The Australian reports Labor’s lead in the latest fortnightly Newspoll is up from 56-44 to 58-42. Kevin Rudd’s preferred prime minister rating is up two points to 67 per cent, and Malcolm Turnbull’s is down two to 18 per cent. More to follow.
UPDATE: Graphic here. Rudd has exchanged five points of disapproval (down to 21 per cent) for five of approval (up to 68 per cent), while Turnbull’s disapproval exceeds his approval for the first time (42 per cent to 39 per cent). Also featured are questions on foreign ownership of Australian mineral companies (it’s bad).
Elsewhere:
• The weekly Essential Research survey has Labor’s lead steady at 63-37. The other questions relate to Australia’s international relations, in particular Kevin Rudd’s handling thereof (67 per cent approve), the state of our relations with China and the United States, and the countries respondents feel “are most like Australians in their attitudes and the way they see the world”.
• Perth’s ABC TV news yesterday reported that litigious Queensland mining billionaire Clive Palmer plans to bankroll a campaign by the WA Nationals to win a Senate seat at the next federal election – something they haven’t succeeded in doing since 1975. No word on who the candidate might be. Former Deputy Premier Hendy Cowan didn’t have any luck in 2001, but he did have Graeme Campbell/One Nation to contend with on that occasion. Their subsequent efforts have been half-hearted.
• The ABC reports the WA Nationals are insisting on a precisely fixed date for the state’s elections, contrary to Premier Colin Barnett’s policy of allowing flexibility in the timing of elections in February or March “in case of natural disasters”.
• In yet more Western Australian news, Antony Green has a page up on the state’s May 16 daylight savings referendum. The Poll Bludger’s page on the concurrent Fremantle by-election is in business here.
• The Victorian Parliament’s Electoral Matters Committee will conduct an inquiry into whether the Electoral Act should be amended to expand the scope of the provision prohibiting misleading electoral material. At present this refers expressly to material “likely to mislead or deceive an elector in relation to the casting of the vote”, and is thus narrowly concerned with matters such as how-to-vote cards that deceive voters into backing the wrong party. The Victorian Electoral Commission rejected a complaint from independent Kororoit by-election candidate Les Twentyman about a Labor pamphlet stating that “a vote for Les Twentyman is a vote for the Liberals”, but its report on the by-election suggested parliament consider addressing “an undesirable trend for candidates to take advantage or build on community misunderstandings of preferential voting with confusing statements”.
• Ben Raue at the Tally Room has started an election wiki.
1,460 Comments
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Hewson is making the rest of the panel look like headless chooks!
frank, who gives a hoot about Tuckey’s electorate anyway, if they vote for the likes of him they deserve zilch.
I would have said our worst Communications Minister ever, but there have been so many…
She’s just making an utter fool of herself
Is it worth watching?
Helen…”we had a policy….” but didn’t do jack in 11 years!
Not one of the better episodes, put it that way
Hewson – “I’m amazed Malcolm’s even got 18% quite frankly”
Hahahahahahahahaha
Wow, Howard’s legacy is getting a bollocking on Q&A
They are priming their electorates for the next big whinge. The $2 billion Howard promised the Nationals for telecommunications in the bush in exchange for the sale of Telstra
It will be a case of Rudd has taken this money from the bush that Howard would have delivered on.
Pre Telstra sale the cost of a phone connection was about $180 flat. Bloke I knew told me, laughing about it, how he watched over the week as a dozer, backhoe and gang of workers laid his phone line. He lived on the outskirts of a small town. He reckoned it must have cost $15,000 -20,000 plus yet he only had to pay $180.
With sale of Telstra I believe this guarantee disappeared.
But Tuckey and others will be pushing the line of the bush being sold short and treated as 2nd class, despite all the benefits the bush has brought for all Australians.
Wireless gets around that problem in rural areas at least
Hence the whinge about not getting Fibre – I’ll bet these people are expecting a family of 4 in the only Cattle Station in the area to get Fibre to the home.
I agree with Bree at 1301
That is kind of a let down for those living in remote areas though.
Well, they know where they can stick there whinge
What, that they get 12Mbps instead of… 12Mbps???
They’re still going to get higher speed broadband than they have at present, Glen – and higher than they were promised by the last Government.
Also, as with all technology, it will very likely keep rolling out long after the 90% are connected – railroads, electricity and phone lines spread once they were initially established.
Pretty low class debate. Coonan looks like she is shaking. Nerves?
Not really a debate.
Getting an improved service is a let down?
Best the libs could was dial up, gave my dad the sheeets. Loved a bet but so may times couldn’t get it on in time because of slow response.
He would have loved the increased speed of wireless.
But your let down line is what the Nat and bush Lib candidates will play on, even though labor is giving them a far superior service to what they ever had and was ever proposed under the Nat and Libs.
Well, Glen, do you want to pay the level of taxation that would be necessary to pay for laying fibre-optic cable to every remote locality in Australia? To the Tanami Desert? To the Torres Strait? To Milparinka and Oodnadatta and Useless Loop? No, I didn’t think so.
The Nats want the $2 billion they were promised by Howard in exchange for selling Telstra to pay for it.
anyone with HALF a brain knows that FTTH to 100% in Australia is simply not feasible.
so the poor country folk are going to get wireless, a better service than they get now. So, true to form, the opposition peddles the politics of envy to try to steal votes
BTW yesterday they were complaining that the govt was spending too much by going from FTTN to FTTH. Today they seem to want everyone to get FTTH. What the???
