Category: Federal Politics 2013-2016

Newspoll: 53-47 to Coalition

The Abbott government’s first Newspoll broke ranks with other pollsters in recording a honeymoon bounce for the Coalition, but the second is back in the territory of the election result. Personal ratings also provide some mild encouragement for Bill Shorten.

GhostWhoVotes tweets that the Abbott government’s second Newspoll result has the Coalition leading Labor 53-47, down from 56-44 a fortnight ago. The Coalition is down two points on the primary vote to 45%, with Labor up one to 32% and the Greens up two to 12%. Newspoll thereby returns to the pack after its previous result, which was unique out of the 15 polls published since the election in showing a significant rise in support for the Coalition. Tony Abbott’s personal ratings are still much better than any he enjoyed as Opposition Leader, although he is down two on approval to 45% and up four on disapproval to 38%. Bill Shorten has made a handy five-point gain on approval to 37%, with disapproval steady at 24%. Preferred prime minister changes only slightly, Abbott’s lead of 47-28 a fortnight ago narrowing to 46-30.

Stay tuned for the weekly Essential Research, which should be out later today.

UPDATE: Essential Research remains at 53-47, with both Coalition and Labor down a point on the primary vote, to 44% and 35% respectively, and the Greens up one to 9%. Monthly personal ratings find Tony Abbott’s disapproval on the upswing after a post-election improvement, up five points to 40%, while his approval is down one to 45% off his personal best result of a month ago. Bill Shorten’s debut ratings are 31% approval and 27% disapproval, and he trails Abbott as preferred prime minister 42-27. The poll also throws in personal ratings for Joe Hockey as Treasurer, in what looks like it might become a regular series, and it shows him viewed very favourably with 45% approval and 28% disapproval.

Further questions find 48% approving Labor’s position of dumping the carbon tax if it is replaced with an emissions trading scheme versus 26% disapproving; strongly favourable response to dumping fringe benefit tax on cars, weakly favourable response to dumping the mining tax, super tax increase and cap on education expenses, and strongly negative responses to dumping subsidies for low super contributions; and 25% opposition to live sheep and cattle exports, 16% unqualified support, and 52% support for the qualification that the receiving country should guarantee humane treatment.

Seat of the week: Scullin

After more than four decades in the hands of the Jenkins dynasty, the outer northern Melbourne seat of Scullin has passed on to Andrew Giles with the former Speaker’s retirement at the September election.

Scullin covers suburbs at the northern edge of Melbourne including Thomastown, Epping and Mill Park, from which it extends eastwards beyond the Plenty River to semi-rural outskirts and further suburban territory around Diamond Creek, a somewhat stronger area for the Liberals. The electorate traces its origins back to the seat of Darebin, which was created in 1949 to accommodate the area from Reservoir south to Preston. A seat bearing the name of Scullin existed in Melbourne’s inner north from 1955 until 1969, at which point it was abolished and the name reassigned. The newly renamed electorate of Scullin continued to cover the area immediately south of its present location, which was accommodated by Burke in the west and Diamond Valley in the east. Epping and Thomastown were absorbed by Scullin when Diamond Valley was abolished with the expansion of parliament in 1984, at which time Scullin continued to cover suburban territory around Hadfield further to the west, while the Diamond Valley area remained in McEwen. The electorate assumed its present character when the former area was exchanged for the latter with the redistribution that took effect at the 1996 election. Scullin as it has existed since 1969 has been held at all times by Labor, by margins ranging from 7.0% in 1977 to 27.6% in 1984. The current margin is 14.3%, following a 6.2% swing against Labor at the election in September.

Despite the dramatic changes in the territory it has covered, Scullin maintained continuity of representation in being held firstly by Harry Jenkins Senior from 1969 to 1986, and then by his son Harry Jenkins Junior up until the recent election. The elder Jenkins had been the state member for Reservoir from 1961 to 1969, and served as Speaker of the House of Representatives from the election of the Hawke government in 1983 until his appointment as ambassador to Spain in December 1985. His son then emerged as a compromise preselection winner after a tussle within the locally dominant Socialist Left faction, which took place against the backdrop of the events which led to its controversial figurehead Bill Hartley being expelled from the party. Jenkins faced a preselection challenge ahead of the 2007 election after the Right and hard Left reached a deal in which the latter was to back Bill Shorten’s move against factional independent Bob Sercombe in Maribyrnong, with the former to support youthful party operative Nathan Murphy in Scullin. This fell through after Sercombe agreed to go quietly, relieving pressure on Right members to fall in behind the contentious deal in support of Murphy, who has since entered state politics as a member for the upper house region of Northern Metropolitan.

