferred prime minister 48-40, out from 47-44. I should have full tables complete with state breakdowns tomorrow, along with the regular Monday Essential Research results.

UPDATE: Phillip Coorey in the Sydney Morning Herald:

The latest Herald/Nielsen poll finds 54 per cent of voters believe asylum seekers arriving by boat should be allowed to land in Australia to be assessed. Just 25 per cent say they should be sent to another country to be assessed while 16 per cent believe the boats should be “sent back” and 4 per cent don’t know … When the question was asked a month ago, 28 per cent favoured offshore processing and 53 per cent onshore processing.

UPDATE 2: Essential Research. Another poll showing Labor’s position has not actually worsened since the High Court’s ruling on the Malaysia solution: indeed, the Coalition’s two-party lead has narrowed slightly, from 57-43 to 56-44. Labor is up two points on the primary vote to 32 per cent, with the Coalition steady on 49 per cent and the Greens down a point to 10 per cent. Unfortunately for Gillard, this survey features Essential’s monthly personal ratings, which show Gillard beating her previous worst result from July with 28 per cent approval (down seven from August and one from July) and 64 per cent disapproval (up nine from August and two from July). Tony Abbott is up two on approval to 39 per cent and steady on disapproval at 50 per cent, and leads 40-36 as preferred prime minister after trailing 38-36 in August. A question on processing of asylum seekers is bewilderingly at odds with the Nielsen results (see above), with 36 per cent rather than 54 per cent favouring processing in Australia. “Sent to another country” has 53 per cent – here the difference with Nielsen can partly be accounted for by the absence of a “sent back” option. You wouldn’t know it from the media coverage, but Andrew Wilkie’s pokies reforms have overwhelming support: 67 per cent (up two from April) in favour against 25 per cent opposed. Forty per cent support changes to industrial relations laws when it is put to respondents that doing so will increase productivity, but 42 per cent remain opposed.

Full tables from the Nielsen poll can be viewed here. With results for September, we can now construct Newspoll-style state-level results for the third quarter with reasonable sample sizes by combining the last three monthly polls. For the Nielsen figures, samples and margins of error are about 1300 and 2.7 per cent for New South Wales; 1000 and 3.1 per cent for Victoria; 750 and 3.6 per cent for Queensland; 390 and 5.0 per cent for Western Australia; 330 and 5.4 per cent for South Australia.

	Apr-Jun		Jul-Sep
	Newspoll	Nielsen	Nielsen	Swing
Total	46	43	41	9.1
NSW	45	41	41	7.5
Vic	52	47	48	7.0
Qld	42	40	35	9.9
WA	42	44	39	4.6
SA	50	47	40	13.2

Some more preselection snippets to add to the ones from Friday, with Tasmania being a bit of a theme:

• Brigadier Andrew Nikolic won Liberal preselection for Bass without opposition in July. Nikolic had most recently run the Defence Department’s international policy division, after previous service in the army including postings in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was rated a favourite for the preselection ahead of the 2010 election, but withdrew citing work and family reasons.

• The Launceston Examiner reported in late July that Brett Whiteley, who lost his seat in Braddon at the state election, had been sounded out as a candidate for the federal seat of Braddon by Senator Eric Abetz and state party president Richard Chugg. However, Whiteley was quoted saying he would prefer a return to state politics. Whiteley is now chief executive of council-owned Burnie Sports and Events.

• The Liberals have again endorsed wool marketer Eric Hutchinson to run against Dick Adams, Labor’s member of 18 years in the central Tasmanian seat of Lyons. There was earlier talk that former Senator Guy Barnett might be interested in running for the seat.

• The retirement announcement of Labor’s Bendigo MP Steve Gibbons excited some speculation that recently ousted Victorian Premier John Brumby, who held the seat from 1983 until his defeat in 1990, might seize the opportunity for a federal comeback. However, the Ballarat Courier reports that Brumby has ruled himself out. The report also said former Bendigo Health and Ambulance Victoria chairwoman and lawyer Marika McMahon had long been touted as Gibbons’ possible successor.

• Rick Wilson, Katanning farmer, divisional branch president and Pastoralists and Graziers committee chairman, will be the Liberal candidate in the WA seat of O’Connor, where the Nationals’ Tony Crook unseated Liberal veteran Wilson Tuckey in 2010. Wilson won an April preselection over Cranbrook Shire president Doug Forrest and Kalgoorlie consultant Ross Wood.

