While not mentioned by Schudson, nothing spoke to the rise of “objective journalism” more clearly than the rise of “scientific” polling: the attempt to document “the voice of the people” based on interviews that, in principle, gave every citizen an equal chance of being heard, of saying what they had to say, via questions free of bias, that bane of objectivity.

George Gallup, a figure central to the spread of polling, presented poll-takers, in his polling manifesto The Pulse of Democracy (1940), as people “moving freely about all sorts and conditions of men and noting how they are affected by the news or arguments brought from day to day to their knowledge.” Gallup took this model from James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth (1888), but his own polling, with its set questions and predetermined response categories, was far removed from the kind of observation Bryce favoured

In reality, Gallup followed a news-making model — the model exemplified by press conferences and media releases, where news is made for the press without being controlled by the press. Gallup not only created news, controlling what was asked, how it was asked and when; he also syndicated his results to a broad range of newspapers. Having his polls published by papers whose politics ranged widely shored up his claims to objectivity.

A parallel existed with the Associated Press, America’s first wire service. Since it “gathered news for publication in a variety of papers with widely different political allegiances,” Schudson notes, “it could only succeed by making its reporting “objective” enough to be acceptable to all its members and clients.”

While servicing a diverse range of outlets was central to Gallup in America, this is not what happened in Australia. When Keith Murdoch introduced the Gallup Poll here in 1941 he made sure that the company he set up to run it was controlled by his own Herald and Weekly Times and its associates in various states. Although Australian Public Opinion Polls (“The Gallup Method”) was notionally independent, executives from the Herald and Weekly Times, including Murdoch, could (and did) influence the questions Roy Morgan, APOP’s managing director, asked, including whether they should be repeated from poll to poll.

Whereas the American Gallup boasted subscribing newspapers that were Republican (as Gallup himself may have been), Democrat and independent, none of the newspapers that subscribed to the Australian Gallup Poll are likely to have ever editorialised in favour of federal Labor; for many years, Morgan himself was an anti-Labor member of the Melbourne City Council.

Much of the polling done in America and later in Australia, however, fits a third model: things that the press creates either directly (in-house polling; for example, of a newspaper’s own readers) or indirectly (by commissioning an independent market research firm to ask questions on the newspaper’s behalf). Media products that fit this category range from Clyde Packer’s creation of the Miss Australia contest in the 1920s (also copied from America) and the Australian Financial Review’s endless business “summits” in the 2020s, to the media’s ubiquitous sit-down interviews with politicians and celebrities. This is now the dominant model.

Creating news is the surest route to having an “exclusive” and creating “product differentiation.” If the “exclusive” is produced often enough, is highly valued, and prominently flagged — polling is now featured on the front page — it becomes a way of building “brand loyalty.” Newspapers that regularly commission polls from the same source, or that have a regular but non-financial relationship with a pollster, hope for all of this. Media that don’t commission their own polls — television and radio, especially — are often happy to recycle polls published in the press.

Brand loyalty is a way of building a readership. When it comes to polling, it generally means not citing polls generated by competing brands — especially polls that could raise doubts about one’s own polls. Where different polls produce different — even conflicting — results, this usually means that the rules of objectivity that require journalists to confirm their stories using more than one source are readily abandoned. While some newspapers are more brand-focused than others, journalists consulting their own polls and not others has become standard practice.

In polling, the strength of any brand — the reputation of the poll — depends on the prestige of the news outlet that publishes it. It also depends on the poll’s record, and that record is assessed against the few objective measures that exist: election results and referendums.

Polls that score well on these measures are more likely to be trusted on things other than the vote. That, at least, is the hope of the companies that poll for the press or have their polls publicised by the press. Companies involved in the prediction business try to ensure that their polls come as close as possible to predicting the actual vote — closer, certainly, than any of their rivals.

What pollsters hope to be trusted on, as a result of the accuracy on these measures, is everything else they do for the press — notably, reporting on the popularity of party leaders and taking “the pulse” (as Gallup liked to say) on issues of public policy. More than that, they are after a spillover or halo effect for their market research businesses more generally; financially, this is the point of involving themselves in the not particularly lucrative business of predicting votes. Trust is important because what companies report on matters other than the vote typically cannot be checked directly against any external measure.

Absent any objective check, there is always a risk of polling that panders, consciously or otherwise, to the client’s agenda or the pollster’s preferences. Against this happening, the guardrails erected by industry bodies like the relatively new Australian Polling Council or the old (Market) Research Society are either weak or non-existent — the APC mostly concerned that pollsters explain their methods and post their questionnaires online, a very welcome development but one that stops well short of setting wide-ranging standards in relation to the questions members ask; the Research Society mostly concerned to reassure respondents about the way polling companies protect their privacy.

Newspoll — and other polls

Enter Newspoll, a brand owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Established for a high-end newspaper, the Australian — whose news and views are seen by some as exerting an out-size influence on conservative politics — Newspoll can claim a record of predicting national elections second to none.

In the course of conducting its most recent poll — a fortnightly event that usually grabs the headlines for what it has to say about national voting intentions, leadership satisfaction and preferred prime minister — Newspoll raised the issue of nuclear power. “There is a proposal to build several small modular nuclear reactors around Australia to produce zero-emissions energy on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired,” Newspoll told respondents (emphasis in the original). It then asked: “Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?” Respondents were invited to select one answer: “Strongly approve” (22 per cent); “Somewhat approve” (33 per cent); “Somewhat disapprove” (14 per cent); “Strongly disapprove” (17 per cent); “Don’t know” (14 per cent). In short: 55 per cent in favour; 31 per cent against; 14 per cent not prepared to say either way.

As Newspoll might have anticipated on an issue as contentious as this, its question generated controversy. Unimpressed, the economist John Quiggin proposed — tongue-in-cheek — a quite different way the question might have been worded: “There is a proposal to keep coal-fired power stations operating until the development of small nuclear reactors which might, in the future, supply zero-emissions energy. Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?”

A question on nuclear power could have been asked in any number of ways: by putting the arguments for and against nuclear power; by taking the timeline for getting nuclear power up and running and comparing it to the timeline for wind + solar + hydro; by asking who should pay (governments, consumers, industry, etc.) for different forms of energy with zero emissions, and how much they should pay; by qualifying the “zero-emissions” solution with some reference to the waste disposal problem; by omitting the words “small, modular” — not just descriptors but, potentially at least, words of reassurance; and so on.

Different questions might still have produced a majority in favour of nuclear energy. A question asked for the Institute of Public Affairs by Dynata, in April 2022, on whether Australia should build nuclear power plants to supply electricity and reduce carbon emissions,” found a majority (53 per cent agreeing), and an even lower level of opposition (23 per cent).

As with Newspoll, the IPA poll raised considerations that invited an affirmative response: “small modular,” “zero-emissions energy,” “on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired” (Newspoll); “to supply electricity,” “reduce carbon omissions” (IPA). Not a single consideration in either poll might have prompted a negative response.

The high proportion in the IPA survey neither agreeing nor disagreeing (24 per cent) — an option Newspoll didn’t offer — allowed respondents who actually had an opinion to conceal it, Swedish research on attitudes to nuclear power suggests. So, while the level of opposition recorded by the IPA might have been higher without the “easy out,” the level of support might have been higher too.

Other questions about nuclear power failed to attract majority support. Asked in September by Freshwater “if Australia needs nuclear power” (the precise question was not published), and presented with a set of response options similar to those offered by the IPA, 37 per cent of respondents supported nuclear power and 36 per cent opposed it, 18 per cent saying they were “neutral” and 12 per cent “unsure.” Apart from coal (supported by 33 per cent), every other energy source received wider support: hydrogen (47 per cent), natural gas (56 per cent), offshore wind (58 per cent), onshore wind (61 per cent) and solar (84 per cent).

Asked in the same poll whether “Australia should remove the ban on nuclear power development,” 44 per cent agreed. But asked whether they agreed or disagreed that “Australia does not need to generate any energy from nuclear power,” 36 per cent disagreed. Similarly, no more than 35 per agreed that “the federal government must consider small nuclear modular reactors as part of the future energy mix” — a much lower figure than Newspoll’s, even if the question isn’t necessarily better.

Freshwater also asked respondents to choose between two trade-offs: “Australia builds nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are replaced earlier” (44 per cent chose this one) and “Australia does not build nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are extended” (38 per cent); 18 per cent were “unsure.” Respondents opposed to both coal and nuclear power were left with only one place to go — “unsure.” But on the poll’s own evidence — 33 per cent supporting coal, 36 per cent supporting nuclear — the figure of 18 per cent appears to underestimate this group considerably.

Another question on nuclear power, this time asked by RedBridge, is said to have shown a 35–32 split over “the idea of using nuclear to provide for Australia’s energy need.” As yet, however, neither the question nor any figures have been posted on its website.

Yet another question, asked in February by Resolve for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, also failed to show majority support for nuclear power. Told that “there has been some debate about the use of nuclear power in Australia recently” and asked for their “own view,” respondents split four ways: “I support the use of nuclear power in Australia” (36 per cent); “I do not have a strong view and am open to the government investigating its use” (27 per cent); “I oppose the use of nuclear power in Australia” (25 per cent); and “Undecided” (15 per cent).

In reporting this “exclusive survey,” David Crowe, chief political correspondent for the two papers, made no reference to the Newspoll published the previous day. This, notwithstanding that in reporting the Resolve poll Crowe gave pride of place to “mining billionaire” Andrew Forrest’s attack on the Coalition’s nuclear policy — a policy the Australian suggested had received a “boost” from the Newspoll. Nor did Crowe refer to any other poll.

On one reading, most respondents (61 per cent in the Resolve poll compared to 39 per cent in Newspoll) had “a strong view” (the respondents who declined to say “I do not have a strong view…”), those without “a strong view” either being “open to the government investigating” the use of nuclear power or “undecided.” More likely, the question didn’t measure how strong any of the views were — some of those without strong views being “open to the government investigating its use,” others joining those who harboured strong views (respondents Resolve didn’t directly identify) to indicate either their support or their opposition to nuclear power.

Effectively, the Resolve poll rolled three questions into one — one, about support or opposition to nuclear power; another about the strength of these opinions; and another about “the government investigating” the “use” of nuclear power. But since responses to one of these questions would not necessarily have determined responses to any other, Resolve’s shortcut obscures more about public opinion than it illuminates; a respondent with a strong view, for example, might still have been “open to the government investigating its use.”

In October 2023, Resolve asked another question — this one reportedly commissioned by the consulting firm Society Advisory, and run “exclusively” by Sky News. The result suggested a degree of openness to nuclear power that was even higher than that indicated by Resolve’s poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Asked if “Australia should rethink its moratorium (ban) on nuclear power to give more flexibility in the future,” half (49 per cent) of the respondents were in favour, less than half that number (18 per cent) were against, opposition to “flexibility” requiring some strength, with an extraordinary 33 per cent “unsure” — a sign that this question too was a poor one.

Not only do answers depend on the question, they also depend on the response options. In an extensive survey — not just a one- or two-item poll — conducted in October–November 2023, the British firm Savanta asked respondents “to what extent, if at all,” they supported or opposed using nuclear energy “to generate electricity” in Australia? While 40 per cent said “strongly support” or “tend to support,” 36 per cent said “strongly oppose” or “tend to oppose,” 7 per cent said “Don’t know,” and 17 per cent said they “neither support nor oppose.”

As with the Resolve poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Savanta’s response options — which included “neither support nor oppose” — reduced the chance that its question, however worded, would yield a majority either in favour of nuclear energy or against it; almost as many opposed nuclear energy as supported it, a quarter (24 per cent) choosing to sit on the fence. In the Newspoll, where 55 per cent approved and 31 per cent disapproved, there was no box marked “neither approve nor disapprove.” If there had been, then almost certainly Newspoll would not have found majority support either.

The Savanta survey also shows what happens to support for a single option — here, nuclear power — when respondents are given a range of options. Asked to think about how their “country might shift its current energy generation mix” and given a list of five alternatives, only 23 per cent nominated “nuclear energy”; 41 per cent, almost twice as many, nominated “large-scale solar farms.” Of the rest, 15 per cent nominated “onshore wind farms,” 6 per cent “gas carbon and storage (CCS),” and 4 per cent “biomass from trees.”

Newspoll made no attempt to ascertain whether the public had heard of “small modular nuclear reactors” much less what the public knew about such things. In the Guardian, the proposal was described as “an uncosted Coalition thought-bubble”; in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, former deputy Reserve Bank governor Stephen Grenville noted that there were “just two operational SMRs, both research reactors” and that work on what “was expected to be the first operational commercial SMR” had “been halted as the revised cost per kWH is uneconomic for the distributors who had signed up.” Elsewhere, an academic specialising in electricity generation described SMRs as “not, by any stretch of the imagination, what most people would consider small.”

On what the public knows — or, more accurately, on how much it thinks it knows — the Savanta survey is again useful. When asked what they had heard of nuclear energy, few (8 per cent) said “I have not heard about this energy option” or “don’t know.” But just 18 per cent said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a lot about how it works.” Most said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a little about how it works” (41 per cent) or “I have heard about this energy option, but don’t know how it works (33 per cent).

In a poll conducted by Pure Profile, reported in May 2022, 70 per cent said they didn’t understand “the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.”

… and the Australian

Keen to publicise the result of its Newspoll — a result the paper openly welcomed — the Australian’s reporting of the poll and its commentary around it was tendentious.

The distinction between respondents’ having a view and their having a “strong” view was one it mostly ignored or fudged. The paper’s political editor Simon Benson, reported in Crikey to be “responsible” for the poll, ignored it. He repeatedly represented “majority” support as “strong” support. The fact that pollsters themselves regularly make this mistake shouldn’t make it any more acceptable. If support is a metre wide, it isn’t necessarily a metre deep.

The headline in the print edition — “Powerful Majority Supports Nuclear Option for Energy Security” — fudged the distinction. In itself, 55 per cent is not an overwhelming majority; in 2017, same-sex marriage was supported in the nationwide “survey” by 62 per cent. In itself,  55 per cent is hardly a “powerful” number — one that politicians ignore at their peril; in the lead-up to the same-sex marriage decision, both John Howard and Tony Abbott made it clear that they wouldn’t consider anything less than 60 per cent in favour to be a number that the parliament would have to heed. Had 55 per cent (not 36 per cent) “strongly” approved nuclear reactors, the Australian would have had a defensible case. But even in polls that offer a binary choice, “strong” majorities are rare.

Rather than representing a “powerful majority” in favour of the “nuclear option,” Newspoll’s figures might equally be said to show that most respondents (61 per cent) did not feel strongly one way or the other — a majority that the Australian would not have wanted to call “powerful.”

A highlight, Benson argued, was the fact that respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four — “the demographic most concerned about climate change” — was the demographic most likely to support nuclear power, 65–32. “There is no fear of the technology for most people under 40,” he concluded. This line was one that impressed shadow climate change and energy minister, Ted O’Brien, when he discussed the poll on Sky News.

It also resonated with opposition leader Peter Dutton. Attacking the prime minister for being out of touch with public opinion, which he was reported to have said was “warming to nuclear power,” Dutton noted that nuclear power was “supported by a lot of younger people because they are well-read and they know that it’s zero emissions, and it can firm up renewables in the system.”

The news that “NewsPoll [sic] showed a majority of young Australians supporting small-scale nuclear power generation,” even prompted a discussion of the pros and cons of nuclear power — not the pros and cons of the polling — on the ABC.

But eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds as the age group most favourably disposed to nuclear power is not what Essential shows, not what Savanta shows, and not what RedBridge shows. In October’s Essential poll, no more than 46 per cent of respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four supported “nuclear power plants” — the same proportion as those aged thirty-six to fifty-four but a smaller proportion than those aged fifty-five-plus (56 per cent); the proportion of “strong” supporters was actually lower among those aged eighteen to thirty-four than in either of the other age-groups.

In the Savanta survey, those aged eighteen to thirty-four were the least likely to favour nuclear energy; only about 36 per cent were in favour, strongly or otherwise, not much more than half the number that Newspoll reported.

And according to a report of the polling conducted in February by RedBridge, sourced to Tony Barry, a partner and former deputy state director of the Victorian Liberal Party, “[w]here there is support” for nuclear power. “it is among only those who already vote Liberal or who are older than 65.”

In the Australian, the leader writer observed that “public support for considering nuclear power in Australia is rising as the cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge becomes more real.” But Newspoll had never sought to establish what respondents think are the “cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge” so it could hardly have shown whether these thoughts have changed.

Benson’s remark, on the Australian’s front page, that the poll showed “growing community support” for nuclear power was also without warrant; “growing community support” is something that the poll does not show and that Benson made no attempt to document. Since the question posed by Newspoll had never been asked before, and since polled opinion is sensitive to the way questions are asked, “growing community support” is one thing the poll could not show.

Subsequently, Benson cited Liberal Party polling conducted “immediately after the [May] 2022 election loss” which “had support at 31 per cent.” The question? Benson doesn’t say. Is it really likely, as Benson believes, that in a “short space of time,” as he describes it — less than two years — support for nuclear power could have jumped from 31 per cent to 55 per cent? The considerable shift in polled opinion on same-sex marriage that Wikipedia suggests happened sometime between 2004 and 2007 is hardly likely to have happened since 2022 in relation to nuclear energy.

Peta Credlin, Australian columnist and Sky News presenter, argued the growing-support line by stringing together: a poll conducted in 2015 (by Essential, though she didn’t identify it as an Essential poll), which had support at 40 per cent; the IPA poll (which it was safe to name) from 2022, which had support at 53 per cent; and the Newspoll, which had it at 55 per cent. Not only was each of these conducted by a different pollster, hence subject to different “house effects”; each had posed their own question.

Had the Australian wanted to see whether support really was growing it might have considered re-running one of the questions it had asked years before — or, preferably, re-run more than one. But perhaps the point of the polling was not to show that support was growing but to create the impression that it was growing — that it had a momentum that might leave Labor, “in its fanatical opposition to nuclear power,” as Benson wrote, stranded on “the wrong side of history.”

This was not the first time the Australian has interpreted the results of a Newspoll as heralding a turning point on this issue. In 2007, shortly before prime minister John Howard announced that the Coalition would set up a nuclear regulatory regime and remove any unreasonable impediments to the building of nuclear power plants in Australia, the Australian told its readers that there had been a “dramatic shift” in support for nuclear power. The basis of its claim: questions asked by Newspoll — two in 2006, one in 2007. (In those days Newspoll was a market research company, not a polling brand whose field work had been outsourced first to YouGov and more recently to Pyxis.)

The questions asked in 2006 were not the same as the question asked in 2007. In May and December 2006, Newspoll told respondents: “Currently, while there is a nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney used for medical and scientific purposes, there are no nuclear power stations being built in Australia.” It then asked: “Are you personally in favour or against nuclear power stations in Australia?” The majority was against: 38–51, in May; 35–50, in December.

In March 2007, Newspoll changed the question, and framed it quite differently: “Thinking now about reducing gas emissions to help address climate change,” it asked, “are you personally in favour or against the development of a nuclear power industry in Australia, as one of a range of energy solutions to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions?” On this, opinion was fairly evenly split: 45–40. The majority were not against; in fact, there was a plurality in favour. The Australian’s interpretation: in just four months, Dennis Shanahan and Sid Marris concluded, the attitude of Australians to nuclear energy had “dramatically reversed.”

Not so. After commissioning Newspoll to ask the 2006 question again, in April 2007, the Australia Institute found that the level of support for “nuclear power stations being built in Australia” was 36 per cent (35 per cent in December 2006), the level of opposition was now 46 per cent (previously, 50 per cent), and the “don’t knows” were now 18 per cent (previously 15 per cent). In short, whereas opposition had exceeded support by fifteen percentage points, 50­–35, it now exceeded support by ten points, 46–36 — a decline of five points, but no reversal, dramatic or otherwise.

This time around, both the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald have asked questions similar to the one Newspoll asked in February, but in polls of their readers not in a public opinion poll. Asked, in July 2023, whether Australia should “consider small nuclear reactors as one solution to moving away from fossil fuels?,” the Financial Review’s readers favoured “consider[ing]” the idea, 58–30. Asked, in July 2023, whether “small nuclear power reactors should be part of Australia’s energy mix,” the Herald’s readers opposed the idea, 32–55. Even if these questions had been included in national polls, the Australian might have baulked at citing the results of either, since it would have given oxygen to another brand.

There is evidence of a growth in support for nuclear power between June 2019 and March 2022, but there is no convincing evidence that points to “growing support” in the two years since. When the Lowy Poll asked respondents, in March 2022, whether they supported or opposed “removing the existing ban on nuclear power,” 52 per cent said they supported it, an increase on the level of support in March 2021 (47 per cent). And in September 2021, when Essential asked respondents whether they supported or opposed “Australia developing nuclear power plants for the generation of electricity,” 50 per cent said they supported nuclear power, a sharp increase on the level of support (39 per cent) it reported in June 2019. However, when Essential asked the question again, in October 2023, the level of support hadn’t moved.

The only evidence for a recent shift comes from Resolve. In October 2023, when Resolve first asked the question it asked in February 2024, 33 per cent (compared with 36 per cent in February) supported “the use of nuclear power” and 24 per cent (23 per cent in February) opposed it. (Nine Entertainment appears not to have previously published Resolve’s result for October.) Its February poll represents an increase of four percentage points in the gap between the level of support and the level of opposition, from nine points to thirteen.

But a shift of four points is well within the range one might expect given the vagaries of sampling — the “margin of error” that pollsters regularly parade but just as regularly ignore. Non-sampling error — a much bigger problem than pollsters acknowledge — also might have played a part, especially given a question as complex and confused as the one Resolve asked. Errors of both kinds are compounded by the widespread use by pollsters of opt-in rather than probability-based panels.

Jim Reed, who runs Resolve, is reported as saying that voters “were increasingly open to the potential of nuclear power now the Coalition was advocating for existing technology in large-scale plants.” According to Reed, support has “swung towards at least openness to nuclear power.” But Nine did not reveal what change, if any, Resolve had detected since October in the number without “a strong view” and “open to the government investigating its use (27 per cent in February).” Support, Reed added, was “weak… at the moment simply because people aren’t being asked to approve an actual site.” Even if he had measured strength, which it appears he hadn’t, one could equally imagine support becoming weaker, not stronger, once voters were asked to “asked to approve an actual site.”

What sort of voters did he think were now supportive or at least “open’? “We’ve got a new generation of younger people who are quite positive towards nuclear power,” Reed said. Was this “new generation” evident in October or did it only become evident in February? If it was evident in October, was it responsible for February’s four-point shift? Nothing in what Nine published allows us to say.

While Reed restricted himself, largely, to interpreting the actual data, in the Australian the commentary strayed much further. It wrote, for example, of “the costs and risks of renewable energy” having “become clearer.” But it offered no evidence that those costs and risks had become clearer to the public — not surprisingly, since these too were things about which Newspoll had not asked.

Leveraging the Newspoll result to predict that “most Australians would back a move to small scale nuclear power,” the headline in the online edition of the Australian ignored another distinction — not between strong and weak opinion but between polls that showed un-mobilised opinion and polls that showed mobilised opinion; so, too did Sky News. Any “move to small-scale nuclear power” would be politically contested, and once contested opinion might shift.

Subsequently, Benson ventured a more sober assessment of the Coalition’s prospects of carrying the day. “For Dutton to win the argument,” an argument that would take “courage” to mount, “any Coalition energy policy must be framed in a cost-of-living context that can demonstrate how nuclear power will deliver cheaper and more reliable power into the future,” he wrote. For Dutton to position nuclear power as “a central component” of his energy policy, Benson declared, was “as big and brave as it gets.”

Others went further. In a rare note of dissent within News Corp, James Campbell, national weekend political editor for Saturday and Sunday News Corp newspapers and websites across Australia, called the idea of Dutton “going to the next federal election with plans to introduce nuclear power” as “stark raving mad.” One thing the Coalition should have learnt from the Voice referendum was that “support for anything radical in Australia shrinks the moment it hits any sort of concerted opposition.” And, he added, “there’s the unity problem. Do you really think Liberal candidates in ‘tealy’ places are going to face the front on this?”

Benson, meanwhile, had back-tracked. Pointing again to the distribution of opinion among eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds, he advanced a quite different assessment: “the onus is now on Labor to convince Australians why we shouldn’t have nuclear power.” Chris Kenny, the Australian’s associate editor, thought “the nuclear argument could play well in the teal seats where there is an eagerness for climate change and a high degree of economic realism.”

If Benson was right the first time, however, and the Coalition needs to take care over how it frames the debate, then the Savanta data suggest that it may face a few challenges. Asked what impact nuclear energy would have on their “energy bills,” about a third (35 per cent) of its respondents said it would make their bills “much cheaper” or “slightly cheaper,” less than a third (28 per cent) thought it would make them “much more expensive” or “slightly more expensive,” but more than a third (38 per cent) said they either didn’t know or thought it would make “no difference.”

In the Essential poll, conducted around the same time, respondents saw little difference in “total cost including infrastructure and household price” between three energy sources: “renewable energy, such as wind and solar” (38 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 35 per cent, the “least expensive”), nuclear power (34 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 34 per cent, the “least expensive”), and “fossil fuels, such as coal and gas” (28 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 31 per cent, the “least expensive”).

Supporters of nuclear energy may also have to address some of the concerns Benson didn’t mention. In the Savanta study, 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (45 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (32 per cent) about “waste management”; 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (47 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (30 per cent) about “health & safety (ie. nuclear meltdowns, impact on people living nearby)”; and 56 per cent were either “very concerned” (23 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (33 per cent) about the “time it takes to build.”

In another poll, this one conducted by Pure Profile in the first half of 2022, respondents were asked how they would feel if a new nuclear power station were built in their city. Around 50 per cent said they would feel “uncomfortable,” more than a quarter “extremely uncomfortable”; just 7 per cent would have felt “extremely at ease.”

It would be reassuring to think that any newspaper that wanted its polling taken seriously would need to commission better polling than the polling the Australian was so keen to promote. But the Newspoll results were taken seriously by a rival masthead. “The Newspoll published in the Australian,” the political editor of the Australian Financial Review, Phillip Coorey wrote, “found there was now majority support for the power source.”

A week after its poll was published, and its results — with a nod to the Coalition — described as “powerful,” the Australian’s front page led with another “exclusive,” this time courtesy of the Coalition: its “signature energy policy” to be announced “before the May federal budget” would include “a plan identifying potential sites for small nuclear reactors as future net zero sources.” The following day, Benson wrote that Newspoll had “demonstrated strong support for the proposal that Dutton is working on announcing soon.” But the policy Dutton was working on, apparently, was not the policy Newspoll had tested. “The Coalition energy plan,” Benson revealed the same day in another front-page “exclusive,” was “likely to include next-generation large-scale nuclear reactors — not just the small-modular reactors.”

A newspaper that has a position on nuclear power and thinks of polls as an objective measure of public opinion should make sure that the questions it gets (or allows) pollsters to ask, and the results it gets journalists to write up, look fair and reasonable to those on different sides of the debate. In effect, this was the discipline George Gallup placed on himself when he signed up newspapers with divergent views.

Even if a newspaper wanted to use its polling to gee-up its preferred party, it might also think about using its polling to identify some of the risks of pursuing a policy it backed — risks that no party wanting to win an election could sensibly ignore — not just the opportunities to pursue that policy.

Whether Michael Schudson left polling out of his account of objectivity because it didn’t fit with his argument about objectivity as an ideology, or because he didn’t think it a part of journalism — neither journalism nor market research being a profession in the sense that law or medicine are professions — or simply because of an oversight, is unclear.

Better, more comprehensive, polling wouldn’t end the political debate or the debate about the objectivity of the polls. Nor should it. Nonetheless, it might be a good place from which to progress these debates.

Of course, for those who don’t want to foster a debate about the policy or about the polls, any plea for do better is entirely beside the point. •

The post Nuclear power, Newspoll and the nuances of polled opinion appeared first on Inside Story.

If you live in Frankston and you’ve got a problem with Victorian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.

If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.

Send Labor a message.

— Sussan Ley (@sussanley) February 29, 2024

Having happened to watch question time that day, I can attest that she (or her staffer) was fully on song with the opposition’s chief theme: that Melburnian women should be terrified of being assaulted by convicted sex offenders — foreign (ie. dark-skinned) ones to boot — released into the community by the Albanese government.

It’s a very Peter Duttonesque message, but he and his team usually deliver it with more subtlety — it sticks better if recipients have to join a few dots — and, crucially, with deniability. By blundering in with the quiet bits out loud, Ley made it more obvious, if not necessarily more objectionable.

It’s all part of the Dunkley frenzy, of course. As with all federal by-elections seen as contestable between the major parties, this one, caused by the death of Labor MP Peta Murphy, has gone from being cast as a useful indicator of how the parties are “travelling” to something incredibly important in its own right: massive tests for the prime minister and opposition leader.

Whenever I write about a by-election I devote some words to explaining why these events are useless predictors of anything and why they only matter because the political bubble believes they do. Readers familiar with these observations can skip the next few pars.

There are two main reasons. The first is that the sample, while huge, is neither random nor scientifically weighted. It’s just one electorate. At the 2022 general election a national 3.7 percentage point swing comprised a spread of 151 seat swings, from 14.2 points to Labor in Pearce (Western Australia) to 7.2 points to the Liberals in Calwell (Victoria). (The 8.3 points to the Lib in Fowler (New South Wales) was bigger, but that was an independent–Labor contest and the two-party-preferred figure comes from an Electoral Commission recount for purely academic purposes.)

So even at a general election, one seat’s swing will rarely approximate the national one.

But perhaps more importantly, by-elections (except in the rarest of cases) are not about who will form government. It’s true that a proportion of the electorate — probably still a majority, but a shrinking one — will always vote for a particular major party out of loyalty, but for the rest the triviality of the contest liberates them to act on other impulses. “Sending a message” is tried and tested (see tweet above).

Candidates also make more of a difference at by-elections. So might the weather. Low turnout is a feature of this genre, worth potentially a couple of percentage points one way or the other.

Still, by-elections do end up being important, precisely because the political class believes they are. They can influence the future, particularly leaders’ job security, but only because of how they’re interpreted. (Would we have ever seen a Bob Hawke prime ministership if Liberal Phillip Lynch had not resigned in Flinders in 1982?)

The magic number here is the margin: 6.27233 per cent to be precise. A swing to the opposition above that figure would shake parliament’s walls, generate shock and awe in the press gallery and even, perhaps, send Labor’s leadership hares out for a trot. After the Voice “debacle,” Anthony Albanese fails another electoral test!

A swing to the government would similarly damage Peter Dutton, rendering his chances of surviving until the next election worse than they are now. And anything in between will be energetically spun by both sides and their media cheersquads.

So what can we say about Dunkley? Antony Green’s page is up, and I’ve followed his lead when calculating average swings by restricting the time period to 1983 onwards. But I’ve also excluded by-elections caused by section 44 of the Constitution — of which we had a slew around six years ago — because in all of them (or at least those with identifiable with two-party-preferred swings) the disqualified MPs ran again. These deserve their own category given that the absence of the personal votes of sitting MPs is the big driver of the difference between swings in opposition-held seats and government-held seats.

That leaves twenty-three by-elections in the past forty-one years with two-party-preferred swings. In the ten opposition-held seats (including Aston and the low-profile Fadden last year) the average swing was an almost negligible 0.8 points to the opposition.

Those caused by resignations by government MPs (eleven in total, the most recent in Groom in 2020) average to a much bigger number, 7.6 points to the opposition. And when they’re brought on by the death of a government MP — it’s a tiny sample of two (Aston 2001 and Canning 2015) — the swing is 5.5 points to the opposition. If we include that pair with the resignations we get 7.2 points to the opposition from thirteen events.

(There were no opposition by-elections caused by death with two-party-preferred swings in that period.)

So you might want to use that 5.5, which would see Labor retain the seat, or 7.2, which wouldn’t. Or you could slot in any other number, because another feature of by-elections is that they’re unpredictable.

The graph below shows Labor two-party-preferred votes in Dunkley since 1984. To adjust for redistributions, notional swings are subtracted from results going backwards. The blue dots show the actual vote at each election; the fact that so many are below the orange line reflects a 2018 redistribution that favoured Labor by an estimated (by the AEC) 2.5 points after preferences.

The big gap between the orange and red lines from 1998 to 2013 (particularly from 2001) is largely because of the big personal vote built up by the energetic Liberal Bruce Billson, first elected in 1996. He ended up in Tony Abbott’s shadow cabinet and then in cabinet; he was subsequently dropped by new prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2015 and retired at the 2016 election. See the dramatic narrowing between red and orange at that election with the absence of his name on the ballot.

Dunkley was retained by the Liberals’ Chris Crewther, but the aforementioned redistribution saw the electorate going into the 2019 poll as notionally Labor. In that year Victoria was the only state to swing to the opposition, and Murphy (who had also contested in 2016) took Dunkley (or retained it vis-à-vis its notional position) with a swing slightly above the state average. If Crewther generated a sophomore surge in that single term, it was counteracted by other factors, perhaps including the Labor candidate and campaign. Murphy seems to have enjoyed a surge in 2022, registering a swing well above the state average. Which takes us to where we are now, and that margin of 6.3 points.

Note that the orange line is above 50 per cent in 1998, 2010 and 2016. All else being equal, this suggests Labor would have won on the current boundaries in those years. All else ain’t equal, and the assumption gets more questionable the further back we go because of demographic changes and compounding errors in those post-redistribution estimates of notional margins. (Notional margins are rather hit and miss. For one thing they can’t take into account postal votes; for another they ignore personal votes in booths from neighbouring electorates.)

But it is reasonable to believe that Dunkley, as it is defined today, would probably have been won by Labor in 2010 and 2016. So although Dunkley was long held by the Liberal Party it’s not really accurate to call it a natural Liberal seat.

Other factors?

Federal electorates tend to be pulled by state tides. One element is the standing of those second-tier governments, and while Victoria’s Labor government under new premier Jacinta Allan is still ahead in opinion polls, the leads are more modest than under Dan Andrews. Put less clinically, Andrews was an accomplished communicator, including on behalf his federal counterparts, and he is gone.

Working the other way, Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto still seems as pitiably bogged down by his party’s right wing as he was eleven months ago during Aston.

Then there’s the personal vote. On the evidence, which isn’t substantial, Murphy had a good one. (The bigger her personal vote, the worse for Labor’s chances on 2 March.)

The Liberal candidate is the Frankston mayor Nathan Conroy, who should bring a ready-made personal vote in parts of the electorate. Labor’s Jodie Belyea has long been involved in the local community but from reports lacks his profile. As noted above, attitudes to candidates can matter a lot at by-elections.

Conroy drew the top ballot spot and Belyea the bottom. That’s got to be worth a point or two for the Liberal overall.

Dutton is reported to be spinning “that a swing of between 3 per cent and 5 per cent would be a respectable outcome,” which suggests his party is expecting something bigger. YouGov, with a small sample, puts the Liberals on 51 per cent after preferences (about a 7 point swing). Polling before by-elections, including surveys conducted by the parties, is notoriously rubbery.

Anything can happen at by-elections, but if forced to choose I would tip a Liberal victory. If that does eventuate, the media frenzy about Labor’s leadership, including whispers from unnamed party sources, will not be for the faint-hearted.

December’s “one-term government” sightings will certainly make a comeback. •

Further reading, in alphabetical order

• ABC’s aforementioned Antony Green
• Kevin Bonham
• Pollbludger (William Bowe)
• Tallyroom (Ben Raue)

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January’s rejigged Stage 3 tax cuts announcement — warmly received in voterland, it seems, and made an ostentatious meal of by the opposition — has turned a new page. Now the political class has all but unanimously declared the return of the prime minister’s mojo. Albanese is in control again, looking and acting confident. But the Dunkley by-election on 2 March could change all that, of course, potentially dramatically.

So what’s the point of these incessant, whiplash-inducing analyses of how the parties and leaders are “travelling”? At core they must be about the next election; they can have no purpose otherwise. But once we’ve voted, this term of government will be viewed through the lens of the 2025 result and all today’s twists and turns will be forgotten. The caravan will move on to how the next election is shaping up.

One popular school of thought sees the media’s incessant horse-race adjudications as self-fulfilling. It is in a party’s interests to be described as being on track for electoral victory because the happy vibes will help it get there. With apologies to Sting, I don’t subscribe to this point of view. The narrative certainly influences reality, even around the edges of opinion poll results, but its effects on elections are usually minor and unpredictable.

The idea matters a lot to politicians and their staffers, though, partly because many of their jobs are dedicated to generating good reviews and partly because those reviews can ultimately affect their professional survival.

Peter Dutton, who was always facing a battle to remain Liberal leader for the full term, went into the summer break looking rather happy, but now he’s biting his nails about Dunkley. Albanese, who as prime minister enjoys more institutional fortification, would be harder to shift in the event of a bad result, but government MPs and staffers still imbibe the commentary. No leader enjoys forlorn troops and nervous backbenchers.

Judgements about how the participants are travelling are largely driven by opinion polls — and most of all, far ahead of the others, by Newspoll in the Australian. The tendency reached a nadir of sorts back in 2015 when Malcolm Turnbull talked about Tony Abbott “losing” all those Newspolls. (Albanese borrowed that formulation on the ABC’s 7.30 this month to point out his government has never “lost” one.)

The first Newspoll of 2024, in early February, found 62 per cent believed the government “did the right thing” by rejigging the tax cuts, with just 29 per cent saying they “should have kept their promise and implemented the tax cuts without changing them.”

Voting intentions and personal ratings were virtually identical to Newspoll’s final 2023 survey, which is widely seen as evidence the government didn’t “take a hit” for breaking that election promise. Along with the problems the decision caused (and will continue to cause) for the opposition right through to the next election, and along with the fact that the government was taking control of its destiny, the figures were enough to make it a “win.”

Just between us, though, Labor was a bit lucky with Newspoll’s phrasing. The fact that the changed policy represented the breaking of an ironclad, repeated promise was hidden in one of the responses, the one very few people nominated.

When another pollster, Redbridge, conducted a big survey at about the same time, it posed several questions about those Stage 3 tax cuts. The first (on page 21) simply asked if the government should stick to its repeated promise not to change them; it received a slight plurality in support of sticking with the cuts designed by the Coalition. The second (page 26) described the reported changes and asked about approval; this time the rejigged policy received large support, rather like that found by Newspoll.

All these pollsters’ questions are valid; the point here is that different wording can produce different headlines. A Newspoll question that resembled Redbridge’s first one would have generated very different perceptions about how the changed policy had been received by punters.

Redbridge also found a decrease in the government’s two-party-preferred support from 52.8 per cent in December to 51.2 per cent in February. Yet despite this “swing” the survey was reported very positively for the government in News Corp tabloids. Perhaps it can be difficult to break from the press gallery consensus.

Note that the prime minister is a bare relic of the figure, a year ago, who could do no wrong. How might voters have reacted if he’d announced these changes back then? He might well have taken that “hit” from those sky-high poll numbers. We’ll never know.

Broken election promises are as old as politics itself. From electors’ point of view Albanese is now just another politician; perhaps he had already become one last year. All prime ministers end up like that. “My word is my bond” is henceforth a punchline, like “Honest John” Howard in a previous era.

Like his predecessors, the prime minister is relying on the allure of incumbency: yes, I’m less than honest at times but I get the job done; I make the hard calls for the nation, and that’s what matters.

He even trotted out, also on 7.30, the sense of “trust” reclaimed by both Howard (in 2004) and Gillard (2012). “Australians,” he told Sarah Ferguson, “can trust me to be prepared to have the strength to take the right decisions that are needed.”

It was an overly long sentence, with spits, starts, lulls and twists, but he got there eventually. Rather like the government’s path to Stage 3 Mark II. •

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The gold in Anthony Albanese’s Midas touch, meanwhile, has turned to something of a slightly different colour, and the flat, syllable-mangling delivery that was once the secret to his connection with unpretentious middle Australia is now dreary and uninspiring. It gets worse: apparently he’s “weak,” a “follower, not a leader” and a “beta male” (ouch), according to focus group quotes plastered over News Corp’s Sunday tabloids.

Last week I did a very challenging thing: I watched question time, or at least large chunks of it, over a couple of days. I wanted to see how both major parties are behaving within this new Labor-is-acutely-mortal paradigm.

I expected cost of living to be on high rotation among opposition speakers. After all, it’s the biggest and most intractable problem the government faces. To my surprise Dutton instead asked question after question of the prime minister about his supposed failure to “stand up to China,” as he and Scott Morrison dedicated so much time to doing, with little evident damage other than to themselves, in the dying days of the last government.

Other questions focused on the repercussions of the High Court decision that set free a refugee child sex offender and all the other “hardened criminals” now in the community. Exactly the sort of thing you’d expect this former home affairs minister to jump on, and something that is at least more likely to hit a short-term nerve in voterland.

And in the government too: if there’s one issue that produces a sinking feeling in the collective Labor gut it’s the whole asylum seeker, refugee and immigration tangle. Unlike with the questions about China, the government’s response — and not just under parliamentary privilege — was completely over the top: hysterical and desperate, with some frontbenchers even bellowing about Dutton being soft on paedophiles.

It’s one thing to chip away at the opposition leader’s self-proclaimed toughness on the issue by revealing home truths about incompetence on his watch. Digging up letters to the current immigration minister from WA Liberal senator Dean Smith requesting the release of a convicted child sex offender certainly highlights the opposition’s disingenuousness.

But “protecting paedophiles” sounds grubby and deranged. It tells voters the government is scared. And who would believe it of any opposition leader in living memory?

Unlike during the Rudd era, Albanese’s Labor has managed to keep the boats stopped. Assuming it remains that way up to the election, “boat people” won’t be an issue. The extent of this general topic’s impact on past election results is generally overstated anyway. And why play on Dutton’s preferred terrain?

There’s a strand of Labor that yearns for the pre-Whitlam days, before Kim Beazley Senior’s famous “dregs of the middle class” hijacked the party of workers and White Australia. We saw it when Julia Gillard replaced Rudd and immediately started channelling John Howard. Some thought it awfully clever politics, at least at first, but it ended up reinforcing Tony Abbott and Morrison’s messaging and normalising their gross behaviour.

I still believe Dutton is unlikely to be opposition leader at the next election, assuming it’s in 2025. Just today Nine papers carry a piece about his deputy’s plan to win back teal seats. Sussan Ley is everything Dutton is not, and the obvious replacement should one be needed.

As pathetic as it sounds, it’s likely both sides are desperate to do well in the final Newspoll of the year so they can relax over the summer. But a truly clever prime minister would try to keep Dutton in place, because when he goes the government will sorely miss him.

Which is, I suppose, what he’s doing, if inadvertently. But there are better ways than lowering your own stature to raise your opponent’s.

Perhaps that’s being too simplistic, though. Troops need to be kept happy. Bill Shorten still has a lean and hungry look, and while the chances of a comeback are not even minuscule, we have seen many times how unsuccessful challengers (on the Coalition’s side in 2018, for instance) can make an incumbent’s position unsustainable.

It was only in June this year (though it feels a lot longer ago) that I finished a piece with these words:

We are only one year in, which as past governments have shown tells us nothing about how things will pan out. And we’ve not seen how Albanese copes under pressure, in difficult times. They will come, sooner or later.

Those times have arrived. And the answer to how he’s coping? Not well. •

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Might it continue dropping? (The rather jumpy Roy Morgan had Labor support dipping to 49.5 earlier in November before bouncing back to 52.5 per cent. Let’s see what December brings.)

Coming after the Voice result, the trajectory has led at least a couple of excited commentators to anticipate a one-term Albanese government. The Australian’s Peta Credlin has penned a rallying of the troops and a hoorah for Liberal leader Peter Dutton. In the Nine papers, Shaun Carney’s rather tendentious offering, aimed squarely at prime minister Anthony Albanese, even implies the PM might not last until the next election.

A fortunate by-product of the narrowing is that we no longer need to endure stories of the Coalition’s existential crisis because of low support among young voters.

But how much do surveys this far before an election tell us about the upcoming result? The answer: nothing at all. This was true when the Labor government was way ahead, and it’s true today. It’s only big, sustained leads for oppositions that should give us pause, and even then we’ve seen the last-minute government comebacks getting bigger over recent decades.

Can we treat this as routine midterm doldrums? Dutton “cutting through”? Damage inflicted by the Voice referendum and the perception that it was an expensive indulgence? Kudos for the opposition leader for backing the right horse?

Or is it the economy — with hip pockets screaming about high inflation, particularly among that not-insignificant minority of voters with variable mortgages?

Or was this always going to happen once the honeymoon ended?

Everyone with a keyboard can explain what the government’s been doing wrong, but that’s all post hoc rationalisation of the polls, much as we saw in the Voice campaign. The next election will be decided by voters’ perceptions of the alternatives on offer, not illusory poll-generated “momentum.”

Still, as the year comes to a close, Mr Albanese must be a rather gloomy prime minister. For election watchers and the political bubble, opinion polls tell us how parties are “travelling” — and who doesn’t want to be seen to be “travelling well”? It makes for an easier life in the media and keeps MPs, most importantly marginal seat holders, and the wider party content. Most would agree that the current polls don’t predict the next election result, but they do measure something approximating the electorate’s happiness with the government.

It’s all indisputably good news for Dutton. The polls, and the interpreting of them, buttress his leadership. And if more friendly ones arrive in December he’ll be able to relax over summer.

But is what’s good for Dutton’s position good for the Coalition — specifically, its chances of forming government after the next election?

The Liberal leader has explicitly repositioned his party away from big business, with its “woke” attitudes and “virtue signalling” — and implicitly away from voters in wealthy, urban, formerly blue-ribbon electorates too — towards the “outer suburbs and regions.” Such politicking, politely referred to as “values”-driven, involves encouraging a fear of the outside world and, at home, resentment towards ethnic minorities. This is Dutton’s political comfort zone and indeed his brand. It’s what drove his rise to the top of his party.

In olden days the Liberals had to tread carefully on this path lest they alienate voters in wealthy blue-ribbon electorates. Now they’ve lost most of those seats, the constraint has loosened. It’s easier to forgo potential gains than consciously sacrifice current sitting MPs.

The six teal 2022 wins were all at the expense of Liberal “moderates.” Each of those Liberals supported Malcolm Turnbull against Dutton in the 2018 leadership spill, for instance. Who in the current party room is vulnerable to teal-like incursions? Paul Fletcher (Bradfield) and Julian Leeser (Berowra) on Sydney’s north shore come to mind. They also supported Turnbull, so perhaps would be no great loss from Dutton’s point of view.

The strategy might work, but it would probably require a very big national vote for the Coalition. Anything around 51–49 either way would likely produce a hung parliament, and while the teals won’t necessarily vote as a bloc, it’s difficult to imagine the six, and independents Zali Steggall (Warringah) and Helen Haines (Indi), supporting a Dutton-led Coalition.

Put simply, Peter Dutton is not a Liberal leader the teals would be likely to elevate to the prime ministership.

And then there are voters in teal seats. We don’t know what the crossbench will look like in 2025. If Steggall’s 2022 re-election is any guide then the six will romp home. But that was against a poor Liberal candidate, and Scott Morrison as prime minister.

Detestation of Morrison was a core driver of the teals’ success. And many of the characteristics those voters couldn’t abide in Morrison are shared by the current Liberal leader.

We do live in unpredictable times, with low primary vote support on both sides leaving more to the vagaries of preferences and how-to-vote cards. With those teal seats in the way, the Coalition will very likely need a lot more than 50 per cent of the national two-party-preferred vote to form government at the next election. More like 52 or 53 per cent.

Or another leader. One the crossbenchers felt they could work with. •

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You never see anything near that kind of variance in ordinary voting-intention polls, though that’s at least partly because the pollsters are posing quite different questions from each other this time. Whose is the best? Referendum polls are a more imprecise science than election ones, so let’s talk about it after the results are in.

But no pollster has Yes ahead, alas, or even approaching it.

At last year’s federal election, people who followed the count from 6pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time experienced an early burst of déjà vu: was this 2019 all over again? The first numbers came predominantly from Tasmania, which happened to be the only state or territory to swing to the Morrison government. By around 7.30 the direction and approximate size of the national swing was clear, and it was an altogether different direction.

There’s a good chance the Apple Isle will again be the renegade on Saturday night, registering the biggest Yes of all states and perhaps generating some excitement for a while. But with only two piles for the ballot paper to be sorted into (plus one for informals) the Australian Electoral Commission’s counting should be faster than at a general election. Even under the Morgan scenario the overall result should be clear by 7pm.

Yet the telecast is scheduled to last until 10pm. What on earth will they talk about?

A referendum passes if it receives a majority of national votes and a majority of votes in a majority (at least four) of states. House of Representatives electorates have nothing to do with it, though they will be of academic interest; according to Antony Green the ABC website will publish all electorate results live online and discuss ones of interest on TV.

Tasmania, that wildest card, has a proud anti-Canberra — or maybe just anti-mainland — tradition of returning relatively high No votes in referendums, but this time the polls, albeit with small sub-samples, pretty consistently show it as the most supportive.

Not coincidentally, Tassie has the only state Liberal government in the country, and that government is supporting the Voice. And the high-profile federal Liberal member for Bass, Bridget Archer, a long-time irritant to her party, is energetically advocating Yes. Voters love major-party mavericks, and not just in their own electorates. But might the Tasmanian government’s meltdown over the past fortnight dampen the effect?

Of the states and territories up on the mainland, the city-territory of the ACT will record the highest Yes and Victoria can be expected to come second — unless South Australia or New South Wales does. It would be very surprising if Queensland and Western Australia don’t bring up the rear. But the rest is rather unpredictable.

Counting in South Australia and the Northern Territory won’t start until 6:30pm AEDT and Western Australia 9pm.

As a broad rule, the “big” states of New South Wales and Victoria, plus South Australia — second-least populous but displaying less of an outlier mentality than Queensland and Western Australia — have been relatively supportive of referendums. We saw it, for example, with both questions at the last set in 1999.

(In 1988, in a very rare break from tradition, Queensland recorded the biggest Yes votes for all four because one of them, for “free and fair elections,” was expected to apply particularly to the electoral malapportionment engineered by the Bjelke-Petersen government.)

Pollsters are broadly predicting these state trends to continue tomorrow. And yet… New South Wales came stone-cold last of all states and territories in the 2017 marriage equality survey. In crude terms, this was due largely to socially conservative religious white people outside the capital and many socially conservative religious people of colour in Sydney, particularly in the west. While the former can be expected to vote heavily No to the Voice, some pollsters have found people from non-English-speaking backgrounds/immigrants more likely to support Yes nationally than the rest.

That last expected dynamic seems counterintuitive. So it will be worth tracking seats in Sydney’s west, and consequently New South Wales as a whole, on the night.

The “inner-urban” professionals–heavy, high-income electorates, including the ones with teal MPs, can be expected to lean Yes. Not so the middle- to high-income, low-NESB ones such as (in Sydney) Lindsay, Hughes and Cook.

Does it go without saying that young people will be much more supportive of the Voice than old ones? That can’t be determined by the voting results, only by surveys. For gender, too, we must rely on opinion polls. For some other cohorts, where census data indicates they constitute a big majority in certain polling places, analysis can provide clues. (Ideally such analysis would adjust for aggregate state or territory votes.)

This time the topic of the referendum adds another geographic dimension. Attention will focus heavily on Indigenous booths, particularly in the Northern Territory, which has more First Nations voters than any other jurisdiction.

The electorate of Lingiari, although only 40 per cent Indigenous (with a lower proportion among voters, given a relatively low median age and a lower, if recently improved, enrolment rate), will come in for outsized attention, but the seat’s aggregate vote won’t tell us much. Turnout in Lingiari is another matter, however, and is (at the risk of tempting the ecological fallacy gods) an okay indicator of, if not the exact level, then the seriousness of low turnout among First Nations voters. In June last year the new prime minister made a big fuss about its low 65.8 per cent.

“That was part of the former government’s design. It wasn’t by accident,” thundered Anthony Albanese, “and they should be held to account for it!” He had a point — the Coalition wasn’t much interested in raising Indigenous participation — but only a small one, because the low Indigenous turnout there reflected a range of factors.

The Australian Electoral Commission has in the last year pulled out many stops to bring estimated Indigenous enrolment up to near the national figure, presumably at least partly by selectively relaxing the rules of its direct enrolment and update program. That’s excellent, but it will — all else being equal — make the turnout worse; after all, the figure will show voting as a percentage of the roll, not of estimated eligible people.

But all else won’t be equal for this referendum. We can expect a higher degree of interest from those voters, and the AEC is pulling out many stops to get their ballots. No doubt others on the ground are also encouraging people to register their vote.

When the counting is done, Lingiari’s turnout will attract attention. It might or might not be higher than at the 2022 election. But the more comprehensive Indigenous electoral roll will come back to bite Anthony Albanese at the next general election.

Probably a dozen or two of our 151 electorates will vote Yes, and maybe, perhaps, one state, Tasmania. The expected thrashing is consistent with your correspondent’s long-expressed deterministic mindset. Midterm Labor government referendums get slaughtered, partly because Liberal opposition is all but inevitable. The content of the proposal only affects the size of the defeat. And this would also apply to merely “symbolic” recognition: the Liberals in opposition would have opposed that too, regardless of what they say (or believe) now.

So expect Saturday night to degenerate into indulgent hot takes as self-identified campaign “old hands” compete to tell the tallest tales, and how they would have run Yes instead. The endless analyses, the gloating dressed up as advice will not be for the faint-hearted. And it won’t stop then but will last for weeks, no doubt joined by intra-Yes sniping.

What does it say about Australia? To this observer, the result will tell us nothing we didn’t already know.

So, no, the No campaign wasn’t brilliant, and the Yes one wasn’t that awful. The devastation about to engulf people on the affirmative side, particularly those for whom this has been a decade-long project, might not be leavened by this knowledge, but this result was a fait accompli once the decision was made to hold the vote apart from an election.

Amid the celebrations, Peter Dutton might even believe this will save his leadership. Perhaps he should have a word with his mentor John Howard, who likely reckoned the same in September 1988 but was out of a job eight months later. •

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Apart from its election record, which for the last thirty years has been the gold standard, Newspoll’s status derives from its longevity (Roy Morgan Research is the only polling brand that has been around for longer), where it is published (an upmarket newspaper read by most federal politicians, with an online presence featuring excellent graphics) and its frequency (unmatched). Poll addicts crave nothing more than a known quantity, easily accessible trend data and a regular fix.

It’s not just the percentages Newspoll generates that matter; it is also the way the Australian interprets the figures. How much the figures themselves matter, and how much the Australian’s interpretation matters, is difficult to say. Both are recycled by politicians and journalists, among others, without much thought being given to whether they make sense.

In the latest poll, conducted 12–15 July, Labor’s primary vote was down (from 38 per cent, 16–24 June, to 36 per cent), as was the Coalition’s (35 per cent to 34 per cent), but Labor’s two-party lead grew from 54–46 to 55–45 — rounded, as are all Newspoll figures, to the nearest integer. As Adrian Beaumont noted in the Conversation, Labor “may have been unlucky” in the rounding of the two previous Newspolls but it “was probably lucky” this time.

At the Australian, the judgement of long-time political editor Simon Benson was unequivocal. Focusing on the fall in Labor’s first-preference support rather than the rise in its two-party share, he declared: “Labor’s honeymoon is officially over.” “Officially”? It was as if Newspoll should be recognised as having the same sort of status as the Australian Bureau of Statistics, say, or the Australian Electoral Commission. If, as Phillip Coorey observed, “the latest Newspoll” was merely “the latest to declare the government’s honeymoon over” (it was the Australian not Newspoll that declared it) then it was uniquely the Australian that made it “official.”

Benson took it for granted that Labor’s “honeymoon” came to an end once its first-preference support declined to a post-election “low” by an amount Benson judged to be significant. No matter that this support for Labor was still well above the 32.6 per cent (primary) or 52.1 per cent (two-party) vote recorded at the May 2022 election. The “honeymoon” had ended, and that was now “official.”

An electoral honeymoon, unlike the real thing, can end it seems — or begin to end — at whatever moment a poll-watcher chooses. Last September, when Labor’s two-party support in Newspoll reached 57 per cent — just two points higher than its current level — and its primary support stood at 37 per cent (one point ahead of where it currently sits), Benson judged that “the electoral honeymoon for Anthony Albanese continues”; in the preferred prime minister stakes, Albanese (61 per cent) was well ahead of Dutton (22 per cent), figures virtually unchanged from July.

This year, at the beginning of March, when Labor’s two-party support was at 54 per cent (three points lower than it had been in September) but its primary support still on 37 per cent, Benson took it as “a sure sign that the romance of the honeymoon phase is coming to an end for the government.” At 54–28, the Albanese–Dutton head-to-head had changed as well, but not dramatically. By mid May, however, when Newspoll estimated Labor’s two-party support at 55 per cent (its current standing) and its primary support at 38 per cent (higher than its current 36 per cent), he wondered whether it was “now the beginning of the end of the government’s honeymoon”; head-to-head, Albanese was still ahead of Dutton 56–29.

The day after the Australian published Newspoll’s figures for July, Nine’s metropolitan dailies published the latest figures from their July poll, the Resolve Political Monitor. Resolve’s percentages read as if Labor’s honeymoon was still in full-swing: Labor on 39 per cent, not 36 (the Newspoll figure); the Coalition on 30 per cent, not 34 (the Newspoll figure).

Political polling is nothing if not competitive. Making its own call about the end of Labor’s honeymoon, Resolve was not to be outdone. In March, after his poll had produced exactly the same figures (39–30) it would produce in July, Resolve’s director Jim Reed took Labor’s fall from 40 per cent in his previous poll as “another confirmation that the honeymoon highs have come to an end.” In June, Resolve had Labor back on 40 per cent. What had previously been a “honeymoon high” was now a sign of something quite different; in May, after all, Labor’s support had been 42 per cent, two points higher. Resolve, the Sun-Herald reported, “had started noting declines in Albanese and Labor’s honeymoon ratings early this year.”

Clearly, the only rule these commentators seem to follow in declaring an electoral honeymoon to have ended is that the level of support for the government in the latest poll is lower than the level recorded in the immediately preceding poll. Neither absolute levels of support nor the longer-term record count. If subsequent support for the government rises and falls — even if it is to a level higher than the previous high — one can declare an end to the honeymoon all over again. Neither the rise nor fall need be outside the poll’s margin of error — a figure the Australian and the Nine newspapers parade endlessly but their commentary studiously ignores.

Poll-watchers who have insisted for years that the Australian interprets its Newspoll data to cheer up or cheer on the Coalition may have noticed that its reading of the latest Newspoll backed up the interpretation of the Fadden by-election offered by the Liberal National Party candidate in Fadden, Cameron Caldwell. The Australian gave Caldwell’s interpretation the hortatory headline, “Fadden result ‘shows the honeymoon is over for Labor.’”

As well as spelling the end of the honeymoon, the result in Fadden showed “concern over the Indigenous voice” to be “high,” Caldwell argued. Columnist Joe Hildebrand — a vocal Yes supporter — recycled and generalised Caldwell’s line in the Daily Telegraph: “It could not be clearer,” he wrote, “that voters are rewarding the Prime Minister for his moderate and centrist direction and punishing him for the one aspect of his government” — the Voice — “that has been cast by his critics as radical or woke.”

Perhaps voters in Fadden were concerned about the Voice. “Using Fadden as a trial run,” Coorey had written on the eve of the by-election, “Dutton is attempting to turn the Voice into a lightning rod for broader discontent with the government.” After the by-election, however, another senior journalist, Paul Bongiorno, was equally adamant that “Dutton didn’t push his opposition to the referendum in the campaign”; having “raised it in a doorstop a few weeks ago, he dropped it as the poll neared.”

How anyone could conclude that Dutton had succeeded in making the Voice an issue based on nothing more than the result in Fadden, neither the Australian nor Hildebrand explained. One needs survey data, not a set of electoral returns, to determine whether Caldwell’s claim has merit. Bongiorno reports Caldwell saying that “people raised the Voice with him quietly because they didn’t want to be accused of racism or prejudice if they raised it publicly” — raised with him, he might have added, because they assumed Caldwell would not have thought such concerns racist or prejudiced. But Coorey, citing another LNP source, discounts the idea that views about the Voice affected the result: “the Voice had little impact either way,” he reports.

Even if the Voice was not shifting voters against Labor, were voters shifting against the Voice? As luck would have it, Newspoll’s latest poll also included a question on “whether to alter the Australian Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice.” For the Yes side, the topline numbers brought no more cheer than Caldwell: Yes, 41 per cent; No, 48 per cent; Don’t Know, 11 per cent. The corresponding figures after the same question was asked three weeks earlier: 43–47–10.

The changes between June and July may have been small but they played to the dominant media narrative about the Voice: that support is declining; that No has now overtaken Yes; that the referendum, if not doomed to failure, is not on a path to success. In June, Benson had cautioned that it would be “foolhardy” to “make a call… four months out from polling day” (expected mid October), and that it was “not over yet for the voice.” Now, just three weeks later, with the margin between Yes and No growing from four points to seven — well within what the Australian describes as Newspoll’s “theoretical margin of error” — Benson concluded that “the voice referendum [was] in serious trouble,” support “gradually collapsing” with “confusion over the detail, the scope and the function of the voice… killing any goodwill many undecided voters may have had.”

More striking than the topline figures was a startling shift in the differences between women’s responses and men’s. The new poll reported a seven-point rise in support for Yes among men and a ten-point fall in support among women. Suddenly, from being more likely to vote Yes than to vote No (a six-point gap), women were more likely to vote No than to vote Yes (a gap of eleven points) — a turnaround of seventeen percentage points. And from being more likely to vote No than to vote Yes (a fourteen-point gap), suddenly men were almost as likely to vote Yes — a twelve-point change.

By any measure, these were remarkable changes. The movement of one-in-five women from the Yes column (48 per cent down to 38 per cent) to either the No column (42 per cent up to 49 per cent) or the Don’t Know column (10 per cent up to 13 per cent) in such a short time — and before the start of the formal campaign — is difficult to credit. The movement of one-in-ten men from the No column (52 per cent down to 47 per cent) or the Don’t Know column (10 per cent up to 8 per cent), while only half as big, also stretches credulity.

