The weekly Essential Research survey has Labor’s lead steady at 58-42. Also featured: support for an ETS-driven early election continues to fall; confidence in the economy continues to rise; there is no one widely held view on who should be our next US Ambassador; and two-thirds agree that “the Liberals are just not prepared at the moment to take on the difficult task of governing Australia”.

Also:

• The Gold Coast News reports that Peter Dutton faces “an ugly pre-election battle” if he wishes to move from notionally Labor Dickson to the safe Liberal Gold Coast seat of McPherson, to be vacated by the retirement of Margaret May. Rival candidates include federal divisional council chair Karen Andrews, a “close ally” of May; Dr Richard Stuckey, husband of Jann Stuckey, state front-bencher and member for the local seat of Currumbin; and Michael Hart, who unsuccessfully contested the state seat of Burleigh at the last two state elections.

• For the second election in a row, Dennis Jensen will represent the Liberals in their safe Perth seat of Tangney despite having lost the initial preselection vote. The West Australian reports that Jensen won a State Council vote over the initially successful candidate, Glenn Piggott, by no less a margin than 76 votes to five. This result was foreshadowed a month ago by a commenter on this site travelling under the name of Matt Brown’s Imaginary Friend (Matt Brown being the initial victor of the 2007 preselection), who wrote: “Council knows that if Jensen (is) dumped, the Libs’ chances of holding the marginals will dive because campaign funds will be so stretched, adverse publicity will have (a) ripple effect, and Tangney itself could be lost to Jensen if (he) stood as an independent, whether to him or even to the ALP if he did the obvious and swapped preferences with them”.

• Saturday’s Weekend Australian featured a post-redistribution proposal Mackerras pendulum, which you can see at Mumble. The accompanying article takes aim at the assertion of Peter van Onselen and others that the redistributions of New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia collectively constitute a “Ruddymander”.

• Simon Benson of The Daily Telegraph reports that the tensions over the New South Wales Labor leadership could be coming to the boil:

With the various warring factions in the Labor party room unable to decide on who would be a replacement, Mr Rees was said to be considering acting before he gets chopped. Sources confirmed he was using threats of a reshuffle to axe “trouble-making” ministers, a veiled reference to Health Minister John Della Bosca, if sniping about his leadership continued. The internal malaise in the Government has become so bad that very few MPs believe the current situation can continue. Mr Rees is also reported to have told those closest to him that his position was untenable if the plotting against him could not be arrested. Another Labor source said Labor powerbrokers including national secretary Karl Bitar were considering tapping Mr Rees on the shoulder next week if they could convince Deputy Premier Carmel Tebbutt to take over. It is understood Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is also being drafted into the soap opera with sources claiming his Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese has directly lobbied Mr Rudd to support a move to install Ms Tebbutt, who is Mr Albanese’s wife.

John Della Bosca today added fuel to the fire by declaring it was “no state secret” that it was constitutionally possible for an upper house MP such as himself to be Premier. However, Andrew Clennell of the Sydney Morning Herald reports focus group research shows “many people still think (Rees) should be given time to make a go of the job”, and gives an insight into the public view of Della Bosca, Tebbutt and other sometimes-mentioned leadership prospects, Kristina Keneally, John Robertson and Frank Sartor.

• The ABC reports that the member for the Nationals member for the Victorian state seat of Murray Valley, Ken Jasper, will retire at the next election. Jasper is 71 years old and has held the seat since 1976. I must confess the seat does not loom large in my consciousness, but my election guide entry tells me the Nationals are “concerned at their ability to hold the seat without him”. Jasper nonetheless held the seat in 2006 with 50.9 per cent of the vote against the Liberal candidate’s 21.9 per cent.

• The Victorian Greens have preselected for the highly winnable state seat of Melbourne a barrister and former president of Liberty Victoria, Brian Walters, ahead of Moonee Valley councillor Rose Iser.

Lots more information on various Greens preselections from Ben Raue of The Tally Room:

• Raue appears to have the inside dope on the state upper house preselection in South Australia, declaring former Democrat and current state party convenor Tammy Jennings the “clear frontrunner” for the lucrative top spot (he earlier named SA Farmers Federation chief executive Carol Vincent, former convenor and unsuccessful 1997 lead candidate Paul Petit and unheralded Mark Andrew as the other candidates).

• Raue also names preselection candidates for the Queensland Senate: Larissa Waters (the 2007 candidate, who also ran for Mount Coot-tha at the March state election), “perennial candidates” Libby Connors and Jenny Stirling, and 2009 Sunnybank candidate Matthew Ryan-Sykes.

