Category: Federal Politics 2019-2022

Both major parties published reviews of their federal election campaigns last month, the Liberal Party’s being conducted by former federal director Brian Loughnane and current Victorian Senator Jane Hume, and Labor’s being the work of Greg Combet, Lenda Oshalem, Linda White and Craig Emerson, the first two being listed as chairs and the latter two as panel members. To the best of my recollection, the publication of such reviews started to become standard some time in the noughties, although it was then generally made explicit that parts of the reports – presumably the most interesting bits – were redacted for internal viewing only. This post offers a summary of what the Liberal Party’s report had to say, and will be followed by a similar effort on the Labor report when I can find an idle moment for it.

In contrast to suggestions that Liberal internal polling had performed poorly during the Victorian state campaign, the report states that the party got its money’s worth out of its “benchmark” polling during the campaign, which it notes did not employ robo-polling. This polling showed the Coalition two-party preferred “improved at least 3-4% over the campaign period in the key seats polled”, although there wasn’t much evidence of this in published polling. Further detail that is provided tells a familiar story of weak support for the Liberals among young women, compounded at this election by a heavy swing among middle-aged women.

On this basis, the review reaches the uncontroversial conclusion that a perceived unresponsiveness to issues important to women was “not sufficiently and effectively addressed”. As is often the case with these reviews though, it does a more convincing job of identifying problems than solutions. The report rejects following Labor’s example by introducing quotas, calling only for “targets” for parliamentary representation and party membership with no mechanism for meeting them. It notes the difficulty of a membership becoming ever less representative of the electorate as it declines in numbers, a problem with deep causes that the listed recommendations are unlikely to overcome.

What remained of the party membership was said to have been further demoralised by widespread denial of rank-and-file preselection ballots. Delays to the process arising from factional disputes discouraged strong potential candidates from nominating and in some cases caused the wrong ones to be chosen, which was “a particularly problem in New South Wales”. State party administrations in general are said to have become dominated by factional warlords who had failed to build networks in the community. Once again though, the scope of the recommendations offered is limited: the federal executive is advised to set preselection timelines to be followed by the state divisions, and to implement a code of conduct for those involved in party affairs, “collegial and professional standards” having been found wanting in some quarters. The report rejects the notion of a US-style primary system, as advocated recently by Dominic Perrottet.

While Scott Morrison’s unpopularity is noted, the report to some extent paints the government as a victim of the pandemic, which allowed it little leeway to pay due regard to “political management” and elevated the profile of Labor Premiers to the Coalition’s disadvantage. This was accompanied by a failure to “define Labor and its leader before the campaign”, causing Anthony Albanese to appear as a “low-risk alternate Prime Minister”.

Perhaps constrained by a lack of authority to address policy issues, the report has little more to offer on the teal independent challenge than suggesting a well-resourced campaign of personal attacks might make the problem go away, notwithstanding the abject failure of such efforts during the campaign and the enthusiastic co-operation they received from News Corp (here some credit is due to The Australian columnist Katrina Grace Kelly, who in the wake of the Victorian result wondered if “sections of the electorate now conflate the party with sections of the media, which they regard as toxic, and perhaps they are voting to reject both this type of media as well as the party they think it represents”).

Other points of note: waiting until late in the campaign to announce major policies encouraged a perception that the government lacked a fourth-term agenda; the government’s initial support of Clive Palmer’s High Court action on border closures was an unforced error contributing to the party’s Western Australian debacle; and the party needs to pay closer attention to emerging social media platforms.

Without bursting out of the confines of the error margins, the monthly prime ministerial ratings featured in the fortnightly Essential Research poll give Anthony Albanese his highest approval rating to date, up two points to 60%. His disapproval is up one to 27%, which leaves him one point shy of his previous best net approval rating. However, an occasion question on the national direction finds a five-point increase since September for “wrong” to 34% and a two-point drop for “right” to 46%.

Once a lengthy explanatory spiel was out of the way, 50% expressed support and 27% opposition to the government’s multi-employer bargaining laws, and has further results supporting industrial relations policies that strengthen the hand of low-paid workers. The poll also finds 43% of the view that it is inappropriate for politicians to use Twitter, compared with 16% favouring the option that it is a “vital channel” for politicians and 41% for a middle course. The full report is here – the poll was conducted last Wednesday to Monday from a sample of 1035.

JWS Research has also released its occasional True Issues survey on issue salience, distinct from the one a fortnight ago that focused specifically on the budget. Asked unprompted to name the three most important issues, 44% came up with a response the pollster categorised as “cost of living”, up from 38% in August and all the way from 11% a year ago. Housing and interest rates increased over the year from 10% to 19%, which environment and climate change was steady at 26% and hospitals, health and ageing fell eight points to 29%. The poll was conducted October 28 to 31 from a sample of 1000, and also features results on national direction and government performance in various policy fields.

