Unpredictable Roy Morgan has unloaded two very different sets of poll results: one using its usual face-to-face methodology, but based on one week’s sample rather than the recently more usual two, and the other a phone poll in which respondents were also asked about leadership preference, contrary to normal Morgan practice. The face-to-face poll is from 999 respondents, and shows Labor’s lead narrowing from 60-40 to 58-42. Labor’s primary vote is down 0.5 per cent to 49.5 per cent, while the Coalition is up a quite healthy 3.5 per cent to a still not-healthy 37.5 per cent. The Greens are down a point to 8 per cent.
However, the phone poll has Labor’s two-party lead at a more modest 54.5-45.5, from primary votes of 45 per cent Labor, 40.5 per cent Coalition and 7.5 per cent Greens. At present, a dedicated page for the phone poll result tells us only that Kevin Rudd leads Malcolm Turnbull as preferred prime minister 60.5 per cent to 26.5 per cent; that Rudd’s approval rating is 57.5 per cent; and that Turnbull’s approval rating is 43 per cent. Perhaps it will be fleshed out with more information at a later time.
Two other pieces of news:
• It seems Andrew Wilkie will run as an independent candidate for Denison at next year’s Tasmanian state election. Wilkie is the former Office of National Assessments analyst who quit over the Howard government’s actions before the Iraq war, and subsequently ran as a Greens candidate against John Howard in Bennelong in 2004 and as Bob Brown’s Tasmanian Senate running mate in 2007.
• A beleagured British Labour Party is considering sweeping electoral reforms, including an elected upper house. House of Commons reforms might presumably include some kind of preferential voting, which Britain’s three-plus party system badly needs, or more radically proportional representation, with which Britons have become familiar through elections for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, its members of European Parliament, and local government.
1,320 Comments
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1099 – Not sure what this proves or answers.
Gary
That’s an excellent question.
The behaviour is NEVER performed by a doctor or nurse, unless they are in administration. It’s always brought in by bureaucrats who are told that the figures are how they will be assessed for promotion. Also, if the bureaucrat gets a special job at a higher pay rate than they normally get, say to reduce the waiting list then it’s in their interest to keep that secondment going by making it look like they are “meeting their targets”. You wouldn’t believe how oftern I hear that phrase “meeting the targets”.
Dio – people up here more or less demand that they get the ops and my mother in law in SA had one at 84 – never quite recovered and died at 85. How does a Dr stand out against someone who is demanding the op.
We have others who are wealthy enough to have private insurance who go onto waiting lists for knees. They are the people who complain long and hard about the time it takes.
I’m all for the urgent matters being put first. Unfortunately we are now taught that it is our right to have whatever we want, when we want it and patience is no longer a virtue.
I agree tho – Rudd needs to have the true picture of what is going on. The Hospital admin/drs. have to stop covering up the facts.
Rather than fudging figures wouldn’t it make more sense for hospital admins to present the actual figures a put pressure on governments? I don’t get it.
There certainly should be an environment of frank and fearless advice to Government. Unfortunately over the last few years public officials have been placed into an envrionment where they feel such advice is unwanted. This Government has gone some way to improving that, but I think there’s still a way to go.
BH
It’s easy to say “no” in private practice, and we do all the time. The patient can’t really complain except to their GP but we always send the GP a letter saying why and explaining they could always get a second opinion.
It’s much harder in public hospitals where they can’t get a second opinion very easily so the patient and relatives get much more pushy and go to the patient advisor to complain etc. It gets so complicated and unpleasant that some doctors will give in and put the patient on the waiting list as the ensuing surgical disaster is spread out between lots of people.
GG
Yes, I know personal anecdotes are dangerous and not necessarily indicative of the whole picture, but this is a public patient with no insurance. The tumour doubled in size in the first two weeks between MRIs, proving it was malignant and aggressive but she would still be waiting for a bed indefinitely if not for the vigorous pulling of strings from a good samaritan. What worries me is – has someone else critical been bumped to accommodate her? Don’t want to think about that.
I’ve been told that it will now be much more likely she won’t come through, if the diagnosis is correct. The other point was, before the string pulling, she was going to be operated on by a registrar, with supervision from a specialist who wouldn’t even have been able to be in the theatre, as he has no access to the public system. Weird.
Surely that’s all at least indicative of a stuffed public system.
Improvement?
Improvement?
Don’t ask me how I posted my last post twice. Beats me.