Since the shifts were in opposite directions, they largely cancelled each other out. Had the shift among either group been less dramatic, the topline results might have looked quite different. For example, if support among women had declined by no more than half as much as Newspoll reports, support for the Voice would have stood at 43 or 44 per cent and opposition at 45 or 46 per cent. This would have represented an improved result, not a worse result, for the Yes camp than Newspoll’s figures of three weeks before. What might the headline have been then?

When Newspoll asks about the Voice, Benson writes, “female voters have until now been significantly overrepresented among the undecideds.” Now, when Newspoll asks those respondents who initially say they “don’t know” whether they “approve” of the alteration to the Constitution, “which way they would lean if forced to profess a view,” things are different: “women voters are now significantly more likely to say No.”

Neither Newspoll nor the Australian is keen to disclose the patterns of response to the initial question — before respondents were leant on to choose Yes or No — in the last three polls. Benson failed to reply to a request that the Australian do so; YouGov, the British-owned firm that conducts Newspoll, said it “can’t really comment.” As a consequence, Benson’s account can’t be confirmed independently. Yet the rules of the Australian Polling Council, of which YouGov is a founding member, say that if “voting intention figures are published with the undecided participants excluded, the proportion who were thus excluded should be published.”

Why might women have moved from Yes to No? Benson attributes the shift to the “targeted campaign by the No camp.” Crucial to this was the fact that the government, “in its contortions over the voice,” had “vacated the field of talking to voters’ primary concern — the cost of living.” Noting that “any pollster… will tell you female voters are more highly attuned to cost-of-living pressures than male voters” — though “cost of living is by far the issue of most concern to a majority of all voters” — Benson insists this gave the No camp a “strategic edge.” The No campaign had also “spent significant funds directly targeting women.” This, in his view, “appear[ed] to have paid off.”

To have “paid off” to anything like the extent Benson implies, the No campaign would have needed not only to have targeted female voters but also to have done so across most of the social media platforms on which the No campaign’s advertising, coordinated by Advance Australia, has largely been conducted. But targeting of this kind is not what the evidence shows. An analysis of the three Facebook pages — Fair Australia, Not Enough, and Referendum News — that Advance Australia has been populating concludes that only one (Not Enough) was targeting voters in the two largest states.

If the other two pages were “essentially ignoring New South Wales and Victoria” — the two states where the majority of women (and men) reside — the No campaign can hardly have been reaching the majority of female voters. Moreover, while the ads on Referendum News skewed “towards a female audience,” the ads on the other pages skewed to different demographics.

Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that the No campaign did enjoy the kind of success Benson attributes to it, are we to conclude that as well as shifting women in extraordinarily large numbers to the No side, the No campaign — in a terrible own goal — also shifted a large number of men across to the Yes side? If not, what did shift these men? This is not a question Benson attempts to answer; everything he has to say goes to explaining why support for the Voice should be falling rather than why, among men, it might have risen.

The explanation for the “rise” in support among men may lie in nothing more profound than the vagaries of polling. Newspoll has asked its Voice question with its current response architecture three times (the first is here). If one looks at all three polls — not just, as Benson does, the last two — among men the Yes–No split is 45–46, 38–48, 45–47: it’s the second (June) poll, not the third (July), that is the odd one out. If the second poll underestimated support among men, the most recent poll may simply be correcting that.

Before the latest Newspoll, only one poll had ever reported finding more men than women in favour of a constitutionally inscribed Voice. Conducted in December 2022 by Freshwater Strategic, it showed only the narrowest of differences in support between men (51 per cent) and women (50 per cent); but even in this poll, more men (30 per cent) than women (22 per cent) were opposed. The most recent poll to use the same response architecture as Newspoll — a poll conducted by Essential Media (5–9 July), a week ahead of Newspoll — shows women (49 per cent) more likely than men (44 per cent) to support Yes, and men (47 per cent) more likely than women (40 per cent) to say No.

None of this appears to have registered at the Australian. For Benson, the referendum had “suffered a collapse in support among women voters,” with women “for the first time… now more likely than men to vote no, a central change to core support.” The precipitous fall in support among women was noted by the paper’s national editor, Dennis Shanahan. The story about a new gender divide got a run in an editorial on the day it broke, and another run the next day. Other outlets, too — seemingly less concerned with objectivity, which requires critical evaluation, than with neutrality, which requires no more than reporting what is newsworthy — reproduced the figures.

Could such a shift have happened? Bongiorno — another strong supporter of a Yes vote — thought it not only could have happened but had happened, even as he took out the standard insurance against being held personally responsible for his report. “If you can believe the opinion polls,” he reported, “regional Australia has gone very cold on the idea of a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament.”

Perhaps Bongiorno also had in mind a poll published a couple of weeks earlier by the Canberra Times, not referenced by the Australian. The poll was conducted online by Chi Squared (the research arm of the Canberra Times’s owner, Australian Community Media) among readers of fourteen daily newspapers “serving Canberra and key regional population centres such as Newcastle, Wollongong, Tamworth, Orange, Albury and Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Ballarat, Bendigo and Warrnambool in Victoria, and Launceston and Burnie in northern Tasmania,” to which 10,131 readers had responded.

Chi Squared purported to show that “in the regions” the level of support for establishing the Voice (the question was not disclosed) stood at just 35 per cent. While this figure was not very different from Newspoll’s estimate, the “poll” was conducted from 16 to 26 June — at a time when Newspoll, using sampling techniques better suited to the task, not simply self-selection, was reporting a 40–51 split in the regions rather than Chi Squared’s 35–57. If regional opinion had shifted between June and July in the way Newspoll suggests, why might it have shifted? Benson doesn’t venture an answer; nor does Bongiorno.

“The bottom line,” says Benson, “is that the trend towards a No vote is increasing and it is expanding in the wrong demographics for the yes camp.” What the “right demographics” might be, he doesn’t say. The Yes camp needs a majority of the national vote and would be happy, one assumes, to accept contributions from all demographics. No demographic — certainly not women rather than men, or regional rather than metro voters — is “right” or “wrong”; if support is slipping, it is slipping largely across the board. To win, Yes also needs majorities in the majority of states; any four will do, though a victory in one or more of the bigger states will do more to secure a national majority vote than a victory in one or more of the smaller states.

To see whether the latest Newspoll has got things horribly wrong on the Voice — or whether, on the contrary, it should be recognised for being the first to detect an extraordinary change in the gender gap and a substantial expansion of the metro–regional divide — we will need to wait for the next polls, whether from Newspoll itself or from Resolve, Freshwater or Morgan.

Finally, a word about an unreported upheaval at YouGov. Between the June poll and the one conducted in July, virtually all of those working in the public affairs and polling unit at YouGov left; the departures included the head of the unit (and chair of the Australian Polling Council), Campbell White.

Did the number and quality of the personnel heading out the door have an impact on the analysis of the more recent poll? If the changes at YouGov have affected data quality or the quality of the analysis, and aren’t corrected, then — much like support for Labor or support for the Voice — Newspoll’s status in Canberra might slide as well. •

The post The “end” of Labor’s honeymoon and the “collapse” of women’s support for the Voice appeared first on Inside Story.

All the better when the incoming government employs its new-found authority to trash the former outfit’s legacy, a task the current administration has been discharging with some vigour.

Pollsters, meanwhile, have the government way ahead in two-party-preferred terms and the prime minister trouncing the opposition leader on personal ratings. This too is par for the course.

Tony Abbott, the most recent of this government-from-opposition species, was an outlier. Like Albanese, he had never enjoyed high personal ratings, but unlike this incumbent his post-election boost was modest. Within months of the September 2013 election the Labor opposition was ahead, and it largely remained there until Abbott was replaced by Malcolm Turnbull in 2015.

But the three incoming PMs before Abbott, Kevin Rudd (elected in November 2007), John Howard (March 1996) and Bob Hawke (March 1983), all generated voting-intention numbers and personal ratings during their first twelve months that peaked above anything seen under Albanese.

At this point in Rudd’s tenure, the GFC stimulus payments were starting to arrive in voters’ bank accounts. That financial calamity gave much-needed purpose to his leadership, which had seemed trapped in a news spin-cycle, addicted to quickly devised policy announcements.

Howard in April 1997 was a long way from his Port Arthur–elevated honeymoon, had three embarrassing ministerial resignations under his belt — and four more to come, mostly victims of his strict code of ministerial conduct — but his first budget had been very well received (much more, from surveys, than this year’s) and had worked brilliantly as a political exercise in delivering bitter medicine and blaming it on thirteen years of Labor. Still, by the one-year mark his personal ratings and the government’s polled two-party-preferred leads had slid to slightly below Albanese’s and Labor’s today.

By the end of 1997 the opposition was ahead, assisted by the government’s embrace of a GST and Democrats leader Cheryl Kernot’s defection to Labor.

Further back, Hawke was still riding high in early 1984, even if he was disappointing the true believers who had expected more Whitlamesque cage-rattling. His personal and party ratings remained stratospheric — until he called an election for December and the gap gradually narrowed to a modest victory. Howard, of course, after a shaky first re-election in which he lost the national two-party vote, went on to have the last and longest laugh.

Ultimately the GFC-induced fiscal problems proved diabolical for the Rudd government, providing a jarring contrast to the boom and the surpluses under Howard. On top of that, treasurer Wayne Swan was about as woeful a chief economic communicator as could be imagined.

What about the current government? According to the polls — and unlike Rudd’s and Julia Gillard’s, but like Hawke’s a lot of the time — it is generally seen as a better economic manager than the opposition. All else being equal, two strands often make it hard for Labor to do well on this rather important measure: the Liberals are generally seen as more economically responsible; and a party in office will score better than it does in opposition. I can’t think of a time when a Coalition government was not viewed as superior on economics, but there have been plenty of times when Labor governments weren’t.

The before-and-after economic situation around the 2022 election has been very different. By pure luck, this government can boast the first surplus in fifteen years. Treasurer Jim Chalmers learned his politics at the feet of Swan, but from such dire beginnings has developed into an effective public politician. His “trillion dollars of debt” mantra — as unfair as the “debt and deficits” narrative Abbott used against Rudd and Gillard — undoubtedly has at least some persuasive power.

And the prime minister? What are we to make of him?

Albanese’s rise to the top of his party was driven not by popular demand — he was little-known outside the political bubble — but by wheeling and dealing. It was his turn. As a factional boss, and someone immersed in politics his whole working life, his timing was brilliant: he reached the peak when a highly winnable election was in the offing. Remaining opposition leader for three years was arguably the bigger challenge.

America’s longest-serving president, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945), was once characterised as possessing “a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament” (a description that might apply even more aptly to Joe Biden). Albanese’s intellect is better than that, but unlike most predecessors he doesn’t seem to be a policy wonk or a details man.

From closer to home comes a 1996 quip from political commentator Cate McGregor (sometimes wrongly attributed to the late Labor speechwriter Graham Freudenberg): that new Labor leader Kim Beazley was the first since Ben Chifley “who doesn’t have a major personality disorder.”

It’s a good line when you think of the parade of grandiosity, narcissism and exploding egos we’ve witnessed, especially if we extend McGregor’s words through to Rudd. Albanese would sit in the Beazley category. But does it make for a good national leader?

We saw from 2019 to 2022 that Albanese has a realistic if unexciting view of what drives changes of government. Not for him the wild tales of opposition leaders dazzling the electorate with feats of derring-do, engaging the enemy in hand-to-hand combat on values, winning the hearts of the middle Australians who hold up the scorecards on election day. (The most obvious of this variety was Mark Latham, 2003–04.)

In reality, federal changes of government tend to occur when voters wish to dispose of incumbents and don’t find the alternative too threatening. In both 1983 and 2007 that fact was camouflaged by the extraordinary personal popularity of Labor’s leader — Hawke and Rudd respectively — though it ultimately had a questionable impact on actual votes. (In both cases the massive polled leads narrowed dramatically by election day.)

Albanese in opposition set no one’s pulse racing and never enjoyed high personal ratings or huge voting-intentions leads. Which means, one imagines, that he commenced his prime ministership without Rudd-like delusions of electoral grandeur.

He had plenty to be modest about. The election of 21 May 2022 was the first in which a party took office from opposition despite suffering a primary vote swing against it. Both sides recorded lows not seen since the second world war, and the winner lost the primary vote by 3 per cent. Preferences from a record-high Greens vote flowed 86 per cent to Labor, and it took office with a two-party-preferred vote of 52.1 per cent, the smallest for a federal change-of-government election since 1949.

A vague, bland quantity, Albanese got out of the way of electors’ anger and allowed the votes, either directly or through preferences, to flow through to him and his party. The electorate’s “pox on both their houses” attitude was also reflected in the record-sized crossbench.

But now Albanese is prime minister — and a rather well-regarded one at that, at least for the time being.

“Small target,” coined in 1996, is not the only Howard comparison Albanese invites. Both are decidedly charisma-free and not particularly eloquent, and so our storytellers have settled on their very ordinariness as explainers of their success. But Howard had shown more policy ambition by this stage. His government broke promises and blamed it on the Keating government and its finance minister, who was now opposition leader.

Howard also enjoyed a much friendlier Senate. While the current one’s “progressive majority” excites some Labor true believers, it is highly problematic for the government. Legislation can only be passed with the cooperation of either the Coalition or the Greens plus someone else (most likely ACT independent David Pocock). That’s not as difficult as Rudd experienced during most of his first term, when (if the Coalition opposed) the government needed the Greens plus Nick Xenophon plus Family First’s Steve Fielding, but it’s still very restrictive.

Further back, Hawke had a one-stop option in the “centrist” Democrats. Howard (before his 2005–07 Senate majority) had it even easier, able to choose either the Democrats or someone else.

Unlike under Julia Gillard, the Greens currently have no incentive to make life easy for the government. In fact, product differentiation — being seen to drag Labor to its positions — is the chief string in the minor party’s electoral bow. We are currently seeing this play out with housing policy, but it will afflict other issues in the years to come.

Given the reality of the upper house, perhaps there’s little point in trying to do too much. The Abbott government’s first budget showed the disaster that can come from broken election promises jammed in the Senate: the odium of unpopular policies without the payoff of having those policies settled into law.

So maybe the Senate partly explains the government’s policy timidity.

There is one area in which Albanese does appear to differentiate himself from recent predecessors: his refusal to get trapped in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. This afflicted Rudd most obviously, but also most prime ministers since. The idea that the media beast can’t be ignored, that it must be fed or it will devour you, enjoyed much currency only a few years ago but is little-heard now.

Is this the product of a level-headed PM and his office, or has the nature of the beast changed? Is Albanese just getting an easy media run (outside News Corp) — and if so, will it turn eventually?

In the past, prime ministers’ longevity (and treasurers’) has been underpinned by economic booms, which are mostly dependent on the international climate. That precondition doesn’t seem likely in 2023 or the foreseeable future. The inflation, the declining real wages, the high interest rates and the housing shortage aren’t going away. The possible international recession will continue to hover threateningly.

Can we detect in this prime minister a Kevin-like aversion to jeopardising the strong polls? Rudd also began his term determined not to break campaign promises, but he eventually ended up doing so closer to the next election, when it was harder to sheet it home to the defeated government. Rudd, instead of developing the authority that comes from making voters eat their greens, ended up being seen as a prime minister afraid of making difficult decisions.

We are only one year in, which as past governments have shown tells us nothing about how things will pan out. And we’ve not seen how Albanese copes under pressure, in difficult times. They will come, sooner or later. •

The post How far will level-headedness take Anthony Albanese? appeared first on Inside Story.

A key question for campaigners is whether voters are switching from “undecided” to No or from Yes to No. “What worries the government,” says columnist George Megalogenis, “is the recent narrowing of the gap between committed Yes and No voters, which reflects a greater shift from the undecided to the No column than from Yes to No.” Another columnist, Janet Albrechtsen, calls Noel Pearson’s highly personal attacks on those disagreeing with him a boon to the No side because “more undecided voters might ask themselves ‘would I want this man running the Voice?’ and shift into the No side of the ledger.”

Is the rise in No being driven by “undecided” voters coming off the fence or by less “committed” Yes voters jumping the fence? That could depend on how “undecided” is defined. In talking about the “undecided,” Albrechtsen and Megalogenis may be focusing on quite different sets of voters.

In any poll, the “undecided” are defined not by the poll’s question but by the question’s “choice architecture” — the range of possible responses the pollster offers respondents. On the Voice, the polls have attempted to measure the “undecided” in at least three different ways. Some polls have offered respondents the opportunity to indicate they have no clear opinion; hence, the “Don’t know” option, or something similar. Some polls have encouraged respondents to express an opinion that has more nuance than Yes or No, enjoining them to indicate whether their views are held “strongly” or “not strongly”; views not strongly held, arguably, are another form of indecision. And some polls have presented respondents with a similar range of responses, but with another possible response — “Neither support nor oppose” — in the middle.

These don’t exhaust the range of possibilities. Some polls have asked respondents, directly, how likely they are to change their positions — “somewhat” or “very” likely — which is another way of indicating that while they appear to have made a choice, their decision is not final. Others have asked respondents who have indicated support for Yes or No how likely they are to turn out and vote.

Still other architectures remove the “undecided” option altogether. Both the most favourable and the least favourable polls for the Yes and No sides are polls of this kind: the latest Resolve poll, which has Yes trailing No, and the latest Essential poll, which has support for Yes a long way ahead of support for No (60–40); each restricted respondents to a Yes or No.

Not to distinguish among these response architectures — some of which allow for further variations — is to risk drawing comparisons between polls that can’t readily be compared, even where the questions asked are similar. It is also to risk inferring trends based on polls that offer respondents very different choices: none of the graphs tracking the narrowing of the gap between Yes and No appears to take any account of the various choice architectures involved in generating the numbers. Not to be aware of these different architectures also risks focusing on only one version of what is going on. Thus, the attention paid to the latest forced-choice Resolve poll or the latest Essential poll is disproportionate.

Depending on the chosen architecture, the “undecided” vote can vary enormously — from more than half, when respondents are invited to consider a middle option in a five-point scale, to zero, when being “undecided” is designed out of the choices on offer. In other words, the contribution to the No vote of the “undecided” is a function, in part, of the choice architecture. Nonetheless, across all choice architectures, the boost to the No vote by the “undecided” appears to have been much smaller than the contribution of those who switched from Yes.

Three types of response architecture: In the standard architecture — following the kinds of questions pollster George Gallup promoted in the 1940s as a “sampling referendum” — respondents are presented with two options (Yes/No, Support/Oppose, and so on) plus a third, for those who don’t want to choose either.

On whether to put a Voice into the Constitution, the standard architecture offers various choices: Yes/No/Don’t know (Newspoll’s most recent polling for the Australian; YouGov for the Daily Telegraph); Yes/No/Undecided–Prefer not to say (Freshwater Strategy for the Australian Financial Review); Yes/No/Undecided (Roy Morgan Research); Yes/No/Unsure (Dynata for the Institute of Public Affairs); Support/Oppose/Don’t know–Not sure (Dynata for the Australia Institute); Yes/No/Need more information–Can’t say” (JWS).

Three things are worth noting. One is that these polls don’t imagine respondents having no opinion. The third choice they offer allows for respondents who have conflicting opinions that leave them “undecided,” qualified opinions that don’t readily fit a straight Yes or No, or Yes/No opinions that reticent respondents may prefer not to declare (a possibility acknowledged explicitly only by Freshwater).

A second point to note is the near-universal assumption that anyone who ticks Yes/No (Support/Oppose) has decided where they stand, at least for the moment. Those who haven’t decided are captured under a residual term: Undecided, Unsure, Don’t know, Can’t say. If some of those — perhaps most of those — who tick Yes/No (Support/Oppose) are still not entirely decided, this particular architecture provides no way of indicating it.

Third, some pollsters (JWS; Resolve Strategic, below) have offered respondents a residual category that conflates two quite different things: not wanting to align one’s views with Yes/No (Support/Oppose) and having a particular reason (“lack of information”) for not wanting to do so. Not only might those in the residual category place themselves there for reasons other than wanting more information, respondents who answer Yes/No (Support/Oppose) might welcome more information too.

In Gallup’s day, a response other than Yes/No, Support/Oppose and so on was usually left to respondents to volunteer. Pollsters have always been keen to promote the idea that the public’s views fit whatever categories the pollsters choose; a choice outside these categories is not something they are generally keen to encourage. With online polling, which means almost all polls these days, respondents can only be offered a residual option — as they should be — as an explicit alternative.

In what we might call the non-standard architecture, pollsters offer a set of response categories designed to distinguish respondents who hold their views (in favour/against) strongly from those who don’t hold their views strongly — the latter sometimes described as being “softly” in favour or “softly” against.

This is one of the two architectures Resolve has used. Since August 2022, it has asked whether respondents support a Voice in the Constitution and, it seems, offered these alternatives: Yes, definitely; Yes, probably; No, probably not; No, definitely not; Undecided/Not enough information. Since April, though, and possibly earlier, the final alternative has read Undecided/Not enough information/May not vote, a category that mixes up the one thing that necessarily distinguishes these respondents from the other respondents (Undecided in the sense of “none of the above”) from other things that may not (Not enough information and/or May not vote).

Before switching to a standard format at the end of May 2023, Newspoll used a similar non-standard response set — something that has been a hallmark of its issue polling over nearly forty years. On three occasions, Newspoll sought to identify those “strongly in favour,” “partly in favour,” “partly against” and “strongly against,” offering “Don’t know” as a residual category. (In principle, there is no reason why one could not also distinguish a strong “Don’t know” from a somewhat “Don’t know,” but that is a distinction that pollsters never draw.)

In the third choice of architecture — one that resembles the non-standard architecture but needs to be distinguished from it — response options take the form of a five-point scale with “Neither support nor oppose” (or some neutral equivalent) in the middle. These scales are known in the trade as Likert items, after the American survey researcher Rensis Likert. The use of “Neither support nor oppose” distinguishes a Likert item from the non-standard architecture,  which has a “don’t know” at the end but no middle option.

SEC Newgate has asked respondents regularly whether they “Strongly support,” “Somewhat support,” “Neither support nor oppose,” “Somewhat oppose,” or “Strongly oppose” the “creation of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.” The Scanlon Foundation has adopted a similar approach. So, too, has Essential — but only once, with another option, “Unsure,” added at the end of the scale.

Accepting versus squeezing: architectures that make the “undecided” visible: Do the various choice architectures affect the proportion of respondents who are “undecided”? If we compare the “undecided” in the standard architecture (Yes/No/Don’t know) with those who tick “Neither support nor oppose” on the Likert items, the answer may be no. In the standard format, the proportion “undecided” about a constitutionally enshrined Voice averaged as follows: 27 per cent (across three questions) between May and September 2022; 19.5 per cent (two questions) between October 2022 and January 2023; and 22 per cent (five questions) between February and May 2023. Given other variations among questions, these are not very different from the proportions ticking “Neither support nor oppose” in the Likert items: 23 per cent between May and September 2022 (four items); 25 per cent between October 2022 and January 2023 (one item); and 23 per cent between February and May 2023 (two items).

Eliminating the “undecided” — architectures of denial and removal: Pollsters have developed ways not only of reducing the “undecided” votes but of making them disappear. The most extreme of these methods is a binary response architecture that imposes a strict two-way choice: Yes/No, Support/Oppose, and so on. These polls give no other option. If we ask whether the choice architecture affects the proportion that shows up as “undecided,” nowhere is the answer clearer than here.

How many respondents have refused to answer when the question is asked in this way is nowhere disclosed; Essential Research, whose polls are published in the Guardian, says it doesn’t know the number. What happens to respondents who refuse to answer is not something pollsters are keen to disclose either. Resolve, which has used the binary format in relation to the Voice since August 2022, appears not to block these respondents from taking any further part in the poll. But in the Essential poll, respondents who baulk at the binary are removed from the sample.

What the process of deleting respondents does to the representativeness of a sample is something pollsters don’t openly address. In an industry that encourages the belief that sampling error is the only kind of error that matters, this is not entirely surprising.

In estimating support for a constitutional Voice, a number of pollsters have resorted to the binary format either wholly (Essential, Compass, and Painted Dog in Western Australia) or in part (Resolve). Their justification for offering respondents just two options is that at the referendum these are the two choices that voters will face. This is misleading. Voters will have other choices: not to turn out (acknowledged by Resolve in the response options it offers in the preceding question) or to turn out but not cast a valid vote. On the ABC’s Insiders, independent senator Lidia Thorpe said she was contemplating turning out but writing “sovereignty” on the ballot.

Binaries are not favoured by the market research industry. In Britain, the Market Research Society Code of Conduct states that “members must take reasonable action when undertaking data collection to ensure… that participants are able to provide information in a way that reflects the view they want to express, including don’t know/prefer not to say.” This code covers all members, including those whose global reach extends from Britain to Australia (YouGov, Ipsos and Dynata).

In Australia, a similar guideline published by the Research Society (formerly the Market Research Society of Australia) advises members to “make sure participants are able to provide information in a way that reflects the view they want to express” — a guideline almost identical with that of the MRS, even if it stops short of noting that this should allow for a “don’t know/prefer not to say.” Whether such guidelines make a difference to how members actually conduct polls is another matter; of the firms that have offered binary choices on the Voice, some (Essential) are members of the Research Society, others are not (Compass, Resolve).

But a binary is not the only way to make the “undecided” disappear. Some pollsters publish a set of figures, based on the standard architecture, from which respondents registered as “undecided” have been removed using a quite different technique. In its latest release, for example, Morgan publishes one set of figures (Yes, 46 per cent; No, 36 per cent; Undecided, 18 per cent) followed by another (Yes, 56 per cent; No, 44 per cent), the latter derived from ignoring the “undecided” and repercentaging the rest to a base of 82 (46+36). This is equivalent to assuming the “undecided” will ultimately split along the same lines as those who expressed a choice. In publishing its figures, with the “undecided” removed, Freshwater appears to do something similar.

Whether the basis on which Morgan (or Freshwater) reallocates the “undecided” is correct is open to doubt. Morgan acknowledges this: “past experience,” it cautions, “shows that ‘undecided’ voters are far more likely to end up as a ‘No’ rather than a ‘Yes’ vote.” Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney, who is said to be “completely confident the Yes campaign will convince undecided voters to back the Voice,” expresses the opposite view.

In considering the narrowing lead of Yes over No, we should ask how the “undecided” have been acknowledged, defined and dealt with in each poll’s response architecture.

What the standard architecture (Yes/No/Don’t Know) shows: Between June and September 2022, the three polls that used a “Yes/No/Don’t Know” response architecture (two by Dynata for the Australia Institute, one by JWS) reported that an average of 55 per cent of respondents said they would have voted Yes, 18 per cent would have voted No, and 27 per cent would not have put their hand up for either.

Across the following four months, the corresponding averages (for the two questions asked by Freshwater and Morgan) were 51.5 per cent, 28.5 per cent, and 20 per cent. (Omitted is a poorly constructed question conducted by Dynata for the Institute of Public Affairs.) From February 2023 to the end of May, when Freshwater, Morgan, and JWS  asked five questions between them, support for a Voice in the Constitution averaged 43 per cent, opposition 34.5 per cent, and the “undecided” 22 per cent.

Since May 2022, support for Yes has declined (from 55 per cent in the first four months to 43 per cent in the most recent quarter) and support for No has risen (from 18 to 34.5 per cent), quarter by quarter, but the decline in the proportion supporting neither Yes nor No (from 27 to 22 per cent) has been relatively small. So, while the 16.5 percentage point rise in the No vote is not entirely accounted for by the 12 percentage point fall in the Yes vote, the contribution to the No vote of the “undecided” appears to have been much smaller than the contribution of those who switched from Yes.

In some cases, pollsters have tried to reduce the number of “don’t knows” by asking these respondents a follow-up question — known in the trade as a “leaner” — designed to get them to reconsider; this might be seen as a way of distinguishing “soft” don’t knows from “hard” don’t knows.

Some of these pollsters have published the figures both before and after the leaner (JWS) or made them available (Freshwater). On these figures (one set from JWS; three sets from Freshwater), the proportion of “undecided” respondents was 8 percentage points smaller, on average, after the leaner than before. Except for one occasion when they split evenly, more chose the Yes side than chose the No side. So, far from contributing to a narrowing of the gap between Yes and No, squeezing the undecided widened the gap.

What the non-standard architecture (Yes, strong/weak; No, strong weak; Undecided) shows: In the first four months after the 2022 election, none of the pollsters who asked questions about support for the Voice used the non-standard architecture. That was to change, first through Resolve, then through Newspoll.

Between September 2022 and January 2023, Resolve adopted this architecture twice. Averaging the two polls, support stood at 50 per cent, opposition 29.5 per cent, Undecided/Not enough information 21 per cent. Between February and May, across three more polls, the corresponding figures were 45 per cent Yes; 34 per cent No; 20 per cent Undecided/Not enough information/May not vote. So, over the two periods, Yes dropped by 5 points, No rose by 4.5, and those opting for the residual category dropped by just 1 point. The rise in opposition is almost entirely accounted for by the fall in support.

Taken at face value, the three Newspoll surveys, conducted in the last quarter, tell a rather different story: 54 per cent Yes; 38 per cent No; 8 per cent Don’t know. But they can throw no light on the shift from quarter to quarter because Newspoll’s figures indicates the size of the “don’t knows” after the leaner; asked to divulge the proportion before the leaner, Newspoll declined.

Could the leaner — or the “squeeze’,” as Freshwater prefers to call it — explain the difference between the size of the “don’t know” response with the standard architecture and the size of the “don’t know” response in the non-standard architecture? In the standard (Freshwater) format, the “don’t knows” averaged 15 per cent, squeezed; in the non-standard (Newspoll) format, the “don’t knows” averaged just 8 per cent, squeezed. (Resolve’s data is not squeezed.) This suggests that, compared with the standard architecture, asking about the Voice while offering a non-standard set of response options makes a difference to the number that finish in the “undecided” column; the non-standard architecture lowers the number markedly.

What the Likert items (Yes, strong/weak; Neither…nor; No, strong/weak) show: The Likert items confirm these shifts. In the first four months, when four Likert items (from Essential, SEC Newgate and the Scanlon Foundation) featured in the polls, the level of support for the Voice (“strongly support” plus “somewhat support”) averaged 57 per cent; the level of opposition (“somewhat oppose” plus “strongly oppose”), 17.5 per cent; those inclined neither one way nor the other, 34.5 per cent. In the next quarter, SEC Newgate produced the only Likert item: 55 per cent supported the Voice, 19 per cent opposed, and 25 per cent neither supported nor opposed. In the most recent period, which saw two (SEC Newgate) items, support averaged 52.5 per cent, opposition 24 per cent, and 23 per cent were neither for nor against.

While the proportion of respondents only partly in support appears to have declined (from 24.5 to 21 per cent) the proportion strongly opposed appears to have increased (from 17.5 to 24 per cent). But the proportions strongly in support or partly opposed have barely shifted. This lends some support to Dennis Shanahan’s remark, seemingly based on private polling, about the “start” of a “drift from soft Yes to hard No.” But on whether this is due to “young people and Labor supporters,” as Shanahan believes, there is room for doubt; although SEC Newgate does not report separately on the demographics of those who are partly in support or strongly in support, the drift away from the Voice has been much more marked among older than among younger voters and much more marked among Coalition than among Labor voters, in their polling.

Compared with results obtained with the standard set of responses, the Likert items point to much smaller shifts away from support and towards opposition: a drop in the level of support for the Voice of just 4 percentage points, not 12; a rise in the level of opposition of just 6.5 points, not 16.5; and a falling away of the “undecided” vote — here, the proportion neither in favour nor opposed — of just 1.5 percentage points, not 5. As with the standard architecture, most of the additional No vote appears to have come from those who supported (strongly or somewhat) the Voice in earlier polls, with the decline in the “Neither… nor” group appearing to contribute much less to the growth in the No vote.

What the binary architecture (Yes/No) shows: Binaries are designed to eliminate the “undecided.” But when they are asked in the wake of response architectures that recognise the undecided, they can tell us one important thing: what happens to the “undecided” when they are forced to choose.

If we compare the results Resolve produced when it used the non-standard architecture and followed up with a binary, it is clear that the Yes side enjoyed a greater boost than the No side when the “undecided” were forced to choose. In other words, far from contributing to a narrowing of the gap between Yes and No, eliminating the undecided widened the Yes vote’s lead; this is consistent with the picture that emerges from other architectures when the “undecided” are squeezed. The one exception was Resolve’s June poll, its most recent, where the “don’t knows,” given a binary choice, appear to have split in favour of the No side (7 Yes, 11 No), causing the overall balance to shift to the No side (49–51).

“Undecided” — differences across the complete catalogue of measures: Across the pollsters’ questions, “Undecided” is hardly a fixed category. Typically, moreover, the “undecided” vote varies with the choice architecture.

Some commentators base their discussion of the “undecided” on the standard response format: Yes/No/Don’t know, “can’t say,” “not sure,” and so on. Megalogenis is one; constitutional lawyer and columnist Greg Craven is another. Each estimates the “undecided” vote to be “around 20 per cent” — a number clearly based on the (unsqueezed) numbers published in relation to questions that offered the standard response options. This proportion was lower in polls that used a leaner: 20–22 per cent before the leaner, quarter-by-quarter; around 15 per cent, it seems, after the leaner.

What of the non-standard format? Though the Resolve poll asks respondents to classify themselves as either “definitely” or “probably” (Yes/No), the Sydney Morning Herald and Age have never published a set of results for any of the samples that separates the “definitely” from the “probably.” Looking at the figures, and the limited detail about the polls that the papers choose to publish, a reader could be excused for thinking that Resolve used the standard rather a non-standard response architecture. A reader could certainly conclude that its publisher didn’t think the distinction mattered.

In Newspoll, those who described themselves as “partly” in favour (28 per cent) or “partly” against (13 per cent) represented a much bigger proportion of the electorate than is represented by the “undecided” (even before the leaner) in polls that used the standard format. If we add those who answered “Don’t know” (8 per cent), we get a combined figure of 49 per cent — half the electorate — who are neither strongly Yes nor strongly No.

Craven speculates that “Once someone congeals [sic] to No” — after shifting from “Don’t know,” presumably — “they will not be shifted.” This implies that even someone only partly against the Voice should not be considered “undecided.” But in support of his opinion, he offers no evidence.

The use of Likert items lifts the proportion of the electorate we might regard as “undecided” to a slightly higher level still. Adding in those only somewhat in support (21 per cent), those neither in support nor opposed (23 per cent) and those only somewhat against (9 per cent), we reach a number of 53 per cent for the most recent four months; that is, over half.

“Undecided”: Further questions, different answers: Some questions in the polls have sought to establish how many respondents are “undecided” about the Voice not in any of these ways but by asking respondents how sure they are that their preferences won’t change. In response to a question Freshwater asked in December 2022, and repeated in April and in May 2023, only 39 per cent (on average) of those who favoured a constitutional change were “certain” they would “vote this way”; among those opposed to a constitutional change, the average was 61 per cent; these are figures not previously published.

Nonetheless, the proportions that said they “could change” their mind or were “currently undecided” remained substantial: 34 per cent (December), 31 per cent (April), 31 per cent (May). Of these, about a third could change their mind, the other two-thirds being currently “undecided.” Among those who could change their mind, the proportion was consistently higher among those who intended to vote Yes than among those who intended to vote No: 17–11 per cent (December), 12–6 per cent (April), and 10–7 per cent (May).

The number of voters who are persuadable could be even greater. Common Cause is reported to have “identified” 20 per cent of the non-Indigenous population as “strong Voice supporters,” 15 per cent as “opponents,” with the other 65 per cent “open to being persuaded either way.”

Two polls also asked respondents how likely they were to actually turn out and vote. Here, too, the response architecture mattered, with JWS using the non-standard response architecture and Resolve using the standard architecture. In February, when JWS asked how likely respondents were “to attend a polling booth (or source a postal vote) and cast a formal vote in this referendum,” more than a third of its respondents said “somewhat likely” (17 per cent), “unlikely” (8 per cent) or “can’t say” (10 per cent). In April, when Resolve asked how likely it was that respondents would “be registered to vote” and would “turn out to cast a vote in this referendum about the Voice,” similar proportions said they were unlikely to cast a vote (10 per cent) or were “undecided” (9 per cent); in the absence of the other JWS categories — extremely likely, very likely and somewhat likely — the rest of the sample (81 per cent) could only say that they were likely to cast a vote.

How different were the likelihoods of Yes and No supporters actually turning out? In the JWS poll, fewer of the Yes (48 per cent) than the No supporters (56 per cent) said they were extremely likely to cast a formal vote — though the gap narrowed (72–69) when those very likely to do so were added. Between those in the Resolve poll who intended to vote Yes (89 per cent of whom said they were likely to turn out) and those who intended to vote No (87 per cent of whom said they were likely to turn out), there was hardly any difference. In both polls, more No supporters than Yes supporters said they were unlikely to turn out. In the JWS poll, 11 per cent of No supporters compared with 4 per cent of Yes supporters said they were unlikely to turn out; in the Resolve poll, the corresponding figures were 10 and 8.

More striking than either of these sets of figures were Resolve’s figures for those “undecided” about whether they favoured Yes or No: 44 per cent of these respondents said they were either unlikely to vote (14 per cent) or were “undecided” about whether they would vote (30 per cent). If nearly half of the “undecided” (on the standard measure) were not to vote (JWS did not publish its figures), allocating the “undecided” to either the Yes or No side would be defensible only if the allocation didn’t assume that these respondents would cast their lot with the No side (Morgan’s hunch) or with the Yes side (Burney’s hope).

The government’s explanation for the “narrowing of the gap between committed Yes and No voters,” as reported by George Megalogenis, is not borne out by any of our measures. On the standard format, the “narrowing of the gap” between May 2022 and May 2023 appears to have been due to respondents moving from Yes (down 12 percentage points) to No (up 16.5); the shift to No from among the “undecided” (down 5) appears to explain much less of what has happened. In the non-standard architecture, the combined support for Yes has slipped (down 5) over the last eight months while the combined support for No has grown (up 4.5), the “undecided” (down 1) having hardly moved.

Moreover, any narrowing of the gap between those “strongly” committed to a Yes vote and those “strongly” committed to a No vote has been due to the number “strongly” Yes shrinking and the number “strongly” No expanding; it has not been due to a reduction in the proportion that “neither supports nor opposes” having the Voice inscribed in the Constitution. Responses to the Likert items over the last year also suggest a decline in support (down 4) and a rise in opposition (up 6.5) without a marked reduction in the proportion registered as “neither… nor” (down 1.5). Binaries, posed hot on the tail of questions that have offered a non-standard set of responses, have not narrowed the gap between Yes and No; except for the most recent of these questions, they have widened it.

Every measure leads to the same conclusion: the gap has narrowed because the Yes side has lost support and the No side has gained support. Each of these measures, it has to be conceded, is based on cross-sectional data — data derived from polls conducted at a particular time that reveal only the net movement across categories. Since the gross movement is certain to have been bigger, panel data — data derived by interviewing the same respondents at different times — might tell a different story. But every claim about how opinions have moved has appealed, if only implicitly, to the evidence provided by the cross-sectional data; panel data have not rated a mention. (So far as we know, no panel data exist.)

The choice architecture makes no difference in establishing that the gap between the Yes and No has narrowed. It makes some difference in showing whether the narrowing is due to a gain of support on the No side rather than a loss of support on the Yes side (suggested by the standard architecture and by the non-standard architecture) or a loss of support in almost equal measure on both the Yes and the No sides (the Likert items). And it makes a big difference in determining the size of the Yes and No vote (the binary architecture being particularly powerful), in estimating the proportion of respondents’ undecided (less so with the standard architecture compared with Likert items), and in identifying the proportion that might be persuaded to change their minds.

To say that the choice architecture makes a difference is also to say that it may not be possible to express one form of the architecture in terms of another; when Newspoll switched from the non-standard to the standard form of response, the previous results could not be converted into the standard form. It follows that changes in support may be difficult to track when the choice architecture changes.

This should not be read as an argument against changing architectures; the more closely the response architecture mimics a referendum, the better it is likely to be. Gallup’s  standard architecture — with or without a leaner — is to be preferred to a binary, a form that offers too restricted a range of choice. The standard architecture is also to be preferred to the non-standard architecture or to a Likert item, forms that offer too wide a choice.

This analysis also does not mean that other, more direct measures of uncertainty should be discarded or not introduced. On the contrary, different measures may serve well as forms of validation and as sources of insight. •

The post “Undecided” on the Voice appeared first on Inside Story.

At the beginning of April, when Newspoll last reported on support for putting a Voice into the Constitution, it estimated the level of approval at 53 per cent and opposition at 39 per cent; 8 per cent said “Don’t know.” Two months later, the corresponding figures are rather different: 46–43–11.

On the face of it, this looks like support has declined by seven points, the opposition has risen by four points, and the “Don’t knows” have gone up by three. And it looks like that’s the result of a couple of months in which the No side has campaigned hard and the Yes side has been on the back foot, with some of its erstwhile supporters either switching to No or putting off a firm decision and “parking” their vote, as Newspoll’s former boss Sol Lebovic used to say, under “Don’t know.”

Thus, Dennis Shanahan, in a comment for the Australian: “The latest Newspoll figures… suggest there is an across-the-board movement against the voice and a surge in uncertainty.”

Not so fast. There are two reasons for caution when comparing the June results with the April results: a change in Newspoll’s question and a change in what we might call, borrowing a phrase from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge, its “choice architecture.”

The question: The Australian notes that the question asked in its latest poll is not the same as the question asked in its previous polls. The obvious implication is that its figures need to be interpreted with care.

In April, Newspoll explained that “There is a proposal to alter the Australian constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament.” It then asked: “Are you personally in favour or against this proposal?”

In its latest poll, Newspoll used a slightly different preamble: “Later this year, Australians will decide at a referendum whether to alter the Australian Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice”(with those italicised words underlined in the questionnaire). It then asked: “Do you approve this proposed alteration?” This made it “the first Newspoll survey to present voters with the precise question they will be asked at the ballot box when the referendum is held later this year.”

If the differences in the wording of the two questions explains, at least in part, the differences in the two sets of responses, it is not clear how it does. Did the reference to “recognition” deflate support? That seems unlikely: since “recognition” has wide public support, its inclusion is more likely to have boosted support than deflated it. Did the prospect of having to vote at a referendum boost opposition? Again, that seems unlikely, though at a time when voters may have more pressing things to worry about, it’s probably the better bet. Perhaps the heavy black underlining of the proposal caused concern.

According to a quote in the Daily Telegraph, another News Corp masthead, polling analyst Kevin Bonham believes Newspoll is “likely more accurate” than many other polls because it has been the first to use the exact wording of the referendum proposal. However commendable that might have been, we cannot assume that the wording necessarily makes a difference to respondents.

A polling purist might baulk at Newspoll’s switch from: (a) asking respondents whether they are “in favour or against” (balanced alternatives) a proposal to alter the Constitution to establish a Voice; to (b) asking respondents whether they “approve” this proposed alteration, with no balancing alternative (“disapprove”). It might also have been better practice to ask respondents how they intended to act (that is, vote) rather than how they felt (“in favour or against”; “approve”).

The choice architecture: What the Australian overlooks — and what Newspoll itself fails to note — may be something more important than the change in the question: the change in the poll’s choice architecture. In April, Newspoll not just posed a different question; it also offered a different array of response options: “Strongly in favour,” “Partly in favour,” “Partly against,” “Strongly against,” “Don’t know.” In its most recent poll, by contrast, the options offered to respondents were simply: “Yes,” “No,” “Don’t know” — a set of responses, it should be acknowledged, better suited to a referendum than the set Newspoll previously offered.

How might this change have affected the results? With a wider number of response options, the proportion that chose “Don’t know” was relatively small; in April’s Newspoll, it was 8 per cent, with the numbers in February (7 per cent) and in March (9 per cent) having been almost the same. Polls by other companies in February, March or April that offered the same sort of choices as Newspoll offered in its latest poll reported higher figures for “Don’t know,” just as Newspoll now does.

The assumption that we can compare polls that use different architectures (Yes/No/Don’t know as against Strongly in favour/Partly in favour/Partly against/Strongly against/Don’t know) simply by collapsing categories (Yes = Strongly in favour + Partly in favour) is mistaken.

It is difficult to say how much the change in the Yes and No responses can be explained as an effect of the change in the choice architecture. But this doesn’t leave us without any bearings. As we would expect, the “Don’t know” number in June (11 per cent) is higher than it was in April (8 per cent); the “surge in uncertainty” is therefore almost certainly an illusion — an effect of changes in the response categories.

If the “Don’t know” number is higher, then the Yes and/or No vote has to be lower. In this Newspoll, the Yes vote is lower but it is also lower than we might have expected on the basis of a switch in choice options alone. And the No vote, far from being lower, is higher.

Allowing for changes in the choice architecture, this suggests that, over the two months since Newspoll’s last survey, the Yes side has lost support and the No side has gained support.

This is hardly news: a tightening of the contest is what almost all the polling has shown for some time. The intriguing question is how much of a tightening would Newspoll have shown — with or without its new question — had it not changed its response options.

Nor is it news that fewer than half of those polled intend to vote Yes. Since March, none of the polls that use the standard architecture (Yes/No/Don’t know) — Freshwater, Morgan, Resolve — have reported Yes majorities. The only way of conjuring Yes majorities from these polls has been by assuming either that the “Don’t knows” won’t vote or that enough of them will vote — and vote Yes — to get the proposal over the line.

According to Simon Benson, who wrote the Australian’s main story, the Newspoll results “suggest the debate is now shaping up as one being led by elites on one side and everybody else on the other.” What this means is unclear. There are “elites” in both camps. But even if the “elites” were only on the Yes side, the polls don’t show “everybody else” on the other. Benson has reprised a dichotomy, pushed by some on the No side, without thinking it through. The poll results, he says, “stand as a warning sign for advocate business leaders that their customer base and employees may not necessarily be signed up to the inevitability of the referendum’s assumed success.”

Is the Australian’s clearest contribution to the debate its headline? In February, the website run by Fair Australia, the name under which senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s Advance is campaigning against the Voice, advertised its plans to “build an army of Aussies” to “defend our nation.” Now, told by the Australian that most “Aussies” don’t intend to vote Yes, the undecided may draw some reassurance that it’s okay to vote No. •

The post Losing ground? appeared first on Inside Story.

This time last year that particular cookware-coating descriptor would have been the last to come to mind in describing the Labor leader. Halfway through the election campaign, “charisma bypass” might have been more appropriate for an uninspiring, somewhat blundering opposition leader whose demeanour contrasted with the incumbent’s energetic confidence. Whatever you thought of Scott Morrison, everyone agreed, he remained a formidable campaigner, while Albo, even within the famed “small target” paradigm, erred on the side of saying as little as possible. And his campaign, to put it mildly, was not blemish-free.

The published opinion polls from March 2022 to the election did put Labor comfortably ahead after preferences but found nothing to celebrate in Albanese’s approval ratings. Were they better than Bill Shorten’s had been three years earlier? Arguably, but you had to look closely to see it. They might have been similar to Tony Abbott’s during the last change-of-government campaign in 2013, but even the much-deflated Morrison usually bested him as preferred/better prime minister.

But when the election result became clear at approximately 8pm AEST on 21 May 2022, Albanese went from zero to hero. If observers had previously struggled to imagine him as prime minister, their perspective changed the moment he became one, or at least one-elect. Suddenly it all made sense.

Had he been a good opposition leader? He won, didn’t he, so he must have been.

Now we are used to Albanese as calm and capable PM. From the highest office in the land he pulls the levers of state with ease and aplomb, authority oozing from his pores, journalists hanging off his words. One day he is hobnobbing with the international great and good, the next munching a white-bread sausage sanger at the footy with the hoi polloi. Is there nothing this everyman can’t do?

And because, despite all the accoutrements of high office, he still decidedly lacks personal magnetism, some close politics watchers judge that — you guessed it — his very ordinariness, his unthreatening lack of eloquence, these are the secrets to his success. So he is more a John Howard than a Kevin Rudd.

On the other side, Scott Morrison quickly became an embarrassing, somewhat demented punchline. And the less said about the federal opposition, led by the faintly ridiculous figure of leader Peter Dutton, stripped of his powerful portfolios, the better. Did this clown show really run the country for eight and a half years?

Elections are routinely followed by shifts in public perceptions of leaders and parties, and the most dramatic come after a change of government and/or a result that has turned out to be different from what was widely anticipated. (Some Newspoll examples are here.) In Albanese’s case, this graph from Essential nicely illustrates his huge leap in stature.

The shape of the graph shows the total reinvention, in the public mind, of the persona of one Anthony Norman Albanese.

The moral of this long-winded introduction? If you want to measure public perceptions of Albanese as an opposition leader you should survey them when he is doing that job. Ideally, you do that as close as possible to when people vote, but certainly before 6pm Saturday eastern time, when votes start to be tallied and the how-and-why tales start to unfold.

And that’s exactly what the regular public polls — Newspoll, Essential, Resolve, Ipsos et al. — did during the campaign.

There is, however, one election survey, much used in academia and often cited in the media, that attempts to measure voters’ attitudes to leaders — along with a host of other factors that influence votes — but collects its data after the election. And not just a few days after, but weeks and in many cases months afterwards. That’s the Australian Election Study, or AES.

Run out of the Australian National University, the AES began at the 1987 election, in some ways as a successor to the Australian National Political Attitudes Surveys. Its counterparts overseas include British and American surveys.

These days the AES is mostly done online. It contains a large number of political questions and a veritable census of demographic ones, most of which are usefully repeated at each election, allowing for comparisons over time. Its sample sizes (2508 in 2023) are a bit on the low side for analysis of some of the cohorts, but its strength is in its breadth of content and repetition across the decades.

Late last year, as after every election, the AES team released a report, some datasets and various accessories. Its trends paper, in particular, has fascinating graphs showing (in some cases) dramatic changes in attitudes on immigration, abortion, the republic, attitudes towards democracy and other topics.

But its huge weakness, all but fatal, lies in the fact that, as its website puts it, the AES is conducted “post-election.” Respondents completed the 2022 survey, for example, between 24 May and 30 September, an average of thirty-two days after the election.

Among the findings given in the forty-page 2022 report is one that received substantial media coverage: “Anthony Albanese was evaluated more favourably than any political party leader since Kevin Rudd in 2007, scoring 5.3 on a zero to ten popularity scale.” This is the relevant graph:

But we know that’s not really how Australians saw the opposition leader at the time of the election, and nor is it what the publicly released polling said. The most popular leader on either side since 2007? You only have to go back to the surveys from the 2019 campaign to find a party leader more popular than Albanese: Scott Morrison. Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 was also rated more highly, even scoring a few net positive results (approval greater than disapproval) during the campaign (something Albanese never did). Julia Gillard in 2010 provides another counter-example.

And the AES’s report itself, in a summary of the Morrison government’s final term, describes the Labor leader entering the campaign in a “not exceptionally popular or inspiring” way.

Beneath the report’s headline, “popular” turns out to mean how much the leader is liked, as in “using a scale from zero to ten, please show how much you like or dislike the party leaders.” That’s a slightly different question from satisfaction and approval; so might that be true of Albanese? Contemporaneous data on this specific question are much scarcer, but what I could find also jarringly contradict the AES.

A Newspoll of “leaders’ character traits” published in March 2022, around ten weeks before the election, had 51 per cent finding Albanese “likeable.” According to Newspoll’s chart, which went back to 2015, that was a much lower proportion than the 68 per cent who said the same about Malcolm Turnbull six weeks before the 2016 poll. Even Bill Shorten managed a higher score in May 2016 of 57 per cent.

Yet in the AES graph above, Turnbull (2016) languishes five spots below Albanese (2022). Could Turnbull have become so much less liked between late May and 2 July? Could Albanese have dramatically grown in likeability during his campaign? Anything is theoretically possible, but the best evidence — satisfaction/approval ratings taken during the campaigns — didn’t show a dramatic rise or fall for either man.

The much more likely reason for Turnbull’s low spot on the AES’s graph is, again, the fact that the survey was conducted after — an average of thirty-eight days after — the last person voted. The 2016 election result, which was significantly worse for Turnbull’s government than was widely expected, provoked a rather bitter election-night speech about Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign. It also set the Liberal leadership hares running, generated universal adverse press coverage and had some in the wider Liberal movement (think Sky After Dark) calling for his head. From then until his demise a little over two years later Turnbull was under pressure — and behaved like it.

This was the prime minister respondents were scoring — just as Albanese’s relatively high “like” score can’t be disentangled from his election success and subsequent popularity in office.

The AES’s retrospectivity affects not just leaders’ ratings but also many other questions probing respondents’ attitudes to issues that might help explain the election outcome. It even includes a question about when respondents made up their minds whom to vote for.

I believe the timing pollutes the responses, rendering much of the AES’s data all but unusable. It’s such a shame given the expertise and expense and skill of the people involved, and the hours they put in. But as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, no one associated with the study believes the timing matters. And nor, presumably, do most of the dozens of academics who analyse the data and present these findings at conferences and in refereed papers in journals.

The sheer length of the questionnaire presents challenges. It skews the sample to people who are willing to go through the arduous process — namely, those who are particularly interested in politics. Attitudes to elite institutions (like the university whose name appears on the survey) might influence people’s decision to participate: only 2.1 per cent of 2022’s respondents said they voted for One Nation or the United Australia Party, for example, which is less than a quarter of the actual 9.1 per cent at the election.

This is probably unavoidable for a long-form survey like this, and in theory weighting (which they do, using actual election results as one of the ingredients, and provide in a separate field) should ameliorate much of it. But the regular pollsters, with a less demanding workload for respondents, probably obtain more representative raw data.

Then there are two long-term, corporate habits of presentation in the various AES reports that are at least in theory fixable.

One is the definitiveness with which the findings are presented. The very first in last year’s report provides a perfect illustration. It reads: “A majority of voters (53 per cent) cast their ballots based on policy issues, down from 66 per cent in 2019” and “just 11 per cent did so based on the party leaders.”

Now, call me difficult, call me pedantic, but deriving such firmly stated conclusions about voters’ intentions from their multiple-choice responses to the question “In deciding how you would vote in the election, which was most important to you?” (available answers: “The party leaders,” “The policy issues,” “The candidates in your electorate” or “The parties taken as a whole”) is absurd, even leaving aside the timing issue.

Many people like to think they’re rationally deciding their vote on policy matters but are actually driven by emotion, tribal loyalty, resentment or just the vibe. We can probably all agree that a healthy economy is, all things being equal, more conducive to re-election than an unhealthy one. On the other hand, longevity can prove an insurmountable obstacle for any incumbent. Neither of these dynamics can be captured in that question. We’ve all met people who always vote for a particular party but justify it by referencing something else. The campaigners, if they’re doing their jobs right, are influencing voters in fleeting, subliminal ways.

And what about those who just reckoned that after nearly nine years of this government it wouldn’t hurt to give the other side a go? Humans are deeply fallible when it comes to understanding, let alone elucidating, their own motivations. There’s a reason why many pollsters have psychology degrees.

So, the AES reckons that in 2022 most people’s votes were largely driven by the parties’ and candidates’ policies. The believability of that might depend on what we mean by “policies.” Does it, for example, include perceptions of the fruits of past policies, such as those of Labor’s last stint in office, 2007–13?

Now, asking the question itself is not without value. The relevant 1996–2022 graph in the trends paper is worth a look — the “policy” line is ridiculously high, but the interest is in the fluctuations. (The two peaks are at the 1998 “GST election” and 2019.)

Changing the wording to “a majority of voters… claimed…” and moving the finding down the list to deprioritise its significance would have been much less misleading. And in the second finding, in fact — “The most important issues in the election identified by voters included…” — the words I’ve italicised make the statement much more defensible.

My complaint here isn’t about a few missing words in one finding. This mode of presentation is a key feature of the AES across its thirty-five years, and comes from an ingrained inability to acknowledge human complexity, both individual and collective. It flows through all the AES reports and associated papers. (Political scientist Murray Goot covered a lot of this in a strongly worded review of a book based on AES findings a decade ago.)

It even turns out, according to the AES, that you can use its data to calculate the value of various drivers of the election outcome. An example from 2019 is that “[b]ased on… voter responses, it is estimated that the net effect of leadership [Morrison versus Shorten] on the vote was 4 per cent against Labor.” This is calculated by taking the proportion who nominated “The party leaders” as the key factor in the question mentioned above, splitting them up by whom they said they voted for, and applying them to the actual election results.

The arithmetic was not repeated in 2022, and giving it a go myself I could see why: it gives Labor an advantage that rounds to zero, which is surprising if you’re dealing with a face-off between the most and least popular leaders since 2007. The closest we get is “With Anthony Albanese as party leader, Labor attracted more votes based on leadership than in the 2016 and 2019 elections.”

I don’t believe it is possible to quantify leaders’ influence on votes. (Should we try, for example, to account for the fact that any other leader might not have made Shorten’s decision to take a big policy suite to the 2019 election?) But if there is a way, this ain’t it. And across the decades calculations of this nature abound.

The other bad habit of the AES is a tendency to write for media headlines.

Political journalists and commentators have an awful tendency to cast (a) the latest election result and (b) the latest opinion poll as representing the new normal, as how voters henceforth will behave. You can observe it today, fuelled by the Aston by-election; these voting snapshots are assumed to showcase patterns as they will always be, and the prognosis for whichever side lost the last (by-)election (and is trailing in the polls) is dire.

Last year’s general election, the first Labor has won in more than a decade (and since 2007 if we’re talking about majority wins), suddenly became evidence of the Coalition’s inability to ever again form government — and here, says the AES, are the reasons. That’s despite the fact that these supposedly fatal electoral drivers didn’t prevent the Coalition from winning the previous three contests.

This Sydney Morning Herald article, headlined “Young Coalition Voters an Endangered Species,” could’ve been published today but is in fact dated September 2009, when the Rudd government was still riding high. AES data back then showed that the Coalition faced intractable demographic hurdles, namely a lack of support among young voters. This was a popular theme at the time, but we know what happened soon after, beginning with 2010’s tied election. Those seemingly insurmountable demographic changes were somehow surmounted, and then it was Labor that faced an existential challenge, due to (other) demographic developments.

In 2023 we’re back with the Coalition at death’s door — because of young people again, and this time specifically “millennials” (voters born between 1981 and 1996). In some cases the individuals singing from this song sheet were only two years ago administering last rites for Labor.

We expect data nerds and academics to be constrained and sober in their analysis, not to be permanently trapped in the present and not to succumb to the hot take. But sadly it ain’t always so.

The 2022 AES report makes quite a big deal of the Coalition’s deteriorating support among young people. “Between 2016 and 2022, millennials record a large decline in Coalition support, falling from 38 per cent to 25 per cent in just two election cycles,” it reports. “Changes of this magnitude and this pace are rare in Australian electoral history.”

I’ve reproduced its graphs below, and you can see that the starting point of 2016 for millennials (middle bottom) wasn’t chosen at random. It was a year the AES found to be exceptionally good for the Coalition among this age group, better than at any time since 2004.

Now, these rather gimmicky age cohorts are no doubt used for popular digestibility. In particular, millennials’ membership has not been constant over the graph; those born in 1996, for example, didn’t join the electoral roll until 2014. And the sub-samples are rather small — just 251 people aged twenty-five to forty-one participated in last year’s survey, implying about a 6 per cent error margin. But let us accept that these figures truly reflect the relevant component of the full electorate.

That 2016 election did exhibit some unusual swings, with the Labor opposition doing very well in low- to middle-income urban electorates, even snatching the hitherto bellwether seat of Lindsay, while the Liberals shored up their wealthy safe electorates. The persona of the ultra-rich, urbane and progressive prime minister Turnbull must have played a part, and perhaps millennials disproportionately warmed to him. That’s interesting, for sure. But to present these figures as a neutral point in the data is simply cherrypicking.

Further down, less sensationally, the report notes that “millennials entered the electorate in the early 2000s with about 35 per cent of this generation supporting the Coalition, a level which has now fallen to 25 per cent.” Is that a big drop? The “Coalition’s historic low levels of support among younger voters” in 2022 can’t be interpreted meaningfully on its own. There are two crucial pieces of context that should be taken into account.

The first is the Coalition’s rock-bottom primary vote in 2022. That 35.7 per cent was the smallest since the formation of the Liberal Party in 1944. Record low support in the aggregate should be expected to translate to low support across most cohorts; there should really only be a sub-headline when one group of people deviates significantly from that shift. Does the AES show a bigger drop among millennials than among the rest of the electorate since 2001?

It does a bit. The ten-point decline since 2001 sits within an overall drop of 7.2 per cent in the Coalition primary vote, from 42.9. A 2.5 to 3 per cent difference (we are subtracting a rounded number from an unrounded one, and giving “2.8 per cent” as the outcome does go against my grain) is still worthy of note. (A trend line over those dots produces something a bit smaller, around 2 per cent.) So, on this evidence, the last two decades have seen an outsized drop in Coalition support among young people. But what happens if the Liberals choose another Turnbull-like leader?

The second missing piece in the gloom and woe about the Coalition’s irretrievably dire situation is that in 2022 Labor’s national primary vote was also historically tiny; at 32.6 per cent it was even smaller than the Coalition’s (it was this fact which made the “net effect of leadership” calculation unpublishable) and was Labor’s nadir since at least the 1930s. Surely if we insist on using primary votes as indicators of electability, this can’t be ignored.

Under our federal compulsory (full) preferential voting system, preferences from other candidates produced a two-party-preferred Labor win of 52.1 to 47.9. The Coalition’s 47.9 was not by past measures spectacularly bad; not as low as in the last three elections (2007, 1983 and 1972) that turfed them out of office. But its current lower-house presence is proportionally smaller than at any time since (again) the Liberal Party came into being, and that’s because nine of the electorates in which it defeated Labor in two-party-preferred terms were won by an independent or minor party instead. That’s a function of its low primary vote. But Labor also missed out on seats in this way — seven, in fact — and that’s because of its low primary vote.

That the AES deals only with primary votes is increasingly problematic, although it’s not clear how to fix the issue. But Labor’s historically small primary vote must, by definition, also translate to splash-friendly depths in some cohorts. On the AES age numbers one could craft a terrifying tale about “boomers” and the “greatest generation,” and to an extent generation X drifting away from Labor. (The more popular one until last year had to do with lack of support among a shrinking working class.) Except, of course, Labor formed government, and so analysis like this doesn’t fit the narrative.

The big story about Australian electoral behaviour is, or should be, the continuing decline of primary votes for both major parties. It’s the two-party system that is under existential pressure, not just whoever happens to be in opposition today, and the record-sized crossbench is the most obvious symptom.

