Why I've Quit Doing Paid Election Coverage For The Mercury

Between 2013 and 2024 I covered four state and four federal elections via live blogging for The Mercury on contract on election night, as well as writing several commissioned articles in the leadup to various elections.  I enjoyed providing this coverage and working with The Mercury's reporters and staff on election nights tremendously.  I think The Mercury in general serves the population of Hobart well, as a rare example of a Murdoch tabloid that is not particularly slanted, and that the paper provides a lot of good coverage of local political matters.  I have high regard for several journalists who work there.  In general my relationship with The Mercury in this time has been excellent, albeit slightly strained at some state election times by some polling coverage issues (lack of transparency and detail around secretive local industry polls and passing off reader surveys as polls, for example).  One doesn't expect to have everything.  

However I have decided to end this association because the Mercury's online subscription system, and customer relations in the event of failure of that system, are so dreadful that I will not work for a company that continues to rip off its customers in this way.   I will think about options for future Tasmanian state and federal election night coverage, but probably not now, as I am very busy for the next few weeks.  It's sad to have had to move on from work I and many readers enjoyed in such disappointing circumstances, but it's time to do something else with my Tasmanian and federal election nights, whatever that may be.  

The background

On 23 March 2024 I covered the Tasmanian election night count for The Mercury and my partner bought an online discount subscription that after two months would increase to $15/per month in order to follow my coverage.  

Having no lasting use for the subscription, in May she wanted to cancel it prior to the increase commencing.  Aware that one (for whatever reason) needed to provide a week's notice to cancel a subscription without being billed, she attempted to do so online on 15 May and was confronted with a forest of "Something went wrong". The online cancellation option did not work (I believe it hasn't done so reliably for years).  

My partner rang up the phone cancellation service early on 16 May and was told that the subscription had been cancelled.  Yet on 17 May she was billed for it anyway with a payment deducted.  

Not only that, but this wasn't even treated as a late cancellation where one could still use the service for the final month; rather the service that she had been wrongly billed $15 for simply completely stopped working on its cancellation, meaning that she hadn't unwillingly bought an extra month's subscription with the $15 but had rather simply had the $15 taken.  

This resulted in me going on strike in terms of providing free political interviews to The Mercury, who I was previously being interviewed by for free many times in the average year (about 18 published cases in 2022, 15 in 2023 etc).   

It took a while for anyone at the Mercury to respond to my boycott at all but one gallant Mercury staffer did make several attempts to get the situation fixed, running into various brick walls of the sort involving us needing to ring up subscriptions ourselves (them ringing me up was all too hard) and so on.  Someone in the online subscriptions staff had also been putting around some nonsense about the cancellation date and the billing date being the same but this was false; we had the receipts on this and provided them.  That still didn't fix it.

When we did call the subscriptions number ourselves after all else failed on 12 July, after quite a while on the phone they eventually said that an error had indeed been made and the $15 would be refunded, but said it would probably take 2-3 weeks to refund the money, and maybe four.  (They were absolutely clear that the money would definitely be refunded.)

So a customer, and why is it so, has to give seven days notice to cancel a subscription, but if the Mercury wrongly bills a subscription it gets to hog the money for up to four weeks before returning it!  That's bad enough, but worse, eight weeks later the refund still hasn't arrived!

The strong feeling I have both from this and hearing of other "you can check out any time you like" experiences is that The Mercury views making it as hard as possible for aggrieved customers to get refunded as a feature not a bug.  

I will not work on contract for a company that treats its customers - including potentially other people who like my work - in this way.  Therefore I have decided to cease all commercial arrangements with The Mercury.  

This decision will be reviewed only if, as well as refunding the money with a personal apology to both of us,  the Mercury implements a working subscription cancellation system allowing for online cancellation any time on the day before the subscription renews or earlier.  The Mercury must also publish an editorial apologising to all victims of its inadequate cancellation system and for the lack of satisfactory dispute resolution services for subscribers.  The Mercury must create a complaints system with the power to ensure that appropriate refunds for customers ripped off by any further incompetence are processed immediately.  

While I may return to doing free political interviews for The Mercury, that will only be considered after the money has been refunded and we have received a written apology including notice that the money has been refunded.   I am not interested in discussing the matter further until both occur.

Newspapers maintain that paywalled coverage is the way to go, that readers should be paying for their articles and that readers shouldn't expect to get stuff for free.  They maintain that paywall-breaking and open reposting of copyright content are forms of theft.  And yet, they themselves steal from readers who are doing the right thing.

This is a disgusting and disgraceful double standard and it has to be brought to an end.  

Crying Wolf: More Embarrassingly Bad Tabloid Poll Reporting

 "Anthony Albanese could be on track to being a one-term Prime Minister, with a new poll showing Labor's primary vote crashing in three major states.  The federal government is in serious trouble in the eastern states - where most of the seats are - with Labor down to 24 per cent in Queensland, 28 in Victoria and 32 in NSW."