Jenkins followed his father’s footsteps still further when he took on the position of Speaker after the election of the Rudd government in 2007. The Labor leadership hoped to improve their precarious position on the floor of parliament after the 2010 election by having Jenkins make way for an independent or Coalition defector, but this could not be effected until Liberal member Peter Slipper agreed to take on the position in November 2011, which proved to be a poisoned chalice for all concerned. Jenkins insisted he had abandoned the position of his own accord as he wished to resume participating in policy debate. He announced his intention to bow out of politics after serving out his term the following July. With the seat remaining a prize of the Socialist Left, there was no reported opposition to the preselection of the state faction’s secretary Andrew Giles, a Slater & Gordon lawyer and former adviser to state MPs Gavin Jennings and Lily D’Ambrosio.

Morgan: 50-50 (and the return of BludgerTrack)

Morgan finds Labor drawing level with the Coalition, although Bill Shorten shouldn’t go measuring the drapes at The Lodge quite yet. The return of your favourite poll aggregate finds no change on the election result.

Morgan published its fortnightly poll yesterday, which for whatever reason was limited to face-to-face and SMS polling, excluding its usual online component. This caused the sample size to come in at 2077, about 1000 short of the usual. The preponderance of face-to-face polling in the result might help explain the poll’s unusually weak showing for the Coalition, who are down two points on the primary vote to 41.5%. Labor and the Greens are each up half a point, to 35% and 10.5%, with the Palmer United Party up a point to 5.5%. The only meaningful two-party figure provided by Morgan is respondent-allocated, which at 50-50 is much as it would have been with a preference distribution based on the recent election.

An aberrant poll result marks an auspicious occasion for BludgerTrack to return to the sidebar, fresh from its almost-accurate projection of state seat totals at the federal election. Bias and accuracy measures have been freshly recalibrated, and a preference allocation model implemented which accounts for the Palmer United Party’s share of the “others” vote. There are currently only 14 polling data points in the mix (and only five with specific numbers for the Palmer United Party), including eight from Essential, four from Morgan and one each from Newspoll and ReachTEL. This is to say there is a paucity of live interview phone polling, which was again the best performing method at the election. At present the trend seems to be one of stability in the first month and Labor decline in the second, but the disturbance to the stability comes down entirely the Newspoll result.

Essential Research: 53-47 to Coalition

Essential Research has primary vote shifts towards Labor and away from the Greens cancelling each other out with respect to two-party preferred. Also featured: party attribute polling, and Senate news.

The latest fortnightly average from Essential Research drifts further away from Newspoll in having Labor’s primary vote up a point to 36%, with the Coalition steady on 45% and the Greens down two to 8%. The Coalition’s two-party preferred lead is unchanged at 53-47.

Questions about party attributes deliver a generally poor report card for Labor, the most eye-opening finding being a 72% rating for “divided”, which up six points from during the election campaign. Labor continues to perform poorly on trustworthiness and the keeping of promises, but is not thought to be too influenced by corporate interests and does okay on vision, policies and moderation. Results from earlier party attribute polling allow us to compare Labor’s position under Julia Gillard at the start of April, Kevin Rudd two weeks into the election campaign, and Bill Shorten this week. With results for negative indicators like “divided” and “out of touch” inverted so that higher numbers consistently indicate better results, Labor’s average score across 12 common indicators goes from 37.25% under Gillard to 46.2% under Rudd to 44.2% under Shorten (the three polls respectively had two-party preferred results of 56-44, 50-50 and 53-47). Departures from the overall trend suggest that while Rudd was rated a better and more visionary leader than his two peers, he had baggage for being too liberal with promises and was not seen as “moderate” (the latter being the only measure on which Gillard was competitive with him).

The Liberals’ average responses went from 47.5% in April to 45.25% in August to 48.7% in November. They have much improved since the August poll on leadership and being clear in what they stand for, but are more likely to be seen as extreme or too close to corporate interests. With mediocre ratings recorded for promises and trustworthiness, the party’s trump card remains that only 25% think it divided. The poll also tests opinion on what the government’s commission of audit should recommended, with means testing of welfare and presumably painless cuts to “duplication” strongly favoured over lower benefits and anything involving privatisation. A separate question finds opposition to the privatisation of Medibank Private at 43% compared with 22% support. Finally, a question on voluntary euthanasia has support at 68% and opposition at 19%, respectively down one and up five since September 2010.

