Do you agree that you are waiting with baseball bats?

Ask an anti-Coalition question and get an anti-Coalition answer

It’s not looking good for the Turnbull government according to a new poll. Guardian Australia reports, Monday:

The Turnbull government has hit a new low in its two-party preferred vote and the Greens trail One Nation in a fresh poll that also shows widespread anger at the Centrelink debt debacle.

Sounds bad. Oh, wait. Guardian Australia continues, yesterday:

The ReachTel poll of 2126 Australians for the progressive political campaign group GetUp! shows the Coalition is trailing Labor 46 per cent to 54 per cent in two-party preferred terms.

Have you stopped beating your welfare recipients? One of the questions from the poll, taken by ReachTel last Thursday:

The Turnbull government recently started using an automated system issuing tens of thousands of letters to Australians about alleged debts from Centrelink overpayments. The government admits that at least 20 per cent of these letters are incorrect, but the burden is on Centrelink clients to correct the information or pay the debt. Do you support or oppose the government stopping the automated debt collection system?

It’s all a bit much even for Crikey’s Poll Bludger. William Bowe, yesterday:

A GetUp!-styled money shot question found 82.2 per cent responding that “cracking down on corporate tax dodging” should be a “higher priority for the Turnbull government” …

Another straightforward question from the poll, Thursday:

“The Turnbull government has acknowledged (there are) significant errors in the Centrelink automated debt collection system. Where there are potential errors, do you think the burden should be on Centrelink to verify their claims against information they already have on file or on the individual to defend themselves, which may include accessing pay slips and employment records from up to five years ago?”

Fairfax Media and ABC websites run with a Reuters report on US election antics, January 13:

A US government watchdog said on Thursday it would examine whether the FBI followed proper procedures in its probe of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. The inspector general’s announcement comes amid outcry from Democrats who say Clinton’s loss to president-elect Donald Trump was in part due to FBI boss Jim Comey’s bringing Clinton’s emails back into the public spotlight less than two weeks before the 2016 election.

Quadrant Online editor Roger Franklin, yesterday:

The shame of this story is that it is no better than 10 per cent correct … Far from fingering Comey as the sole subject of the Inspector General’s probe, as presented by Fairfax and the ABC (the announcement) suggests … the Clinton posse will be under just as much scrutiny as Comey; indeed, perhaps more. A competent foreign editor should have known about all of the above and, regardless of personal political leanings, should have laid it out for readers … That those same readers were instead peddled the latest bogus update of the Left’s comforting narrative that Mrs Clinton was robbed blind on November 8 … says everything about the real source and propagators of the fake news we have heard so much about of late.

Finally, the Guardian is asking all the big — or is that small? — questions, yesterday:

What does the trend for smaller nipples say about us?