Adelaide’s Advertiser newspaper today carries a slightly curious poll of voting intention in Boothby, held for the Liberals by Andrew Southcott on a margin of 5.4 per cent. Conducted by phone from a sample of 649, it shows Southcott leading Labor candidate Nicole Cornes by an improbable 49 per cent to 32 per cent after distribution of the undecided. No two-party result is provided, but commenter Matthew Sykes has transcribed the paper’s large volume of generally unilluminating data from the poll throughout the previous comments thread. No doubt the Advertiser’s pollsters do their best, but my mind is drawn back to the final week of the state election campaign last March, when it ran a poll showing the Liberals neck-and-neck in Norwood and set to retain Hartley. Labor went on to win the seats with respective margins of 4.2 per cent and 4.6 per cent.
Reflections on the Miracle of Democracy at Work in the Greatest Nation on Earth
Advertiser Boothby poll
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516 Comments
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Ruawake to be challenging for the seat he’d have had to have been a member of the National Party…and hence a Nat even though he ran as an independent.
Yeah, you’re right. The Canning River is closer, but he’d definitely have a lovely view of both.
*sighs* If only I’d known then I’d have made greater efforts to befriend him last I was in the same room. Can you imagine a beautiful Perth sunset, some lovely Swan Valley wine …. ahhhhh
Tell me you didnt shake his hand Jas!
Kevin Reynolds – Have heard of him and he should know better.
Craig Johnston – Never heard of him. Gee he’s been a naughty boy.
John Speight – Never heard of him. Gee he’s been a naughty boy.
Sharan Burrow – Wow what a demon. Everyone is scared of sharon
Norm Gallagher – Deceased isn’t he?
Martin Kingham – Heard of him but as quiet as a mouse.
Dean Mighell – Not in the Labor Party
Leigh Hubbard – Heard of him but as quiet as a mouse.
Cesar Melham – Never heard of him. Gee he’s been a naughty boy.
Any time you want to detail their misdeeds please go right ahead.
All im saying is id rather have people from the bush supporting my party than the trade Union movement…Gary im sure you have the smarts to search their misdeeds on the net it wont be so hard i assure you…nevertheless we should be talking about the credible Boothby poll and the ‘gaffe’ that cost Cornes a seat in Federal Parliament….
So why do you run through the government lines that being a unionist is automatically bad?
Isn’t that the same as saying that all lawyers are bad?
The government’s only hope is to pretend that politics is black and white, they are running this anti-unionist line because it is all they really have left to talk about. It is a sign they are losing, if they had positive things to say then that is what they would be talking about.
Pi @ 289
Well said.
Also, the old Country Party, now the National Party, have always been the greatest mob of agrian socialists this country has ever encountered. As soon as the Mercedes runs out of petrol, beaut! – another grant from the taxpayer. (I know it’s hard on the land and my comment is not to cast delphiniums on farmers.)
On one hand we have R. Rattuss and his mob saying the individual is supreme and should look after themselves without government support, on the other a party (the Nats) dedicated to picking the public purse.
Optimist Says:168
September 27th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Ah SDA bashing i love it
Norm Gallagher was a Peking-line communist and was never an ALP member. Dean Mighell has been expelled – do you expect us to have him assassinated? Kevin Reynolds ought to be expelled and probably will be. The others are or were perfectly ordinary union officials
Not all Unionsts are bad ShowsOn obviously but there are many in the trade union movement who have done rather terrible things like run throughs and spitting on employees and employeers ect now people like this are going to be off the hook if Labor gets in…plain and simple.
#
207
Glen Says:
September 27th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
She was a communist, then a dedicated socialists, and a massive Union supporter…need i say more she represents a minority of public opinion and yet she could be deputy PM and treasurer…oh and to top it off she’s fugly nuff said!
Adam you must dislike Gillard then if she was a communist. Oh but then again its only ex communist Greens you dont like
Glen, I just looked up Cesar Melham and he is in Victoria. guess what – I live in Victoria and follow the news closely. I haven’t heard of this guy. Let me make it simple for you Glen (you’re the accuser) tell me what this guy has done wrong to be on a list of “union thugs”.
Glen if you have to troll back to someone who died 8 years ago it says more about you than those you mention.