Morgan: 58-42 to Coalition

Roy Morgan has published results from its last two weekends of face-to-face surveying, with one period before the High Court ruling on the Malaysia solution and the other after. The poll actually shows a slight improvement for Labor on the poll covering the two weeks previous: their primary vote is steady on 32.5 per cent, but the Coalition is down three to 46.5 per cent and the Greens up 1.5 per cent to 12.5 per cent. On the respondent-allocated preferences two-party preferred measure, this translates into a shift from 58.5-41.5 to 58-42; allocating preferences as per the result of the previous election, the shift is from 55.5-44.5 to 54.5-45.5. This is the biggest disparity yet recorded by Morgan between the two preference allocation methods, with Labor receiving just 45 per cent of minor party and independent preferences compared with 65.8 per cent at the election.

Also:

• I have been informed that an unpublished survey of 400 respondents in Western Australia, conducted six weeks ago by Patterson Market Research (which conducts, among other things, Westpoll for The West Australian), had federal voting intention at 57 per cent for the Coalition, 27 per cent for Labor and 9 per cent for the Greens, suggesting a two-party result of about 63-37. This points to a swing of about 6.5 per cent: Labor’s margins in the three Western Australian seats they still hold are 3.3 per cent in Brand, 5.7 per cent in Fremantle and 5.9 per cent in Perth. The margin of error on the poll is a bit under 5 per cent.

• Arthur Sinodinos, former chief-of-staff to John Howard, looks set to fill the NSW Liberal Senate vacancy created by the resignation of Helen Coonan after confirming his intention to nominate.

• In the Sunshine Coast seat of Fisher, Mal Brough’s election as Liberal National Party divisional branch chairman ahead of the preferred candidate of sitting member Peter Slipper is universally being interpreted as a portent of looming preselection defeat of the latter by the former. Slipper had said his position as an LNP member of parliament would become “untenable” if his candidate was defeated, but after the event claimed he had “never threatened to resign”.

• Jessica Wright of the Sydney Morning Herald reports that as well as Brough, Tony Abbott has approached former Lindsay MP Jackie Kelly and Parramatta MP Ross Cameron with a view to returning to parliament at the next election. Also on Abbott’s wish list is Tom Switzer, editor of The Spectator Australia and former opinion page editor for The Australian. Kelly at least has been unequivocal in denying any interest in a comeback, while Switzer appears to be holding out for a seat in Sydney after being discussed as a possible contender in Craig Thomson’s central coast seat of Dobell. It has further been reported that Gary Hardgrave and De-Anne Kelly, who lost their Queensland seats of Moreton and Dawson in 2007, have also “come in for attention”.

• Labor’s Bendigo MP Steve Gibbons has announced he will bow out at the next election. Gibbons won the seat from the Liberals on the retirement of Bruce Reid in 1998 and consolidated thereafter, winning last year by a margin of 9.5 per cent. There was speculation that Senator David Feeney might seek refuge in the seat, having been unable to advance up the batting order from his highly loseable third position on the party ticket. However, Andrew Crook of Crikey described such reports as “erroneous”, and quoted Gibbons saying he “wouldn’t support David Feeney or anyone else administrative people from Melbourne impose on us”. Also mentioned by The Australian was Ben Hubbard, local native and chief-of-staff to the Prime Minister.

• Christian Kerr of The Australian suggests WA Liberal Senator Matthias Cormann has his eyes on preselection for the lower house seats of Pearce and Moore, to be vacated at the election by the retirements of Judi Moylan and Mal Washer. This threatens to be factionally problematic, as Cormann is of the Right whereas Moylan and Washer are noted moderates. Kerr’s report also foreshadows yet another preselection challenge to Tangney MP Dennis Jensen, who has twice required intervention from higher up to save him from preselection defeat at the local branch level.

• Alex Sinnott of the Warrnambool Standard reviews Liberal preselection jockeying for Corangamite, where Sarah Henderson is hoping for another crack after narrowly failing to unseat Labor’s Darren Cheeseman last year. She may face competition in the shape of Rod Nockles, an internet security expert who also sought preselection last time. Robert Hardie, an adviser to Senator Michael Ronaldson, was identified as a potential starter but declined to comment.

• Victorian Liberal Senators Helen Kroger and Scott Ryan are shaping up for a preselection contest for the second position on the party’s ticket at the next election, to be determined early next year. Kroger was elected from number two and Ryan from number three in 2007, but Ryan has since attained a more senior parliamentary position and is thus by party convention entitled to the higher place.