Category: Federal Politics 2016-2019

Essential Research closes its account for 2016 with another finding of 53-47 in favour of Labor, with both major parties steady on 37%, the Greens and One Nation both up a point to 10% and 8%, and the Nick Xenophon Team steady on 3%. The other findings record a view that 2016 was a bad year for pretty much everything, most remarkably in the case of “Australian politics” (good by 6%, bad by 62%) and “the planet” (good by 12%, bad by 44%), with a follow-up on expectations for 2017 producing much the same results. The current state of the economy was rated good by 23% and bad by 36%, with 26% rating it headed in the right direction against 45% for the wrong direction. Thirteen per cent expect their job to be more secure in two years, versus 30% for less secure. A question on whether Malcolm Turnbull understands various issues confirms, in a roundabout kind of way, that he’s more understanding of the rich than the poor.

First, Crikey has a seasonal offering this week of 25% off for gift subscriptions. If you’re a subscriber already, you can get $33 off a renewal (and also enjoy my piece today on Rod Culleton’s resignation from One Nation).

Second, I forgot to post the latest BludgerTrack update at the close of business last night, mostly because the result wasn’t very interesting, with only the usual Essential Research to add to the dataset. Labor gains 0.2% on two-party preferred, together with projected seats in Victoria and Queensland. Essential also included its monthly leadership ratings, causing a very slight improvement in both leaders’ net approval ratings. Essential will have one result for the year tomorrow, which will presumably be a wrap for all federal polling in 2016. However, The Australian should have Newspoll’s quarterly state and demographic breakdowns, along with scattered state results.

The latest fortnightly rolling average of federal voting intention for Essential Research returns Labor’s two-party lead to 53-47, after walking a point at a time from 53-47 four weeks ago to 51-49 a fortnight ago and now back again. Both major parties are now at 37% on the primary vote, with the Coalition down one and Labor up one, while One Nation comes off a point from last week’s high to 7%, with the Greens and Nick Xenophon Team steady at 9% and 3%. The poll also features its monthly leadership ratings, which have Malcolm Turnbull down two on approval to 34% and up two on disapproval to 46%, while Bill Shorten is respectively up one to 35% and, oddly, down five to 38%. Turnbull’s lead as preferred prime minister is now at 39-28, down from 40-28, leaving for a remarkably high “don’t know” remainder. The most interesting of the survey’s remaining findings is the overwhelming support recorded for an increase in the minimum wage, with 80% approving and 11% disapproving. Another question canvases whether respondents would be “likely” to vote for a new conservative party formed around the likes of Tony Abbott, for which 23% answered in the affirmative, although polling exercises of this kind have shown themselves to be of very little value in the past.

More evidence that the Coalition is ending the year in a very slightly better position than it’s been in over the past few months, this time courtesy of Newspoll in The Australian, which records Labor’s lead narrowing to 52-48 from 53-47 a fortnight ago. The Coalition now leads 39% to 36% on the primary vote, after a 38% draw in the last poll, with the Greens steady at 10%. Malcolm Turnbull is down two points on approval to 32% and up one on disapproval to 55%, while Bill Shorten is respectively down two to 34% and steady at 51%. Turnbull holds a 41-32 lead as preferred prime minister, compared with 43-33 in the last poll. The accompanying report has further results on the salience of jobs, asylum seekers and same-sex marriage as political issues. The poll was conducted Thursday to Sunday from a sample of 1629.

UPDATE (Essential Research): After a week at 51-49, Essential Research moves back a point in favour of Labor, who now lead 52-48. The most interesting aspect of the primary vote is that One Nation have gained a point to reach a new high of 8%, with the Coalition down one to 38%, and Labor, the Greens and the Nick Xenophon Team steady at 36%, 9% and 3%. The most interesting of the supplementary questions records approval ratings for senior government ministers, which finds Julie Bishop to be by far the government’s most popular figure, with 52% approval and 23% disapproval. Christopher Pyne, Barnaby Joyce, Greg Hunt, Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison more or less break even, but George Brandis has a net rating of minus 8%, and Hunt records a particularly high “don’t know” rating.

A “party trust to handle issues” question records a slight deterioration across the board for the Coalition since August, the biggest mover being “controlling interest rates”, on which their lead has narrowed from 12% to 7%. On a series of “party best at looking after the economy” questions, the Coalition has an 11% lead over Labor on “handling the economy overall”, but a less helpful 33% lead on “representing the interests of the large corporate and financial interests”, with nothing separating the parties on “handling the economy in a way that best helps the middle class” and “handling the economy in a way that helps you and people like you the most”. Also canvassed: voluntary euthanasia, Gonski funding, climate change, and where we go when we die.

The return of Ipsos this week threw a spanner in the BludgerTrack works, since its results were starkly divergent from the trend of the other two pollsters, to an extent that went well beyond the pollster’s observed peculiarities before the election. In particular, the primary vote for Labor was four points below anything recorded by Newspoll or Essential since the election; the Coalition were about two points below its recent form; and the Greens came in about six points on the high side. My general strategy for bias adjustment had been to use half measures of the difference between election result and trend measurements for the relevant pollster, but that wasn’t remotely adequate to cover the peculiarity of this Ipsos result. So, for the time being at least, I’m incorporating Ipsos in a way that is all-but-neutral to the overall calculation, but in which the trendlines will be affected by the movement in Ipsos results (or will be, when there is more than one Ipsos result to go off).