Gary 313#
Cesar Melham
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/jun2000/wf-j30.shtml
“Johnston and fellow MTFU leader Dean Mighell were convicted of contempt of court on May 12 after they convened stopwork meetings last November in defiance of the federal Liberal government’s punitive Workplace Relations Act. The stoppage, involving more than 40,000 manufacturing workers in Victoria, was called to discuss Campaign 2000. Johnston and Mighell were fined $20,000 each and given until June 29 to pay. A third official, Australian Workers Union organiser Cesar Melham, escaped financial penalty after he apologised to the court.”
Hehehe Cesar had to apologise to the courts lol, he got off lucky!
As I suspected Glen, when pushed for evidence you have none and your accusations against the union movement are based on sheer fear, fear of a group of people you neither know or understand.
I dont want to know them Gary and i dont have to understand thuggery i see it with my own two eyes…
Now how many Laborites are celebrating that a future ALP Rudd Government is going to have Wayne ‘Rooster’ Swan as the Treasurer…lol!
So peacefully protesting against something you feel strongly about is thuggery is it Glen?
Nope Glen, no handshaking took place. No need to count my fingers.
“I dont want to know them Gary and i dont have to understand thuggery i see it with my own two eyes…” My point has been confirmed. Hence Glen this argument is over. No use debating with someone who doesn’t want to know the facts.
Ha peacefully yeah when they have the cameras on them Gary…but that’s one thing its how they act on the work site that shows how low some Unionists can go!
Glad to hear that Jasmine you might not be such a ‘terrible’ left winger after all…just think of how sweaty his hands would have been anyway (shudders) lol.
‘left winger’ really Glen you don’t get much to the right of me without being a little scarry and extreme.
But do you know what the funny thing is im sure people on the left on this blog would have political positions similar to people on the right on some issues its just that the left argues that the State can do a better job of providing services while the right generally believes the individual and the free market can do a better job…on some social issues i know i am on the left of the Liberal Party but on others id be on the right…
Glen
In a perverse way, I find your loathing of the word “union” mildly interesting. Were you subject to a bully at school? Was he, it, her, a “union boss”. Did that experience warp your brain cell?
Glen, this is serious. What formed your curious thoughts?
Swan won’t be worse than the gutless treasurer we have now. Costello was too gutless to be leader of the opposition, and now he is too gutless to be prime minister. Keating said it right, he is a low altitude flyer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaLLP4sc_6Q
So does that mean you advocate privatising every school, hospital and prison? I’d love to see how many votes the Liberals would win if that was their policy.
Why do you support the current government then? They are the biggest spending government in Australia’s history! If you believe in small government, you should vote for someone else.
As far as I know, Paul Keating is the only post-WWII P.M. to actually reduce federal government expenditure as a proportion of GDP. It has ballooned to record proportions under Howard.
Derek the reason why i and many people dislike Unions/Union bosses-officials is simply look at actions not words…
One only has to listen to the rantings of Dean Mighell and Kevin Reynolds to turn off more people to the trade union movement…
But also that the Union movement continually paints small business owners as willing to rip off their workers…do you know just how hard it is to find good staff once you’ve got them you wouldnt in your right mind want to dud them and yet the Unions pander to this and i dislike that because it denigrates the work they provide for the community in employing people and providing services…
ShowsOn he had to because he put Australia so far in to debt he had no other option!
What are you going on about? When you work and you get some extra pay for working a Sunday, or you get a day off because you need to attend a funeral, you are making use of provisions that unions fought for and won. They were not volunteered by businesses, unions had to work hard to negotiate such conditions. Are you saying all those conditions are unnecessary, and undesirable?
No, the unions want workers to be able to talk to each other about the conditions they work under, and if they want to, pursue a collective agreement.
WorkChoices is simply designed to make it hard for workers to pursue collective agreements. That is all it is about, it has nothing to do with improving conditions, wages, or helping the economy grow.
Why would a small business want to stop workers from talking to each other about the conditions they work under? Stopping that is inherently undemocratic.
While we are in the mood for scary union officials.
How about:
1. Tony Abbott
2. Brendan Nelson
3. Ronald Reagan
Debt was 4% of GDP when Keating took over as treasurer from Howard, it was 2% of GDP when Keating left office.
Debt went down under Keating. So did government expenditure as a proportion of GDP. Under Howard and Costello it has increased massively, they are big government conservatives. They don’t believe in small government, what they are against is government that they don’t run.
Gippslander,
My Bairnsdale friends (not especially or overtly partisan) referred to the former unlamented National Party MP as “hidden treasure”, a tribute to his subterranean profile.
