The Poll Bludger

Courtesy of The Australian, the first Newspoll in four weeks has Labor leading 51-49, down from 52-48 last time, with similarly slight movement on the primary vote, with the Coalition up a point to 41%, Labor steady on 38%, the Greens down one to 10% and One Nation up one to 3%. Scott Morrison recovers much of the ground he lost on personal ratings in the last poll, being up four on approval to 59% and down three on disapproval to 37%, while Anthony Albanese is down three to 40% and up two to 43%, though these changes do not alter the general stability of his position over the longer term. Morrison now leads 56-30 on preferred prime minister, out from 52-32 in the last poll and identical to the result in the previous poll six weeks ago. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Saturday from a sample of 1514.

The Age/Herald have published their first poll of federal voting intention since the 2019 election, dispensing with the services of Ipsos (who happened to be the least wrong pollster at the election) and enlisting Resolve Strategic, which is run by Jim Reed, who once worked for Coalition pollsters Crosby Textor. As national political editor Tory Maguire explains, the polling failure of the last election has inspired the pollster and its publisher to cast around for a fresh approach, the salient feature of which is not telling us straight what the two-party preferred is.

We do get primary votes though, and they are quite a bit different from Newspoll’s, with the Coalition on 38% rather than 40% and Labor on 33% rather than 38%. This means higher scores for minor parties, which happens to replicate a peculiarity of Ipsos. The Greens are on 12% compared with Newspoll’s 11%, but most striking is a 6% reading for One Nation compared with 2% from Newspoll. The latter result is, hopefully, a teething problem: it approximates the party’s 5.4% Senate vote in 2019, but most assuredly would not be matched in the House of Representatives since the party contests few seats there. It also seems highly unlikely that One Nation would be bearing up so well given its recent performance at state elections, with its share of the upper house vote in Western Australia having crashed from 8.2% to 1.5%.

Applying preference flows from 2019, this lands pretty much bang on 50-50 nationally, with the Coalition leading 53.4-46.6 in New South Wales (a 1.6% swing to the Coalition) and 54.3-45.7 in Queensland (a 4.1% swing to Labor), but trailing 53.8-46.2 in Victoria (a 0.7% swing to Labor) and 52.4-47.6 in Western Australia (an 8.0% swing to Labor). The New South Wales result is more favourable for the Coalition than the recent quarterly breakdown in Newspoll, which had it at 50-50, but the results for the other three states are about the same. Distinctions by gender are slight in the case of voting intention, except that the Greens are three points higher among women and One Nation are two points lower, and confounding in the case of personal ratings: Scott Morrison’s net approval is four points stronger among women than men, while Anthony Albanese’s is five points weaker.

Personal ratings are measured on a four-point scale of very good, good, poor and very poor, which is similar to Essential Research but different from Newspoll’s straightforward satisfied and unsatisfied responses. Morrison registers a combined good rating of 50% and a poor rating of 38%, a net rating of plus 12% that compares with plus 17% from a recent Essential poll and plus 15% from a not-so-recent Newspoll. Anthony Albanese scores 35% good and 41% poor, for a minus 6% rating that compares with plus 5% from Essential and plus 2% from Newspoll. Morrison is credited with a 47-25 lead as preferred prime minister, compared with 47-28 in Essential and 52-32 in Newspoll.

The poll wins points for transparency, at least by Australian standards, in providing breakdowns by state (or at least, the four biggest states), gender and age cohort. If I’m reading the small print correctly, the New South Wales and Victoria breakdowns will be published as a two-month rolling average, combining the current and previous poll. The idea seems to be that these states will have results with sample sizes robust enough to allow the Age/Herald to analyse them with a straight face: readers who choose to probe deeper into the breakdowns will be advised to exercise their own caution. (UPDATE: It seems I’ve read this wrong, and that there will actually be state voting intention results published every two months, based on the combination of two monthly polling samples). However, the results as published still leave a fair bit missing, as the poll is also weighted for education and income (and the survey includes a question on religion), for which breakdowns are not provided. There is also the rather glaring absence of any detail on field work dates: we are told only that the survey was conducted “in April”.

One of two accompanying reports by David Crowe relates the following detail absent from the published numbers:

Support for the Coalition in primary vote terms has fallen since the last election among voters who described themselves as Christian, dropping from 56 to 49 per cent. While support for Labor among this group rose from 28 to 29 per cent, the change was within the margin of error. In a more significant shift, the same cohort increased its support for independents and minor parties from 15 to 22 per cent. The Coalition has lost ground among voters across the board since the last election, with its primary vote slipping from 41 to 38 per cent, but the shift was strongest among immigrants and people from “non-Anglo-Saxon” backgrounds. Immigrants have reduced their support for the Coalition from 48 to 40 per cent since the election, while increasing their primary vote for Labor from 30 to 35 per cent. Those from “non-Anglo” backgrounds reduced their support for the Coalition from 44 to 35 per cent, while increasing their support for Labor from 31 to 36 per cent.

