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.

• The silly season endeth – Kerry O’Brien and Lateline are back, and parliaments federal, Victorian and South Australian resume today.

• The Australian Workers Union has released a comprehensive survey of workers’ attitudes to the global financial crisis, derived from 1016 interviews conducted by Auspoll. The headline finding is that 40 per cent fear losing their jobs in the next year.

• Parties’ disclosures of receipts, expenditure and debts are available for perusal at the Australian Electoral Commission, at least so far as donations of over $10,500 are concerned. Siobhain Ryan and Imre Salusinszky of The Australian and Bernard Keane of Crikey sift through the evidence; the latter also opens fire on the Coalition over its obstruction of legislation reversing the 2005 disclosure threshold hike. Keane notes that one travesty can’t be pinned on the previous government: that we have had to wait until February 2009 to find out what went on at an election held in November 2007. Anyone who imagines this has something to do with logistics should consider the practice in New York City, where donations have to be declared before election day and “made public immediately on a searchable, online database”.

• Antony Green returns from a fortnight in the wilderness (literally) with a belated post-mortem on the Liberals’ defeat in South Australia’s Frome by-election. As I suspected, independent Geoff Brock owes his win to a peculiarity of the state’s electoral system that saves ballot papers with incomplete preferences by assigning them the preferences officially lodged by their favoured candidate. Without this provision, 258 ballots that were thus admitted the day after polling day would have been informal, leaving Brock 38 votes behind Labor at the second last count rather than 30 votes ahead. Another issue has been brought to my attention by Kevin Bonham, who points to the fact that a certain number of Liberal voters harmed their candidate’s chances by voting Liberal rather than Labor. If 31 such voters had tactically switched to Labor, Brock would have been excluded and the distribution of his preferences would have given victory to Liberal candidate Terry Boylan. Public choice theorists call this flaw in preferential voting “non-monotonicity”, which is elaborated upon here (although Bonham reckons “some of their worked examples are wrong”).

• Antony also gets in early with a preview of Western Australia’s May 18 daylight saving referendum, which combines customary psephological insight with a keen eye for the state’s lifestyle peculiarities.

• Former Labor MLA Kathryn Hay will run as an independent for the Tasmanian upper house division of Windermere (extending from the outskirts of Launceston north to the proposed site of Gunns’ Bell Bay pulp mill), challenging independent incumbent Ivan Dean at the poll likely to be held on May 2. Peter Tucker at Tasmanian Politics reports that one of the the other two seats up for election, the Devonport-based division of Mersey, looms as a clash between Latrobe mayor Mike Gaffney and Devonport mayor Lyn Laycock. Mersey is being vacated by retiring independent Norma Jamieson.

• Staying in Tasmania, a recount has confirmed that the last remaining Labor candidate in Franklin from the 2006 election, Daniel Hulme, will assume the lower house seat vacated by former Tourism Minister Paula Wriedt.

• Mining magnate and former National Party director Clive Palmer is making himself visible as the Queensland state election approaches, having been profiled last week on The 7.30 Report and in a cover story for The Weekend Australian Magazine. The latest salvo in Palmer’s charm offensive is a demand of $1 million in damages for defamation from Anna Bligh, who said there was “something just not right about one billionaire owning their own political party” (the annual financial disclosures discussed previously list $600,000 in donations from Palmer to the Liberal and National parties). Sean Parnell’s Weekend Australian piece describes Palmer as a “notorious litigant”, who “once listed it as a hobby in his Who’s Who entry”. Palmer’s 18-year-old son Michael has been preselected as the Liberal National Party candidate for the safe Labor seat of Nudgee.

• Rick Wallace of The Australian reports that Nationals-turned-Liberal Senator Julian McGauran will face a number of challengers in his bid for one of the two safe seats on the Victorian Senate ticket, with other incumbent Michael Ronaldson “widely expected to claim top spot”. The field includes prominent Peter Costello supporter Ross Fox, barrister Caroline Kenny and solicitor Cate Dealehr. Other names mentioned by Andrew Landeryou’s VexNews are Terry Barnes, a “former Tony Abbott adviser”, and Owen Lysaght, who ran as an independent in Chisholm in 2004.