Two years of bad polls. It is not this morning’s horrid Newspoll result that Liberals and Nationals should be worrying about but rather the past two years of them. Rarely has a political party had such an uninterrupted run of shocking poll numbers as the Coalition. My advice is to get into the $1.30 Labor available at Sportingbet with your ears back. It is a steal.

The really worrying aspect of the Newspoll figures for Malcolm Turnbull must be the overwhelming acceptance by voters of the economic stimulus package. The notion that the Australian government has handled this economic crisis better than other countries seems to have established itself in the public mind.

Heaven help them. If Peter Dutton is a vital part of a Liberal Party future, then heaven help them. To me he appears a surly, irritating and quite unappealing personality. More importantly, he has had the perfect shadow ministry from which to attack where the Labor Government is most vulnerable but he has failed miserably to capitalise on Kevin Rudd being all talk and no action when it comes to ending the blame game and fixing the public hospital system. Clever people, those McPherson pre-selectors.

Why not pass it. Talk about an argument about nothing; I just can’t see what all the fuss is about when it comes to deciding on an emissions trading system before the world meets in Copenhagen to try and get an international agreement on climate change. For goodness sake it’s not as if any legislation on the subject will be carved in stone. It can always be changed and it would be some kind of miracle if the proposal Australia goes to the negotiating table with ends up being 100% appropriate. This is a major game of give and take but going with a legislated proposal is at least a sign of minimum good intentions. If every nation adopted the view that its national interest was best served by waiting to see what every one else proposed to do then the talks would never get started.

A little late interest rate action. Clearly I was not alone in reading the tea leaves yesterday as indicating that perhaps there might be an interest rate rise this afternoon. The Crikey Indicator has moved considerably overnight towards the Reserve Bank opting for a 0.25 percentage point increase although no change is still slightly the favourite way.

Rather smugly I have locked in my profit and backed the “no rise” to accompany the modest investment I wrote of yesterday on the 0.25 option.