The latest Reuters Poll Trend weighted average of Newspoll, Morgan and ACNielsen results has federal Labor with a two-party lead of 55.8-44.2, presumably being weighed down a little by recent results from before the weekend.
UPDATE: Roy Morgan has joined in on the action with a small sample (546) phone poll including questions on leadership approval, which Morgan doesn’t normally do. It finds Malcolm Turnbull’s approval rating down to 25 per cent from 43 per cent in May, with his disapproval up a breathtaking 33.5 per cent to 62.5 per cent. Kevin Rudd’s approval rating on 63 per cent, up from 57.5 per cent in May, with his disapproval rating down from 33.5 per cent to 29 per cent. Labor holds leads of 56-44 on two-party preferred and 46 per cent to 39 per cent on the primary vote, which is actually quite mild by Morgan standards. Newspoll has also published its quarterly geographic and demographic breakdowns of recent polling by state, age, sex, and capitals/non-capitals.
Apart from that:
• Robert Taylor of The West Australian reports that Labor preselections for some highly winnable Liberal-held seats in Perth appear to be ”stitched up”. In the only two seats in the country which the Coalition gained from Labor in 2007, Cowan and Swan, those respectively named are Wanneroo mayor Jon Kelly and Slater & Gordon lawyer Tim Hammond. Kelly is interesting, as he ran as an independent against state Labor MP Margaret Quirk in Girrawheen at the 2005 election after a split in the Right faction. In Stirling, where decorated Iraq war veteran Peter Tinley failed to unseat current Shadow Workplace Relations Minister Michael Keenan in 2007, the nod is apparently set to be given to Karen Brown, former deputy editor of The West Australian and current chief-of-staff to Eric Ripper. Brown famously failed to win the new notionally Labor seat of Mount Lawley at the state election last September after suffering an 8 per cent swing, which many blamed on Alan Carpenter’s insistence that local member Bob Kucera make way for Brown. Peter Tinley is said to be holding out for a safe seat or a Senate position, and the unlikelihood of either suggests he will not be a starter at the next election. In Hasluck, which Sharryn Jackson recovered for Labor in 2007 after a term in the wilderness, Liberals are said by Taylor to be “working behind the scenes” to secure the endorsement of Mike Dean, who last week stepped down from his high-profile position as president of the Police Union.
• The ABC reports that Kathryn Hay will seek Labor preselection for Bass at next year’s state election. Hay is a former Miss Tasmania who became Tasmania’s first Aboriginal MP when elected at the age of 27 in 2002. After surprising everybody by dropping out at the 2006 election, Hay ran as an independent against Ivan Dean in the upper house seat of Windermere in May, and did very well to finish within 5 per cent of victory on the final count. With incumbent Jim Cox retiring, Michelle O’Byrne a sure bet for re-election, and Labor looking certain to win a second seat but very unlikely to pick up a third, the battle for the second seat is looking like a tussle between Hay, Beaconsfield mine disaster survivor Brant Webb, CFMEU forests division secretary Scott McLean (who famously came out in support of John Howard at the 2004 federal election) and Winnaleah school principal Brian Wightman, with only the latter looking an obvious also-ran.
• Rick Wallace of The Australian reports that George Seitz, western Melbourne Labor Right potentate and state Keilor MP, proposes to publish a “warts and all” account of his career in politics. Seitz is being forced out after nearly three decades in parliament due to a Victorian Ombudsman’s report which probed into the involvement of various state MPs in goings-on at Brimbank City Council. The aforementioned Wallace article is worth reading for a broader overview of the episode’s far-reaching impact on the Victorian ALP.
• Andrew Landeryou at VexNews reports that the closure of nominations has brought no challenges to sitting federal Liberal MPs in Victoria – including Kevin Andrews in Menzies, who was believed to be under threat from former Peter Reith staffer Ian Hanke.
• Nick in comments informs us that according to a Channel Nine news report, Labor polling has it trailing the Coalition 57-43 on NSW state voting intention.
2,238 Comments
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MHS – Gorn
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25739128-12377,00.html
It’s interesting that Milne protects himself from any correspondence from bloggers. Just how do you contact him?
Phone Liberal Party Headquarters.
Good one Steve. LOL
Took long enough. He’s been a corpse for ages.
SA Libs, most inept major party in Australia?
SA Libs, most inept major party in Australia?
Only if we close our eyes to the LNP in Queensland.
