We all knew a fall was coming after the debacle with the Malaysian swap of asylum seekers for refugees.
Tony Abbott’s record lead over Julia Gillard: Newspoll
After a devastating decision in the High Court last week wiped out the Prime Minister’s Malaysia Solution for asylum-seekers, Labor’s primary vote has stuck at a record low of 27 per cent.
The Coalition’s has risen to 50 per cent – the highest since John Howard was prime minister at the time of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.
The Greens dropped from 14 to 12.
Based on preference flows at the last election, the Coalition has an all-time high two-party-preferred vote of 59 per cent compared with Labor’s 41 per cent. Such a result at an election would reduce Labor to a rump of a party, wiping out dozens of Labor MPs including many ministers.
The ALP need to more than just replace Gillard: they must dump the deadly policies, clean up the union corruption, and worse, lose the political correctness at their core.
If they implicitly admit they were wrong by picking up the Coalition policies on asylum seekers, the public will remember they mucked up but it won’t be an issue if the boats stop coming. They need to delay the Carbon Scheme for the forseeable future — they have the perfect excuse, of current world economic “uncertainty”: “We’ll take action when China, Russia and the US do”. They need to stop complaining indignantly about mining super profits: the miners pay 42% of those profits in tax already. While these are bumper years for mining, the mining industry spends much of the business cycle in the doldrums and needs these bumper years to justify the leans times and the huge amounts of capital required. If mining was more profitable than other industries over the whole cycle, it would attract a greater share of capital and shareholders.
If the rest of us want to get mining profits, we have to take risks and put the money up front — sometimes waiting years for results. Changing the rules to take profits post hoc is theft.
The most astonishing thing is that somehow 23% of Australians* still think Julia Gillard is doing a satisfactory job. What would qualify as unsatisfactory?
*Call me a cynic: 18% of the National workforce are government employees.
*UPDATE: A more useful point — One in four households are dependent on welfare.
UPDATE Cassandra Wilkinson tries to name good things Gillard has done.