That non-existent Morgan poll discussed in the previous post has now shown its face four days behind schedule. The phone survey of an unusually small sample of 618 respondents supports last week’s Newspoll finding that some of the gloss has come off Labor’s lead, which is at 47 per cent to 37 per cent on the primary vote and 58-42 on two-party preferred. This is down from 62-38 at the Morgan face-to-face poll published the previous Friday and 62.5-37.5 at the previous phone poll from mid-April, and is on both measures Labor’s weakest result since the election.

In other news, News Limited reports that Alexander Downer is “expected to quit Parliament within days”, having “delayed his departure until after Treasurer Wayne Swan tonight outlines Labor’s first Budget in 12 years, so as to avoid distracting from the Coalition’s response to it”. This of course will mean a by-election for his South Australian seat of Mayo.

I have lately gotten into the habit of providing a bulletin of recent electoral news along with the regular Friday Roy Morgan poll, but for whatever reason Morgan failed to come to the party last week. This is also an off-week for Newspoll, so the following will have to make do on their own:

• In lieu of a poll on voting intention, Morgan gave us a survey on support for a republic showing 45 per cent of “respondents” would prefer a republic with an elected president to a monarchy, versus 42 per cent against. Put Prince Charles on the throne, and the results are 56 per cent and 33 per cent. “Respondents” is in quotation marks because they have gone to the trouble of asking people as young as 14, and have provided separate but near-identical figures for “electors”.

• An in-house poll of federal voting intention conducted by the Adelaide Advertiser shows Labor with 50 per cent of the South Australian primary vote against 31 per cent for the Coalition, translating into 61-39 after preferences. The comparable figures at last year’s election were 43.2 per cent and 41.8 per cent, and 52.4-47.6.

• The Queensland Nationals and Liberals will hold a joint convention in three weeks to decide whether to proceed with plans to merge as the “Liberal-Nationals”. While the proposal will bring the parties together under the existing Liberal structure, former state Liberal vice-president Graham Young says the dice will be loaded in the Nationals’ favour through the creation of 10 heavily malapportioned “regions”. Young does not like the plan’s chances of being approved by the Liberal rank-and-file, but says the party’s Senators have been won over through a deal giving them the top three Senate positions at the next election. This will reduce Barnaby Joyce to the number four position, but he will then fill a casual vacancy created by Ron Boswell’s retirement.

• Greg Chijoff, the only member of the Lindsay pamphlet five to plead guilty, was last week convicted on a charge of distributing unauthorised election material and fined $750 out of a possible $1000. The case against the three who pleaded not guilty will be heard later in the month (the remaining member had the charge against him dismissed).

• The AEC has now published both public suggestions regarding the redistribution of Tasmanian electoral boundaries (which uniquely have effect at both federal and state level) and comments on the suggestions. We are presumably not too far away from seeing proposed boundaries for the Western Australian federal and Queensland state redistributions.

• This Friday is the deadline for submissions to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters’ Inquiry into the 2007 Federal Election. Hats off to whichever straight-talker decided to junk the past practice of naming it the “Inquiry into the Conduct of the 2007 Federal Election and Matters Related Thereto”.

The Australian reports tomorrow’s Newspoll will have Labor’s two-party lead at a relatively modest 57-43. However, Liberal hopes of positive headlines have been dashed by a preferred prime minister rating showing Brendan Nelson back in single figures at 9 per cent, compared with 72 per cent for Kevin Rudd.

UPDATE: Graphic here.

This week’s Morgan poll combines two weekends’ worth of face-to-face polling, producing a large sample of 1891 voters. Labor leads 61.5-38.5 on two-party preferred (with Labor down 1 per cent on last week’s phone poll and 0.5 per cent on the previous face-to-face), and 54.5 per cent to 33.5 per cent on the primary vote.

Other news:

• Voters in two of the districts which form Tasmania’s 15-member Legislative Council, Huon and Rosevears, will go to the polls tomorrow to rubber-stamp the re-election of sitting independents Paul Harriss and Kerry Finch. Tasmanian super-pundits Peter Tucker and Kevin Bonham have more here and here. I’ll have something up tomorrow, including my annual audit of upper house divisions and half-hearted live coverage of the count.

• Antony Green’s ABC Elections page has been given a revamp. From this I learn for the first time that draft redistribution proposals for the Northern Territory parliament were unveiled last week, on which Antony has much more.

• The Lindsay pamphlet case came before a Sydney court on Tuesday. Greg Chijoff, estranged husband of Liberal candidate Karen Chijoff, has pleaded guilty and will be sentenced next week. Jackie Kelly’s husband Gary Clark and Right faction powerbroker Jeff Egan have pleaded not guilty and will be back in court in late May. One of the remaining two charged has sought an adjournment, and the other has had his charge dismissed by Magistrate Pat O’Shane, who unfortunately felt it necessary to complain of a “political climate of divisiveness and disharmony” from which the country had “moved on”. She was on firmer ground in complaining that the penalty provided by Section 328 of the Electoral Act – a $1000 fine – was inadequate for the alleged offences, though whether her proposed new offence of “racial slander” would be a suitable remedy is another matter.