Senate matters:

• I’ve had a fair bit of paywalled material on the Western Australian situation in Crikey, which subscribers can enjoy here, here and here (the articles respectively being from Tuesday, Monday and Friday).

• Labor in New South Wales moved promptly last week to confirm former Robertson MP Deb O’Neill to fill Bob Carr’s Senate vacancy, which he announced to the surprise of nobody only a week before. O’Neill was a surprise winner in Robertson at the 2010 election after deposing beleagured incumbent Belinda Neal for preselection, but she was unable to withstand the tide against Labor on September 7. Early nominees for the vacancy included another casualty of the election, former junior minister and Eden-Monaro MP Mike Kelly, but he withdrew as it became apparent that O’Neill had decisive cross-factional support. Labor appears to be planning to have O’Neill continue to work her old electorate with an eye to recovering it at the next election, as well as maintaining a broader Central Coast presence for the party after it also lost Dobell.

• The Queensland Senate seat made vacant by Barnaby Joyce’s move to the lower house as member for New England remains in limbo, as Campbell Newman withholds parliamentary endorsement for Liberal National Party nominee Barry O’Sullivan pending a Crime and Misconduct Commission inquiry. A former LNP treasurer, O’Sullivan faces lingering accusations that he improperly sought to induce state MP Bruce Flegg to vacate his safe seat of Moggill at last year’s election in favour of Campbell Newman, in lieu of which Newman was required to contest the Labor-held seat of Ashgrove. With the CMC taking longer over the matter than anticipated, the vacancy will go unfilled until state parliament resumes in February. That leaves Queensland a Senator short when the new parliament convenes next week, which if nothing else will deprive the Nationals of a vote in the party room. The matter has aggravated ongoing tensions within the LNP, with Barnaby Joyce and Ron Boswell calling for O’Sullivan’s Senate position to be confirmed even as “senior members” of the party reportedly push for him to “graciously step down”.

Seat of the week: Bowman

Covering Brisbane’s coastal outer south, Andrew Laming’s seat of Bowman came within 64 votes of falling to Labor under Kevin Rudd in 2007, before going dramatically the other way as part of the statewide backlash three years later.

Bowman covers Brisbane’s coastal outer south from Thorneside through Capalaba and Sheldon to Redland Bay, and extends across the southern part of Moreton Bay to North Stradbroke Island. It has existed in name since 1949, but did not include any of its current territory until 1969, instead being based in Brisbane’s inner south-east. The 1969 redistribution caused the redrawn electorate to extend from the mouths of the Brisbane River in the north to the Logan River in the south, the latter also marking the Bowman’s southern extremity today. The area now covered by Bowman began to acquire its suburban character at around this time. With the redistribution of 1977, the southern part of the electorate came to be accommodated by the newly created electorate of Fadden. Bowman’s present dimensions were established when its northern neighbour Bonner was created to accommodate the Wynnum-Manly area at the 2004 election, setting Thorneside as the northern extremity of Bowman.

Bowman in its various permutations has been a marginal seat for most of its history, having been held by the Liberals throughout the Menzies and Holt years outside of a win by Labor as part of its near-victory at the 1961 election. It next changed hands with the big swing to Labor under Gough Whitlam’s leadership in 1969, and would henceforth go with the government of the day until 1998. Leonard Keogh held the seat for Labor from 1969 to 1975 and again after 1983, and also contested unsuccessfully in 1977 and 1980. Keogh was defeated for preselection in 1987 by Con Sciacca, who lost the seat to Liberal candidate Andrea West in 1996 before winning it back again in 1998. The Liberal member during the Fraser years was David Jull, who re-emerged as member for Fadden in 1984.

The reorganisation caused by the creation of Bonner in 2004 boosted the Liberal margin in Bowman by 4.4%, prompting Sciacca to unsuccessfully try his hand in Bonner. Bowman meanwhile was won by Liberal candidate Andrew Laming, an ophthalmologist and World Bank health consultant who added a solid 5.9% to the notional Liberal margin of 3.0%. Laming spent much of 2007 under the shadow of the “printgate” affair, in which he was investigated for allegedly claiming $67,000 to print campaign material for state election candidates, before being cleared two months before the election. After rumblings that the affair might cost him his preselection, Laming survived an 8.9% swing to Labor at the 2007 election to hold on by 64 votes. He had a much easier time of it in 2010, his 10.4% swing being strong even by the standards of Queensland at that election. There was a correction in Labor’s favour of 1.5% at the 2013 election, going slightly against the trend of a 1.3% statewide swing to the Liberal National Party.