Labor is currently in office. One day it won’t be. One day also Peter Dutton won’t be Liberal leader, and the opinion polls might start to look more competitive. Commentators, finding themselves on the other side of the fishbowl, will simply internalise and recite the current vibe. Academics, I hope, won’t.

Analysing election results is serious stuff. When we write and say things, we should really mean them.  It’s better to remain silent than announce a conclusion from a piece of work that ticks all the statistics boxes but rests on hopelessly flawed assumptions.

The individuals involved in the AES are smart, well-credentialled and statistically literate. Most of the data they collect, which don’t purport to deal with the hows and whys of the election results, make for excellent observation and, in their comprehensiveness and multi-decade extent, are unique. The problems lie in some institutional practices

The AES isn’t alone in the academic world in producing statistics-based work in this glib genre. But it does run a big, important poll, widely used, whose post-election aspect is a big flaw. If its personnel found a way to have their surveys completed before election night the value of their data would increase immensely. Not claiming to quantify the unquantifiable with simplistic calculations, and avoiding playing to the media zeitgeist, would improve their reports. •

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The conundrum? They flatly disagree on whether the country will have a Labour government with a clear majority within the next two years, or whether it could be heading for a closely fought contest — or even a fifth consecutive Conservative victory for the first time in British history.

The May ritual I’m referring to is the annual round of local government elections. Not every British voter will be able to take part — there are no local elections this year in Scotland, Wales or London — but most will have a chance to decide who runs 230 cities, towns and local districts across much of England. On Friday 5 May, while much of the country prepares for King Charles to be crowned the following day in Westminster Abbey, party strategists and media pundits will be paying less attention to the coronation than to the local elections’ impact on another historic building, just across the road from the Abbey, the Houses of Parliament.

In a way, this is all rather odd. Voters will be choosing who should run their local services — schools, public housing, parks, social care, libraries, refuse collection and so on. The 8000 councillors they elect will have no say on income tax, immigration, energy prices, Brexit, help for Ukraine or any of the other great national issues that decide the fates of governments. And yet decades of experience show that most people consider not the qualities of the particular candidates standing in their neighbourhoods but the rival merits of the national parties they represent.

Not everyone: thankfully for the cause of democracy, outstanding local candidates can defy national trends. And some parties — notably the Liberal Democrats — win more votes in local than national elections. But, overall, when all the votes around the country are added up, the national picture is what matters.

Older readers may recall the Falklands war in 1982. Before the war, Thatcher’s government was deeply unpopular. Unemployment had trebled in three years from one to three million; the polls said the Conservatives were doomed to lose the following election. Yet Thatcher’s party triumphed in that May’s local elections because British troops were heading to the South Atlantic and most of Britain’s voters backed Thatcher’s quest to reclaim the islands from Argentina. Not a single local council in Britain had anything to do with any of this. Yet it was national sentiment, not local judgements, that decided which party should run each town and city.

Given all that, we shouldn’t be surprised that the national picture will be what really matters when this year’s local votes are counted. What gives the results added significance this time, though, are the disputes among pollsters. They agree that Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour Party is ahead but they disagree by how much. Some give Labour a lead of around 25 per cent, others nearer 15 per cent.

To be sure, both are big leads. (They might sound very big to Australian readers, but remember: Britain uses a first-past-the-post system and Labour’s votes are geographically concentrated, so the national vote translates into seats quite differently.) Repeated in a general election, Labour would be back in power. But there are two reasons why a big Labour victory is by no means certain.

First, governments over the past six decades or more have consistently lost support in the middle of each parliament, only to recover, at least to some extent, as the next general election approaches.

Second, changes in the relationship between votes and seats mean that Labour needs a bigger lead than in the past if it is to win outright. In 2005 — the last time Britain elected a Labour government — the party secured a comfortable majority with a lead in the popular vote of just 3 per cent (Labour 36 per cent, Conservatives 33 per cent). Today, a 3 per cent lead would leave Labour well short of a parliamentary majority; it might not even be the largest party in the House of Commons. Depending on a variety of factors, Labour will need a lead of at least 8 per cent, and might need a lead of as much as 13 per cent, to win outright. That was the margin by which Tony Blair led Labour to a landslide 179-seat majority in 1997. A repeat of those nationwide figures would mean a far closer outcome in terms of seats, and possibly a wafer-thin majority that could make it hard for Labour to remain in office for a full five-year term.

Given all that, a 15 per cent lead today would mean that even a modest Conservative recovery could jeopardise Labour’s chances of a clear victory. On the other hand, if Labour really is 25 per cent ahead, then it has a cushion against a Conservative recovery.

(A note for nerds: a narrow Labour lead in national votes at the next election is unlikely to mean the Conservatives stay in office. A more likely outcome is a hung parliament, in which neither Labour nor Conservative commands an overall majority. In those circumstances a minority Labour government is more likely than a minority Conservative government, because the great majority of smaller-party MPs, mainly Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party MPs, are viscerally anti-Conservative. But a minority Labour government would be limited in what it could do, and would probably hold another general election within a year or two. Britain’s longer-term future would effectively be on hold.)

Given all that, what will the pundits and parties be looking for on 5 May? Above all, they will want to see the BBC’s estimates of how the local vote maps nationally, taking account of the fact that parts of Britain won’t be voting at all. Assuming the Liberal Democrats repeat their usual trick of doing better in local than national elections, and Labour worse, a good rule of thumb is to add eight to ten percentage points to Labour’s lead.

So, if the national vote share in the local elections shows Labour fifteen or more points ahead of the Conservatives, this suggests a “true” Labour lead of around 25 per cent. Pollsters showing the bigger Labour leads will be vindicated and the Conservatives will have reason to be dejected. But if Labour’s lead is below 10 per cent then its “true” lead would be in line with polls reporting smaller leads just now. And any significant Conservative recovery would jeopardise Labour’s hopes of outright victory at the next general election.

Doubtless the television cameras will show us the expressions on the faces of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer as they enter Westminster Abbey for the coronation the following day. They will do their professional best to look positive; but experts in facial expressions might be able to detect their true feelings as they absorb the news of the local election results. •

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We all know that polls taken years before an election are poor predictors of voting intentions. Unforeseen events will occur, of course, but it’s also unrealistic to expect all voters to know what they’d do under the suddenly posed hypothetical: “If an election were held today…”

As the actual vote approaches, polls get better, especially when the question becomes “How will you vote on Saturday the Xth?” (These days the question is tweaked to take account of what is increasingly a weeks-long voting period.)

Things are trickier when a referendum is being discussed. Nearly everyone knows what an election is. But what proportion could immediately describe what a referendum actually is? What about words like “enshrined,” “Indigenous Voice” and the “Constitution” itself?

Way back in 1987, a Newspoll found that only 54 per cent of respondents “knew that Australia has a written Constitution.” In 1992 a Saulwick poll put the figure at 67 per cent. More recently, in 2021, the Constitutional Values Survey found a much higher 83 per cent answering affirmative to the easier statement, “had heard of the Australian Constitution.” And the proportion who could describe how the document is amended? We have no idea.

Americans are more likely to know about their founding document, and it’s possible Australians are more aware of America’s too. Its clauses (particularly its amendments) feature regularly in international news, commentary and popular culture. (America’s, unlike ours, is amended by majorities of federal and state legislatures.)

Until this year the Voice to Parliament was largely a preoccupation of the political/academic/media class. A little over half the respondents to this 2021 survey, for example, had never heard of it.

Given all these uncertainties, springing a benignly described question on an unsuspecting citizen isn’t going to produce a reliable indicator of people’s eventual voting decision. So it’s little wonder early polls on referendums have a history of being wildly wrong — much more wrong than voting intentions ones. But they too become better predictors as the day approaches.

(The 2017 marriage equality survey would also have suffered from the evolution of the question’s meaning, but to a much lesser extent. It was not intended to change the Constitution, and the “vote” was just another survey, labelled as such, voluntary, filled in at home — and by three-quarters of respondents, it turned out, during the first week of the official campaign. Like the 1999 republic referendum, it dealt with a familiar, long-discussed topic, but without the earlier one’s constitutionally ordained, and fatal, requirement that a specific model be approved.)

The last time a Labor government held a referendum — a midterm set of four questions — was in September 1988. Shadow cabinet voted to support two and oppose two, but the party rooms overturned them and the Liberal and National parties campaigned energetically against all four.

Triumphantly as it turned out; what the Hawke government saw as a set of proposals so inoffensive it would slip through unharmed became the worst-performing in referendum history. The cause was not helped by a High Court finding that some of the government’s info-ads had broken the law.

In the final six months of that campaign, polled support halved, from the high 60s and low 70s to the 30s. Party-support surveys have been known to shift by several points over similar periods, but nothing approaching 30 per cent. The actual survey questions have disappeared into the ether, and they would have changed over the months, but the early ones (to take one of the four proposals) might have been along the lines of “Do you support recognising local government in the Constitution?” To which a reasonable answer might have been “Sure, why not, it makes sense.”

By referendum day, after an all-singing, all-dancing campaign, the act of voting had become more complicated for the one-in-three voters who ended up “changing their mind.” From their point of view, the question might have become “Exactly why does this government want to change the Constitution?”

From there, the questions would have multiplied: “We’ve survived this long without this change, why do it now? This important document should not be tinkered with lightly; I read somewhere it will create a lawyers’ picnic. And the taxpayer dollars to do all this” — $30 million–plus was bandied about then; for the Voice the popular estimate is $200 million — “would have been much better spent elsewhere. And it wouldn’t hurt to remind this rather arrogant and complacent government who’s in charge.”

During 2022 and 2023 the main Voice polls have measured expressed opinions about “support/in favour” rather than voting intentions for a referendum held either “today” or later in the year. The wording will change later in the year, but these are the reported questions for recently released surveys.

Essential asks: “As you may be aware, there will be a referendum held later this year on whether a Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be enshrined in the Constitution. Do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

Newspoll, in the Australian: “There is a proposal to alter the Australian Constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament. Are you personally in favour or against this proposal?”

Resolve, in Nine papers: “The new federal government has committed to a referendum — a national vote — on whether to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Constitution. You will be asked to vote on this change to the Constitution in the next year or two, and voting is compulsory. Given this, do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

Resolve’s reported “next year or two” and “new federal government” look like gremlin-induced remnants of 2022 polls. Apart from that, its wording seems best because, while rather long and laborious, it doesn’t assume people know that the Constitution can only be amended by popular vote, or what a “referendum” is. But still, like the others, it’s different from a standard political poll because it doesn’t ask about voting intention.

So there’s variety in pollsters’ questions, much more than is found, again, in party-support polls. Referendum polling seems an even less exact science than general election polling. Despite that, though, the polls are all recording similar levels at the moment: around 60 per cent support once you exclude undecideds and/or push them to choose.

(That Resolve survey was taken in two portions. The first in December found 62 per cent net support, while the second in late January, after opposition leader Peter Dutton had launched his quasi-No “confusion” campaign and the topic started featuring heavily in the news, had it lower, at 58 per cent.)

Obviously the surveys taken in the final week of the campaign will more resemble each other and be very different from those above. They’ll ask people how they voted if they’ve done so already, or how they intend to vote. They’ll all be pretty close to the final result. (Even a 2019-sized poll fail will appear respectable unless the “error” happens to account for the difference between success and failure.)

Afterwards, accounts of the Voice referendum will describe a trajectory of surveyed “support,” but in reality the question respondents answer, from January to referendum day, will gradually have changed.

How meaningful are opinion polls purporting to measure support for inserting an Indigenous Voice to Parliament into the Australian Constitution? At the moment, barely meaningful at all. •

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Current two-party-preferred polls are more encouraging for the new government than they were for Abbott at this point, but not as heartening as for the other two. Does this point to anything? No. Both Abbott and Rudd were dragged down by their parties before their governments’ first re-election. Howard was looking rather shop-worn by the time of the 1998 election, which he survived with the lowest national two-party-preferred victory in history. Only after the 2001 election was he the untouchable man of steel.

They don’t call it a honeymoon for nothing. Young governments find they can make mistakes and barely anyone notices, while ageing, more experienced ones can get away with much less. Fledgling government ministers are boosted by their new positions at the top table.

On the other side of parliament, stripped of the authority of incumbency and the allure of power, the nakedness of former Morrison government members is faintly embarrassing. Did this bunch really run the country for so long? Was that Liberal leader really home affairs minister so recently?

Scott Morrison’s bizarre, secret swearings-in to multiple portfolios provides further revisionist fuel. Were the higher echelons of the just-deceased government particularly lacking in talent, or does it just seem that way?

The early Hawke government went to town on the fiscal misdeeds of its vanquished predecessor, and Howard and team used the same playbook thirteen years later. While Rudd and his treasurer Wayne Swan were negligent on this front — yes, it’s harder when you inherit a budget surplus, but they barely tried — Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers aren’t making that mistake. They’re rarely missing an opportunity to employ the “t” word — a trillion dollars of debt. It’s not fair, it’s not honest, but politics is often like that.

What did the 21 May result tell us about voters’ changing behaviour?

After every election the Australian Electoral Commission provides us with two-party-preferred results for all House of Representatives electorates. Those two parties are Labor and the Coalition, whether or not the actual two-candidate-preferred count was between them. (The Liberals are given a 51.4 per cent two-party vote in Warringah, for instance, though Zali Steggall was the victor.) Total all 150 seats and you have the national two-party-preferred vote.

In 2007, a national Labor vote of 52.7 per cent saw eighty-three of the 150 seats return Labor two-party-preferred majorities, and all of them were won by Labor. This time eighty-four seats out of 151 recorded two-party victories for Labor, but MPs representing seven of them sit on the crossbench: four Greens plus independents Andrew Wilkie in Clark and Dai Le in Fowler, and — the surprise Labor two-party win — the Centre Alliance’s Rebekha Sharkie in Mayo.

So although Labor’s countrywide vote of 52.1 per cent was well below 2007’s, and although its seventy-seven-seat haul was lower than 2007’s eighty-three, its victory over the Coalition, nineteen seats, was larger by one than it was fifteen years ago.

The leakage to the crossbench was even worse on the other side. Of the Coalition’s sixty-seven two-party-preferred wins, nine were taken by independents and minor parties.

The massive crossbench is a result of the decline of support for the major parties, and there is no reason to believe it won’t continue over the medium term. Recent history tells us that Labor will have difficulty evicting the Greens from their lower house positions. We don’t know if the teals will prove similarly durable, nor the extent to which they will become, or be seen as, a quasi party. The future of Dai Le, the independent who won Fowler, is similarly unpredictable.

Does it worry you that the party that won 33 per cent of the primary vote formed government? It’s a bit like Emmanuel Macron becoming French president in April despite receiving just 28 per cent of the first-round vote. But at least Macron topped that first round.

You’d rather the Coalition, with 36 per cent primary vote support, had been sworn in? But then there’s no point having preferential voting, which gives the voter multiple bites at the cherry. Overseas, our voting system is often called “instant run-off” because it roughly replicates the French-style two-round system, but does it on a single voting occasion, using the one ballot paper.

Back in 1995, France’s first-round winner Lionel Jospin lost the second round to Jacques Chirac. A majority of the voters who cast a ballot two weeks after the first bout found Chirac the lesser of two evils. Same with primary vote versus two-party-preferred here. Australian federal elections have seen primary vote losses turned into two-party-preferred wins three times: 1987, 2010 and, now, 2022. The victor on each occasion was Labor.

Even under the awful first-past-the-post voting system, which Britain and Canada still have and New Zealand used to, the overall vote winner can lose the seat count.

Perhaps you’d prefer more proportional results, giving parties representation closer to the share of support they received? Then you need an electoral system of — drumroll — proportional representation. Single-member electorate systems are in many ways a relic of a pre-party time, when men (as they were) were elected to represent their geographic constituencies in parliament. Much of our system — indeed our Constitution, and most obviously the make-up and powers of the Senate — is like that. (I’ve argued before that PR in our lower house would improve governability by giving the upper house more incentive to make life easier for the executive.)

But back to our current government, and the question of how long Anthony Albanese will be prime minister. Our longest-serving PMs — Bob Menzies, Howard and Hawke — were elected at or near the beginning of longish periods of sustained international economic growth. They got the boasting rights and the favourable comparisons with their predecessors.

We live in different, stranger times, with unemployment very low yet growth sluggish and wages stagnant. And leaders are more disposable these days.

Both major parties are on the nose, but the contradictions in the Coalition’s support base are more glaringly on display because it’s in opposition. Peter Dutton gives every indication he won’t try to win back teal territory, and will instead prioritise what used to be seen as swing seats, the ones that tend to go to whoever forms government. They’re in the outer suburbs and regions: “aspirational,” socially rather conservative, not very multicultural, the fabled western Sydney seat of Lindsay being their archetype. But those voters and seats simply aren’t numerous enough to come close to a governing majority.

They also have a habit, at state level, of swinging to narrowly elected incumbents. (While the states and territories boast plenty of examples, we’ve not had a federal opposition squeak into government at an election since the formation of the two-party system over a century ago.)

That’s one way it could turn out: a stronger vote for Labor in three years. But Dutton is unlikely to be leader at the next election, and his successor would probably take a different tack.

And with a global recession on the cards, the pendulum could — in the context of low major-party support — swing back, quickly.

Did I mention we live in strange, uncertain times? •

The post Strange, uncertain times appeared first on Inside Story.

One popular one is that by-election wins portend general election results. They simply don’t, because by-election voters aren’t deciding who will form government, and that frees them to be influenced by all sorts of other things. But while commentators might understand this at one level, many still can’t resist overlaying by-election swings onto state or national pendulums to produce high drama.

Another is that leaders’ personal ratings in the polls matter more than voting intentions. As in “that 53 per cent lead is well and good, but you can’t win with such a low preferred prime minister/leader satisfaction rating.” It’s rubbish. In fact, if there is a relationship it’s the other way around: for a given voting intention figure it’s better for the leader to have a low personal rating than a high one, because the latter can artificially inflate party support. But this one too won’t go away. Very often it is wielded by a leader’s internal enemies.

(Just one federal Australian election in polling history might be cited to support that view: Bill Shorten’s low ratings in 2019. But the surprise of Labor’s defeat was an opinion poll fail; the polls were simply wrong, right up to election day, and we don’t know how long they’d been wrong for.)

Another classic: “Disunity is death!” Except when it isn’t (in 2019, for example).

And that voters “reward” governments for jobs well done. This is pertinent in the Covid era, of course, when all our governments have accrued goodwill. But I reckon voters look forwards, not backwards, and that a fine performance is only relevant because of what it suggests about the future. With Covid, it’ll be about what is happening at the time of the election, and what looks likely in the months and years ahead.

Like by-elections, plotting state election results onto the federal pendulum is a pointless pastime, too. But again it makes good copy.

Which brings us to the persistent idea that popular state premiers generate support for their federal counterparts. Right now, some expect rampaging Western Australian Mark McGowan to deliver votes for Anthony Albanese at the next federal election — perhaps enough for that state alone to deliver a Labor victory.

Just this year McGowan clocked up the biggest election win — federal, state or territory — since Federation. His zero-tolerance attitude to border crossings in arguably the country’s most parochial state (Queensland and Tasmania are also in contention) has delivered both low case numbers and, along with Commonwealth largesse, economic health. While the other states are mostly slowly relaxing their boundaries, Western Australia’s remain sealed. In the ongoing stoush with the feds (who want McGowan to quickly join the rest of us) there’s no doubt on whose side the WA majority sits.

On top of that, Scott Morrison’s standing over there is dire, so it is said, and come March, April or May, voters will back their guy against the prime minister.

Do the polls support this expectation? Nationally, they tend to have the federal opposition on 53 or 54 per cent after preferences, a swing of about five percentage points since the last election. In Western Australia the number is also around 53 or 54, or a swing of around nine points. (See Pollbludger on the most recent Newspoll.) So that’s some mild evidence for the idea, although it’s nothing like state Labor’s 69 per cent eight months ago.

But there are opinion polls, and then there are elections. They are not the same thing. One is trying to estimate the other by asking people to imagine a certain ritual, known as an election, is held today. In some circumstances the response to that hypothetical is more realistic than in others.

In the thirty-nine federal elections since preferential voting was introduced, Western Australia has given Labor a majority of the two-party-preferred vote just eight times. And five of them were when the party was led by someone perceived as one of their own — John Curtin in 1943 and 1946, and Bob Hawke in 1983, 1984 and 1987. For a similar reason, the party in opposition didn’t do too badly in the state under Kim Beazley in 1998 (49.5) and 2001 (48.4). But it’s been downhill from there, fuelled by the mining boom, and in 2019 Labor recorded a miserable 44.5. (At the 2007 Kevin Rudd landslide the party only managed 46.7 per cent.)

Generally, across all jurisdictions, the electoral record shows that the idea of a popular local leader bringing votes to their federal counterpart is bunkum. To the contrary, the two have often worked against each other. In the Howard years, for example, we saw soaring Labor premiers, often with record wins under their belts, alongside comfortable Coalition victories federally. After the Rudd government took office in 2007, state Labor governments started dropping.

Queensland’s Peter Beattie in 2001 and South Australia’s Mike Rann in 2004 clocked up their state parties’ biggest wins in history, achieving two-party-preferred votes in the high fifties. It didn’t stop those states thrashing federal Labor in the same years, giving them 45.1 and 45.6 per cent respectively. In both cases the federal vote took place months after a state contest in which Coalition parties had been reduced to a rump.

These are extreme examples. But popular premiers delivering the goods for federal counterparts? It. Just. Doesn’t. Happen.

The historical polling record offers some evidence that those high-flying locals boost support for federal counterparts. But only in the surveys, and it can crash as the federal campaign starts and minds start to move towards the contest at hand, and matters such as economic security.

And so, by the time of the election next year, if the new Omicron strain allows it, Western Australia’s borders will again be reasonably porous. Covid restrictions will largely be scaled back and cross-jurisdictional bickering mostly a thing of the past.

As usual, the Coalition’s key message for sandgropers will be about Labor’s secret plan to steal their mineral royalties, force them to quickly decarbonise, and perhaps dud them on the GST to boot.

Voters will know that McGowan won’t take any nonsense from Scott Morrison, but would he stand up as aggressively against an Albanese government?

So expect Labor’s WA surge to dissipate as election day approaches. Off such a low base last time, there should be a decent swing to the opposition, but not enough to even hit the 50–50 vote mark.

A federal Labor victory, if it comes, will be off net gains spread across most of the states. •

The post Western Australia to the rescue? appeared first on Inside Story.

Testing “public sentiment” in Australia has almost as long a history as in the United States; in September, it will be eighty years since the first Gallup poll, run by Roy Morgan, started gathering Australians’ opinions on a range of issues. Since 1971, when the Australian Sales Research Bureau (for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age) and the Australian Nationwide Opinion Poll (for the Australian) broke the Morgan monopoly, Australian newspapers have commissioned various polling companies to test opinion when public interest in an issue has been “at its height” but also when public interest has barely been engaged.

What is new this year is the arrival of the Resolve Political Monitor. Until now, issue-based polling has been dominated by the Essential Report, whose findings appear fortnightly in the Guardian Australia. In April, to some fanfare, the company that produces the Monitor, Resolve Strategic, run by Jim Reed, began polling monthly for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. Newspoll remains dominant in what it, and most of the political class, sees as the main game — calculating two-party-preferred voting intentions.

Until April, neither the Herald nor the Age had commissioned regular polling since the May 2019 election, when both mastheads — and the Australian Financial Review — predicted a Labor win. All three relied on Ipsos, which estimated that Labor led 51–49 on the two-party-preferred vote, an error slightly less egregious than that recorded by other pollsters, but an error nonetheless.

Resolve, which assures potential clients that it does “the best work,” having been set up “to introduce the advanced research techniques practised by political parties to the communications industry,” wasn’t around for that debacle. Reed insists that survey research questions need to be “understood,” response categories need to be “appropriate,” and there could be “no proxy for proper testing.”

For its latest Monitor, conducted 8–12 June, Resolve was commissioned to “test public sentiment” on Australia’s quarantine capacity, carbon emissions and relations with China, and the uptake of the Covid vaccines. To work one’s way through the Herald’s coverage of the results is to find the odd question without tables or graphs, the odd graph that doesn’t report the response distribution for the sample as a whole, and accounts of the questions that differ between print and online versions if you have sufficient ingenuity to find the two. It is also to become increasingly aware of the poll’s weaknesses (including its polling on individual behaviour around  the vaccine, to which we’ll return); its capacity to mislead readers; and, to the policymakers Gallup privileged, its limited utility.

Some of the weaknesses of the poll should be clear to anyone who has even a passing awareness that polls shouldn’t ask questions many respondents will be in no position to answer. Some of the weaknesses might be evident only to a reader who knows something about how questions should be asked. And some of its weaknesses can be illustrated by reference to other polls — the most recent Essential Media, but also the annual Lowy Institute Poll, whose 2021 poll, conducted 15–29 March, was published in the same week as the Monitor.

QUARANTINE

With the federal government under pressure to allow more Australian citizens back into the country and provide alternatives to the hotel quarantine provided by the states, the Monitor saw an opening: “There has been some debate in the media recently about whether Australia should increase or decrease its quarantine capacity to allow more people to enter the country, and if so how this is best handled,” it told respondents. “On this, which of the following comes closest to your own view?” The responses? “I think the number of people entering Australia should be reduced (36 per cent); I think the number of people entering Australia is about right now (19 per cent); I think we should increase hotel quarantine capacity so more people can enter Australia (7 per cent); I think we should increase purpose-built quarantine camp places so more people can enter Australia (30 per cent); Undecided (9 per cent).” For David Crowe, the Herald’s chief political correspondent, those percentages showed that “there is only minority support for increasing arrivals, even if it is done with more purpose-built facilities.”

But piling the various preferences (fewer, the same, more) and possibilities (“purpose-built quarantine camp places,” “hotel quarantine”) into a single question may not have done justice to what respondents actually wanted — or might have been enticed to consider. Those who wanted fewer arrivals might have been happy to accept the present number if more quarantine places (of either kind) had been on offer. Those who wanted “purpose-built quarantine camp places” may have been equally happy with “hotel quarantine capacity,” and vice versa, had they been allowed to say so — and the response may have changed again if “purpose-built quarantine” had not been described as “camp places.” Some may have wanted to increase the numbers entering Australia but not wanted either more “purpose-built quarantine camp places” or an increase in “hotel quarantine” places.

In the latest Essential poll, also conducted online, in this case on 16–20 June, no fewer than 65 per cent favoured “purpose-built quarantine facilities” as “Australia’s long-term approach to safely quarantining international travellers,” compared with 16 per cent who favoured “home quarantine” (a possibility the Monitor did not entertain), and 9 per cent who favoured “hotel quarantine.” While the two questions are not the same, some of the differences — the much clearer preference for “purpose-built quarantine camp places” over “hotel quarantine capacity,” and the reference to “purpose-built quarantine camp places” rather than “purpose-built quarantine facilities” — are instructive.

CARBON EMISSIONS

According to David Crowe’s lead story accompanying the first results of the June Monitor, “A majority of Australians want the federal government to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 but do not want a carbon price.” Crowe based his conclusion on a question that asked respondents whether their “preferred method for Australia to reduce its carbon emissions” was by putting “a cost on emissions” (preferred by 13 per cent) or by using new technologies (61 per cent). In the print version of the story, the question is prefaced by the words “while both these methods can be used”; but “both methods” was not an option the question went on to offer.

Given the choice, respondents chose “new technologies” over the alternative — the alternative that involved a “cost.” Who would have thought? Not for nothing does the prime minister promote the idea of “technology not taxes.” Surely, he didn’t need the Monitor, or Crowe, to tell him he was “tapping into community sentiment with his vow.” Not many people would choose to pay for a lunch — assuming they might be forced to pay — when they could get one free.

If no one else is paying for your lunch, however, it doesn’t follow that you would not be prepared to pay for it yourself. The possibility that Crowe — and Resolve — had overlooked was that someone who prefers a new technology, especially when their attention is not drawn to any associated costs, may still be willing to have a “cost” put on emissions if new technologies (alone) won’t solve the problem. While the conclusion that people “do not want a carbon price” may have been correct, the reasoning behind it was invalid.

What of the timeline for any “cut”? And how far should the “cut” go? Responding to a separate question — a response that would become the premise for Crowe’s conclusion — 55 per cent of respondents supported “the federal government adopting a 2050 ‘net zero’ emissions target,” a figure revealed in the text of Crowe’s article but not in the accompanying table. The proportion of respondents either opposed to this proposal or “neutral/undecided” (45 per cent) was almost as great as the proportion in favour. In short, there was nothing like the consensus implied by either the front-page headline “Net Zero: Public Is Ready for CO2 Cuts,” or the online headline “Voters Want Australia to Set a Net Zero 2050 Emissions Target, but No Carbon Tax.”

And what did the very large proportion of those who classified themselves as “neutral/undecided” — about a third of the respondents (the report provides no precise number) — understand by words like “adopting,” “emissions targets,” and “net zero” — especially when the prime minister, no less, chooses his words around “net zero by 2050” so carefully? Respondents may have been less clear about what the question meant than the Monitor assumed they would be or the Herald imagined they were.

Perhaps respondents who were reluctant to commit to net zero by 2050 wanted the government to commit to a more modest target but one that could be achieved more quickly. “Asked whether it was more important to concentrate on meeting Australia’s 2030 commitment or to adopt a new 2050 goal [zero emissions?], 42 per cent of voters preferred to concentrate on the earlier target while 29 per cent wanted more importance [sic] on 2050,” Crowe reported; the exact question was published neither in print nor online. The reporting tells us nothing about those who were “neutral/undecided” about net zero by 2050: the 55 per cent who supported net zero may have included those who would have preferred “to concentrate on the earlier target”; but the 42 per cent, for the most part, may have been a different group. As to what, if anything, respondents were told about “the 2030 commitment” — that remains a mystery.

The fact that so many respondents (26 per cent) were “undecided” when asked to choose between “new technologies” and putting “a cost on emissions” may have reflected another problem with this question: it didn’t allow for respondents who did not want Australia to reduce its emissions or didn’t believe that it needed to.

In the Lowy Institute Poll, the majority of respondents (55 per cent) said that the government’s “main priority” in relation to “energy policy” should be “reducing carbon emissions” rather than either “reducing household bills” (32 per cent) or “reducing the risk of power blackouts” (12 per cent). On this evidence, the majority of those who wanted net zero by 2050 may have been prepared to countenance a “cost.” In addition to his reasoning being invalid, Crowe’s conclusion — and Reed’s — that the majority of Australians do not want a carbon tax may have been misleading.

CHINA

Most of the issue questions in June’s Monitor were about China. First, respondents were told that “Australia has taken a number of actions in relation to China in recent years, including those listed below. For each, please tell us whether you support or oppose the action that was taken.” The order of the list, Reed tells me, was randomised or rotated. The options were: strongly support, support, neutral/undecided, opposed, strongly oppose.

Published in descending order of support, Australia’s actions were described in these ways: “Cancelling visas of Chinese citizens suspected of being covert agents” (supported by 71 per cent, opposed by 6 per cent); “Speaking out against human rights issues involving the Uighur” (69–5); “Calling for an investigation into the source of COVID” (66–8); “Launching trade restriction cases against China via the WTO” (63–7); “Reviewing the 99-year lease of Darwin Port” (60–12); “Criticising China on its approach to Hong Kong and Taiwan” (59–10); “Banning Huawei from Australia’s 5G network” (58–9); “Criticising China on its taking over of the disputed Spratly Islands” (56–9); “Cancelling Victoria’s ‘Belt and Road’ agreement” (54–8); and “Warning of the chances of armed conflict with China” (45–19).

The first thing to say about most of these actions is that, unless they were prepared to endorse whatever Australia had done simply because Australia had done it — a point to which we will return — large numbers of respondents would have had little or no basis on which to answer. How many respondents would have heard of or known much about: covert agents and the cancelling of visas; the Uighur; the WTO, even had the acronym been spelled out; the ninety-nine-year lease of Darwin Port; China’s approach to Hong Kong and Taiwan; Huawei or Australia’s 5G network; the Spratly Islands; or Victoria’s Belt and Road agreement, let alone the cancelling of it. And how many would have heard about Mike Pezzullo (secretary of the Department of Home Affairs) or Peter Dutton (defence minister) “warning of the chances of armed conflict”? Most Australians’ knowledge of, or interest in, the finer points of China’s or Australia’s foreign policy is unlikely to be particularly extensive — something that a poll putting words into people’s mouths should not be allowed to disguise.

Just how many respondents had little or no basis on which to answer these questions we cannot say, but the proportions that ticked the box marked “neutral/undecided” provide one clue. The proportions that declined to register a judgement ranged from 24 to 26 per cent (the three actions most widely supported) to 36 to 38 per cent (the three actions least widely supported). These are high numbers; a comparison with the single-digit figure for the “undecided” on the Monitor’s quarantine question is striking.

Those self-identified as “neutral/undecided” in the Monitor no doubt included respondents who knew something of the matter at hand and were genuinely undecided about its merits; but the greater number are likely to have been respondents who hadn’t heard of the matter or given it much thought. And since many respondents will have been unwilling to admit that they knew little if anything about what was being asked, and simply indicated their support for whatever the government had done, the real number of those not in a position to answer is likely to have been much greater than the “neutral/undecided” figures suggest — very likely, over half. Reed himself concluded, on the basis of a quite different survey, that “no matter how inane and ill-conceived your question, and regardless of the inappropriateness of your response categories, a large proportion — perhaps all — survey respondents will try to give you an answer if compelled to do so.”

Had a preliminary question been asked along the lines Gallup once suggested — “Have you read or heard anything about…” — readers (politicians included) would have been much better served; even better, had the substantive question included “Do you have an opinion on this?” or, better still, “Have you thought much about this issue?” Any of these questions may have shown that support for Australia’s actions, not just opposition to them, was the preserve of minorities not majorities; and that the gap between supporters and opponents was narrower than the Monitor figures suggest. Properly pre-tested, these questions may not have been asked at all.

The second thing to say is that the Monitor’s question format lends itself to acquiescence, also known as agreement tendency or yea-saying. Having been told that these were all actions that “Australia” had taken — “Australia” being a cue, for most respondents, likely to carry a high positive affect — and knowing little or nothing about the substance of the actions, a substantial number of respondents are likely to have gone down the list, ticking “strongly support” or “support,” one after the other. Note that in relation to the top nine actions, the range of both “strong support” (33 to 41 per cent) and total “support” (54 to 71 per cent) is quite narrow. Opposition to any of the actions fluctuates even more narrowly (5 to 12 per cent). Both are precisely what we would expect if acquiescence loomed large and cognitive engagement was low.

On what basis would respondents, with little knowledge of these things, dissent? As Reed told the Herald ahead of the Monitor’s launch in April, “What people are thinking about [right now] is how they’re travelling themselves, in their own families and households, as we adapt to life under a global pandemic, and they’re thinking about how our leaders are performing in their response to this extraordinary challenge.”

Had respondents been told that these were the actions of the “Liberal–National Party government,” rather than the actions of “Australia,” respondents would have been given a rather different cue. We might then have expected some respondents to have supported or opposed the ten actions according to whether they were Labor or Coalition voters — more, if Labor objections to any of the Coalition’s actions had been noted; less, if Labor’s support for any of the Coalition’s actions had been noted. Had such a cue polarised the response, it would have narrowed the gap between the proportion that supported and the proportion that opposed the action. While the desire to avoid such a cue is understandable, more thought might have been given to the potential skew introduced by the cue that was chosen in its stead.

Having been taken through this list of Australia’s actions, respondents were then asked: “Do you think Australia should compromise on any of these points if it meant better trade and diplomatic relations with China? Please either pick ‘no’ or choose as many of the options as you like.” Most (56 per cent) of the respondents picked “no.” But “no” wasn’t just one option among many; it was the easiest option — physically, cognitively and emotionally — and in each of these senses the set of options was biased, however unwittingly, in its favour.

Only 12 to 17 per cent went to the trouble of ticking one or more of the other ten boxes, each identifying a different action on which they would be prepared to compromise — the same determined respondents, possibly, ticking more or less all of them. Again, the lack of discrimination — roughly the same low proportion willing to compromise over “criticising China on its taking over the disputed Spratly Islands” and “criticising China on its approach to Hong Kong and Taiwan,” for example — suggests low cognitive engagement. How many ticked no box at all (as many as 27 per cent, potentially, but no doubt fewer) was not reported. The full table was made available online but not in print.

“Some people have said that Australia should not antagonise China as it is a major trading partner with a large military, while others say that Australia should stick to its values, speak up or act against neighbours like China when we feel they are doing the wrong thing. Which of these views comes closest to your own?” This question on China is notable for being the only one that presented Australia’s dispute with China, and what to do about it, in terms of argument and counterargument rather than support for or opposition to a particular government response.

Whether the argument and counterargument were “balanced” is another matter. On the one hand, respondents were presented with a statement about China as “a major trading partner” (an implied risk) with “a large military” (a threat); on the other, they were given a rather longer statement about “Australia sticking to its values” (principled behaviour) against those who are “doing the wrong thing” (unprincipled behaviour). The outcome, surely, cannot have been in doubt: less than a quarter (23 per cent) thought that Australia should “think twice before antagonising” while nearly two-thirds (62 per cent) thought Australia should “stick to values & speak up,” to quote the labels on the pie-chart. On this question, as one would also expect, relatively few (15 per cent) were “undecided.”

Is this a finding worthy of an online headline of this kind — “Australians Wants Nation to ‘Stick to Its Values’ in China Dealings” — in an upmarket daily? Perhaps. But one would have to search quite a way through the annals of polling to find a majority in any country that favoured surrendering to an immoral bully — let alone doing so in the absence of a serious threat of war. Even if respondents imagined that the chances of war were substantial — and the public may be wont to exaggerate such threats — most respondents (75 per cent according to the latest Lowy poll) would have drawn comfort from their belief that “the United States would come to Australia’s defence if Australia were under threat.” Before crafting the question, it might have been a good idea to have considered the pattern of response it was likely to generate, and what — if anything — the pattern would mean.

Having asked about past actions, the Monitor moved on to test the water about future actions. “The Chinese government has said that it may block or place tariffs on other Australian imports in the future. If such trade sanctions were to occur, would you support or oppose the following potential courses of action?” In descending order of support, Australia’s “potential courses of action” were described as: “Focus on finding new export markets outside China” (supported by 79 per cent, opposed by 4 per cent); “Continue to seek a quiet diplomatic solution with China” (63–8); “Take each case to the WTO to try and reverse China’s actions” (56–7); “Restrict or place tariffs on the import of Chinese goods in retaliation” (53–12); “Add export [sic] tariffs on exports to China to compensate affected industries” (53–10); “Push for compensation from China for starting the COVID pandemic” (41–21); “Boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics, to be held in China” (33–30); “Break off diplomatic relations with China, including expelling diplomats” (29–30); “Do nothing so as not to antagonise China and make the situation worse” (15–48).

Here, clearly, respondents discriminated — at least at the top (63 to 79 per cent) and the bottom of the range (15 to 29 per cent). It helped that the two suggestions that were most widely supported referred to actions that no one in Australian public life had opposed: “focus[ing] on finding new export markets outside China”; and “continu[ing] to seek a quiet diplomatic solution with China,” a question that told respondents what Australia was (ostensibly) doing already and essentially invited them to endorse it. It also helped that the two least popular suggestions were actions that no one of any consequence had proposed: “Break off diplomatic relations with China, including expelling diplomats,” and “Do nothing so as not to antagonise China and make the situation worse,” a proposal that might have been understood as rejecting all of Australia’s past actions as well as precluding the search for “new export markets,” and the pursuit of “a quiet diplomatic solution.”

Every proposal that won majority support had to do with trade. Designed to respond to a Chinese tariff wall, proposals that ventured beyond trade — demands for compensation for Covid-19, boycotting the 2022 Winter Olympics, or breaking off diplomatic relations — failed to win majority support.

Noteworthy, too, is that without the comfort of knowing what “Australia” had already done, the levels of support for various future actions were lower at both the top of the range (56 per cent) and the bottom (33 per cent) — ignoring the two most popular and the two least popular suggestions — than they were for past actions (69 per cent and 45 per cent, respectively).

One of the most remarkable features of the Herald’s coverage of the poll is that the high “neutral/undecided” responses — and the exceptions — formed no part of its narrative. Overall, the proportion of respondents who classified themselves as “neutral/undecided” was lower in relation to past actions (an average of 31 per cent) than in relation to future actions (34 per cent); but it was still extraordinarily high. The only question that most respondents could relate to in the list of “potential courses of action” was the one that engaged with the wholly familiar and widely accepted idea of finding new markets; here, the “neutral/undecided” dropped to 17 per cent.

“I think the prejudice,” said Reed, commenting on the results of the questions on future actions in relation to China, “is ‘if this gets resolved and China starts buying our beef and barley again, that’s excellent.’ People see value in the trade relationship and they realise there’s an issue here.” This mercantilist framing of public opinion may be correct, but it is not one that sits particularly well with what the other questions on China purport to show. Nor does it fit well with the findings of the Lowy poll, where “Chinese investment in Australia” was also seen as a negative — and a big one (by 79 per cent) — as were “China’s military activities in our region” (93 per cent). Both were seen as “negative” by substantially largely proportions than in 2016, the last time the Lowy poll checked. And if there were still any doubt, one could look at how China’s favourability ratings have tanked across much of the First World.

DOING THINGS BETTER

All of these questions in the Monitor — the one on quarantine, at a time when the government was pondering whether to move beyond hotels; certainly, the ones on emissions, built around the prime minister’s slogan; but also, those on China — could have been written in the prime minister’s office. The fact that they weren’t tells us that those involved in constructing the poll held strong views of their own; the Herald’s Peter Hartcher, in particular, has just written a book on China. On seeing the results of all the questions, Hartcher wrote of his hope that they would “encourage the federal government in standing against Beijing’s list of 14 demands, and Labor to continue to stand with the government.”

Perhaps that was the point of the polling: to show that public opinion backed the prime minister. In this sense, polling that found majority support for “cancelling visas of Chinese citizens suspected of being covert agents,” for “speaking out against human rights issues involving the Uighur,” for the very public calling-out of China on Covid (though the question wasn’t exactly phrased this way), and so on, while at the same time finding majority support for what the poll, without a hint of irony, described as “continu[ing] to seek a quiet diplomatic solution,” could hardly have been bettered.

If providing cover for government policy wasn’t the point — if the Age and Herald would shudder to think of their polling as a form of propaganda — then the two papers need to reconsider how polls should be done. Crafting questions on matters that are keenly contested — questions that are worth asking in an appropriate manner — means having to take account of more than one view.

An important limitation of the Gallup model, which conceives of polling on an issue as a kind of referendum on that issue — a “sampling referendum” Gallup called it — is that referendums typically involve a single proposition with voters limited to either supporting or opposing it. A question in the Lowy poll, which didn’t follow the referendum model, found that while the majority (56 per cent) supported the proposition that “China is more to blame for the tensions in the Australia-China relationship,” and hardly anyone (4 per cent) agreed that “Australia is more to blame,” more than a third (38 per cent) supported the proposition that “they are equally to blame.” No doubt, had the Monitor asked this question, it would have found something similar.

One way of having polling that acknowledges alternative ways of framing issues is to involve those who hold alternative perspectives in the process of constructing the questions. In the case of China, what the Herald might have done was to have Hartcher sit down with someone like Geoff Raby, whose views on Australia’s relations with China are rather different. The fact that Hartcher and Raby barely reference each other in their respective books might make an exchange between them all the more refreshing. Raby is not necessarily better on China than Hartcher; that question isn’t relevant when it comes to constructing a poll. But Raby is at least as well credentialled. On China, as there are on Covid or on climate policy, there are any number of people who could have helped.

The job of the pollster is to work out how to ask the questions, to advise on the use of argument and counterargument as against approve/oppose, to think about the various assumptions the question makes about respondents or the demands it puts upon them, to pre-test or to build in filters, to contemplate the use of split samples, to organise the sequencing/rotation of questions, and so on.

According to its website, Resolve sees its work as “Always quality,” “Always insightful,” “Always practical” — this last, a dig at “academics, researching for the sake of knowledge or debating theory.” But it’s not just academics who might beg to differ. It would be difficult for anyone concerned with standards in the industry to say that the Monitor’s questions on quarantine, climate or China exemplified “quality” or “insight”; and if they fell well short on either, that the results offered something that was particularly “practical.”

The questions in the Monitor on the Covid vaccine — asking respondents whether they had been vaccinated, whether they were “likely” or “unlikely” to get vaccinated, and so on; and seeking reasons why they may have hesitated — were somewhat better. But these were questions of a different order. First, because asking respondents to report on their own actions, past or planned, is quite different from asking them about issues of public policy, even if people are not particularly good at predicting their own behaviour, especially in unusual circumstances, and response categories can still make a big difference. Second, because following up with a list of fourteen possible reasons, which allows for multiple responses, seems to cover almost all the possibilities, even if respondents are not necessarily very good at explaining their own motivations for doing — or not doing — things; a notable absence from the list is “don’t know.”

The Australian Polling Council, set up in the wake of the 2019 debacle to lift standards in the polling industry, and pollsters’ accountability, is not a body that Resolve wants to join, Reed tells me; apart from not wanting to join a club whose members include some he sees as beyond the pale, he doesn’t want to have to divulge “trade secrets.” If Resolve were to join the APC it might be obliged to lift its standards — if the APC can be persuaded to match the demands of the British Polling Council — and to raise its level of transparency not just by making available its computer tables with the questions, answers and question order but also by revealing some of its other “trade secrets.” The Herald and the Age, endlessly concerned with holding others to account, should insist on nothing less.

“We can’t put all of it in the data centre because of the scale of the results,” Tory Maguire, the Herald’s national editor explained, when announcing the launch of the Monitor, “but we will report on as much of it as our readers find interesting.” As it happens, none of the answers to any of the issue questions (or vaccine questions) polled in the last three months have found their way into “the permanent data centre.” How the Herald judges what its readers find “interesting,” only it would know. But as anyone may judge, there is nothing about “the scale of the results” that would prevent the “data centre” functioning as a repository for every one of the Monitor’s questions and the top-line results. What had sounded promising when it was announced pales by comparison with the repository established by the Lowy Institute. It’s not just the Monitor that needs to reconsider what it does; fifty years after breaking the Gallup monopoly in Australia, and showing that there are other ways of conducting polls, it’s also the Age and Herald that need to reconsider. •

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In its dramatic setting in The Messiah, the aria is a commentary on the loss of leadership, though in this case the message is that the people are to blame. “We have turned every one to his own way,” runs the next line of the text, drawn from Isaiah. If we the people are in trouble, we may have no one but ourselves to blame, but who are we?

“It’s time to find out,” Annabel Crabb announced later in the evening, introducing Australia Talks, a ninety-minute feature on the results of a survey in which 60,000 people across the country were invited to respond to 600-plus questions about their attitudes, habits and opinions. Co-host Nazeem Hussain declared himself “so pumped to be part of this special event” as cheers went up from the studio audience and a graphic of bouncing coloured balls set the party mood. There would be none of Tingle’s astringency here.

Some of the survey’s findings suggest the mood of the nation is upbeat: 80 per cent of us think it’s the best country in the world, a rise of 10 per cent over the past decade; 80 per cent of us are optimistic about our own futures; 79 per cent of us think we should keep the borders closed until Covid is over. How good is Australia?

And yet, as emerged from a series of live crosses to regional centres, many of the responses were far from happy. Forty per cent of residents in Rockhampton, for example, say they have difficulty making ends meet, and the young are especially hard-pressed. One young woman fights back tears as she says she can’t afford to rent somewhere to live and fears she may never be able to move out of her parents’ place. The trickle-down effect doesn’t work, says a train driver.

Fifty per cent of respondents say that capitalism has failed. Seventy-nine per cent think the gap between rich and poor is too big. Sixty-five per cent think that JobSeeker should be raised. Eighty-one per cent don’t trust corporate executives. As if to reassure viewers that no one was going to get too serious about such matters, live-cross host Nina Oyama did a brief stand-up on the theme of capitalism at a Rockhampton club; then it was back to the studio for some fun facts about our sex lives and personal habits.

No doubt the bubbly atmosphere was a careful programming decision: halfway through a second year of intermittent lockdown and social distancing, perhaps it was fair enough to use the survey as pretext for a show that accentuates togetherness and fun. And it should be acknowledged that its findings are being featured elsewhere, including in snapshots of the data from Casey Briggs on ABC News.

Yet the program came across as over-hyped and confused. Contradictory findings — majority concern about economic inequality versus an overall satisfaction with the state of the nation, for example — were ignored. Glib studio banter risked making light of the obvious distress of some interview subjects.

The announcement of the number one issue on which we all agree (“Da-ra!”… “Are we all pumped?”) led to tougher perspectives. Ninety-eight per cent of us think politicians should resign if they are found to have taken a bribe. Ninety-four per cent think they should resign if they lie to the public. Crabb made an awkward attempt to shift to a more urgent register. “In many ways Australia Talks is a cry for help and for more accountability from politicians,” she said.

Fifty-six per cent of respondents think politicians are often corrupt; 72 per cent think they get away with it. Eighty-eight per cent support a federal corruption watchdog. Barrie Cassidy, appearing in a video segment on the theme of trust in politics, said the public should be pushing for the watchdog. “Make them nervous and that might just change behaviour,” he urged, striking a note of moral seriousness that the program as a whole signally failed to sound.

The appearance of John Howard for the concluding section did nothing to help in this regard. If the responses in the survey are to be taken seriously, it was bizarre to call for a warm welcome to the prime minister who so consequentially traded on fake news about weapons of mass destruction and refugees throwing their children overboard.

Like any such attempt to gauge public opinion, the survey behind the program is open to criticism for its methodology. And we should always be wary of attempts to translate pollsters’ respondents into “us,” or Australians in general. For a more circumspect consideration of who “we” are, viewers can turn to Rachel Griffiths’s three-part ABC series Finding the Archibald, which delves into the hundred-year history of the national portrait prize.

Using the medium of portraiture to focus on how we see ourselves needn’t entail any attempt to come up with firm answers. In fact, Griffiths’s explorations serve to deepen the enigma of identity rather than resolve it. Perhaps there is an analogy with the way a good actor works: Griffiths has no need to indulge in flamboyant vitality in order to draw us into the genuine curiosity she so evidently feels for the work of the painter.

As a motif for the series, she takes on the challenge of finding the one painting that, above all others that have been in contention for the prize, represents the face of the nation. It’s a chimera, of course, but she redeems her quest by making it all about the uncertainties and shifting criteria of judgement.

Here she is helped by curator Natalie Wilson, who has the task of selecting one hundred portraits from some 6000 Archibald finalists for a centenary retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. As we look at some of the paintings Wilson has already identified as key works, social and aesthetic transitions are starkly visible.

W.B. McInnes’s inaugural winning portrait of architect Harold Desbrowe Annear, an image of posed dignity in greys and browns reflecting a deeply conservative white Australia, is set against John Brack’s 1969 pop art rendition of Dame Edna Everage. With its gaudy colour palette and satirical attitude, Griffiths suggests, Brack’s is the first portrait that was really about celebrity.

The search for the one painting involves moving through a forest of exploding criteria. As a form of social enquiry, it’s a scoping exercise with requirements that echo those of a good demographic survey. Painters and their subjects must be considered across ethnicity, gender, age, location and employment.

And then there is the range of styles and approaches taken by the painters, many of whom have sought to flout the conventions of portraiture and test the adjudicators. Ultimately, the work must itself be the determinant. “You have to look and look and look and look,” advises Ben Quilty, who has recent experience on the judging panel. “A good portrait is way, way more than a likeness.”

If we, like sheep, have gone astray, it may indeed be time to take a good look at ourselves. One hundred years of the Archibald, with all its controversies, could test our preconceptions about what we will see. •

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Even John Howard’s famous jump in support after the 11 September 2001 attacks and the arrival of the Tampa mostly turned to dust by the time Australians cast their ballots in November 2001. September’s double-digit two-party-preferred leads had whittled down to a touch under 2 per cent, which is probably what the government would have won by if neither event had taken place.

Budget bounces — if and when they happen — tend to be short-lived. And those midterm leadership changes are no more than a sugar hit. Even the big, long rise in figures after Kevin Rudd’s elevation to the Labor leadership in late 2006 ended with an election day result at around the level of his predecessor Kim Beazley’s polled leads.

As an election approaches, swinging voters’ minds turn back to the things they usually vote on. Any desire they have to kick out the current government is tempered by considerations of security, safety and paying off the mortgage.

But the Covid-19 polling boost experienced by all state and territory leaders more than a year ago is the real deal. It just keeps going, and it applies to actual elections as well. The virus and its repercussions permeate our lives, and it’s wrapped in the very same things that drive people’s votes: stability, income, safety. Bread-and-butter issues. Yes, Big Brother has loomed large, but he’s welcome for the time being. People cling to their institutions, their governments and the state apparatus. Border closures, scratching a longstanding territorial itch, are an added bonus.

Five re-elections have shown it’s a brilliant time for incumbent governments in Australia. From the arrival of Covid to last Saturday, four Australian governments had asked for another term: in the Northern Territory, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and, most recently, Western Australia. All had big wins.

But last weekend’s contest in the Apple Isle was different. Unlike the four earlier elections, this time the sitting government was Liberal. And those four earlier elections were held after governments had served more or less their full term.

The fact that the four were all Labor governments matters. When a party is in power federally — as the Liberals are at the moment — voting-intention figures tend to drift towards the other side during a state campaign. And while Labor oppositions have struggled during Covid, the Liberals have had the extra challenge of trying to balance the demands of the wider electorate with those of an excitable support base demanding politically risky pronouncements about lifting restrictions.

The other obstacle Tasmania’s premier, Peter Gutwein, created for himself was his timing. Having observed interstate counterparts reap political rewards, he decided to engineer an early election.

In the end, the Liberal vote of 49 per cent last Saturday was a few points down from what polling during the pandemic suggested, but up on pre-Covid numbers. It was also lower than at the last election. But Labor also went backwards, with the Greens and independents improving. Gutwein won, but not as resoundingly as pre-campaign polling would have led him to believe. So Tasmania did indeed follow a different trajectory from those other states and territories, but still, on current counting, the government seems likely to have achieved, just, a majority (thirteen out of twenty-five seats).

What are the federal implications? Scott Morrison already knows Covid is good for incumbents. He might also take encouragement from Tasmanian Labor’s poor showing. But there’s a caveat. Tasmania is the one jurisdiction where “bandwagon effect” can be said to apply: some voters will back the expected winner to avoid the dreaded minority government, of which Tasmania has had a few. That dynamic doesn’t usually apply to federal elections, although we can expect the Coalition and the Greens to be playing up the prospect of a Labor–Greens government during the next campaign.

In fact, the Morrison government has been the odd one out in the polling. While the prime minister’s ratings have soared, voting intentions have remained mediocre. If they drop by as much as the Tasmanian Liberals’ did, the federal Coalition is gone.

Scott Morrison and his colleagues would love to go early to bank some of that Covid goodwill. Possibly the PM can take some heart from the apparent absence of voter malice towards the premier’s obvious cynicism in cutting parliament short. If there was any anger, it seems to have been overwhelmed by Covid magic.

Covid is still great for Australian governments; the main question is: how long will that last? •

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Probably even more than now, Newspoll was the pollster the political class most obsessed over.

You can read it in the Financial Review here; it apparently earned a private rebuke for the Fin from the then Oz editor (who is now the Fin’s editor-in-chief). But the very next Newspoll did include two-party-preferred figures, and they have ever since. I like to think I played a part in this positive development for humanity, but Simon Crean’s office — which had been complaining to the Australian for quite a while — might have claimed some credit too.

Unfortunately the subsequent Newspoll preference-allocating strategy left much to be desired, culminating in egg on its face at the 2004 election. More on that here.

The point of this skip down memory lane is that, finally, with total major-party support ever-declining (it hit a postwar low of 74.8 per cent in 2019) and preferences becoming ever more important, all pollsters had climbed on the two-party-preferred wagon.

Until last month. That’s when Nine’s Age and Sydney Morning Herald introduced us to their new Resolve Political Monitor, a monthly dive into not just voting intentions but also a range of other issues. There’s a lot to like about it, including a smashing online presentation and an informative “About the data” section. If it all stays online for years (we can only dream of decades) it will be a useful historical resource.

But the killer is flagged in the headline to Tory Maguire’s explainer: “New polling does away with the two-party preferred results and gets behind the issues.”

What? Yes, they’re publishing primary vote numbers but not two-party-preferred numbers. Here we go again.

The decision is cast as a high-minded attempt to improve the tone of Australian political commentary. According to Maguire, “Our readers told us in the past they did not appreciate the ‘horse race’ nature of the way we reported the results of TPP questions” — that’s two-party-preferred — “and they wanted something deeper.” Resolve boss Jim Reed, formerly of the political advisory company once known as Crosby Textor, casts the exercise as akin to the work private pollsters perform all the time for political parties. It’s “about understanding what is going on and helping [parties] decide what to do about it.”

Now it’s true that political opinion polls, outside election campaigns, are something of a blight on our democracy. When Malcolm Turnbull spoke in 2015 of the Abbott government “losing” Newspolls it was a sign that the things had become a competition in themselves. For at least a decade we’ve observed beleaguered party leaders attempting from time to time, usually unsuccessfully, to generate a Newspoll “boost” to shore up their position.

The only solution to this problem would be to do away altogether with contemporaneously published voting-intention polls. If everyone did this, the world would be a better place. But it won’t happen; people interested in and around the politics (like us) crave them.

The Guardian and its pollster Essential have moved some way in this direction, publishing voting-intention figures only in aggregated form, once every quarter. In between, they give other regular and non-regular survey results. According to Essential boss Peter Lewis, “it leaves space for us to focus on the issues and attitudes that inform votes, rather than seeing the vote as the end in itself.” Fair enough. (Not so Essential’s eccentric decision to leave undecideds in its published primary and two-party-preferred numbers.)

But publishing primary voting intentions without a two-party-preferred figure makes no sense whatsoever. Maguire writes that “years of leadership contenders using polling as a justification for knifing incumbent prime ministers led, understandably, to the perception the polling was distorting politics, not just examining it.” Indeed, but on the Labor side at least the knifers have tended to discount the two-party-preferred numbers and cite primary intended votes and personal ratings instead. “Yes, the poll says we’re ahead on the two-party-preferred, but we can’t win with that primary vote/personal rating” was the catchcry leading to Kevin Rudd’s 2010 demise, and had also been used against opposition leader Kim Beazley (by Rudd’s and Julia Gillard’s supporters) in 2006.

Nine and Resolve will still give us personal ratings; indeed, the first report highlighted Scott Morrison’s big lead over Anthony Albanese as preferred prime minister. But if there’s one thing worse than the political class obsessing over two-party-preferred poll numbers, it’s the political class obsessing over primary support and personal ratings.

Resolve’s primary votes have a problem too. Pollsters have long known that including minor parties in their initial voting-intention questions tends to overstate their support. The problem is, leaving them out — to be included in a second question for those who nominate “other” — understates them. (If I ran a polling outfit I’d do half the respondents one way — just the major parties in the initial question — and half the other way, and then combine the two.)

Resolve’s methodology — it tries to replicate the ballot paper — might be okay at election time when candidates are known, but at other times is almost designed to overstate minor-party and independent support. In the first outing, the question “Which party would you number ‘1’ on the ballot paper — Liberal/National, Labor, Greens, One Nation, Independent, Other?” (with options presumably rotated) found implausibly low primary votes for major parties. It will continue to do so unless it’s changed. This probably wouldn’t matter so much if Nine were publishing two-party-preferred figures, where these problems largely wash out. But it isn’t.

The inclusion of One Nation in the opening question is especially risky: it ran in barely a third of electorates in 2019, so mentioning it to all respondents overstates its vote even more — unless it happens to contest all 151 seats next time.

Like Essential’s Peter Lewis, Reed references the 2019 election, when all pollsters put Labor on around 51.5 per cent after preferences and voters instead delivered the Coalition that number. But being shy about two-party-preferred numbers simply points to a lack of confidence. And remember: the primary voting figures contributed about two-thirds of the 2019 error. (About a third can be put down to preference allocations that favoured Labor too much.)

Opinion polls generate excellent publicity for the pollster and good clickbait for the organ that runs them. An arrangement between the two guarantees they will always be on the front and home pages, entrails extracted, importance exaggerated. For it to be worth Resolve’s and Nine’s while, it can’t be any other way. Sure, the headline two-party-preferred figure is facile, but it’s not as facile as whatever else is headlined instead.

What will Nine’s chief political correspondent, David Crowe, write about in the next instalment, in two weeks’ time, apart from again noting the continuing low Coalition primary vote? (Labor’s is also suppressed by Resolve’s methodology, but that offsets an increase found by the other pollsters, leaving it on around the 2019 result.) An issues poll, or Labor’s improved lead on healthcare and aged care, something like that? Interesting, but will it bring in the readers?

Meanwhile, observers such as this writer will go straight to the primary votes and estimate our own two-party-preferred numbers, albeit with the handicap of starting from numbers rounded to the nearest integer.

For what it’s worth, Resolve’s first poll probably comes to a rounded Labor lead of 51–49. After preferences. •

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Both of them were opposition leaders — John Hewson in 1993 and Bill Shorten in 2019 — and they each went on to lose an election they were widely expected to win. In fact, if election-eve betting markets are an indicator of general expectations (and it’s hard to think of a better one), 1993 and 2019 are the only “shock” federal results of the past thirty years.

Less easy to quantify is the fact that both were “big target” elections, with the opposition taking ambitious economic policies to the ballot box. And in both cases the government ran a ferocious negative campaign.

As they say in the classics, “correlation doesn’t equal causation,” and it can’t be claimed that the Press Club no-shows decided the outcomes. In fact both decisions were probably symptomatic of nervousness within the expected victor’s campaign team: we’re ahead, but it’s softening, the last thing we need is a headlined blunder in the final days.

The lesson? Don’t take big, complicated, serious economic reforms to an election, especially from opposition. When John Howard regained the Liberal leadership in 1995, he cast off his 1980s baggage bit by bit: his suspicion of Medicare, his talk of drastic spending cuts and workplace deregulation, his worries about Asian immigration and, of course, his enthusiasm for a GST. The “small target” label was born. And it worked.