Glen, At the Victorian election last November, Labor lost just two seats, which can unequivocally be classified as non-metro – Morwell (won by Nationals) and Narracan (Liberal gain). There were evidently issues particular to the Latrobe Valley – water, declining employment opportunities etc. – at work here.
The other Liberal gains apart from three very marginal seats in the outer eastern suburbs were Evelyn which has a significant suburban component, and Hastings which is part of the increasingly urbanised Mornington Peninsula. In any case both of these were on a knife edge, and had swings comparable to those in the suburbs. The Nationals also picked up Mildura from Independent Russell Savage. It was hardly a Liberal triumph in non-metro areas. In fact their vote improvements were largely in formerly safe Liberal seats which came under threat in the 2002 Brackslide, e.g. Doncaster, Box Hill, Mornington, Nepean, Caulfield.
Shrek ran a student union. Hence he must from now on be called a thug.
Glen.
Once again in the attempt to keep this threat accurate.
“slander (harmful statement in a transitory form, especially speech) and libel (harmful statement in a fixed medium, especially writing but also a picture, sign, or electronic broadcast)”
Libel is the word you are looking for. In my opinion (not libel) there is enough evidence to form a prima facie case against two Govt. Ministers, so that they should face criminal prosecution, for obtaining benefit by deception.
Bill, firstly I don’t believe Gillard was ever a communist. Socialist Forum was formed by people who had left the CPA because they no longer believed in even its mild version of communism, so the fact that she worked for SF doesn’t prove that she was a communist. Gillard worked for SF but I don’t believe she was ever a CPA member. Even she was a communist, she isn’t one now. She is a democratic socialist. This is a political position I don’t sgree with – I’m a social democrat – but it’s a perfectly legitimate one and not at all the same as communism.
Secondly, Gillard belongs to the Socialist Left, a minority faction (and getting more minority all the time) of the Victorian ALP. That means that she won’t ever be either Leader or Treasurer. Those positions will always be held by the Right. And whatever portfolios she and other Left ministers get, they will be members of a Cabinet in which the Right will hold a clear majority, and they will be bound by majority decisions of that Cabinet. So they will not be able to implement “socialist policies” (whatever that expression means in 2007) even if they are minded to.
Thirdly, I don’t condemn people for having once been communists. I was a communist myself in the early 70s, and so were a lot of other people who aren’t now – I’ll debate the intellectual follies of the 70s with you some other time. What I condemn is people who continue to spout Marxist cliches in 2007 without any reflection of the fact that Marxism is a failed, bankrupt and discredited ideology, and also people who sneak into the Greens so they can foist their Marxist views on the well-meaning but naive hippies who make up most of its membership.
Yes, ShowsOn
Costello had every opportunity to grab the prize – but wimped it. He is not the next PM. He’ll scuttle off to McBank to join his mate, the former Victorian treasurer, Stockdale.
Look at the exits over the past few years. Reith, Anderson, Sindonosis ( spelling?) various inept backbenchers, Janet of the Board …
Mosy people today think a commutist is someone who travels to work by public transport.
#207
Glen Says:
Your got to get over the name calling Glen. She is educated, she can obviously work with other people, she holds views a percentage of the population hold, and as for the comments on her looks, what has that got to do with ideas.
I am still not clear why this carry on about the Unions, yes there has been abuse of power, but Unions are part of our system. People who runs unions are just like any other group, good, bad and indifferent.
The hatred of unions has got the Liberal where they are , Howard just couldn’t help himself, he had to kick the sleeping dog.
As for the carry on about communist, I think it is fair to say that today not many people care who owns the means of production, a large proportion is now owned by private citizens living in China, a communist country and a very important trading partner.
We are increasingly a service economy, we need new ideas and new direction not people carrying on using labels that lost their significance decades ago.
Howard protects the Mad Monk AGAIN.
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,22492869-5005361,00.html
What makes you think that anyone is listening to Howard now?
Why does anyone bother responding to the Glens? They appear to have the analytical capacity of a gnat. Once he/they had made that truly appalling comment about Julia Guillard being “fugly”, he/they should be treated with the total disdain such a comment deserves. Back on thread, does anyone (with an intellectual capacity beyond kindy Glen/s), have any further information about how Nicole Cornes & the ALP might be responding to, sorry got to say it, Nicole stumbling? As I posted earlier, I thought Penny Wong did a good job of defending her, but I think someone’s got to sit her down with a copy of the policy ( and the other policies!) and make sure she can articulate it/them. I also think she’s quite anxious. There’s rather a lot of us who are quite good at helping people with this sort of problem, would be glad to suggest some names in Sth Aust.
ruawake, Glen is right. Your comment was defamatory and has been deleted.
