Category: Tasmanian Politics

The Mercury today brings us a second Tasmanian state poll in a week (compare this with Western Australia’s election last year, for which only three polls were published from the start of the year to polling day on March 9), this one a ReachTEL automated phone poll conducted on Thursday night from 2912 respondents. The poll has the Liberals on 47.2%, Labor on 24.6% and the Greens on 17.2%, and while this amounts to a six-point drop for the Liberals since the last such poll in November, the slack is taken up by the Palmer United Party on 7.5%, with Labor steady and the Greens only up one point. The results are similar to a Liberal internal poll ReachTEL conducted last month, which was reported as having the Liberals on 48.8%, Labor on 25.8% and the Greens on 15.3%. The latest poll was conducted on Thursday from a sample of 2912.

Electorate breakdowns suggest the Liberals are on track to win three seats in Braddon (56.7%), Bass (49.6%) and Lyons (47.3%), which would secure them a parliamentary majority, as well as being in the hunt in Franklin (44.8%). The Palmer United Party, whose highest hopes are for Braddon, finds its support spread too thin to be in contention in any given electorate, although it will be hoping a well-oiled advertising blitz might change that. The Greens look a shot on these numbers to win seats in all five electorates, although they have a history of falling short of opinion poll projections at Tasmanian state elections. Kevin Bonham goes so far as to say the numbers suggest the Greens could possibly emerging with more seats than Labor, and while that hardly seems in serious prospect, they do look to have pulled out of their slump:

The poll also has Will Hodgman with a commanding 54.1-26.3 lead over Lara Giddings as preferred premier, with 37.3% rating his performance very good or good compared with 33.5% for very poor or poor. Giddings’ ratings are 23.2% for very good or good against 48.7% for very poor or poor.

The latest EMRS poll of state voting intention in Tasmania finds Labor’s “divorce” from the Greens has done nothing to alter its dismal electoral standing, with the Liberals up a point on the November survey to 50%, Labor up one to 23%, the Greens down two to 17%, and the Palmer United Party steady on 5%. Liberal leader Will Hodgman’s lead over Lara Giddings as preferred premier is likewise essentially unchanged, out from 47-22 to 48-21. This is well in line with results of a Liberal internal poll published in The Mercury recently, conducted on January 20 by ReachTEL from 1984 respondents. The Liberals were on 48.8%, Labor on 25.8% and the Greens on 15.3%.

UPDATE: Here’s how the term’s ERMS and ReachTEL polling looks when run through the Bludgerometer, which applies to both pollsters downward bias adjustments for the Liberals and the Greens:

The latest quarterly EMRS poll of state voting intention in Tasmania, conducted last week from a sample of 854 respondents, records Labor at just 22%, down six points from an already disastrous showing last time, although the pollsters’ charts suggest this to be part of a two-year pattern in which the Labor vote bounces up and down within the twenties. The Liberal vote is also down three points to a still commanding 49%, the drop making room for the rise of the Palmer United Party from 1% to 5%. The Greens are also up four points to 19%, their strongest showing since August last year. Kevin Bonham calculates this as an absolute majority for the Liberals with 13 or 14 seats out of 25, up from their present 10.

Below is a poll tracking chart derived from the full gamut of published polling from the current term, encompassing 14 EMRS and four ReachTEL polls. I’ve recalibrated the bias adjustments that probably marked the Greens down too hard last time (a tendency to inflate the Greens vote being a clear feature of EMRS polling in particular), which was based on federal election results that were complicated by the Andrew Wilkie factor in Denison. On top of the bias adjustment, the polling suggests that the Greens are pulling out of a lull that kicked in at the start of the year, with little change to major party support since the start of 2012.

The Burnie Advocate also reports that a ReachTEL poll of 657 respondents commissioned, for some reason, by the Nationals puts support for the Liberals across the northern and central Tasmanian electorates of Lyons, Bass and Braddon at 52% compared with 26% for Labor and 13% for the Greens, adding to the impression that the Liberals are very well placed to win third seats in each electorate, which would very likely secure them a parliamentary majority.