• Raue names Emma Henley and Peter Campbell as candidates for the Victorian upper house region of Eastern Metropolitan.

• In the Tasmanian state seat of Braddon, Paul O’Halloran has apparently been chosen to “lead the ticket”, to the extent that that means anything under Robson rotation. Braddon is the only one of the five divisions currently without a Greens member.

Antony Green corner:

• In comments on this site, Antony discusses the prospects of a Victorian redistribution before the next federal election:

A Victorian redistribution is due because the boundaries from the last redistribution were gazetted on 29 January 2003. A re-draw starts seven years later, the end of January 2010. A redistribution is not required in the last 12 months before the House expires. The current House first sat on 12 February 2008 so it expires 11 February 2011. This means there is an unfortunate two week gap that will force a redistribution. If the Victorian boundaries had been gazetted two weeks later in 2003, or if the Rudd government had re-called parliament in December 2007, the redistribution would be deferred. Unfortunately, the Electoral Act is very prescriptive on dates so it appears the redistribution will have to take place, unless the act is changed.

• Two posts on his blog relate to the slow decline of the Nationals, one directly, the other with reference to the relative decline of rural population.

• Also featured is a post comparing the current position of the state Labor government in New South Wales with that of the Unsworth government as it drifted to the abyss in 1988.

• Northern Territory MP Alison Anderson, on whose whim (along with fellow independent Gerry Wood) hangs the future of Paul Henderson’s floundering government, has advised that Tuesday will be nothing less than “the biggest day in Territory history”, which should alarm survivors of Cyclone Tracy and the 1942 air raids. Tuesday was to be the day Anderson would make known her attitude to the government’s future, but it’s presumably been brought forward a day now that Speaker Jane Aagaard has agreed to a request from Anderson, Wood and the CLP for parliament to resume on Monday. Notice will then be given of a no-confidence motion on Friday, which if successful – and given the pitch of Anderson’s rhetoric, any other outcome would be an enormous anti-climax – will result in either a new election or an immediate transfer of power to the Terry Mills-led CLP. The procedure for such a motion was established late last year in legislation establishing fixed four-year terms, which like similar legislation in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia provides for an escape clause in the event of no-confidence or blocked supply. As Antony Green explains, it thus marks a test case for the aforementioned states, which have never experienced such a situation in the fixed term era. If the motion passes, the parliament will have eight days to back an alternative government, after which the Administrator will have the authority to issue writs for an election which the Chief Minister will be obliged to advise. The government’s ongoing crisis reached its current pitch on Tuesday when Anderson quit the ALP – not as she foreshadowed due to dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of an indigenous housing program, but because she blamed Henderson for an allegedly racist article about her and other indigenous MPs in Saturday’s edition of the Northern Territory News. The same day saw Arafura MP Marion Scrymgour return to the Labor fold after two months of independence, leaving the numbers at Labor 12, CLP 11, independents two. While Anderson’s tone of certainty might be taken as a clue, Wood’s precise attitude remains unclear: although of presumably conservative sympathies, he has expressed concern at the CLP’s readiness to govern, and was quoted this week saying an election was “certainly an option”. Anderson tells The Australian her gauge of the public mood is that there is “a push for an election so that they can teach Hendo a lesson”.

• Talk of John Della Bosca challenging Nathan Rees for the New South Wales premiership has focused attention on the theoretical prospect of a leader sitting in the upper house. While dismissive of the rumours, Imre Salusinszky of The Australian muses that Della Bosca “could serve a symbolic first 100 days in the Legislative Council and hope to have gained sufficient traction by that point to make the switch feasible”. He also notes that in the current environment, no lower house seat is so safe for Labor that Della Bosca could be guaranteed to win a by-election even if a sitting member agreed to make way. The Sydney Morning Herald reports party operatives hope Della Bosca can assume Bankstown from Tony Stewart by forging a deal in which Stewart receives an apology for his sacking over an incident involving a staff member last year, for which he is suing the government. Another Herald report mentions Riverstone, where John Aquilina has said he will not contest the next election. Della Bosca’s home patch, Gosford, is deemed unsuitable in part due to the lingering local unpopularity of his wife Belinda Neal following the Iguana’s episode, but also because it is too marginal and sitting member Marie Andrews would be unwilling to make way in any case. The Herald reports that a move to Bankstown “could pave the way for a graceful exit from politics for Ms Neal”, who is unlikely to retain preselection in her Gosford-based federal seat of Robertson. It will be recalled that when Barrie Unsworth was parachuted into Rockdale at a 1986 by-election to assume the premiership upon Neville Wran’s retirement, he suffered a 17 per cent dive in the primary vote and came within 54 votes of defeat. In May, Malcolm Mackerras wrote an article in The Australian decrying what he saw as the outdated convention that places leaders in the lower house, complaining that “New South Wales has Nathan Rees as Premier when John Della Bosca should be premier”, and suggesting the federal Liberals “should replace Julie Bishop as its federal deputy leader with Senator Nick Minchin and explicitly not ask Minchin to transfer to the House of Representatives”.