I’m talking about improvement of public sector relations with ministers which is irrelevant to the question of whether there has been improvement in hospital service delivery.
Improvements in the reporting system is not unimportant, in fact it is fundamental to futher improvements surely.
Gary Bruce #1101
Sorry it needs to be explained. It was intended as a humorous means of saying the government has been ‘full of it’ on its grand plans to remove the age old state/federal finger pointing logjam on hospitals, but has now essentially admitted it will do nothing about it, and is now obfuscating madly, using the same style of empty phrases as ‘Sir Humphrey’.
One of the biggest problems in rural areas is the infighting and jealousies internally raging within the Area Health Services or whatever they call them now.
Some of the stories coming out of there are woeful and as it is mostly about protecting their own little fiefdoms and their positions.
Perhaps independent analyses of them need to be done.
Vera – you and I have the power, no doubt. Centre would be proud of us.
JV,
Can only point you to Diogs comments above.
The amount of money being spent of health and hospitals will never be enough to cater for demand and the only way that hospitals can cope is via waiting lists.
Obviously, Doctors make hard choices about priorities for particular patients. You’ve gone round the system to achieve a result for your friend. However, the unpalatable truth may be that their prognosis is not good and that the initial doctors involved made a decison that reflected that.
Also, how does transferring admin responsibility to the Feds fix things.
1113 – doesn’t help if the figures are being fudged though does it and not by the government.
I can understand your anger having lost a close relative to a brain tumour 2 year’s ago. Sorry to hear about your friend JV.
GG & Gary B
Thanks for your sympathy for my friend. The operation is nervously anticipated this week – tomorrow in fact, I think.
I thought the idea was to create a clear line of responsibility and accountability. At present the states and Feds can hide behind blaming each other, and always do.
Gary B
It does not help indeed. The health bureaucracy is toxic. There are huge numbers of psychological injury claims from that Department in NSW becasue of the sort of stuff Diogenes talks about at 1102.
Julie Bishop just mislead parliament, she said when the government was elected there was “no debt”, this is wrong, there was actually about $58 billion worth of debt.
Gary
The issue of target figures is incredibly complicated. I’ll give an example.
I was talking to someone who had just become the head of a big surgical unit. He wanted to build up a strong unit providing excellent, efficient care with a good reputation. I asked him how he was going to do it. He said he initially thought he would bring in some strategies to operate on more people to reduce the waiting list for his unit and show that his unit should be supported with funding etc because it was a well-performing unit.
I pointed out to him that the hospital would say “Gee you’re done a good job. I wish the X department would do that because they are just terrible.”
The next week he would get a letter from administration telling him that they were cutting his units operation sessions and giving them to Unit X because Unit X was so far behind in it’s waiting list.
This has happend innumerable time. Inefficency and bad care is REWARDED in public hospitals witb more funding.
What do you do?
Nice comment by the member for Wills, noting that, given her comments on the Budget, that the Opposition ought to make Julie Bishop the Shadow Treasurer and then he says “opps, they’ve already tried that”. Bishop claims a point of order and Madame Deputy Speaker says “no” and the Labor speaker continues on
Especially considering that Bishop spent half of her speech slagging of Gough Whitlam’s legacy.
It seems that personal attacks are fine with her, so long as she’s the one making them.
Dio
happy birthday
I think that bishop is a sideshow looking for an alley
Nup, not the usual suspects
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Creating-a-spineless-nation-pd20090525-SCRHQ?OpenDocument
A classic example of self interest and venality, the first resort for scoundrels.
Think for a moment all of those climate change denial op eds that grace the pages of the The Australian. Then have a look at what the actual management of News Ltd. thinks about climate change: http://www.1degree.com.au/
They say by next year that their newspaper business will be carbon neutral. I guess this could mean they are no longer going to print newspapers.
And of course they completely fail to mention the Government cutting taxes on small business investment, and the government providing stimulus payments so more people can keep spending money at small businesses.
A true entrepreneur would be too busy being entrepreneurial, rather than providing feedback on tax reviews and Awards that haven’t been finalised, or responded to by the government.
CHK Chk Ke-Boom. “Hasta la vista, Baby; I’ll be back”: So said the Temporary Terminator (Amigo Ronnie)
That 17% CO2 reduction sounded good in the US, but it equates to 4% based on 1990 levels. Not much incentive for Rudd to increase his 5% mandatory target by much.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/05/25/obama-falls-short-on-climate-legislation/
Greensborough Growler @ 1093
I don’t believe that bureaucrats in Canberra are more likely to know about what is going in on in remote and rural areas than bureaucrats in State capitals do. But I also don’t believe that they are less likely. Moving from Sydney to Canberra and then moving back from Canberra to Sydney did not affect one way or the other my level of knowledge about what is going on in remote and rural areas.
