The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age – or the Herald/Age, to adopt what is evidently Nine Newspapers’ own preferred shorthand for its Sydney and Melbourne papers – have revealed their opinion polling will be put on ice for an indefinite period. They usually do that post-election at the best of times, but evidently things are more serious now, such that we shouldn’t anticipate a resumption of its Ipsos series (which the organisation was no doubt struggling to fund in any case).
This is a shame, because Ipsos pollster Jessica Elgood has been admirably forthright in addressing what went wrong – and, importantly, in identifying the need for pollsters to observe greater transparency, a quality that has been notably lacking from the polling scene in Australia. In particular, Elgood has called for the establishment of a national polling standards body along the lines of the British Polling Council, members of which are required to publish details of their survey and weighting methods. This was echoed in a column in the Financial Review by Labor pollster John Utting, who suggests such a body might be chaired by Professor Ian McAllister of the Australian National University, who oversees the in-depth post-election Australian Election Study survey.
On that point, I may note that I had the following to say in Crikey early last year:
The very reason the British polling industry has felt compelled to observe higher standards of transparency is that it would invite ridicule if it sought to claim, as Galaxy did yesterday, that its “track record speaks for itself”. If ever the sorts of failures seen in Britain at the 2015 general election and 2016 Brexit referendum are replicated here, a day of reckoning may arrive that will shine light on the dark corners of Australian opinion polling.
Strange as it may seem though, not everyone is convinced that Australian polling really put on all that bad a show last weekend. Indeed, no less an authority than Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has just weighed in with the following:
Polls showed the conservative-led coalition trailing the Australian Labor Party approximately 51-49 in the two-party preferred vote. Instead, the conservatives won 51-49. That’s a relatively small miss: The conservatives trailed by 2 points in the polls, and instead they won by 2, making for a 4-point error. The miss was right in line with the average error from past Australian elections, which has averaged about 5 points. Given that track record, the conservatives had somewhere around a 1 in 3 chance of winning.
So the Australian media took this in stride, right? Of course not. Instead, the election was characterized as a “massive polling failure” and a “shock result”.
When journalists say stuff like that in an election after polls were so close, they’re telling on themselves. They’re revealing, like their American counterparts after 2016, that they aren’t particularly numerate and didn’t really understand what the polls said in the first place.
I’m not quite sure whether to take greater umbrage at Silver’s implication that Antony Green and Kevin Bonham “aren’t particularly numerate”, or that the are – huck, spit – “journalists”. The always prescient Dr Bonham managed a pre-emptive response:
While overseas observers like Nate Silver pour scorn on our little polling failure as a modest example of the genre and blast our media for failing to anticipate it, they do so apparently unfamiliar with just how good our national polling has been compared to polling overseas.
And therein lies the rub – we in Australia have been rather spoiled by the consistently strong performance of Newspoll’s pre-election polls especially, which have encouraged unrealistic expectations. On Saturday though, we saw the polls behaving no better, yet also no worse, than polling does generally.
Indeed, this would appear to be true even in the specifically Australian context, so long as we take a long view. Another stateside observer, Harry Enten, has somehow managed to compare Saturday’s performance with Australian polling going all the way back to 1943 (“I don’t know much about Australian politics”, Enten notes, “but I do know something about downloading spreadsheets of past poll data and calculating error rates”). Enten’s conclusion is that “the average error in the final week of polling between the top two parties in the first round” – which I take to mean the primary vote, applying the terminology of run-off voting of the non-instant variety – “has been about five points”.
😀
Okay so we’ve established that it makes no sense, but it’s politically expedient to pretend that it does. We’ll say that we support this massive new coal project because “jobs” while out of the other side of our mouth we say that hopefully nobody will want to buy what we’re selling! That will go down really well I’m sure.
Full list of the ministry:
lizzie says:
Sunday, May 26, 2019 at 4:17 pm
Well “we” did vote for them! 🙁
Hunt keeps Health and gets Public Service. The Minister for Oxymorons.
Joyce left to fester.
I make that 6 women in the ministry. Wasn’t that the same as in Turnbull’s ministry?
#backtosquareone
ajm @ #1837 Sunday, May 26th, 2019 – 4:09 pm
I’ve also wondered this, so I’ve been doing some digging into booth results in my seat of Capricornia.
Essentially, what I found is that the booths that voted for Labor the most in 2016 swung the most towards the LNP in 2019, and the booths that voted for Liberals the most in 2016 swung the least towards the LNP.
I’ll have a graph soon to visualize this.
ItzaDream says:
Sunday, May 26, 2019 at 4:20 pm
You just made that up, no such Minister exists.
That Department is spread equally across all portfolios.
Just on the coal market thing.
It’s the fraud of the capital owners to assert that markets are driven by supply becasue that gives them the preeminent role in the economy.
The actual fact is that markets are driven by demand. Some capitalists have understood this. The most famous was Henry Ford who paid his workers well so they could afford to but his cars.
It was also the basis for the Keynesian revolution in macroeconomics which informed government policies that created the post WWII boom.
So yes, focusing on Adani to stop burning of fossil fuel is irrelevant. However, focusing on Adani to make sure it doesn’t become a fast track for funnelling taxpayers money to government mates IS HIGHLY RELEVANT. That is what informs the Qld government policy towards it. I hope that policy is backed up by insistence on a proper groundwater plan and making sure that any front loaded royalty holiday does not become a long term gift.
Well for all those low to middle income people worried about death taxes, Porters new gig will relieve their concerns because they won’t have anything to leave except debt.
My totally uneducated opinion is Morrison is going to go after the unions and the wages we have now will be seriously undermined. Gloomy prediction but that’s how I feel.