Note that a dedicated thread for discussion of the Victorian election continues in the post below.

The 2022 federal election was a much happier experience for the polling industry than 2019, with each of five pollster producing election eve primary vote numbers broadly suggestive of the actual result. However, there was a collective error in favour of Labor, whose actual primary vote came in 2.3% below the pollster consensus while the Coalition landed 0.4% higher. While not at the standard Australian consumers had come to expect before 2019, such errors were fairly moderate by historic standards, particularly in the international context.

The pollsters in the national voting intention game before the election: Newspoll, conducted by YouGov for The Australian; Ipsos, for the Financial Review; Resolve Strategic, for the Nine Newspapers; Essential Research, for The Guardian; and Roy Morgan, which tacks voting intention on to its market research survey for its own amusement and, in the pre-election period at least, regularly published its results. The charts below show their final pre-election poll results for the Coalition, Labor and the Greens as black dots that lie at the centre of the span of their margins of error, with the relevant party’s actual result shown as a thick vertical line.

In the case of the three who are members of the Australian Polling Council (Newspoll, Ipsos and Essential Research), what is shown are the pollsters’ effective margins of error, which account for the fact that their results are weighted to emphasise or de-emphasise demographic cohorts who are over-represented or under-represented in their samples. Since Resolve Strategic and Roy Morgan don’t provide this detail, the margins of error have been calculated from their raw sample sizes, making them somewhat smaller than they would be otherwise.

Some caveats must be applied here: the final survey periods ranged from over a week before the election in the case of Roy Morgan (from May 9 to 15) to the course of the final week (Saturday to Wednesday from Ipsos, Thursday to Thursday from Newspoll), and pollsters may always plead they were caught out by late shifts in voting intention that it was beyond their power to foresee. There’s also a certain injustice in evaluating a pollster’s performance entirely by its pre-election poll, as the unavoidable randomness of the exercise means an element of luck is involved in who gets the honours. The best we can do is keep that in mind in the analysis that follows.

Essential Research did not have a great result, having systematically understated the non-major party vote (results here exclude a 7% undecided component). Other than that, three results are clearly outside the margins of error: Newspoll’s 36% and Ipsos’s 35.8% (after exclusion of 5% uncommitted) for Labor, whose actual result was 32.6%, and Resolve Strategic’s 14% for the Greens, whose result was 12.3%. None of these final poll results look like outliers for the pollster concerned. Newspoll’s four previous polls, which were published weekly during the campaign period, had Labor one to three points higher than the final result; Ipsos’s polling consistently had Labor clear of their actual result even without excluding their uncommitted component; and Essential Research’s numbers bounced a few points at a time within a consistent range throughout 2022.

Resolve Strategic’s evident inflation of Greens support was peculiar to its last two polls, which had it at 15% and 14% compared with 10% to 12% in its earlier polling. It should be noted here that margins of error are tighter for parties with lower vote shares, and that it’s conceivable that bad luck with rounding put the final poll outside the error margin at 14% rather than within it at 13%. State breakdowns show the inflation of the Greens vote arose from New South Wales and Queensland, which was respectively balanced by unduly low results for Labor and the Coalition. The latter was a peculiarity of the final poll, which had the Coalition at 31%, down from 41% at the previous poll a fortnight earlier and comparing with an actual result of 39.6%.

Essential Research’s issues were consistent across the board, landing too high for the Coalition and Labor and too low for the Greens in each state. The Victorian numbers were particularly far off the mark, perhaps reflecting their unusually high reading of 11% undecided in this state. It should be noted that the results for Western Australia and South Australia are three-week rolling averages, which means they ought not be regarded as strictly election eve results.

By process of elimination, it might be thought that the honours belong to Roy Morgan, whose reputation never really recovered from a series of poor federal election performances two decades ago. However, state breakdowns suggest a certain amount of luck was involved here, in that every one of its results during 2022 put Labor much higher in Victoria than they managed at the election. The element of luck was that the least askew of these results came in the pre-election poll, which had Labor’s lead in Victoria at a relatively narrow 57-43 compared with an actual result of 54.6-45.4. UPDATE: Adrian Beaumont also points out that they always had the United Australia Party implausibly low, the final result coming in at 1% compared with an election result of 4.1%, and this was matched by an excessive reading for independents/others.

Unfortunately there are state breakdowns available for Newspoll, for which we disappointingly did not see any of the usual aggregated breakdowns during the campaign period, and Ipsos, which did not maintain the finely detailed breakdowns it offered for its first few polls a the business end of the election. I’ll have more to say though about pollster performance at the election during quiet moments over the weeks or months to come, so stay tuned.