Diogenes @ 1102
If you make anybody’s promotion, performance bonus, higher duties allowance, or other form of career advancement are contingent on nominated figures, then you create an incentive for them to focus their attention on improving those figures. That’s the purpose of setting up that kind of contingency. And if the figures are susceptible of manipulation, then you have created an incentive to manipulate them. Therefore, if you don’t want the figures manipulated, don’t make people’s career advancement contingent on figures which are susceptible of manipulation.
What you should make health administrators’ career advancement contingent on I don’t know. I hope somebody can figure it out.
Ideological soundness.
But how do you measure “ideological soundness” ? If you bring in some innovation which looks fantastic and everyone loves it which should make patient’s get better care, you still get asked (not unreasonably) to show how much it helped.
Adherence to the party line.
Adam
I just saw a copy of this book “Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism, 1945-1948″ by David Cesarani . Was there an organised payback after the Holocaust?
BH
Do you think we could make a few quid using our special powers?
Ahh, good old bitter fishnets is at it again.
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25531441-5006703,00.html
The UK had the League of Nations/United Nations Mandate of Palestine until 1948.
Diogenes @ 1127
Thanks for that info, and still no howls of protest from the Greens at Obama’s 4% target?
PS happy birthday
So I’ve finished reading Peter Hartcher’s book and I think everyone here should read it, if they have the opportunity.
The most interesting things I found in the book -
Detailed accounts of Howard’s mood swings dependent on polling. Apparently he came very close to quitting a few times when he was in a slump and was getting Downer to canvass party support for him. He only wanted to quit if it looked like he had been pushed by Cabinet, something they weren’t prepared to do. Also noted is a general distaste for Costello amongst the electorate that was noted by powerbrokers.
The internal Liberal discussions on climate change policy. A number of cabinet ministers were pleading with Howard to sign Kyoto and set up an ETS because they knew Labor would hammer them on and they didn’t see any actual problem with it. Hartcher’s conclusion is that Howard didn’t sign Kyoto because he didn’t want to leave Bush hanging.
We often talk about the reasons for the Liberals loss in 2007 and how important each factor was. Liberal party research after the election, apparently released by Brendan Nelson, showed that the three biggest factors were the “it’s time” factor, Work Choices and climate change.
A lot of interesting things about how Rudd and Gillard ended pairing up, based on interviews with both of them and other heavyweights like Beazley, Kim Carr and Mark Arbib.
bob1234 @1135 The rest of the article was OK though.
Jenkins just told Tuckey to take his points of order to the Rules Committee
…..
Swan backs down on the rort crackdown lauded here earlier.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/05/25/2579791.htm
GO Kevin
……. He’s just brought up Turnbull’s failed visit to Karrinyup shopping center last week 
I thought it was full of crap myself. Alexander Downer is a tool.
Certainly there is the capacity there to lose many over 50s voters depending on what they do to Superannuation and especially to access ages. It would make a very simple argument for the Liberals to run if for example Rudd delayed access to Super until age 67. And once the issue is in the mind the trust can be lost for a long time. This will be a good opening for the Liberals if Labor is a bit slack in managing the issue.
So Labor needs to get their head around this early and make sure their messages are clear and often if it is their intention to not play around with this. In fact they should be out there now otherwise they will find the Liberals out their with misinformation which, will inevitably force Labor’s hand prior to the results of any review.
And this scare campaign would hurt more than most as it is an ‘immediate’ issue for those in their early/mid 50s. Then again Turnbull and co could be too ‘tin eared’ to realise it.
The Gen Blue’s could be dying off only to replaced by the Gen Supers.
[I just saw a copy of this book “Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism, 1945-1948? by David Cesarani . Was there an organised payback after the Holocaust?
Sorry, I don't follow: payback by who directed at whom?
‘Hard of Hats’
oh dear
Wonder how much Abbott has paid Phillip Coorey for this story?
……….
Albo up with big blowup pics of Libs who have been at ground breaking ceremonies for various nation building projects in their electorates despite having voted against these programs in Parliament …… All of the front bench on their game today
Wish someone would put a muzzle on that poodle
Vera, agreed
……. and Albo needs more air time as well 
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