BludgerTrack: 51.6-48.4 to Labor

Another placid week for the BludgerTrack poll aggregate, suggesting a new equilibrium has been struck between the government’s budget disaster and MH17 recovery.

The only national poll this week was the regular weekly Essential Research, which is joined in the BludgerTrack poll aggregate by Galaxy’s result from Queensland. That adds up to no change whatsoever on two-party preferred, but the Greens are up on the primary vote at Labor’s expense. There’s some shifting of the deckchairs on the seat projection, with Labor down one in New South Wales and Victoria and up one in Queensland and Western Australia, but it cancels out on the total score. Nothing new this week for leadership ratings, which serves as a sad reminder that in the past we would have expected Nielsen to come due this week.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,032 comments on “BludgerTrack: 51.6-48.4 to Labor”

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  1. That link to the eurozone picture from BK, above is rather ominous. It sort of means that the best we can hope for the Euro train wreck is that it will be in slow motion.

  2. zoomster @ 42

    Yes, that period of protection was what Swan now regrets in hindsight. I think it goes to prove the good heart of the Labor caucus, and why they find (found) it hard to beat the Libs’ nastiness.

  3. Quoted from the Paul Kelly by Zoomster @36 above:

    [now as Prime Minister, attempting to run on a series of positives, having to put forward his own reform agenda and policy agenda, is in a considerable degree of difficulty. Well, the lesson is clear.]

    it seems that Paul Kelly did not link the Prime Minister’s difficulties to the fact that he hid his true agenda until after the election.

  4. Victoria

    On previous thread I put it that Kelly is in the second phase of grief. The latter part of his interview shows the real part of this.

    He was angry at the diminishing role he and fellow scribes have over the narrative. The public is getting more say as social media holds more sway.

    Its not debasing politics. Its the lack of the MSM to be able to manipulate public opinion.

    As for Kelly’s comments on leadership they did not gel to me with what Wayne Swan said at the National Press Club. The leaked video we all saw of Swan speaking to the faithful with Julia Gillard standing by his side.

  5. Bushfire

    [All Abbott has done while in power is run campaigns, usually in the Murdoch press, against parts of our society that give him trouble, be they pensioners, the unemployed, his political opponents or, lately, Muslims. It’s a disgrace the way he tries to run Australia, pitting one sub-group against another, hoping to gain advantage, or get his way.]

    And as so many have said, he’s just the sort to encourage war between nations.

  6. [….Paul Kelly…

    now as Prime Minister, attempting to run on a series of positives, having to put forward his own reform agenda and policy agenda, is in a considerable degree of difficulty.]

    Positives? Kelly is lying again. There is nothing remotely positive about this Government. They are wreckers.

  9. Abbott now on radio:

    [‏@GeorgeBludger 2m
    Abbott says he’s happy to hear “any specific suggestions” on creating better community ties rather than dog whistling. The guy is a fuckwit.

    Abbott uncomfortable with the discussion coming around to inclusiveness. Instead he says about migrant groups “you chose us”. Unbelievable!]

  10. What goes around….

    [ How The Swiss Deal With Police Brutality

    With all the world’s eyes firmly focused on Ferguson, Missouri; ….the following clip from a Swiss soccer match would provide some context for what is possible…

    When a fan ran out onto a soccer field, several policeman tackle him and start beating him with clubs.

    …This conduct outraged the fans so much, people from the stands stormed onto the field and chased down the police for their inappropriate actions.]

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-20/how-swiss-deal-police-brutality

  11. victoria

    Yes. The grief comes from the reality that sin as hard as they can they cannot turn the turd of their ideology into a pollywaffle.

    Thus today all these articles about how the senate may accept a co payment if exemptions are made. This based on the AMA proposal despite knowing the PM has ruled this out. Let alone have confirmation from actual Senators giving numbers to make the assertion that the co payment is going to pass

  15. I don’t know what Kelly has to complain about other than that cognitive dissonance must be a bit confusing for him.

    News Corp print division, as a business proposition, is a bit like the old barbed wire canoe.