Curious they don’t rename it Grech-Gate by now. After all, it is clear there was no scandal in the ute or what it was used for. The question of Grech’s role and his dealings with the opposition and/or News Ltd is far less certain and more of a scandal.
Look who’s coming to dinner.
http://www.lnp.org.au/lnp-article/static-content/inaugural-lnp-state-convention-2009/355.html
As in any war truth goes first so it is with News Ltd’s war against the labor Govt, ethics went next, followed by integrity, and any other decent standard that Australians hold sacred. Like WWII no actual declaration was made just preemptive strikes. When I saw Milne recently I should have tripped him up but ignoring him made me feel better.
What were you doing at Tony Abbott’s office William Conroy?
GB651 Re MHS standing down in SA, its a very harsh standard to set, when Liberal opposition leaders are forced to resign for merely misleading parliament with fraudulent documents while failing to make any progress on the policy debate with the government. You would certainly hate for that to be a precedent…
Damn I love sarcasm
Streve 653 – try milneg@theaustralian.com.au
Did BB get his comment piece in today. It was terrific.
Milne & Lewis need to be told that no-one saw Grech sworn in. I watched from the beginning and there was no swearing in. Could it have been done prior to the Chairman opening the hearing.
The Queensland election is still not finalised. The appeal is due to be heard on August 13.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/hundreds-robbed-of-chance-to-vote-lnp-20090706-d9ta.html
665 – ffs, you’d think they lost the election by one seat the way this is going.
BH, the secretary of the committee was phoned this morning.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2009/07/03/reuters-poll-trend-558-442/comment-page-13/#comment-301716
I wonder how much is down to people who have decided to stay put instead of churning jobs like they might have and businesses putting on hold natural expansion. You would think this would pick up once infrastructure projects get under way. However I gather it is the tourist industry that will be hit worst.
Thanks Steve. Then Milne and Lewis need to be asked what they are basing their statements on.
I wonder if the Govt expects a shellacking from the MSM near election time so are considering to get into a war with them now so the public will know how to read the papers later.
It works for the Govt to get into a big fight with News Ltd ad cause them to reveal their colours as it will cause many to ‘filter’ what News Ltd then print.
Hahahahaha. The same sorts of journalistic skills that have served them so well in the past of course! Maybe it’s just that Glen’s been back hard on the bottle again?
Witnesses are not sworn in because it’s unnecessary. They are well aware that the giving of false or misleading evidence is an offence. The use of ’sworn evidence’ is factually incorrect but it still remains that there is the expectation that evidence given before a committee is honestly given. This means that Turnbull would’ve expected the evidence given by the witness to be as truthful as if given under oath.
So these journalists got it wrong? Heaven forbid… they’ve been so reliable until now
TP – I’ve been thinking along those lines. Newsltd does need to be shown up as deliberately partisan (apart from a couple of journos they allow to be less partisan).
The voter knows that Newsltd made a big hash of the fake email so the seed is planted that what they read cannot be gospel. May be a good ploy by Rudd & Gillard.
I think tho that every time something false is written or splurged everywhere then Labor just has to say it is blatantly wrong.
Take the War graves thing this a.m. – heavy rain over there so how on earth could they move long more quickly. A real beat up but the media is running with it everywhere. Did they go to the people actually in charge of the project. Betcha they didn’t – it would have spoilt their beatup.
Lagoon School – heard that the Principal has asked for a portable playground cover so that if the school ever did close the cover could be transported to another school.
Apparently the Principal and school PSA agreed the spend but one parent is complaining. Price ran with it early and hard this a.m. Switched him off – couldn’t be bothered listening to the rant.
Thomas,
I highly doubt that the Government needs to paint News as the conservative antagonist of the MSM – the organisation already champions a proud history of slamming Labor during electoral seasons. In this way, the colours of News are well understood.
The move is likely just retribution for the Tele’s handling of the ute-gate affair, mixed, of course, with the knowledge that the Government has remained extremely popular among voters despite News’ lukewarm response to Rudd and his main policy objectives.
From OzPol Tragic’s article @ 615
Fate my arse, call me cynical but an ABC cheer squad following Turnbull “for some time’ and that time just happens to be the time leading up to and during a fake email scam that was to bring down Rudd sounds a bit suss to me. Hmm just how involved are their ABC in all this? They do employ Newltd scum the likes of Piers and Bolt after all.
