The latest Morgan Poll is out. The headline prediction was that Labor would win with 53 per cent of the national two-party preferred vote.
The usual opinion poll graphs are here. You may need to hit the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the latest graphs.
This is the second landslide-for-Labor Newspoll in a row. The headline prediction had Labor winning 53 per cent of the national two party preferred vote were an election held last weekend.
If we look at the next two graphs, we can see why Labor’s fortunes have risen. The three major pollsters have found that Labor’s primary vote rose steadily since the last election from roughly 37 to 42 per cent. On the other hand, the Coalition’s primary vote fell from some 46 per cent to around 42 percent in January this year. Since then it has (at best) flat-lined at around 42 per cent.
Because Labor typically wins 60 per cent of the non-major-party preferences, and because it is growing its primary vote while the Coalition primary vote has flat-lined (perhaps even declined slightly), Labor is increasingly seeing polls that predict a landslide win.
Put simply, the Coalition has an electoral problem and only 12 months to fix it. It has won from worse polls 12 months out. Still, I think we know why the Coalition has flipped the switch to vaudeville and ditched the rough end of the Work Choices pineapple. It’s called Operation Tart-Up.
There are small signs that the government has focused on the election campaign for 2007.
On the Treasury benches, the Ministers for Trade and Transport have done a job swap. The ostensible reason was to give Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile more time at home to focus on domestic (National Party) issues. Labor cynics have painted the move as distancing Vaile from the AWB scandal.
The Government is keen to polish off the rough edges of Work Choices, its industrial relations legislation. Last week a set of amendments prevented the more excessive misuses. Employees must now apply in writing before their annual leave can be cashed out. Employees can not have their pay docked when they take sick leave, or if they could not give advance notice or provide a medical certificate when ill. As is the way of things, what the Government has described as fine-tuning, the Opposition has described as an admission of failure and a vote-grab.
Another development is that many Ministers have got themselves a web site with a personalised URL. Let’s work our way through the Cabinet. Completed sites include: John Howard, Mark Vaile, Warren Truss, Tony Abbott, Amanda Vanstone (who uses the surname only URL approach), Brendan Nelson, Ian MacFarlane (who has an MP in his URL so that people do not mistake him for the Reserve Bank Governor), Kevin Andrews and Julie Bishop. Sites under construction include: Peter Costello, Philip Ruddock and Mal Brough,
Alexander Downer was beaten to the URL by his opponents (Google cached here). Interestingly, I could not find a personalised URL for the Information Technology Minister, Helen Coonan.
There does appear to be a certain electoral frisson in the air.
I have refreshed my blog feeds. The full list of blogs can be seen in the right hand column on this page. The newbies include:
I dropped a few that seem to have stopped posting, and one that seemed to crank out 10 posts in a row every second day. But almost all of the oldies are still in the mix.
Every time I do this I find small things to amuse me. I had the tweak the feed program for Penny Sharpe’s, Red Leather. For some reason, Penny does not include links to the individual posts in her feed. (It almost begs the question: why provide a feed service?) In his feed, Malcolm Turnbull only provides the date and not the time of his posts. Malcolm is not alone. The ALP media feed time stamps every post 2pm.
As always, I aim for a wide cross-section of blogs. No matter who you are there are some you should love and others you will hate.
If you would like your blog to be included on this page drop me a line and let me know your RSS feed. As a general rule of thumb I only include established sites with more than 100 posts on Australian politics and new sites from established bloggers. I only keep sites that I judge of sufficient quality (no correspondence will be entered into), and which produce well formed feeds. I am happy to accommodate a selection of feeds that span the spectrum from the far left to the far right of Australian politics, provided the blog is well written and well argued.
Over the past week and a bit, there was no movement to report in the betting market for the next Federal election. The average of the four bookmakers suggested a 57.5 per cent probability of a Coalition government following the 2007 Federal election.
The usual graphs are here. You may need to hit the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the latest graphs.