"Labor’s primary vote has crashed to just 24 per cent in Queensland, 28 per cent in Victoria and 32 per cent in New South Wales, the wolf + smith shows.  But Labor is dominant in South Australia, where its primary vote is 41 per cent, and 60 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.  The poll – which measured both state and federal voting intention – suggests the government is in dire trouble in the eastern states, with just 43 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote in Queensland and 48 per cent in Victoria."

This is how the Daily Mail and the Murdoch tabloids (Courier Mail/Daily Telegraph etc) respectively wrote up a massive new poll by an initially mysterious outlet wolf + smith.  But this was in fact another example of laughably incompetent poll reporting from these outlets, one that again happened to be in service of the narrative their right-wing readers would want to see.  What the poll in fact found is very different.  The state-level figures these outlets were commenting were state voting intention not federal.  This was made so abundantly clear in the poll report that, among other subtle hints, the whole of page 10 of the poll report is devoted to making it clear that the rest of the report is state not federal.

Page ten looks like this:

This whole page is apparently, somehow, not large enough or clear enough to make it clear to journalists from the Dailys Mail and Telegraph that what follows (in sections helpfully also introduced as "nsw politics", "victorian politics" etc) is state voting intention.   Abysmal!  There are even more helpful pointers like " IF A NSW ELECTION WAS BEING HELD TODAY AND YOU WERE TO VOTE, WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING PARTIES WOULD RECEIVE YOUR FIRST PREFERENCE VOTE?" to indicate that this is state voting intention.  The Murdoch tabloid article even manages to realise that the poll canvasses both state and federal intention and still somehow represents the state figures as federal.  Unbelievable!

What the poll actually finds concerning federal voting is rather different.  The poll finds primary votes of Labor 29% Coalition 36% Greens 13% One Nation 6% Independent 11% Others 4%.  The two-party preferred is 51-49 to ALP by "past preference flows".  As far as the poll report goes is "with Labor’s majority in danger."  Majority in danger, it says (and fair enough), not government.     

There aren't any specific state primary or 2PP breakdowns provided, but what the report does provide is state by state primary vote gaps between the major parties.  I provide these with the 2022 results in brackets below.  

SA ALP +4 (-1.08) 
Tas ALP +2 (-5.68) 
WA ALP - 3 (+2.06)
Vic ALP -7 (-0.23)
NSW ALP -9 (-3.16)
Qld ALP -10 (-12.22)

This means the poll actually finds substantial swings to Labor on major primary gap in SA and Tas, and a slight swing to Labor in Queensland, with swings of a few points away (note again: this is major party gap, not 2PP) in WA, Victoria and New South Wales.  (The change in gap is halved to get the swing.)

If I treat the primary gap swings as 2PP swings and apply them to the expected post-redistribution boundaries, by uniform swing by state Labor would lose Aston (if counted off the 2022 baseline), Bennelong, Gilmour, Robertson and Paterson (maybe Chisholm as well depending on whose estimates you use) and gain Sturt and Bass.  However, the poll had swings to the Greens and independents and away from the combined One Nation/UAP, so that 75-seat projection (minus any seats dropped in NT) is a pessimistic reading of the poll for Labor.  Most likely on these state numbers Labor would win a majority if its preference flows held up from 2022.   That's a big if at this moment according to all three pollsters that are running respondent preferences, but the state numbers are hardly Dutton-in-the-Lodge territory.

In particular, there's a big difference between the major party vote gaps in Victoria (federal 7 points, state 12 points) and Queensland (federal 10 points, state 18 points) that shows why the poll looks so bad for Labor if one confuses its state results with the federal picture.  

Even if one sees a 10% primary vote gap in "marginals" in this poll, should one be alarmed on Labor's behalf?  Not really, because the average gap in marginal classic seats last time was 6.8% and the gap swing is about the same as in the poll overall.

As for the mysterious wolf+smith with its enormous sample size for a federal poll, it turns out this is an outfit directed by Jim Reed of Resolve and carrying similar hallmarks including a high Independent vote and a relatively low Labor primary (more or less cancelling out on expected 2PP).  Former Scott Morrison advisor Yaron Finkelstein is also involved.  However there is no mention of who is involved on the wolf+smith website (did the Murdoch tabloids even know this was an outfit that involved a Ninefax pollster?)  We're told that it's a online poll using "quality ‘research only’ panels." and that it is weighted, but not on what basis (beyond state).   I understand it is not intended to be a regular polling series.  

There are a lot of demographic breakdowns of primary vote gap - mostly unsurprising (younger voters are more pro-ALP but also more likely to be uncommitted to their vote, which is not the same thing as "undecided", etc).  These are of somewhat limited use because one needs to know the Green and minor party mix to really say how left-or-righr-leaning a given group may be; primary vote gap does not alone reveal it.  We're also told (p 4) that One Nation got 2% last election and indepedents got 8%; neither of these things are correct (try 4.96% and 5.29% respectively).  There's also an issues mix question which in common with any other poll this term finds cost of living way on top as the leading concern for voters.  

