Message from "Anonymous" to the Australian Government.

Earlier today the group known as "Anonymous" shut down the APH website with a DDoS attack. The attack was aimed at drawing attention to the Government's ridiculous internet filtering plan. They then uploaded the following video to Youtube.



At AustraliaVotes we support the "No Clean Feed" movement and believe the Government's plan will do harm than good and will not help with fighting against the disgusting crime of child por*ography.

Parliament debating the CPRS again.

See my Twitter feed for updates. If anything really interesting from this, Question time or the Senate. It will be posted here.

First Question time of the election year - Live

Australia Votes will be bringing you tweets and views of the years first question time.

9:30pm - Here we go again - Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2010 - Presentation by Mr Combet, 1st reading, 2nd reading moved

9:20pm - australiavotes Either Julie Bishop has been hitting the gym or shes wearing shoulderpads. #qt

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Latest Morgan Poll - 58..5%-41.5%

The latest face-to-face Morgan Poll conducted over two weekends, January 9/10 & 16/17, 2010 shows the ALP (58.5%, up 1.5%% since the last face-to-face poll conducted on December 19/20, 2009 & January 2/3, 2010) maintaining a strong two-party preferred lead over the L-NP (41.5%, down 1.5%).

The ALP primary vote rose 2% to 47.5%, and remains clearly ahead of the L-NP (35.5%, down 1.5%), while looking at the minor parties shows support for the Greens rising (10%, unchanged), Family First (2%, unchanged) and Independents/ Others (5.0%, down 0.5%).

The Roy Morgan Government Confidence Rating is now at 136.5 (up 4pts) with 59.5% (up 1%) of Australians confident that Australia is ‘heading in the right direction,’ compared to 23% (down 3%) that say Australia is ‘heading in the wrong direction.’

The weekly Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence Rating for January 16/17, 2010 is 130.0, up 1.1pts from the last Consumer Confidence rating conducted on January 9/10, 2010, and up 2.2pts over the period of interviewing for this poll.



Gary Morgan says:

“The Rudd Government (58.5%, up 1.5%) has strengthened its Two-Party preferred lead over the Tony Abbott-led Opposition (41.5%, down 1.5%) as Australians return to work after their Summer holidays.

“The increased lead for the ALP is matched by rising Consumer Confidence — now at 130.0 (already up 9.6pts in 2010) and at its highest for nearly five years, since February 2005 (132.0).

“Incumbent Governments usually gain support as Consumer Confidence rises, and today’s Morgan Poll shows the Rudd Government is also benefiting from an increasingly confident Australian population.”



Electors were asked: “If a Federal election for the House of Representatives were being held today — which party would receive your first preference?”

This face-to-face Morgan Poll on Federal voting intention was conducted on the weekends of January 9/10 & 16/17, 2010, with an Australia-wide cross-section of 1,819 electors. Of all electors surveyed, 4.5% (unchanged) did not name a party.

Business as usual, basically.

No Clean Feed

The federal government has green-lighted its highly controversial mandatory ISP filtering plan.

FULL STORY

COMMENT: Say goodbye to the youth vote Kevin.

New NSW newspoll. Labor still heading for a beating.

The latest Newspoll published in The Australian on voting in NSW is further bad news for NSw Labor and Kristina Keneally. Primary support for Labor is at just 26%, with the Coalition on 44% (+2) and the Geens up a whopping 5% to 17%. The 2PP is running 59-41 in favour of the Coalition. No graphs yet.

Average Green Vote in the Blacktown/Mt Druitt area.

Some of you may remember me making some graphs for the Blacktown Greens after the last council. I've now made graphs for the last state/federal/council and average vote using GEGraph with the results displayed in Google Earth. The elecorate outline backgrounds comes from Ben Raue at The Tallyroom Blog. (The Federal Greenway/Chifley backgrounds are the new proposed ones, not the previous) Not all booths have been used for all 3 elections. The Greens only ran in 1 ward the in the last council election and with a higher vote at the council election, those booths have a higher average than others.Let me know what you think.

State 2007

Federal 2007
More graphs after the 'jump' (Click 'Continue Reading')

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Pollytics: Data, fiction and politics.

Possum has written a brilliant post over at his Pollytics blog. I won't spoil it for you but here is a quote.

That linear regression is statistically significant to so many decimal places that I had to go into the guts of my stats software to find a value that wasn’t zero. The p-value of the linear regression is 0.000001 (rounded up), meaning that there is less than a 1 in one million chance that the long term increase in demand we are witnessing could be due to chance alone. It’s a slow grinding increase, but a consistent one regardless of the local, short term variation involved.
If you were a government facing that kind of data, there would be absolutely no hesitation at all, on either side of politics, to plan for a future which contains that increasing demand for this particular service. There might be political differences over how to do it, maybe even on what ought to be done – but there would be universal acceptance of the empirical reality of increasing demand, albeit one that contains significant variation at any given time. Similarly, if you were a business or an industry facing that sort of data on the demand for your own product, there would be universal action to deal with it. In fact – you would struggle to find anyone that would suggest such data doesn’t have an observable and statistically significant linear trend over time strong enough to warrant acting on.
Yet – the data above isn’t actually polling data about demand for a government service...

Turnbullr calls Abbott a flip-flopper and says he's full of "Bulls*it"

Malcolm Turn has just posted on his blog about the Coalition's objection to the ETS. In it he says Abbott has changed his position plenty of times and that lowering emissions without cost is "bullshit" and that Abbott knows this. Looks like the disunity in the party is just starting, not coimng to an end as they would like us to believe.

While a shadow minister, Tony Abbott, was never afraid of speaking bluntly in a manner that was at odds with Coalition policy.

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Greens booth worker assaulted by DLP booth worker. The story I was told.

Earlier today I got a call from a friend of mine who is a member of the Blacktown Greens. He and another member of the Blacktown Greens (for the purpose of this story we will call him Jim but that is not his name) were handing out HTVs at Warrawee in the electorate of Bradfield. Jim noticed that the DLP hot-to-vote cards had no "Authorised by" statement on it and went inside to complain/enquire about it. When he returned the DLP worker called 'Jim" a "fat pig" and told him to go lose weight. Other booth workers told the DLP worker to calm down and he started abusing them. After getting really angry and really loud the cops were called on the DLP worker.

According to TheTallyRoom there are reports 'Jim' was also pushed over a fence. Either my source at the Blacktown Greens didn't mention this to me or I didn't hear it. I will confirm in the morning whether or not the pushing over a fence actually happened

p.s I got the call around 3:30pm and tweeted about it here here and here