Author: William Bowe

Having done my bit to fan the flames of anti-Australian hysteria, props are due to the paper for this morning’s typically excellent piece by George Megalogenis on regional variations in housing price movements. Crucially, a “two-speed housing market” is identified in New South Wales, promising to hit the Coalition hard in marginal suburban and hinterland electorates (specifically Parramatta, Lindsay, Dobell, Robertson and all-important Bennelong), while delivering worthless dividends in the rich inner suburbs (where double-digit swings to the Coalition were recorded in the March state election). There’s a particularly handy cut-out-and-keep graphic listing the 20 electorates where prices have moved most heavily either way, the “price rises” list being monopolised by Western Australia. This ties in nicely with localised polling showing the Coalition collapsing in NSW, while holding ground or better in WA. Also instructive are Possum Comitatus‘s renowned observations on the ratio of interest payments to disposable income. Further analysis of Megalogenis’s data from Simon Jackman.

Comedy alert. What follows is a parody. It seems some readers actually thought it plausible that this was written by Chris Mitchell.

Guest post by Chris Mitchell, editor of The Australian.

Kevin Rudd’s prime ministerial ambitions lie in tatters today after yet another devastating opinion poll, this time from ACNielsen. For all the ignorant whingeing levelled at the government lately by out-of-touch ivory tower eggheads, loony left “web loggers”, civil libertarian do-gooders, bludgers and parasites from the Aboriginal industry and (SNIP – maybe I was a bit harsh on poor old Chris with this last one), the Coalition primary vote is still on 39 per cent. This is profoundly significant because, as those who really understand opinion polls can tell you, only four of the previous nine changes of government occurred after ruling party support remained steady in the last month before the election whose name began with a J.

Minor details of the poll include a Labor primary vote tapping on the door of 50 per cent, a further widening of the two-party gap from 57-43 to 58-42, growing opposition to Australian involvement in Iraq, little support for the notion that high house prices are caused by “inadequate land releases by governments”, and – this can’t be right – movements away from the Prime Minister on those all-important performance approval and preferred leader ratings.

In other news, it seems not even The Age can spell ACNielsen (I beg your pardon if this has been corrected by the time you read this).

Yesterday came Newspoll’s quarterly geographic and demographic analysis, featuring state-by-state breakdowns and such; today comes marginal seat figures from The Australian. Analysis galore at Possum’s Pollytics and Oz Politics.

Roy Morgan has released results from a “special” phone poll of 600 respondents conducted yesterday and on Wednesday, which has Labor leading 57.5-42.5 on two-party preferred and 47.5 per cent to 37.5 per cent on the primary vote. The former figure is 1.5 per cent better for the Coalition than last week’s face-to-face poll. Some cute observations from Gary Morgan in the accompanying release:

Australia is lucky that we publish ‘voting intention’ more frequently than all other public opinion polls and Australians must be relieved they have, in addition to the traditional Australian media, an Internet news media which keeps everyone quickly, accurately and independently informed. All pollsters know voting intention is the real guide to how electors will vote. They also know it is hard or nearly impossible to measure how ‘preferences’ will be allocated at the ballot. We (the Morgan Poll) only ask approval ratings occasionally because Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Ronald Reagan and Helen Clark were all behind as the ‘preferred’ leader with low approval ratings a few months before being elected! All poll watchers need to read or re-read what I wrote on Wednesday, namely: ‘Can the Coalition win the Federal Election? The answer is…’

A red-letter day for the psephological blogosphere, as The Australian responds with the full length of its editorial column to the barbs of the “online news commentariat”. At issue is the paper’s penchant for putting a rosy spin on the Coalition’s prospects each time Newspoll points to a big Labor win, which reached its apogee with Dennis Shanahan’s analysis on Tuesday. My eyes glazed over a number of times as I pored through the editorial’s dense thicket of self-serving assertions, but the pay-off came at the end:

A guide book recently published by one site demonstrates the extent of confused thinking on how the polls operate. A chapter by Mumble’s Peter Brent says two party preferred ratings are at the same time worthy but unreliable and that an Opposition Leader with a high satisfaction rating has no better chance of being elected than one with a low rating. He dismisses approval ratings and the preferred Prime Minister measure as “embroidery”. Yet the fact is when Mr Howard and Mr Rudd’s offices telephone The Australian to get advance warning on what the following day’s Newspoll will show they invariably want to know two things: The primary vote and preferred PM. Not properly understanding how polls work gives our critics licence to project their own bias onto analysis of our reporting. The Australian is not beholden to any one side of politics and recent election outcomes vindicate our treatment of our polls. So let’s not mince words. We just don’t think many of our critics have any real clue about polling and very little practical experience of politics.

The Australian – sober and experienced voice of reason, or craven mouthpiece of the crony capitalist military-industrial complex? I throw it in for debate.