Today’s Mercury brings us what looks like the third in a series of bi-monthly ReachTEL automated phone polls of state voting intention for the Tasmanian election to be held in March, from big samples of roughly 550 for each of the state’s five electorates. Excluding the 6.6% undecided from an overall sample of 2723, the results pan out at 25% for Labor, 53% for the Liberals and 16% for the Greens. The poll finds Liberal leader Will Hodgman with a similarly enormous lead over Lara Giddings as preferred premier of 59.2% to 25.5%, with 15.3% favouring Greens leader Nick McKim.

The new results have inspired me to make my second attempt at a bias-adjusted poll trend for the current term using the 13 available results from ERMS and the four from ReachTEL. The bias calculations are based on comparison of ReachTEL’s federal polling for Tasmania in the months prior to the state election with the BludgerTrack poll aggregates adjusted to account for the discrepancy for the final BludgerTrack reading and the actual election result. Measures for EMRS are in turn derived by comparing their poll results with proximate bias-adjusted results for ReachTEL. This procedure suggests that the Liberals and the Greens are heavily inflated by both pollsters, mostly at the expense of “others”. However, I can’t state with too much confidence that this isn’t down to the one-off circumstance of the polls underestimating the others vote at the federal election, to which a late surge to the Palmer United Palmer may have contributed. So with due caution advised, the trend looks as follows, with the “current” result being 48.0% Liberal, 28.3% Labor and 9.6% Greens.

The latest EMRS poll of Tasmanian state voting intention, which emerges roughly quarterly, shows little change on a dismal result for the Labor-Greens government in the previous poll in May. The Liberals hold a primary vote lead of 52% (down two points) to 28% (steady), with the Greens up a point to 15%. The poll was conducted Saturday to Wednesday by phone from 1000 respondents. Since the May EMRS poll there have been two ReachTEL surveys which I neglected to publicise, owing to my preoccupation with the federal election. The results after removal of the undecided are as follows:

August 22
		Sample	ALP	LIB	GRN
Bass		514	23	62	10
Braddon		570	29	60	8
Denison		510	29	41	26
Franklin	515	25	49	21
Lyons		520	23	59	14
TOTAL		2630	26	54	16

June 14
		Sample	ALP	LIB	GRN
Bass		500	15	63	17
Braddon		483	19	62	10
Denison		468	25	42	26
Franklin	493	24	56	16
Lyons		511	22	57	15
TOTAL		2455	21	56	17

To make good my recent neglect of matters Tasmanian, I’ve put together a poll aggregate for the current term using the 13 EMRS and three ReachTEL results which have emerged over the current term. I’ve made an effort to adjust the results for bias, and in this I’ve been assisted by a significant amount of federal data from Tasmania available for ReachTEL and the opportunity to test that polling against the federal election result. That in turn has enabled me to evaluate EMRS by measuring its results against ReachTEL’s. As those who have carefully observed the numbers above may have surmised, it is calculated that both series appear quite strongly skewed to the Liberals.

If the Liberal bias of the polls is as heavy as the model is making it out to be, their path to majority government is not as clear as the published figures suggests, great as their lead on the primary vote may be. However, there are two strong reasons for caution. First, the bias calculations are off a very shallow base of data, and it might be that the adjustment being made for the dominant EMRS data is excessive. Secondly, measures based on ReachTEL’s federal polling are possibly compromised by the high “others” result, which ReachTEL had failed to pick, and which may not be such a factor at the state election. At the very least though, the chart is instructive with respect of the shape of the various parties’ trendlines, if not their actual positions.

Much more on this and the general state of play in Tasmania six months out from the state election from Kevin Bonham.

The quarterly EMRS poll of Tasmanian state voting intention has Labor on 28%, up five on a disastrous result from February, with the Liberals down a point to 54%. The poll also shows the Greens down four to 14%, which is well below anything I recall seeing for the Greens from this series in the past. Liberal leader Will Hodgman’s lead over Premier Lara Giddings is little changed, at 46-25 compared with 46-24 in February.