Laming was promoted to the position of shadow parliamentary secretary for regional health services and indigenous health after the 2010 election, but was dropped after the Abbott government came to power.

Newspoll: 56-44 to Coalition

After a string of mediocre post-election ratings from other pollsters, the first Newspoll is more in line with what governments can normally expect in the first blush of their honeymoon.

The first Newspoll in the life of the new government shows the anticipated honeymoon bounce which has not been evident in earlier entries from Essential Research, Morgan and Research. The poll has the Coalition leading 56-44 on two-party preferred, from primary votes of 47% for the Coalition, 31% for Labor and 10% for the Greens. Tony Abbott leads Bill Shorten 47-28 as preferred prime minister, which is a lot closer to Essential Research’s result from last week than Morgan’s. Tony Abbott’s net approval has gone from minus six to plus thirteen, his approval up three to 47% and disapproval down sixteen to 34%, while Bill Shorten’s debut ratings are 32% approval and 24% disapproval.

UPDATE: The weekly Essential Research is unchanged at 53-47, although both sides are up a point on the primary vote – the Coalition to 45% and Labor to 35% – but with the Greens (10%) and others (11%) unchanged owing to the vagaries of rounding. Also featured are questions on leader attributes (Abbott is up five or six points on capable, understanding of the problems facing Australia, good in a crisis and honest, although off a low base in the latter two cases). Debut numbers are also featured for Bill Shorten, and his biggest deficits against Abbott relate to the negative qualities of the latter – narrow-mindedness, arrogance and intolerance. Questions on the New South Wales bushfires are perhaps a little more climate-sceptic than I might have anticipated, with 48% thinking them unlikely to be linked to climate change. Similarly, 46% say the carbon tax should be replaced either with the Liberals’ “direct action ” plan (15%) or nothing at all (31%), against 15% in favour of keeping the carbon tax and 21% opting for an emissions trading scheme. Forty-eight per cent of respondents thought Tony Abbott too soft on politicians’ expenses against 26% for about right and 3% who somehow thought he was too tough.

Seat of the week: Wills

Located in Melbourne’s middle north, Wills was once home to Bob Hawke, is now home to Kelvin Thomson, and was home in the interim to independent Phil Cleary. It has never been home to the Liberals.

Red and green numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Labor and the Greens. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

Wills covers an area of Melbourne’s middle north, from long-established Brunswick in the south and Coburg in the centre to post-war suburbs further north. Like its eastern neighbour Batman, it straddles the divide between the Greens stronghold of the inner city and the expansive Labor heartland of Melbourne’s northern suburbs. However, the former area carries lesser weight in Wills than in Batman, being confined to the area around Brunswick, which makes the seat substantially more secure for Labor. The electorate was created with the expansion of parliament in 1949, though at that time its southern end was covered by the since-abolished electorate of Burke (an unrelated electorate of the same name covered Melbourne’s outer north from 1969 to 2004). Prior to 1949, an electorate called Bourke had boundaries similar to those Wills has had since Burke was abolished in 1955. Labor’s strength in the area was established early, with Bourke being held by either Labor or socialist independents from 1910 until it was abolished.

The inaugural member for Wills was Bill Bryson, who had won Bourke for Labor in 1943 before losing to an independent in 1946. Bryson was among seven Victorian “groupers” who were expelled from the party during the split of 1955, and he contested that year’s election as the candidate of the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), which would shortly evolve into the Democratic Labor Party. However, Bryson was defeated by Labor candidate Gordon Bryant, who went on to serve as Aboriginal Affairs Minister in the Whitlam government. When Bryant retired in 1980, the seat was used to accommodate Bob Hawke’s long-anticipated entry to parliament, enabling him to assume the prime ministership three years later.