The opposition seemed to have learned a similar lesson from the 2019 result. But then, early this year, it announced a great big industrial relations overhaul. I had a rant about the lack of wisdom of this in February; it’s the kind of thing an opposition leader under pressure does to shore up support within the party, but it decreases their chances of electoral success. (The Covid crisis saw this dynamic hit extreme levels across the country as Liberal state and territory oppositions estranged themselves from the middle ground by succumbing to internal pressure to demand an early end to restrictions.)

During the 2019 campaign Labor was burdened not just by its policies but also by a stunningly inarticulate leader, habitually evasive in front of the camera. Still, Bill Shorten had done better than expected at the election three years earlier, and the policy suite back then hadn’t been modest: the same housing policy and the same ambitious climate change target, though without the franking credits. But few voters considered a Labor victory a likely prospect that year, and few had focused on the consequences if it happened. (And, of course, there was also “Mediscare.” The Coalition got their own back three years later with Labor’s “death tax.”)

Maybe one lesson from 2016 is that when no one expects you to win, you can get away with more. In 2019, by contrast, Labor was the heavy favourite, and a Shorten government loomed large.

That lesson goes against the “bandwagon effect” that is popular among political scientists and observers but has never made sense to me. (Except for special circumstances, such as a likely hung parliament, which can propel voters to attempt to give the expected winner a working majority. This might have played a part in Victorian Labor’s shock 2018 landslide.)

Given all that, what will the next election look like?

Assuming Scott Morrison is still prime minister, election-watchers — and indeed voters — will add an electoral-prowess loading to poll-driven perceptions of the likely winner. We saw this at last year’s presidential election in the United States, with Donald Trump given a much better chance of winning than the polls suggested. And the American doubters were proved half right, because a roughly nine-point polled national lead for Joe Biden became a 4.5 per cent margin on election day. (Overall, state-by-state polls also overstated his support.) The polls picked the right winner, but were even less accurate than four years earlier.

We don’t know if Australia’s pollsters have improved since 2019. But those suspicions that Morrison will once again pull off a miracle will assist the opposition.

The government will want Covid-19 to be as prominent as possible, but it’s tricky to hold the election early without appearing not just opportunistic but willing to put lives at risk for political gain. The Tasmanian government is taking that punt as we speak, with a half-believable excuse, but it began the campaign a mile ahead in the surveys. The federal Coalition, by contrast, is generally a bit behind at the moment — if you can believe the polls.

Labor will be led by Anthony Albanese, Tanya Plibersek or Jim Chalmers. Albanese is probably not as uninspiring as he seems; anyone who got the opposition leader’s job in May–June 2019 would be looking worse for wear by now. But no one forced him to grab it. Plibersek has the recognition, is probably Labor’s most accomplished media performer, and would generate the most media pizzazz. Chalmers is a Queenslander (a good thing, electorally) and seems to know his way around a balance sheet. But he’s rather inexperienced and seems susceptible to those empirically nonsensical ideas about coal-mining communities being the key to electoral victory.

Labor’s Achilles heel remains its perceived economic incompetence, the sense that it spends too much when in office. That image is exacerbated by an institutionally ingrained response when the topic is raised: the party’s leaders avoid the question by changing the topic, inevitably if they can, to health and education, as if that will push those two Labor strengths to the front of people’s minds as they cast their ballots. But voters, particularly Australian ones, tend to be risk averse, and those niggling doubts about financial security — repaying that loan, financing those renovations — keep niggling right up until they mark the ballot paper.

When the opposition looks like it doesn’t want to talk about economics, it increases those doubts. This terror of defending its record stretches back to the Rudd and Gillard days; only the departed Lindsay Tanner seemed able and willing to engage on this terrain.

And did I mention the opposition has burdened itself with a big IR platform? •

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More importantly, though, oppositions are no longer like the Labor Party of 1950s South Australia, patiently resigned to continuing failure. Today’s parties are restless on the opposition benches and ruthless in seeking victory. Any leader who doesn’t look like delivering electoral success is on borrowed time.

The landslide election victory of Mark McGowan’s Labor Party in Western Australia last Saturday sent ripples through opposition parties across the land. The Liberal Party was reduced to two seats, its lowest ever tally, and Zak Kirkup became the first opposition leader to lose his own seat in a WA election in eighty-eight years. Antony Green estimated that the combined swing to Labor in this and the 2017 election was around twenty-six percentage points.

The repercussions in the east were immediate. Within just two days, agitation intensified within the opposition parties in the two largest states.

Monday saw Liberal MLA Brad Battin pushing for the Victorian Liberal Party opposition to declare the leadership vacant. Leader Michael O’Brien comfortably squashed the move the following day, twenty-two to nine. He remains in the job, but the safest prediction is that the party will stay entangled in turmoil. Battin didn’t even go through the ritual renunciation of further challenges, and news reports suggest other contenders are circling.

Former premier Henry Bolte once proclaimed Victoria to be the jewel in the Liberal crown. Now it seems to be the most divided branch in the country.

Slightly more subtle was the agitation in Labor’s traditional powerhouse, New South Wales. Over a decade or more, the well-oiled machine driven by such renowned powerbrokers as John Ducker and Graham Richardson has rusted into mediocrity, losing three state elections straight. Despite the scandals and divisions in Gladys Berejiklian’s Coalition government, Labor is still making little progress.

That problem was sensationally played up in a poll published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday. State Labor’s primary vote was just 23.9 per cent, said the headline, and the story talked of a nine-point swing against Labor since the last election. “It’s catastrophic and it’s historic,” contributed former leader Morris Iemma. Labor “would suffer its worst primary vote in almost 120 years,” the article went on, putting “further pressure on the embattled opposition leader,” Jodi McKay.

None of these alarmist claims takes account of the fact that 18.9 per cent of respondents said they were undecided. Once they are distributed across the parties, the swing against Labor is nothing like a nine-point catastrophe. In the 2019 NSW election, the Coalition polled 42 per cent and Labor 33 per cent, which translated into a two-party-preferred 52–48.

McKay became leader following that election after a long contest with fellow right faction member Chris Minns. Minns had the support of two key unions known to be hostile to McKay, the Australian Workers’ Union and the Health Services Union, both of whose leaders are quoted in the Herald article. The Herald reported that the AWU had sponsored the poll and given it to the paper; no doubt the union was happy with its investment, but Herald readers were less well served.

Another Herald poll — by Ipsos in October 2020 — is more revealing. It showed that 22 per cent approved of McKay, 25 per cent disapproved and, more importantly, more than half the electorate had no opinion at all. State opposition leaders always struggle for visibility, and the pandemic has made their problem worse.

Mark McGowan is basking in unparalleled success, sitting on the highest leader approval rating in the country. It’s easy to forget that he badly lost his first election as opposition leader in 2013 — yet the party, against the trend, kept him on as leader. Nor were the next four years smooth sailing. In 2016 former federal minister Stephen Smith, who wasn’t even an MP at the time, challenged him for the leadership. Would Labor have triumphed in 2017 and 2021 if MPs hadn’t rallied around McGowan?

Leaving aside the merits of McKay or O’Brien, what seems to be happening is that the ineffectual performance of opposition parties is destabilising their leaderships in ways that rarely improve their electoral prospects. The WA Liberals, looking for their fifth leader in as many years, should know this better than anyone.

Labor election victories over the past year — in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia — suggest that the pandemic has helped incumbents, at least at state level. This has no doubt fed into the thinking of political strategists in New South Wales and Victoria. But it is far from clear that changing leaders is the solution.

We can’t yet say whether the post-pandemic advantages being enjoyed by state governments will flow to the federal government. There, the polls are much closer, with Labor currently ahead. Perhaps Scott Morrison and his colleagues should remember the fate of Winston Churchill in 1945. Churchill’s prestige as wartime leader was not sufficient to hold back the mood for change and reconstruction. In a shock result, a grateful nation swept Labour into government, thanks partly to women voting in record numbers. •

The post Borrowed time appeared first on Inside Story.

The pandemic was wonderful for antipodean incumbents in 2020. Most spectacularly, it produced New Zealand’s first outright majority since that country’s proportional representation system, MMP, replaced first-past-the-post in 1996.* It was not to be sneezed at in the Northern Territory, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory either.

The dollars are also flowing to a Coalition victory. Scott Morrison is a shoo-in, people reckon — he’s Teflon, approval ratings sky-high, and the Coalition is usually leading in the polls after preferences, by a bit. (Today’s Newspoll, published in the Australian, has it at 50–50.) And we’re talking about ScoMo remember, author of the miraculous come-from-behind 2019 election. The bloke next door; voters love that daggy dad schtick.

But the polls don’t point to a lay-down misère. Votes determine elections, and voting-intention surveys, however imperfect they are, show a close contest. As tempting as it is to believe that big personal ratings (Morrison is on 63 per cent satisfaction in this Newspoll, to Anthony Albanese’s 41, and leads as better prime minister 57–29) portend improvements in voting intentions, the trend, if anything, has been the opposite. The very popular leader tends to artificially inflate the voting-intention figure, which then goes south during the campaign.

Covid-19 will be largely over when the election is held — otherwise it won’t be held, because it’s not due until next year and gratuitously putting the community at risk would be a cynical step too far. But elections are not really pats on the back for a job well done; they involve judgements about who should govern for the next three years.

And there’s a big difference between the next federal election and those listed above. Last year’s all had Labo(u)r incumbents facing centre-right oppositions that had been dragged by an angry, restless base into some politically unwise utterances about opening borders and relaxing restrictions. Federal Labor (like Labor oppositions in Tasmania, South Australia and New South Wales), by contrast, was simply left out of the loop — yes, even more marginalised than oppositions usually are — but the emotions of the Labor base push, if anything, the other way, towards regulation and spending. In fact, any Covid-induced missteps on federal Labor’s part have been into the familiar trap of giving an impression of fiscal irresponsibility.

The election will not be about Covid-19. It will not be about some schmaltzy appeal to the suburbs or battlers or regions, or about leaders showing they share the values and love the footy. It won’t be about which side can show the most enthusiasm for coal, nor who is most serious about tackling climate change. It will, as usual, be largely about economics, that yearning for security. The government’s argument — that only the Coalition can get us back to a sustainable position, that Labor will send us broke — will be powerful. As usual.

But the government will be eight or nine years old by then, suffering sluggish economic conditions (despite some impressive-looking “bounce back” in the short-term data), as it has been for years, with its get-out-of-jail-free card already punched.

Can Anthony Albanese do it? Show me an opposition leader who has been in the position for more than a year (and this one’s approaching two) and I’ll show you one who has started to wear out their welcome, if they ever enjoyed one.

The last two occupants to succeed at the ballot box after being in the job longer than thirteen months were Tony Abbott (2009–13) and Gough Whitlam (1967–72). Abbott, of course, was never much liked or respected, and Whitlam lost his sheen in the final years in opposition. (In 1968–69 Whitlam was in the low 50s and prime minister John Gorton in the low 60s. In December 1971, a Morgan poll had Whitlam on 36 per cent and prime minister Billy McMahon on 37.)

In the olden days, opposition leaders were all but immovable (until three election losses in a row, anyway), but today they’re much more disposable. Abbott survived despite his obvious shortcomings by attacking and attacking, facilitating very good voting-intention numbers. Bill Shorten’s longevity derived from Kevin Rudd’s spill rules, and in the second term consistent, if modest (and possibly, depending how longstanding the 2019 poll fail was, illusory) two-party-preferred voting-intention leads.

Do fresh leaders perform better at the ballot box, or is the record merely a function of recent decades’ turnstile? I think it’s mostly the latter. Albanese, while more articulate than his predecessor, still has presentational issues, and struggling leaders, even if their faults have simply become more evident over time, tend to encourage party rooms to throw the dice.

What can’t be denied is that a leader installed with an election on the near horizon (Kevin Rudd in 2006 and 2013, Abbott in 2009, Mark Latham in 2003, John Howard in 1995… I could go on, back to Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser) enjoy a clear run, free of mischief-making through the media. Usually there’s a honeymoon in which we read profiles of their families and so on, and a boost for the party in the polls, which does wonders for confidence, although the long-term value of either is open to question.

Labor doesn’t have to worry about Covid-19; its hands are clean there. It’s the post-virus recovery, the dealing with the Achilles heel of economic competence, that will be the big challenge.

And of course it needs to ditch its housing and franking credit policies, the site of so much scarifying in 2019. Which is a shame, because the policies themselves weren’t awful, just the dumb idea of taking them to an election. •

* Pedants might insist MMP is semi-proportional; point taken.

The post Early-election watching appeared first on Inside Story.

When an election is on the horizon, they tell us who will probably win. Yes, other ingredients are in the mix, such as a leader who has previously survived against the odds. Remember the lurking suspicion that Paul Keating (in 1996) and John Howard (in 2007) might pull rabbits out of the hat, like they’d done three years earlier?

But expectations are mostly driven by the surveys, reinforced these days by the betting markets, which also mostly come from the polls but are cited as if they’re independent. Political observers often internalise it all, and might even get to a point where they believe they don’t need the polls to tell them what’s going on: they can just feel it; a change of government is coming.

Not all polls are equal. The last polls in the campaign, published on or close to election day, ultimately matter most. That’s an understatement: reputations can live or die on them. If the market researcher gets that final one “right” then all the preceding ones can retrospectively be judged accurate as well. It’s why the pollsters usually put extra effort into that last one.

And sometimes those polls get it spectacularly wrong. When that happens, the fourth estate attracts a lot of criticism for being out of touch. They don’t understand their fellow citizens; they need to get out more. Very often the nagging comes from people who themselves thought the losing side would win. Sometimes journalists respond with performative hand-wringing and mea culpas: we must try harder. But being in or out of touch had little to do with it; it was the polls.

Well-publicised “polling disasters” in recent years include Britain’s shock 2015 election, the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump the following year, and our own “Morrison miracle” last year. But these were not the worst misses. The largest big-ticket polling misfire I’ve found was in the second round of France’s 2017 presidential election, when the final surveys averaged to about a twenty-five-point lead for Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Penn but the result came in at a touch over thirty-two (66.1 to 33.9 per cent). The error largely escaped notice because, of course, a huge win is a huge win.

Our own Victorian state election in November 2018 was rather like that: averaged, the final surveys underestimated the size of the Andrews government’s two-party-preferred vote by more than three points (which means they understated the vote gap by more than six). So Labor was re-elected with 57.3 per cent after preferences, not 54 — who cares (apart from a few unemployed former Liberal MPs)? And in New Zealand this year the final polls were out by about eight points.

In other words, polling blunders only generate a fuss if the contest is pretty close and the error changes the result.

Brexit met these criteria. Its late-survey average of around 52–48 in Remain’s favour ended up 52–48 the other way. A four-point lead one way to four points the other is an eight-point miss. The 2016 error in the United States was only one or two points nationally, but polls dramatically underestimated Trump’s support in the three northwestern states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In each case, survey leads for Hillary Clinton of around five points turned into small (less than one point) Trump victories at the ballot box (or a six-point miss).

A year earlier, in Britain, the final polls suggested about 33.5 per cent apiece for the two main parties, pointing to a likely Labour minority government. Voters delivered a Tory majority, 36.9–30.4. And back home in Queensland that year, an expected narrow-to-comfy Liberal National Party victory became a small Labor one. (That polling failure came mostly from misfired preference-flow estimates, which is harder to avoid under optional preferential voting than in the compulsory version used federally and in Victoria. Queensland has since adopted the federal system.)

Finally, last year’s federal election saw a six-point error, turning the pollsters’ two-party-preferred Labor lead of 51.5 per cent into a 51.5 per cent Coalition victory.

What caused last year’s poll fail? Two days after the election, YouGov/Newspoll boss David Briggs was on the front foot in the Australian, claiming that Labor’s small national lead in the polls, after a pre-campaign narrowing, had never justified the wide expectation that Bill Shorten would become prime minister. That’s true enough at a macro level, but it doesn’t explain YouGov/Newspoll’s own final survey misses, or the exit poll on election day showing Labor on 52 per cent. Briggs also claimed vindication in some individual seat polling, but swing-wise, as blogger Kevin Bonham pointed out at the time, they were “just as bad as the national polls.”

In July this year, Essential’s Peter Lewis described a few changes his company had made, including weighting state by state. On preferences, Essential “will now be asking participants who vote for a minor party to indicate a preferred major party. Only when they do not provide a preference will we allocate based on previous flows.” This remains problematic because it still doesn’t take account of how-to-vote cards, which were the main cause of the difference between 2016 and 2019 One Nation flows.

Essential’s two-party-preferred numbers will henceforth be published with undecideds included (which is actually how the Americans, with first past the post, tend to do it). It’s good to know the percentage of undecideds, but publishing a pair of numbers that add to something under one hundred isn’t exactly a giant leap for mankind. Essential’s chief problem, which it shared with the others, was in the primary votes: too many for Labor and too few for the Coalition. (Ipsos can claim to have got Labor’s primary vote right, but it habitually overstates the Greens at the expense of Labor, and its Coalition number was way too low.)

What’s interesting is that the Great Australian Poll Fail was different from most of its international counterparts. Take the five final Brexit polls, which ranged from a ten-point Remain lead to a single point Leave’s way, averaging to four points in favour of Remain. A similar variety shows up in the state polling misses in the United States in both 2016 and 2020. In Australia last year, by contrast, you didn’t need a calculator to average the final five surveys, because they all said almost the same thing: Labor on 51, 51.5 or 52 per cent, Labor leads of two to four points.

What was going on? Some have suggested that the pollsters “herded,” and not just in the final polls. Kevin Bonham and others sounded the alarm during the campaign, and some had detected it in the 2016 federal election as well. The herding theory says that pollsters twiddle their figures to avoid standing out from the crowd. If every other pollster has Labor on 51 or 52 per cent, and your results give the Coalition 51, publishing and being damned would be courageous.

Back in the 2001 federal election, Roy Morgan Research showed immense courage when its polls showed Labor headed for a big win when the others all said the opposite. The others were right (although they all overstated the size of the Howard government’s victory) and Morgan lost its contract with the Bulletin magazine the next year.

One complication with applying the herding theory to the 2019 election was that the uniformity in the two-party-preferred findings belied a larger range of surveyed primary votes, with Coalition leads over Labor ranging from one to six points. Our compulsory preferential voting system tends to smooth results: shifts between Labor and Greens, for example, are mostly ironed out at two-party-preferred level. Herding would have involved adjusting published primary numbers as well (which wouldn’t be too challenging).

Is it possible that compulsory preferential voting, and rounding to the nearest integer to produce two numbers that add to 100, can give the appearance of herding? Do pollsters’ strategies for estimating preference flows have a smoothing effect? Maybe a bit. Perhaps two-horse races inevitably look a bit herded: Macron’s final polled 2017 numbers against Le Pen were 63, 62, 63, 62, 61.5, 62 and 62. And first-past-the-post Britain looked very herded (and wrong) in the final days of the 2015 election.

After last year’s federal election, the Association of Market and Social Research Organisations, or AMSRO, asked a bunch of brainy folks, including some very distinguished ones, to get to the bottom of it all. Their final report was published last month. (Media release here, executive summary here and full report here.)

A very long, deep-diving, fine piece of work it is, with the tables alone worth the price of entry.

But the authors don’t bury the lede (or not much anyway): they were seriously handicapped by a lack of cooperation from the four pollsters involved (four because YouGov and Newspoll are run by the same outfit). To seriously investigate what went wrong, they needed unweighted, unrounded data and details of sampling methodologies at the very least, but nothing like this was forthcoming. The most important consequence is that the herding question is explored but in the end left unanswered.

The report’s chief finding is that the pollsters’ samples were unrepresentative — too many educated, politically engaged Labor supporters — and there was not enough weighting to correct for that. That’s similar to Brexit and Trump 2016; but, as this paper notes, Australia’s pollsters last year didn’t feel the need to take account of any of those overseas lessons, probably because they had a splendid 2016.

The “shy” voter thesis, which has respondents too ashamed to admit they’re voting conservative, is convincingly dispensed with. This is a different proposition to the scenario of conservative voters disproportionately declining to participate in surveys, or not even being asked to, which is what seems to have happened. (Note that in France 2017, Victoria in 2018 and New Zealand in 2020, any “shy” respondents would have been supporters of the more left-wing party or candidate.)

Estimating two-party-preferred numbers from primary-vote support accounted for some of the misfire. It’s not the first time this has happened, and it’s not the worst; 2004 holds that honour. Relying solely on 2016 preference flows, when it was obvious that One Nation’s would more heavily favour the Coalition this time, was an unforced error. Newspoll/YouGov seems to have adjusted that assumption, although not, as it turned out, by enough. (During the campaign I suggested several times that pollsters’ two-party-preferred numbers were probably too kind to Labor.) It accounted for about 1 per cent of the two-party-preferred miss. The bigger problem was in the primary figures.

Does the pollsters’ refusal to share their sausage-producing lend weight to the herding thesis? You bet it does. But then, Australian polling, as this report illustrates, is the Wild West in the international context. Each outfit revels in its mystique and jealously guards its herbs and spices. If you’ve ever wondered (as some poll-watchers have) why the figures released by YouGov (previously Galaxy) display so little volatility, this analysis leaves you none the wiser.

It turns out that most of the pollsters scrutinised in this report are not even members of AMSRO. (YouGov joined in July 2020.)

In October this year, all of the aforementioned pollsters, except for Morgan, established, along with a few other pollsters, a new group, the Australian Polling Council. The press release announcing the formation contains a blessing from AMSRO, “welcom[ing] the formation of the Australian Polling Council as we believe that collective industry representation is vital to being able to establish and police appropriate quality and disclosure standards in the conduct of public opinion polling.” Many individuals in these pollsters are also members of the Research Society, and Morgan is a partner. A bit confusing for anyone outside the industry.

Among its recommendations, the AMSRO report puts forward a bunch of proposals involving pollsters signing up to robust governance rules, with “an appropriate arbitration and sanctions process.” Great idea, but I wonder how likely that is.

Then there’s this, from the discussion of international standards: “researchers/pollsters must not make claims that exceed the limits of the scientific principles on which opinion polls are based and be sure that interpretations and statements are fully consistent with the data.” It’s true: overstating the importance of an individual poll is the journos’ preserve, and that’s not going to change. If those who buy (or at least run) the surveys started treating them with the (lack of) significance they deserve (outside campaigns), they would cease to be publishable, at least on page one. Political polling is great publicity for market researchers, which is why they usually do it at cut price, or provide it free.

There’s a big underlying problem, of course. Three decades ago, 90 per cent or more of Australians had a landline telephone and would usually answer it when it rang. Now there’s a shrinking pool of available respondents and those who agree are more skewed towards the politically engaged. (The same with recruits to online panels.) Do the politically engaged tend more to the left than they used to? Is weighting by education the elixir some claim? In the 2020 American election, at which nearly everyone weighted by education, the poll average again overstated the Democrat candidate’s lead — by more than it had in 2016 nationally, in fact, and by about the same amount in key states.

(There’s a fascinating FiveThirtyEight podcast with J. Ann Selzer, who conducts polls for the main newspaper in Iowa’s capital, Des Moines. Her track record for that state’s contribution to national events, including the 2020 election, has been excellent, with some apparent outliers ending up vindicated. She’s a weight-by-education sceptic.)

Australian pollsters will always have the added problem of estimating two-party-preferred votes. They have to decide which minor parties are included on the initial list of parties offered to respondents. If they’re left off, their support is likely to be understated. If they’re included, it’ll probably be overstated. Until recently this has mostly been about Labor versus Greens support, which didn’t really matter in two-party-preferred terms. But supporters of One Nation (and recent variations of Clive Palmer’s parties) are more susceptible to following how-to-vote cards. And if people tell a pollster they’ll vote for the United Australia Party, but then don’t, who will they vote for?

I have a suggestion for pollsters: for half of their sample include only Labor and Coalition and “someone else” in the initial question, and for the other half offer a liberal list of parties. Comparing the two groups over time could be illuminating, giving clues to strength of support. Some pollsters ask respondents for preferences without necessarily publishing them, which is a desirable habit if only, again, for academic purposes. Pollsters should be more bold when anticipating likely preference flows, taking into account minor parties’ expected how-to-vote cards as well as recent elections.

Weighting is the obvious solution to unrepresentative samples. But as the AMSRO report notes, the more you fiddle, the greater the theoretical error. Maybe survey more people. Or maybe not; in 2019 the larger surveys weren’t necessarily more accurate. Education (university degree or not) seems blunt. A computer scientist, engineer or accountant is going to skew differently from an arts graduate, and perhaps be less interested in politics and less likely to respond to a survey.

Finally, Australians pollsters have long had a Queensland problem: federal Labor support is overstated midterm, and gradually whittles away as election day approaches. This happened again in 2019, and then some, and accounted for a lot of the failure. As the trajectory is always down as election day approaches, it can’t just be about sampling. It’s about what’s going on in Queenslanders’ heads. I don’t know what the solution might be.

We are now eighteen months into this term, and an election can be held from August next year without getting the two chambers out of sync.

In the United States, despite Joe Biden’s much bigger poll lead than Clinton’s four years earlier, general expectations, as measured by betting markets, favoured the Democrat to win but not by as much as they had in 2016. So observers factored in the 2016 poll miss, and the fact that Trump was candidate again. The result, closer than the polls indicated, vindicated this scepticism.

Whether our election is next year or in 2022, most of us will similarly downgrade the polls’ accuracy because of the 2019 result and Morrison’s perceived prowess. Labor would need a much bigger published lead (say, an average of 55–45 after preferences) to be perceived as the sure thing most believed in 2019. And with the chastened pollsters more nervous than last time, the temptation to find safety in the crowd could be even stronger.

Those motivations to herd aren’t going away. •

The post The polls, and nothing but the polls appeared first on Inside Story.

It was certainly a poorer result than most expected, but we can imagine if the order of counting had made it look the opposite: an apparently comfortable seventy-nine-seat haul on the night that enabled the prime minister to claim victory but was eventually whittled down to seventy-six. A different narrative arc with different real-life consequences.

It happened because of a large number of postal and pre-poll votes, which favour the Coalition. The proportion of voters availing themselves of early voting leaps at each poll; because the makeup of these electors is unknowable, it isn’t possible to accurately anticipate and tweak numbers to make allowances. (So far, in 2016 and 2019, early voters have remained surprisingly strongly pro-Coalition; you’d expect the advantage to dilute as the numbers grow.)

Anyone who vaguely followed this year’s US presidential election campaign would have been aware that most Americans had already voted by 3 November, and the early voters very heavily slanted towards the Democrats. So we all knew that the votes counted first, which in most states were election day ones, would favour Donald Trump more than the votes counted later. And there was a strong suspicion (not least because it was told to Axios by White House insiders) that if Trump were ahead in the election day count he would claim victory and delegitimise further updates of the numbers as fraud.

That’s exactly what happened. But when the counting is over, Joe Biden will probably have a 4 to 5 per cent lead in the national vote, and an electoral college haul in the low 300s (out of 538) — similar to, say, the 2012 result that brought Barack Obama’s re-election. But it will have happened by what seems a tortuous path, because of the order the votes are counted.

Some are still making much about this “close” result, but that should subside once the actual numbers are tallied. Meanwhile, there are short-term real-life risks from Trump supporters who sincerely believe that they and he have been robbed, though that would have happened to some extent regardless.

Yet the polls foretold a much more one-sided outcome. They certainly failed in that sense, but were they so bad in historical terms?

In aggregate, they seem to have overstated Biden’s position relative to Trump by about four points, both nationally and in the important states. That’s worse than last week’s Queensland election, when the final Newspoll showed a one-point primary vote lead for Labor and the voters delivered (on current numbers) one of 3.8 per cent. (The estimated two-party-preferred gap seemed to have missed by a bit more, between 3 and 4 per cent.)

The polls at our last federal election failed by a comparable magnitude to America 2020, as did those for Brexit in 2016 and for Trump’s election the same year. And they were out by even more at the last Victorian election in 2018, underestimating the Labor lead by at least 6 per cent. But they picked the right side.

America is a bit different. It has so many polls, dozens and dozens of them, nationally and in vaguely contestable states, and that should make for more accuracy overall.

Still, at Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, the polls were out by three or four points. But they too understated the size of his re-election and so largely emerged unexamined.

Was there ever a golden age of accurate opinion polls? Our most looked-at pollster, Newspoll, has been in the field since 1985. At its first two federal elections, in 1987 and 1990, its primary vote results (which is what it measures and, back then, was all it published) were absolute shockers, saved only by the fact that the party it (wrongly) had ahead in primary votes (Labor) ended up with a majority of seats thanks to preferences. In 1987 the election eve Newspoll gave the Hawke Labor government a primary vote lead of 5.5 per cent; the result was a 0.8 per cent lead for the Coalition. In 1990 a 2 per cent Labor lead in the final survey contrasted with a 4.1 per cent deficit at the ballot box. So Newspoll was out by over 6 per cent both times.

It got better, but there’s a fair bit of hit and miss in the record. Our preferential system tends to smooth out mistakes and volatility: if the Greens are overestimated at Labor’s expense, or vice versa, it mostly comes out in the two-party-preferred wash. Similar with the Coalition and One Nation or a Clive Palmer party.

Three decades ago it was a challenge for pollsters to allow for those 5 per cent of people without landlines. Now the challenges are more immense, and the polling methods more sophisticated, cheaper, and more reliant on weighting.

One factor in the 2020 American election is that with the majority voting before election day, the “late swing” thesis can’t work. Pollsters were asking those many early voters to say whom they had already voted for. •

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“Historical,” you say?

The article itself, by Simon Benson, is a little less assertive, reporting a 2 per cent first-preference Coalition increase from a fortnight ago and a “corresponding fall for Labor, which has returned to near-historical lows of 34 per cent.”

In Newspoll terms there’s nothing historical about it; the Gillard government of 2010–13 often registered primary-vote numbers less than 30 per cent, bottoming at 27.

But in the context of actual election results the Australian is on safer ground. A 34 per cent primary vote would be, well, historically very low, although an improvement on the 33.3 per cent Labor got at last year’s election.

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that 34 per cent is a small proportion of the electorate. Past Labor leaders, successful or otherwise, would find it hard to believe the party could sink so low.

Can Labor win with 34 per cent? Not if the Coalition is on (as this Newspoll has it) 43, the Greens are on 12 and One Nation is 3. It would probably lose with about 49 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, which happens to be Newspoll’s estimate. But if the previous fortnight’s Newspoll was replicated at the ballot box — 36 per cent for Labor versus 41 for the Coalition — Labor would get a two-party-preferred vote of about 51 per cent in today’s climate, which is usually enough for victory.

It’s the “c” in “compulsory preferential voting” that keeps Labor competitive at the federal level. If it were an “o” for optional (like in New South Wales) you could shift another 1 or 2 per cent (more like 2) from Labor’s two-party-preferred column into the Coalition’s.

Way back in the decade before last, Labor “sources” seeking to undermine their leader — those who denigrated Simon Crean because they wanted a return to Kim Beazley, and then those among the Crean/Gillard forces getting their own back against Bomber — would confide to journalists that “it,” the Labor primary vote, “needs a four in front of it” if the party is to be at all competitive. (Usually this would be prefaced by “mate,” because it is written somewhere that this is the preferred mode of address of party apparatchiks when dealing with our fourth estate.)

Then Labor won a slender two-party-preferred majority in 2010, with 38 per cent of the primary vote. (That involved overhauling a five-point primary-vote deficit with preferences, mostly from the Greens. It was only the second federal election at which the primary-vote loser won the two-party-preferred vote; the other was the Hawke government’s second re-election in 1987.)

So for the last ten years it’s been “(mate,) it needs to be in the high thirties.” But the truth, in our voting system, is that neither side’s primary vote means much in isolation; the result depends on what the other side gets, and what the minor parties and independents receive and where their preferences flow. One of Labor’s worst results ever, the landslide after the 1975 dismissal, came off a 42.8 per cent primary vote, which the party would have killed for at any election over the past decade. (Preferences in 1975 barely improved it, to an estimated 44.3.)

It is little noted that in 2019 the Coalition’s 41.4 per cent was its second-lowest primary vote since the second world war and the creation of the Liberal Party. Its lowest was in 1998, which those with long memories will recall the Howard government survived despite losing the national two-party-preferred vote by a Trumpish 2 per cent.

You get the picture: it’s two-party-preferred votes that count, not primary ones.

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that Australia’s oldest political party attracts barely a third of the national primary vote. Is it on the way out? You bet it is. So are the Liberals and Nationals. It’s not if, but when.

In the meantime, there are still elections to contest and two-party-preferred majorities to aim for. •

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A couple of days later Roy Morgan reported high support among Victorians for stage four lockdown measures.

And on Monday, the Australian’s Newspoll reported a lopsided response to its question about an area of conflict between the two spheres: a great big 80 per cent of respondents believe that “premiers should have the authority to close borders or restrict entry of Australians who live in other states.” Now, the wording is a bit once-removed — almost going to the constitutionality of these measures rather than whether premiers should act on such authority — but it’s a reasonable indicator of a high level of comfort with state and territory border closures.

(Respondents would probably be particularly supportive of their own jurisdiction’s decisions, and a state breakdown of these numbers, for Western Australia and Queensland in particular, would be illuminating.)

Now public goodwill, even if it can never be close to unanimous, is important for compliance. For this reason alone, authorities will be happy with these survey findings.

But what else does the widespread community support tell us?

One thing it certainly doesn’t indicate is that the federal, state and territory governments have adopted the “correct” approach. Any judgement on that question belongs in the future, when the pandemic is actually “over,” perhaps via international studies comparing various indices.

And in this situation, more than most, we would hope that government decisions are not driven by public opinion. On the evidence, they reflect technocratic and health considerations, although the rhetoric has at times wandered into demagogy. (Yes, I’m looking again at Labor premiers in the two big outlier states, Queensland and Western Australia, one of whom faces an election next month, and the other early next year.)

Much of the public approval would flow regardless of particular Covid-19 strategies. The wartime analogy is only a little overused: around the planet, heightened insecurity is driving many people further into the arms of governments and leading many to rediscover the value of collective action and community. Extreme outliers like the United States and Brazil, and perhaps Britain, where governments have ostentatiously made a mess of it, are exceptions to the rule.

And the longer-term politics? It would be a mistake to assume that governments will earn the undying gratitude of their communities. Voters are fickle and unsentimental, and memories can be short: policies that are unpopular when they are introduced — John Howard’s GST, for example — might subsequently receive a tick. For the inverse, see Kevin Rudd’s GFC stimulus, widely supported across the community, which eventually came to be seen as emblematic of Labor’s supposed fiscal recklessness.

But undeniably, as NT first minister Michael Gunner can attest, the short-term politics remain excellent for incumbents. Surveying voting intentions is notoriously difficult in the Northern Territory, and diseconomies of scale (its population is less than half Tasmania’s and smaller than Canberra’s) make opinion polls a rarity. Still, the few polls published suggest, tentatively, that by the time last month’s election took place the Labor government had made big gains on its position only months before.

But let’s return to that Essential question: “How would you rate your state government’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak?” Back in early May, Queensland’s Labor government attracted the lowest total “good” rating out of the five states surveyed (Tasmania was left out). Last week, while the other four states registered drops in approval, Queensland shot up to 73 per cent, coming in second after Western Australia.

You might call this fortuitous, with that election in October. Or maybe it’s the result of closing the borders (with the two most heavy-handed states being the most approved of). And perhaps it’s also because the election is approaching, and voters are turning their minds to what will be at stake.

Polls this year have had the opposition Liberal National Party slightly ahead in Queensland, on 52 per cent after preferences in June and 51 per cent on 30 July. But it will be surprising if the Palaszczuk government doesn’t enter the official campaign with a lead. And, given the opposition’s less-than-enthusiastic support for the government’s pandemic measures, it will also be surprising if Labor doesn’t prevail on 31 October.

What you can be sure of is that Annastacia Palaszczuk, like Michael Gunner before her, will do her best to make it all about the virus. Not about a job well done (elections are always about the future, and this pandemic is not close to being over) but about the dangers of changing strategy, of throwing away the results of all this sacrifice.

Way back in 1987, in the midst of the balance-of-payments crisis, Bob Hawke’s federal government employed the re-election theme Let’s Stick Together. Among the John Singleton–supplied lyrics were these: “Nobody ever got anywhere changing horses in midstream … Together, let’s stick together (repeat chorus)…”

That seems like a pretty useful message for incumbents in the time of Covid-19. •

The post Together, let’s stick together appeared first on Inside Story.

Over in New Zealand, the National Party responds by churning through leaders. Over here the strain is evident in all jurisdictions, but particularly where Labor is in office.

Parties under pressure tend to showcase their contradictions and flaws. At the moment, Labor oppositions in New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania, and, of course, federally merely find themselves out of the loop and irrelevant. The centre-right oppositions (the other states and territories) have the added problem, to varying degrees, of grappling with matters of identity.

Across the nation, hardcore Labor (and Greens) supporters are largely untroubled by the expanded government presence in our lives, the seas of red ink and the public dollars sloshing around. In fact some (I’ve seen them on Twitter) hope it ushers in a socialist nirvana. But many ideologically committed conservatives, including in party rooms, are insurrecting, dragging opposition leaders into unpopular (and nonsensical) positions.

This is most evident in Victoria, where shadow minister Tim Smith, the chief parliamentary conduit of discontent, has for months made life difficult for leader Michael O’Brien, and in Queensland, where an attempt to topple Liberal National leader Deb Frecklington culminated in the resignation of the party president and a series of confused utterances about border closures.

Those fiscal and libertarian purists might be angry with governments of all colours, but the prime minister, premiers and chief ministers remain snug and secure inside their approval-rating-driven authority. So far, that is — voters can be fickle. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s recent invocation of conservative legends Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, an attempt to tug the warriors’ heartstrings, indicates an appreciation of the tension.

There’s an added dynamic: incumbents, all of them members of the national cabinet, are largely sticking together. Well, avoiding attacking each other. Directly, anyway. Some MPs, including some senior ministers, have indulged in feel-good Labor government–bashing in their own states. Most high-profile have been Peter Dutton, on Queensland borders, and Dan Tehan, who had to backtrack a few hours after dumping on the Victorian premier on the ABC’s Insiders. But none of this stuff is coming from national cabinet members.

It’s true that Scott Morrison’s office briefs journalists about government dissatisfaction with the Victorians, but he himself doesn’t criticise. Overtly. In return, Daniel Andrews holds the prime minister close, letting no daily press conference go by without proclaiming the constancy and effectiveness of their working relationship.

The federal government’s decision, since reversed, to join Clive Palmer’s legal challenge against Western Australia’s border closure was a strange interlude. But when attorney-general Christian Porter is involved in decision-making, odd things can happen.

This intersphere support further isolates oppositions. One novel consequence is the unity ticket between the Liberal leader in Victoria and the Labor leader federally over the need for parliaments to sit as soon as possible.

It also means that the upcoming elections in the Northern Territory, Queensland and the ACT won’t be anything like business as usual. Tirades backwards and forwards between Morrison and all those Labor premiers/chief ministers will presumably be kept to a minimum.

For the other oppositions (apart from Western Australia, with an election due next March), logic would dictate they should be patient, wait out the crisis, and prepare for when business has returned to something approaching normal. But to varying degrees their leaders are under the gun, and for some of those leaders the damage will be permanent.

Remember the global financial crisis. It gave Kevin Rudd something to do just when the new prime minister’s apparent inability to extricate himself from the nightly news cycle was starting to look like a serious problem. By December 2008, as the stimulus payments were landing in voters’ bank accounts, his Newspoll satisfaction hit 70 per cent, his second-highest ever. Under Malcolm Turnbull, the opposition supported that first round of stimulus but opposed the second. That might have seemed dumb at the time — it went against the demands of everyone from ACOSS to the Business Council — but it set his party up to exploit the “debt and deficits disaster” at the next election and beyond. “His party” is a necessary qualifier because Malcolm wasn’t around to reap the rewards.

And as Rudd’s 2010 fate illustrated, fortunes can change quickly, particularly if an incumbent’s newly created X factor is crisis-induced.

What’s federal Labor leader Anthony Albanese to do? Try to anticipate the context of the next election and plan for that, but most of all, as a more seasoned politician than Turnbull and aware of his own mortality, he will prioritise not losing his job in the meantime.

That’s quite a balancing act. •

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Is 9 per cent a lot?

In the Australian vernacular we’d be talking about an anticipated 54.5 per cent two-party-preferred vote for one side and 45.5 per cent for the other, which would certainly qualify as a landslide. We last saw one that big when Malcolm Fraser was re-elected in 1977. (1975 was even bigger, 55.6 to 44.4.)

If I were writing this in early November, on election eve, we could be pretty sure that Biden would be the next president. But maybe not as certain as we might once have been, because of recent high-profile poll fails. And remember also that Trump won the presidency in 2016 despite losing the national vote by 2.1 per cent. In uniform swing terms he did it with a 0.7 per cent buffer: anything less than 2.8 per cent would been enough to clinch an electoral college majority.

(A homegrown equivalent was John Howard’s 1998 re-election with 49 per cent of the two-party vote to Labor’s 51. Assuming a uniform swing, the Coalition could have survived with seventy-five out of 148 seats had it received just 48.3 per cent of the vote — a 3.4 per cent loss to Labor’s 51.7.)

FiveThirtyEight estimates that Trump’s likely electoral college advantage in 2020 is a bit bigger than last time, although that may be shrinking. If we conservatively assume it’s 2 per cent, that effectively whittles Biden’s lead to 7 per cent.

Have opinion polls been out by 7 points recently? You bet. Remember, we’re talking in terms of one side’s lead; every per cent that moves from one major candidate to the other increases the gap by double that. So, yes, polls have made mistakes of similar magnitude many times, and not just recently.

A polling mistake makes headlines when (a) the election is high-profile, in a high-profile country, like America or the United Kingdom, or in one’s own country, and (b) the error makes a difference to the win–lose outcome.

In Victoria in November 2018, the final polls had the Andrews government easily ahead on 53 or 54 per cent after preferences, but the result came in much bigger at 57.3. A predicted win by 6 or 8 became 14.6 percentage points. Yikes, how embarrassing. Luckily the right side won. Also, no one outside Australia was paying attention.

But in lead terms they missed by about 7 per cent.

Brexit in 2016 was watched the world over. The final polls averaged to around 51–49 in Remain’s favour. It ended up 51.9–48.1 the other way, a 6-point turnaround. A slightly better performance (with many more polls) than Victoria, but the “failure” reverberated across the globe.

At our last federal election, in 2019, final polls were out by about 3 per cent, predicting around 51.5 per cent for Labor when the result was 48.5 — another 6 per cent turnaround.

All of those examples were election-eve failures. But we are more than three months away from this election, which is a long time in survey land. Have past American presidential election results moved by 7 points or more in that final hundred days? Certainly; many times.

Part of the problem is that the picture is muddied by both parties’ national conventions, where they formally nominate their candidates. These highly choreographed affairs last several days and are supposed to generate a “boost” in the polls, and usually do. (Whether “boosts” are sustainable or usually fleeting by nature is another topic.) They are usually held in July or August, but sometimes in September.

In 2020, because of Covid-19, both conventions are late, and will be shadows of their former selves.

So, after hours of research (or maybe a quick visit to Wikipedia), I compiled a table of presidential election-year polls from 1936 (when the Gallup method of random sampling became de rigueur) to 2016. The biggest July to November change on record was in 1976. The only July poll, taken after the Democrat convention, had Jimmy Carter at more than double the incumbent, Gerald Ford, 62–29. The election-day victory was by a modest 2.1 per cent (the Republican convention was in August), a 31 per cent collapse in Carter’s lead. Obviously that dwarfs Trump’s challenge.

The 1988 Democrat collapse was also spectacular, with Michael Dukakis going from an average lead of 11.5 in July to a 7.8 per cent loss, a 19-point turnaround that would obviously see the Donald romp home. Again, conventions played a part. (Dukakis’s ill-fated tank stunt took place in September, after the Republican convention, when George Bush had already taken a sustained lead.)

And the biggest July to November gain for a Democrat — or drop for a Republican — was in 1936.

Let’s narrow it down to elections at which a president is seeking another term. Incumbent Barack Obama made a modest 3-point gain in 2012 against Mitt Romney, and George W. Bush did the same against John Kerry in 2004. Hullo, do we have a pattern? Sadly, no, because in 1996 Bob Dole made substantial gains from mid-year. In fact Bill Clinton’s eventual 8.5 per cent win was smaller than any opinion poll since January that year.

And in 1992 the self-described comeback kid’s November achievement looks impressive compared with June (a gain of 17 points) but not July, after his convention boost.

Ronald Reagan (1984) gained 6 points, Richard Nixon (1972) went up by 4, while Lyndon Johnson in 1964 lost ground 9 points against Barry Goldwater. (The famous “Daisy” advertisement was released in September; no evidence to support the received wisdom that it was crucial to the outcome can be found in these published polls.)

How about 2016, Hillary Clinton’s shock loss? The gap change between July and November rounds to zero. That is, Clinton led by an average 2 per cent in July, and that’s what she won by in November. The election-eve polls generally had her ahead by around 3 per cent, which is nothing to be ashamed of compared with 2.1. Had it translated to an electoral college win no one would have blinked an eyelid. Crucially, the pollsters did fail in a few states.

But all elections are different and, as with much of the Trump presidency, this one is particularly so.

What can be said is that Biden’s lead is sustained and largely reflects a big swing among college-educated whites. But cohorts have been known to flirt with one side in surveys only to return to the fold as the big day approaches. (In Australia during the Howard years, women repeatedly polled well for Labor in Newspoll before moving back to the government by election day. Queensland almost always overperforms for Labor in the surveys compared with the ballot box.)

Will those small-c conservative Republicans and Independents actually vote Democrat when push comes to shove? At the time of writing Trump has just delivered one of those press conferences (on Covid-19) where he impresses the beltway by following the autocue and saying only sensible things. Almost like a normal president.

Has he the discipline to maintain such behaviour? Would it be enough to bring back those “rational” Republicans? Would it leave his base unimpressed?

There are still three months to go. What can be said other than that Biden will probably win, but Trump might? •

The post Maybe, probably, definitely? appeared first on Inside Story.

But president Donald Trump eschewed unity and empathy. Instead, in two speeches — at Mt Rushmore National Park on 3 July and then at the White House official celebration on 4 July — he advanced a view of the nation that was even darker, more disruptive and more dystopian than in his chilling inauguration speech.

From the moment it was announced, Trump’s Mt Rushmore speech was clearly going to be more about self-aggrandisement than acknowledging the impact of the pandemic. His campaign staff chose to flout recommendations to protect crowds from coronavirus (masks were optional and social distancing ignored) or to protect against the possibility of fires caused by fireworks.

Trump has long shown a fascination with the monument and has even mused about having his own face carved into the mountain alongside presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. He seems unaware or unconcerned that the monument, designed by a white supremacist, is built on land that is sacred to, and was stolen from, the Sioux Nation. Peaceful protests by First Nations people were, of course, ignored.

From a stage set beneath those stone presidential faces, Trump read woodenly from a speech that sought to engender fear and loathing of those who have protested at racial injustice and symbols of white power and slavery. He excoriated them as “evil” representatives of a “new far-left fascism,” and part of a “left-wing cultural revolution” whose ultimate goal is “the end of America.”

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” Trump proclaimed. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”

He doubled down the next day in his “Salute to America” address in Washington. He assured his supporters that he was “defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing,” while he pledged to “safeguard our values.”

He spoke out against a “cancel culture” he charged with attempting to close down the economy and intimidate dissenters (presumably a reference to pandemic lockdown efforts), against schools that are “teaching children to hate America,” against newsrooms and even corporate boardrooms, and against the “years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions.”

What became clear over these two days was the character of the president’s campaign for a second term. In this beefed-up version of his 2016 campaign, the threats to his supporters no longer come from rapists and drug dealers flocking across the border (the coronavirus has halted that flow) but from other Americans. (In this he follows a tradition that goes back at least as far as the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s.) Of what he calls “far-left fascism,” he said: “If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.”

As if to convince those who were shocked by his tone that these speeches do truly presage his re-election strategy, Trump has continued his attacks in the days since. He criticised the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians sports teams as “politically correct” for reviewing the Native American element of their respective names, criticised the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing’s decision to ban the Confederate flag from its races and events, and made a baseless attack on the only Black driver on the NASCAR circuit.

This is red meat for Trump’s rusted-on supporters, signalling to them that they are “the true victims of discrimination.” But for most other Americans it evokes scenes from The Plot Against America and other dystopian literature.

An obvious contrast came in the 4 July message from Trump’s Democratic challenger. Former vice-president Joe Biden also focused on racial justice, in his case highlighting the fact that the United States has not lived up to its founding principle that “all men are created equal.” But Biden offered hope. “We have a chance to rip the roots of systemic racism out of this country,” he said, and “live up to the words that founded this nation.” He went further in an op-ed piece, writing that “Independence Day is a celebration of our persistent march toward greater justice.”

Polling and surveys indicate that Biden is in tune with majority opinion. In fact, Trump appears increasingly out of touch not only with mainstream sentiments on race and racial justice, but also with public concerns about the coronavirus pandemic, where the country is heading, and other issues important to voters. Concern about Trump’s suitability for the highest office is also intensifying, not least among those who have worked most closely with him.

Race has been a defining issue in US politics since the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776. Now the issue is once again at the centre of a national debate made more urgent by the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic consequences on Black Americans, and the brutal killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

Almost 75 per cent of Americans (including 53 per cent of Republicans) say they support the Black Lives Matter protests. Most don’t buy into the picture of anti-American chaos that Trump paints; even among those who think the protests are violent, 53 per cent are supportive. The seismic shift in the politics of race is leaving Trump and his followers on the losing side of the culture wars he is attempting to stoke.

George Floyd’s death has been pivotal in changing public opinion in a way that so many other Black deaths have not. Many thousands of Americans of all races and ages have marched in the streets of not only big cities but also small towns, and fully two-thirds of Americans (including 47 per cent of Republicans) now think their country has a race and law-enforcement problem.

The National Football League has reversed its position on players’ kneeling during the national anthem; Mississippi and other parts of the country are acting to remove Confederate symbols and statues; sports teams are changing their racist monikers and mascots; and the military and universities are looking to remove Confederate names from their bases and facilities.

While the daily lives of many Americans are consumed by the worsening consequences of the coronavirus, Trump’s focus is elsewhere. His rare references to the pandemic — entirely without empathy for individuals and communities — are taken up with falsehoods and fallacies.

An average of this week’s polls reveals that 56 per cent of Americans disapprove of the president’s response to the pandemic, the highest level so far. This figure is even higher among Independent voters (65.3 per cent) and dramatically so among Democrats (89.6 per cent).

As the epicentres of infection move from the blue states of the northeast and west coasts to the red states of the south and Midwest, his disapproval among Republicans is likely to grow. Republican-led states like Florida, Arizona and South Carolina now have the highest daily reported cases per capita, and officials in Texas and Florida have warned that hospitals are increasingly overwhelmed.

The Pew Research Center recently found that 87 per cent of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, 71 per cent say they are angry, 66 per cent say they’re fearful, and just 17 per cent are proud of the way things are going. As the country’s economic performance — which was to have been Trump’s key election card — declines, so too does Trump’s approval rating for managing the economy, which has fallen sixteen points to 47 per cent since January.

It all adds up to intense opposition to the president. The latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that his overall disapproval rating was 58 per cent, and that an extraordinary 49 per cent of voters “strongly” disapprove of the job he’s doing.

The corollary of that is Joe Biden’s clear and consistent lead, sometimes edging into double digits. The RealClearPolitics average of the polls at the end of June had Biden up by 8.7 points and ahead in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Pew polling gave Biden an eleven-point advantage (52 per cent to 41 per cent) on who can best handle the public health impact of the pandemic.

Particularly worrying for the president’s circle is the 29 per cent swing against Trump among suburban voters. Once-loyal older white voters are also defecting. Not all of them will vote for Biden, of course, but those who will say they trust the former vice-president to do a better job of unifying America and handling race relations. Interestingly, this shows up as a bigger positive in their view of Biden than the fact that they think he will also do a better job handling the coronavirus pandemic.

A series of polls shows that healthcare, the economy and jobs are consistently the top issues for all voters. As lay-offs continue, millions of people are also losing their job-linked health insurance — up to forty-three million of them, according to one report. Many will look to obtain insurance through the Obamacare exchanges and Medicaid expansion programs, although this will be difficult in many Republican-led states.

Enrolments in the federal Obamacare exchange were up 46 per cent in April–May over the same period last year, and enrolments in state-based marketplaces are up even more. This increased reliance on Obamacare comes even as the Trump administration has asked the US Supreme Court to strike down the law in its entirety, with nothing to replace it or to ensure that Trump’s promises of protections for pre-existing conditions are kept. In the midst of a pandemic that will compound a whole range of pre-existing conditions, this move alone highlights the extraordinary disconnect between the president and voters.

With a little over one hundred days to election day, it’s still possible that Trump’s current dismal position could turn around. But that seems unlikely in the absence of any sign of a second-term agenda and with reports that Trump is dismissing advice from his campaign staff in favour of following his own instincts to victory.

Trump’s flailing on policy issues and failing in the polls have consequences for those who had hoped to ride into, or back into, public office on his coat-tails. Despite their muted response to the president’s Independence Day rhetoric, reports indicate that Republicans are unnerved, to say the least.

Not only are the Democrats predicted to hold the House of Representatives but their chances of taking over the Senate are also rising. Incumbent senators from Arizona, Colorado and Iowa look increasingly vulnerable, and seats in Maine, North Carolina, Montana and Georgia are competitive, too.

Republican lawmakers reportedly fret that Trump’s positions on social issues and lack of a second-term agenda leave their party running against the currents of change and open to charges of ignoring voters’ concerns. “He’s got us on the wrong side of every emerging demographic,” said one anonymous senior congressional Republican. What is noticeable, though, is that most of those speaking out about the behaviour that Republicans have pandered to for the past three and a half years are doing so anonymously.

One indicator of Republican lawmakers’ concerns is the substantial number of retirements: in all, twenty-six of the party’s House members and four senators are forgoing re-election this year without declaring their candidacy for another office, while just seven Democrats in the House and one in the Senate are retiring outright. Trump’s grip on the party remains so strong that it’s easier to withdraw from politics than be an anti-Trump Republican.

In the absence of policies that can win votes, the only visible election strategy from Trump and Republicans is to prevent as many people as possible from voting. This is an effort that has engaged the Republican Party for some time (I wrote about it for Inside Story in 2016) and has now reached fever pitch. Efforts obviously designed to stop likely Democratic voters from enrolling and getting access to voting stations, early voting and mail voting (these last two increasingly important in these pandemic times) are being justified as measures against non-existent voter fraud.

Trump rails against mail voting despite the fact that it has always been used by overseas Americans (including State Department and military families) and has been used for over a decade in states like Colorado, and despite using it regularly himself. He has openly admitted, “If you ever agreed to [mail voting] you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

It seems clear that his belligerent attacks are also designed to undermine confidence in the election process. In a recent article in Newsweek, former senator Tim Wirth and former senior congressional aide Tom Rogers postulate a Plot Against America–type scenario in which Trump loses the election but refuses to step down on the basis that the vote was rigged (he has already laid the groundwork for this) or that there was foreign interference (again, he has already outlined how this could be done — presumably by China rather than Russia — using false ballots).

This scenario might seem far-fetched, but it is raised disturbingly frequently by level-headed observers. It is a sad indictment of where some people fear Trump has taken America. •

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Back then, Scott Morrison and his team ran a disciplined, hip-pocket-focused campaign. For the very opposite, go back to Labor’s 2013 re-election attempt, when Kevin Rudd tried again and again, with on-the-run policymaking, to get a “boost” in the polls that would carry through to election day.

Desperate prime ministers can be tempted to do this kind of thing. John Howard did it in 2007 with his Northern Territory intervention and, twice, by targeting Sudanese refugees.

But last year’s more successful effort was focused on the fundamental equation: the decision voters make at the ballot box. And the message Morrison and his colleagues hammered home was that they were the safer alternative.

After 18 May 2019, Morrison was God — even better, to some, he was Howard reincarnated. But the more apt comparison is with Paul Keating in 1993. A surprise win transformed Keating into the unbeatable master of caucus — until his comeuppance five months later after a budget no one liked. (Hiking indirect taxes after an election dominated by your opposition to a GST can do that.) Last year Morrison enjoyed seven months of sunshine before an unwise holiday in the Pacific followed by several blundered attempts to reset his public persona.

But that’s all forgotten now. He’s riding high, as are the state and territory leaders. It’s a respite from a long, steady depletion of trust in political parties and governments, assisted by sluggish economies. But while the coronavirus will linger, our leaders’ heightened stature can’t.

The latest federal Newspoll, roughly in line with other surveys, has the prime minister’s personal ratings still very high, with voting-intention figures putting the Coalition on 43 per cent and Labor on 35. If this were Britain or Canada, with first-past-the-post voting, such figures would point to a landslide win for the government. As it is, estimated preference flows put the Coalition just ahead, 51–49, because around 80 per cent of Greens support (which is 10 per cent in this poll) will end up in Labor’s two-party-preferred pile.

What do polls like this mean? Very little. Given Morrison’s personal ratings, it’s interesting that the government isn’t further ahead. But the “if an election were held today” scenario is even more ludicrous than usual. We’re in a crisis and political attitudes are on hold.

Overall, the 2022 election result remains as it was last year: unpredictable, but with Labor the likely victors. Re-election is difficult for nine-year-old governments. The economy wasn’t great before the current crisis, which has added to the likelihood of the unexpected (and unforeseeable), in any direction.

The biggest potential strain lies within the Coalition. If it were in opposition it could complain about Labor’s reckless spending, but governing bestows certain responsibilities. Still, a substantial section of the government’s support base is grumpy about the measures taken, partly because they have internalised the propaganda about the Rudd government’s response to the global financial crisis: you can’t spend your way out of trouble. Now this centre-right government is doing the same, but on steroids. There’s also the related backlash against the health restrictions, which often veers into voodoo analysis, mixing up cause and effect (namely, “all these restrictions and for what, just a few deaths?”).

Naturally enough, the rushed-out spending has its anomalies. If Labor were in power we would have a good idea how it would play out politically in coming years (not well for them) but the electorate gives the Coalition more leeway on fiscal behaviour.

Which brings us back to the friendly fire. For the time being, Morrison’s heightened community standing inoculates him against internal mischief. But that’ll be gone soon enough, probably by the end of the year.

Then intra-party machinations might get interesting again. •

The post Happy anniversary? appeared first on Inside Story.

Cometh the hour, cometh the leader, and all that.

But voting intentions, by contrast, are decidedly sub-stratospheric: the government is on 41 per cent, Labor on 36 and the Greens 12, and the estimated two-party-preferred is 50–50. And elections are funny things: votes, not personal ratings, decide who forms government.

There’s a general assumption among politics-watchers that high approval ratings bode well for elections, and that party support will follow when push comes to shove. The last federal election provided mild evidence for that, with Morrison always easily ahead of Bill Shorten on personal measures, and then that last-minute miracle. But election 2019 was an outlier on several fronts (including opinion poll fails for possibly six months, or even longer).

The usual dynamic is the opposite: when a party leader is miles ahead of an opponent, it seems to artificially inflate his or her party’s vote. Then, during the election campaign, both measures significantly decline. A dramatic example came in 2001, after the Tampa, September 11 and children overboard, when John Howard entered the October campaign hugely dominant personally, and also with double-digit two-party-preferred voting-intention leads. That government ended up, on election day, with a vote of 51 to Labor’s 49.

Kevin Rudd’s messianic standing pushed a similar trajectory in 2007. Labor went into that campaign on around 56 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote but its share fell during the campaign. The party’s eventual 52.7 per cent was lower than had been registered in any survey since Rudd took over as leader a year earlier.

So today the government enjoys a wartime leader’s ratings, but lineball support in a hypothetical election contest. But of course there are a couple of provisos. The first is the usual one, that no election is on the horizon and won’t be, probably, for two more years. The second is that our worlds are in the process of being turned upside down by the coronavirus and governments’ responses to it. Who knows what the political rules of the game will be after this?

Speaking of which, “a good election to lose” is a hackneyed phrase, but let us briefly contemplate a road not travelled: that widely expected Bill Shorten prime ministership emerging in May 2019.

Labor would be barely into its first term when the international catastrophe dropped, requiring the quick dispatching of bucket upon bucket of public money. In 2008–09 the Rudd government didn’t hesitate, but the party paid a terrible long-term political price for it; it still struggles with the legacy today. Most Australians think it spent too much.

In 2020, from Labor’s point of view, it’d be: oh my God, here we go again, though this time it’s taken about double the amount as a percentage of gross domestic product. So far.

If you think a Coalition opposition in this parallel scenario would support the breathtaking levels of government spending we’re witnessing, well… the owners of that giant coathanger over the harbour are still fielding offers. The laws of politics don’t allow it. No Liberal opposition leader could go along with it even if he or she wanted to; the party room and wider conservative movement simply wouldn’t tolerate it.

You can find the argument in commentatorland already: the shutdown is unnecessary, an overreaction, the spending is a waste, the virus was never going to hit Australia anyway. In other words, the GFC narrative refurbished.

There’s disquiet among the self-proclaimed “base” (Sky After Dark, free-market think tanks, News Corp columnists), but right-wingers in the party room (Barnaby Joyce aside) have shown admirable restraint. A prime minister has much greater authority than an opposition leader. Certainly one with a miracle win under his belt and a 68 per cent satisfaction rating. (Bushfires, Hawaii, who can remember those?)

It’s possible that if Labor were in government, having been burnt so badly by the GFC, it would be tempted towards timidity. In fact there seems to be some evidence that around the world the bigger stimuluses are coming from centre-right governments.

That “Nixon and China” template is pretty hoary, but it has its uses. •

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It’s happening with leaders around the world: Jacinda Adern, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson despite his sudden strategic about-face. Yes, even that catastrophic bumbler Donald Trump got a bump. Similar movements are no doubt replicated in countries whose polling we don’t often report.

Leaders are elevated by crises. They accrue stature. They take charge, wielding the apparatus of state like their personal plaything, and if they let some emotion slip out, all the better. Their finest hour and all that. Remember Anna Bligh and Queensland’s 2011 floods.

Do you reckon Morrison is doing a good job? Doesn’t matter that much, people are looking to authority. The fact that he’s raining largesse doesn’t hurt, although unlike in the 2008–09 GFC it’s his diktats (and the ones from state and territory leaders) that are causing the downturn, at least in the immediate sense. (With the world headed into an economic funk, though, we couldn’t have avoided being touched no matter what we did.)