Of course industry Super will also fall into this field. Morrison can make lots of friends by allowing people to use their Super to buy houses and by the time they are losing them to the banks he will have been re-elected and another of Labor’s great policies will have been dismantled.
Huh?
“@Greg_MarineLab
15m15 minutes ago
OK. I give up. How is it possible for one government to manage to produce so many irredeemably stupid people, promote them to Ministerial level and expect us to show respect for them?”
I thought Labor lost?
Millennial says:
Sunday, May 26, 2019 at 4:23 pm
That plays to what SeeNoDonors was saying Election Night, where he talked about Morrison resonating in completely different areas to Turnbull.
Ajm
With regards to supply, all the trends show the market is trending towards renewable energy as it becomes cheaper and more reliable, added to that we know there are substantial amounts of capital going into battery and other technologies that in time will render Coal’s days as the best energy source over, if the truth be known owners of coal are hoping to get rid of it by digging it up as quickly as possible because many of them do see the rise of renewables and the replacement of coal as the dominate energy source.
As a Victorian i have no issue with Henderson in the senate She would do a better job for Victorians than that former banktupt Kitching. That reminds me, didnt Albo oppose her preselection/ captains pick.
AJM
I agree. Only I disagree. You make the assumption that the average Joe assess UAP as further right than the LNP. I am not sure they got that far into it. They know the ALP are bad…. just because. They are pretty sure the LNP are hopeless but the polls say the LNP will lose so its OK to give bargearse a vote and preference the rabble.
The QLD government thinks it can avoid blame for the mine not going ahead by saying that the only way it could go ahead would be if it were public ally subsidized.
Do they think the pro-coal-jobs voters will let them off the hook that easily? To them, a refusal to subsidize an otherwise non-economical project is no different from blocking the project on environmental grounds. Either way you’re anti-jobs.
To a far north queenslander, being anti-jobs because you’re pro-market is no better than being anti-jobs because you’re pro-environment
taylormade
Henderson won’t be any use in Estimates. She was the ultimate noddy-smiley and shout across the aisle for her leader.
taylormade @ #1865 Sunday, May 26th, 2019 – 4:36 pm
I would have thought you would have approved of Kimberley Kitching. She’s very popular with the Sky After Dark crowd. 🙂
And guess who is rumoured to be parachuted into Fifield’s Victorian Senate vacancy?
The former Ms Corangamite, Sarah Henderson.
_____
C@t
There’s always Princess Georgina!
Barney in Saigon @ #1859 Sunday, May 26th, 2019 – 4:25 pm
Does PM stand for Prime Moron then? 🙂
BK @ #1870 Sunday, May 26th, 2019 – 4:43 pm
Has she moved back to Melbourne again?
ItzaDream @ #1856 Sunday, May 26th, 2019 – 4:22 pm
Scott Morrison isn’t stupid.
Apparently Barnaby found out he’d been dumped as drought envoy watching Sky News. Not even a courtesy call from the PM.
Has she moved back to Melbourne again?
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I don’t know C@t
Apparently Barnaby found out he’d been dumped as drought envoy watching Sky News. Not even a courtesy call from the PM.
____
That could drive him back to the bottle. Oh wait!
BK:
Seriously? Aussie PM has combined his new minister for development and Pacific, Alex Hawke, with responsibilities as Assistant Defence Minister! Is this the only Govt in the world to tie defence and aid? #auspol
____
With this mob aid is slowly being eliminated.
Joyce doesnt know how to drink beer from a bottle. Not surprised.
I heard (as in, I am making it up) that the Downer family are moving to a country that does not have an extradition agreement with the US.
I don’t know if this is meant to be sympathetic or snarky.
Australia has been infected by a toxic bug: Stupidophilus votecoalitionis. Everything has been tried to eliminate it from the system, but nothing has worked so far. Given the toxicity of the bug, it is now recommended that, in order to save the uninfected population, those suffering from the symptoms should be allowed to suffer the full consequences of the toxin; until they are eliminated from the population or recover from the disease.
We haven’t heard from ACOSS. I’ll be interested in their reaction.
Aid is either a junket or gravy or marketing. It was fascinating to see every single large scale engineering consultancy create an International Development arm. They contract all the tendering and report writing etc out to specialists and then just coordinate the winnings by screwing everybody else.
Sarah doing her best to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
lizzie says:
Sunday, May 26, 2019 at 4:53 pm
S.A. is at risk of being completely ignored federally.
Labor need a 2ppl of more 55% to win a seat and 45% to lose one.
Not much to gain or lose if the Government ignores the State.
BK says:
Sunday, May 26, 2019 at 5:00 pm
Makes sense!
Isn’t all about tough love?
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-has-a-heritage-listed-sewer-it-has-set-off-a-storm-with-developers-20190515-p51nnd.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1558854635
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/stuart-roberts-litany-of-transgressions,12001#.XOo5ZEr0Cko.twitter
Alpo,
Unfortunately the effects of this bug are similar to toxoplasmosis.
Sufferers appear to behave normally until they are within the proximity of the ballot box….
So, nothing for Tony Abbott either yet? 🙂
Sinodonis can see it’s going to be a shit-show and doesn’t want to hang around and deal with the loonies in the Senate?
bakunin @ #1895 Sunday, May 26th, 2019 – 5:20 pm
I would have plumped for Rabies myself. 🙂
C@tmomma @ #1895 Sunday, May 26th, 2019 – 3:23 pm
Yet. I suspect something will be found to avoid having him give free-ranging assessments of Morrison’s performance to his favourite Liberal loving media, 2GB and Sky After Dark.