What a shame their Australian Story couldn’t go to script, as a scoop on the downfall of Labor and the rising of their Messiah Malcolm
LTEP, of course that’s true. Witnesses are under a legal obligation to tell the truth. But Turnbull is an experienced lawyer and he should know meaning of “sworn testimony” and “under oath”. Neither of those is an accurate description of Grech’s evidence. He keeps saying this because he thinks it will give what Grech said more credibility. “Ooooh he was Under Oath so he must have been telling the truth!” I’m not sure whether News Ltd is copying him or he is copying them. In any case, they’re all wrong.
Any part of the MSM that wishes to be partisan needs to, in order to be effective, be very subtle about it, but that takes a lot of time to have effect, if at all.
Issues and events that polarise often do it down partisan leanings (an assumption) so if a person was leaning to Labor before say, a smear was put into effect, they would probably take the side of Labor on it. Howard knew this type of thing and is why he tried so hard to get into a fight with Rudd and why Rudd avoided it at all costs.
The alternative to subtle is to go down the FakeNews path but the more you do that the more you lose credibility and thus defeat your intention.
While I’m in an ABC bashing mood (such fun) their radio 702 news last night reported that the Opposition were going to keep an eye on Rudd’s world trip to see if the taxpayer were getting value for their money, then they had Julie Bishop repeating the same statement.
What I want to know Julie is what value did the taxpayer get from your’s and Turnbull’s trip to Afghanastan last week?
Understood by those who follow politics, but not by the switched off masses I feel. If this will get more of those folk educated to the News Ltd form then it will insulate the Government to some degree in the future.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Liberal
#640, Hugo, my optometrist told me once that truth, like contact lenses, are in the eyes of the beholder, you see whatever you like to see. Wise man, my opto.
TP – Love your ‘FakeNews’ title. Goes well with ‘FauxNews’ in the US.
Vera – I heard that last night and said the same thing ‘what value from your trip, Julie’.
Turnbull looked miserable the whole time and she was doing her vamping bit to the guys over there.
Dario is spot on – the non-pollie tragics will take the words ‘fake news reporting’ and file them away subconsciously.
I just checked. Amazingly my post to Milne’s blog made it. It is one of many along the same lines. Good on youse, Bloggers!
Another poster here wrote:
This is why these “scandals” were dreamed up earlier on. If the inventors of them didn’t get the immediate hit in the polls they were after, then the consolation prize is being able to list them much later in a litany of supposed “affairs” that serve to reinforce the idea that the object of the campaign is gaffe or scandal-prone, despite the fact that none of the actual incidents amounted to anything in themselves. It seems that in journalistic muck-raking lore, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Or, to use another well-known saying, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” QED…
Milne and others are still attempting to keep Utegate alive. Some take the direct approach: they’re still poring over factoids, ignoring inconvenient rebuttals and, if necessary, actual evidence (or worse, making it up). The “sworn evidence” furphy is an example of ignoring facts. The fake dummy-up of the text of the email with MS Office lookalike headers to make it more convincing to the casual reader is an example of “making it up.”
But Milne fancies himself as more subtle than that. He is always on about “paradigms” and “themes” when he is interviewed or on Insiders. Glen regards his job as that of the more intellectual journalist. Not for Glen the argey-bargey of directly faked evidence, or misleading graphics (although he will resort to these when there’s nothing else). Glen always goes for the meta-issue, the intellectual angle. Utegate is not about a dodgy deal done between a rich PM who is still so cheap and petty that he wants everything on the nod no matter the source (the “Christian Kerr Hypothesis”), and who destroyed emails and misled Parliament in order to hide the evidence (the “Raving Wingnut On Pies’ Blog Hypothesis”). No, Glen takes the indirect path, and we see articles like this one (and it is not the only article on this thesis that Milne has written in recent days) asserting that Rudd is Kim Il Jong, or Josef Stalin or Hitler and that the SFP is none other than Rudd’s personal Secret Police Force. See? A $5,000 ute morphs into The Clash Of Cultures.
Milne is famous for saying that the original gaffe or misdemeanour is not what he’s after, it’s the cover-up that Mr. Milne is interested in. By taking this line Milne both shows that he is a cut abouve the hack reporters who peddle fakes around as the genuine article and generally get their hands dirty to write a story. It betrays Glen’s wishful striving to align himself with the vaulted Woodward & Bernstein and the Ben Bradley school of journalism, a clear cut above his grubby colleagues wearing out shoe leather at the Daily Telegraph.
