Newspoll Tuesday via The Oz rolls around again, this time with the primaries running 48 (up 1) / 34 (down 2) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 59/41 the same way – a one point gain over last week’s special Newspoll. The Greens are steady on 10, while the broad “Others” are up 1 to 8. This comes from a sample of 1144, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.9% mark.

Oh dear.

With the phone poll average in the sidebar now showing 109 seats going to Labor were the latest round of phone polls repeated at an election, there must be some pretty nervous Coalition marginal and not so marginal seat holders.

Look back at the tactics of the Opposition over the last few months where every card from the Howard era was played. Rising Interest Rates…. tick. Labor’s debt…. tick. Boat People….. tick.

It’s like that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa tests the difference in learning capability between a hamster and Bart. Sure the cupcake is electrified, sure every time he tries to grab it he gets shocked – after a few tries even a hamster would learn – but Bart keeps grabbing away time and time again, hoping that this time he won’t be zapped. Hoping this time it will be different.

When you change governments you change the country – as Keating said, but the national zeitgeist also changes with it and pulling these old cards out from the Oppo benches is a roadmap to failure.

I was surprised by the absence of additional questions today measuring the public perception of asylum seeker issues. Something has been influencing the metrics and it’s a good bet that might be it. In the usual charts below, you might notice that Rudd’s slow incremental increase in his personal satisfaction level has hit a big bump, with sats going down 4 and the dissatisfaction going up 4. This is pretty unusual when you also get an increase in the primary vote.

Turnbull’s satisfaction rating only fell by a point, but his dissatisfaction rating leapt 6 – with 5 of those points coming from his undecideds. For Turnbull that’s a bit dangerous since the recovery in his personal ratings involved shifting people on net from dissatisfaction into undecided… then into the satisfaction territory – from what we can tell. In one respect he’s lost 8 weeks worth of recovery in his personal standings.

UPDATE:

Arsehattery of the Day

Over in the Op-Ed section of the Oz, John Pasquarelli dreams a little dream.

As Christmas Island readies to put up the no-vacancy sign, the hitherto silent Libs have broken out, led by Philip Ruddock and Kevin Andrews, and already the polls have spiked substantially in their favour, no doubt creating more grief for Malcolm Turnbull, who is handcuffed to the usual suspects in Wentworth and whose only comment to date has been a limp-wristed call for an independent inquiry.

Something has spiked – I’d be checking my drink.

The usual charts come in like this:

pmsatoct20 opsatoct20

netsatoct20 ppmooct20

marginsatoct20