Peter Brent on Newspoll:
Quote:Politicians have always indulged in, well, politics, even if it has meant subjugating sound policy to political requirements. And with an election approaching, many have reached for that opinion poll “boost.” John Howard’s July 2007 Northern Territory intervention was a particularly theatrical example, intended to push the Coalition into a competitive position.
And who can forget Rudd (again) in the 2013 campaign? Announcement after announcement – a northern Australia special tax zone here, moving naval shipyards from Sydney to Queensland there – each one quickly dissipating as he searched for that elusive connection with the electorate, particularly the component that made up his home state.
But a leader trying to push the polls up with no election on the horizon sits in a different category. That’s a person trying to retain his or her job. Once mainly the lot of opposition leaders, it has for the past seven years been a characteristic of governing parties.
And it’s not even about what the polls say; it’s about how they are interpreted.
Let us imagine that this Newspoll data and the last one contained no errors of any sort, and measured stated responses among registered voters with total accuracy (rounded to an integer). We still wouldn’t know how much of this modest “movement” came from those migration-related policy changes, how much was influenced by other “events” over the past fortnight, the past month or the past six months, or what the polls would be showing if Turnbull hadn’t made these announcements. Survey results are driven by a Rumsfeldian smorgasbord of known unknowns, long and short term.
The fact is that this Newspoll, for all intents and purposes, is the same as a fortnight ago, but what matters is that the Australian’s online headline reads “Support for PM on the rise” and the blurb says “The Coalition has gained an increase in support over tougher citizenship rules while PM’s voter satisfaction improves.” Other news outlets are repeating this interpretation, and given the centrality of Newspoll to the consensus of opinion within the political class, most reporting will take place through that prism: of a prime minister rebuilding his stocks.
That should stop leadership talk, for a while, leaving clear air to sell the budget in two weeks. That’s the plan, anyway.
http://insidestory.org.au/those-damned-elusive-newspoll-boostsThe Budget should remove any move to the Libs, assuming there was a real one not just sampling error (and an apparent move from 1 to 2 could in fact be a move from 0.4 to 0.6.)
NEVER trust just one poll. The trend is your friend.