1309 – anywhere not viable (<1000 pop) will get wireless. A very limited technology at this stage. It will get better but it’s impossible to get running – fast
They might fool some but perhaps Rudd and his travelling cabinet will do a bush tour and set the locals straight on how much better off they will be
I shouldn’t have said fast…. wide is the key
Adam obviously not but 12Mbp compred to 100Mbp for the city seems quite unbalanced.
Can’t you get wireless to be half as fast as what can be achieved in the city?
Hard to know what the multipliers of this will be when completed but I imagine them to be quite significant. This sort of thing always leads to new innovations, systems and business models and so forth. People will be creating new dedicated electronic toys to take advantage of it, and people buy them. We have primed ourselves a little with normal broadband so will be read to develop faster when the turbo stuff comes along.
And does anyone remember during the debate regarding the sale of the last 1/3rd of Telstra that Barnaby Joyce’s Exchange all of a sudden was upgraded for ADSL ?
12 Mbps when a lot of remote communities today can’t even get 28.8 Kbps from a dial up modem because their phone line is pair gainee! The current regulation says that Telstra must provide a 19.2 Kbps connection to anyone in a town with 1000 people, but that is only the speed the connection CONNECTS at, it doesn’t mean the connection actually has to WORK at that speed so long as it stays connected.
You are saying that 12 Mbps by wireless 3G or satellite isn’t enough, when your mob made Telstra a private monopoly that spends most of its time in the high court trying to stop other companies getting access to its network.
I can get 5 Mbps, but I have exactly ONE choice of broadband – Telstra Cable – which hasn’t changed the price I pay for 3 years, because it has NO COMPETITION on its cable network.
If I wanted ADSL, the fastest connection I could get guaranteed on my phone line is 0.5 Mbps, which doesn’t even COUNT as broadband anymore.
I remember Coonan being interviewed on broadband before the election. She honestly had no idea what it was. You would think she would at least got herself a briefing beforehand.
Oh have a cry
Probably at the same cost as giving FTTH to the rest of the country
And it’s not just the bush either – I know someone inthe Perth suburb of Hamilton Hill who can’t get normal adsl and is relying on a ULL Connected ADSL connection which isn’t very reliable at the best of times.
Yeah, very ordinary performance from Coonan, Hewson I’ve always had some respect for, even though I quite happily voted against him in 1993!
Chris Bowen vs Sophie Marabella next week! Go Chris!
Make up your mind which argument your side wants to run with. Either 100 Mbps is TOO FAST for people in metro areas which will cost to much to build and fund, or the problem with the proposal is that it isn’t expensive ENOUGH and EVERYONE should have fibre optic cable EVERYWHERE!
The previous government couldn’t deal with this problem, because they basically thought that the only people that deserved fast broadband is those who live in the inner capital cities. The market will of course automatically fund those areas because they are densely populated, and thus profitable.
The previous government’s plan for outer metro areas was to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, so that we still have the situation that the metro area of our capital cities have areas that can’t get ANY broadband whatsoever. According to the previous government, this was not a problem.
Showson et al – All true, but the obvious if spurious line bound to be a mantra for the LNP arises from the fact that the new Rudd plan widens the difference between what will be the haves (city slickers promised a bazillian megapipes on tap) and the have nots (poor battling country folk in small communities on 12bps wireless maximum, often less). Get used to hearing it. But Joyce is in a bind thankfully.
She demonstrated that on Q&A when she thought that 100 Mbps equals 1 Gigabit per second.
And people in rural areas have some things that people in cities don’t have, like clean air, wide open spaces. People in rural areas can’t have EVERYTHING.
Moreover, I can’t even get close to 12 Mbps on my connection NOW, so why would they complain with 12 Mbps in 8 years time?
Well she has my sympathy there. I can never remember whether a mega is a thousand gigas or vice versa.
but you’re not the Communications Minister in a News Conference
I’ve avoided News Ltd publications for the last few days, I presume their coverage of Rudd’s broadband policy has been overally negative.
Does a bear Defecate in the Woods ?
A quite a lot of money got wasted over the last decade on not much in particular. A huge case of negligence from Howard and Costello. And Costello knew at least that it was being wasted. It is like winning lotto a few times then blowing the whole lot in couple of years and looking around for your next quid.
Yes and no. atm no, you can for instance, in some very very small ‘closed’ area’s, get 1/2 but only in the best of times. What Rudds on about changes everything. HUGE AMOUNTS OF DATA CAN BE SWAPPED IN A MICRO-SECOND. It’s unprecedented in this Country, nothing to do with how your monthly “ADSL etc ” bill. A fundamental change in the way we do anything, everything is on the way
No it hasn’t. The News Ltd. papers have be generally very positive about it, because 1) it ends Telstra’s monopoly on access to homes 2) it is a future proofed system, it can become even faster as engineers figure out more sophisticated ways to send signals down the fibre.
At least you’ve got the excuse of never having been the Communications Minister
Leigh has one too many buttons done up.
Ally Moore…..the SMSF trustee’s “spunk”
The best way to think about it is this, at best you can get a very fast DL speed however you are limited to a UL speed of around 1/10th of that. Imagine if it works 50X faster BOTH WAYS and consider what you might do with that kind of access
WTF??????
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/some-will-miss-out-on-broadband-burke-20090409-a29y.html
Have these idiots been living in a hole?
Shows On [People in rural areas can’t have EVERYTHING.]
Absolutely. And I reckon people in the bush really understand very well the limitations in getting services to them in the remoter areas.
Oh and expect The Age to link Helen Liu and the Chines Communist Party as major investors in the Brodaband Network
And if they really need more than 12 Mbps, they could move to a town with over 1000 people. Seriously, how anyone can honestly pretend that they are better on a 28.8K modem that times out every couple of hours, then they have no real interest in broadband.
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