Speaking of the premiers and chief ministers, imagine what their polling is like: it would be stratospheric. Getting the police out, shutting borders, turning cruise ships away — voters love that stuff.

So Australians are scared and crave action, there’s an appetite for strong measures, and governments are satisfying it. But how long these attitudes last is another thing. People will weary of these restrictions. No, that’s putting it too mildly: they’re going to drive us crazy. Jobs are being lost, businesses going bust. The fines imposed in some jurisdictions are astonishingly high. The heavy-handedness is appreciated now, but it will get stale.

On the other side of the aisle, Anthony Albanese’s approval rating has risen a little. In this way the dynamics are similar to what happened after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, when John Howard responded firmly, supported by Labor leader Kim Beazley: a big boost for the PM, and an okay one for the opposition leader. But it’s not what happened five years later, after the Tampa–9/11 double whammy, when the government wasn’t in anything like a bipartisan frame of mind.

The political future, like everything else about this astonishing social and economic period, is unpredictable. The world will change, but we don’t know how. (So far the predictions offered have tended to coincide with the predictor’s own preferences.)

The next election is one of those unpredictable things. The war analogy is not far-fetched, but remember Winston Churchill in 1945, George Bush Senior in 1992. Bligh in 2012.

Albanese’s biggest task is the same as before: to remain in his job until 2022.

What is a Labor opposition to do in circumstances like this? What it believes is in the interests of the country, of course, and particularly the interests of the people it is supposed to represent, those of lesser means. While not being totally oblivious to political considerations.

It should try to muscle in on that newly generated authority, by acting not so much as an alternative government but an adjunct one, providing advice, relaying concerns.

And that’s what Labor is largely doing. •

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Then there’s the failed Italian referendum to curb the powers of that country’s Senate, also in 2016. Talk about populism! But Australians need only imagine such a vote in Australia, at any time, to see how dubious that classification is. A referendum to allow our House of Representatives to expand without a proportional growth in the Senate crashed badly way back in 1967.

This year, our own Morrison miracle was described by the New York Times as “another swell in the wave of populist fervour that swept President Trump into office and set Britain on a path out of the European Union.” A centre-right government winning re-election on a ferocious scare campaign about taxes and spending — is this something new?

That’s not to say the upsurge in “populism” is imaginary. The old centre has been collapsing across advanced democracies for years, and was accelerated by the global financial crisis. Many voters no longer seem happy to eat their greens when instructed. The result in Europe has been the rise of far-right — and, to a lesser extent, far-left — parties.

But populist gains usually strike a blow against business as usual, which is another reason why our May 2019 election doesn’t fit.

What Trump, Brexit and Australia 2019 do have in common are failed opinion polls. Before each of those votes, the final polls were out by several per cent. At most elections this would go unnoticed, but not when the error reverses the outcome. The 2017 British election was also a bit of an opinion poll miss; the pollsters picked the late movement to Labour but most of them missed its size. British pollsters had got 2015 wrong as well, seeing a neck-and-neck Tory–Labour result rather than the big Conservative win that eventuated.

They’ll do much better on 12 December. Of course they will.

The poor polling added ballast to a crucial component of the “populist” narrative: that “the elites” are misreading the people. The surveys pointed to one thing, but “the voters” didn’t follow the script. Hoorah! Score one against the establishment.

In the annals of “populism,” our 2016 election result was actually a better-qualified entry than this year’s. Like Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 stunner, election night went against the tide of expectations. The Coalition won the national vote by only 0.7 per cent and barely kept its majority. The polls did get the aggregate vote about right, but general expectations (well, mine anyway) were that they had understated likely Coalition support or that those figures would translate into a bigger seat win for the Coalition. Sitting federal governments tend to do well in the vote–seat trade-off. But not that time.

These unexpected results have an important feature that doesn’t neatly fit with the popular takes. It wasn’t just “the elites” who got a shock. The hoi polloi were astonished too. They approached the ballot box (and, outside Australia, decided whether to bother voting) with expectations that made some of them feel reckless, and free to throw the dice (and others to stay at home because the result was in the bag).

In 2016 it was Labor that benefited from these lost-cause expectations, with few people contemplating the prospect of Bill Shorten emerging as prime minister. For some, the option of putting the government in its place with a spot of protest voting was hard to resist.

Shorten certainly didn’t enjoy that advantage in 2019, when he and his policies came under scrutiny so fierce it veered at times into fiction.

There’s also a big difference between Brexit and Trump. Surveys and election returns showed that most Brits on low incomes voted to leave, and most Remainers were better off. Trump, by contrast, won greatest support among high-income Americans, while most poorer people voted for Hillary Clinton.

That might surprise some, but it was a presidential election, after all, and Trump received the votes of the vast majority (about 90 per cent) of registered Republicans who turned out. Clinton got most (also around 90 per cent) of the Democrats who voted. What was decisive were the low-income swings to Trump and the high-income (smaller) swings to Clinton, compared with the 2012 election. Holding everything else constant, the low-income swing probably decided the result.

Brexit, on the other hand, was just a plebiscite on a topic that most people had barely contemplated until the vote was announced. That’s quite different from an election, when people decide who they want to rule over them for three years and party loyalty still plays a big, if declining, part.

Our own 2017 marriage-equality survey produced a similar income split to Brexit, as did the republic referendum two decades ago. High-earning urban folks mostly voted Yes, while low-income outer-suburbanites and people outside the capital cities were more likely to vote No. For most, it was a tenth-order issue.

Our marriage survey romped home, yet our republic referendum had failed. Like Brexit, that result brought forth a lot of crowing about out-of-touch elites, and about how Labor was estranged from the ordinary, unpretentious, salt-of-the-earth types it’s supposed to represent.

But these commentators’ fetishisation of people power tends to be conditional. You might recall their querulous pre-election columns this year about the reckless Australians who appeared so easily bribed by Labor’s magic pudding of spending promises. As the recent Victorian election had already shown, they lamented, the system was now rigged against any party of economic responsibility. But faith in humanity was quickly restored on election night. The voters always get it right, after all.

Here’s a thought. Imagine the Australian government suddenly decided to hold a plebiscite on quitting the refugee convention? That would be a decent equivalent of Brexit. Or leaving the World Trade Organization, or undoing all free-trade agreements? Maybe tariffs should be reimposed to revive our manufacturing industry? Get rid of the GST and make everything 10 per cent (actually 9.1 per cent) cheaper — how good would that be?

We don’t know how votes on these and other facets of the cosy bipartisan political-technocratic consensus would go. (The GST, despite Labor’s cynical opposition at two elections, is bipartisan policy.) You can be sure it would pit the cosmopolitan “insiders” against the “outsiders,” inner against outer urban, urban against regional, “elites” against “real Australians.”

Some might even get through, in which event there’d be lots of gloating. Just not necessarily from the usual suspects.

Populism can cut both ways. •

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During the campaign, the internal polls were not as encouraging for Labor as the public polling, though they still generally had it a bit ahead, and on election eve they put it on 50 per cent after preferences. This was not a national figure; tracking polling is done in a basket of marginal electorates. As the review noted, Labor’s 2016 vote in the tracked seats was 48.7 per cent, so the final pre-election number in May was a modest 1.3 per cent swing to the opposition. This compares with Newspoll, say, whose final national poll showed a 2 per cent swing to Labor. The actual result was a 1 per cent swing to the government.

What was surprising was the fact that “less than a week into the campaign,” according to the review, “Labor’s primary vote had slipped to 34 per cent and its two-party preferred vote to 47 per cent.” That’s a 1.7 per cent swing against Labor compared with the 2016 result — one week into the campaign.

You wouldn’t have known it from journalists’ accounts of cheery briefings from their Labor Party sources at the time. Yes, they reported opposition leader Bill Shorten’s week one “stumbles,” most of all on superannuation, but expectations for the opposition remained upbeat. As far as I am aware, no journalist reported that Labor was, on that party polling, going backwards from the last election.

You might think members of our fourth estate would learn a lesson from this — that they’re being used when they pass on these whisperings at face value — except we know they haven’t yet and never will, because a journo who expressed the merest skerrick of scepticism when recounting information from “party insiders” would find the tap quickly turned off.

I don’t know what Liberal tracking was showing, but throughout the campaign party figures were telling the press gallery that things looked grim from their point of view. So both sides saw it in their interest to talk up expectations of a change of government.

The idea that creating this kind of expectation increases its chances of happening is sometimes known as the “bandwagon effect.” Lots of people seem to believe in it — including Labor insiders, on the evidence — and some academics claim to have shown it to be real, but in reality it’s impossible to prove one way or the other.

Those loopy conspiracy theories about Rupert Murdoch rigging his Newspolls in favour of the Coalition (favoured by the late Bob Ellis and thousands of people you’ve never heard of on social media) rest on a bandwagon assumption. So, I suppose, has the occasional behaviour of the Australian over the years, such as its embarrassing, desperate insistence on playing up John Howard’s chances back in 2007, scouring its latest Newspoll for something, anything, to indicate the Conviction Politician was about to make a comeback.

The bandwagon effect has always struck me as inapplicable to electoral behaviour, at least in Australian elections. In fact the opposite, an “underdog effect,” is more likely. And in 2019, Labor’s expected victory concentrated the minds of voters on the prospect of a Shorten Labor government, while the Coalition seemed quite content to be the underdog.

(It’s different when a hung parliament seems possible. I have a theory — also unprovable — that during Victoria’s state election a year ago the Liberal opposition’s repeated warnings of a Labor government reliant on the Greens drove some dispirited Liberal supporters to vote Labor in the hope of making sure the Greens weren’t the king-makers.)

Meanwhile, the latest Newspoll is out today. In May, the Coalition got 51.5 per cent after preferences; it then peaked at 53 in a July Newspoll, and now it’s level-pegged with Labor. Flip the lid off the esky, we have a contest! Except that no one takes opinion polls seriously since 18 May — an upside of the pollsters’ failures for the health of our democracy and our general sanity. And it’s a long way to the next election.

The big take-out is a leap in Anthony Albanese’s net satisfaction rating. As Kevin Bonham notes, it’s the biggest jump since Tony Abbott unexpectedly did so well at the 2010 election. One might be tempted to put it down to his “Jobs and the Future of Work” speech the week before last, but that would imply enough people were paying attention, or saw enough of it on the news to make an impression.

What are respondents thinking when they answer the “how satisfied” (or “do you approve”) question? In the case of an opposition leader, a fair chunk are just party supporters desperate for a win and making a judgement about political accomplishments: is the leader scoring points, is he or she going to take us to the promised land? In the context of wide expectations of a Labor victory this year, Bill Shorten’s stubbornly low ratings are certainly worth reflecting on.

A slightly encouraging poll today tells us nothing about a likely election outcome in two years. But for a party leader wishing to still be in the position then, every little bit helps. From the point of view of Albanese and his office, this would be a “good Newspoll.” •

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But the theory that has got most traction in the post-election polling is one that has teased poll-watchers for longer than almost any of these, and has done so since the advent of pre-election polling in Australia in the 1940s. This is the theory that large discrepancies between what polls “predict” and what voters do can be explained by the existence of a large number of late deciders — voters who don’t really make up their minds until sometime after the last of the opinion polls are taken.

In 2019, if that theory is right, the late deciders need to have either switched their support to the Coalition after telling the pollsters they intended to vote for another party, or shifted to the Coalition after telling the pollsters that they didn’t know which party to support. It was, after all, the Coalition that the polls underestimated, and Labor that they overestimated. On a weighted average of all the final polls — Essential, Ipsos, Newspoll, Roy Morgan and YouGov Galaxy — the Coalition’s support was 38.7 per cent (though it went on to win 41.4 per cent of the vote) and Labor’s 35.8 per cent (though it secured just 33.3 per cent of the vote). Variation around these figures, poll by poll, wasn’t very marked. Nor was there much to separate the polls on the two-party-preferred vote: every poll underestimated the difference between the Coalition’s and Labor’s two-party-preferred vote by between 2.5 and 3.5 percentage points.

The most recent, and most widely reported, research to have concluded that late deciders made the difference is a study of voters interviewed a month before the election and reinterviewed a month after it, published recently by the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods. According to Nicholas Biddle, the author of the study, the group that  determined the result was comprised of those who were “undecided in the lead-up to the election and those who said they were going to vote for the non-major parties but swung to the Coalition.” At the beginning of July, the Australian’s national affairs editor, Simon Benson, also argued that those who were only “leaning” towards Labor ahead of the election had “moved violently away from Labor” once they entered the polling booths and had a pencil in their hands; the “hard” undecided, those who registered in the opinion polls as “don’t knows,” also decided not to vote Labor. At the beginning of June, an Essential poll, conducted shortly after the election, had presented evidence for much the same point.

Over the years, the idea that polls may fail to pick the winner because they stop polling too early had become part of the industry’s stock-in-trade. Especially in the period before 1972, when there was only one pollster, Roy Morgan, the argument had been difficult to refute. By 2019, it was an oldie — but was it also a goodie?

The ANU study: For the Biddle report, two sets of data were collected from the Life in Australia panel, an online poll conducted by the Centre for Social Research and Methods. The first was collected between 8 and 26 April, with half the responses gathered by 11 April, five weeks ahead of the 18 May election; the second between 3 and 17 June, with half gathered by 6 June, three weeks after the election. The analysis was based on the 1844 people who participated in both.

In the first survey, respondents were asked how they intended to vote. Among those who would go on to participate in the June survey, the Coalition led Labor by 3.8 percentage points. In the second survey, respondents were asked how they had voted; among those who had participated in the April survey, the Coalition led Labor by 6.4 percentage points. These figures, based on first preferences, included those who said they didn’t know how they were going to vote (April) and those who didn’t vote (June).

Although Biddle says that the data “on actual voting behaviour and voting intentions” were collected “without recourse to recall,” this is misleading. While the data on voting intentions were collected “without recourse to recall” — this is axiomatic — the same cannot be said for the data on voting behaviour. The validity of the data on voting behaviour, collected well after the election, is wholly dependent on the accuracy of respondents’ recall and their willingness to be open about how they remember voting. It can’t be taken for granted.

Among those who participated in both waves and reported either intending to vote (April) or having voted (June), support shifted. The Coalition’s support increased from 38.0 to 42.2 per cent, Labor’s increased from 34.1 to 35.4 per cent, while support for “Other” vote fell from 14.4 to 8.7 per cent. Only the Greens (13.6 per cent in April and 13.7 per cent recalled in June) recorded no shift.

The panel slightly overshot the Coalition’s primary vote at the election (41.4 per cent) and, as the polls had done, also overshot Labor’s (35.4 per cent). More importantly, it overshot the Greens (10.4 per cent), and undershot the vote for Other (14.9 per cent), and did so by sizeable margins. It overestimated the Greens by 3.3 percentage points, or about one-third, and underestimated Other by 6.2 percentage points, or more than a third. These are errors the polls did not make. A problem with “Australia’s first and only probability-based panel,” as the ANU study is billed, or a problem with its respondents’ recall of how they really voted? None of these figures — or the comparisons with the polls — are included in Biddle’s report; I’ve derived them from the report’s Table 3. Of course, the total shift in support across the parties was much greater than these numbers might indicate.

From his data, Biddle draws three conclusions: that “voter volatility… appears to have been a key determinant of why the election result was different from that predicted by the polls”; that part of the “swing towards the Coalition during the election campaign” came “from those who had intended to vote for minor parties,” a group from which he excludes the Greens; and that the swing also came from those “who did not know who they would vote for.”

None of these inferences necessarily follows from the data. Indeed, some are plainly wrong. First, voter volatility only comes into the picture on the assumption that the polls were accurate at the time they were taken. And before settling on “volatility” to explain why they didn’t work as predictions, one needs to judge that against competing explanations. Nothing in the study’s findings discounts the possibility that the public polls — which varied remarkably little during the campaign, hence the suspicions of “herding” — were plagued by problems of the sort he notes in relation to the 2015 polls in Britain (too many Labour voters in the pollsters’ samples) and the 2016 polls in the United States (inadequate weighting for education, in particular), alternative explanations he never seriously considers.

Second, while positing a last-minute switch to the Coalition among those who had intended to vote for the minor parties might work with the data from Biddle’s panel, it cannot explain the problem with the polls. Had its vote swung to the Coalition, the minor-party vote would have finished up being a good deal smaller than that estimated by the polls. But at 25.3 per cent, minor-party support turned out almost exactly as the polls expected (25.7 per cent, on a weighted average). In its estimate of the minor-party vote — the Greens vote, the Other vote, or both — the ANU panel, as we have seen, turned out to be less accurate (21.4 per cent).

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Third, in the absence of a swing from minor-party voters to the Coalition, a last-minute swing by those in the panel “who did not know who they would vote for” can’t explain the result. That’s the case even if the swing among panel members, reported by Biddle, occurred entirely on the day of the election and not at some earlier time between April and 18 May, the only timeline the data allow. In the final pre-election polls, those classified as “don’t know” — 5.7 per cent on the weighted average — would have had to split about 4–1 in favour of the Coalition over Labor on election day in order to boost the Coalition’s vote share to something close to 41.4 per cent and reduced Labor’s vote share to something close to 33.3 per cent (unavoidably rendering the polls’ estimate of the minor-party and independent vote slightly less accurate). In the ANU panel, those who had registered as “don’t know” in April recalled dividing 42 (Coalition), 21 (Labor) and 36 (Other) in May. That is certainly a lopsided result (2–1 in favour of the Coalition over Labor) but nowhere near as lopsided as would be required to increase the gap between the Coalition and Labor in the polls (roughly three percentage points) to eight percentage points, the gap between the Coalition and Labor at the election.

The C|T research: Biddle wasn’t the first to argue that there was a late swing — a swing that the polls couldn’t help but miss — and to produce new data that purported to show it. Already, the Australian’s Simon Benson had publicised another piece of research — “the most comprehensive and intelligent analysis so far” — said to show the effect on the election of “[hard] undecided and ‘soft’” voters who had swung late.

This research was conducted by “a private research firm” (the C|T Group, in fact — the political consultancy that polled for the Liberal Party) and “provided to senior Liberals and shown to the Weekend Australian.” Its findings — released without the knowledge or endorsement of any senior member in the Group — were said to show that: (a) ahead of the election, “many Labor voters” had been “only leaning towards Labor” — having been classified initially as “don’t knows,” nominating Labor, presumably, only after being pressed about the party for which they were likely to vote (in the jargon of the trade, after being asked “a leaner”); (b) “on the day of the election,” these Labor “leaners” — plus the “‘hard’ undecided” who remained “don’t knows” after the “leaner” (“about 5 per cent”) — “couldn’t bring themselves to back Labor” and “largely went with a minor party”; and (c) via the minor parties, the preferences of both “came over to the Coalition.” Benson quotes the “research briefing” as saying, “Rather than Newspoll results suggesting Newspoll ‘got it wrong,’ a more informed interpretation is that the ‘“hard” undecided’ voters (those still undecided on May 17) did not support Labor on election day.”

But the story doesn’t survive the most cursory of checks. If the “soft” Labor voters — the “leaners” — and the “don’t knows” (the “hard” undecided) moved to the minor parties on election day, Newspoll’s estimate of the vote for the minor parties must have been an underestimate. In fact, Newspoll’s estimate of the vote for “others” was an overestimate: “others” in the final Newspoll were 16 per cent; at the election, they accounted for 14.9 per cent of the vote. (I exclude the Greens from what the analysis calls “others,” almost all of them supporters of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation or the United Australia Party, simply because it makes little sense to assume that many “softly” committed Labor supporters switched to the Greens and then preferenced the Coalition.) Newspoll didn’t underestimate the vote for “others,” and neither did the final polls from Essential, Galaxy, Ipsos and Morgan.

“Labor and Shorten,” Benson says, may “have made it very difficult for their soft supporter base to stick with them” — and, he might have added, difficult for the “hard” undecided to swing to them. But not all the polls overestimated Labor’s vote, as Newspoll did. Ipsos, which provided a better estimate than Newspoll of the Coalition’s first-preference lead over Labor, estimated Labor’s support at 33 per cent — almost exactly the proportion that voted Labor. Roy Morgan was also closer than Newspoll in estimating Labor’s first-preference vote; so, too, was Essential.

Newspoll estimated the “don’t knows” (the “hard” undecided) at 4 per cent — not 5 per cent, the estimate in the post-election private polling. By ignoring the “don’t knows,” as all the polls did, it was effectively assuming that they would split in much the same way as those who had nominated a party: 38 (Coalition), 37 (Labor), 9 (Greens) and 16 (Other). If we assume, for the sake of the argument, that three times as many of the “don’t knows” voted Coalition as voted Labor, then a more accurate Newspoll would have been one in which the “don’t knows” were split 60–20–10–10. Had that happened, Newspoll would have estimated the Coalition’s first-preference vote at 39 per cent, Labor’s at 36 per cent (allowing for rounding) — a Coalition lead of three percentage points compared with the lead of one percentage point it actually reported. Since the Coalition’s winning margin was 8.1 percentage points, an estimate of three percentage points would have been better than an estimate of one percentage point, but not much better. On the other hand, Newspoll’s estimate of the Coalition’s share of the two-party-preferred vote would have been 50.4 per cent (50.5 per cent if it stuck to 0.5 per cent as its smallest unit) not 48.5 per cent. Compared with the actual tally of 51.5 per cent, this estimate of the two-party-preferred would have been considerably better.

Newspoll was at liberty to adjust its figures along these lines. It didn’t, presumably because it wasn’t persuaded that there were good reasons to do so. But if Newspoll’s figures are to be rejigged, why not those of the polls that don’t appear in the Australian? Most of them had a higher proportion of “don’t knows” to redistribute (5 per cent, Morgan; 7 per cent, Ipsos and YouGov Galaxy, and all (except Morgan on the two-party-preferred) had results as close, if not closer, to the mark than Newspoll’s. Rejigged, their figures would benefit even more substantially than Newspoll’s. For some reason, the research Benson cites appears not to have noticed this; and if Benson noticed it, he didn’t draw it to the attention of his readers.

Like all the polls, Newspoll got the election wrong. But Newspoll’s performance, on some measures, was worse than other polls: both its overestimate of the Labor vote and its underestimate of the Coalition vote were greater than any other poll’s. Having stayed in the field later than all the others — it ran its final poll from Tuesday through to Friday — and having boosted its sample size to 3038, nearly twice the number used by anyone else, Newspoll had given itself the best possible chance of picking up the late swing to the Coalition for which, no doubt, both the Australian and its readers were hoping. But a late swing to the Coalition is something it did not pick up. Its final poll detected what Benson described, literally though ludicrously, as a “half-point break” not to the Coalition but “towards Labor.”

The fact that C|T’s findings surfaced in the Weekend Australian is no great surprise. Where better for the C|T researcher to drop the findings than into the hands of the Australian, the newspaper that commissioned Newspoll, hence the newspaper where the research was most likely to get a run and least likely to be critically examined? The findings, as Benson wrote, offered “another explanation” for why Labor hadn’t done as well as the polls’ expected. And they seemed to get Newspoll off the hook: “Even polling on Friday night would not have picked up what was going to happen.”

The Essential poll: The C|T Group wasn’t the first to produce research purporting to show a late swing either. That honour belongs to Essential Media — a firm that conducted polls on its own account and then placed them with the Guardian.

Immediately after the election, Essential’s Peter Lewis wondered whether the polls had erred by simply “removing” the “don’t knows” — what the C|T research would call the “hard” undecided — from the poll; “removing” them, as all the pollsters had done, meant, in effect, assuming that they would split along the same lines as the respondents who said that they did know how they were going to vote. Essential had not only “removed” that 8 per cent of the sample categorised as “undecided” — a figure Lewis revealed for the first time — which was “nearly double the number from previous elections,” it had also given insufficient thought to another 18 per cent of respondents who “told us they hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to the campaign.” As a result, Lewis conceded, the company may have missed the “possibility” that “the most disengaged 10 per cent” — why 10 per cent? — had “turned up on election day and voted overwhelmingly for the Coalition.”

To test this theory, Essential conducted another poll. According to this poll (or at least the Guardian’s reporting of it — Essential has not responded to a request for a copy), the result “underscore[d] the fact that undecided voters broke the Coalition’s way in the final weeks of the campaign, with 40 per cent of people who made up their minds in the closing week backing the Coalition, compared to 31 per cent for Labor.” Of those who had been “undecided” on election day — 11 per cent of the post-election sample — “38 per cent broke Morrison’s way and 27 per cent Bill Shorten’s way.” From this, the Guardian inferred that the Coalition did especially well from late deciders. Though the story didn’t say it, Lewis’s theory, it seemed, had been confirmed.

But had it? One problem with the analysis is that those who made up their mind either during the last week or on election day weren’t necessarily those categorised as “don’t know” in Essential’s final poll; that group may have included respondents who indicated a party preference but hadn’t made their minds about whether that was the way they would actually vote. Another problem is that the report doesn’t say what proportion of respondents made up their minds in the final week. And we are not told what proportion was changing from one party (which?) to another party (which?) rather than simply confirming an earlier decision to vote for one of the parties and not another. Without knowing any of this, there is no way of estimating the impact a 40–31 split among the “undecided” in the final week would have had on the distribution of overall voting-intention figures.

The figures for election day itself give us more to work with; but they don’t do much to confirm the thesis. To see what difference a 38–27 split would have made (38–27–35, allowing for “others”) requires us to compare it to the 40–36–24 split when it was assumed that the “undecided” would divide in much the same way as the rest of the sample. Since the proportion of “don’t knows” in Essential’s final pre-election poll was 8 per cent (not 11 per cent), the new ratios imply that 3 per cent (unchanged) would have voted for the Coalition, 2 per cent (rather than 3 per cent) would have voted Labor, and 3 per cent (instead of 2 per cent) would have voted for some other party.

On these figures, had the final Essential poll been conducted at the same time as the final Newspoll, the Coalition’s share of the distribution would have remained unchanged (about 40 per cent) and Labor’s would have come down from 36 to 35 per cent. In terms of the two-party-preferred vote, the Coalition’s share would have risen from 48.5 to 48.8 per cent (49 per cent, if we round up to nearest 0.5 per cent) — the two-party estimate produced by YouGov Galaxy and Ipsos. For Essential, this would have been a better set of figures — but no cigar.

Evidence, post-election, that the “don’t knows” favoured the Coalition — let alone did so by a wide margin — is not unequivocal. A poll conducted by JWS, in the two days after the election, shows virtually no difference among those who said they had decided on their vote in the last week, including election day, between the size of the Coalition vote (39 per cent) and the size of the Labor vote (37 per cent). Moreover, among those who had voted Greens, 49 per cent also said they had decided late.

The Guardian’s account of Essential’s analysis, like all the arguments for a “late swing,” fails to mention the exit poll conducted by YouGov Galaxy for Channel 9, which purported to show that the government was headed for defeat — and by a similar margin to that predicted by the pre-election polls.

Oldies can be goodies. Given that the polls, using different techniques, missed the mark by roughly the same amount, all pointing in the wrong direction, the idea of a late swing might be especially tempting. But if the decisions of late switchers are to explain why the polls performed poorly, these voters would have to have switched from Labor to the Coalition — not from minor parties to the Coalition. For respondents who said they “didn’t know” how they were going to vote to have made the difference, they would have to have voted for the Coalition — and to have done so overwhelmingly.

Responding to pollsters, respondents can be strategic or they can be sincere. If they are strategic, “late deciders” may not be late deciders at all; for the most part, they will simply be respondents who dissemble. Mark Textor, co-founder of the C|T Group, and Australia’s most internationally experienced pollster, insists that respondents now “game” the polls. “Knowing the results will be published,” he observed after the 2015 British election (referring, presumably, to Britain’s public rather than its private polls), “leads many respondents to give the most dramatic choice that sends the message of the day… they are using their answers to ‘tickle up’ one party or another.”

Misleading pollsters, though not necessarily in this way, has a long history. As early as 1940, the American Institute of Public Opinion used a “secret ballot” to encourage respondents to be honest about how they intended to vote. The Australian Gallup Poll, worried about its under-reporting of the DLP vote, would later introduce a similar device. More recently, it has become fashionable to talk knowingly about the “shy Tory” — respondents who may be perfectly certain that they are going to vote for a party on the right but don’t feel comfortable admitting it to a pollster, not only in a face-to-face interview, apparently, but also in a robopoll or in response to an online questionnaire. If the polls were “gamed” in 2019, it won’t have shown, and it won’t have mattered, provided it affected the Labor and Coalition vote in equal measure. That voters didn’t drift from the minor parties to the Coalition at the last minute is clear from a comparison of the final polls and the election results. The final destination of the “don’t knows,” however, cannot be established in this way.

A “late swing,” including claims about the “don’t knows” dividing disproportionately in favour of one party or another, has long been invoked by pollsters who believe their polls were fine at the time they were taken — only to be overtaken by events. This line of defence can take a pollster only so far. Always, the challenge has been to find a narrative that fills the gap between what the last poll showed and how the electorate actually voted — the last-minute intervention of Archbishop Mannix in the 1958 campaign, for example, or the death of President Kennedy shortly before the 1963 election — and to do so plausibly, if not always persuasively.

Reviewing the performance of the polls this time, Graham Young, a pollster who claims to have “pioneer[ed] the use of the Internet for qualitative and quantitative polling in Australia,” also concluded that “undecided voters, and a late swing to the government, rather than problems with methodologies’ explained the polls’ ‘failure.’” His narrative? That Bill Shorten had “pulled-up stumps” too early and gone “for a beer on Friday, while Morrison was still working hard, just as people were making their final decision.” Benson’s narrative turned out to be very much the same. The idea that over 350,000 voters responded to the last minute campaigning — or absence of it — by switching their vote choice from Labor to the Coalition, stretches belief.

Strikingly, none of those responsible for actually producing the polls sought refuge in Benson’s or Biddle’s or Young’s line of argument — certainly, not on its own. For Lewis, “the quality of poll sampling” also merited examination — not only in the online polling of the kind Essential used but also in the modes used by other pollsters. He  thought that the problems pollsters encountered around the weighting of their data, especially data gathered from groups reluctant to respond, warranted investigation as well.

John Utting, another pollster, though not one involved in this election, wasn’t buying the last-minute-change argument at all. He thought more structural factors were at work. Had the kinds of problems that had brought the polls undone, he wondered, existed undetected for a long time? “Did polling create a parallel universe where all the activity of the past few years, especially the leadership coups and prime ministerial changes, were based on illusions, phantoms of public opinion that did not exist?”

Not, apparently, in some of the private polling. The last of the Liberal Party’s “track polling” — polling conducted nightly during the campaign using rolling samples in twenty seats — put the Liberals ahead of Labor, on the final Thursday, 43–33, according to a report that quotes Andrew Hirst, the party director, as its source. Exactly which seats — five of them Labor, fifteen Liberal — were polled is not disclosed, and Hirst has declined to name them. Nor are we told how the polling was conducted. But if the polling was as accurate as the story implies, it follows that: we don’t have to posit a last-minute swing; we don’t have to worry about the need to track down “shy Tories” or similar respondents (and non-respondents) who may have gamed the polls; and we can accept that whatever mode C|T chose, its polling worked. Not only did it work during the campaign; the polling showed that the government’s fortunes had “turned around immediately after the [early April] budget.” This suggests that the problems encountered by those pollsters that used the same mode — and there must have been some that did, given the range of modes deployed during the campaign — could have been overcome had they (or their impecunious paymasters) been both willing and able to invest in them properly.

The fact that none of the post-election surveys has succeeded in identifying any last-minute swing suggests that a swing of any great significance simply didn’t happen. While it’s conceivable that evidence of a swing will still emerge, this line of inquiry seems to have reached a dead end for now. It’s one thing to go back to the past in search of explanations; it’s another thing to be trapped in it. •

Murray Goot is a member of the Association of Market and Social Research Organisations panel inquiring into the 2019 federal election polls. The views expressed here are his own. For comments on an earlier draft of this article, he is indebted to Ian Watson and Peter Browne.

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The polls had been remarkably consistent for the two years leading up to the election. In fact, I can’t find a single reputable poll during that period showing the Coalition ahead, or even managing 50 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote. Perhaps late deciders went disproportionately to the Coalition, but there is nothing in the polls to suggest much movement as election day drew closer. Indeed, Newspoll detected a very slight, half-a-per-cent swing to Labor in the last week.

It is possible, even likely, that major-party support at the beginning of the campaign — and perhaps much earlier — was level-pegging, or even that the Coalition was ahead. If that reality had been reflected in the polls at the time, how different would the campaign have been? Faced with the danger of losing rather than what looked like the certainty of winning, would Labor have campaigned differently? And if the media hadn’t shared the all-but-universal assumption that Labor would form government, would they have scrutinised Scott Morrison and the Coalition more closely?

With a win apparently assured, Bill Shorten seemed determined to take the high road to victory. Even as the criticism of Labor’s franked-dividend and negative-gearing policies became more ferocious, Labor made no attempt to finesse or soften them. If the polls had been neck and neck, would Shorten and his colleagues have been more flexible? Labor ran an unusually positive campaign, concentrating on its own policy proposals; if it had thought it might lose, would it have tried harder to keep the focus on the government’s failings?

Morrison, by contrast, was able to take the low road to victory. Very few governments running for re-election have been able to direct the focus so strongly onto the opposition. The media generally scrutinise the alternative government more closely as the election gets nearer, but this campaign was notable for how little the government’s record or its plans for the coming term of government figured.

The rather threadbare positive side of the Coalition’s campaign featured three elements. One was its claim to superior economic management, captured in its promise that the budget introduced for the coming financial year would be in surplus. But even this claim to virtue was overshadowed by its dire predictions about what would happen under Labor’s leader, “the Bill Australia cannot afford.”

The second element was the promise of large tax cuts, projected a preposterous ten years into the future to make the benefits seem greater. Without much scrutiny, the Coalition simply asserted that these cuts could be made while keeping the budget in surplus and without harmful cuts to spending. Labor’s costings and tax policies, by contrast, were subject to intense analysis and criticism.

The third element was a sweeping series of local projects, which largely passed under the radar of the national media. In this unashamed example of widescale pork barrelling, it isn’t clear how many projects were of social value or represented value for money.

Post-election, with Morrison’s stunning victory lending a halo of success to all he did, commentators have tended to forget some of the more bizarre aspects of his campaign. After lower-house crossbenchers and Labor defeated the government on the medivac legislation, Morrison sought to dramatise the consequences by re-opening the Christmas Island facility. A few weeks later, after the huge influx of asylum seekers failed to materialise, he closed it again, having spent an enormous amount on an extravagant pre-election gimmick.

Equally absurd was the government’s campaign against electric cars, and its casting of Labor’s aspiration that half of the new cars sold in Australia would be electric by 2030 as an attack on tradies and boat owners.

If the Coalition’s re-election had been seen as likely then its cynical and erratic polices on global warming would surely have been subjected to more scrutiny. Instead, environment minister Melissa Price gave not a single interview during the campaign, a reflection of a belief within the Coalition leadership that she couldn’t be trusted to handle difficult questions on this key portfolio. Morrison removed her straight after the election, despite having denied during the campaign that he would do so. Several times the government made blanket assertions about its progress on global warming, but few journalists showed great interest in probing the claims.

No doubt expecting Labor to take government, the media went along with the Coalition’s strategy of focusing on the opposition. Labor put forward perhaps the most economically responsible and carefully costed election platform in many years. Its reward was the deliberate misrepresentation of its “retiree tax,” its “housing taxes” and even, largely on social media, its completely fictitious “death tax.”

The Coalition’s campaign was in many ways an unsubtle throwback to the 1950s and 60s, when it cast Labor as inherently unfit to govern. When Labor announced a $4 billion plan to improve childcare, education minister Dan Tehan dismissed it as “a fast track to a socialist, if not communist, society.” Morrison told a business meeting that “the union movement will basically be in control of your business if the Labor Party is elected.”

It is miraculous what Morrison got away with. The sense of shock on election night was very much a product of the expectations generated by the polls. But the way the campaign itself unfolded may also have been the product of how those expectations shaped the behaviour of the parties, the media and perhaps even, indirectly, the electorate. •

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Last month Queensland swung most to the Morrison government — a touch over 4 per cent on current estimates, and more than double any other state. The swing was particularly pronounced in areas that might be affected by the Adani coalmine (although it was exacerbated by high support for One Nation and the United Australia Party, with their Coalition-friendly how-to-vote cards).

Instead of opposing Adani outright, as Hawke opposed the dam, Labor sat awkwardly on the fence. But similar sentiments came into play: an outlier state angered at the prospect of Canberra interfering in its affairs and sacrificing jobs at the behest of trendies in Sydney and Melbourne. Only this time the state in question had thirty seats, not five.

More generally, we need to be wary of trying to find “reasons” for last month’s shock result by matching seat-by-seat (or booth-by-booth) swings with assessments of whether voters would have won or lost under Labor’s proposed policies. For one thing, many of the 2019 swings appear, at least partly, to be corrections for 2016 moves in the other direction, which were in turn at least partly a result of Labor’s “Mediscare.”

Most importantly, though, political scare campaigns, of which we have just witnessed a ferocious example, don’t target rational individuals researching party policies and deciding what’s in it for them. On the contrary, spreading misinformation relies on voters’ lack of knowledge and disinclination to dig into the detail. It’s about whipping up emotion. Throw in a fictional “death tax” and it becomes safer for stressed voters to stick with what they know. Those in precarious economic circumstances — people who would be more likely to benefit from the spending that would have been funded by Labor’s housing and dividend policies — can be the most susceptible to fear.

So you could see the results in, say, Sydney as simply a case of Labor seats swinging to the Liberals, and Liberal seats moving the other way. Or you could see them as a general change-of-government swing counteracted by a scare campaign that was particularly effective among people of modest means.

After every Labor election loss, opinion pages and airwaves burst with advice. Overwhelmingly, the party is urged to move to the centre, reconnect with battlers, and learn the values of aspirational voters. These naggings are as hollow as they are predictable; sometimes the same commentators, only months earlier, had been celebrating what was seen then as a move to the centre (2004 was a prime example).

They don’t stand up in 2019, either. Labor’s big-ticket policies — straight out of Treasury and the technocrats’ handbook — were hardly the stuff of revolution. (It’s true that promising to legislate to reverse the Fair Work Commission’s penalty rate decision was a bit out there, and perhaps played into the usual fears of union domination.)

But Labor presented the platform with fiery rhetoric, exaggerating its mildly redistributive effects. Beyond the true believers, it was never clear who all those swipes at the “top end of town” were supposed to impress. Like the decision to present a big target, this tactic probably flowed from the better-than-expected result three years ago and the hope of latching on to the international post–GFC anti-elitist zeitgeist.

But perhaps one lesson from 2016 — and from Trump, Brexit and Theresa May’s close shave against Jeremy Corbyn — is that low expectations are a necessary ingredient. And in 2019 it was the Coalition government that was the firm underdog.

There is little point in the opposition gnashing its teeth about being out of touch with voters. Its policies might have been good or bad, but it lost the election because it asked voters to give it a tick before it acted. No opposition since 1993 has been so foolish. And with the exception of the 1998 GST election, no government in living memory has either.

In 1983 the Hawke opposition declined to mention that it would impose an assets test on pensions, which was perhaps the hot potato it handled in its first term. A lot of the language and sentiments were similar to this year’s dividend franking debate. Few of the reforms still celebrated today were taken to elections first.

The fourth estate’s rare bout of introspection — how did we get it so wrong, do we not understand our own country? — will be fleeting, but on this occasion is not really warranted. When all the opinion polls point one way, what’s an election pundit supposed to think? It’s true that many observers enthusiastically internalised the long line of poll results, perceiving political events so clearly through a poll-created lens that they convinced themselves that we don’t need the polls to tell us that this government was going down, big time.

But if the pollsters had accurately anticipated the result, expectations would obviously have been different.

(My election-morning assessment was in line with earlier jottings: seeing Labor’s campaign as wrong-headed but ultimately accepting the evidence of the polls. See also reasons for the government to be hopeful, last December.)

The polls said it would be around 51 or 52 per cent to Labor. The Coalition instead won 52 per cent. Was there a late swing? Were the polls wrong for the whole campaign? Were they wrong for the last two years? Were voting intentions for the Coalition under Malcolm Turnbull as high as 52 or 53 per cent (rather than 49) in the weeks before he was chopped down?

As noted last week, I’m also not as sceptical as most about the idea of a late swing.

It is clear that two things will survive a nuclear Armageddon: cockroaches and the bizarre insistence among the political chatterati that betting markets are useful “predictors” of election results. They are merely a reflection of general expectations, which are mostly driven by the opinion polls, and should never again be referenced as evidence on a particular seat or the overall result. But of course they will be.

One side effect of this result is that the chances of a successful referendum on the Uluru Statement from the Heart have shot up. Under a Labor government it would probably have gone nowhere, because Liberal opposition leaders simply lack the clout to bring their side to the constitutional amendment table. And Bill Shorten would not have been likely to hold a referendum without Coalition support.

Labor opposition leaders, by contrast, have no problem jumping aboard. Supporting constitutional referendums is in their DNA (communism in 1951 aside). As a rule (with the usual exceptions) referendums succeed when a Liberal prime minister with the necessary internal clout is convinced of the desirability of constitutional change.

Scott Morrison now possesses a level of authority not seen since Tony Abbott’s early months as prime minister. The spectacular nature of the polls’ failings insulate him against poor future numbers. And even before the election he had expressed an interest in making progress on this front. •

The post Notes on an election appeared first on Inside Story.

We’ll never know for sure what went wrong, but here are a few ways of looking at the great 2019 polling disaster.

A big two-party-preferred miss: The headline fail was the fact that all public pollsters published Labor two-party-preferred support that rounded to 51 to 52 per cent in the final days of the campaign. When the counting is over it will be close to 48 per cent. So, 3 to 4 per cent off.

That’s about how wrong they were in Victoria last November, but the difference between a big win and a landslide doesn’t generate the same headlines.

A big primary-vote miss: Leaving aside idiosyncratic Ipsos, which always overstates the Greens (mostly at the expense of Labor), the polls exaggerated Labor support by two or three percentage points and understated the Coalition by three or four. See them all at Wikipedia.

Aggregated, that’s a slightly smaller fail in the primary votes than in two-party-preferreds.

Then there’s Queensland: The northern state has a long tradition of excess enthusiasm for Labor in the polls, which it then corrects as election day approaches. In 2019 the trajectory was extra steep. Just six months ago the polls were suggesting a two-party-preferred swing to Labor in that fifth of the electorate of around 7 or 8 per cent. The current estimate is 4.2 per cent — in the other direction.

The most recent pre-election state-by-state data comes from Ipsos and Newspoll, both sets published in the final week of the campaign but taken over the previous several. Allowing again for Ipsos’s bad Labor–Greens habit, it seems that Queensland was the site of the biggest exaggeration of Labor support.

Overstating minor parties, understating the Coalition: There was also a totally predictable overstating of surveyed support for the biggest right-wing minor parties, One Nation and the United Australia Party. One reason is the decision to include them in the initial list of “which of these will you vote for?” All the pollsters included One Nation in the question, while only Galaxy and Newspoll (which happens to be run by Galaxy) included the UAP.

Complicating the picture is the fact that while the UAP ran in all 151 electorates, One Nation only contested fifty-nine. Galaxy, Newspoll and Ipsos seem to have adjusted for this reality, but perhaps not Essential, which had One Nation on a great big 6.6 per cent in its final poll. At last count, One Nation received only 3.1 per cent. So how did Essential’s other 3.5 per cent vote?

It seems likely (though there’s not enough evidence to say, and never will be) that the vast bulk of the people who told pollsters they would vote for these two parties, but didn’t, put a “1” next to the Coalition instead.

Preference flows: This is part of the same minor-party problem. Not only did pollsters overstate them, but by using preference flows from 2016 (One Nation) and 2013 (PUP, Clive Palmer’s previous party) they understated preferences for the Coalition.

Only Galaxy and Newspoll seem to have assumed a relatively high 60 per cent flow to the Coalition from both minor parties, but even that looks likely to be too low. (The Australian Electoral Commission will publish two-party-preferred flows from all parties in a few weeks.)

(I went into this preference issue in a bit more detail earlier in the month.)

The ingredients came together in particularly combustible fashion in Queensland, where support for those minor parties was highest (both in actuality and polled). Still, even allowing for these minor party and preference errors, we’re left with a big polling miss.

Late swing? The statistically skilled commentators in particular tend to be dismissive of the concept of a late swing, seeing it as an excuse from the pollsters. I’m not so sure.

Voting-intention polls aim to measure, within the margin of error and so on, how the voting population would answer the “how will you vote?” question, not how the respondent actually would vote. As election day approaches, the voting scenario becomes less hypothetical and the two concepts should converge, making the final polls the most accurate.

To an extent, all elections involve scare campaigns with potential effects close to polling day. The desire to kick the government out is tempered by misgivings about the opposition and a fear of the unknown. At this election this dynamic was dialled up to the red zone.

A late swing, not captured by the pollsters, could happen. The fact that Labor was widely expected to win could concentrate voters’ minds. Newspoll stopped surveying at noon on Friday. All it takes is for undecideds to break predominantly one way.

As Essential’s Peter Lewis wrote after the election:

Our final poll was still at 8 per cent of voters undecided and thus, removed from the sample, nearly double the number from previous elections. A further 18 per cent had told us they hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to the campaign. That’s more than one-quarter of the electorate.

A counter-argument is that the YouGov/Galaxy exit poll had Labor on 52 per cent after preferences. But polls like these, conducted across a selection of unidentified electorates, have always been rough.

Internal polling: What about the internal party polls? From journalists’ reporting, Labor was delivering mixed messages. One, based on the tracking polls (conducted for the first time by YouGov/Galaxy), had them easily winning. (Just like that exit poll.)

But there was also handwringing in the final week, seemingly based on Labor’s individual seat polling. Expectations had dipped into minority government territory. Then, by Friday evening, Labor insiders evidently had a spring back in their step and were briefing journalists on a seat haul in the high seventies to low eighties. (Labor has ended up with sixty-seven or sixty-eight.)

The Coalition, meanwhile, was happy to confide doom and gloom. The polling was generally pessimistic, with the odd ray of light.

Overall it’s consistent with a belief on the part of Labor that the mere appearance of being headed for victory will generate something called “momentum” and become self-fulfilling. Perhaps the Coalition, by contrast, reckoned that being seen as the underdog was no bad thing.

Herding? Many brainy people, including Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt, detect something fishy in the pollsters’ two-party-preferred numbers across the campaign: they’re all so similar, sitting around 51 and 52 per cent. They calculate, to varying degrees, the chances of the campaign polls being so close together as astronomically remote.

See, for example, Kevin Bonham.

I humbly have several issues with this, and questions for the stats folks, which I’ll leave to another post. (Mostly it’s to do with the fact the pollsters measure primary support and estimate two-party-preferred, and the primary numbers didn’t obviously herd.)

My two cents: To overcome the minor-party problem, the pollsters might like to try surveying twice as many people, reading out only the major parties to half the sample, and also naming the minor parties they deem worthy of inclusion for the other half. The differences between the two sets of results, at least over time, could be illuminating, at least giving an indication of the softness of major-party support vis-a-vis minor parties.

And they should keep a very, very close eye on Queensland. But they’ll no doubt be doing that anyway. •

The post Queensland, and other polling problems appeared first on Inside Story.

It may be that Labor lost the election for the same reason that Hewson lost in 1993. They proposed an ambitious plan of tax reforms. Their opponents launched an all-out scare campaign that misrepresented the taxes, created fear, uncertainty and suspicion, and won the election. If that’s the explanation for Labor’s shock defeat, it is a bad sign for the chances of future reform — and hence, for the quality and wellbeing of Australian society.

At most, seven seats remain in doubt. More in doubt is whether Scott Morrison will lead a majority government or a minority one. As of Sunday morning, the Coalition was ahead in seventy-six of the 151 seats. Labor was ahead in sixty-nine, and others in six. That’s very tight, especially when in Bass, the Coalition led by just over 300 votes.

It could easily end up in a minority on the floor of the House, as it was before the election. Indeed, the current state of the parties in the count is exactly the same as it was six months ago, before Julia Banks defected from the Coalition. But if that’s how it ends up, that should be workable — and if not, it will probably be because the government is trying to do something fundamentally wrong.

There will be plenty of time for considered opinions on why Labor lost its own unlosable election, after having led in every opinion poll since September 2016. It might help us understand why it happened if we first learn more about exactly what happened.

1. We expected a medium-sized swing to Labor. Instead we got a medium-sized swing to the Coalition

The opinion polls estimated on average that Labor would win 51.7 per cent of the two-party vote, a swing of just over 2 per cent. Instead, the ABC’s Antony Green estimated at the end of Saturday night that the final results would show a swing to the Coalition of 1.5 per cent, giving Labor just over 48 per cent of votes after preferences. (The Australian Electoral Commission’s results website shows a two-party swing of 0.5 per cent, but that excludes sixteen seats where the final contest includes a Green, independent or minor party.)

That is a big difference from what the polls were forecasting, and well outside their margin of error. It follows the Victorian election six months ago when the polls got it even more wrong, that time by underestimating Labor’s vote. For a decade, we’ve had the good fortune of having opinion polls we can trust. Now, alas, we can no longer rely on them for accurate information on how the voters see things.

(When did the polls wander off track? Before all those bad Newspolls helped to overthrow Malcolm Turnbull? Yesterday’s Newspoll was 3.5 per cent out. Had the public long been saying one thing to the pollsters, while thinking something else? Or was the result just the effect of the scare campaigns against Labor’s tax reforms and against Bill Shorten?)

The outcome also made fools of the punters — and of Sportsbet, which on Thursday, as a publicity stunt, offered to pay out early for anyone who put their money on Labor. Even Ladbrokes was offering odds of 6 to 1 against the Coalition until the voting stopped and we discovered it had won.

The only polls that gave any hint of the result were the final seat polls YouGov Galaxy published in the final days, and even they were hit-and-miss. (They reported the Queensland seats of Herbert and Forde as 50–50, but the Coalition won them both by at least 58–42.) But the polls did find that in some seats the swing was to the Coalition, and in others the swing to Labor fell short of what was needed. But because seat polling has a poor record, most of us discounted them as reliable evidence.

2. We were divided. Any district within ten kilometres of a GPO was probably swinging to Labor. Any district outside that was probably going the other way

In most seats, the swing was to the Coalition. But there were exceptions. In Victoria, Labor won two-party swings of 2 per cent or more in roughly half the seats. And in the inner cities, of whichever city in Australia you look at, the Coalition lost ground, and Labor and the Greens gained.

The election has left Australia more divided than ever. In central and north Queensland, electorates suffering high unemployment were looking forward to the prospective Adani coalmine, so they dumped Labor and swung massively to the Coalition.

It sums up the mood in central and north Queensland that the biggest swing to the Coalition anywhere went to the MP whom southerners see as a joke: George Christensen. He won an 11.26 per cent swing in the Mackay-based seat of Dawson, and there were big swings on either side of it: 10.68 per cent in Capricornia (Rockhampton) and 7.62 per cent in Herbert (Townsville).

The anti-Labor mood in Queensland was felt everywhere outside the southeast except Leichhardt (Cairns). It extended to outer-Brisbane seats like Blair, Forde and Longman (which the Coalition won back), and even to Bonner in the eastern suburbs and to Lilley in the north. Wayne Swan’s old seat was shaken by a 4.8 per cent swing, although it looks like Labor will survive.

But inner-suburban Brisbane, Liberal or Labor, went the other way. Ryan, Brisbane’s poshest seat, recorded a 3.68 per cent swing to Labor, and there were noticeable swings in its neighbours, Brisbane and Griffith. In all three, the Greens’ vote topped 20 per cent — at least partly due to their fervent opposition to the Adani mine.

Adani has become a fault line dividing Australians. To people in regional Australia, especially regional Queensland, the mine represents an opportunity for well-paid, full-time private-sector jobs: manna from heaven, to relieve the lack of jobs. But to others, especially in inner cities, it represents expansion of the world’s use of coal, the fuel largely responsible for warming the planet, with all the risks that follow as icebergs melt, weather patterns worsen, the sea rises, and low-lying land is submerged.

The first group doesn’t want to see the government tackle climate change seriously; the second insists that it must. Scott Morrison is basically with the first group. But unless the Coalition accepts that climate change is real and serious action has to be taken urgently, the reality of the climate emergency means the issue will keep growing like a cancer within the party.

But this cancer is spreading within Labor ranks too. Outside central and north Queensland, the biggest swing against Labor was in the coalmining areas of the Hunter Valley. Frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon lost 9.24 per cent of the vote and held on only narrowly in his normally safe seat of Hunter, while neighbouring seats like Shortland and Paterson also recorded big swings against Labor. Neither party has an easy way out of its dilemma.

The division within Brisbane was repeated in other cities. In Sydney, a swing of almost 20 per cent saw independent Zali Steggall eject former prime minister Tony Abbott from his seat of Warringah, while across the Heads, fellow independent Kerryn Phelps is still a chance to retain the Wentworth seat she won in last year’s by-election. Bradfield, Bennelong, Mackellar, North Sydney: the affluent Liberal heartland swung as one against its government. It’s hard to believe it did so because it was attracted to Labor’s tax reforms. Climate change was surely the key issue.

But on the other side of Sydney, in Labor’s heartland, it was a different story. The Liberals won back Lindsay with a swing of 6.14 per cent, and won an even bigger swing in Chifley against Labor trailblazer Ed Husic, the parliament’s first MP from a Muslim family. Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen’s seat of McMahon was shaken by a swing of more than 5 per cent.

In Melbourne, the trends we saw in November’s state election continued with slightly lesser force. The swing to Labor in the Liberals’ blue-ribbon seats was 7.38 per cent in Kooyong, 6.41 per cent in Higgins, and just under 5 per cent in Goldstein. That was not enough for any of them to fall to Labor or the Greens, but Higgins is now more marginal than La Trobe, which is a classic outer-suburban marginal that the punters expected to fall to Labor this time but instead went strongly the other way.

In Perth, Labor failed to take any of the three marginal middle- and outer-suburban seats it had hoped to gain, but won a 6.36 per cent swing in the city’s richest electorate, Curtin, vacated by former foreign minister Julie Bishop. In the ACT, it won a 3.64 per cent swing in affluent, educated Canberra, now an inner-suburban seat straddling both sides of the lake.

3. The Greens polled well, One Nation so-so, Clive Palmer no-no

The seat of Canberra embodies another trend: by and large, these big swings to Labor in two-party votes in the inner cities were matched by a big rise in the Greens vote. In Canberra, Greens candidate Tim Hollo, who was chief of staff to former Greens leader Christine Milne, ran second for most of the night, and was overtaken by the Liberals only when the pre-poll votes came in.

Across Australia, the Greens vote was almost unchanged at 10.1 per cent, but that masks an increasing geographical division. It continues to build as a formidable force in the inner suburbs, Liberal and Labor, while losing relevance almost everywhere else.

The $50 million Clive Palmer reportedly spent on election advertising certainly damaged Labor, but did nothing for Clive’s electoral chances. His United Australia Party ran in almost every seat, but won only 3.4 per cent of the vote, a third that of the Greens. It got to double figures only once: in Riverina, where it was the only right-wing alternative to Nationals leader Michael McCormack, and hence reaped the gains of the widespread anger shown in the area at the state election.

Bad results for the Liberals often went hand in hand with a strong showing by the Greens, and the same was true for One Nation’s impact on Labor. Pauline Hanson’s party was unable to top 20 per cent in any seat in Queensland, but it did so in the seat of Hunter, almost pushing the Nationals out of second place. Bob Katter held his seat of Kennedy for Katter’s Australia Party, but his bid to expand its reach to neighbouring seats failed.

4. The independents’ surge was patchy, but still reverberated

The independents did better than expected in some areas, worse in others. Former Olympic skier Zali Steggall had an emphatic win in Warringah to send Tony Abbott on his way. Health administrator and academic Helen Haines won an unexpected victory in Indi to succeed Cathy McGowan. And Kerryn Phelps, written off by the punters weeks ago, is still in the contest to hold Wentworth, although the Liberals’ Dave Sharma now has a 1000-vote lead.

But Rob Oakeshott failed to make the soufflé rise twice in his attempt to win Cowper, and Albury mayor Kevin Mack was easily beaten by former health minister Sussan Ley. Apart from Andrew Wilkie, now a fixture in his Hobart electorate, no other independent topped 15 per cent of the vote.

But one long shot has been overlooked. In Mallee, where Nationals MP Andrew Broad retired early as a result of an unfortunate trip to Hong Kong, thirteen candidates have sliced up so much of the vote that his intended successor, Anne Webster, won only 29.5 per cent. That leaves a lot of preferences to be distributed, especially between three independent candidates. Webster is likely to win, but no one knows for sure where those preferences will end up.

5. More than one in twenty Australians voted informal

With the votes of 75 per cent of electors counted, some 677,000 Australians have voted informal. They include well over 10 per cent in Mallee and six other seats, all in western Sydney. In some seats, more than one in eight votes were informal. Some of that was presumably deliberate, but some is due to inconsistent voting rules at federal and state level, which are hard to explain to inattentive voters, or those with little English.

Most of them are in Labor electorates, so it should be Labor’s responsibility to find ways to usher in common laws at federal and state level. Should voting be compulsory? Should preferences be compulsory? We should debate how to avoid the unnecessary disenfranchisement of so many.

Arguably, it could have affected the result in a seat like Lindsay, where more than one in ten voters had their votes ruled informal.

6. Coalition Senate gains could make it easier to pass key bills

The Senate count is only half-done, but the results are clear in almost all seats. The one exception is in Queensland, where the collapse of Labor’s vote could see it lose a Senate seat to the Coalition. Elsewhere the Senate results are much as I forecast, but with the Queensland outcome updated by Lonergan’s final poll for the Australia Institute — one of the few polls in the whole campaign that proved to be of any use — which predicted the failure of Clive Palmer.

On the right, the Coalition has won three of the six seats in all states except Tasmania and probably Queensland. Jacqui Lambie will return to the Senate from Tasmania, and One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts from Queensland.

Palmer and his United Australia Party did not come remotely close to winning a seat in the Senate or the House. One Nation proved it is still by far the biggest of the many non-Coalition parties on the right, but only in Queensland was its support strong enough to win a seat.

On the left, by contrast, the Greens defied expectations by retaining their senators in all six states. Labor at best has won two seats in every state, and its second seat in Queensland is far from certain.

The bottom line is that the Coalition is likely to have thirty-four or thirty-five of the seventy-six seats in the new Senate, up from thirty in the old, meaning it will need either four or five votes from the crossbench to pass legislation opposed by Labor or the Greens.

The existing crossbench of eleven non-Green senators will be whittled down to six: Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts, once again at her side; Cory Bernardi, elected as a Liberal in 2016, only to quit the party immediately afterwards; Stirling Griff and Rex Patrick, the two Centre Alliance senators left from Nick Xenophon’s glory days in 2016; and Jacqui Lambie.

Gone are former Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm and his replacement Duncan Spender (New South Wales); former radio and TV livewire Derryn Hinch (Victoria); centrist independent and former Xenophon follower Tim Storer (South Australia); Nationals senator and former Lambie follower Steve Martin (Tasmania); and Liberals senator and former Family First senator Lucy Gichuhi (South Australia).

Also gone are three senators who arrived in Parliament on Pauline Hanson’s coattails: Peter Georgiou (Western Australia), her last loyalist in the current Senate; Brian Burston (New South Wales), who eventually quit to run for Palmer’s party; and, of course, Fraser Anning (Queensland).

Anning’s party stood everywhere and won just 0.6 per cent of the national vote; he himself came last in the four-man battle for Queensland’s final seat on the right, in which Roberts also easily beat Palmer and Liberal conspiracy theorist Gerard Rennick.

Bernardi’s party, which had success in its days as Family First, won just 0.75 per cent of the national vote. Even Palmer’s party won just 2.2 per cent, despite the fortune he spent to win the election.

Hanson’s 5.1 per cent of the vote was less than half the Greens’ tally (11.2 per cent) — but however obvious her limitations, she remains the biggest brand on the right after the Coalition parties. They must be grateful that they do not have a more formidable rival.

7. The battle for Queensland’s final seat is now crucial to Senate control

If the Coalition wins the final seat from Labor in Queeensland, it will have three options for passing legislation Labor opposes: making a deal with the Greens, winning the support of the Centre Alliance and two of the four crossbenchers of the right; or persuading One Nation, Bernardi and Lambie to vote together for the measure.

That makes the battle for the final seat in Queensland crucial. If Labor wins, the Coalition will need support from the Greens or the Centre Alliance to pass legislation Labor opposes; if the Coalition wins, it does not need the centrists on side. As of Sunday, with less than half the vote counted, the Coalition had 2.55 quotas and Labor 1.65.

The Greens (0.82) and One Nation (0.69) both look assured of a seat after preferences. In 2016 both of them won far more preferences than the big parties did. A lot was made of Clive Palmer directing his preferences to the Liberals. This will be the test of whether his voters followed instructions.

And the outcome may help decide how Scott Morrison’s government will govern: on crucial issues, will it seek consensus, or just try to crash through? •

The post The great divide appeared first on Inside Story.

Why? Because the opinion polls say he will. The polls, published and internal, were even more spectacularly wrong this time than back then. Right up to election day, Labor was confident of a number in at least the high seventies. Liberals were sharing their pessimism with journos.

The lashings of eggs-on-face for the commentariat come from the polls. If they had pointed to this result during the campaign no one would be surprised.

For months and years they had Labor ahead — not by huge amounts, but consistently enough for seasoned political observers to internalise the figures and find verification of the inevitable change in all manner of nooks and crannies. Parliament’s walls seeped it, ministers reeked of it, you could see it in the faces of people in the street. This government was doomed.

During the campaign I spent a fair bit of time in this column obsessing about likely preference flows making the difference, but it turned out that what the pollsters got horribly wrong were the primary votes.

Queensland not only repeated its proud tradition of underperforming for Labor relative to survey-generated expectations, it also swung to the government by (on current figures) around 2 per cent. The big difference between surveyed and actual numbers in that fifth of the country alone would account for the pollsters’ national misfire.

Labor won two-party-preferred majorities in Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria and the two territories.

Of course, not fronting up for the journos’ difficult questions in the last week doesn’t change votes one way or the other. But it’s likely that similar considerations drove opposition leader John Hewson in 1993 and Bill Shorten in 2019 to make that decision. To avoid any awkward questioning, any bad headlines. Don’t rock the boat.

