White Goes First, Right Goes Beatup: The ABC Did Not Attempt To Cancel Chess

In recent days I've been involved in a media and social media flurry sparked by the ABC's decision to explore the subject of whether White moving first in a game of chess was in any way connected to race issues.  This claim was once most commonly seen as a spoof of anti-racism campaigns, but these days, a small number of people seem to be actually fearing chess might be symbolically racist.

I appeared on ABC radio and gave an interview that outlined that there is no evidence this is the case.  The host did not try to argue that there was, just mentioned that people on social media have held concerns about the issue.  The mere existence of that interview has triggered a massive backlash from right-wing culture warriors, which had already started before the interview aired.  The thing is, it is unclear that the enemy they're tilting at exists!  The ABC may be guilty of filling up its programs with offbeat fluff on the slender pretext of a few tweets, but that does not mean it was trying to have chess cancelled.

Poll Roundup: Shorten's Struggles Aren't Shifting Votes

2PP Aggregate: 52.3 to Labor (unchanged since end of last week)

Labor would probably win election "held now" with small majority

It's been another fortnight of sound and fury, dominated by speculation over Bill Shorten's leadership (amid worsening personal polls, unflattering reflections from The Killing Season, and concerns about aspects of his union background), still more anti-terror laws and another overheated culture war about some goose let loose on QandA.  Yet in this week's voting intention polls, very little has changed.

A ReachTEL late last week came out with a 52:48 to Labor headline, followed by a 53:47 by last-election preferences (53.5:46.5 respondent-allocated) from Morgan and a 53:47 from Essential.  The latter broke the run of seven consecutive 52s, as Essential finally caught a touch of the Green surge being seen by all other pollsters.  There was no Newspoll as the brand is in transition to operation by Galaxy.  (Meanwhile former Newspoll staff have started Omnipoll, which doesn't look like it will be doing regular voting intention polling, but which will continue many of Newspoll's other operations in an online format.)

After adjustments for the primaries and Morgan's house effect, I aggregated the ReachTEL as 48.2 to Coalition, the Morgan as 48 and Essential as 47.3, and the net impact is diddly-squat: a 0.1 point improvement for the Coalition on two weeks ago:

I should note that while the different aggregators have been pretty close together in recent weeks, PhantomTrend now has it at just 51.5, from which the "model's best guess" is an Abbott-Katter coalition. Mark The Ballot has 52.2 and I'll add in BludgerTrack when it's updated (update: it's 52.0, with a projection of 77 seats for Labor).  Labor's lead might look pretty solid but when translated into seat terms, it's a sliver.