William Bowe
http://www.pollbludger.com
So the “magician” has got the chooks running around,tilting at windmills and generally blowing smoke
1.Monica,Jas et al sorry for Glen and the other neanderthals rant (i actually find julia quite fetching as it is)
2.Nicole Cornes is “having a go” all plaudits for at least getting out there to the general public (its good to stumble shows she is human)
3.HowardJ has already planned his exit and as i said in aprevious post the rest is smoke and mirrors.
4.The audacity of AbbottT is incredible and howards lack of “ticker” in not admonishing him is an outright slight on the australian public
the “carpet bombing” of anti-labor stories will continue until Howard has enough spine to face the public!
# 293 Glen Says: September 27th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
I think you need to see a little bit more of the world than a young-liberals fact-sheet, before you even think you know how to earn a living, let alone solve a problem.
Unlike you, I don’t have a blinkered view of what Kevin Rudd, or the ALP, can or will do in government. But unlike the liberals, they don’t stand for the demonization of helpless people, they don’t stand for the stripping of your right to collectively bargain, they don’t stand for fear, they don’t stand for segregation, and they don’t stand for denying that we are having an effect on our environment that needs to be addressed.
Unlike you, I have a realistic understanding of what a union actually does, instead of relying upon the ignorant fear of a slogan. You’re a silly kid that is still stuck in a student-level debating mind-set, without even understanding how to earn a living. THAT is the level of experience you bring to any discussion regarding unions.
And it shows.
A few weeks ago I predicted Gillard would be the subject of a protracted smear campaign and got snorted at.
I think it’s only the start. Anyhow, I suspect most people have switched off on politics a long long time ago so it’s going to do little good for the Liberal Party.
The Tony Abbot story is just more desperation.
We have been trolled again by Glen with his pathological reaction to unions. Don’t waste your time with Glen. The discussion will go in circles, go nowhere and achieve nothing. Don’t waste time and bandwidth discussing unions with him.
Now that this is settled, how about we get Glen to outline for us the long term vision of this Govt. What have they planned for us?
1. WorkChoices Mar II
2. Nuclear Power Stations
Add to this list Glen and others please…
Why does the Govt want to get re-elected? Is there a plan or is there only obsession about Labor and a fear, smear and negativity campaign we can expect for the future?
Pauline, those are rhetorical questions you put #346. We know you think the government’s time is up. Most bloggers seem to agree with you so it won’t matter what Glen says.
Why is it that anybody with a view different to the ALP gets branded as…
A. Having no opinions of their own
B. A ‘troll’
C. Taking orders from Liberal HQ
This is just the easy way out for the left to avoid debating issues which they cannot respond to…quite simply.
Pauline…there is no workchoices mark II but there is Labor’s IR policy mark II…
Pauline why must you blather about nuclear power stations being the tool of the devil…i think nuclear power is something any sane person should consider if they were serious about dealing with climate change because nuclear has 0 emissions and unlike renewables can provide base load power…
Chernobyl happened a long time ago Pauline give it a rest…the 4th generation reactors are going to be Russian/Ukrainian proof and i think we would be ignorant not to make use of our 30% + reserves of Uranium…by the way Pauline if you are against nuclear power then you shouldnt vote for Rudd because he supports selling uranium to countries who use it for nuclear power…you wouldnt be a hypocrite would you?
The Government wants to be re-elected because it wants to create a full employment economy something that can and will never happen under the ALP and wants to lock in the savings of the mining boom into funds that will continue to provide revenue for much needed infrastructure…at an important cross roads we can’t afford to have a novice at the helm unless Rudd wants to become another Prime Minister Scullin and be in for one term because he couldnt manage an economic down turn…now is the time for experience and not a bloke whose been leader for less than 1 year and in Parliament for less than 10 years the country deserves someone better.
Finally and id say most importantly the Government wants to be re-elected to keep Wayne Swan from buggering up the economy…case closed!
Glen, points ABC are all correct.
Also Minchin has confirmed Workchoices Mark II but ONLHY to achieve your vision of full time serfdom
You have just confirmed Nuclear is coming
Libs have no future – case closed
Glen,
Please tell us more about what you know about buggering.
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