I wrote yesterday morning of Labor’s habitual avoidance, at campaign after campaign, of the difficult issue of the economy and its longstanding conviction, ingrained at institutional level, that emphasising its strengths — health and education, and now climate change — will encourage electors to cast their votes with those issues in mind.

But humans aren’t like that. They care about the value of their homes and the state of the economy, and a voter approaching the ballot box with a niggling fear of the unknown can be an unpredictable thing.

Scott Morrison, a charm-free zone but unburdened by Bill Shorten’s woodenness, repeated the simple theme again and again that none of the good stuff is possible if you don’t have a strong economy.

It would have been wiser for Shorten and Chris Bowen to spend the final week talking about their economic plans until they were blue in the face, and then some more. Better to make people bored than twitchy.

The good news is that conservative commentators who were only days ago whingeing about the greed and irresponsibility of the voters have had their faith in humanity restored. But for the rest of us, now is the time to turn off the telly and newspapers and rediscover the joy of books, because the unending prognoses of Labor doom will be too much to bear.

The reheated stories of the blue-collar base, battlers, values, a moribund party structure, estrangement from the silent majority, and how the next Labor prime minister is not even in parliament. If you’re old enough, you’ve read and heard it — and its equivalent applied to the conservative side — a thousand times before.

The next polls should  register jumps in the prime minister’s and the Coalition’s fortunes, but in the longer term there is no reason to believe this government will be any more liked by the public than it was in the past.

In 1996 Hewson’s successor, John Howard, discovered the wonders of a small-target strategy. He had to promise no GST, ever. Thanks to Labor’s gamble, franking credits and negative gearing for all are here to stay. But three years is a long time to wait. •

The post A lesson twice learnt appeared first on Inside Story.

There’s change in the air. People can feel it.

Will today’s election be decided in western Sydney? Or in Queensland? By women, or by young people? The answers to all are yes, and it’ll be decided everywhere else in the country too. The aim is to get seventy-six or more lower house seats. Strengths for one side in different demographics will be cancelled out by weaknesses in others.

The Coalition’s best states should again be Queensland and Western Australia. Tasmania is likely to once more put in Labor’s biggest two-party-preferred vote, with Victoria and South Australia fighting it out for the mainland title.

New South Wales could be a dark horse, outperforming for Labor compared with expectations for the second time in a row. Queensland will likely fizz for the opposition (again), and Victoria will certainly disappoint anyone who’s been anticipating anything like a repeat of last November’s state election.

Overall, unless the pollsters have really stuffed up, there’ll be a national two-party-preferred swing to Labor, seats will move in both directions, and some will shift to and from independents. The Greens might take Higgins from the Liberals.

Will election 2019 be decided by preferences? Of course, in the way that every federal election this side of 1975 has been. It’s quite possible to impute slightly different preference flows that would change the overall outcome. (To put it another way, at no election since 1975 has any party won a majority of seats on primary votes.)

And if Labor prevails today, it will probably be despite trailing in primary votes in most electorates.

But with One Nation and the United Australia Party together registering 9 per cent in today’s Newspoll — the first running in only fifty-nine electorates, the latter in all 151 — strong preference flows from those two parties to the Coalition should moderate the big preference advantage Labor has had this century, mostly from the Greens.

But there is a different preference question this time, as I’ve written too obsessively about already. In short, we could see a repeat of Queensland in 2014, when the pollsters got the primary votes about right, but their mistaken preference assumptions made for a surprise overall result.

And of course there’s the fact that Newspoll’s 5 per cent for the UAP is unlikely to be replicated in the actual results. Where will those extra votes go?

Scott Morrison has run a disciplined, on-message campaign, emphasising the standard Coalition theme that a government can’t afford to pay for good stuff like health and education if the economy isn’t healthy. Labor will wreck the economy, goes the theme — and its “new taxes” will send you to the poor house.

Bill Shorten has made the best of his inherent woodenness, revealing warmth and humour, but in the final days has displayed that very Labor tic of just ignoring his party’s weak spot, the economy, and emphasising — guess what — health and education. And climate change.

It would be wiser to meet the weakness head on (see Morrison above). Voters take these lingering doubts to the ballot box.

Shorten also declined to give the traditional final-week National Press Club talk. I believe the last opposition leader to do that — I’m sorry to bring him up — was John Hewson in 1993, who instead busied himself with noisy rallies that every commentator at the time judged an excellent way to “build momentum” but then, from around 7.30pm on the Saturday, saw (more accurately) as a mistake.

Bill’s also been doing a bit of rallying the true believers in the final days, presumably to enthuse the volunteers for election day.

Still, if Labor wins all will be forgotten. And it probably will.

The betting markets, those distillers of general expectations, give Shorten an 83 per cent chance of being sworn in as prime minister. That’s way too high. Let’s just say Labor is more likely to form government than the Coalition.

Note: equivocation about the result does not imply a “close” result, let alone a hung parliament.

Noon update: note that being unsure about the likely result does not equate with anticipating it’ll be particularly “close” (however that is defined).

•

The post Can you feel it? appeared first on Inside Story.

According to the story, James Chessell, group executive editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, had said that his papers would “no longer commission uComms” to carry out polling now that he had become aware of who owned it. The story, which was published by ABC Investigations on the day parliament was prorogued, also reported that “some other uComms clients now intend to stop using the company after being made aware of its ownership.” Clients mentioned in the report included GetUp!, Greenpeace, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, the Australia Institute, the Animal Justice Party, and a number of political candidates — none of them conservative — in the federal electorates of Higgins and Wentworth, and in the state electorate of Sydney.

Who owns uComms (or rather UComms, as it appears in the company registry)? Effectively, three shareholders: Sally McManus, ACTU secretary; Michael O’Connor, national secretary of the CFMMEU, an affiliate of the ACTU; and James Stewart, a former executive of another polling operation, ReachTEL. Both McManus and O’Connor are “listed as shareholders on behalf of their organisations,” said the ABC. It also noted that “[b]efore being contacted by the ABC, uComms’s business address was listed in company documents and on published polls as being the same as the Melbourne CBD office building as the ACTU.” Subsequently, its listed address had changed “to a nearby Melbourne CBD address.”

The ABC had discovered much of this by searching UComms’s records, lodged with the corporate regulator ASIC. Even then, it had been forced to dig “deep,” since UComms’s records made “no explicit reference to the ACTU or the CFMMEU.” An initial search revealed only one shareholder, a company called uPoint Pty Ltd. McManus, O’Connor and Stewart were the (non-beneficiary) shareholders of uPoint, making them directors of UComms only indirectly.

UComms styles its polls — or it did until shortly after the story broke — as “UComms/ReachTEL” or “UComms Powered by ReachTEL.” This was not because it is the polling company ReachTEL, renamed, but because UComms uses ReachTEL’s original robo-polling and SMS technology. ReachTEL, founded by Stewart and Nick Adams in 2008, was acquired in September 2015 by Veda, a data analytics company that is also Australia’s largest credit reference agency. The sale of ReachTEL to Veda, said Stewart, would allow the two “to grow the business with Veda… [and] enhance our research offering, and the union of our collections and marketing platforms [would] expand our market leading solutions.” (Veda itself was acquired by Equifax, a member of the S&P 500, in February 2016.)

Whether Chessell held himself or his newspapers responsible for not checking on UComms’s ownership, or blamed UComms for not presenting him or his editors with a statement of ownership, is not entirely clear. The former seems unlikely. According to the report, “none of the eleven uComms clients contacted by the ABC said they had thought to make a paid search of the company’s structure” — a search that would have set them back all of $17. “We do not routinely do ASIC searches of all companies with which we do business,” said the NSW Nature Conservation Council, one of UComms’s (now former?) clients.

If clients aren’t responsible for checking these things, should the company have told them? UComms thinks not. But rather than argue that it is up to clients to protect themselves from reputational damage, UComms says that any concern on that score would have been without foundation. “The notion there would be a conflict of interest is ludicrous — the whole point of establishing the company in the first place was to provide a quality service at lowest possible cost for both unions and the broader movement,” a representative was quoted as saying. “We’re growing the union movement to fight for fairer workplace rules and that means we need to make use of the latest technology. uComms is a part of that effort.” The trouble with this defence, of course, is that clients like the SMH and the Age are not part of any union or “broader movement”; if anything, just the opposite.

The ABC’s story noted that UComms had “received widespread media coverage in the past twelve months for its polls, including a recent front-page splash commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald predicting a Labor win in the New South Wales state election” — an election Labor lost. Was the SMH concerned that UComms had predetermined the result in Labor’s favour — on the assumption, perhaps, that a good set of figures for Labor would discourage the Coalition’s volunteers or deflate its vote? Apparently not. “There is no suggestion,” the report was careful to say, that “the outcome of uComms polling is influenced by its ownership structure.”

So, why the fuss? Because in the same way that justice not only needs to be done but must be seen to be done, polling that purports to give an objective measure of public opinion to any reader needs to be neutral and be seen as neutral — meaning, among other things, that it is conducted by those who don’t have a conflict of interest or agenda, however unconscious. (One reason why the uranium lobby dropped its own polling, in the late 1970s, and had some of its questions incorporated into other polls, was that Max Walsh of the Australian Financial Review, noting the provenance of the polls, discounted them.) While UComms’s state election poll may have been conducted in a thoroughly professional manner, if the company was “controlled by two of the most powerful forces on the left-side of politics,” as the report put it, there was a very real risk — if the ownership of UComms became known — that it would fail to satisfy the requirement that it be seen to be conducted in a thoroughly professional manner.

“Polling experts,” the ABC’s report insisted, “say uComms should have made clear to its clients, survey respondents and anybody reading their results that the Labor-aligned groups co-own the company.” But in the long history of polling in Australia, just when exactly have polling companies made it clear to their clients, to respondents, or to “anybody reading their results” who it is that owns them?

The rise of in-house polling. Where media outlets that publish poll results also own the company that produces them, the need to have the company clarify its ownership to its client hardly arises. From the early 1940s to the early 1970s, the only national poll — the Gallup Poll, formally known as Australian Public Opinion Polls (The Gallup Method), or APOP — was owned by a consortium of newspapers whose members, and associated mastheads, had exclusive rights to publish its results. The consortium consisted of the Melbourne Herald, whose managing director Keith Murdoch was responsible for bringing the Gallup Poll to Australia and for organising the group; the Sydney Sun; the Brisbane Courier-Mail; the Adelaide Advertiser; the West Australian in Perth; and the Hobart Mercury.

In 1971, when the Australian started publishing the results of APOP’s first rival poll as a national poll, Australian Nationwide Opinion Poll, or ANOP, it was publishing the results of a poll that News Ltd, majority owned by Keith’s son Rupert, had created, only this time as a joint venture with Associated Newspapers in Britain, and with its British subsidiary, National Opinion Polls. After the 1974 election, ANOP’s managing director, Terry Beed, bought out Associated Newspapers’s half, sold because ANOP wasn’t making money; Murdoch lost interest, though the company’s losses were attractive for tax purposes; and the company was sold to two of ANOP’s other employees, Rod Cameron and Les Winton. By year’s end, the relationship between ANOP and the Australian had come to an end.

In 1985, News — this time with a local market research firm, Yann Campbell Hoare Wheeler, or YCHW — created a new poll, Newspoll, via Cudex, a joint venture company in which News and YCHW were equal partners. Newspoll’s findings were published by the Australian. In May 2015, after Cudex was dissolved, News was left without a direct stake in any polling organisation. Newspoll now became a brand within the stable of Galaxy, a company founded by David Briggs, a former Newspoll executive, who struck out on his own (with his wife as co-owner) in 2004. Since December 2017, Galaxy has been owned by the British polling organisation YouGov.

While in-house polling of the kind associated with two generations of the Murdochs may now be largely a thing of the past, in-house polling has not disappeared. The SMH publishes the results of its weekly “readers’ panel,” in which 2000 or so readers are asked to give their “feedback” on questions that touch on issues of public policy, politicians in the news, and so on. For the election campaign, the AFR, its stablemate, has also established a “reader panel,” though a much smaller one. But the most prominent of the in-house polls is the ABC’s Vote Compass. First run in 2013, it attracts more than a million participants. While the ABC’s reach is undoubtedly bigger and more diverse than the SMH’s, not to mention the AFR’s, respondents to Vote Compass self-select — not only in the sense of deciding whether to participate (a feature, not sufficiently recognised, of all polls), but also in the sense that respondents (as in all viewers’ or readers’ polls) are not brought into the poll through a process of sampling.

External pollsters come to the fore. The first newspapers to commission national polls from companies they didn’t have a stake in were the Age and the SMH. When Age Poll (known in Sydney as the Herald Survey) was created in 1970, the polling was done by Australian Sales Research Bureau (subsequently Irving Saulwick & Associates) with samples drawn initially from voters in Sydney and Melbourne. From 1972 until the arrangement came to an end in 1994, polling was conducted nationally. Between 1996 and mid 2014, Fairfax — the Age, the SMH, and the AFR — used AGB McNair, subsequently ACNielsen McNair, ACNielsen and finally Nielsen, for its national polls.

The ownership of these companies was not something to which the newspapers drew their readers’ attention; Fairfax was satisfied that no conflicts of interest were involved. Following Nielsen’s decision to withdraw from the field, Fairfax turned to another foreign-owned provider. Since October 2014 the old Fairfax mastheads (now owned by the Nine Entertainment Co.) have depended on the French-owned Ipsos — the third-largest market and public opinion company in the world — for their national polling, and UComms and ReachTEL (with occasional exceptions) for their state and single-seat polling.

In 1973, after losing the APOP contract to McNair — a consequence of an ill-advised National Press Club speech by Roy Morgan shortly before the 1972 election, in which he claimed not to have “read a textbook on statistics, nor on sampling… nor on public opinion polls,” and boasted of his very special ability to interpret the figures from his computer — Morgan Research, through Gary Morgan, began a long association with Sir Frank Packer’s (later, Kerry Packer’s) Bulletin. Again, the magazine saw no reason to say who owned the poll. In 1992, Morgan switched to Time magazine — he was replaced at the Bulletin by AGB McNair — before switching back to the Bulletin in 1995. But after the Morgan Poll badly misread opinion ahead of the 2001 election, its contract came to an end. The Morgan Poll has not been signed up by any media company since.

After the axing of APOP in 1987, when the Herald & Weekly Times — and hence APOP — was acquired by News Ltd, the various mastheads involved in the APOP consortium made new arrangements. Some polled in-house, others engaged outside suppliers. On occasion, they sang from the same song sheet; for the 1998 election, Quadrant, run by Ian McNair, the last custodian of APOP, ran their polls. Again, there were no declarations of interests — or the absence of any conflicts — as is now the norm for contributors to some academic journals and online sites like the Conversation.

Since 2013, all News Ltd’s metropolitan mastheads — the widest-circulating newspapers in every state — have used (YouGov) Galaxy. Again, none makes any mention of YouGov’s interests. As with other outlets that don’t disclose such details, declarations of ownership are deemed irrelevant, and disclosing irrelevant information would simply waste valuable space. Ultimately, however, it is the mastheads — not the suppliers — that have to take responsibility for what questions are asked, when they are asked, and by whom they are asked.

Surveys for free. Other media outlets have established arrangements through which they get first access to polls they have neither purchased from an outside provider nor conducted in-house. The two most prominent pollsters to have come to arrangements of this kind are JWS Research, which produces a series called “True Issues,” and Essential or Essential Media (formerly Essential Media Communications), which publishes the Essential Report — originally weekly, now fortnightly, though more frequently during the campaign. JWS has a relationship with the AFR, Essential with Guardian Australia; previously, Essential had an arrangement with another online publication, Crikey.

Presumably, the AFR knows that JWS numbers the Mineral Council of Australia, the Australian Coal Association, and the Property Council of Australia among its clients; and the Guardian knows that Essential describes itself — a bit like UComms — as “a public affairs and research company specialising in campaigning for progressive social and political organisations.” If they don’t know about any of this, it’s not because either JWS or Essential keeps it a secret: the information is on their websites. The pollsters’ backgrounds and connections, far from discouraging the arrangements with their respective publishers, may serve to recommend them.

What’s in this kind of arrangement for the pollsters is publicity, their results being published on the front page of an important newspaper or its e-equivalent. What’s in it for the publishers is editorial material that is “exclusive” and free. The Roy Morgan Research Centre also gives away its poll findings, not via an intermediary but by posting them on its website and sending them to its clients.

OWNERS AND PLAYERS

When interviewers first ventured into the field in 1941 to conduct a poll for APOP, they didn’t tell respondents that the company was owned by a group of newspapers, much less tell them who owned the papers or managed them; typically, market research is conducted on the basis that respondents are not to be told for whom the research is being conducted lest it influence the results. (Telling respondents where they could read the results would have been a different matter.) Nor, when they published APOP’s results, did newspapers tell their readers who owned the poll or that newspaper executives had helped determine the questions.

Yet the fact that APOP was owned by a group of newspapers led by Keith Murdoch, an important political player on the conservative side of Australian politics, occasioned controversy; in particular, it caused concern to those who didn’t share Murdoch’s politics or trust him to conduct a proper poll. In the Worker, readers were warned that “the ‘polls’” were “financed by newspapers whose interests were opposed to the interests of the Labor Movement.” The stridently anti-Murdoch Smith’s Weekly, noting that APOP required its interviewers to “not be known as ardent supporters of a particular political party,” asked whether “the same qualifications” had been laid down “for its newspaper proprietor subscribers?” There were even demands that the government should set up an organisation — perhaps as “a branch of the Statisticians Department,” suggested one Labor MP — to conduct polls devoid of “political gerrymandering,” rather than leave polling to private enterprise.

None of the newspapers that had come together to create APOP (a not-for-profit company) and publish its findings were sympathetic to Labor. As Sally Young shows in her recently published history of “Australia’s newspaper empires,” Paper Emperors, between 1922 and 1943 none of these newspapers had editorialised in favour of Labor at a federal election; none, as she also shows, would do so until Fairfax broke ranks in 1961. In 1946, a member of the Tasmanian parliament alleged that Gallup interviewers had been conducting polls for the Liberal Party. Did the Mercury, a stakeholder in APOP, ask Roy Morgan whether this was true? Whether true or not, Morgan appears to have said nothing about it.

In 1959, while employed as APOP’s managing director, Morgan stood as a “Progressive Independent” for election to the Melbourne City Council; once elected, it was a position he would hold until after his contract with APOP came to an end. Councillors representing business interests formed a non-official party, the Civic Group, which largely controlled the council. By the time he was defeated, in 1974, Morgan had become its leader. The only official party on the council, Labor, had seen its influence decline. By contrast, Morgan’s first mentor as a public opinion researcher, George Gallup, far from seeking public office of any kind, made a point of not even voting. The Melbourne Herald covered Morgan’s 1959 campaign, including the fact that he conducted a survey of electors in his ward. But it went on publishing APOP findings on party support and political issues without mentioning Morgan’s political involvement.

By the late 1960s, suspicions within Labor’s ranks that APOP was under-reporting Labor’s vote encouraged Rupert Murdoch to establish ANOP. In those days when being an “underdog” was not considered an advantage, Murdoch was keen to do what it took to see Labor win. How he would have reacted if ANOP had done work for the Labor Party while being published by the Australian is difficult to say; while ANOP did some work for the Whitlam government, possibly brokered by the party’s secretary, Mick Young, it did not work for the Labor Party. ANOP’s work for the party would come after its connection with News was severed.

Failures to disclose how polls are conducted. What should polling companies — or, more to the point, those who publish their findings — disclose to those trying to make sense of the polls? During the current campaign, with its focus on the vote, the Australian (Newspoll), and the SMH and the AFR (Ipsos) have published the date(s) on which their polling was conducted, the size of the sample, and the sampling variance, or “margin of error,” due to sampling. But sampling variance, sometimes misrepresented as “the maximum sampling error,” rarely becomes part of any discussion of what the figures produced by the poll mean, and helps drive out any mention of non-sampling error. Under Morgan, APOP was not required to disclose the date(s) on which the polling was conducted, the size of the sample, or the sampling variance; under McNair, APOP at least disclosed the size of its sample. Saulwick disclosed the date of the fieldwork and the size of the sample (usually 1000), but said nothing about sampling variance. The same is true currently of YouGov Galaxy, and of the Morgan Poll. ReachTEL, which rejoices in publishing its results to the first decimal point, also says nothing about sampling variance.

Not every polling company or its client publishes the actual questions the poll has asked. Even with the question(s) on voting intention, there is a lack of disclosure. While Newspoll (and, in turn, the Australian) publishes the question it asks all respondents about how they intend to vote, as does YouGov Galaxy, no one following the Morgan Poll online, or Essential, or reading the Ipsos results in the AFR or SMH would know the question respondents had been asked. In particular, they wouldn’t know whether respondents had been presented with a list of parties from which to choose.

Presenting respondents with a list of parties may well prompt certain responses and repress others; not presenting respondents with a list may have different consequences. While the use of both approaches during the current campaign hasn’t attracted much attention from poll-watchers, Newspoll’s decision to add the United Australia Party to its list generated a discussion about how to compare polls that list a particular party with polls that do not. The AFR and SMH (and presumably the Age) publish the Ipsos figures for the Coalition, Labor and the Greens only; support for the other parties, which Ipsos also gathers, is swept out of sight by the papers and hidden under “other.”

Overlooked by most newspapers — the Australian, reporting Newspoll, is a notable exception — is the pollsters’ practice of posing a follow-up question to respondents who say they “don’t know” or are “unsure” how they will vote. This question is designed to get respondents to say to which party they are currently “leaning”; hence, the term “leaner.” Only after these respondents have been pushed — Essential pushes them twice — and the “don’t knows” reduced to a minimum, are the final voting-intention figures calculated and made public.

What do pollsters do with the remaining “don’t knows” — a figure that neither Ipsos nor YouGov Galaxy publishes? Newspoll makes it clear, as does Essential: “don’t knows” are excluded. In the past, however, not all pollsters have excluded them. Some pollsters have distributed them to one or other of the parties on the basis of which leader these respondents prefer or how they recall having voted at the last election.

There is also the not-so-small matter of the two-party-preferred figures. At the beginning of the campaign, Newspoll calculated these on the basis of preference flows at the 2016 election; so did Essential. How they distributed the first preferences that went to parties that didn’t exist in 2016 (the UAP, above all), they didn’t say. More recently, Newspoll has distributed preferences “based on recent federal and state elections,” an approach that has problems as well. Whether YouGov Galaxy, its stablemate, adopted this method for its national poll, conducted during the second week of the campaign, is hard to say from newspaper reports. Ipsos uses two methods: it looks at preference flows at the 2016 election, and it asks respondents who support minor parties to indicate whether they “will give a higher preference to the Labor Party candidate or the Liberal/National Party candidate?” In its last poll, happily, the two methods produced the same result. In its latest release, Morgan says it uses “respondent’s [sic] stated preferences.”

Where on the interview schedule the voting-intention questions are asked is something else few polls disclose. If the results of these questions are the most important results the poll generates — and no results are more closely scrutinised during a campaign — best practice suggests that the questions should be asked early in the interview; this ensures that the answers aren’t affected by the questions raised or answers given later. Ipsos asks its voting questions up-front. Under Morgan, perhaps to keep things low-key, APOP put them towards the end. Whatever it is that other pollsters do, they don’t advertise.

Even something as basic as the medium through which the interviews were conducted is not always clear; indeed, with some of the new technologies, it is not obvious that “interview” is still the appropriate word. Once upon a time, almost all interviewing was conducted face-to-face; in America, and beyond, face-to-face interviewing appeared to be part of “the Gallup method.” By the late 1970s, when more than 80 per cent of Australian adults had access to landlines, the industry shifted, largely, to telephones — interviewers dialling numbers at random, asking for someone in the household who met a set of demographic specifications (age and gender, typically), reading out the questions, and recording the answers. These were either recorded manually, to be punched into cards as code and processed by a computer, as Newspoll originally did; or, with Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing, or CATI, recorded on screens and fed directly to a computer, soon becoming the industry standard.

The main hold-out was the Gallup Poll, which maintained its commitment to face-to-face interviewing; under McNair it continued to interview face-to-face until the end. In an industry that has largely moved on, Morgan still uses face-to-face interviewing for much of its work; during this election, all of Morgan’s national polls have been conducted face-to-face. Valuable in its own right, face-to-face interviewing helps Morgan — one of the country’s biggest market research firms — build a database of respondents that can be reached for other purposes, and by other means.

With the tweaking of telephone technologies and the rise of the internet — both of which have reduced costs massively — the pollster’s toolkit has become increasingly diverse. Ipsos, polling for the old Fairfax mastheads, continues to use what it only describes as “random digit dialling.” In its first poll of the campaign (though neither the AFR nor the SMH noted the fact), it managed to combine landlines with mobile phones — whether via CATI or by some means it didn’t say. The Australian says nothing at all about how Newspoll conducts its interviews; last time, respondents either answered online or were reached by robo-polling — questions asked on the telephone, but not by a live interviewer, and answered by someone in the household, though not necessarily the person from whom the pollster wants to hear — the data from the two methods somehow being combined. YouGov Galaxy appears to have moved its national polling online; at the last election, Galaxy (in line with its other brand, Newspoll) combined online polling with robo-polling — a mode of polling that YouGov doesn’t use in Britain. Essential has always polled online.

Whatever the mode, raw responses are never wholly representative of the population from which they are drawn. This is because some demographics are easier to reach than others, with those of non-English-speaking background and young men traditionally posing the biggest challenge, and not all of those reached agree to an interview. It is also because response rates, falling for years, are now typically in single digits — a change that may be more marked among some groups than others. And it is because, within a particular demographic, those who do respond may not be representative of those who do not; with weighted data one has to hope that this isn’t true — even when, as with Vote Compass (which we are told weights by gender, age, education, language, religion and even respondents’ unreliable recall of their past vote), it almost certainly is true.

If the actual distribution of a population’s relevant characteristics is known — location, age and gender are the parameters pollsters usually look at — weighting the data so that it better matches the distribution of these characteristics in the population at large addresses only the first two reasons. If other or additional demographics matter — characteristics that are overlooked (ethnicity or education, for example) or for which there are no population data that can be used (income, possibly) — the ability of weighting to fix even these problems can be severely limited.

A longstanding mystery is what pollsters actually do to weight their numbers. Newspoll acknowledges its numbers are weighted, but doesn’t say what variables it has used or what weights it has applied. Ipsos applies weights, but its first poll of the campaign didn’t adjust for all the variables the AFR says it did — age, sex, location. YouGov Galaxy weights its data, but the report of its most recent national poll, carried by News Ltd’s Weekly Times, doesn’t actually say that it does. Morgan, too, doesn’t say whether it weights its data, though it surely does.

In their failure to disclose almost anything about their polls, the political parties are in a class of their own. On Anzac Day, when the Coalition and Labor had agreed to a truce on advertising, the UAP declared in the News Ltd press — via one of its full-page ads, repeated several times since — that its polling showed that “15 per cent of Australians” had “decided to vote for the United Australia Party” and that “the majority” of those “undecided” (“over 28 per cent of Australians”) would also “vote for the United Australia Party and bring real change to Australia.” If these were the answers, any reader might have asked, what were the questions?

But in reporting poll findings that are unsourced — and, in this case, also completely implausible — the UAP is hardly alone. Where would newspapers be, especially in this campaign, without stories sourced to one party or another claiming to reveal what “internal polling” is showing in this electorate or that? Whether journalists ever see the original reports, or even summaries, is doubtful. No polling company is ever mentioned, no account of the methods is ventured, no data… no nothing. Reports of polls conducted by interest groups are almost never so bare.

Since November 2004, Britain has had an umbrella organisation to which virtually every polling organisation of any importance has belonged; members include both Ipsos and YouGov. Companies that join the British Polling Council agree to “fully disclose all relevant data about their polls.” Indeed, they agree to “publish details of the questions that they have asked, describe fully the way the data have been analysed and give full access to all relevant computer tables.” The council’s “objects and rules” require members to post both the unweighted data and a description of the weighting procedures on their websites within two working days of the original public release of the findings. This doesn’t offer pollsters many places to hide. The defence of proprietorial privilege and claims to intellectual property get short shrift.

An attempt to establish something much more modest for Australia was made more than thirty years ago, ahead of the 1987 election, by Jim Alexander (then at AGB McNair) and Sol Lebovic (at the time, running Newspoll). Their initiative was inspired, in part, by the formation of two groups said to have operated during the 1987 British election — the British Market Research Society Advisory Group on Opinion Polls and the Association of Professional Polling Organisations. But because they didn’t want to go it alone, and not everyone was up for it — Morgan Research, in particular, would not have supported it — nothing came of the proposal.

An initiative of this kind need not rest with the pollsters. There is nothing to stop media outlets or other Australian clients requiring polling companies to fully disclose their practices along the lines mandated in Britain. Some companies, no doubt, would rather forfeit the business than enter into a voluntary arrangement of this kind. But why would companies like Ipsos or YouGov, which have signed up to this sort of arrangement in Britain, decline to comply with such a request here?

Conflicts of interest. Ownership of polling companies, and of the companies that pay for their polls, routinely involves conflicts of interest that go beyond having a mission, like UComms, or a political position, like the consortium once built by the Herald & Weekly Times. Companies that conduct polls and companies that publish them employ labour — or, in the case of pollsters, as Gary Morgan is wont to insist, hire contractors. As a result, they stand to be affected by wage rates, payroll taxes, industrial disputes, leave entitlements, and so on. Does the polling they commission or conduct, however unwittingly, reflect this?

In the 1940s, Arthur Kornhauser, a researcher at Columbia University, set out to explore one aspect of American polling — was it “fair to organised labor?” After looking at the choice of topics on which they polled and the wording of their questions, he concluded that across the period he examined — the war years, 1940 to 1945 — pollsters had shown “a consistent anti-labor bias.”

There were no technical impediments to overcoming this bias, Kornhauser argued; “necessary safeguards” could be put in place to ensure that the job was done “objectively.” There were, however, “more formidable hurdles.” Polling organisations were “sizable business organisations” in their own right, he noted. In addition, they had business clients to satisfy — newspaper and magazine publishers, among them. “How far these influences will persistently stand in the way of balanced inquiry and the reporting of opinions about labor must be left for the future to answer.” But he wasn’t optimistic. One solution was for organised labour to do its own public opinion research; seventy years later, the mission UComms set itself might be seen as part of this. Another solution, “urgently” needed, was “research centres devoted to thoroughgoing, continuing attitude studies in the labor relations field.”

Opinions sympathetic to organised labour may not be the only views that a newspaper might be less than keen to publish. Companies responsible for commissioning polls sometimes have other interests to protect. For a newspaper to suppress the results of a question asked in a poll, after its executives have been involved in deciding whether to ask it, is unusual. But it has happened. In October 1958, after Roy Morgan had written up the results of an APOP question on newspaper readership, the Herald suddenly took fright and refused to publish it. The instructions to Morgan were unambiguous: “completely kill, destroy and otherwise wipe.”

Polling organisations may also have interests that may threaten their integrity — or appear to do so. During the debate about Indigenous land rights in the early 1990s, Gary Morgan agreed that the following words should accompany the Morgan Poll published in Time magazine: “Statement of Interest: The executive chairman of the Roy Morgan Research Centre, Gary Morgan, is also chairman of the WA mining company Haoma North West NL.” Until this statement appeared in small print, on 14 February 1994, Time had been publishing Morgan’s polls on land rights for over a year without any acknowledgement that the company had a potential conflict of interest.

Morgan’s interest in goldmining was hardly news; until February 2018, Haoma was a publicly listed company and Morgan makes no secret of his mining company. But since Time appears to have had no idea that Morgan was invested in mining — like UComms’s clients, presumably, it didn’t “routinely do ASIC searches of all companies with which we do business” — then in the absence of Morgan’s statement few of its readers would have had any idea either.

Identity matters. If material interests matter, at least potentially, so might identity; typically, of course, the two are connected. Since the emergence of polling, no Indigenous Australian, so far as I know, has been in charge of a poll or worked as part of a media team commissioning a poll in the mainstream media. Since APOP asked not a single question on Indigenous (or “Aboriginal”) issues until 1947 and no further questions until 1954, and after thirty years of polling and the asking of over 3600 questions had included only twenty-two questions on Indigenous issues, it is difficult not to conclude that some Indigenous involvement in the process of determining what questions to ask might have made a difference. And not just under Morgan’s stewardship; from 1973, when APOP turned to McNair, it asked just six questions out of nearly 2000 on Indigenous issues. What was true of APOP was true of the polls more generally. Over the same years, the Morgan Gallup Poll asked at least 600 questions in total, no more than two on Indigenous issues. ANOP, polling for the Australian from 1971 to 1974, asked just five out of nearly 600; Saulwick, from 1970 to 1979, just six out of nearly 1000.

With Indigenous involvement, not just the number of questions but also the nature of the issues — or the terms in which they were asked — might have been different. A question, for example, about whether “Aborigines should have the right to vote,” included for the first time by APOP in 1954, might have been included earlier; it might have been repeated sometime before the Commonwealth extended voting rights to Indigenous people in 1962; and the question of whether “Aborigines… should or should not be given the right to vote at federal elections” might not have been asked in November 1963, since their right to vote had already been “given” more than a year earlier.

Overwhelmingly, polling organisations in Australia — like the media companies to which they have usually had to answer — have been run by men. In recent years, this has changed, but not dramatically. At Ipsos, Jessica Elgood is in charge of what used to be called the Fairfax–Ipsos or Ipsos–Fairfax poll; at Morgan, Michele Levine, chief executive since 1992, once managed the Morgan Gallup Poll; and at ANOP, Margaret Gibbs built a formidable reputation, though as a qualitative researcher rather than as a pollster.

Having few, if any, women involved in constructing the polls can make a difference. For a few years during the war, two organisations sampled opinion for the press. One, of course, was APOP. The other was Ashby Research Service, run by Sylvia Ashby, the first woman to own a market research firm — not only in Australia but very likely the British Empire. Ashby sampled opinion in New South Wales for Packer’s two Sydney newspapers, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. Polling in early 1942, she asked: “Should the Government form a People’s Army to fight in co-operation with the AIF and Militia if the Japanese invade Australia?” Respondents thought the government should. The men Ashby interviewed said that if a “people’s army” was formed, they wanted to join it; so, once she decided to ask them, did the women. Later that year, APOP asked its first question about a “merger” of the Australian Imperial Force and the Australian Military Forces. But it didn’t ask about the possibility of “a people’s army.” Even if it had, what are the odds that APOP would have asked whether women wanted to join?

Like the people they survey, pollsters — and those who pay them to ask some questions, not others, and to ask them in certain ways — range in their social attitudes from liberal to conservative, and in their political views from left to right. Whether these predispositions are conscious or unconscious is a separate matter. Among pollsters, diversity of outlook is much greater than diversity of ethnicity or gender. A similarly diverse media may well hire pollsters that make a good fit.

Polling in the 1970s, on issues the women’s movement was raising — the pill, abortion, prostitution, rape, divorce, child care, women in the workforce, how women should be addressed, and so on — and that other movements were raising — homosexual relations, the age of consent — provides one window into these predispositions at work. McNair, especially, but also Roy Morgan Research, commissioned by the Herald & Weekly Times (McNair), and by the Bulletin and the Women’s Weekly (Morgan), were inclined to ask about a more limited range of issues or to frame their questions in a more conservative way, than Irving Saulwick & Associates or ANOP, commissioned by the SMH and the Age (Saulwick) and by the Australian (ANOP). The pattern wasn’t wholly consistent; many of the questions asked by each of the pollsters were relatively neutral. And a number of topics — rape crisis centres, and the gender pay gap, for example — were ignored by all the men. But there was a pattern nonetheless.

AN OBLIGATION TO DIVULGE?

Knowing who owns a polling organisation can raise doubts about the bona fides of the polls it produces. In the case of UComms, Nine raised concerns about an independent operator, but when polling first began in Australia, much wider concerns were expressed about the in-house poll that Keith Murdoch had organised. While the UComms connection lasted no time at all, and its most controversial polling was conducted for the SMH only in New South Wales, APOP’s connection with the Herald & Weekly Times lasted for forty-six years — and for more than half of this time it was the only organisation conducting polls for the press nationwide.

Any list of the things that require fuller disclosure by the polls and by those who commission polls — if not to respondents then to readers — should not stop at naming who owns what or identifying who controls what they do. Pollsters and their paymasters are in the business of gathering information, publishing it, and using it to shape public deliberation and political debate. As a consequence, they should be under some obligation to reveal: anything that might pose, or appear to pose, a conflict of interest; the questions they ask and how they gather their data; and what they do to the data before they publish the results. •

The post Who controls opinion polling in Australia, what else we need to know about the polls, and why it matters appeared first on Inside Story.

For a couple of weeks now, according to pollsters, those national two-party-preferred figures have rounded, in Labor’s favour, to 51 or 52 per cent versus 49 or 48 per cent. That’s after they have distributed estimated preference flows, an exercise whose imprecision grows with the level of non-major support.

And 51 per cent of the vote can deliver a big win, as the Howard government experienced in 2001, or a loss, as Labor found out in 1998. In 1993, a 51.4 per cent vote gave the Keating government eighty out of 147 seats. In 1987 the Hawke government’s 50.8 translated to a bumper eighty-six out of 148. (It remains Labor’s second-best seat haul since the second world war.) The vote–seat equation traditionally favours the Coalition, and also sitting governments, but Malcolm Turnbull found out in 2016 that on a bad day 50.4 per cent will get a conservative government a miserable seventy-six out of 150 seats.

The pendulum, that wonderful device introduced by Malcolm Mackerras in the 1960s, predicts the number (but not the identity) of seats for a party for a given two-party-preferred vote, based on the result at the previous election. Pendulums usually work. Sometimes they don’t. According to pendulums going into the 1998 and 2010 contests, both the Howard and Gillard governments should have been thrown out of office.

The pendulum will probably get it about right in 2019. But it might not.

The narrowing of the polls over the campaign has dampened earlier wild expectations of a seat tally in the nineties for Labor, obtained by applying those poll results to the pendulum. Those anticipations could also be found in the betting markets, which are not the great predictors some claim but instead reflect general expectations (mostly fed by the polls.) Now the tally is down to the low eighties.

And falling? Let’s touch base on election day.

PRIMED POSITIONS

This week the Australian released a bunch of Newspoll seat-survey results, and the electorates the pollster (and its clients at the paper) chose to measure just happened to be ones in which the Morrison government is expected to do well. Taken together these results showed… the Morrison government doing well.

But seat polls are as a rule not very reliable.

Newspoll has also released a consolidation of the last five national surveys to give state-by-state results. The ABC’s Antony Green plots that on his pendulum to get eighty-one out of 151 seats for Labor. Pollbludger’s latest estimate is a slightly lower seventy-nine.

But Newspoll’s two-party-preferred estimates are not assisted by its silly decision to include UAP in its party readout.

And if you’re a bit perplexed at the generally positive coverage by News Corp of its former bête noire Clive Palmer, and those massive ads on for his United Australia Party this week, Neil Chenoweth reports in the Financial Review that “a month ago News Corp’s sales team signed a $6 million ad deal with Clive Palmer for prime positioning across the group’s mastheads in the last week of the election campaign.”

Is it conceivable that Newspoll readouts were discussed at any time?

But even with massive ads in the former Fairfax newspapers as well, and Newspoll’s and Galaxy’s assistance, UAP remains flat on 4 or 5 per cent. No 2013-style late surge for Clive this time.

A ROD FOR ITS OWN BACK?

Labor’s platform is regularly described as redistributive — from wealthy to poor, from old to young — and that’s true to a modest degree, but the actual housing and dividend imputation policies are in themselves hardly the stuff revolutions are made of. Instead, they’re prescriptions Treasury would recommend and the Coalition has at least considered.

They’re also the kind of thing a reforming government like the sainted Hawke and Keating’s would have implemented — without being foolish enough to take them to an election first.

But the opposition’s rhetoric at this election, in keeping with the “populist” international zeitgeist, is decidedly left-wing — all these swipes at the “big end of town” (a hunk of early 1980s red meat that NSW premier Neville Wran used to toss to the true believers; it seemed less clunky then) and talk of empowering the ordinary folk are almost Trumpian in their anti-establishmentism.

It’s true that firebrand ACTU leader Sally McManus is a rockstar in some circles, but those circles account for only a tiny section of the voting public. Projecting those gushing feelings onto the general population would be very unwise.

Bill Shorten has shown no reluctance to employ the c-word, “change.” This Labor opposition is doing it their way. If it wins on Saturday (still the likely outcome, just) “big target” will be judged a success, but a hard-headed assessment is that those policies are making the campaign more difficult for the opposition than it should be, and Labor’s majority would be bigger had it allowed all the attention to focus on the government’s problems.

Still, unless you happen to be one of the Labor candidates who just misses out on Saturday, a win is a win.

Having been upfront will also give the new government authority to push the promised policies through the Senate, although crossbench senators will claim their own mandate. And when it comes to the many other things the government will wish to do, the post-July Senate is likely to be almost as monstrous as it is today.

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Because election campaigns produce insatiable demands for journalists’ copy, each one produces a plethora of demographic hot takes: Will women make the difference this time? Are single mums the key? Stay-at-home dads? Battlers, aspirationals or doctors’ wives? These memes never make it past election day, partly because of their inherent flakiness, and also because it’s never really defined what “making the difference” or “deciding the election” means.

It’s almost certain that had men voted as women did at the last election, Labor would have formed government. So perhaps men made the difference in 2016.

“Young voters might decide!” gets a run every time, but particularly this year because of the uptick in enrolment for the marriage equality survey and, thanks to direct enrolment, an unusually comprehensive electoral roll. But the grim reality is that the roll gets older at every election, and 2019 is no exception. The proportion of the enrollees aged eighteen to twenty-four is smaller than last time, and probably smaller than it’s ever been. The proportion aged sixty-five and over is bigger than ever. That’s what an ageing society produces.

The oldies might not be as reliably right-wing as they used to be, but they’re still overwhelmingly Coalition voters. People do get more conservative with age.

Some 10.3 per cent of the electoral roll is aged twenty-four or under. Those aged sixty or over account for 30.8 per cent. Labor supporters determined to frame this contest as young versus old might want to be careful what they wish for. •

The post Careful what they wish for appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s worth noting that the consistent poll consensus (Labor at 51–52) has prompted comment from election specialists who view this pattern of agreement (over dozens of individual polls) as statistically suspect given the nature of polling and the laws of probability. Pollsters can sometimes be guilty of “correcting” for outlier polls, a phenomenon known as “herding.” The recent Victorian state election is cited as a possible example, with polls overwhelmingly predicting a narrow Labor majority rather than the substantial victory that occurred. This election may be a test of the polls as much as of the parties.

Compared with the other changes of federal government since 1972, Labor entered the current campaign with an historically modest poll lead, and hence less margin for error. Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd on the Labor side and Liberals Malcolm Fraser, John Howard and Tony Abbott all entered the campaign with levels of party support (some up to the mid 50s) affording some insurance against any loss of ground in the campaign. Four leaders secured large majorities, with Fraser topping the two-party-preferred ladder (55.7 per cent), followed by Howard (53.6 per cent), Abbott (53.5 per cent), Hawke (53.2 per cent) and Rudd (52.7 per cent). Labor’s Gough Whitlam achieved the same percentage as Rudd, but with an anti-Labor electoral bias and some idiosyncratic seat results could only secure a nine-seat majority.

Labor’s three successful postwar government-winning leaders were all, in their own ways, dynamic, larger-than-life figures, not a compliment likely to be directed at Bill Shorten. But whether this will cost him victory will be known soon enough.

The narrowness of Labor’s lead may have suggested the merits of a cautious, small-target approach, but as has been discussed in Inside Story, the party opted for a big-target (“courageous”) suite of policies, involving significant spending commitments. The substantial revenue required would come largely from involuntary contributors apparently written off as electorally irrelevant by Labor. “They are free to vote for someone else,” as shadow treasurer Chris Bowen so bravely put it.

If Labor assumed that its big-spending agenda would win votes, polling suggests that such confidence was misplaced. Any poll movement during the campaign has been slightly to the government. A big-spending program always had the potential to play into the Coalition’s preferred theme of competent economic management, terrain on which Labor routinely loses. The government has been trying to exploit that advantage, and ally it to Scott Morrison’s lead in the preferred prime minister polling, to eke out an unlikely victory.

National polls cannot tell the full story of what might happen in 151 seats, but it is possible to craft a picture of how Labor might assemble a parliamentary majority. Minimal credence will be paid to single-seat polling or to party polling: the former is largely discredited (see Longman and Braddon by-elections, for example), and the latter is often a case of the media being used by party apparatchiks. A reasonable assumption might be that, all other things being equal, any pro-Labor swing in a state will be larger in the capital/metropolitan area than in the regions/bush.

While Labor won sixty-nine seats in the last parliament, redistribution has meant that it enters the contest with a notionally higher number. It is allocated the new seats of Bean (ACT) and Fraser (Victoria), plus redistributed Corangamite and Dunkley, both in Victoria. It loses the abolished South Australian seat of Port Adelaide, for an amended overall total of seventy-two. It needs a net gain of four to secure the narrowest of majorities.

Queensland is a state where polls promise federal Labor much between elections and then voters fail to deliver on the day. The emerging view suggests that this will again be the case in central and north Queensland, and Labor has already been written off by some in its ultra-marginal seat of Herbert. Labor simply has to win two or three seats in the Brisbane–Gold Coast area to get something out of its apparent rise in support in the state since 2016.

In New South Wales, the enduring stench of the Labor “brand” apparently continues to pose problems. It has been suggested that in the seat of Lindsay, the circumstances of the Labor member’s “retirement” may render the seat vulnerable, and if it were to be lost it is essential that Labor pick up two or three Coalition seats to compensate.

In Victoria, Labor optimists would be hoping for the recent state election result to be transposed to federal boundaries, but it is possible that gains may be limited to La Trobe and Chisholm, with anything more a bonus.

Tasmania often votes differently — electing a full contingent of Liberals in the Hawke Labor landslide election of 1983, for example — and there are enough “difference” vibes around for Labor to be concerned this time.

If Labor loses seats in these three states, it could be a long election night, although Gough Whitlam had just that experience in 1972, with losses in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, compensated for by sufficient gains elsewhere.

In South Australia, Boothby is the government’s most vulnerable seat, but the margin (just under 3 per cent) may be a stretch for Labor. The status quo in the state seems a reasonable bet, with Rebekha Sharkie an overwhelming favourite to retain conservative Mayo for the Centre Alliance.

Attention then focuses on Western Australia, historically as much a boulevard of broken dreams for federal Labor as is Queensland. Starting from a low base, Labor would be in trouble if it could not pick up the marginal Hasluck, and it would be useful to win one or two of Pearce, Swan or (a roughie) Stirling.

These prognostications can identify the elements of a Labor victory, but it’s far from landslide territory. Quite simply, Labor must keep any losses in Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania to a bare minimum. And the Greens are not without hope in the Labor seats of Macnamara and Wills, where victory in one or both could jeopardise a clear Labor majority.

Labor supporters will probably regard the above scenario as understating their party’s chances, and they may be right. I am factoring in some remaining softness in the Labor lead and the ability of some government MPs in marginal seats to hang on through their personal votes. One or both assumptions may prove to be misplaced.

A relevant factor is the likely result, in both city and country, where government-held seats are being contested by well-credentialed independents or (in Victoria) Greens. If sufficient independents are successful, but the government holds enough of its ground against Labor, the possibility of a Coalition minority government can’t be ruled out. Katter and Sharkie could be expected to be onside in such a scenario.

This election will provide answers to at least four questions. Can a government as divided as the Coalition has been in this term still prevail at the ballot box, or does the “disunity is death” axiom still apply? Can a government so consistently behind in the polls between elections still turn it around during a campaign and manage a come-from-behind win? Can an opposition with a big-target strategy withstand the predictable onslaught from threatened interests and secure government? Finally, can a Labor opposition leader with persistent low personal approval ratings still be elected prime minister? (The Liberals have already achieved it: see Abbott.)

These questions are not merely academic. If Scott Morrison prevails, future prime ministers will be able to assert more credibly that continual bad polling between elections need not guarantee defeat. And nor may party disunity. Hardline conservatives within the Liberal Party might feel even more empowered to propagate their views.

A Labor loss would probably consign a big-target strategy to the filing cabinet for some considerable time, and would be a blow to those contending that the “end” of neoliberalism necessarily creates an appetite for a redistributive alternative program. Defeat would ensure that the approval/preferred PM metric resumes critical relevance for future Labor leaders.

Bill Shorten is close to achieving what has eluded some big names in Australian politics, including Billy Snedden, Andrew Peacock and Kim Beazley. No first-up federal opposition leader after loss of government has ever gone on to become prime minister. One — Liberal Brendan Nelson — was rolled by his party before even contesting an election. We will soon know whether the much-maligned Shorten is in fact in the right place at the right time. •

The post A close election draws closer appeared first on Inside Story.

Every election is unique, of course. But when we are trying to guess what might happen in the near future, looking at past patterns can help us see where the current campaign fits, and guide our weighting of likelihoods and probabilities. It also helps us see what has changed and what hasn’t.

As Table 1 shows very vividly, Australia goes to the polls relatively often: twenty-eight times in seventy years, during a period in which Britons voted in nineteen parliamentary elections and Americans in eighteen presidential elections. This is no surprise, given that the constitutionally determined maximum interval between federal elections is just three years from the date the House first sits after an election. Sometimes it is a little shorter (as this year) to accommodate the different rules governing Senate elections. Sometimes prime ministers see an opportunity and call an election earlier than they need to.

A quarter of those elections have seen a change of government. The only pattern is that no government has been thrown out of office at its first attempt at re-election, although Julia Gillard did lose Labor’s majority in 2010. Some governments have been very long-running — Robert Menzies and his Liberal successors won nine elections; Labor’s Bob Hawke and Paul Keating won five; John Howard won four; and Malcolm Fraser three. But each of these governments had at least one brush with near defeat.

Of those twenty-eight elections since 1946, the Coalition won eighteen and Labor ten, the discrepancy largely reflecting the Liberals’ nine successive victories during the twenty-three years from 1949 to 1972. Since 1972, Labor and the Coalition have won nine elections each.

Minor parties and independents are treated more kindly by Australia’s system of preferential voting than by the first-past-the-post systems in Britain and the United States. Voters can express both a preference for a minor party with their first vote and a second preference for a major party, which allows them to affect the result if their preferred candidate is eliminated.

The outstanding feature of Table 2 is the recent increase in the vote for “others,” and the corresponding fall in the combined vote for the Coalition and Labor. Until 1987, the highest percentage of “other” votes, at 12.3 per cent, came in 1977. Nine of the ten elections since 1990 have recorded a higher figure than that.

Twice in earlier times, the vote for minor parties had surged when a new party emerged. The first followed the Labor split of 1955, and the rise of the breakaway Democratic Labor Party, or DLP. The second followed the formation of the Australian Democrats by a former Liberal minister, Don Chipp, in 1977. In both cases the major parties recovered much of the lost vote over time.

But the current situation, with “others” topping 20 per cent in the last two elections, looks likely to be a continuing feature of the Australian political landscape. The most important of the other parties is the Greens, but Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party are also a substantial presence in 2019, and a large range of independents have enormously varying prospects in their own seats.

Table 3 shows the election results according to the winning two-party-preferred margin. This measure, popularised by the political scientist Malcolm Mackerras, is designed to take account of the two key facts about Australian elections: it is a preferential voting system in which the distribution of second preferences from minor parties may be crucial; but the key contest is between the two major parties — Labor and the Liberal–National Party Coalition.

This table also highlights another feature of Australia’s single-member system in the House of Representatives: the number of seats won is not necessarily proportional to the total vote obtained. (They can even go in opposite directions: in 1987 Labor’s two-party-preferred vote dropped 1 per cent but it increased its majority.) In almost every election, the winning side won a greater proportion of seats than of votes, and the disproportionality has sometimes been quite marked.

Two patterns are apparent. The first is that the greater the winning margin, the more marked becomes the disproportion. In other words, the electoral system tends to magnify landslides. The second is that the system has, over all, been kinder to the Coalition than to Labor. Only on two of the twelve occasions when the difference between votes won and seats won has been more than 6 per cent has Labor been the beneficiary.

The conventional explanations for the difference between parties are that for many years the distribution of seats was weighted towards more conservative rural electorates, and that too much of Labor’s vote was locked up in the working-class electorates it tended to win by large margins. Both these explanations have become weaker with time. The disproportion has been smaller recently, perhaps reduced partly by the success of independents and minor parties in winning seats.

In this single-member, preferential voting system, the flow of preferences is crucial to who forms government. Occasionally there is careless commentary that a party needs at least 40 per cent of the primary votes to form government, but twice already — Labor in 2010 and the Coalition in 1998 — government has been won with less than that percentage. In all seats where the candidate does not obtain 50 per cent of the vote in the first round, what matters is the post-preference count.

The DLP’s preferences went overwhelmingly to the Coalition; the Democrats’ tended to go more to Labor, but by a much smaller amount. Among current groups, the Greens’ second preferences flow more than 80 per cent to Labor. The likely preference flows for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party are less clear, but 60–40 to the Coalition is a commonly cited figure.

Because the distribution of seats doesn’t necessarily match the distribution of votes, winning sides have prevailed on five occasions despite receiving less than 50 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote. If the distribution of votes between seats had been different, they could easily have lost. Each of these elections (1954, 1961, 1969, 1990 and 1998) was a case of an incumbent government performing less well than its opponent but managing to win because it retained its most vulnerable seats. Interestingly, the government with the smallest-ever winning share of the two-party-preferred vote was John Howard’s in 1998.

Table 3 also shows that Australian elections tend to be close, and have become even closer. Over the twenty-eight elections, the winner’s two-party-preferred percentage has been between 48.9 and 51.0 on thirteen occasions, or just under half. In only nine has the winning side won 53 per cent or more. The largest victory was in 1966, the so-called Vietnam election, in which a relatively new prime minister, Harold Holt, faced a much older Arthur Calwell. The second- and third-largest victories were by Malcolm Fraser in 1975 and 1977. But in the twelve elections since 1984, the winning side has topped 53 per cent just twice, on both the occasions when the Coalition drove Labor from office.

On the three most recent occasions that Labor won government from opposition, its two-party share was 53.2 per cent (under Bob Hawke in 1983) and 52.7 per cent (under both Gough Whitlam in 1972 and Rudd in 2007). A Shorten victory this year looks unlikely to exceed these figures.

Table 4 describes the net swing measured in two-party-preferred terms at each election. On only seven occasions did the government improve its position in an election — when the Menzies government won in 1955 and 1958 following the Labor split (its share of the vote fell very slightly in 1958, but it gained seats); in 1963 and 1966, when Labor under Arthur Calwell fell further behind after almost winning the 1961 “credit squeeze” election; when Paul Keating’s Labor won the 1993 “Fightback!” election; and when the Coalition won the 2001 and 2004 elections under John Howard.

Interestingly, each of these government successes was followed by a large swing back to the opposition. Menzies almost lost the credit squeeze election in 1961; Whitlam made huge strides in 1969; and both Keating (1996) and Howard (2007) ignominiously lost the next election after their 1993 and 2004 triumphs.

The other five changes of government were two-step processes. In the first election the opposition almost draws equal, and then gets a further swing and victory at the next election. This happened in 1946 and 1949 for Menzies; 1969 and 1972 for Whitlam; 1974 and 1975 for Billy Snedden and Fraser; 1980 and 1983 for Bill Hayden and Hawke; 2010 and 2013 for Abbott.

There is great variation in the size of the swings at elections, although in only three of twenty-eight was the swing less than 1.0 per cent. In twelve, the swing was 4.0 per cent or more, with the two biggest, at more than 7.0 per cent, in 1969 and 1975.

Polling and pendulums

The lead-up to an election is always accompanied by the breathless reporting of opinion polls. The news organisations that commission polls have an interest in maximising the news value of the product they have paid for, as well as in increasing the newsworthiness of the election. So the reports of polls tend to highlight change and drama. The following should be borne in mind.

Margin of error. If a poll sample is genuinely random — if every member of the relevant population has an equal chance of being selected — then the results from a sample of 1000 people can be extrapolated to the wider population with 95 per cent confidence to plus or minus three percentage points. In other words, if such a survey showed a result of 50 per cent then the true figure, nineteen times out of twenty, would lie between 47 and 53 per cent. If the random sample is 2000 people then it is accurate to plus or minus two percentage points. If the sample is 10,000, it is accurate to plus or minus one percentage point. It’s important to note that the margin of error follows a normal distribution (or bell curve). If a sample survey of 1000 finds 50 per cent support for Labor, for instance, that is much more likely the true level of support than 47 or 53 per cent.

It is the size of the sample that matters, not the size of the population. As long as the sample is random, then a sample of 2000 can be extrapolated to the Australian population, the state, or an individual electorate with the same confidence level of plus or minus two percentage points. Surveys of individual electorates are often and rightly seen as less reliable, but this is principally because they tend to be based on much smaller samples, and so have a much larger margin of error.

Pollsters sometimes combine several recent polls to explore regional variations. But they also extract state-level figures from national polls, and the size of these subsamples means that they have a much larger sampling error than the survey as a whole.

The value of surveys rests on random selection and probability theory. Polls based on self-selection — when readers record their views on a website, for example — have no scientific validity.

In practice, pollsters can have more confidence than the level suggested by probability theory alone. They know the demographic parameters of the Australian population (gender, age, occupation, location, place of birth, and so on) and can see how well their sample matches them. If instead of the stringent scientific criterion of the result having a less than one in twenty probability of occurring by chance, we adopt a probability of 90 per cent, then a sample of 1000 gives roughly a plus or minus of two rather than three percentage points. If a whole series of polls give a similar result, the pollsters can be more confident.

Sampling distortions. In practice, few surveys achieve pure randomness. Access problems and the need to limit expense produce distortions. In the old days, when most surveys were done face to face, it used to be joked that owners of German shepherd dogs were under-represented. Equally, remote rural dwellers were often under-represented. Landline telephone polls tended to miss younger people who were less often at home, and even now, when the great bulk of the public own telephones (mobiles or landlines), the sampling frame of telephone ownership does not exactly match that of the electorate.

Apart from the shortcuts that cost-conscious marketing organisations may take in obtaining their sample, the other major distortion is that pollsters can’t compel people to respond to questions, and the pattern of refusals — seemingly becoming more common as the years pass — introduces another element of non-randomness.

Probably the most important potential distortion in samples before contemporary Australian elections involves people whose first language is not English. The 2016 census found that 21 per cent of Australians spoke a language other than English at home, with the largest groups being Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese and Vietnamese. Many of these people are also fluent in English, of course, but it seems likely they are under-represented in a lot of surveys.

Conversion of votes into seats. The election result is determined by the number of seats a party wins, not the total votes it acquires. No single-member system can be guaranteed to give proportional outcomes. If the distribution of the vote is lopsided then this can affect the number of seats won. If the two-party-preferred vote shows a clear margin, the seats are likely to follow, but if the election is close, distribution — and the pattern in the most marginal seats — can become all-important.

One of the icons of Australian elections, the pendulum, shows which seats will change hands with what degree of uniform swing. Swings are never uniform, though; they tend to be very different in different parts of the country. The size of the national swing is often a good guide to the total number of seats that one side will gain (rather than the identity of which seats will change) as different trends cancel each other out.

It’s also important to remember that national polls can never predict whether independents or minor parties are likely to win seats. The pendulum works well for Labor versus the Coalition but not so well when a major contender is a minor party or independent.

Don’t knows and mind-changers. News organisations are interested in a simple, dramatic poll headline. They are interested in opinions rather than lacks of opinion. But along with those who refuse to participate, the “don’t knows” typically form a sizeable proportion. Pollsters try to minimise this by asking which way they are leaning, but for many purposes ascertaining the lack of a settled opinion or the softness of opinion may be as important as the headline result.

The Australian Election Study, which has taken surveys after each election since 1987, finds very sizeable proportions of people saying they decided how to vote during the campaign itself, and quite a few in the final days — enough, by far, to deliver a landslide to one party or the other if all decided in the same direction. But these surveys almost certainly exaggerate the actual degree of indecision. The polls published contemporaneously have never found the size of movement that those surveys suggest is possible. There does seem, though, to have been an increase in the number of softly committed voters who are prone to late decisions.

The potential for people to change their mind or to make their final decision very close to the election is the basis of the explanation pollsters often use when their results don’t match the election results. Rather than present a misleading certainty about what the polls portend, though, they could give more priority to probing degrees of ambivalence and indecision among their respondents.

Distributing minor-party preferences. Australian pollsters have one advantage over those in other democracies. With voting compulsory, they don’t have to estimate which respondents will vote, and which won’t. On the other hand, they have their own special problem, thanks to preferential voting. With the likelihood that the vote for “others” will exceed 20 per cent, the distribution of preferences will be crucial. Although the pollsters’ current protocols are about as good as we are likely to get, this factor could make it harder to predict the result in closely contested seats.

Table 5 shows the current state of the parliament, which saw the Coalition going into the campaign as a minority government. The only other time this has happened since the second world war was in 2013, when the Labor government went on to lose easily to Tony Abbott. More independent and minor-party members (seven) sat in the House than at any other contemporary election (and the national polls are no use in knowing which of these is likely to hold their seat).

The table also shows the significant differences in support for the major parties in different states. Labor’s two weakest states are Queensland and Western Australia. In 2016 it won less than 46 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote in both states, and less than a third of the seats. On the pendulum for the 2019 election, a vote of 2 per cent against the incumbent would see a change of hands in eighteen seats (nine each for government and opposition). Eight of these are in Queensland, which accounts for why both sides are giving that state such attention.

We won’t know the impact of two unique aspects of this election until after the results are in. No other minor party has ever spent as lavishly on advertising as Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party; it will be interesting to see if these dollars translate into votes. And an extraordinary number of candidates have been forced to withdraw or have been disendorsed by their parties. Before nominations closed, nine candidates withdrew, mainly because of concerns over their eligibility under citizenship provisions in section 44 of the Constitution. Two others were replaced by their parties: the Labor candidate for Curtin had to withdraw because of her strong views on Israel; and the Liberal candidate for Corio had to withdraw seemingly for being too nice about his Labor opponent.