Hawke resigned from parliament immediately after losing the leadership in December 1991, providing Paul Keating with an early electoral test in the form of a by-election for a seat the party had never lost before. The test was failed disastrously: in a record field of 22 candidates, local football identity Phil Cleary outpolled the Labor candidate 33.5% to 29.4%, prevailing by 15.7% after preferences. The result was declared void the following November when the High Court ruled Cleary had not been qualified to nominate as his job as a teacher constituted “an office of profit under the Crown”. The imminence of the 1993 election meant no new by-election was held, but Cleary won the seat at the ensuing election by a margin of 2.4%. Cleary’s position was subsequently weakened when redistribution pushed the seat westwards, and Labor candidate Kelvin Thomson provided his party with a rare highlight at the 1996 election when he polled 50.0% of the primary vote to prevail over Cleary by 5.8% after preferences.

A member of the Labor Unity (Right) faction, Thomson entered politics as the state member for Pascoe Vale in 1988, and served in the shadow ministry following the Kirner government’s defeat in 1992. He was elevated to the federal shadow ministry in 1997, serving in portfolios including environment and regional development. However, he resigned from the front bench in March 2007 when it emerged he had given a reference to colourful Melbourne identity Tony Mokbel. From February 2013 until the government’s defeat he served as a parliamentary secretary, first in the trade portfolio and then in schools after Kevin Rudd resumed the leadership in June, after which he returned to the back bench. Thomson supported Julia Gillard in the February 2012 leadership ballot, but was among those who defected to the Rudd camp in June 2013. Together with the rest of his faction, he supported Bill Shorten in the post-election leadership contest. While Thomson’s electoral position has at all times remained secure, the Greens achieved a minor milestone at the 2013 election when they finished ahead of the Liberals to secure second place, ending up 15.2% arrears after the distribution of preferences.

Essential Research: 53-47 to Coalition; Morgan: 51.5-48.5

Essential Research records a spike on Tony Abbott’s monthly approval rating, and finds less concern about the Senate electoral system than one feels there should be.

Essential Research and Morgan are still the only pollsters back in the game, and both have shifted slightly to the Coalition this week. The regular Essential Research fortnightly rolling average has the Coalition lead up from 52-48 to 53-47, from primary votes of 44% for the Coalition (up one), 34% for Labor (down one) and 10% for the Greens (steady). Monthly personal ratings have Tony Abbott up five to an all-time high of 46% approval and down one on disapproval to 35%, and with a 41-22 lead over Bill Shorten (who doesn’t get his own personal ratings yet) as preferred prime minister. There are particularly large gender gaps in these results, Abbott having a net approval of plus 14 among men and zero among women, and leading Shorten 48-21 among men and 35-23 among women.

Pleasingly, this week’s supplementary questions look at electoral reform. A question on the Senate voting system offered respondents the option of keeping the present system (a surprisingly high 32%), introduce New South Wales-style optional preferential above-the-line voting (33%) or look into other options (20%). There also seems to be a benign attitude to the Senate’s crop of successful micro-party candidates, who despite having mostly scored very few votes are rated “good for democracy” by 36% and “bad for democracy by 26%, with 17% opting for no difference. Support for compulsory voting remains very high at 71% with only 25% opposed, closely reflecting results of a comprehensive Australian National University survey on attitudes to electoral reform from August. Essential also features a semi-regular question on same-sex marriage, with results essentially unchanged from May: support and opposition are both down a point, to 57% and 31% respectively.

The latest Morgan multi-mode poll, which will be reporting fortnightly for the rest of the year at least, is a better result for the Coalition than the last, having their primary vote up 1.5% to 43.5%, Labor’s down 2.5% to 34.5%, the Greens up a point to 10%, and the Palmer United Party steady on 4.5%. On respondent-allocated preferences, Labor’s 50.5-49.5 lead from a fortnight ago has turned into a Coalition lead of 51.5-48.5, which aligns precisely with my own calculation based on modelling of preference flows from the recent election. Morgan is also publishing previous-election preference figures, but since they have made the curious determination to grant all PUP and KAP votes to the Coalition until the AEC makes available breakdowns from the election, they are of no value at present.

In other news, I had a post-mortem on Labor’s remarkable Miranda by-election victory in New South Wales in Crikey yesterday, available to subscribers only.

UPDATE (25/10): Morgan has published results from an online poll conducted on the weekend from a sample of 1169, which limits itself to the question of preferred prime minister. Despite the similar methodology, it’s considerably better for Bill Shorten than the Essential poll, putting Tony Abbott’s lead at 40-36 compared with Essential’s 41-22. Abbott’s lead is entirely down to those aged over 50, with Shorten leading in each of the three younger cohorts. Abbott’s lead is at 43-36 among men and 38-36 among women. Qualitative findings are also featured, which you can read here.

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