It’s as reliable as a metronome as the Do-nothing Malcolm non-agenda weighs:
Bill Shorten’s popularity and standing as preferred prime minister has taken a hammering from voters, but Labor has kept its election-winning lead over the Turnbull government.
The findings, contained in September’s Fairfax-Ipsos poll, show Labor has maintained the 53 per cent to 47 per cent lead in the two-party preferred vote it enjoyed in May, based on 2016 election preference flows.
Bill Shorten’s standing as preferred prime minister has taken a hammering from voters, but Labor has kept its strong six point lead over the Coalition in the two-party preferred vote.
If repeated on election day, there would be a 3.4 per cent swing away from the Turnbull government. If that movement was uniform, this would trigger a loss of 16 seats – which would comfortably hand power to the ALP given the government’s slim one-seat majority.
…The primary vote of both the Coalition and Labor fell in the poll, to the benefit of the minor parties, with the Coalition’s vote falling 2 percentage points to 35 per cent, Labor down 1 percentage point to 34 per cent, the Greens rising 1 point to 14 per cent and “others”, including the Nick Xenophon Team and One Nation, rising 2 percentage points to 17 per cent, compared with May.
Meanwhile, Do-nothing Lucy just lost Sydney with her growth lobby, also from Domainfax:
After staking so much political capital merging NSW councils, the Liberal party risks walking away from Saturday’s elections without controlling any newly merged Sydney council as opponents claimed voters abandoned the party driving Sydney’s “overdevelopment”.
As counting continued on Sunday across 46 council districts, including 22 Sydney councils, early results showed voters had punished the Liberal party across the board, but surprisingly including deep into its Sydney heartland.
“In the councils between Newcastle and Shellharbour the average swing to Labor currently stands at about 5.5 per cent,” said psephologist Ben Raue, who said the swing was tempered by inconsistencies in comparing merged and unmerged councils.
But swings to the opposition in Ryde, a council the Liberals had previously held in its own right, reached close to 15 per cent. That follows a turbulent term in which a sitting Liberal councillor was convicted for tax offences and others left the party to run as independents.
…”NSW has seen through the ugly politics of forced amalgamations, privatisation and overdevelopment being pushed by the Liberal government and demanded change,” Greens MP and local government spokesman David Shoebridge said.
The Greens claimed to double its representation from four seats to eight across the three eastern suburbs councils – Randwick, Waverley and Woollahra councils – while running on its anti-development agenda.
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific's leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