• As the new government moves to reform public election funding arrangements that boost Pauline Hanson’s coffers each time she runs for the Senate, Glenn Milne reveals Hanson has moved $200,000 of such funding out of a bank account for her United Australia Party and into one controlled by herself and a friend. Hanson, who should know a thing or two by now about the public funding laws, insists it’s all above board.

• Thomarse in comments answers (courtesy of News Radio) an oft-heard question: the Federal Court will resume hearing Labor’s appeal against the Liberals’ 12-vote victory in McEwen on May 24.

The latest Newspoll shows an increase in Labor’s federal two-party lead to 61-39 from 59-41 a fortnight ago. Kevin Rudd’s lead over Brendan Nelson as preferred prime minister has narrowed marginally from 73-9 to 71-10. No word yet on the Liberal leadership preference questions which Newspoll was apparently asking respondents over the weekend (see the update on the previous Morgan post).

UPDATE: Graphic now available. The favoured Liberal leader is Malcolm Turnbull (25 per cent) ahead of Peter Costello (23 per cent), Brendan Nelson (15 per cent), Julie Bishop (13 per cent) and Tony Abbott (6 per cent). Support for the three proposed leadership teams (Nelson/Bishop, Turnbull/Robb, Costello/Turnbull) divided about evenly, while Turnbull leads Wayne Swan as “preferred Treasurer” 35 per cent to 29 per cent. In spite of everything, Brendan Nelson’s satisfaction rating is a presentable 38 per cent.

Morgan has released two sets of federal poll results: a mid-week phone poll of 765 respondents, and a face-to-face poll of 897 respondents conducted last weekened. Morgan has gone against normal practice by using “preferences distributed by how electors say they will vote” for the headline two-party measure for the phone poll, which puts Labor’s lead at 64-36. The more reliable “preferences distributed by how electors voted at the 2007 election” has it at 62.5-37.5, down from 63.5-36.5 last week. The face-to-face poll has it at 62-38, the same as the previous such poll conducted a fortnight ago.

Other news:

• The main starters are in place for the Gippsland by-election. The Nationals have nominated Darren Chester, staffer to state party leader Peter Ryan; Labor has nominated Wellington Shire mayor Darren McCubbin; and the Liberal candidate is Central Gippsland Health Service bureaucrat Rohan Fitzgerald. Gerard McManus of the Herald Sun reports Labor internal polling has them on 36 per cent to the Nationals’ 32 per cent and the Liberals’ 19 per cent, which after preferences would mean a comfortable win for the Nationals.

• On Monday, The West Australian published a Westpoll survey of 406 voters concerning federal voting intention in Western Australia, which had Labor leading 62-38 – a 16 per cent turn-around from the federal election. A question on preferred Liberal leader had Peter Costello on 19 per cent, Malcolm Turnbull on 18 per cent, local hero Julie Bishop on 17 per cent, Brendan Nelson on 12 per cent and Joe Hockey on 11 per cent. The survey also gauged support on a republic, finding 51 per cent support against 33 per cent outright opposition, with 70 per cent supporting a referendum on the matter to coincide with the next election (leaving aside the small matter of the model being proposed).

• Norm Kelly, member of the Australian National University’s Democratic Audit and former Western Australian Democrats state MP, peruses the government’s recently announced package of electoral reforms and finds fault with the move to tie public campaign funding to verified expenditure (clearly introduced to prevent a repeat of Pauline Hanson’s $200,000-plus windfalls from her recent Senate campaigns), which he says will disadvantage minor parties in its proposed form.

• Radio National’s The National Interest program had an interesting item recently on campaign funding laws in New York City and Canada. The practice of the former makes it very hard to understand why donations for last year’s federal election won’t be disclosed until February next year (to the extent that they still need to be disclosed at all, following the Howard government’s disgraceful 2006 “reforms”).

• The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters is inviting submissions for its inquiry into the 2007 federal election, which will be received until Friday, May 16.

• I have just had to cough up $400 for annual site hosting, so now would be a good time for those who like to make the occasional donation.

UPDATE: Victorian Greens upper house MP Greg Barber drops by in comments to plug a parliamentary inquiry into the state’s donation disclosure laws. Reader ShowsOn tells us he has been Newspoll-ed, and that we can expect Tuesday’s poll to feature responses on who would make the best Liberal leader out of Brendan Nelson, Julie Bishop, Peter Costello and Malcolm Turnbull; who would make the best leadership team out of Nelson/Bishop, Costello/Turnbull and Turnbull/Andrew Robb; and who out of Turnbull and Wayne Swan would be best at handling the economy.

The latest Morgan phone poll has Labor’s two-party lead widening to 63.5-36.5 from 60.5-39.5 last week. I believe this is a record for a Morgan phone poll, while not quite matching face-to-face polls from earlier in the year which put it at 65-35 and 64.5-35.5.

Morgan’s latest survey combines two sets of phone polling conducted in the middle of this week and last week, producing an unusually large sample of 2231. Normally their phone poll figures consist of only one such set of polling. It shows Labor leading 60.5-39.5 per cent on two-party preferred – down from 61-39 at the phone poll of March 11-12, and from 63.5-36.5 in the more recent face-to-face survey released last week.