• Christian Kerr of The Australian notes the British Conservatives have “turned a PR disaster into a triumph” by conducting an American-style open primary to choose the successor to one of many MPs disgraced in the country’s expenses scandal. Having done so, the party has given “everyone in the constituency a stake in the success of their candidate”. The New South Wales Nationals have decided to hold such a vote in one yet-to-be-chosen seat for the next state election.

• Antony Green comments on the potential availability of various double dissolution triggers, and on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bill in particular, where the Coalition appears to be playing a good hand with its apparent plan to oppose it at the second reading.

• Danna Vale, Liberal member for the southern Sydney seat of Hughes, has announced she will quit at the next election. The margin in Hughes was cut from 8.6 per cent to 2.2 per cent at the 2007 election, and by Antony Green’s reckoning the redistribution proposal unveiled yesterday will further reduce it to 1.1 per cent – less than a sitting member’s personal vote is generally reckoned to be worth. No word yet on who might be up for the tough task of keeping the seat in the Liberal fold.

• The Victorian Parliament’s Electoral Matters Committee has published a report recommending that consideration be given to adopting the weighted inclusive Gregory method for surplus transfers in upper house elections, as opposed to the (non-weighted) inclusive Gregory method currently employed both in Victoria and for the Senate. Under weighted inclusive Gregory, which was introduced in Western Australia at the last election, the system achieves mathematical perfection of a sort with every individual vote cut up and distributed among the final quotas at equal value. The inclusive Gregory method saves time, but it means individual votes which are used in surplus transfers more than once in the count are inflated in value on the second and subsequent occasions. Usually only small handfuls of votes are involved, but like anything these could be decisive in the event of a close result.

• The abolition of Laurie Ferguson’s Sydney seat of Reid threatens an interesting Labor preselection for one of the seats which have moved into its turf: Parramatta, Blaxland and McMahon, as Lowe has been renamed. Antony Green has composed what promises to be a headline-grabbing post noting that the New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australian redistributions (only proposals in the first two cases) have between them given Labor a notional boost of five seats. Those wishing to discuss these matters are asked to do so on the New South Wales redistribution thread.

UPDATE: Oz in comments reports the sample was but 500, according to the print edition.

UPDATE: Graphic here. Rees’s approval rating is down three to 34 per cent, which is where it was in November-December. However, Barry O’Farrell’s disapproval rating (37 per cent) exceeds his approval (35 per cent) for the first time. O’Farrell has nonetheless narrowed the gap as preferred premier from 34-29 to 33-31.

UPDATE: Antony Green employs the good old-fashioned uniform two-party swing method to calculate which Labor seats would fall to the Coalition if the result of this poll was borne out. However, Antony concedes that “with a third of voters off with the Greens and ‘Others’, more than admitting they will vote Labor, I’m not sure that analysis based on uniform 2-party swing is very useful”. That being so, I’ve taken a different approach: changing the results in each electorate in proportion to the shift indicated in the poll and applying the same preference distributions as last time. No doubt this is statistically clumsy, but accepting the exercise as a bit of fun (unless you’re one of the dwindling band of Labor loyalists), here’s what I’ve come up with. Coalition gains from Labor: Camden, Cessnock, Drummoyne, Gosford, Granville, Heathcote, Londonderry, Macquarie Fields, Maitland, Menai, Miranda, Monaro, Mulgoa, Penrith, Riverstone, Rockdale, Ryde, Swansea, The Entrance, Wollondilly, Wyong. Greens gains from Labor: Balmain, Coogee, Heffron, Marrickville. Independent gains from Labor, should the relevant candidates choose to run again: Charlestown (Paul Scarfe) and Newcastle (John Tate). Result: Coalition 55, Labor 25, Independents 9, Greens 4.