The Poll Bludger

The first heartening opinion poll to emerge for the Coalition during the Queensland election campaign turns out to be not worth the paper it’s printed on. The Herald Sun reports the Roy Morgan findings under the heading "Beattie approval rating plummets", and asserts that the figure in question has "slumped by 13 percentage points". It then transpires that this is based on a feeble sample of 268. No detailed breakdown of voting intention figures is provided, but the Roy Morgan site gives a two-party preferred result from the sample of 52.5-47.5 in Labor’s favour.

The Poll Bludger sends his condolences to the family of Steve Irwin, dead at 44.

Would it be insensitive of me to note that the death of possibly the world’s most famous Queenslander is another setback for a Coalition that needs every bit of news space it can get in the final week of the campaign? Perhaps. But don’t imagine that such thoughts aren’t going through the minds of Queensland political operators right now.

After two weeks of carelessness, the Coalition campaign was struck in its third week by misfortune. The death of his father-in-law on Wednesday took Lawrence Springborg away from the hustings for three crucial days and probably saw off any hope of momentum building in the final part of the campaign. Even on Wednesday, Tony Koch of The Australian was reporting that the Nationals had been concentrating on rural areas where the election could not possibly be decided, as they had "made a decision to protect themselves" after Bruce Flegg’s troubles early in the campaign. With only one campaign week left to salvage the situation, it can be presumed that much of Springborg’s efforts will be spent holding the line for the Nationals in Charters Towers, Burdekin and Hinchinbrook.

The parties initially responded to Springborg’s family tragedy by agreeing to suspend negative advertising, but this ended with a vengeance on Friday when the Coalition fielded an ad aggressive enough to have brought joy to Andrew Landeryou’s heart. I suppose the proper thing would be to link to it on the Coalition website, but I have been itching for an excuse to join the YouTube generation for a while now.

The impact of attack ads in the American context is well understood: they lead to significantly lower turnout. A UCLA experiment during the 1990 Californian gubernatorial campaign exposed some voters to positively worded ads and other voters to negative ones, and found that even one attack ad reduced turnout by 1 per cent. In Australia of course, such an impact would be negated (or at least mitigated) by compulsory voting, and would presumably find expression through some sort of protest vote. But minor parties and potential independent candidates seem to have been caught napping by the brief, short-notice campaign, and any impact they might be having has so far escaped the polling agencies. With respect to the major party contest, there is no certainty that the damage done to Labor will outweigh the sense that the Coalition is becoming increasingly desperate.

Some new Campaign Update additions for the electorate guide:

Charters Towers (Nationals 2.7%): The Australian carried a report by Ian Gerard on Friday which queried whether "dissatisfaction with the health system" would overcome "the voices of the thousands of coalminers who have flooded into the sprawling regional seat of Charters Towers in recent years". Labor candidate Bruce Scott (not to be confused with the federal Nationals member for Maranoa) sounded a note of caution on the latter point, saying "it depends where these miners are registered, a lot of them are probably fly-in fly-out". The electorate’s coal industry is centred around Moranbah in its south, where Labor records big majorities that are overwhelmed by Nationals-voting rural booths to the north.

Indooroopilly (Labor 2.1%): Labor member Ronan Lee’s opposition to uranium mining was back in the news after equivocal statements on the issue from Peter Beattie and Anna Bligh. Appropriately enough, Lee is among the Labor candidates to whom the Greens are recommending a second preference. AAP reports that the Coalition accused Lee of campaigning "almost as an independent" after fielding campaign signs with no ALP branding.

Clayfield (Labor 1.2%): Clayfield, which includes Brisbane Airport and is located a short distance north-east of the CBD, was a big target of the Coalition’s promise to spend an extra $1.4 billion bringing forward completion of the Airport Link and adjoining North-South Bypass Tunnel under the city.

Gaven (Nationals 3.4%): Labor was on the attack after the Gold Coast Bulletin reported Nationals member Alex Douglas had allowed his 18-year-old son to attend a high-school formal after-party held at the Bandidos bikie gang clubhouse at Mermaid Beach.

Far be it from the Poll Bludger to tell Rupert Murdoch how to do business, but one can only wonder if News Limited is getting value for money by having three different titles commission three different agencies to conduct three different sets of opinion polls. For better or worse, The Australian’s Newspoll, the Courier-Mail’s Galaxy Research and now the Sunday Mail’s TNS all point in the same direction, although TNS predicts a somewhat more modest Labor victory than the other two. After distribution of the undecided and unresponsive, Labor is on 45 per cent of the vote compared with 20 per cent for the Liberals and 16 per cent for the Nationals, with Labor leading 55-45 on two-party preferred.