UPDATE: Do jaws come any glassier? Yesterday, Dennis Shanahan’s blog post addressing his critics (“Cheers to all those who engage in the great, democratic and political exercise of freedom of speech – what do you think?”) was closed for discussion after 16 comments. Today, centre-left News Limited blogger Tim Dunlop’s post on the subject has mysteriously disappeared (please let there be an alternative explanation for this). Fortunately, Poll Bludger regular and occasional Greens candidate Darryl Rosin preserves it for posterity at Larvatus Prodeo:

Who says the mainstream media don’t pay attention to the blogosphere? This extraordinary story relates to this week’s Newspoll results and the way The Australian reported it. Peter Brent runs the excellent psephological blog called Mumble. It’s one of a number of blogs that run analysis and commentary of opinion polls, and others include OzPolitics, Possums Pollytics, and Poll Bludger. Yesterday, Peter Brent noted that he had fallen foul of some of those at The Australian …

The editorial is up this morning and yes, they do “go” Peter Brent. They defend themselves in the strongest possible terms and attack, specifically and generally, just about anyone who disagrees with them, particularly “Australia’s online news commentariat that has found passing endless comment on other people’s work preferable to breaking real stories and adding to society’s pool of knowledge.”

There are a number of things to say about all of this. The first is that the editorial is as much concerned about charges of bias against The Australian as anything else … If bias is in the eye of the beholder, then there are a lot of “beholders” out there who think The Australian is biased, particularly in its coverage of polling data. The evidence for this is not just to found in the blogosphere but on their own pages where their columns and articles often fill up with criticism from their own readers accusing them of spinning information in favour of the Howard Government. In attacking the “online commentariat” they are also attacking a sizeable sampling of their own readership.

The latest bout of charges of bias were prompted by this week’s Newspoll and many people, including me, were struck by the way The Australian chose to cover the story. For instance, Bryan Palmer at OzPolitics wrote:

“When I first glanced at today’s headlines — Howard checks Rudd’s march — Kevin’s sizzle not snag-free — Howard finds fertile ground for support — I was expecting to read about a polling improvement for the Howard Government. What I found was a flat line.”

What’s interesting is that The Australian seems to believe that only they are capable of objectivity and they reject entirely any charge of bias. This is odd given that Chris Mitchell himself has said:

“Can I say something about The Australian’s contribution to the national political debate. It has made, as a newspaper, a remarkable contribution, I think back over the last 10 years that this government has been in office and I think of the positions taken by The Australian newspaper. It has been broadly supportive, generously so, of the government’s economic reform agenda. And it has been a strong supporter, consistently … of industrial relations reform. Its only criticism of the government is that it might not have gone far enough … I think editorially and on the Op Ed page, we are right-of-centre. I don’t think it’s particularly far right, I think some people say that, but I think on a world kind of view you’d say we’re probably pretty much where The Wall Street Journal, or The Telegraph in London are. So, you know, centre-right.”

It is precisely that “generous” “broadly supportive” “right-of-centre” tilt that people are responding to when they see Newspoll reported the way it was this week. For the editorial to deny that any such tilt exist seems disingenuous.

So I think the editorial is ill-conceived and way off the mark in singling out Peter Brent in the way that it does. His site largely confines itself to interpretation and in doing so, provides a great service. The idea that he can’t comment without the editor of The Australian ringing him up to say they are going to “go” him is disturbing.

Still, I think it is fair to say that News Ltd, including The Australian, has opened itself to comment and criticism from its readership more so than Fairfax, the other major news organisation. They have embraced readers comments and “blogs” more fully, and this site alone is evidence of that. So while most News news stories and columns allow reader comment, the same is not true of Fairfax. You can, for instance, comment on Dennis Shanahan’s and Paul Kelly’s columns, but not Michelle Grattan’s or Gerard Henderson’s.

But having embraced such an approach, they have to accept that not everyone is going to agree with them or buy into their particular take on a given issue or, indeed, their own self-image. The Australian is, of course, completely free to defend themselves, but it might also pay them to reflect on why so many people see them as the “government gazette” rather than just dismiss nearly all such criticism as “a waste of time”.

UPDATE 2 (13/7/07): A column on the saga from Alan Ramsey in the Sydney Morning Herald.

We’re apparently back to the routine of fortnightly Tuesday Newspoll surveys. Tomorrow’s effort shows Labor’s two-party lead steady on 56-44 and their primary vote up from 46 per cent to 48 per cent. The increase comes at the expense of minor parties and the Greens, with the Coalition vote unchanged at 39 per cent. Also featured are questions on the government’s intervention into Aboriginal communities (strong thumbs up) and whether troops should be returned from Iraq (two bob each way). The Prime Minister has at least narrowed the preferred leader deficit to 42-43, his best result since February.

Roy Morgan’s first poll in two weeks is from a face-to-face survey of 1690 voters conducted over the past two weekends. It shows a slight widening of Labor’s two-party lead to 59-41, with the Coalition primary vote down from 37 per cent to 36 per cent and Labor’s up from 48 per cent to 50.5 per cent.

UPDATE: The outstanding Possum’s Pollytics, whose absence from this site’s blogroll is keenly felt (to be corrected when I overhaul the site in about a month or so), produces some interesting data on variations between Newspoll and Morgan results.

UPDATE 2: And Andrew Leigh has an easy-to-follow run-through of the Portlandbet electorate odds that have everybody talking.