    Kelly has a richly paid job as whinger-in-chief at Australia’s most expensive sheltered workshop – ‘The Australian’ where his main job is to promote an unregulated market for spivs while the government sticks it to the disentitled.

    All he has to do is talk gravely like a pompous ass, set his jowls a-quiver, weep on Abbott’s behalf at the injustice of it all, get his pat on the back from Murdoch, and bank his pay.

    How hard is that?

  16. [62
    lizzie

    Abbott says the budget “reaction” has “been manipulated by the Labor Party”.

    Bloody hell, he’s paranoid.]

    And he’s also obliquely, if unintentionally, suggesting that anyone who opposes the budget should thank Labor and support them.

  17. Tories are going to be full bore gun shy come the next budget.

    Hockey on the record saying he wanted to go much much harder.

    credlin said “This is a budget” *SHE* would take to an election.

    Their problem is they are all over the place with contradictory statements.

    The more of the IPA’s agenda they implement the more grief they find themselves in.

  18. I felt that Abbott tailored his responses on abc radio today to reflect the ABC listening audience. I believe if he were on 2gb, his commentary would be more strident

  19. @CliveFPalmer: Woeful @couriermail just follows loss-making @Australian like sheep with @PalmerUtdParty obsession #yesrupert $auspol http://t.co/Hv97tAsTYB

    “@ABCNews24: #BREAKING: A High Court challenge to the Govt’s powers to detain & turn back #asylumseekers at sea will proceed to a full bench hearing”

  20. BK – So Paul Sheehan got taken down by the spivs he always so desperately supports. Comic gold. He should just shut up and take it like a true Capitalist!

    I was buying my coffee this morning and reading about “fireman” Abbott. The barista asked me why I kept laughing.

    Yeah, the libs are the firemen if the firemen turn up with no water, no ladders and no hoses.

  22. Further to BB’s post, something peculiar happens when a journalist ends up in court (as per Greste), being assassinated for doing their job (dozens in Putin’s Russia alone) or murdered as a graphic social media political message.

    The peculiar thing is that messages about these murders are transmitted by media colleagues. Quite often the emotional reactions of the MSM trasmitters becomes part of the ‘story’. There but for the grace of god go I.

    Does it matter what Foley was motivated by, career-wise, psychologically, ideologically or intellectually, provided he gathered good info, didn’t doctor it and got it back to all of us?

    It seems to me that, whatever their motivation, we badly need journalists to get in, get close, understand what is happening and get this stuff back to the rest of us.

    Democracy depends on it which is exactly why so many journalists end up being murdered.

    It is interesting that if the deliberate killing of journalists is the general issue, no one has done a comparative study of the unfortunate, and some would argue, disproportionate number of deaths of Al Jazeera journlists during the opening phases of the invasion of Iraq. One wonders whether their heads came off when they were killed by explosions emanating from the weapons of Australia and its Allies?

  24. vic

    [I felt that Abbott tailored his responses on abc radio today to reflect the ABC listening audience.]

    Nothing new about him telling one audience, particularly at speaking engagements, one thing and then at somewhere else saying the almost opposite.

    He has real ‘form’ on this.

  28. Clive has become an underdog. How strange. He has pitched himself as an outsider. If there was any doubt about that, the attacks on him by the Liberal officer caste this week have removed it. In his intemperance, Clive has proved he is human – that he’s passionate and can be provoked to anger, that he’s not a premixed, work-shopped package. He is an anti-hero now.

  29. It was interesting listening to Kelly rave on, quite disconnected with both the role Abbott and his own newspaper played in the situation he now laments.

    I used to predict this, that Abbott would sow the seeds of his own misfortune. He’s got the Punters thoroughly disillusioned with governance itself. An alarmingly large proportion don’t think democracy is a valid anymore (well, democracy for others… the whingers still want it for themselves, of course).