More poll misery for the Coalition today courtesy of the latest Galaxy Research poll for the Courier-Mail. The survey covered 800 voters in four marginal Labor electorates – Clayfield, Hervey Bay, Broadwater and Aspley – and finds a collective two-party vote of 56-44 in Labor’s favour, compared with 53.4-46.6 at the 2004 election. This is not the only indication that I may have been unduly hasty in disputing the accuracy of Tuesday’s Newspoll results. In yesterday’s Courier Mail, Dennis Atkins reported that both Labor and Liberal sources agreed the Newspoll results were "very close" to their "tracking polling of key marginals":

It is now hard to see any Labor losses in Brisbane – although the always difficult seat of Clayfield could be a wildcard if there’s some late movement. And the Liberal by-election gains in Chatsworth and Redcliffe are in serious danger of going to the ALP: partly because the Beattie liberals who switched to Labor in 2001 and stayed in 2004 have resisted the urge to turn on Beattie and are now either angry with the Liberals for denying them an alternative or just appalled at how appalling the Opposition has been … Labor’s primary vote was in the high 40s late last week and it has now climbed above 50 per cent. Liberal tracking puts primary support at "around or just above 50".

Some good news at last for the Nationals: Elisa Roberts’ off-again, on-again, off-again, on-again campaign for re-election as independent member for Gympie is now off again. Roberts’ withdrawal comes too late for her name to be removed from the ballot paper, so she will face no obstacle if she feels like changing her mind again. Otherwise, the seat should return to its natural home as a Nationals seat: their candidate is David Gibson, general manager of the Gympie Times and a former army officer.

It’s a shame yesterday’s Newspoll results are so difficult to take seriously, because the agency has gone a few extra yards with its survey results. Included is a question regarding respondents’ strength of commitment to their chosen party, which is run alongside comparable results from the previous two elections. If hopeful Coalition supporters go looking to these results for indications that Labor has won soft support from a volatile electorate, they are in for a disappointment. Overall commitment is at least as strong as at similar stages in the earlier campaigns, and Labor voters rate themselves less likely to change their minds than Coalition voters.

It appears that this was not all Newspoll had to offer, as Sean Parnell of The Australian today provides detailed results of voter attitudes towards the party leaders. These measures are normally of only incidental interest, but Parnell makes some interesting observations by comparing the results with those from previous election campaigns. However, Bruce Flegg may have cause to feel aggreived that Parnell didn’t extend a similar courtesy to him yesterday, when the Coalition’s disastrous poll ratings were explained in these terms: "Liberal leader Bruce Flegg’s early errors have cost the conservatives dearly". As has been argued earlier, the trend is little different from the last two elections, when the onset of the election campaign led to a rapid decline in Liberal poll ratings both in absolute terms, and relative to their coalition partners.

The following tables indicate the Liberal Party primary vote and share of the total Coalition vote in the second last Newspoll of the 2001, 2004 and 2006 campaigns and the two previous polls, extending on to the election result for 2001 and 2004.

Not that too much should be made of this: there is little doubt that the leadership change has been a disaster, and that Bob Quinn would have had the Liberals in a less bad position. Elsewhere, Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo asks "why state oppositions are hopeless". Instructive newspaper report: "A Victorian Liberal candidate has been caught distancing himself from his party in an apparent bid to boost his chances in the November state election".

Whatever else might be said about Australia’s opinion polling agencies, they cannot be faulted for having sent mixed messages during the current Queensland election campaign. If today’s Newspoll figures are to be believed, the trend towards Labor has turned exponential: their primary vote has gone from 45 per cent to 52 per cent in one week, and the two-party gap has widened from 54-46 to 58-42. The accompanying report in The Australian buttresses itself against the poll’s obvious inaccuracy, saying "long-term tracking by Newspoll shows Labor often squanders a strong lead developed mid-way through a campaign" – which is the first I have heard of such a phenomenon. The Coalition’s primary vote is at 36 per cent, leaving a surprisingly meagre 12 per cent to spare for minor parties and independents.

If you haven’t take an a look at the Poll Bludger election guide lately, the following entries have been expanded in the past week: Cook, Mulgrave, Thuringowa, Redlands, Mansfield, Noosa, Cleveland, Glass House, Ipswich West, Springwood, Burdekin, Hinchinbrook and Currumbin.