More importantly, an unprecedented nine “zombie” candidates appear on the voting papers. These are candidates who have been disowned by their parties after the close of nominations. The first such zombie candidate that I can remember was Pauline Hanson in 1996, who was disowned by the Liberal Party after making anti-Aboriginal comments. She probably wouldn’t have won her seat had she remained a Liberal. Among the zombies are four Liberal candidates, two Labor, and one each for the Greens, One Nation and the United Australia Party. Two are in the Senate. In none of the House seats was the disendorsed candidate favoured to win, although some were in with a chance. It is unlikely any will do a “Hanson,” but it is a strange situation nonetheless.

Both in terms of seats and two-party-preferred share (50.4 per cent), the balance of the House is very fine, and a small swing could easily see the government defeated. Labor all but equalised in 2016, so the Coalition has no scope to absorb any adverse swing.

This is the government’s second attempt at re-election, which tends to be more difficult than the first. It is harder to blame the previous government for problems, and promises sound more hollow if it looks as if the government should already have acted.

Of the five governments fighting their second attempt at re-election, four experienced marked swings against them (Menzies in 1954, Whitlam in 1975, Fraser in 1980 and Hawke in 1987). The one exception is Howard, who had been travelling badly in the polls from 1998 to 2000 but fought back in 2001, probably helped by the Tampa incident and 9/11.

Every election generates contests that may not reflect the main contest between the parties, but this election has an unusually, perhaps uniquely, high number of them. Apart from the record number of independent and minor-party incumbents, there is an unusually high number of contests where independents could either win or change the outcome. Since Malcolm Turnbull was deposed as Liberal leader, a series of independents have emerged who say they are on the conservative side of the political spectrum but want strong action on global warming. The highest-profile such contest sees Zali Steggall running against Tony Abbott in Warringah. In Victoria, (ex-Liberal MP) Julia Banks is standing against Greg Hunt, and ex-Liberal office-bearer Oliver Yates is running against Josh Frydenberg.

Several National Party seats are also likely to generate unusual contests. Former independent MP Rob Oakeshott is running in Cowper, and it will be interesting to see how the voters in neighbouring New England now feel about Barnaby Joyce. In the New South Wales election, the Nationals lost seats to the Shooters Party along the Darling River.

In other words, it’s not only the electorates that the pendulum shows as most marginal that will be interesting to watch on election night, and some unexpected results may even determine the outcome. •

The post Getting the numbers appeared first on Inside Story.

The Queensland businessman’s relations with another, not-unrelated entity have also warmed. Things seem very cosy with News Corp, the media outfit Palmer has spent years raging against. This week his party ran multiple full-page ads in the Australian and News’s tabloids, and News gave him uncharacteristically soft treatment in its reporting.

But wait, there’s more. On Easter Saturday the Australian conducted four seat-level Newspolls, in Herbert, Deakin, Pearce and Lindsay, with the results published on Tuesday. Unusually, the pollster included Palmer’s UAP in the initial readout of small parties.

When pollsters contact people and ask them “which of the following will you vote for?” they usually read out a list of the major parties, the Greens and, in recent years, One Nation. Other minor parties are either read out to respondents who chose “other,” or are left to the respondent to nominate in a follow-up question.

Pollsters have to decide when a minor party is receiving enough to support to be included in that first question. When they are included, the results tend to overstate the party’s support; when they’re left off, the results understate it.

Most pollsters added One Nation to their list after the last federal election. Newspoll added the Greens after the 2007 election.

Now, it’s likely that including any old name (just make one up, especially with the word Australia in it) would generate a few per cent of support. Which is why, as a rule, minor parties would kill to get onto that list. Yes, it does mean that they go on to perform less impressively at elections than the polls suggested (see the Greens, and One Nation at state level over the past few years), but it sets tongues wagging in the meantime.

Apart from the Herbert survey, it’s hard to see a justification for Newspoll’s decision to include the UAP in those weekend readouts.

Unlike Clive’s old Palmer United Party, or PUP, the UAP doesn’t even include his name. Despite its avalanche of advertising and text messaging, it’s likely most voters wouldn’t recognise the party on the ballot paper. But thanks to Newspoll and the Australian, UAP can expect much more media coverage than it would otherwise have attracted.

Coalition how-to-vote cards will assist Palmer in his quest to return to parliament, this time in the Senate. But the benefit for the government itself shouldn’t be understated either.

The UAP is running in all 151 lower house seats, as the PUP did in 2013. Back then, PUP preferences flowed 54 per cent to the Coalition and 46 per cent to Labor, a near-even split that led some commentators to conclude that PUP how-to-vote cards didn’t make much difference.

But those percentages need to be considered alongside an unknown: how PUP preferences would have flowed in the absence of its uniformly pro-Coalition how-to-vote cards.

If, for example, the Greens decided to preference the Liberals and their preferences flowed 54 per cent in that major party’s favour, we would all agree it was phenomenally successful. That’s because the usual figure is around 15 to 20 per cent.

We don’t know the corresponding PUP proportions, but the inside word from pollsters in 2013 was that when PUP supporters were asked which of the main parties they would preference they chose Labor over the Coalition by around 60–40. In other words, PUP took more from Labor in primary votes than from the Coalition. On this (admittedly not very robust) evidence, a PUP preference deal is not to be sneezed at, even if the minor party only gets a few per cent in support.

And speaking of preferences, another problem with including UAP in a pollster’s readout is that it makes it more difficult to estimate two-party-preferred numbers — an extra headache for pollsters already grappling with how to split One Nation’s preferences.

Now that nominations have closed we know that One Nation is only contesting fifty-nine lower house electorates. For the pollsters who are taking things seriously, this should mean a drop of a bit less than half in One Nation support in future surveys. (A bit less than half because the seats they’re running in would be overall strong ones for them. The last Newspoll had them on 4 per cent, down from 6, so perhaps the pollster has already made some adjustments.) Pollsters will now only include them in the readout for respondents in those fifty-nine electorates — or they might have another way to adjust the figure down — and this will make their two-party-preferred estimates a bit better.

But if Newspoll gets carried away and starts including UAP in readouts for its national surveys it will work the other way, adding rubberiness to its two-party numbers.

Using that 2013 54–46 split this time around would be unwise, as there’s no particular reason to believe Palmer will attract support from the same kind of voters (or have the same level of on-the-ground presence, all those Swedish backpackers thrusting cards into voters’ hands) as in 2013. (I suspect that with Clive a decidedly less cuddly entity this time around, UAP supporters will be more right-leaning than PUP ones were.)

Clive would love to see UAP in national survey readouts, but would Newspoll really create this rod for its own back? •

Update: the answer to this last question turned out to be Yes, so this saga has a part two, here.

The post It’s not what you ask, it’s how you ask it appeared first on Inside Story.

In today’s Australian, Newspoll has the Labor opposition steady at 52–48 after preferences. Newspoll’s primary numbers put the Coalition on 39 per cent, Labor 39, Greens 9, One Nation 4 and others 9. That combined Labor–Coalition share of 78 per cent is higher than recent polls have suggested, and about where it was at the 2016 election.

The opinion poll trajectory over the next five weeks, culminating in the final-week surveys and then the election itself, is impossible to foresee. Current expectations, including in the betting markets, strongly favour Labor; they no doubt derive from dozens of polls showing a modest lead for the opposition. But overcoming a four-point two-party-preferred deficit over a campaign is hardly a Herculean task for a government.

Still, Labor remains the likely winner. If it is to form government, where will the seats come from?

General expectations have for months involved large gains for the opposition in Queensland and Victoria. I’ve long been sceptical about both portions of that story.

Queensland, the third-most-populous state, contains one-fifth of the country’s lower house electorates. A big state with a small state (anti-Canberra) mentality, it’s reliably pro-Coalition at federal elections. It’s not quite as loyal in recent decades as Western Australia, but with twice the number of seats Queensland is twice as important.

Queensland was Malcolm Turnbull’s second-strongest state in 2016 (after Western Australia), giving him 54.1 per cent of the vote and twenty-one out of thirty seats. It last delivered federal Labor a two-party-preferred majority in 2007; before that it happened back in 1990 and way back in 1961, and those were all small majorities of less than 51 per cent.

Part of the baseball-bats-are-out-in-Queensland narrative comes from wild over-interpretations of last July’s Longman by-election, which saw a modest swing to the opposition off a big One Nation vote that ate into Liberal support but mostly returned after preferences.

For many months, opinion polls have also been suggesting a big swing to Labor in the northern state. But Queenslanders have a long tradition of flirting with federal Labor in surveyed voting intentions, only to return to the conservatives as the election approaches. In fact, it’s possible the recent narrowing of national figures is mostly due to that.

And then there’s the Adani mine, difficult for both sides of politics but potentially explosive for Labor. Way back in 1983 the Labor opposition’s promise to stop the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam might or might not have contributed to swings to them in every mainland state; it certainly produced a hefty one in the opposite direction in Tasmania. But Tasmania has and had only five seats; Queensland has thirty.

Labor support in Queensland is likely to rise from 2016’s 45.9 per cent this year, but still fall short of the halfway mark.

Meanwhile in Victoria, the scorched-earth scenarios have been driven by last year’s state election result, the occasional poll in safe Liberal seats (of modest quality at best) and leaked internal party polling — a dodgy genre at the best of times.

State election results are even less reliable indicators of upcoming federal ones than by-elections. The outcome in one tier never portends the other, except on random occasions. And no opinion poll I’ve seen has suggested the Labor vote in Victoria will be anything like the 57.3 per cent the Andrews government received five months ago. We should totally ignore the state result.

Victoria is Queensland’s opposite: Labor-friendly, with Coalition two-party-preferred majorities as rare as Queensland’s Labor ones. In 2016 the Labor vote there was 51.8 per cent, although it produced only eighteen out of thirty-seven seats. The redistribution has made it a notional twenty.

Nationally, Labor enters the contest with a notional seventy-two seats out of 151. Most elections, even some change-of-government ones, see seats moving in both directions. Possible Coalition gains from Labor include Cowan in Western Australia, Solomon in the Northern Territory, Corangamite (from notional Labor) and Macnamara in Victoria, and Herbert and — wait for it — Longman in Queensland. (Yes, forget the by-election for this purpose as well.) Lindsay in New South Wales is a longer shot.

For Labor’s part, a victory must almost certainly include gains in New South Wales. Recent leaked Liberal (supposed) internal polling suddenly has the Morrison government travelling well in the most populous state, but that looks suspiciously like someone’s simply taken heart from last month’s state result. Labor’s most likely gains there include Reid, Banks, Page and Gilmore.

So let’s assume the Coalition takes four from the opposition and Labor grabs four in New South Wales, three in Queensland, a couple in Victoria and a couple in South Australia. That adds up to seventy-nine seats for Labor.

Five weeks out, that’s one victory scenario. •

The post One path to victory appeared first on Inside Story.

Then, his claims of unfairness came only after the Electoral Commission had announced the official result. This time, his team have floated accusations of dodgy voter lists and plans to rig the vote count weeks before polling day.

All reputable opinion polls suggest the electoral outlook for Prabowo and his running mate Sandiaga Uno is grim. Incumbent Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and his running mate Ma’ruf Amin have maintained a double-digit lead in even the closest of polls, consistently polling in the low to mid 50s. At the same time, a March Indikator poll showed each of Prabowo’s coalition partners at or below their 2014 vote count, with the National Mandate Party polling well below the electoral threshold of 4 per cent.

Predictably, Prabowo has questioned the reliability of these polls, asking attendees at his massive Jakarta rally on 6 April, “Do you want to be continually cheated? Do you believe the surveys?” Further muddying the waters, his camp has claimed that their own internal polling shows the former general ahead by 62 to 38 per cent. Dubious pollsters such as Puskaptis, an organisation that falsely claimed in 2014 that Prabowo had won the election, have also released results showing him in front.

More prominent, though, in Prabowo’s recent campaign rhetoric have been efforts to discredit the work of the electoral commission ahead of polling day. Such efforts fall into two categories: allegations floated directly by members of Prabowo’s campaign team and social media hoaxes.

His campaign team has claimed, for example, that the voter list contains 17.5 million dubious voters sharing just a few different birthdays, and that Jokowi will be installed as president even though Prabowo will win the popular vote. Prominent Prabowo supporters such as his brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo and former National Mandate Party chair Amien Rais have also sought to intimidate Indonesia’s election commission by threatening mass protests, a legal challenge at the Constitutional Court and even a complaint to the United Nations.

Meanwhile, social media hoaxes have claimed that seven containers of pre-filled ballot papers favouring Jokowi were stacked at Jakarta’s port and that Electoral Commission servers had been preset for a Jokowi victory. In another online campaign, social media influencers supporting the Prabowo camp sent out an SOS to international observers to supervise the 2019 election in order to guarantee its integrity.

Indonesia’s election campaign has certainly not been entirely free of irregularities or controversies. Recently, reports about stray ballots marked in favour of Jokowi emerged from Malaysia — where around 600,000 registered voters live — but the ballots’ authenticity remained unclear at the time of writing. The National Mandate Party had already admitted problems with the voter list prior to this, but denies the allegations of systematic fraud. Rather, it has pledged to work continuously on updating the voter list until election day. The Election Supervisory Board (Bawaslu) has backed the party and made it clear that while minor irregularities have indeed occurred in the preparation of the voter list, there is no evidence for systematic fraud on Jokowi’s behalf.

The polls available have also shown little sign that voters believe the claims of unfairness. Recent surveys by Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting and Indikator — albeit conducted prior to reports of the Malaysia case — revealed an overwhelming majority of voters have confidence in the Electoral Commission’s ability to conduct the election professionally. Disaggregated results from the Indikator poll demonstrate strong confidence in the Commission and Bawaslu even among Prabowo voters.

So what are the main goals of the Prabowo camp in raising these allegations? There are at least three potential reasons for the strategy.

First, Prabowo might hope to sway undecided voters by building an overall narrative that the Jokowi administration is dishonest and will do anything to be re-elected. This narrative is tied to earlier accusations that the government was unfairly targeting and prosecuting opposition figures, mobilising village heads and bureaucrats for the campaign, and using misleading statistics to make its performance in government look more impressive.

Second, the spread of fabricated polls could lay the groundwork for a potential legal challenge after the election, either from Prabowo himself — in case the final result in the presidential election is narrower than most polls are currently predicting — or from one of the parties in Prabowo’s coalition that are at risk of failing to clear the 4 per cent threshold.

Third, Prabowo might be hoping to build up his threat potential in order to pressure Jokowi into protecting his interests if he loses the election by a margin so large that a legal challenge is futile. Despite the polarising effects of the campaign, Indonesia’s long tradition of promiscuous powersharing makes it entirely possible that the two men will seek to collaborate after the election if Jokowi wins a second term. For Prabowo, such collaboration is likely to be more appealing if he can negotiate from a position of relative strength — hence his provocative actions towards the end of the campaign.

Whether Prabowo’s efforts will have the desired effect remains to be seen. What is certain, though, is that after an initially subdued campaign, the last few weeks once again revealed Prabowo’s true colours. Election day therefore shapes up as another important fork in the road for Indonesian democracy. •

This article first appeared in East Asia Forum.

The post Old strategy with a new twist appeared first on Inside Story.

That’s just Queensland. Sportsbet’s odds imply the punters are also tipping the Coalition to lose six seats in New South Wales, five in Victoria, four in Western Australia, and one in South Australia. In all, the Coalition would lose twenty-five seats and win back just one: Wentworth, the seat it lost last October after it overthrew Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister.

The starting point for this election is significantly different from the 2016 result. Redistributions covering half the country have created two new Labor seats, in Melbourne and Canberra, while abolishing a Labor seat in Adelaide. They have also made two marginal Liberal seats in Victoria into (very) marginal Labor seats. And an independent now holds Wentworth.

The bottom line is that the Coalition begins with just seventy-three seats, three short of a majority in the new 151-member parliament. Labor starts off with seventy-two, with another six MPs on the crossbench.

If the same group came back, the Coalition could not form a viable government. To retain power, it will need to win more seats than it loses. In the situation it finds itself, that is a huge ask.

As I pointed out last week, the Coalition has not won an opinion poll by any established pollster since September 2016. Every one of the 153 opinion polls Wikipedia records since then has pointed to a Labor victory. The average margin has narrowed slightly, but the four latest polls show Labor with an average of 52.5 per cent of the two-party vote to the Coalition’s 47.5 per cent. That’s a 3 per cent swing, which would give Labor a comfortable majority.

Indeed, if the punters are right, the Coalition would return with only fifty-one of the 151 seats in the new house. Labor would have ninety-four, with six on the crossbench. That implies a bigger landslide than the polls are now pointing to.

On average, the betting agencies’ odds imply that Labor has an 80 per cent chance of winning the election. The Coalition has just a 20 per cent chance. The polls and the punters are telling us that this election is over before it has even started.

But could they be wrong? Remember: in 2004, the polls at the start of the campaign also showed Labor ahead. Newspoll then had exactly the same result as it has now. But the Coalition was confident that most Australians trusted John Howard as prime minister, but did not trust Mark Latham — and confident that it remained ahead in the marginal seats that mattered. It was right: it won a thumping victory.

Scott Morrison is trying to run his campaign the same way. The Coalition and its media support pack have put the blowtorch to Bill Shorten many times since he became Labor’s leader, but we are likely to see them outdoing themselves this time. They know that the public has not warmed to Shorten, that they see him as an old-style union leader, and that he trails Morrison as preferred prime minister.

Shorten is clearly not a great asset for Labor, but unless the Coalition is holding something back to spring on us late in the campaign, it’s hard to see that he is much of a liability. After all, Labor has won the last 153 opinion polls under his leadership. Newspoll shows Morrison’s lead as preferred PM is only half as big as Turnbull had in the middle of last year, while Shorten’s net disapproval rating has shrunk appreciably.

Yesterday morning, Morrison told us repeatedly that the Coalition had given Australia a “strong economy” — a somewhat contestable claim when many voters have not had a real wage rise since it took office, some have gone backwards, household debt is at record levels and consumer spending is falling. The Liberals presumably are saying this to reinforce the traditional doubts about Labor’s capacity to manage the economy, but they themselves are vulnerable on that front. These are indicators that go to the heart of household finances.

And when the PM tries to imply that what disrupted the economy in 2008 was not the global financial crisis but the election of a Labor government — well, that’s on a par with his insistence that you couldn’t have an electric ute. I guess it must work with a lot of voters, but at some point his habit of going over the top must hurt him.

Security and personal safety got token mentions in Morrison’s opening salvo, and he kept steering us towards Howard’s old slogan: “Who do you trust to run the country?” And when asked his response to Labor’s focus on fairness, he repeated his mantra: “I believe in a fair go for those who have a go.” Presumably that explains the big tax cuts for the well-off that the Coalition is promising, but what does it mean beyond that? Who doesn’t “have a go”? Who does?

But the PM and his team clearly are getting through to many Australians with messages like that, and the polls suggest they are gaining ground. Is it possible that they could do the unthinkable, and take enough seats from Labor and the crossbench to offset the inevitable losses?

Yes, they say, we can. This morning their house paper, the Australian, listed no fewer than ten seats held by Labor or the crossbench that Coalition strategists see as winnable.

They include Wentworth and Indi, taken back from the independents, and eight seats from Labor: Lindsay and Macquarie in western Sydney, Bass, Braddon and Lyons in Tasmania, the Townsville seat of Herbert, Anne Aly’s seat of Cowan in Perth, and the Darwin seat of Solomon.

The punters see only four or five of these as realistic chances (that is, better than a one in four chance). The Liberals’ Dave Sharma, a former ambassador to Israel, is narrowly favoured to win his rematch with Kerryn Phelps, the independent MP for Wentworth. Cathy McGowan’s retirement in Indi opens up a three-way contest between her intended successor, Helen Haines, the Liberals’ Steve Martin and the Nationals’ Mark Byatt.

Labor won Herbert by only thirty-seven votes last time, and Townsville wants the Adani mine to go ahead. Emma Husar was an expected winner in Lindsay in 2016, and the controversy over her ousting clearly makes the seat vulnerable. Braddon in northwest Tassie is probably a realistic chance too; the Liberals absolutely blitzed Labor there at last year’s state election.

But even if the Coalition could win these five seats, that is an inadequate buffer against the losses it is facing in Australia’s big cities and coastal areas — if the polls and the punters are reading the tea leaves right.

Let’s return to Queensland. The latest figures from Newspoll and YouGov (nee Galaxy) imply swings to Labor there of 7 to 8 per cent. That will probably soften by election day, but with the Coalition holding eight seats by margins of less than 4 per cent, even a swing of half that amount would do serious damage.

Queensland is the most important state in federal elections. Whereas Sydney and Melbourne are stratified by class into regions that are consistently Liberal or Labor — think of Sydney’s North Shore versus the southwestern suburbs — Brisbane and regional Queensland are not. Most Queensland seats can and do change hands, often with the force of a tropical cyclone.

In 1949 when Menzies led the Coalition to power, he did so on the back of a 9 per cent swing in primary votes in Queensland that left Labor with just three of the state’s eighteen seats. In 1961 with the credit squeeze sending unemployment soaring, eight of those seats swung back to Labor, almost bringing the Menzies era to a premature end.

In 1975 the anti-Whitlam landslide left Bill Hayden as Queensland’s only Labor MP. But by 1983 most Queensland MPs were Labor. By 1990 Labor had a fifteen-to-nine edge, but two elections later it was down to two seats again. Then, when Kevin07 hit town, Queensland’s seats slid his way en masse: at the 2007 election, Labor made nine of its twenty-two gains in Kevin Rudd’s home state.

What the polls and punters are predicting is not a mirage: it is something that has happened repeatedly in Queensland’s history. The question is whether this election will see it happen again.

The bookies’ odds imply that Labor will hold Herbert, and add Leichhardt (Cairns), Dawson (Mackay — George Christensen’s seat), Capricornia (Rockhampton) and Flynn (Gladstone), giving it almost the entire coastline of North and central Queensland.

The Coalition would hold its seats on the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and the farmlands of the southeast. The two vast outback seats of Kennedy and Maranoa would stay with Bob Katter and the Nationals respectively. But Brisbane would be a disaster area for the Coalition.

In 2016, the LNP and Labor split the city’s seats seven-all. This time, if the punters are right, it’ll be twelve-two Labour’s way. Inner-city Brisbane, outer-suburban Petrie, Forde and Bonner, and Peter Dutton’s urban fringe seat of Dickson would all be casualties. Only Ryan and Bowman would stay blue.

Warning: these are only the bookies’ odds, and they and the punters can get it wrong. But in 2017, the LNP won just five of Brisbane’s forty-one seats in Queensland’s state election. Swings of this magnitude are as common as cyclones in Queensland.

Victoria is another potential disaster area. The state election saw Labor win a near-record 57.6 per cent of the two-party vote. If Victorians vote the same way on 18 May, the Coalition would lose six seats to Labor (including the two notionally lost from the redistribution). I wrote on this last month, and won’t repeat the details here, but on those figures, Dunkley and Corangamite would be certain Labor gains, Chisholm, Casey, Higgins and La Trobe probable ones, with Deakin, Flinders, Goldstein, Kooyong, Menzies and Aston all within the realms of possibility.

The bookies’ odds imply that the Liberals would hold Casey and Higgins but lose Deakin. Indeed, the punters are now confident that Labor’s vote this time will not match the highwater mark it set at the state election in those blue-ribbon Liberal seats. Labor is given a decent chance in Higgins, the Greens’ Julian Burnside an outside chance in Kooyong, and Goldstein is rated safe.

But the only serious threat to any Labor seat in Victoria is from the Greens’ Steph Hodgins-May in Macnamara (nee Melbourne Ports). Were the Coalition governing for people living in this century rather than indulging those stuck in the last century, Melbourne Ports’s upmarket suburbs would probably be Liberal turf by now. Morrison has spent much more time in Victoria recently, announcing imaginary transport projects such as a fast train between Melbourne and Geelong. But the Coalition decided long ago that Victoria is not its priority. If the bookies’ odds are right, it stands to win only twelve of the state’s thirty-eight seats.

New South Wales has just seen a Coalition government triumphantly re-elected with minimal losses. You’d assume it is looking good for them at the federal level too. Not so, say the bookies: six Liberal or National seats are thought likely to fall to Labor or independents, with Wentworth the only seat to move the other way.

As in Queensland, the bookies expect Labor to sweep the north coast, in company with independent Rob Oakeshott. Labor already holds Richmond (Tweed Heads to Ballina), and is tipped to win Page (Lismore, Grafton), while Oakeshott regains Cowper (Coffs Harbour to Port Macquarie).

Labor is also favoured in the central coast seat of Robertson (where it polled strongly at the state election), the south coast seat of Gilmore (where the conservative vote will split three ways), and the Sydney seats of Banks (inner south) and Reid (inner west).

That sounds excessive. The Liberal vote held up well at the state election in the suburbs comprising Banks, and while seats like Reid and Gilmore are clearly vulnerable, losses on the scale forecast would leave the Coalition with only seventeen of the state’s forty-seven seats — and in Sydney, just ten out of twenty-nine seats. That would be a very different result from the state election.

Western Australia is the other state where the bookies have Labor poised to make big gains. While the seats in the outback and southwest would remain unchanged, the odds show Labor is tipped to take four of the Coalition’s eight seats in Perth — attorney-general Christian Porter’s seat of Pearce, aged care minister Ken Wyatt’s seat of Hasluck, Michael Keenan’s seat of Stirling, and inner-suburban Swan.

In Adelaide, the Liberals are tipped to hold the eastern suburbs seat of Sturt, vacated by Christopher Pyne, but lose Nicolle Flint’s southern suburbs seat of Boothby — a seat Labor has not won since 1946. Sturt would be the Coalition’s only seat in Adelaide, and one of just three in South Australia.

Labor already holds all but one seat in Tasmania, and every seat in the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory, so it’s unlikely to make any gains there. As mentioned, the Liberals believe they can regain all three Tasmanian seats outside Hobart, as well as the Darwin seat of Solomon. At this stage, the punters disagree.

Add them all up, and Labor would have a majority of thirty-seven seats in the new house. As I’ve argued, that overstates its likely margin, but the Coalition would have to make up a lot of ground to win the election from here.

The Senate, meanwhile, is always hard to predict. As yet, we don’t know who the candidates will be, their positions on the ballot paper, or their preference deals (although the Cormann reforms in 2016 ensured that voters will determine their own preferences, rather than having them traded in backroom deals). We can look at the Senate once those details are clear. It is clear that no one will have a majority, but the two major parties are likely to increase their numbers slightly at the expense of the Greens and the minor parties.

The Coalition’s dream is that this will be a repeat of 2004. So far it reminds me more of 1972: a bumbling, backward-looking Coalition team with an unimpressive leader and a focus on palace coups, up against a Labor opposition eager to make reforms on issues that the Coalition has discarded as too hard.

The difference is that Labor then had a brilliant but flawed leader — witty, arrogant, visionary, determined and disorganised — whereas this time it is led by a solid, unexciting political pragmatist, who has taken some political risks to give a lead on important issues, but has yet to win over the voters after six years in the job.

This morning the papers all shouted in unison: “It’s on!” It made me recall the song with that name, written decades ago by the old leftie folk singer Don Henderson:

A sad story you’ll hear if you listen to me,
About two men who could never agree.
What one said was white, the other called black.
They’d argue a while, then they’d go out the back.

And it’s on! And it’s on!
All reason and logic are gone.
Winning the fight won’t prove that you’re right.
It’s sad, it’s true, but it’s on! •

The post Over the top with Scott appeared first on Inside Story.

One is the latest Newspoll in the Australian. Newspoll sits front and centre of the political class’s obsessions, fetishised by players and addicts alike, and has even been a fashionable prime ministerial assassination accessory. It’s now a contest in itself, with parties “winning” or “losing” Newspoll. The other, less closely watched one is Ipsos in the Nine papers.

Newspoll has the Coalition on 38 per cent, Labor 37, Greens 9 and One Nation 6, washing through to 52–48 after preferences. Ipsos puts it at 37, 34, 13 and 5, with 53–47 two-party-preferred.

The big difference is in Greens primary support, of which Ipsos is a serial overestimator. During and before the 2016 campaign, for example, the pollster had the minor party on 13 or 14 per cent; on election day it received 10.2 per cent of the vote. The other polls, including Newspoll, had much more realistic measurements, as this cheat sheet shows.

(Like most minor parties, the Greens tend to get inflated opinion poll figures when they’re included in the initial “Which of these would you vote for?” question. If they’re not included, they’re understated. My guess, without being privy to the pollsters’ sausage-producing procedures, is that while they all include the Greens, most of them — but not Ipsos — adjust their result downwards in some way.)

If we take three or four points off Ipsos’s Greens vote and give 80 per cent of it to Labor and 20 per cent to the Coalition (which is about how they would flow in preferences anyway), we get… very similar numbers to Newspoll’s.

Both pollsters agree that Labor is on about 52 or 53 per cent.

The Australian, always a strong believer in the power of positive thinking — and of the media’s (particularly its own) ability to influence political “momentum” — is pushing that 52–48 (“It’s Game On: Budget Bounce for Morrison”) for all it’s worth, while the Age and its siblings see 53–47 as no bounce at all.

Speaking of that archaic annual ritual inflicted with preposterous fanfare on a long-suffering nation last week (and already a distant memory to most), both pollsters agree the budget was well received.

What these and other polls remind us is that while Labor has been ahead in the surveys for more than two years now, the lead has never been huge. Nothing like, for example, the heights reached by the Coalition under Tony Abbott against the Gillard government over much of 2011 to 2013.

Last time the Coalition lost office federally, in 2007, the Howard government’s final pre-campaign Newspoll had Labor on 58 per cent and the Coalition on 42, having averaged 56.5 to 43.5 since Kevin Rudd had become opposition leader the previous December. Six weeks later, Labor’s actual vote came in at 52.7 per cent. A similar improvement for the Coalition next month would see it retain office.

But eleven and a half years ago Labor support was artificially inflated by Rudd’s stratospheric personal popularity. Bill Shorten certainly doesn’t suffer from that affliction.

The surveys will become more useful once this election is called. Most of the pollsters will change their initial question from “If an election were held today, which of the following would you vote for?” to something like “Which of the following will you vote for on May X?”

As we get closer to election day, people’s answers will become more accurate. Changes in sentiment picked up by polls during campaigns are not usually a result of actual “events” but come about because respondents are concentrating their minds. The question becomes less and less hypothetical.

At some point in the campaign, One Nation support will drop significantly in most polls. That’s because it will become clear that the party isn’t running in all, or probably even most, of the 151 electorates. (Psephologist Ben Raue has the current tally at twenty-one.) As much as they can, most pollsters will include them as an option for respondents only in those electorates.

Allocating One Nation preferences has been a bit of a nightmare for pollsters. Should they follow the flow at the 2016 election, when the party uncharacteristically preferenced Labor more than the Coalition? Or should the assumed flow be more favourable to the Coalition? (Correct answer: the latter.)

If One Nation goes down to, say, 2 per cent, most of the other 3 or 4 per cent will shift to the major parties, and most of that to the Coalition. The size of that “most” will affect the two-party-preferred figures a little.

Most observers expect Labor to win off a low primary vote (a problem for both sides), as in the above survey results. Labor almost did it in 2016, but it benefited from a kind of underdog status then; at the very least, no one seriously expected it to win, and it performed better than generally expected. It enters this election as heavy favourite, and that’ll produce a different dynamic, with more policy scrutiny.

And, as I like to say, polls come and go, but for the pollsters there’s only one that really counts: the one before election day. That’s the one against which their “performances” are judged. Which is why Newspoll at least, and probably others, gives it extra resources. The betting markets will also have a better idea on election eve as well. And so will the rest of us.

And of course we’ll all be terribly smart and wise about what happened and why at around 7.30pm eastern standard time. If we ever get there. •

The post More polls, but still no election appeared first on Inside Story.

“Labor may have just lost the election,” warns David Crowe in what we used to call the Fairfax papers. “I don’t have the certainty I had in 2001 that Labor has thrown away an election,” writes Katharine Murphy in the Guardian, not much comfort for the opposition. And over at News Corp, well good taste prevents any description of the debauched celebrations.

With Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton and other ministers channelling John Howard, government members have a discernible spring in their step. And with “moderates” like Christopher Pyne tub-thumping about keeping Australians safe from these rapists and paedophiles, who needs race-baiting demagogues anyway?

The government is adamant that the Labor-endorsed legislation will result in more boat arrivals. Despite the detail, it says, people smugglers will spin it to their advantage. There may be something to this, just a bit, although realistically it would take months to result in new boats, as the Rudd government’s 2008 changes did.

But the smugglers’ best friend as they market their goods will be the Australian government itself, which proclaims — no ifs or buts — that the opposition and crossbench will extend the medivac rules if more asylum seekers arrive, even though Labor insists it won’t.

It’s all designed for domestic consumption, but like the fanfare about reopening the Christmas Island facility it’s music to the smugglers’ ears. Perhaps most worryingly of all, home affairs minister Dutton, the man who controls the apparatus that stops boats arriving, states unequivocally that more boats will arrive.

And this all happened before the Ipsos poll, published late on Sunday, which helpfully played into the narrative by putting the parties almost neck and neck, 51–49 in Labor’s favour after preferences.

Now, Ipsos is notoriously volatile. The last two Newspolls have been 53–47 in Labor’s favour. An Essential poll in the Guardian last week showed 55–45, but with the previous fortnight being 52–48, it looked a bit rogue-ish. (Essential no longer “smooths” its results by averaging two weeks.)

As they say in the classics, it’s just one poll, there’s a margin of error, yadda yadda yadda. What makes this possible outlier different is that it coincides with medivac, and that inevitably conjures up the Tampa.

I’ve expressed my scepticism ad nauseum about the received wisdom that the Tampa, and boat arrivals in general, delivered the Howard government a third term in 2001. I know party strategists on both sides insist it did, but these same people swear the “carbon tax” was a big vote-driver in 2013.

Here’s a brief summary of the opinion poll trajectory eighteen years ago. In February and March 2001, the Labor opposition was way ahead in the polls, peaking at around 57 per cent, but by late August 2001 the Howard government had recovered to about 48 per cent. After Tampa arrived on 24 August it drew level, and then the 11 September attacks drove Coalition support skywards. The government entered the campaign in early October 10 to 12 per cent in front of Labor after preferences, but on election day was re-elected 51–49, a 2 per cent national win.

Which is about where, in my opinion, it would have ended up without either of those landmark events. Both Labor’s and the Coalition’s huge leads were illusory and unsustainable. The question “how would you vote if an election were held today?” is hopelessly hypothetical, and can be pushed one way or another by a small group of voters influenced by forces that don’t hold as much sway at an actual election — in these instances, the detested GST and then asylum seekers and terrorism. As election day approaches, voters’ responses to surveys become more realistic, and opinion poll movement during a campaign is less a case of voters responding to events than polls simply becoming better indicators of what will actually happen.

Since then, asylum seekers, refugee policy and immigration in general have hovered over our politics, threatening to intervene and turn the contest around. It’s almost as if all the Coalition has to do is bring them up and voters will salivate on cue. But usually the danger turns out to be non-existent.

When, for example, John Howard tried twice in 2007 to drag Sudanese refugees into his re-election quest, it went nowhere, partly because Labor, through its calm, reassuring shadow minister Tony Burke, refused to bite. For some reason, though, persuasive occupants of the important immigration portfolio are the exception to the Labor rule, and since the last election it’s been Queenslander Shayne Neumann. And leader Bill Shorten, as we know, is no Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard or Kim Beazley in the articulation stakes. This topic is always difficult for Labor.

As a general rule, “events” identified by the commentariat fail to show up in the next survey and are quickly forgotten.

In truth, a host of factors influence opinion polls, and for most of them there’s a long lag. The polls reflect everything that’s happened over the last months, even years. And polls are not the same as elections: most “bounces” prove to be just that, momentary and illusory, not a serious reflection of what would actually happen at a hypothetical election.

(The Howard government’s post–September 11 double-digit leads are a case in point. If an election had been held in late September 2001, I don’t believe that the government would have won with 55 or 56 per cent of the vote. Rather, it would have been around the 51 it received in November, and the polls would have reflected this as election day approached.)

Anyway, whether or not the Ipsos figure really is evidence that the Coalition’s boats campaign is biting, the political class is interpreting it that way, which influences reporting, politicians’ behaviour, and even future opinion polls. Media reports of political success tend to boost politicians’ personal ratings, which can artificially lift voting intentions. These are just surveys, though, not the real deal.

So we could be in for a wild ride. But the election in May will not be decided by asylum seekers. It will be, as most are, predominantly about hip-pocket issues, although disarray in any policy can facilitate an argument that a party isn’t ready to govern.

Even if we never hear from boats again, Labor will still be lumbered with its big, juicy economic policy target. •

The post Votes by the boatload? appeared first on Inside Story.

God’s secret weapon in securing Trump the presidency was the electoral college. The United States is the only democracy in which a popular election for president is mediated through a body made up of representatives of the candidate who wins each state. This system has always had the potential to produce a different majority from the popular vote, and the second-placed candidate has won the college on five occasions — three times during the nineteenth century, and in the twenty-first-century elections that brought George W. Bush (who lost the popular vote by 500,000) and Donald Trump to power.

Trump’s victory produced the biggest-ever discrepancy between the two results. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 2.9 million votes yet Trump won the electoral college 306–232. Clinton lost the electoral college because of Trump’s narrow victories in three Midwestern states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), each by a margin of 0.77 per cent or less, or a total of 78,000 votes in an election at which 136 million votes were cast. God is quite the joker.

With such a knife-edge result, many explanations can plausibly be advanced about what made the difference. Most have focused on the campaign and/or the weaknesses of the defeated candidate. Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment and the deleted emails saga figure most prominently. In particular, her use of a private server for official emails revived memories of Clintonesque arrogance and a willingness to bend rules. The revival of the FBI’s investigation into improper email procedures, made public less than two weeks before the election, gave Trump fresh fuel for his “crooked Hillary” diatribes. It probably didn’t shift many votes to Trump but may have led some people who’d been inclined to vote for Clinton to stay home instead.

Although Trump’s victory was made possible by immediate factors and some improbable contingencies, the very fact that a candidate like Trump would be a serious contender was unthinkable a decade earlier. What broader currents in American society and politics made such a candidacy possible? Many have concentrated — justifiably — on growing inequality, how the living standards of many Americans have stagnated or declined, and also how many reasonably well-off voters still feel they’re losing status. But another clue is to be found in changes in the country’s political culture.

The three charts below all point to growing political alienation in the United States in the decade or so leading up to 2016. Each uses data from eighteen stable, affluent democracies, and each shows that changes in American political culture were homegrown rather than reflecting international trends.

Chart 1 shows that the proportion of Americans who thought corruption was widespread in government rose (from an already high level) by 17 percentage points over the decade. Among the eighteen democracies as a whole, the average figure barely changed. Indeed, several countries — Germany, Canada and Sweden — moved strongly in the opposite direction. America is second last, ahead of that perennial wooden-spooner, Italy.

Chart 2 reveals a similar picture. Across the eighteen democracies, citizens’ confidence in the legal system actually rose slightly. But in the two bottom countries — the United States and Italy — confidence declined further. In 2016, barely half as many Americans, proportionally, had confidence in their legal systems as Danes, Norwegians and Swiss.

The figures in Chart 3 are not so stark, but show similar trends and ordering. In terms of citizens’ confidence in their national government, the United States, France and Italy were at the bottom of the table in 2016. Again, countries moved in opposite directions in these nine years, with America one of several to experience a substantial decline.

So, on these three measures of political disaffection, the United States rates almost at the bottom among eighteen democracies, and on each measure Americans showed a substantial decline, more substantial than in most other countries. Why was political alienation in the late Obama era so much greater than it was in the late George W. Bush era? And why is the United States such an international outlier over this period?

To the external observer, it is far from clear that corruption had become more widespread, or that the legal system and national government had become worse under Obama. What, then, accounts for the sharp fall in public approval?

The answer, I suggest, is found in changes in American political culture, driven by trends in both the Republican Party and the media, and especially the influence of Fox News. While much of America rejoiced at Obama’s 2008 victory, the new presidency immediately energised the far right of the Republican Party. Most strident was the Tea Party, which gained growing influence inside Republican ranks after its formation in early 2009. It was a powerful force in Republican primaries, where its main targets were what its leaders call RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). Any congressional figures who seemed too friendly to Obama’s policies were targeted. The most endangered species in American politics became the moderate Republican.

The rise of the Tea Party was aided by constant sympathetic publicity from Fox News. Fox’s chief executive for the twenty years from its creation in 1996 was former Republican propagandist Roger Ailes. The most obvious feature of Fox is the outrageous and intolerant claims of its far-right commentators, but its more important and distinctive appeal comes from relentlessly driving its own news agenda.

An insightful critic of the trend to “media tribalism” is ex-president Obama. He believes that “a Balkanised media” contributed to the partisan rancour that worsened during his tenure, bemoans the absence of a common baseline of facts underpinning political debate, and accuses Republicans of peddling an alternative reality.

The first two decades of Fox were accompanied by a growing partisan divide in terms of Americans’ attitudes to the media. In 2002, according to Pew surveys, 76 per cent of Republicans and 67 per cent of Democrats thought Fox News was believable; by 2012 the figures were 67 per cent and 37 per cent. So the partisan divide had increased from 9 to 30. In attitudes to Fox’s main competitor, CNN, 84 per cent of Democrats and 72 per cent of Republicans thought the network could be trusted in 2002. By 2012, the parallel figures were 76 and 40. The partisan divide had grown from 12 to 36. So overall attitudes to the news media declined somewhat in the decade, but the more important trend was the contrasting movements among party supporters.

Trump exploited and then escalated these trends. More than any other president, whether by instinct, strategy or an inability to do otherwise, he has practised the politics of polarisation. By many conventional measures this is not working well for him. A Washington Post–ABC News poll in late January 2019 found 56 per cent of Americans said they would “definitely not” vote for Trump in 2020, while just half that number (28 per cent) said they definitely would. This follows the midterm elections in November 2018, where Democrats secured 52.5 per cent of the vote to Republicans’ 45.8 per cent, a further swing of over 4 per cent since the 2016 elections.

Yet, in other ways, his strategies are bearing political fruit. His constant denunciations of fake news and the media as the enemy are having an impact among his base. According to Pew, in 2016, the last year of the Obama presidency, around three-quarters of both Republicans and Democrats endorsed the idea that criticism from news organisations keeps political leaders from doing things that shouldn’t be done (Republican 77 per cent; Democrat 74 per cent). But by the second year of the Trump presidency, 2018, the percentage of Democrats taking that view had climbed to 82 per cent, while the percentage of Republicans had halved to 38 per cent. Across at least fifteen Pew surveys under six presidents, this is the lowest percentage of Republicans endorsing the sentiment, and the biggest gap between supporters of the two major parties.

In the same survey, 12 per cent of Democrats said they had not much or no trust in the information they got from national news organisations, compared with 38 per cent of Republicans.

Assuming Trump doesn’t retire in triumph in 2024 after being re-elected in 2020, one prediction is safe. Whether his exit is brought about by electoral defeat or by some politico-legal process, it will not be dignified or gracious. He and his supporters will allege bad faith, fraud and conspiracy.

During the political turmoils in America in 1968, Republican candidate Richard Nixon pronounced that “there is nothing wrong with this country that a good election wouldn’t fix.” Many critics of Trump feel the same. But American political culture is deeply fractured, and the jaundiced Fox News view of the mainstream media and of all political participants to its left has attracted a constituency sufficient to make it difficult for the next presidency to be a time of healing. •

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Until 2013 this fact was masked by the phenomenal popularity of Liberal MP Joanna Gash, who won the electorate as part of the big 1996 Coalition victory under John Howard. Gash retired in 2013, just when the Coalition was again storming into government under Tony Abbott. Newbie Ann Sudmalis took her place on the ballot paper and the Liberal vote returned to earth: while New South Wales swung by 3.2 per cent to the Coalition, Gilmore shifted by 2.7 per cent to Labor.

After another swing to Labor in 2016, Gilmore is now the Coalition’s most marginal NSW seat.

This graph shows the Coalition’s two-party-preferred vote in Gilmore (dotted blue line), the state vote (orange line) and the Gilmore vote adjusted backwards for redistributions (solid blue line). The adjustment uses swings against notional margins estimated by the Australian Electoral Commission.

Source: Author’s calculations using Australian Electoral Commission data.

The effect of those redistributions can be seen in the fact that the solid blue line is below 50 per cent from 1984 to 1993, indicating that on current boundaries the electorate would probably have been won by Labor over that time.

The second key point is the explosion in the gap between the seat and the state vote during Gash’s tenure, most dramatically from 2001. With her gone, Gilmore sits around the state figure. “Bellwether,” anyone?

At first glance, from the 2016 swing, Sudmalis doesn’t seem to have generated much of a personal vote during her first term. But a comparison of that swing, 3.1 per cent to Labor, with bordering electorates puts her in a more favourable light. Eden-Monaro swung by 5.8 per cent to Labor and Whitlam by 6.8. Hume, also a sophomore seat, shifted by 3.4.

It took Gash two terms to build that huge personal vote. We’ll never know whether Sudmalis would have emulated her and outperformed her party enough to retain the seat in 2019, because she was rolled by her local branches last year for Grant Schultz, local real estate agent and son of the late Alby Schultz, who was a federal and state MP.

Recent media scuttlebutt had Morrison and the state executive intervening to retain Sudmalis, but in the end, for reasons not totally clear, they dropped Schultz but parachuted Warren Mundine in instead.

Mundine, like his fellow Sky after Dark identity Peta Credlin (whose News Corp PR machine breathlessly keeps us updated on the question on the lips of no one but those who watch Sky News: will she or won’t she enter federal politics?), is recognisable to close followers of politics but barely known outside. (His more famous nephew, Anthony “Chock” Mundine, and Anthony’s father Tony might generate name recognition.)

But because of that “beltway” presence (he is a former Labor president, after all) he’s been all over the news this week, including in an interview with ABC’s 7.30 anchor Leigh Sales. Most major-party candidates could only dream of such exposure.

So he’s getting a profile boost, but that can go either way for someone who was in yet another party, the Liberal Democrats, only last year and has never lived in the area.

Whether Mundine stands a better chance of winning than Schultz or Sudmalis might be beside the point. Perhaps he’s not there to get elected but rather to flesh out the wider Liberal image for the campaign: a successful, conservative Indigenous businessperson with a Labor background who is happy to explain what’s wrong with the federal opposition and why Bill Shorten shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the Lodge.

Schultz has quit the party, taking a few supporters with him, and says he will run as an independent. The Nationals might put up a candidate, and it might be former state minister Katrina Hodgkinson.

In the flurry of media reports in recent weeks, one scenario briefly floated was bringing back Gash. She would probably win the seat, but as she turns seventy-four this year that scenario was far-fetched.

And, yes, the Labor candidate has a name; she’s Fiona Phillips, and she’ll probably be the next member for Gilmore. Just as Labor will probably win the election overall. It’s likely, and the opinion polls tell us so, but if Labor’s campaign goes off the rails — if Shorten drowns in the detail of his housing and dividend-imputation policies, for example — a Coalition victory would show up in seats just like Gilmore.

In that sense Mundine’s fate is intertwined with Morrison’s. •

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Newspoll’s detailed quarterly figures since the last election suggest a small one. From Pollbludger’s aggregated data (and ignoring Ipsos because of its small sample sizes) we get this graph covering the period from late 2016 to Decamber 2018. It shows more men than women saying the Coalition will get their primary vote, though the gap — usually rounding to 1 per cent — isn’t huge.

But opinion polls months or years before an election are one thing, and election results are another. The question “If an election were held today…?” is hypothetical in the extreme; unfocused minds are expected to snap to attention and pretend they’ve just endured a whole election campaign and are about to cast their vote.

Polling becomes more reliable as the election approaches, and during the campaign the question becomes “How will you vote on Saturday the such and such…?” Best of all are exit polls on election day. They need to be conducted before the votes are counted, or at least before the results are known and the airways, cyberspace and general chatter are filled with election takes and rapidly developing “hows” and “whys” about the outcome.

Over in the United States, with a population around thirteen times ours, they conduct lots of exit polls with a dozen or two questions and very large samples. Here, for example is the New York Times’s for the 2016 presidential election, with 24,537 respondents. In Australia we have nothing like that; instead, there’s a smattering of polls of varying quality, usually with no published gender breakdown, which are promoted on election day and never heard of again.

We also have the ANU’s Australian Election Study. Its strength is in its huge number of questions, its particular forte the same question repeated over the decades. But the long, time-consuming surveys (these days the instructions also include how to fill them in online), sent out by post, inevitably skew the respondent sample into, well, the type of people who are willing to devote an hour or so to such a project. And, crucially, the voting questions are let down by the fact that respondents fill in the survey in the days and weeks after they’ve cast their vote.

And then there’s Newspoll. It’s not an exit poll, but its final survey, conducted in the dying days of campaigns, is the next best thing. Even more than other pollsters, it puts extra resources into that last pre-election effort (after all, reputations can be made and unmade on that one survey), and so the sample size tends to be large by Australian standards. The 2016 survey, taken from the Tuesday to the Thursday evenings, had a huge 4135 sample, meaning probably around 2000 each for men and women.

Newspoll generally doesn’t publish those final-week gender breakdowns at the time, but they can be found later, in their regular quarterly tables, as entries for the most recent election. The latest Newspoll quarterly, for example, shows Coalition primary support of 39.7 per cent among women and 43.9 per cent among men in the final days of the 2016 campaign. Unlike the gap in subsequent Newspolls, that 4.2 per cent is worth noting.

The chart below shows voting intention by sex from Newspoll final-days surveys over the two decades from 1996 (which is as far back as their published data goes) to 2016. (At the last two, Newspoll published to one decimal place.)

Yes, yes — insert caveats about margins of error and so on. And Tuesday to Thursday is not quite as good as Saturday.

One other thing: Newspoll doesn’t provide two-party-preferred numbers by sex (or age) because how minor party and independent preferences flow by such demographics is not known. For this exercise I’m rather recklessly assuming that men’s and women’s preferences flow to the major parties by the same proportions, which has enabled me to estimate rough two-party-preferred figures for each sex.

The estimated gap, rounded to the nearest half per cent, is shown in the last column, representing the difference between the female two-party-preferred vote and the male one. A red number means an advantage for Labor among women over men; and blue, an advantage to the Coalition among women over men.

For example, the 2016 figure of 3.0 per cent comes from an estimated Coalition win of 52–48 among men, and a Labor one of 51–49 among women.

What can we glean from these numbers? It seems the Coalition under John Howard, at least when it was in government, did relatively well with female voters, with 2001 being the exception. Given the closeness of the 1998 result, it’s reasonable to say that women saved the Howard government.

The two elections at which Kevin Rudd was Labor leader are a great contrast. In 2007 the Coalition enjoyed a three-point advantage among women, while in 2013 Labor had a six-point lead. The first contest was against Howard, the second against Tony Abbott. The first was Rudd as opposition leader, the second as prime minister.

Until 2016, the data (with that 2001 exception) was consistent with a possible “women back incumbent governments more than men do” thesis. But the most recent election also showed an advantage to Labor, even though it was in opposition.

(Actually,  the Howard years were characterised, at election after election, by women moving towards Labor in mid-term Newspolls but then returning to the Coalition fold by the final campaign week.)

Of course, Abbott as Liberal leader is a variable in itself. In opposition it was often said that he had a “women problem,” but given the large overall opinion poll leads he enjoyed it might have made more sense to say he enjoyed a particular advantage among men. (And the other side of the equation was for most of that time, Julia Gillard as prime minister, also played a large part.)

In the end the Coalition romped in at the 2013 election despite that big six-point Newspoll gap (when men voted an estimated 56.5 per cent after preferences for the Coalition, and women 50.5 per cent).

But is voting support by gender a zero-sum game? Can a major party thrive by simply compensating for low support from one half of the population with high support from the other?

Surely not. Australian men, and society in general, are also increasingly “pro-women.”

For most of its existence the Liberal Party was more appealing to aspiring women MPs than the boozy, blokey Labor Party. The first female federal minister (Annabelle Rankin, 1966) and the first cabinet minister (Margaret Guilfoyle, 1975) were Liberals. (And in 1949 Robert Menzies had appointed Enid Lyons vice-president of the Executive Council.)

The roles have long been reversed, and in 2019 the Coalition’s parliamentary gender representation appears frozen in the 1990s. This is part of a general conservative grip on the Coalition parties on culture war matters, a hangover of the successful Howard years prolonged by Abbott’s success as opposition leader, and the less than glorious performances of his successors.

They see getting more women into parliament as just another trendy inner-city obsession, like climate change.

I wonder what the 2019 final week Newspoll gap will be. •

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Just kidding. What gives commentators such confidence are the opinion polls, and particularly the most-watched Newspoll, which week after week, fortnight after fortnight, show the government a mile behind — this month by around 46–54 after preferences. And the polls drive not just media perceptions and reporting, but also the behaviour of the political players, which in turn influences the polls.

So can the Coalition government recover from these disastrous numbers?

Some Coalition diehards cling to the superiority of Scott Morrison’s personal ratings over Bill Shorten’s as harbingers of a possible recovery. But history shows that, if anything, the opposite is the case: the leader with low ratings usually improves in the voting-intention figures as election day approaches, and the popular one deflates.

Perhaps the most dramatic recent example came at the June 2017 British election. Only a month before polling day, Theresa May’s approval ratings were twice Jeremy Corbyn’s and the Conservatives led Labour by at least fifteen points. On the day, the Tories scraped into minority government with national support of just 2.4 per cent more than Labour’s.

(And, in a note for Australians determined to overlay state results onto federal ones, a Conservative landslide at local council elections the previous month had prompted headlines such as this from the Telegraph: “Corb-tamination! Local Elections Show that the Tory Wave Is Coming to Sweep Jeremy Corbyn Away.”)

The clearest recent Australian example was 2010, when the preferred/better prime minister and approval/satisfaction numbers for the newly installed Julia Gillard were almost double those for opposition leader Tony Abbott in mid July, and Labor’s voting intentions were around eight points clear of the Coalition’s. Five weeks later the election was a virtual tie, at 50.1–49.9.

So there is nothing in the minutiae of the public numbers to cheer the government.

But if we look hard enough they can find reasons to be, if not cheerful, then hopeful.

• Under Malcolm Turnbull in mid 2018, the government was quite competitive, nudging into 49 per cent after preferences. Yes, Turnbull has gone, but that background suggests potential for improvement.

• Because they’re using election 2016 preference flows, most pollsters (though not Newspoll) are very likely overstating One Nation preference flows to Labor. Back then, One Nation preferenced Labor or ran split tickets in most seats. That won’t happen again. Furthermore, many of the respondents telling pollsters they’ll vote for the minor party today will find it absent from their ballot paper on election day, and a lot of them will vote Coalition instead. This will only make a difference around the edges, but every little bit counts.

• While it is probably true that no government has come back from the poll position the Coalition finds itself in today, some governments have made recoveries of a magnitude that could get Morrison over the line. From January to October 2007, for example, the Howard government averaged a two-party-preferred 43 per cent in Newspoll, and bottomed at 39 per cent. On election day in November that year, it received 47.3 per cent. That’s still a bad loss, but if that kind of shift happened next year it would put this government — whose average in the latest Newspoll quarterly was 46 per cent, and whose lowest figure has been 44 per cent — at around 50 per cent.

• Eroding partisan loyalty over the decades has seen growing voter volatility. The Keating government’s recovery and win in 1993 was unprecedented, and then, in 2001, the Howard government’s was. The comebacks are getting bigger.

• Perhaps most importantly, Labor is taking some big items to the election, particularly its proposed changes to superannuation and a housing policy that involves alterations to capital gains tax and negative gearing. As fine as these plans might be, they are excellent fodder for a scare campaign. Particularly with a softening housing market in Sydney and Melbourne, the message that the value of your house will drop even more under Labor, perhaps causing a recession, is potentially powerful.

Morrison, so wily at manipulating his party room, has so far proved a lemon at the retail side of politics. He would be wise to give up all that daggy bloke-next-door schtick, the cringe-inducing desperation to connect with voters, and get serious about the art of negative politics and mount a 1993-style scare campaign.

Morrison is no Paul Keating, and a change of government remains likely in 2019, but if the unexpected does transpire, expect the phrase “Labor’s GST” to enter the political lexicon. •

The post Reasons to be hopeful appeared first on Inside Story.

He was so effective last time; his methods crude but devastating; he just never let up. True, he wasn’t at any stage popular, but he kept banging away, with the results there for all to see. And the new Liberal leadership rules make the ultimate prize of prime minister even more appealing.

But this scenario is a fantasy. If the Labor Party wins the next election, and wins it comfortably, Abbott will not be first-off-the-rank opposition leader — and not just because his party would baulk at such a move, with all it would signal to the electorate. Abbott himself would avoid the job like the plague.

Expectations of a 2019 Abbott leadership ignore one crucial factor: the human dimension. For Tony, the risk analysis doesn’t remotely stack up.

Abbott became opposition leader in December 2009, with an election due within a year and his tenure secure until then. In early 2010 he ruminated to an interviewer that he would either win the election or become “political roadkill.” Neither occurred in the end; the election was a tie. Remaining Liberal leader for three years was a huge challenge — that’s why he was constantly demanding an early election — and he met that challenge by generating massive two-party-preferred leads in the polls, month after month, year after year.

And then in September 2013 the Coalition took office in a thumping win.

I suspect Abbott has a more realistic view than most commentators of the role in his success of electoral cycles, timing and luck. He surely appreciates that not getting the leadership in December 2007 (when he famously campaigned on his “people skills”) was the hugest blessing. He knows he would have suffered the fate of Brendan Nelson, buried under the (then) most popular prime minister in polling history.

And he would have an inkling that if Labor hadn’t dumped its carbon pollution reduction scheme in April 2010 — a blunder that led to the deposing of Rudd two months later — it would probably have been comfortably re-elected. Hullo Road Kill Tony.

It’s one thing to grasp the opportunity of the opposition leadership, with success seemingly unlikely (as it appeared in late 2009), when you have nothing to lose. Today, though, Abbott is a former prime minister of Australia, and one who can boast of bringing his party back from the wilderness. He travels the world delivering sermons to conservative groups. Supporters, a tiny but opinionated minority of the population, insist he was cut down unfairly, and that the government’s woes began with that act of betrayal. He agrees.

Adding “failed opposition leader” to that CV would massively dilute the cachet. Oh, it turned out he wasn’t that great a campaigner after all. And the experience would be emotionally bruising.

Scott Morrison’s new leadership rules apply only to prime ministers and do nothing for Liberal opposition leaders. The former PM would be unlikely to last the whole term, let alone win the next election.

Against the Rudd and Gillard governments, part of his sales pitch was a promise to bring back the Howard government glory days of surpluses and open wallets. That’s not a trick he could pull again.

Of course it’s possible he could succeed, but the chances are slight. For him, the risk is simply too great.

But a repeat of his timing in 2009, taking the leadership during the home run (which means in 2021), could appeal. And that’s presumably why he’s doing nothing to hose down the rumours. It’s quite possible he will, Peter Costello–like, flirt with the party room for the first two years in opposition. (Peter is still kicking himself for leaving parliament, triggering a by-election days after the Liberal leadership changed.)

There’s one possibility that might entice him earlier: if Labor barely scrapes in next year and is forced to form a minority government.

Barring that, though, Abbott as first post-election opposition leader is a fairytale. And fairytales never come true. •

The post Abbott in wonderland appeared first on Inside Story.

The dries fancied a spot of economic shock treatment to jolt the country out of its post-recession malaise. The wets agreed, but only up to a point: you also had to consider the poor.

The senior players in the soul-destroying 1993 loss — leader John Hewson, along with Peter Reith and Peter Costello — had all been fully paid-up dries or at least more dry than wet. The wets included names such as Fred Chaney, Chris Puplick and Warwick Smith. Their leading light, Ian Macphee, had been pushed out of his Melbourne seat of Goldstein by an impeccably dry Victorian party president named Michael Kroger in a 1989 purge of the party left.

And John Howard? The failed former leader had been the dries’ leading light in the 1980s, but his old-fashioned social conservatism was considered a poor fit for the pragmatic, ideology-free Australian electorate. And his disastrous 1988 foray into Asian immigration served as a lesson in what not to do. No longer part of the leadership equation, he was said to be preparing for retirement.

In 2018 it’s a very different party, shaped most importantly by Howard’s 1996–2007 prime ministership. Hewson has reinvented himself as a relic of an old, progressive Liberal era. Costello was for a long time the great hope of the party’s left. Howard the 1980s small-government advocate ended up presiding over the biggest-taxing government in the country’s history. There aren’t really any dries anymore, but social conservativism is back in vogue.

And since 2001, when Howard employed astonishingly inflammatory rhetoric ­— at least by the standards of the time — race and immigration have been stand-by election tools for the Liberal Party. Although they were seen to have failed spectacularly in the 1980s, and for the first five years of Howard’s prime ministership were viewed as embarrassing baggage, in 2001 this side of Howard became emblematic of his connection with “ordinary Australians.” Howard was finally out and proud, and voters rewarded him with a third term in office.

Asylum seekers and immigration now lurk within the Coalition parties as potential election life rafts. Encouraged further by events in Europe and the United States, the self-proclaimed “base” — the rabid, highly ideological section of their supporters — demands every leader engage in this section of the culture wars.

The Liberals’ other, more recent, ideological tic involves climate change. It too can be traced to the electoral feats of an individual leader: in this case, Tony Abbott. Howard was the longest-serving prime minister since Robert Menzies; Abbott was the first federal Liberal opposition leader since Ming to contest consecutive elections — and win the second one. He did it by ferociously opposing Labor governments’ carbon-pricing policies.

Electoral success is the driver of political lessons learnt and modes of behaviour developed. Whether or not the cause and effect are accurately identified is moot.

Immigration and its accessory issues have always been politically sensitive. A technocratic consensus tends to suppress public discussion, which is what makes it so alluring to political insurgents. No doubt it works well in Liberal focus groups. But practitioners of qualitative research are also susceptible to political mythology, and as last month’s Victorian election suggested, ramping up the rhetoric about minority groups isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be for a major party. (It’s largely forgotten that Howard also attempted, twice, to bring Sudanese refugees into his case for re-election in 2007.)

The ramifications of the obsession with opposing climate change action is more clear-cut: it’s just a dead end for the Coalition. They tie themselves in knots and appear, to the majority of voters, ridiculous.