    Almost every morning for weeks now the Murdoch papers have been full of one threat or another, be it pensioners, the disabled, Labor, Palmer and lately jihadis.

    Joe Hockey’s been out trying to run a charm offensive, and the first time someone baulks he starts threatening, “My way, or the nation gets it.”

    Amusingly, Kelly listed the Carbon Tax and the Mining Tax as failures. But at least they were legislated, through a proper committee and consultative process taking years. Abbott hasn’t got many of his brain farts through yet, so I’ll reserve judgement on just who has been successful and who has been a failure.

    And then there are the polls. For Kelly to weep tears of blood over the prominence of the polls is bastardry at its highest level. We all know who ran Newspoll as some kind of oracle, writing up (or down) every nuance that their own shop’s statistical noise delivered each fortnight as if it was handed down on stone tablets.

    I remember that Kelly once wrote such-and-such a policy would not get up because “commentators” would pick it to pieces. As a member of the Commentariat, I suppose he had the inside running on just how they would react. I love the way that “senior journalists” regard themselves more as players than members of the media they seem to despise so much.

    Abbott has made his bed. He and his gang trash-talked the economy so badly that the Punters were scared to get out of bed. They’re still doing it (except to overseas investment lobbies, where all is, counter-intuitively, sweetness and light). The media happily followed along, ramping up anything bad, or even conceivably bad, into near depression. A country that confidently – confident in itself, confident in its government’s ability to manage things – survived the GFC on top of the world was turned into a cringeing mass of quivering victims by this almost treasonous naysaying of its own achievements. We were brushed by the GFC, barely touched, but the whingers were given permission to whinge by Abbott & Co, and their media and corporate patrons. Wind, meet whirlwind. We’ve talked ourselves into a black funk. Wayne Swan was right: it almost wasn’t worth the effort. The ungrateful bastards will still blame you anyway.

    Papers like Murdoch’s, while heckling the Labor government’s inability to run successful programs, collect enough taxes or generally balance the Budget (whether valid heckling or not), are now revealed officially to have been economic basket cases themselves, sacking lowly staff and rewarding fat cats. Fairfax is not far behind, especially in the loot-for-management stakes. Both organizations are probably in far worse shape today. The figures published this week in Crikey were a couple of years old.

    Kellys words last night were in denial of his, and his newspaper’s role in the disaffection we have for governance. Editorially, in the relentless polling and the two-faced barracking for the Coalition they were as culpable as anyone else in the sorry state that has beset our nation.

    As for his obsession with who said what to whom in “that” meeting back in 2010, he has based his entire theory on the testimony of one person – Kevin Rudd. Why he should believe him, uncorroborated, is anyone’s guess. I guess he just believes what he wants to believe. That’s the problem with “senior journalists”: they’re as partisan as the rest of us. They just pretend they aren’t.

    Damn them all.

  32. [75
    Boerwar

    If Abbott is triangulating, Shorten is drawing a flat line, Milne is doing a cosmic spiral, and Palmer is squaring the circle.]

    Abbott doesn’t do Euclid. He has just about enough sums at his disposal to play snakes and ladders.

  33. [79
    victoria

    Briefly

    Palmer may have garnered support in some quarters, but his outburst is not endearing him to the majority]

    Yes, he disgraced himself. But he has been made into an “enemy” by the Liberals. This will help him in the end.

  34. … and photographers

    the ABC showed a documentary on Don McCullin in June.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_McCullin

    It was hard to watch as he reflected on not knowing what to do while standing along side young men about to be murdered in the Congo while he was surrounded by crazed English, South African and Rhodesian mercenaries who just want to kill black people.

  35. How can Dutton get away with saying medicine is free when there is a Medicare Levy? Rhetorical question, I suppose. The journos aren’t picking him up on it.

