It's a big drop

I'm heartened to see my dislike of the Abbott Federal government (and Abbott personally) continues to be reflected in polling.   Newpoll and Morgan both indicate that on primary votes, the Coalition has dropped a full 10 per cent since the election.   That's pretty massive in such a short space of time, isn't it?  Details (including a link to today's Newspoll) are at Pollbludger.

(Pollbludger also notes that the TPP for Labor is even stronger if you believe the polls that include respondent allocated preferences, rather than the "last election" preferences.   Sweet.)

In other political news - Treasury head Martin Parkinson was a target of the Right when he was working under Labor.  Now that he is seen as giving a warning to Labor to not reflexively oppose all savings measures, it makes the Right's dark mutterings about his partisanship look flimsy and ill founded, does it not?

And yes, Labor does have to tread carefully here.  Especially if there is a real chance of a double dissolution election, Labor does have to be able to show that they appreciate that there does need to be some serious re-jigging of finances going into the future.  Unfortunately, accepting what most people will take as pretty obvious - that a relatively small increase in GST will cover a fair bit of the problem - is probably something Labor is not inclined to do.  They have to come up with something else, then.