Newspoll is keeping up the good work in the post-federal election lull with a series of state polls, today following last week’s Victorian and South Australian polls with a survey showing the Coalition taking a narrow lead in Western Australia. The following charts show how Newspoll has tracked the progress of the Bracks/Brumby, Gallop/Carpenter and Rann governments.

The Poll Bludger has a new home for the next three weeks, courtesy of kindly benefactors at Crikey (UPDATE: As I feared, there are a few glitches to be sorted through, so I’m reopening comments here.). The main difference with the new arrangement is that you will need to register in order to comment, a free and mostly painless process. Don’t be alarmed by the “7 day free trial” message that will greet you when you register – your registration will remain valid beyond that without costing you anything. There will be a few technical issues in the first few days: if these prove overwhelming in the short term, business will resume here until they can be sorted out tomorrow. Life will hopefully continue much as it did before, so please head over and make yourself at home. If there’s a particularly calamitous immediate issue going on with the comments there which I have failed to notice, please email me.

Sadly, technical problems that had this site offline for most of last evening have caused the last week’s worth of comments to disappear. Apologies to future historians for the gap in the record. Everything else appears to be working again now, touch wood.

Welcome to the all-new colour scheme from the Poll Bludger, the psephological website that goes up to 11. I have my doubts about the alternating black-and-khaki backgrounds in comments, but fancy that the colour scheme is otherwise inoffensive at worst. Anyway, I can easily replace it with another theme if nobody likes it, such is the magic of WordPress. This is all timed to herald the arrival of the Poll Bludger’s federal election guide, which at this stage I must confess falls a good deal short of Adam Carr’s magnum opus. Entries are presently limited to outlines of seats’ locations and histories, with further detail on candidates to follow as time allows.

UPDATE: White on black, while good for the environment, is apparently bad on the eyes. Plan B activated.

The previous thread on Tuesday’s Newspoll result took a turn to matters constitutional. What’s it all about? Beats the hell out of me. The important thing is that esteemed constitutional authority George Williams has put his two cents in, and anything he has to say deserves a better fate than delayed moderation and position 484 in a thread that should have been put out of its misery days ago. So here it is:

In answer to Fulvio’s question re State taxing powers, the Constitution was meant to secure the States’ financial position and independence. At federation in 1901, it was the States and not the Commonwealth that levied income tax. However, the demands of two world wars and changes to the economy, as well as some canny manoeuvring by the Commonwealth, have left the States with no revenue from income taxation.

The High Court decisions in the Uniform Tax Cases of 1942 and 1957 upheld a Commonwealth takeover of the income tax system. Not only that, the decisions also gave a wide interpretation to the ability of the Commonwealth to attach conditions to money granted to the States. Section 96 of the Constitution allows the Commonwealth to make grants on “such terms and conditions” as it thinks fit.

The States today could levy income tax, but it would be in addition to federal tax and so it would mean taxing people twice. The Commonwealth could even insist that its share is collected first. As a result, the States have turned to new sources of taxation, such as on gambling. Hence the rise of casinos …

Gasp in awe at Antony Green’s gargantuan online compendium of New South Wales election results, the product of many months’ labour in conjunction with the state’s Department of Lands. Featured are district-level results going right back to the very beginning (1856), including all by-elections. What a Poll Bludger wouldn’t give for such a resource in every other state. You might care to begin your browsing with the Prime Minister’s near-successful bid for the state seat of Drummoyne in 1968, which escaped my notice when I was compiling my state election guide. It appears that only the donkey vote stood between Mr Howard and a no doubt very stimulating career in state politics.

If you’re really keen – and why wouldn’t you be? – you can splash out $85 on the accompanying Electoral Atlas of New South Wales 1856-2006, co-edited with Eamonn Clifford and David Clune. As well as featuring boundary maps for every election, it “maps historical curiosities such as the Sydney Hamlets, the non-contiguous boroughs and the extensive pastoral districts of the 1850s, the multi-Members electorates of the 1880s and the experimental proportional representation of the 1920s, the maladjustment caused by country weightings and the emergence of one-vote, one-value electorates that we have today”. Some idea of this product’s magnificence can be gleaned from the images available on the Wikipedia entry. In comments, Antony tells us he is “still working on the project to put all the old NSW maps on the web, on a site to be combined with all the results”.

Those with an interest in the state of Australian democracy could do a lot worse than to subscribe to the Democratic Audit of Australia’s email list, which offers electoral news along with updates of the Audit’s own activities. Talking points from the latest edition:

• Mumble man Peter Brent and Simon Jackman of Stanford University crunch the electoral enrolment numbers and conclude that the Australian Electoral Commission has been “more proficient at expunging than at enrolling or re-enrolling voters”.

• Swinburne University politics professor Brian Costar appeared on Radio National’s Perspective last week to discuss Vickie Lee Roach’s legal challenge against disenfranchisement of prisoners, which can be read here (electoral matters have been getting a good run on the program lately: Tuesday’s edition featured Peter Andren, independent Calare MP and Senate candidate, who offered a familiar critique of the Senate voting system).

• Yet more from Radio National: this time an item on the Law Report program dealing with concerns about the severe new electoral enrolment regime.

Bryan Palmer’s technical difficulties have prompted him to temporarily relocate to http://www.ozpolitics.biz.