The other tells us the following:

The swing against the Coalition was spread evenly across most demographic groups but was more pronounced among those on higher incomes, with support falling from 49 to 43 per cent among those earning more than $100,000 a year. Labor gained support from the same workers, with its primary vote rising from 29 to 33 per cent.

There are further attitudinal results available in a nicely laid out results display page, including the finding that 44% expect the Coalition to win the next election compared with 28% for Labor. The display includes, under “comments”, sampling of qualitative responses that aim for an impressionistic view of why the ratings for each question are what they are. The poll was conducted by phone and online from a sample of 2000, compared with the Newspoll norm of around 1500. However, the phone sample of 400 appears to be a one-off of this “baseline survey”: it seems that in future the series will be a monthly online poll from a sample of 1600.

The latest fortnightly Essential Research poll includes the regular monthly leadership ratings, their principal item of interest in between their quarterly dumps of voting intention numbers. The pollster included a bonus result for Scott Morrison’s leadership ratings in the last fortnightly poll by way of discerning any emergent gender gap in light of recent events. The results chart a steady decline for Scott Morrison, from 62% a month ago to 57% a fortnight ago to 54% now, and a corresponding rise in disapproval from 29% to 35% to 37%. While he remains well in positive territory, a distinct downturn can be observed in the BludgerTrack polling trend. The gender gap that opened a fortnight ago, which you can read about here, has neither narrowed nor widened.

Anthony Albanese records his weakest personal ratings in a while, with approval down two to 39% and disapproval up two to 34%. GhostWhoVotes, who monitors these things, points out that breakdowns by voting intention have him down five on approval among Labor voters to 55% and up six on disapproval to 22% – this is from a sub-sample of 483 and a margin of error of about 4.5%, so make of it what you will. In any case, he has taken a reasonable bite out of Morrison’s lead as preferred prime minister, which narrows from 52-26 to 47-28.

The remainder of the survey is mostly about COVID-19 and the vaccine rollout, including the regular question on the quality of the federal and state governments’ responses. The federal government’s good rating is down eight points to 62% and its poor rating is up five to 17%, though this isn’t a whole lot different to the situation before the government’s numbers surged in mid-November for whatever reason. The ratings for the five mainland state governments are down as well, by two in the case of New South Wales to 73%, four for Victoria to 58%, three for Queensland to 72%, seven for Western Australia to 84% and ten for South Australia to 75% (with progressively increasing caution required for small sub-sample sizes). As with the federal results though, these numbers don’t look that remarkable when compared with their form over the longer term.

Respondents were also asked how confident they would have been about COVID-19 management “if a Labor government under Anthony Albanese had been in power”, with an uninspiring 44% rating themselves confident and 37% not so. Fifty-two per cent felt the vaccine rollout was proceeding too slowly, with 19% happy with the situation and 20% signing on to the seemingly odd proposition that it was happening too fast. For those in the former category, 42% held the federal government mostly responsible, 7% state governments, 24% international supply chains and 18% “unavoidable delays in the production of vaccines”.

There are a whole bunch of further questions on the vaccine rollout, interstate travel and the end of the JobKeeper and JobSeeker supplements, plus one on paid parental leave, which you can read about in the full release.

I had a vague hope that last fortnight’s sooner-than-expected Newspoll portended a return to a (usually) fortnightly rather than three-weekly schedule, but apparently not. Essential Research should be along this evening though, hopefully including its monthly leadership ratings. Then there’s this:

• Roy Morgan has published results of an SMS poll conducted on Friday and Saturday from a sample of 1423, which asked if respondents were still up for the COVID-19 vaccine in light of recent developments (only 17% were not, increasing to 24% when those who would only settle for Pfizer were included) and, most interestingly, if they approved of Scott Morrison’s handling of “all COVID-19 related issues”. In the absence of a non-response option, the latter question recorded 49% approval and 51% disapproval. I’m aware of two past polls that specifically asked about leaders’ rather than governments’ handling of COVID-19, both from Newspoll – one in April and one in July – from which the weakest result was 61% approval and 36% disapproval for Daniel Andrews in the July poll.

• Sarah Elks of The Australian reports that Andrew Laming has declined Scott Morrison’s invitation to sit out the preselection for his Brisbane seat of Bowman, and is “collecting evidence in an effort to disprove a series of allegations against him”. The report notes he has an incentive in a $105,600 reward available to to MPs who “retire involuntarily”, which would not be granted if he went gracefully. Laming will also need to pass muster with the Liberal National Party’s “candidate suitability panel” if his nomination is to proceed to the stage where local party members have a say.

• In a piece for The Conversation, Benjamin Reilly of the University of Western Australia evaluates the likely impact of optional preferential voting, as mooted by the Coalition members of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. The conclusion is that Labor would only have won about half of the 36 seats it won on preferences at the 2013, 2016 and 2019 elections after trailing on the primary vote, and that few if any members of the House of Representatives front bench would have got their foot in the door.

• I have a guide up for the Upper Hunter state by-election in New South Wales on May 22, though it’s still at a preliminary stage since most of the candidates haven’t been announced, together with a Tasmanian state election guide that has lately been supplemented with a page for the Legislative Council contests.