Despite the Ipsos numbers having little impact on this week’s result, there has been a fairly solid move back to the Coalition on the voting intention reading, which partly reflects the recent trend of Essential Research, which has had Labor’s lead over the past fortnight narrowing from 53-47 to 51-49. On the BludgerTrack seat projection, this translates into gains for the Coalition of two seats in Western Australia, and one apiece in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. Here the Ipsos numbers did play a role, since its state breakdowns were particularly strong for the Coalition in Western Australia and South Australia. Ipsos also makes as much difference as it would always have done to the leadership ratings, the model for which begins with the Malcolm Turnbull prime ministership. Reflecting to the overall strength of the Ipsos result for the Coalition, Malcolm Turnbull records a solid recovery on net approval, to the extent of almost closing the gap on Bill Shorten, and widened his lead as preferred prime minister.

We finally have a new player in the post-election opinion poll game, with Ipsos making its return for the Fairfax papers. It’s come in slightly lower for Labor than Newspoll and Essential Research, recording a 51-49 lead, although I don’t know at this stage if that’s previous election or respondent-allocated preferences (UPDATE: It’s both), since Ipsos provides both. The primary votes retain Ipsos’s pre-election peculiarity in coming in high for the Greens, at 16% compared with 10.2% at the election, and others, at 18% compared with 13%. That only leaves room for 36% for the Coalition and 30% for Labor, compared with 42.0% and 34.7% at the election. We are told that Malcolm Turnbull now has equal approval and disapproval ratings, and that Bill Shorten’s net rating is minus eight, though not the exact numbers (UPDATE: 45% apiece for Turnbull; 37% and 53% for Shorten, which I’d call a net rating of minus sixteen). Turnbull’s lead as preferred prime minister is 51-30, which unlike the other measures is better for him than pre-election. The poll was conducted Thursday to Saturday from a sample of 1403.

UPDATE (Essential Research): The Coalition has picked up a point in the Essential Research survey for the second week in a row, so that the pollster concurs with Ipsos in recording a Labor lead of 51-49. The primary votes are Coalition 39% (up one), Labor 36% (down one), Greens 9% (down one), One Nation 7% (up one) and Nick Xenophon Team 3% (steady). Other questions find 79% saying social class exists in Australia, versus 10% who say it doesn’t; 51% rating themselves middle class, 31% working class and 3% upper class; 52% perceiving the Liberal Party as mainly representing an upper class few purport to be a part of, compared with 17% for middle class and 3% for working class; 41% saying Labor mainly represents the working class, versus 16% for the middle class and 7% for the upper class; 31% saying One Nation mainly represented the working class, versus 7% for the middle class and 3% for the upper class; and a general recognition that the Greens didn’t reflect class one way or the other. A question gauging the importance of a range of issue priorities suggests that national security and the budget deficit rate less strongly now than they did in August.

Two new polls this week, from Newspoll and Essential Research (expect the post-election pollster duopoly to be broken over the next few days), produce an incremental move to Labor on the BludgerTrack poll aggregate, sufficient to gain them a seat in Western Australia on the seat projection. Newspoll as always provided a new set of leadership ratings, which likewise failed to make much difference.

• A production error resulted in me neglecting to mention the Essential Research numbers earlier this week. There was a move back to the Coalition on two-party preferred, putting Labor’s two party lead at 52-48, with primary votes at Coalition 38% (up one), Labor 37% (steady), Greens 10% (down one), One Nation 6% (steady) and Nick Xenophon Team 3% (steady). Essential have surpassed themselves with their supplementary questions this week, by recording strikingly high levels of agreement with a series of pointedly Trumpian statements about the present state of our own nation. This included an 83-9 split in favour of “the government should bring manufacturing jobs to Australia”, 75-14 for “if people who are not Australian citizens commit a crime they should be deported”, 77-13 for “we should do more to stop people entering our country illegally”, 52-32 for “I would like to see Australia more like it was in the past” and 60-26 for “no matter who is in power the system is rigged against ordinary people”. There was a 46-40 split in favour of “racial equality has gone too far”, and 40-48 against “gender equality has gone too far” (no gender breakdown on the latter unfortunately). Other findings: 64-17 in favour of cutting back on 457 visas, 45-44 in favour of taxes to make junk food more expensive, 51-39 for a 20% levy on soft drinks, and 56-16 for resettling refugees on Nauru and Manus Island to the US.

• Possum Comitatus relates that union-commissioned polling in Queensland finds One Nation support “in the teens”, and that the support is driven not by “the things One Nation gets headlines and TV grabs for”, but rather by those who “think, in the general case, that the world is fucked and not operating as it was promised”. For what it’s worth, Campbell Newman rates that a shy Hansonite effect is causing polls to rate One Nation several points too low; that the party will win a bag of seats at the next state election; and that the Liberal National Party should be laying the groundwork to enter into a coalition with them. I had a fair to say on such matters in a paywalled article for Crikey yesterday.