Still, a party’s warts tend to be obvious when it’s doing badly, which in this country means lagging in the polls. It used to be the lot of opposition parties, but in our topsy-turvy post–global financial crisis world governments are usually in disarray while oppositions have a spring in their step. A little over five years ago the Labor Party was the empty vessel, losing elections in state after state, headed for defeat federally, its faults and contradictions clear to everyone, obsessing about “the base” and becoming further alienated from the mainstream.

Give it a few years and the boot will once again be on the other foot. •

The post Warts and all appeared first on Inside Story.

Roll out the drama and superlatives: this is huge, and on top of the Wentworth by-election “swing” it might point to a general election result of historic proportions.

But if, next fortnight, the numbers round down to something more modest, say 52 to 48, the political class might well sense a possible recovery on the way.

Newspoll, Newspoll, Newspoll.

It’s been this way for decades, political players hanging off this one polling outfit — even after the Australian dumped Newspoll and moved to the cheaper Galaxy in 2015, but managed to retain the name.

Newspoll.

Galaxy still also does Galaxy polls (though rarely federal ones), but they don’t enjoy the cachet of its Newspolls, which even Fairfax journalists defer to over their own. (Sorry Ipsos.)

When a Newspoll drops, everyone in the political bubble knows everyone else will be obsessing over and internalising it, and so they need to as well.

In 2015 Malcolm Turnbull, explaining why he was challenging Tony Abbott for the prime ministership, spoke of the Coalition having “lost thirty Newspolls in a row.” Not “Newspoll has shown us behind in the estimated two-party-preferred vote,” but “lost.” It was now a competition in itself. Since then that terminology has been used routinely: who’s winning Newspoll?

Is this a kind of sickness? You know it is.

Anyway, it’s not just Newspoll: most pollsters have the Coalition government seriously behind. Essential has Labor on 53, Newspoll says 54 and Ipsos 55. But in measured primary support, from which the pollsters calculate two-party-preferred numbers, there’s less agreement.

The most recent Essential, published last week in the Guardian, has the Coalition on 38, Labor on 37, Greens on 10 and One Nation on 7.

The last Ipsos two weeks ago put both Labor and the Coalition on 35, Greens on 15 and One Nation on 5.

And this week’s Newspoll had Coalition 36, Labor 39, Greens 9 and One Nation 6.

If Australia voted under first-past-the-post, like Britain and Canada do, it would all be a bit confusing. And too close to call.

Most of the variation is between Labor and Greens support — that is, one tends to be higher at the expense of the other — and (to a lesser degree) between the Coalition and One Nation. When estimating two-party-preferred numbers the pollsters assume (quite reasonably) that around 80 per cent of Greens preferences will go to Labor. So this variation in primary support tends to be ironed out in two-party-preferred numbers.

Pollsters also plug in One Nation preference flows, but this estimate is trickier. While Greens voters tend to be politically engaged and not much influenced by how-to-vote cards, One Nation supporters are more directable — as long as the party has the personnel to hand out the cards. And the make-up of One Nation voters changes between elections (as does total support for the party).

From 2001 to 2013, One Nation votes split around 55 per cent to the Coalition and 45 to Labor. (Specifically, going backwards from 2013, percentages to the Coalition were 55.1, 54.8, 53.0, 56.4 and 55.9.)

At the last election it was almost even, 50.5 per cent to the Coalition and 49.5 to Labor. That was largely because One Nation cards, in the seats it ran in, either preferenced Labor or preferenced neither side.

According to blogger Kevin Bonham, most pollsters today are plugging in the 50.5 to 49.5 per cent from 2016, while Newspoll, after last year’s Queensland state election — which saw One Nation preferences split roughly 60–40 in the Coalition’s favour — started using about those numbers for federal surveys. This is sensible, as One Nation is unlikely to preference Labor in any electorate next year.

And its support is currently coming, even more than usual, from disaffected Coalition supporters. As it is unlikely to run candidates in anything like every electorate, many of its supporters who find One Nation isn’t on the ballot paper will vote Liberal or Nationals instead, so it makes sense to err on the side of the Coalition when estimating two-party-preferred support.

And at the Longman by-election in July this year, where One Nation preferenced the Liberal National Party (and, unlike at a general election, could supply plentiful volunteers to thrust the cards into voters’ hands), the flow was much more one-sided, 67.7 to the Coalition and 32.3 to Labor.

I’ve said it before: from the pollsters’ point of view there’s only one poll that counts — and that’s the last one before election day. If that one is close to the actual result, no one cares how loopy any of the earlier ones were. Often pollsters devote extra resources, with larger samples, to that final one.

This means that most election-eve surveys tend to be pretty close in the two-party-preferred numbers, though not necessarily as close to the primary votes. With lower and lower levels of support for the major parties, and more preferences to distribute, these estimates can only get more rubbery.

And, of course, national polls tell us nothing (or little) about the size of the House of Representatives crossbench. It’s looking a lot like we’ll have at least six independents (that is, all those up for re-election) and probably more.

Individual seat polling tends to be scarce, and the results hit-and-miss. Yes, even when it’s conducted by Newspoll. •

The post The addictive drama of Newspoll appeared first on Inside Story.

Over the past week or so we have witnessed a largely News Corp–driven leadership semi-frenzy that was starting to spread to the rest of the mainstream media. The media plays a vital role in generating momentum in leadership changes. If it’s not reported — over and over — then how can it gather steam?

The strange all-but-universal political-class interpretation of a modest swing to Labor in the Longman by-election last month as “disastrous” for Turnbull tilled the soil, but Liberal MPs more attuned to objective reality would have seen a general narrowing of the national polls that was finally making the next election look like a real contest. Now that’s been blown away by Ipsos.

Yes, one opinion poll can have such an impact. Only in Australia?

When Turnbull lost the Liberal leadership almost nine years ago, it was attributed to his determination to support the Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme. That was a valid explanation up to a point, but the real driver was a sustained period of very poor opinion poll results. Had the Coalition been ahead, or even only behind by a little, Turnbull probably would have survived. After all, the party room had tolerated John Howard’s professed enthusiasm for an emissions trading scheme in 2007 in the belief, or hope, that he would prevail at the polls.

Once again it’s climate change and energy policy that look like burying Turnbull, and once again it’s really about the coming election, and the Coalition’s lagging in the polls over a long period.

Peter Dutton is the subject of all the speculation — he “has the numbers,” according to his supporters — but enjoys negligible electorate enthusiasm beyond the rabid Coalition base. Tony Abbott longs to regain the crown, and actually enjoys a little more support in the community, though also more ferocious opposition, and not just from left-wing voters. He would presumably settle for the home affairs or defence ministries (and seeing Turnbull humiliated).

Is it strange that Turnbull remains (or did, until this week) a reasonably well-regarded prime minister, according to the opinion polls (including this Ipsos)? The only alternative popular in voterland is Julie Bishop, but the party conservatives would not abide her.

And, at time of writing, the prime minister continues capitulating to his opponents’ demands on climate change policy, a process of hollowing out his public persona reminiscent of Kevin Rudd’s decision to drop his emissions scheme in April 2010. That event drove a big drop in public satisfaction, which dragged down the government’s voting intentions and facilitated his political execution eight years ago.

But back then Rudd had a choice. Turnbull’s options seem to be going out either with a bang, à la 2009, or with a whimper.

So far it looks like option 2.

Back in 1991 Bob Hawke, with his government sagging badly, was forced to make way for the even less popular Paul Keating, partly because it was believed Keating had the political skills to mount a turnaround. That’s the idea today, but neither Dutton nor Abbott is remotely like a Keating, and it’s an incredible stretch to believe either can win the next election by flicking the switch to immigration and electricity prices.

If, as looks likely, Turnbull is dragged down, whoever replaces him will presumably need to disavow any remotely meaningful action on climate change, and instead pledge allegiance to coal. It is difficult to believe the party room would really install such a harsh ideological warrior as Dutton, susceptible to getting carried away by alt-right memes such as the “plight of South African farmers.”

But stranger things have happened.

If not Dutton, Abbott or Bishop, then who? There’s another figure who (like Dutton) attracts about 5 per cent support in leadership surveys. He was the conservatives’ golden boy before he fell out with them over the 2015 leadership change, but would probably be tolerable to them — and preferable to Dutton among the party moderates.

Step forward Scott Morrison — Peter Dutton with a human face? •

The post End game appeared first on Inside Story.

On those national figures, the next election isn’t looking such a sure thing for Labor anymore.

And yet the commentariat, almost to a person, is excitedly reporting exactly the opposite, simply because of a modest by-election swing in a seat called Longman. In the process, they’ve airbrushed the negligible swing in Braddon on the same day.

Also gone missing is the fact that Bennelong saw a bigger swing to Labor last December, yet was largely perceived as a disappointment for the opposition.

Inevitably, some people are plotting the Longman result on the pendulum and listing the seats that would fall to the same swing. But at a modest 3.7 per cent it doesn’t make for great drama. You could take any of the dozens of 53–47 national polls over the past year and a half and apply that 3.4 per cent swing (from the Coalition’s 50.4 per cent at the last election) to get something similar.

What, or who, is driving this interpretation of Saturday’s results?

There are, of course, the furious partisans who roam social media in permanent campaign mode, insisting that the Albanese leadership story was made up, Lindsay MP Emma Husar is the victim of a beat-up and it’s about time journos publicly acknowledged the beauty and magnificence that is Shorten and the Labor Party.

Another group, Malcolm Turnbull’s enemies inside the Coalition movement, are also availing themselves of this weekend’s opportunity.

And there are journos themselves, some of them feeling silly for having contemplated Liberal victories on Saturday. It’s not really their fault — that’s what the public polling and the “leaked” internal polling told them was possible, even likely. So a big mea culpa, Bill, sorry we doubted you; and now let’s overcompensate and lay it on with a trowel. (Remember this when we’re talking about your leadership again in a month.)

Some commentary comes close to justifying itself simply by the fact the political class believes this is important, therefore it behoves us all to play along. Certainly, while by-elections are pretty meaningless in themselves, they do take on a certain mysticism — a ridiculous amount of fuss about one in Canning in 2015 played a role in Tony Abbott’s demise, for example — but that can’t be a reason for commentators jumping on board.

Common to most of the above is the apparent conviction that if the political class, especially the media, believes something to be true, that will make it so. Momentum and all that. But momentum is illusory in electoral politics.

Before Saturday we all thought Labor would probably win the next election anyway, didn’t we? Back when the by-elections were announced, few gave the Liberal National Party any chance of taking Longman. But those subsequent polls encouraged an expectation that has now been dashed.

It’s true that the 9 per cent collapse in the LNP’s primary vote is noteworthy. But most of it went to One Nation and returned to the LNP in preferences, which doesn’t do Labor much good. And it’s right to point out that One Nation preferenced the LNP this time, and if we imagine it had done the same in 2016 (leaving aside the fact that Wyatt Roy would have retained the seat) and then slot in some estimates then we find a larger swing to Labor on Saturday. Perhaps 1 per cent bigger.

On these pages on Monday Tim Colebatch made the excellent point that the record of by-election swings to oppositions in opposition-held seats is much more modest, an average of 1.5 per cent. But there’s a reason for that, illustrated most clearly by the biggest outlier in Tim’s table, a 13.4 per cent swing to John Gorton’s Liberal government in the Australian Capital Territory in 1970, after the death of a very popular Labor member, Jim Fraser.

By-elections are usually caused by members retiring or dying, which sees their personal vote disappear. On average, this has exacerbated the swing against governments in seats they hold, and softened it in opposition-held seats.

That wasn’t the case in Longman and Braddon (and Fremantle and Mayo). In fact, it was the opposite: these MPs had been newly elected in 2016, which should (all else being equal) generate a personal vote — that is, a “sophomore surge.” In Braddon it was what I call a “single” surge, because former Liberal member Brett Whiteley recontested. In Longman it was a “double” (Wyatt Roy’s 2016 personal vote disappeared, and Susan Lamb generated a new one) — although former state MP Trevor Ruthenberg was already known in parts of the electorate, which eats into that “double” a little.

Remember Liberal Jackie Kelly’s 5 per cent swing in Lindsay in 1996? Sophomore surge contributed to that.

Anyway, by-elections should never be seen as tests for general elections, because people aren’t voting about who will form government. That 1970 swing in Jim Fraser’s seat didn’t do the Coalition much good at the next election.

Yes, you can find big by-election results that portend changes of government: Bass (14.3 per cent) in 1975 and Canberra (16.1) in 1995 come to mind. But the Hawke government survived big swings in its third term (11.1 per cent in Port Adelaide; 8.4 per cent in Adelaide). John Howard came close to losing the election after Lindsay and Ryan (9.7 per cent), in March 2001, gave him a wake-up call.

The only by-election swing to a Labor government in federal history took place in Fremantle in 1994; two years later the Coalition was elected in a landslide. And we’re making a fuss about 3.7 per cent in Longman?

Meanwhile, according to the national polls, Malcolm Turnbull might actually have been doing something right politically over the last few months. He needs to be careful about jumping at by-election shadows. •

The post Jumping at shadows appeared first on Inside Story.

Yesterday’s shifts of 0.5 per cent in Braddon and 4.6 per cent in Longman, both of which may shrink a little after the rest of the postal votes are counted, averaged around the same swing as in Flinders. Yet they are being hailed as feats of splendour and magnificence on the part of the current Bill.

This largely reflects the unrealistic expectations generated by the published single-seat polls, which on the whole proved every bit as unreliable as they usually do. In both electorates they hovered around 50–50 after preferences, leaning towards Labor a little in Braddon and the Liberal National Party a touch in Longman. “Leaked” alleged internal polling from both sides sang from the same sheet.

All of which the media–commentator–political class internalised and amplified, with the betting markets, those dutiful dawdling distillers of general expectations, following suit.

In two-party-preferred terms, the pollsters performed respectably in Braddon (the final Newspoll had Labor’s Justine Keay on 51 per cent; at last count she’s on 52.4) but vastly understated the vote for independent Craig Garland and so overstated support for both major-party candidates.

In Longman, by contrast, the polling was pretty shocking in two-party-preferred terms (Labor’s Susan Lamb is currently on 55.4). The largest component was a big overstating of the primary vote for the Coalition’s Trevor Ruthenberg. That 10 per cent collapse in LNP support, to around 29 per cent, is a headline-grabber.

Centre Alliance’s Rebekha Sharkie’s big victory in Mayo was a surprise to no one — and that’s also wholly because of the published surveys, which had her in the high 50s or low 60s after preferences from the outset. When numbers are so one-sided there’s less pressure on the pollsters to get it exactly right, but in fact the final Newspoll did very well, especially on the main contenders’ primary votes and two-candidate-preferred votes.

And in the two Western Australian contests, the forgotten pair of Perth and Fremantle, Labor romped home as expected against the Greens.

Back in Braddon and Longman, Labor could have expected to benefit from “sophomore surge” (both sitting MPs were freshly elected in 2016 and are likely to have generated new personal votes) as well as the usual swing against the government. The unexceptional results — on the low side of swings to oppositions — were made to look exceptional by the opinion polling, which allowed the media and party insiders to whip themselves into a lather of expectation that the Coalition would probably take one, maybe both. And what would that mean for Shorten’s leadership?

Against these anticipations, the opposition leader looks like a miracle maker and a vote magnet. And from around 7.30pm eastern standard time on Saturday it was apparent to all that Labor had run two very fine, well-oiled campaigns indeed, particularly in Queensland.

In reality Shorten remains a less-than-popular opposition leader. As in Bennelong last December, he insisted on inserting himself into both contests, presumably aware this would suppress his candidates’ support but also knowing that to do otherwise would have generated unhelpful commentary. And this time the gamble paid off: he can now claim ownership of both results.

As usual with by-elections, it was all a huge fuss about close to nothing. It is always erroneous to view these contests as “dry runs” for a general election, because people aren’t voting on who they want to form government. So these results tell us very little about the next election (at which, it remains my humble opinion, Labor is likely to win overall, though the Coalition will probably take back Longman).

But while the Braddon and Longman votes tell us little, they’re producing much colour and movement inside the political bubble. The chance of Shorten being toppled before the next election has receded further, which is actually a good outcome for the government. And Malcolm Turnbull can expect an uncomfortable time.

Had the polls been accurate indicators of the outcomes from the outset, we would have adjusted our expectations accordingly. And had polls erred the other way, pointing to huge swings to Labor, questions would now be directed at Shorten.

Tony Abbott largely bit his tongue during the final weeks of the campaign but might now be on hand to provide constructive criticism, contrasting Saturday’s numbers with the one by-election under his prime ministership, Griffith in 2014, which saw a small pro-government swing.

Anyway, this government will now be at the receiving end of the “learn the lessons” mantra. And, as always, it isn’t exactly clear what those lessons should be. •

The post Not-so-great expectations appeared first on Inside Story.

The Australian National University has a centre for Islamic studies and offers a bachelor of Asian studies. Do you think it should also offer a degree in the study of Western civilisation?

You won’t be surprised to hear that the results were massively in the affirmative (66 per cent yes, 19 per cent no, and 15 per cent uncommitted).

It’s not the first time this newspaper–pollster duo has played hard and fast with respectable practice. Four weeks ago they performed an exercise so slanted it bordered on parody.

On that occasion, Newspoll presented respondents with the Turnbull government’s full, unlegislated company tax cuts as if they were a fait accompli. When should they be introduced, respondents were asked, with one of three options being “not at all.” The other two, “immediately” and “over ten years” together attracted the most support, which left the journalist to report massive support for the policy under the headline “Tax cuts now more popular than gay marriage, polls show.”

Some history is relevant. In 2015 the company known as Newspoll, half-owned by News Corp, was disbanded. Another company, Galaxy, became the Australian’s political pollster. (With its mixed-platform strategy, it presumably offered a much cheaper product than its telephone-only predecessor.) The name Newspoll was retained, however, along with the cache of the respected outfit that Sol Lebovic had founded in the mid 1980s. And so Newspoll in the Oz remained the pollster the political class obsesses over most.

There’s nothing wrong with Galaxy’s survey methods — their election-eve voting-intention numbers are generally close to the mark — but reputationally aware pollsters need to be willing, from time to time, to say no to clients, or prospective clients. Even if it means losing business. “Sorry,” they might say. “That question is loaded, we’re not going to use it.”

I believe Lebovic, and his successor Martin O’Shannessy, would have nixed the question about company taxes and the one about Western civilisation. (ACNielsen, when it was polling politics for Fairfax, was similarly fastidious.)

On the other side of the ideological spectrum, robopollster ReachTEL, favoured by left-wing proselytisers, also appears to have a client-friendly disposition to question content. For more on that, see Adrian Beaumont in the Conversation.

(None of this, I should stress, is the same as “push polling,” the practice of attempting to directly influence public opinion by spreading information, accurate or otherwise, under the guise of surveying. There, the “results” are of secondary importance, or more often not used at all.)

You could say: well, pollsters can do what they like with their own reputations. You pays your money, you gets your results; just don’t expect people to take it seriously. The problem is that journalists do treat these products with seriousness: the Guardian, for example, regularly repeats at face value the latest survey offering from the Australia Institute (which often uses ReachTEL).

Still, questions about voting intention are, we hope, sacrosanct. The wording remains constant, and they go at the top of the survey (or at least atop the political section) so they are not polluted by other questions. And at the moment all the pollsters are saying the same thing: Labor is comfortably ahead after preferences.

Too far ahead to lose? Well, former prime minister John Howard has dutifully been talking up the Turnbull government’s election chances recently. He notes that on the last three occasions when the federal government changed hands “the primary vote of the winning party was in the middle forties for a consistent period of six or twelve months before the election.” Today, by contrast, “the Labor primary vote has been stuck below 40 per cent for a very long time.”

Nice try Mr Howard, but you left out the bit about Coalition primary support also languishing in the high thirties. Likely Greens, One Nation and other preferences put Labor on around 52 to 53 per cent.

At the last election, the combined primary vote for the major parties was 76.7 per cent, the lowest since at least the second world war. It’s been headed south, in spits and spurts, for decades. We don’t know for sure that the total figure will be lower again at the next election, but it’s sure not going to increase much.

Estimating two-party-preferreds from such low primary votes can be an imprecise business; perhaps that’s what the former PM should have pointed out.

The other piece of silver lining Coalition optimists tug at from time to time is that Malcolm Turnbull’s leads his opponent in the preferred prime minister stakes (46–31 in the latest Newspoll) and in satisfaction/approval (40 per cent to Bill Shorten’s 33 per cent). These figures, they hope, will see him through.

That aspiration is also likely to be forlorn. It’s likely that voters’ evaluations of the two individuals are already built into the voting-intention figures, where a residual respect for the prime minister, and the low esteem in which the presentationally challenged opposition leader is held, are keeping the contest reasonably competitive.

In fact, sky-high personal ratings for the leader tend to artificially inflate voting intentions, making them likely to crash to earth as polling day approaches. (The most dramatic example of this is Labor and the stratospherically popular Kevin Rudd in 2007: ten- to twenty-point voting-intention leads whittled down to 5.4 per cent on election day.)

Labor remains very likely to win the next election. If the parties are led by the same individuals, those personal ratings will probably converge by election day. ●

The post Poll positions appeared first on Inside Story.

“The High Court’s latest decision on the parliamentary eligibility of dual citizens should definitively end the constitutional fiasco that has now stripped as many as fifteen federal lawmakers of their seats,” it began. ‘‘The legal battle is over,” it triumphantly concluded. “The consequent political one has begun.”

Back in the real world, this constitutional soap opera shows no signs of wrapping up. As Jeremy Gans has written, WA Labor MP Anne Aly might be next for the high jump. And even the Age has since reported that “experts say dual citizenship crisis is far from over.”

Among the editorial’s other doozies was its breezy pronouncements that the meaning of section 44 is “unambiguous” and that the “looming ‘Super Saturday’ of expensive by-elections” would have been “eminently avoidable” if only Bill Shorten had referred his MPs to the High Court late last year. In fact, that action would probably not have avoided a single by-election. (More trivially, the paper also got wrong the number of constitutional referendums held since Federation: it’s forty-four not forty-three.)

On Thursday morning the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters released its report on this very imbroglio. It reminded us that while dual citizenship has been the main topic of public discussion, section 44 has other ramifications, such as “disqualify[ing] teachers, nurses, firefighters and anyone with a Commonwealth contract — unless they quit their job simply to nominate and have a go.” The committee recommended (among other things) that a referendum be held either to repeal sections 44 and 45 or to insert “until the parliament otherwise provides” before each, which would have the same effect of putting the laws in the hands of parliament.

The report “makes no comment on what today should be the most appropriate qualifications and disqualifications for parliamentarians.” Instead, “that should be decided after a national, and parliamentary, debate.”

By lunchtime the Turnbull government had rejected the referendum proposal, citing a lack of public support. In a sense you can’t blame it: with even newspapers like the Age kicking the populist can, who needs enemies?

The report also acknowledged that “the preconditions for [referendum] success will take time to achieve,” so it recommended that the government introduces “early mitigation measures” to reduce the likelihood of referrals to the High Court after the Super Saturday by-elections and the next general election.

Good luck with that.

The idea, implicit in this recommendation, is that Australians can be “convinced” of the merit of change over months and years of reasoned discussion, after which a majority will vote Yes. This is fantastical. Electoral behaviour at referendums — at least in the way they’re traditionally held — is a lot like that at general elections: it relies more on emotion and a range of semi-definable societal dynamics than on any objective facts. Very often, the urge to deliver a boot up the backside to “elites,” the government, or just… somebody, becomes the major vote driver.

We’re talking about the Australian electorate, remember, which thirty years ago voted No, by 62 to 38 per cent, to a referendum proposal “to alter the Constitution to provide for fair and democratic parliamentary elections throughout Australia.”

All of this might make the referendum hurdle seem insurmountable. But it doesn’t have to be — if done right.

Yes, the very idea of dragging voters to the ballot box solely to fix section 44 sets the head spinning. Australian election campaigns rely on hyperbole, exaggeration and sophistry and one centred on such an arcane piece of constitutional housekeeping would get very silly very quickly.

Referendums also cost a lot of money. Even with on-paper bipartisan support, a section 44 campaign would inevitably largely come down to the fact of the vote itself. The expense, the inconvenience — why are our politicians putting us through this? As the opinion polls show support declining, more MPs and public figures would defect to No.

Here’s the solution: hold a section 44 referendum simultaneously with a general election, preferably the next one. That’s how referendums were held in the first decade of the Federation, with a success rate of two out of three. The mid-term habit began under a Labor government in 1911, and for some reason it took hold, but there is really no reason for it. These days the standard explanation is that it’s better to deal with such matters away from the argy-bargy of an election campaign. But the argy-bargy would actually make a referendum more likely to pass.

If both major parties support the change, its unexciting nature would see it buried by the main contest and the chances of it degenerating into one of those spiv-heavy “people power” campaigns would be negligible. With electors’ (and editorial writers’) minds on weightier matters and with the Coalition, Labor and the Greens advocating Yes, it would stand a good chance of sailing through.

The last time a government took referendums to a general election was in 1984. Even though both of them were opposed by the opposition parties, they received 47.0 per cent and 50.6 per cent support respectively (the latter failing to clear the “double majority” hurdle). Few voters gave the referendums much thought during the campaign. Which is exactly what you want if it is to pass.

(By the way, the successful 1967 “Aboriginals” referendum has been the site of much myth-making. It was held mid-term, but along with the very controversial “nexus” proposal, which attracted nearly all the attention and lost badly.)

A mid-term referendum, on anything, is asking for trouble. Because Liberal opposition leaders institutionally find it difficult to support Labor government referendums, and Labor is likely to win the next election, a referendum concurrent with that could be our one chance for a long time to fix section 44. ●

The post Yes, section 44 can be fixed appeared first on Inside Story.

With Labor certain to retain most of these seats, and likely to win all of them, and given that Wednesday’s High Court ruling made Bill’s earlier bragging about his party’s vetting processes look ill-advised, you could call this making a virtue of necessity. Nice work if you can get away with it.

The Liberals have announced they’re not running in Perth, which seems particularly unadventurous. Of the remaining seats, the most vulnerable is Longman, in Queensland, one of the party’s surprise gains in 2016.

Longman was created at the 1996 election and won by a youngish Mal Brough (aged thirty-four). By the time it fell to Labor in 2007 Brough was Indigenous affairs minister, an Action Man regularly on the nightly news as leader of a quasi-military exercise in that foreign land, the Northern Territory. The man who defeated him, former state Labor MP Jon Sullivan, held Longman for just one term; many blamed his 2010 loss — to the very young Wyatt Roy (aged twenty) — on indelicate comments to a voter at a public meeting. An unfriendly redistribution in 2009 hadn’t helped either.

Two elections later, in 2016, Roy was done in by minor-party preferences. By “preferences” I mean how-to-vote cards — most importantly those of One Nation, whose 9.4 per cent primary vote flowed 56.5 per cent to Labor and 43.5 to the Liberal National Party. That translated to a net gain of 1.2 per cent for Labor’s Susan Lamb, more than her winning margin of 0.8 per cent. The important “what if?” is how One Nation preferences would have flowed if the party had recommended Roy ahead of Lamb, or recommended neither (or even both, one on each side).

Debate rages about how powerful One Nation how-to-vote cards are. One important seat-by-seat unknown is the number of volunteers available to thrust the cards into voters’ mitts. One Nation doesn’t have a great number of those — nothing like the major parties or the Greens — but given the closeness of the Longman result we can be pretty sure friendly how-to-vote cards would have saved Roy.

One Nation will almost certainly preference the LNP at this by-election (and the next general one). Working in the other direction, Lamb will probably have built a personal vote.

But the most important factor in all this is the fact that by-elections are very different beasts from general elections. Who will form government is not at stake; huge swings are possible, though they are always corrected (give or take some personal-vote effects) at the next election. Expected or actual by-election outcomes should never be converted into projected general election results (which doesn’t stop many journalists and commentators doing just that).

This brings us to a ReachTEL poll conducted in Longman this week, commissioned by the Australia Institute. It gives a roughly 4 per cent two-party-preferred swing to the LNP, putting it at 53 per cent to Labor’s 47.

Don’t take too much notice of that figure, because there is a big, big problem with ReachTEL’s survey question.

The High Court’s ruling on Labor Senator Katy Gallagher came down on Wednesday, and Lamb and the three other MPs (one a Centre Alliance member) announced their resignations later that day. The ReachTEL survey was conducted on Thursday.

How many Longman respondents knew that they were about to be dragged to the ballot box because their MP has been caught out on a citizenship technicality? ReachTEL could have included that information in their question, along the lines of “As you may be aware, Susan Lamb has resigned as your local member because…” It would have been a big mouthful, so they opted for the general “If a federal election for the House of Representatives was held today…”

That means the results tell us almost nothing about the likely by-election outcome because… well, see the sentence above about the incomparability of by-election and general election numbers.

These numbers might give us a clue about how the major parties are travelling in the state with the third most electorates (thirty out of 151) in the country, very tentatively suggesting that Coalition support is holding up, at least there. (As noted last year, the re-election of the state Labor government boded nicely for the federal Coalition’s performance in Queensland.)

There’s good reason to believe Lamb may struggle at the next general election. But by-elections usually swing against sitting governments, and two last year suggested voters aren’t likely to blame their MPs for falling foul of section 44.

We have to wait for opinion polls about intended voting intentions for the Longman by-election itself to get an idea of that result.

On top of all that, individual seat polls are not terribly reliable at the best of times, and seem particularly hit and miss for by-elections.

Still, Longman remains the by-election to watch. Bill Shorten will certainly be keeping a close eye on it. ●

The post The Longman and Shorten of it appeared first on Inside Story.

But what happens when we ask Australians not about a distant past but about events in their own lifetimes? What do they see as the occurrences, at home and abroad, that have most shaped their country?

Australia is wired in to US perspectives on world events, but we are not quite “Austerica,” as some intellectuals worried we were becoming in the 1960s.

The Social Research Centre’s Historic Events Survey provides a snapshot of Australian historical consciousness. It asked its Life in Australia panel members — aged eighteen to ninety-three — what they saw as the “ten most important historic events” in their lifetime. It then asked them to choose a single event among their ten that had “the greatest impact on the country.” Subsequent questions invited respondents to reflect on which event made them proudest of, and which most disappointed in, Australia.

When the Pew Research Center in the United States asked Americans for their top ten in mid 2016, more than three-quarters included the September 11 terrorist attacks. Far fewer Australians, just 27 per cent, nominated 9/11, but this still placed the event second, just behind the same-sex marriage vote with 30 per cent. And when Australian respondents were asked to nominate the single most significant nation-shaping event of their lifetime, the most common choice was 9/11 (11 per cent).

Still, the lower rating of 9/11 in the Australian survey reminds us that national differences matter. Not only does 9/11 have much greater recognition as historically significant in the US, but so do the Vietnam, Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Australia is wired in to US perspectives on world events, but we are not quite “Austerica,” as some intellectuals worried we were becoming in the 1960s. It is notable, however, that the two youngest Australian generations each included the election of Donald Trump at the tail of their top tens.

Evidently, then, responses to such matters reflect generational differences. Of the five generations considered, only gen X (aged thirty-eight to fifty-two in 2017) had 9/11 first, with 35 per cent of the vote. This group also ranked highly the Bali bombings of 2002 (eighth, with 11 per cent, a higher proportion than any other generation). Many of the eighty-eight Australians killed in Bali, being in their twenties and thirties at the time, belonged to gen X. And the response to 9/11 reflects the fact that Australians see that event as part of a wider pattern of terrorist threat rather than as a specific US experience.

Australian respondents younger than gen X had 9/11 second, behind same-sex marriage. For these millennials (aged twenty-three to thirty-seven) and members of gen Z (twenty-two or younger), other terror events, such as the Bali bombings and the Lindt Cafe siege, were also prominent in their ten. In sum, for anyone younger than about fifty, terrorism provides a powerful defining historical experience, despite the small scale and relative paucity of attacks on Australian soil.

Baby boomers (aged fifty-three to seventy-one), by way of contrast, rated 9/11 as low as fifth (20 per cent), while for the silent generation (aged seventy-two to ninety-three), with their longer perspective on twentieth-century international conflict, it was not in the top ten at all (it came in at eleventh). Those born in 1945 or before nominated the second world war first, with a hefty 44 per cent placing it in their top ten, the largest figure for any event in any generation.

The Historic Events Survey was carried out online and via telephone between 13 November and 3 December 2017, when same-sex marriage was prominent in public debate. The survey results contradict claims advanced, mainly by opponents of same-sex marriage, that ordinary Australians regard the issue as unimportant. Indeed, 45 per cent of respondents nominated issues that could broadly be categorised as “human rights” or “civil liberties,” belying the frequent claim that Australians are concerned overwhelmingly with material or economic issues. So much for “jobs and growth.”

When respondents were asked about the most significant single event in their lifetime, same-sex marriage came in second at 7 per cent, behind 9/11. When they were asked what made them most proud of Australia, 13 per cent mentioned same-sex marriage, while 6 per cent were most disappointed at the cost and delay involved in bringing the reform about, and another 6 per cent nominated its achievement as their most disappointing event. When the top ten is considered, same-sex marriage was first for both gen Z and millennials. But for gen X it appeared less frequently than 9/11, while the baby boomers only had it at three (24 per cent), and the silent generation at six (13 per cent). For the two youngest cohorts, alongside their consciousness of the changes wrought by terrorism is a sense of profound transformation around gender and sexuality.

By way of contrast, baby boomers don’t appear to have been much preoccupied with the “identity politics” of race, gender and sexuality. The events that are usually seen as critical in their formation and experience are there: the Vietnam war at one (28 per cent), the Whitlam government dismissal at two (27 per cent) and the Apollo 11 Moon landing at four (21 per cent). This is seemingly a generation with a distinctive historical consciousness, shaped by a sense of the transformational events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, events associated with their coming to maturity in a world changing rapidly in political and technological terms. We should also perhaps not overlook the impact of a rich nostalgia industry, drawing on the televised imagery of the era, which frequently reminds boomers of the happenings that have supposedly defined them.

The boomers are distinguishable from the silent generation in that the second world war is outside their living memory, but the legacy of that war was often profound for them — a phenomenon impossible to capture in a survey on “events.” The Moon landing, the Vietnam war and the Dismissal also figured prominently for the silent generation (ranked two, three and four, after the second world war); but this generation also ranked a panoply of events concerned with the monarchy (Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and subsequent visits), nation-building and infrastructure (the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, the Sydney Opera House), and technological change such as air travel and medical advances.

The boomers shared with gen X Australia’s America’s Cup victory of 1983 (ranked six by both, 15 per cent for gen X and 12 per cent for the boomers). The 2000 Olympics might have performed some of the same work for the millennials and gen Z (both 14 per cent), but it was nominated by even greater numbers of gen X, who seem to be particularly preoccupied with sporting spectacle and national esteem. Gen X appears to have been most affected by the period’s strains of cocky sporting and corporate nationalism — a winged keel generation, perhaps.

Gen X has some other distinctive features, too. It is the only generation that ranked the development of the internet — at seven (12 per cent). Unlike the two youngest groups, who are “digital natives,” gen Xers are old enough to recall a world before the web. They are also mainly old enough to recall the mass shootings of the 1980s, and rated the Port Arthur massacre at three, with 21 per cent nominating it in their top ten, and gun law reform at equal tenth (9 per cent). In the national top ten, Port Arthur was fourth, with 13 per cent. But when respondents were asked to nominate the single most significant event, the Port Arthur massacre came in third (5 per cent), with gun law reform seventh (3 per cent).

Economic vulnerability registered most strongly among millennials. The global financial crisis, which appeared in their top ten (12 per cent), possibly serves as an event conveying their concerns about issues such as student debt, job security and the price of housing. But the relative success of Australia in weathering the economic storms of recent years is reflected by the finding that just 8 per cent of respondents overall mentioned the GFC.

Social researchers have remarked on white Australians’ reluctance to discuss wrongs against Indigenous people. But the survey suggests that many Australians do see Indigenous experience as important in their history. When the responses to the top-ten question are grouped in themes, Indigenous issues are ranked sixth, with 24 per cent nominating events such as the Apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous children, the Mabo High Court decision on native title in 1992, and the 1967 referendum. In particular, the Apology has some purchase as a symbolic national event. It came in third overall, with 13 per cent, but the generational breakdown indicates that it was rated highly only among those younger than their early fifties. For members of gen Z — many of them at school when it was delivered — the Apology appeared defining, with more than a quarter mentioning it (27 per cent).

It is possible to agree that an event had a significant impact while disagreeing about the nature of that impact — whether it was good, bad or in between. The dismissal of the Whitlam government appeared in the top ten of Labor, Coalition and Greens supporters, but we can be sure that they do not see it in the same way. There were, more generally, significant areas of difference between supporters of the parties, even allowing for common ground. Labor supporters rated same-sex marriage slightly higher, and Greens supporters significantly higher, than 9/11. Coalition supporters had 9/11 first, and the Bali bombings, absent from the Labor list, was also in their top ten.

Labor supporters put the Apology to the Stolen Generations at number three, while Coalition supporters did not rate the Apology in their top ten at all. One Nation voters also omitted the Apology, as well as the Port Arthur massacre, and they rated same-sex marriage only at number seven: as many as 17 per cent nominated it as the event that had most disappointed them. This group seemed especially enamoured of Anzac Day commemoration, with 14 per cent nominating it as the event that made them proudest, and they had the Queensland floods at number six, expressing the strength of the party in that state and perhaps a sentiment about battling natural as well as social hardship.

There are also some notable gender differences. Men mentioned the September 11 attacks (27 per cent) more than same-sex marriage (25 per cent); women mentioned same-sex marriage (35 per cent) more than 9/11 (27 per cent). Intuitively, this result seems to mirror participation rates in the 2017 same-sex marriage survey, which were higher for women than men. Women also ranked the Apology significantly more than men did — 17 per cent compared with just 9 per cent — while Julia Gillard’s election as prime minister came in at six for women (11 per cent) but did not figure in the top ten for men (4 per cent). In general, her election was not Australia’s “Obama moment”: 40 per cent of respondents in the Pew survey ranked Barack Obama’s election in their top ten compared with a mere 8 per cent of Australians mentioning Gillard.

Sometimes an event, because it is local or regional, has imprinted itself much more firmly in a particular state or city than elsewhere in the nation. The most spectacular example of this pattern is the Port Arthur massacre, which was mentioned by 32 per cent of the admittedly small Tasmanian sample, outranking both same-sex marriage (31 per cent) and 9/11 (29 per cent). Similarly, 19 per cent of the small Northern Territory sample mentioned Cyclone Tracy. The Lindt Cafe siege, which occurred in Martin Place, Sydney, was mentioned by 13 per cent of Sydneysiders, compared with the much lower national figure of 7 per cent.

And the same is true for some happier occasions. The Sydney Olympics were much more likely to be mentioned in that city (21 per cent) and in New South Wales generally (18 per cent) than by people living elsewhere (the national figure is 12 per cent). Western Australian residents were twice as likely as Australians overall to recall the significance of the America’s Cup’s (the successful syndicate was from that state). They were also more likely to nominate the mining boom than their fellow Australians further east.

The sample size for Indigenous-identified respondents was very small (forty), but there were some variations from the national norms in Indigenous selections. The most significant is unsurprising: 37 per cent mentioned the Apology, compared with a 12 per cent non-Indigenous figure. On the other hand, rural and regional respondents rated both the Apology and same-sex marriage lower than their metropolitan counterparts did.

Historians might be puzzled by some of the results. Many events to which they commonly turn to explain the making of modern Australia figure barely or not at all.

One might have expected the issue of asylum seekers to have figured, perhaps in the form of a recognition of the Tampa crisis of 2001 as an influential historical event. In fact, it emerged only when people were asked about a time or event that has most disappointed them, topping this list with 8 per cent. The postwar immigration scheme was not mentioned in any top ten, perhaps not being recognised by respondents as an “event.” The end of the cold war is apparently regarded by Australians as none of their business.

Australians perhaps like to think of themselves as less insular than Americans, but 13 per cent in the US survey identified the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war as consequential, ranking these momentous events eighth. In Australia, neither the end of the long postwar economic boom in the 1970s nor the rise of China registered as a landmark. Indeed, economic “events” barely figured in Australian top-ten responses. The 1983 dollar float, for instance, a favourite among politicians and journalists, had little resonance. Nor were there any signs of environmental issues, such as the saving of the Franklin River, in the top ten — not even among Greens supporters!

Women’s lives have been transformed in recent decades, but there are few gestures towards this social revolution in the data. The arrival of the contraceptive pill (1961) appeared in no one’s top ten, not even the baby boomers’, whose lives are usually seen to have been so shaped by it. Those under about forty did, however, nominate a moment that encapsulates the shift in gender politics: the election of Julia Gillard was ranked five by gen Z (15 per cent) and eight by millennials (10 per cent). Overall, 8 per cent of respondents included Gillard’s election as the first female prime minister, placing it equal tenth.

Historians might be puzzled by some of the results. Many events to which they commonly turn to explain the making of modern Australia figure barely or not at all. And contrary to the image of Australia as a utilitarian society whose people are concerned overwhelmingly with material issues and practical outcomes, respondents appeared to have a taste for the symbol, the spectacle and the landmark.

The survey reminds us that we live in a globalised world where big international events — such as the Moon landing and 9/11 — are recognised across oceans and borders as turning points in a shared history. All the same, Australians continue to find a place for the national and even the local, still recognising their own backyard as a place where history happens. •

The results of the survey can be found here.

The post Our global backyard appeared first on Inside Story.

Immediately below it is a second inscription. This one quotes from the 1998 Noumea Accords between the French government and leaders of the indigenous Kanaks, which formalised a staged devolution of power from France to New Caledonia. “The moment has come to understand the shadows of the colonial period,” it reads in part, “even if this era was not devoid of light.”

Even if obliquely and grudgingly, the words are an acknowledgement of the devastation inflicted on the Kanaks by the French colonisers. Indigenous revolts were violently suppressed, land taken and culture trampled. It is a familiar story to Indigenous people in Australia.

As historian Ken Inglis pointed out many years ago, 26 January was celebrated sporadically and in various forms in the early decades of last century, and it was not until 1931 that Victoria adopted the name Australia Day.

The La Foa monument is testament to the evolving relationship between the original inhabitants and the European colonists. It’s also an example we could follow to help resolve the debate about the outdated inscriptions on our own statues and monuments. It might also help us navigate the renewed debate over Australia Day, which has become another depressing example of how our main political parties feel compelled to follow rather than lead.

Most of the ubiquitous opinion polls in recent months suggest that a majority of Australians oppose changing the date of Australia Day from the anniversary of Arthur Phillip’s landing at Sydney Cove. But could the poll results reflect the fact that most people haven’t given the subject a great deal of thought? A survey commissioned by the Australia Institute found that only half of Australians know that Australia Day marks the arrival of the First Fleet, and fewer feel that the date is offensive to Indigenous Australians. It also suggested that Australians are attached to the idea of a national day but don’t necessarily believe it needs to be held on 26 January.

To argue, as did citizenship and multicultural affairs minister Alan Tudge last week, that the day is “a great unifying moment for this country,” let alone to imply that it is somehow a sacred part of our tradition, is absurd. As historian Ken Inglis pointed out many years ago, 26 January was celebrated sporadically and in various forms in the early decades of last century, and it was not until 1931 that Victoria adopted the name Australia Day. Other states followed later.

As early as 1938, on the 150th anniversary of Phillip’s arrival in Sydney, Aboriginal leaders called for a day of mourning and protest. And as recently as 1960, members of the Pioneers’ Association of (proudly convict-free) South Australia declared themselves to be “deeply disturbed” by attempts to persuade their state to accept 26 January as Australia Day. It was not until 1994 that it was decided that Australia Day should be celebrated on the actual date — as opposed to the nearest Monday, where it had ensured that Australians could enjoy that most sacred of all Australian institutions, the long weekend.

An increasing awareness and acknowledgement of Australian history before 1788 will eventually lead to a more suitable date for our national day. The Mabo judgement of 1992 overturned the fiction of terra nullius and recognised that Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders had a legal right to land, which went on to be enshrined in legislation. Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations in 2008 was another step towards healing past wrongs. And there has been a growing appreciation of the richness of Indigenous art, ancient and modern, and to a lesser extent of Indigenous languages, which are the oldest, or among the oldest, in the world.

Australians are also gradually awakening to the evidence that British settlers did much more than occupy land populated by nomadic hunter-gatherers. When Indigenous author and historian Bruce Pascoe used the journals of the early explorers to tell the story of life in Australia before European settlement, he found repeated references to permanent settlements.

As he describes in his book Dark Emu, they included extensive yam pastures in Victoria and grain fields in Queensland that flourished without the use of fertiliser or herbicides. Large buildings held tonnes of surplus grain. Some villages were home to 1000 or more people, and some houses had thick coatings of clay over the roofs and were large enough to accommodate up to forty people. There were cemeteries, wells and means of irrigation. Dams and channels were built to facilitate the harvesting of fish. On an island off the Western Australian coast, hundreds of stone buildings were part of a high-density settlement.

Pascoe argues that there is a reason why we know so little of this history. The Europeans arrived in Australia, as they did in other colonies, with fixed ideas about the superiority of their civilisation. “To understand how the Europeans’ assumptions selectively filtered the information brought to them by the early explorers is to see how we came to have the history of the country we accept today,” he writes. “It is clear from the journals that few were here to marvel at a new civilisation; they were here to replace it… Few bothered with the evidence of the existing economy because they knew it was about to be subsumed.”

After 1860, he adds, most people saw no evidence of any prior complex civilisation. Villages had been burnt, their foundations stolen for other buildings, and the occupants killed in warfare, or by murder or disease.

Some large stone structures, possibly used for ceremonial purposes, did survive. They were so impressive, Pascoe writes, that the settlers who came across them could not accept that they were Indigenous and concluded that they must have been built by Europeans or, according to one theory, aliens.

Yes, European settlement needs to be seen in the context of prevailing beliefs at the time. We can’t undo history, but it is one thing to acknowledge it and another to celebrate it without reflecting on its consequences.

Changing the date of Australia Day is not the most important step towards coming to terms with our history. Twenty-seven years after government and opposition agreed to establish a Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and seventeen years after the date set for the process to conclude, reconciliation remains an ongoing project. Our Constitution still makes no reference to Australia’s first peoples, and a broader agreement on Indigenous input into decision-making seems remote.

But while the date of our national day is only one small element in dealing with the past, it is hard to see how reconciliation can be advanced if we continue to assert that 26 January is a great unifying moment or fail to acknowledge that the benefits bestowed by Western civilisation came at a very high cost for the original inhabitants. •

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But what to do when the swing is the other way — to the tune of a big 7.4 per cent (which, for the record, would reap twenty-six Labor seats on the pendulum) — as we saw in New England on Saturday, and yet the government consistently performs abysmally in national voting-intention polls?

The answer, and this applies to all by-elections, is to resist the urge to extrapolate anything at all from the result. By-elections are grossly over-interpreted by the political class in this country and are barometers of not much at all — or at least not much that we can comprehend. Most importantly, because fates of governments are not at stake, by-elections allow people to vote with other factors in front of mind.

Barnaby Joyce’s big result — at last count, a 64.8 per cent primary vote and 73.8 per cent after preferences — verifies that he is a popular sitting member. Then again, rural MPs tend to enjoy popularity; on average, they have high personal votes (as measured, for example, by comparing lower house and upper house support for their parties). Independent Tony Windsor certainly enjoyed immense esteem — and wins of similar magnitude to Barnaby’s on Saturday — as sitting MP in that electorate from 2001 to 2010.

From 2010 to 2013 many Labor supporters projected all sorts of fuzzy attributes onto the denizens of New England — so wise were they in repeatedly electing a person of the calibre of Windsor — but his September 2010 decision to support Julia Gillard and Labor, and the subsequent toxic standing of that government, went down diabolically in his electorate. Windsor wisely sat out the 2013 election — he would have been thrashed, by Joyce or any other Nationals candidate — but in 2016, with the gloss removed from the Abbott and then Turnbull governments, he reasonably judged his chances as not bad. On the day, though, he was soundly defeated by one-term MP Joyce.

The speed and enthusiasm with which New England voters shifted their affection to the current member must be galling for Windsor.

Saturday’s result also suggests that voters aren’t inclined to blame MPs for falling foul of section 44 of the Constitution. So, while it should give no encouragement to the Coalition at the next general election, it does provide hope for John Alexander in Bennelong on the Saturday after next. (The fruits of Labor senator Sam Dastyari’s need to ingratiate — obsessive even by Sussex Street standards — may have already cruelled Kristina Keneally’s chances.)

Two years and three months ago, an upcoming by-election in the Western Australian seat of Canning generated a huge amount of fuss in the Liberal Party. Bizarrely, it became a test of prime minister Tony Abbott’s leadership, when it was all but irrelevant in terms of numbers in parliament. (In the end, assisted by the fevered anticipation, Abbott lost his job before the poll.)

Yet now, in December 2017, with the outcome of Bennelong potentially affecting the fate of the government in the House of Representatives, Malcolm Turnbull has so far escaped an equivalent ultimatum. Partly that’s because parliament will have closed shop by the time the result is in.

But it’s also because, despite recent travails, Turnbull retains greater respect and approval in the community than Abbott ever did. Liberal deputy Julie Bishop has overtaken him as preferred leader in surveys, but by nothing like the leads that Turnbull enjoyed over his predecessor. And, as luck would have it, the final week of parliament commences with an Ipsos poll in Fairfax papers showing a big majority in favour of the proposition that prime ministers “should be allowed to serve a full term.”

That Ipsos poll, like today’s Newspoll, has a Labor two-party-preferred lead of 53–47, off mid-thirties primary support for both sides. A week that should see same-sex marriage become law will still be a long one for the prime minister. He hasn’t quite made the year out yet — it’s just possible that something unfortunate will happen or someone will give the leadership can one last kick — but he’s almost there.

Who would the party room turn to? The foreign ministry always flatters its occupant — immersed in important international affairs, floating above grubby day-to-day politics — and colleagues would recall Bishop’s limitations from her unhappy time as shadow treasurer in 2008.

Scott Morrison, like Wayne Swan on the other side, has been trying for years to insert himself into the living-room psyche and push to double digits as preferred leader, but doesn’t quite get how those voters operate. (Actually, Swan these days, with his Corbynesque economic pronouncements, seems to mostly play to the Labor membership and, as they now get half a say in any leadership vote, he might be onto something.)

Immigration minister Peter Dutton is adored on Sky News after dark, largely because he betrays not a skerrick of sympathy for the plight of people we lock up in the South Pacific. But he remains on Morrisonesque numbers — around 5 per cent, even less than Abbott. (Sadly for Dutton, ordinary Liberal Party members don’t get a vote.)

Turnbull, meanwhile, remains ahead of Bill Shorten as preferred prime minister, which doesn’t amount to much in itself but is taken very seriously by MPs and party operatives.

So he has likely survived to 2018, when it will all start again. The bad polls will continue, and particularly that date with destiny, the thirtieth losing Newspoll in a row, which will probably arrive in March.

Figures from one online betting agency imply odds of 50 per cent that he’ll still be prime minister in 2019.

That seems highly, wildly optimistic for him. ●

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Well, duh. All nicely caveated, not exactly out on a limb, the embedded notion being that a second Trump term remains less than likely, but not impossible. It could happen.

But a naughty Post headline-writer jazzed it up with “Trump Is on Track to Win Re-election,” thus inverting the probabilities, and that person earned his or her wages that day, because the article did roaring trade and was syndicated around the planet, including by London’s Independent and, down under, our own Fairfax papers.

A meme was born. Googling “Trump is on track to win re-election” returns multiple references to Sosnik’s piece — such as “The Washington Post Admits: Trump Is on Track to Win Re-election” and “Trump Is on Track to Win 2020 Re-election Says Long Time Far Left Democratic Strategist” — showing that comment-section contributors aren’t the only ones who read the headline and skip the article.

This spawned, among others, a truly dreadful article in an online journal called Inquisitr that screamed, both at top and in the body, that Trump is “heavy favourite” to win in 2020. Noting (need we say) that “according to Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, Trump remains ‘on track to win re-election,’” the author examined online betting markets and concluded that “Trump’s chances of winning re-election, according to people willing to put their money where their mouth is, rank far higher than in the national polls.”

By “favourite,” the writer meant that more money has been bet on Trump than any other individual the betting markets can think of. Which is not surprising, because who else is there?

The article quoted odds at Ireland’s Paddy Power, whose site is blocked in Australia, where a Trump re-election was apparently paying US$2.75. An Australian site (no free advertising here) was paying $3.40 this morning (no conversion needed; the same odds apply regardless of currency) for a Trump win (second “favourite” is — you guessed it — vice-president Mike Pence, on $9.00) from a field of fifty-eight. These markets, containing celebrities and wild cards, are not meant to be taken too seriously, but if we do (and ignore the fact that without a “somebody else” option it’s not a complete field), then the implied probability of a Trump second term is just 15 per cent.

“Heavy favourite” indeed.

Will Trump be in the Oval Office in 2021? Who knows? We’re all equally qualified to try our hand. I put the chances of his still being president and being the Republican candidate at around 60 per cent (so a 40 per cent chance of an earlier change at the White House) and, assuming he is, his odds of re-election at, say, 40 per cent, which combine to a 24 per cent chance he’ll be victorious in three years’ time. About one in four; so I’m more optimistic for the Donald than the punters.

One element that is hard to dispute in the general commentary, and the articles referenced above, is that the economy will be crucial. An uptick will gazump most of the clownish and embarrassing behaviour and the damage to his country’s international standing. And after that result a little under a year ago (has it only been that long?), and after Jeremy Corbyn’s impressive performance in Britain in June, and even after our own close outcome in July last year (but not “Brexit” — I never did comprehend the wide assumption that Brits would vote No), we really must discard our well-learned assumptions about who’s electable and who’s not in this low partisanship, post-GFC world.

But first we have to get through these next three long years. ●

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If his support for the Rudd government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme hadn’t triggered a party revolt, something else would have. And had the Coalition appeared at least competitive in voting-intention surveys, the Liberal party room would have tolerated Turnbull’s enthusiasm for pricing carbon — as it had John Howard’s claimed intention throughout 2007 to introduce an emissions trading scheme.

This week, it’s same-sex marriage — on which the prime minister called an emergency meeting — that’s causing enormous grief and threatening to tip him over the edge. Except, again, it’s really about the polls, on top of the poor result at last year’s election.

Nothing generates authority for leaders like perceived electoral prowess. Howard’s longevity was grounded in the widespread (but erroneous, in my opinion) conviction that only he could have pulled off that series of victories between 1996 and 2004. Leaders who look like they’re taking their party to defeat, on the other hand, will find themselves friendless.

Today’s Newspoll, published in the Australian to greet the parliamentary session, gives yet another 53–47 in Labor’s favour. A six-point, two-party-preferred gap is hardly insurmountable for a government, but there have been too many results like this. It’s been so long since the Coalition was regularly ahead, and Turnbull can point to no glorious return-from-behind tales in his backstory.

Over at Fairfax, meanwhile, an Ipsos focus group reports deep disappointment with this do-nothing, timid prime minister.

Way back in March last year, with an election on the horizon, cabinet secretary Arthur Sinodinos let slip in an Insiders interview that “a returned government with Malcolm Turnbull at its head after the election I think will have the capacity to stamp its authority on all sorts of issues.” People in the party, he predicted, “will respect that.”

Party conservatives understandably viewed this statement as provocative. But their fears proved unfounded because the government was only just returned (although the closeness shouldn’t be overstated: with sixty-nine lower house seats to the Coalition’s seventy-six, and five others, Labor is quite a distance from government) and the Senate make-up proved not much better for the government than it was during the last term.

Turnbull’s authority remained unstamped. Instead, the knives came out on election night, 2 July.

What might those “all sorts of issues” have included? One naturally thinks of the two he had to give up to regain the leadership: opposition to a plebiscite on gay marriage and a resolve to act on climate change. The latter is, to the point of caricature, a matter of ideological purity for the conservative rump of the party.

A big-winning, reauthorised prime minister dragging his party into the twenty-first century on these two policies would’ve been worth the price of admission. Back in real time, though, a lethargic economy contributes to public grumpiness with those in power. The election result and continuing poor polling give succour to party conservatives, determined to see the government’s woes through the conservative-progressive prism. The Senate sure doesn’t make life easy.

And if same-sex marriage doesn’t break the back of Turnbull’s leadership, the stoush over a renewable energy target might do it.

In an Essential poll in the Guardian last week, Turnbull was the most popular of the preferred Liberal leaders, at 25 per cent, with Julie Bishop runner-up on 20. Tony Abbott is on 10 (as usual) and Peter Dutton and Christopher Pyne sit on 3 each. Scott Morrison attracted just 2 per cent.

Turnbull is doing quite well for a leader in deep trouble. Julia Gillard spent years behind Kevin Rudd on these measures, and as far as I know no opinion poll in history has ever found Tony Abbott preferred Liberal leader, in opposition or in government.

Yet the odds remain against Malcolm lasting out the year, and the likely successor is not Bishop, or even Abbott, but Mr 3 per cent, Peter Dutton. If not him, then Scott Morrison. It’s a right-winger’s turn, you see; they’ve tried the left-wing experiment.

A cynic might even anticipate that if Turnbull decides it’s all too much he will engineer another glorious defeat, all guns blazing, on one of those matters of principle.

Politicians do like to keep an eye on those history books. •

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Both men took their party to office at the ballot box, but under contrasting circumstances. Rudd’s feat was far less impressive: he simply slipped into the leadership when Labor was already generally ahead in the polls and headed for likely victory.

Abbott cut his own path to the Lodge. Like Rudd, he was elevated less than a year before an election, and hence enjoyed guaranteed tenure – though in Abbott’s case the Coalition was way behind in the polls and a win appeared unlikely. Abbott was also saddled with his own baggage: he was widely perceived in the community as an overly religious oddity, respected – perhaps – for sticking with his anti-abortion convictions but with little else going for him.

He had already published his book Battlelines, though, in an attempt to flesh out that public persona, and as leader he proved an adept opportunist. References to that which had been “this generation’s legacy of unutterable shame” (the rate of abortions) rarely passed his lips again, and by opposing the Rudd government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme he got into Labor’s head – which turned out to be a breathtakingly easy break-and-enter.

The following year’s drama flowed from that decision. Kevin’s backflip, Labor’s leadership change, the rush to the election, Julia Gillard’s mad incumbency-free re-election strategy – all generated the hitherto unthinkable, Tony Abbott as an acceptable candidate for prime minister. After taking the Coalition to the brink of victory in 2010, his second accomplishment was remaining opposition leader for three more years.

This he achieved by, yes, relentlessly attacking the Gillard government (he was desperate for an early election) but fundamentally by winning thumping voting-intention leads in the published polls. But he was never held in any kind of regard by most voters, and after Rudd’s return in June 2013 his position began to look shaky. Kevin obliged by calling the election quickly, motivated in part by fear of a return to the now-popular Malcolm Turnbull.

The two men’s personalities could hardly be more different. Abbott is, by all accounts, genial and considerate in person (like Julia Gillard). Rudd, on the other hand, is often cranky, sometimes bullying, with a curious need to put others in their place. He is highly intelligent, a policy wonk, and was across all portfolio areas. Abbott, not to put too fine a point on it, is none of these; philosophical musings are more his forte.

For a time, Rudd attracted the highest recorded approval ratings for an opposition leader, and then for a prime minister. The only records Abbott was in contention for were at the other end of the scale.

The dumping of Rudd in June 2010 is seen, close to unanimously, as an act of monumental political stupidity. The government had briefly dipped below 50 per cent two-party-preferred support in the polls, and at the time of the leadership change had been ahead in Newspoll for two fortnights in a row. If you accept (as I do) the counterfactual of a comfortable Labor victory under Rudd in 2010, the Abbott experiment could have been quickly terminated if Labor hadn’t panicked.

While Malcolm Turnbull might have disappointed as prime minister, the Liberals’ September 2015 leadership change will never be widely perceived as a blunder. It was more like Rudd’s 2013 comeback, which was greeted with an almost audible sigh of relief in voterland. Turnbull remains streets ahead of Abbott in head-to-head polling of preferred Liberal leader.

While Rudd enjoyed high esteem in the community during his exile, Abbott remains toxic. Yet he is adored by a highly ideological section of Liberal supporters, the self-appointed “base.” In Labor’s leadership wars, Labor’s own base remained firmly behind Gillard. Rudd was like Turnbull, seen by true believers as a carpetbagger; as Wayne Swan once put it, in characteristic prose, he “lacks Labor values.”

So Rudd’s campaign to retake the top job was directed not at caucus but at the general public, whose role it was to earbash their local Labor MPs. Abbott also bypasses the party room, but speaks to a small minority of Australians, the roughly 10 per cent of the voting population that tells pollsters he should lead the Liberal Party. At the elite level, the Abbott Show is strictly for the Hadley, Jones, Sky News (evening editions) crew and a handful of News Corp sentimentalists.

Any leadership aspirant must offer electoral salvation to his or her party. Rudd promised a popular and reauthorised leadership, generating a boost in the polls that would carry the party to victory (or at least “save the furniture”). Abbott pledges a major shift to the political right that he believes will remake the political landscape. Conceptually, such a strategy shouldn’t necessarily be dismissed, but the specifics here – the detested Abbott at the helm, voters reinvented as coal-adoring, renewables-hating, 18C-fixed IPA card-carriers – sit in the realm of science fiction.

After he lost the February 2012 leadership spill, Rudd warned (in not so many words) the party not to replace Gillard with anyone other than him. Abbott, by contrast, gives the impression that he would accept the consolation prize of another conservative (read “Peter Dutton”) as prime minister.

The Liberals will likely tear Turnbull down (or he will come up with a reason to bow out) by year’s end, but the choice before them of replacement is invidious. The candidate who is streets ahead as his most-wanted replacement, Julie Bishop, will be bypassed, not because she’s a woman but because she’s seen as “moderate,” and it’s a right-winger’s turn again, and because she’s too close to Turnbull and was insufficiently loyal to Abbott in September 2015.

The most likely candidates are Dutton – another Sky News hit for whom even fewer Australians clamour – or, perhaps, Scott Morrison (whom Tony has not yet forgiven for his 2016 desertion).

Bill Shorten, meanwhile, enjoys enhanced security thanks to rules put in place by none other than Rudd. The view must be wonderful from there. •

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