Newspoll sinks again for Do-nothing Malcolm to 47-53 two party preferred:
The latest Newspoll, conducted exclusively for The Australian, reveals a dip in the Coalition’s primary vote from 37 per cent to 36 per cent over the past two weeks to give Labor a clear election-winning lead.
Malcolm Turnbull has lost ground to Bill Shorten as preferred prime minister to lead by only 41 per cent to 32 per cent on the key leadership measure, reversing some of the gains he made after unveiling plans to expand the Snowy Mountains hydropower scheme.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has kept its hold on 10 per cent of voters to match the support shown for the Greens, confirming the threat to the two major parties as more Australians give their first preferences to other groups.
After weeks of dispute over a Fair Work Australia decision to scale back Sunday penalty rates and a more recent argument over the Opposition Leader’s call for a lift in the minimum wage, Labor increased its primary vote from 35 per cent to 36 per cent.
While it’s all a bit of good fun, it is equally a waste of valuable time. Ross Gittins has nice take on things today:
I realised Australian government was fast approaching peak fake when I read Laura Tingle of the Financial Review’s revelation that Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 announcement was timed to favourably influence the imminent fortnightly Newspoll result.
When our leaders progress from being mesmerised by opinion polls to trying to game them, that’s when we know the country’s in deep, deep trouble.
It hardly needs saying that Snowy 2.0 was just a stunt, designed to excite the media and portray Turnbull as the great Nation Builder, while being no more than a feasibility study of a scheme that’s probably not feasible, would end up costing at least double what we were told it would and, if it did eventuate, would come years too late to help with the energy crisis.
Since faking progress – conning the media into conning their voting customers – is a lot less time-consuming than pondering real solutions, you fill the vacuum by attacking your opponents’ policies and record – even though such attacks rate sky-high on the hypocrisy Richter scale.
…Veteran Australian National University political scientist Professor Ian McAllister says trust in politicians is at its lowest than at any time since he started surveying it all the way back to 1969.
Either One Nation dies or the Coalition does. Only one policy shift can change it: cutting immigration. Everything else is deckchairs on the Titanic.