One can only come to the conclusion that Milne is so far up himself that he hasn’t got too far to go before his ar$ehole turns up for breakfast. Milne has always fancied himself as a player, an important ikon, almost an institution in Australian journalism, head and shoulders above the braying pack of hyenas that everybody else in News Ltd belongs to. Yet what are his main claims to fame?
He ratted on his patron, Peter Costello in 2006, by breaking the Walletgate story too soon, cruelling his master’s chances of taking over in decent time for the election. I bet that went down well with Peter, Glen. His other big stories – Long Tan, Scores, Brian Burke etc. – did nothing to Rudd except to enhance his popularity. And Glen’s very biggest story was about himself: how he, seven-eighths tanked on Walkley Awards plonk, made an utter and complete fool of himself and the awards ceremony by drunkenly ascending the stage, taking a swing at Stephen Mayne, complete with stained penguin suit, shirt tails hanging out around his girthload of booze and security guards with headsets hauling him struggling off the stage. To illustrate his view of himself, the little Napoleon believed he was of such stature that he went for election as President of the Press Club, and got voted down by his fellow professionals, about 80% of whom are News Ltd journalists.. his own colleagues! You’d think Glen would have received he message by now, loud and clear, wouldn’t you? But no, he persists. Glen Milne is his own best obsession.
The man clearly cannot take it anymore. The disease seems terminal. He writes about ethics and fairness, balance and facts, while at the same time, in the very same article he perpetuates “scandals” that have been either consigned to the “Disproved”, the “Don’t Care” or (worse for Glen) the “Don’t Call Me Glen, I’ll Call You” baskets. I hate to put it this way but Glen’s malady is the classic “Small Man Syndrome”. He is perpetually hard done by. Only Glen can see the truth. Only Glen has the intellect to write the Big Story. Yet he muffs it every time… every time.
Poor bugger, I’d almost feel sorry for him if he wsn’t such a poisoned little dwarf.
Also re the job adds, people should remember that the second last figure only saw unemployment ries because the participation rate rose. If the markets continue to recover and retirees investment incomes improve, that will revert to the previous situation, bringing the number of persons looking for work down.
LP has got some good bits on the media stoush and Milne. Fun reading for us.
I always find PB and Possum much better and more balanced reading than LP, which is mostly rant, IMHO.
You are right Psephos but it is interesting to read that others are getting stuck into Hartigan et al as well. And not before time I say.
Good win for you and the Demons on Saturday – glad they did it for Jim S. Tadhg Kenneally will be upset because Jim was his inspiration for playing AFL.
Yes it was a fine win, though it does raise the question of why they can’t play like that all the time. Stynes is a terrific guy, I met him once, and he was doing great things for the MFC, so it’s all very sad.
Can’t help themselves. It will be seen as more trivial carping but I guess it is something to say when you have nothing to say.
I see Turnbull is in Bunbury campaigning – according to his Twitter Posts:
Wonder if he told the truth Frank. Gillard says he is spouting wrong information on it.
I hope the infrastructure spending is ready to go because by the look of this graph it is going to be needed very soon.
http://petermartin.blogspot.com/2009/07/if-job-ads-count-means-anything.html
It really is quite funny. The editor of the News Ltd has dismissed politics blogs as basically irrelevant but all he’s achieved is to draw attention to sites like PB and the musings of the good folk who post here. It pleases me greatly to know that PB must now be essential reading for the clones at News.Ltd..and the sniggering behind Milne’s back must be increasing in volume.
Two top posts today from you Bill. Keep up the excellent standard mate. Your words are being read and appreciated by many journalists across the political spectrum.
Well here is the story from “their ABC”.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/06/2618033.htm
I don’t suppose anyone speaks Indonesian, or knows anyone who does? I am being driven mad by the Indonesian Election Commission website.
Try your local High School Psephos – might be a source there.
Frank – Julia G answered quite a few questions on the student gap year in QT and explained it fully but still the Libs get the story wrong, intentionally.
Bernard in Crikey today
Did they give any to the ALP I wonder?
BB another great post, as usual. Maybe they should replace Milne with you. Now THAT would make news ltd worth reading!! Cant help but read the sense of panic in his articles- he is becoming less relevant by the day, particularly as he hasnt got friends in govt to feed him stories
… which is the key to News Ltd’s existential fury about Rudd. The Australian used to be called the Government Gazette here – The Court Circular would have been even more apt. They saw themselves as *part* of the government, and in a sense they were. Now they are out in the cold, forced to rummage in rubbish bins like everyone else, and they do not like it.
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