  37. I thought Palmer’s outburst was pretty good. It was, for one thing, mostly factual. Whether it’ll do his business interests any good is another thing, but I doubt it’ll hurt his electoral prospects too much.

    It was only a few months ago that Palmer’s line was the government’s (albeit toned down a little). Plenty of farmers, for example, will agree with him. Barnarby Joyce whipped them up on foreign ownership. Mesma has been lambasting China – and its legal system – for years.

    Palmer’s only going for sub-10% of the Senate voters. If he can manage that, he’s in clover.

    Remember he’s only gotten half his quota into the upper house so far. Next half-Senate election (or in the case of a double dissolution) expect to see 8 or more PUP Senators, if going by resent trends is any indication.

  38. shellbell

    From McCullin’s bio:

    ‘In 1968, his Nikon camera stopped a bullet intended for him.’

    Nonsense. They would have been aiming at the Nikon.

  39. [victoria
    Posted Thursday, August 21, 2014 at 8:41 am | Permalink

    Darren Laver

    Paul Kelly made the obvious observations, but omitted the most important point as I mentioned above. It was the coalition who debased politics during the Rudd/Gillard years]

    And continues to do so.

  41. BCassidy was on ABC radio a little while ago. Apparently, China is putting off proceeding with an agricultural business arrangement cos of Palmer’s comments. Something sbout producing oramge juice here in Australia for export to China

  47. Palmers real *use* IMO is to frustrate abbott as much as possible.

    The tories probably thought he would support them on most things after grandstanding.

    Abbott is currently delighted to attack Clive as part of ‘look over there’, but I doubt Clive will forgive or forget.

    If Clives ‘newspaper’ brainfart goes ahead as a web edition it could probably be done at relatively modest cost and up the anti against murdoch, the GG and abbott tories even more.

    Too long years until the next election and abbott still needs PUP’s senate votes for lots of stuff.

    I’ve not much time for Clive at all but any damage he does to any or all of the aforesaid is most welcome.

    He probably also seriously thinks he can be PM ?

    The rich want power if they don’t have it and the powerful want money if they don’t have it.

  48. [84
    victoria

    briefly

    I am still unsure how the Palmer experiment will play out. I have conflicting views st any given moment!]

    He is now firmly aligned against the LNP. They are going to try to stomp on him again and again. This can be good for him. He is one of the counter-weights to LNP dominance and will benefit from that.

    His real problem is the lack of an activist base and a coherent, continuing platform. How far can money, curiosity-value and “otherness” take the PUP? Not very far, I guess. But he has a quirky underdog status, so he might last some time…maybe he’s a new Don Chipp: a politician trying to make a living by not being a politician.

  49. One of the most interesting things about the leaked Newscorpse financial docs is that staff on the Oz are earning an average of $174,000 a year. Talking about partying hard while the ship goes down.

  50. [the ABC showed a documentary on Don McCullin in June.]

    Saw that too, but McCullin is by no means unique.

    It’s the going back that is revealing. Most people would see that kind of shit once and never return. It would haunt them all their remaining years. PTSD would rule the rest of their lives.

    It’s not war junkies who are normal. It’s the vast majority of us who hate war and would never kill anyone, or even harm them. I don’t admire someone simply because they choose to accept mortal danger as a way of life.

    I watched a You Tube on Wingsuit “proximity flyers” the other night. It’s fascinating. They jump off cliffs thousands of metres high and literally fly down valleys, through holes in walls (true), sometimes on a couple of feet off the ground.

    It watched it because an Australian was killed last week in France doing just this. He misjudged a turn or whatever and plowed into a cliff. Dead, instantly.

    At the end of the You Tube video (very professionally produced) there was a list of no less than 25 flyers who had been killed just in 2013.

    Both Wingsuit flying and war journalism are not for the faint-hearted. The only way they can do what they do is to accept that they’re already dead.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnvvsjstveM

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