The more professional polling the merrier (though preferably with more weighting etc details than this) but the innumeracy, incompetence and bias of much of the mainstream media coverage of polling continues to do Australian voters a disservice.  There has been little if any improvement across the media in the standard of coverage since the 2019 polling failure and it seems that tabloid outlets in particular view polling as somewhere between a free story for their journalists and a launching pad for partisan spin and ragefarming about hung parliaments.  When these outlets do report polling exclusives the public cannot take any details on trust because these media just can't understand what is under their own noses.  I cannot see why such incompetence should be allowed.  

With a clear note that this award goes to the media outlets involved and not the pollster, the Murdoch tabloids and the Daily Fail share one of these for their hopeless coverage of this poll:

Porcupine Fish Award For Ultra-Fishy Poll Reporting (credit)

 

Poll Roundup: 50.5 Is The New 51

2PP Aggregate 50.6 to ALP (-0.1 since end of last week)
Aggregate has changed little since loss of about half a point in mid-July
Election "held now" would probably produce minority Labor government

I haven't done a federal poll roundup for a while and today is a randomly opportune time to do one following the second straight 50-50 Newspoll and mention some general themes in recent 2PP polling.  In the last week we have had:

* Newspoll at 50-50 (ALP 32 L-NP 38 Green 12 ON 7 others 11)

* Redbridge at 50.5-49.5 to ALP (ALP 32 L-NP 38 and the rest not published yet, but I'm expecting Greens either 10 or 11)

* YouGov at 50-50 (ALP 32 L-NP 37 Green 13 ON 8 others 10) (Note: normally the 2PP for these primaries would be 51-49 to Labor, though it is possible to get 50 from these primaries sometimes because of rounding and perhaps also the makeup of others.).  

* Essential at 48-46 to ALP, equivalent to 51.1-48.9 (raw primaries ALP 29 Coalition 33 Greens 13 ON 7 UAP 1 others 11 undecided 6 - meaning the major party primaries are effectively more like 31-35)

* Morgan at 50.5-49.5 to Coalition by respondent preferences (50-50 last election) (ALP 29.5 L-NP 39.5 Green 13 ON 4 IND 9 others 5 - Morgan has a standalone IND option on the ballot everywhere, which is likely to be overstated)

Supporting First Past The Post For Australia Is Pointless

Lately I've been seeing a lot of social media griping about the current government and/or the Greens and teals, mostly from alternative right-wing accounts, in which the writer attacks the Government and says it was only elected because of preferential voting, and we should get rid of preferences by switching to first past the post.   I don't think there is much significant advocacy for first-past-the-post in Australia though Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner has unfortunately supported it (what, optional preferences is not enough for him?), as has Resolve pollster Jim Reed in 2022, and a steady flow of petitions to the Commonwealth Parliament generally with tiny signature numbers.  

The following alone is sufficient reason to dismiss all such calls: First past the post is a discriminatory system that violates the Australian value of a fair go.  Under first past the post, a voter whose most preferred party or candidate is unpopular must make a strategic decision between voting for someone who is not in fact their first preference and effectively throwing away their vote.  However a voter who is pretty sure their most preferred candidate will finish first or second does not have to face that strategic dilemma.  On this basis, having first past the post, in a country able to afford and count a fairer system, is not treating all electors fairly.   I do not think there is actually any valid excuse for keeping single-member first past the post anywhere (though the transition out of it needs to be carefully managed in those places that do have it) but this article is confined to the argument re Australia.  

Australia has a proud tradition of fair voting that started over 100 years ago when preferences were introduced to stop conservative parties from losing conservative electorates when voters were split between two different conservative candidates.  The famous case is the 1918 Swan by-election, but in fact the Hughes Government was working to introduced preferential voting months before it occurred but the legislation had not yet passed the parliament.   When I see supposed patriots with Australian flags in their social media profiles propose that we junk this fine tradition and replace it with unfair and primitive crud voting systems used overseas, I can only shake my head at their claims that they really love this country.   I am not going to let these people get away with it; to paraphrase a slightly different Doctor, this voting system is defended.  

Similar to my polling disinformation register, I've written this article mainly as a labor-saving device so that I don't have to keep making the same long replies on the same points but can simply say "see point 3 here" with a link.  I hope others find it interesting and useful, and more points may be added.

I should note that this article also applies to many criticisms of compulsory preferences made by supporters of optional preferencing - especially part 7.

EMRS: Surprise Boost For Rockliff In Pre-Lamblowup Poll

EMRS Lib 36 (+1) ALP 27 (-1) Greens 14 (-1) JLN 8 (+1) IND 12 (=) others 3 (=)
IND likely overstated, others likely understated
No significant difference from previous poll or election
Significant lead increase for Rockliff as Preferred Premier

A quick post about a poll I don't at this stage have a lot to say about.  The August quarterly EMRS poll is out, but it's showing its age as its in-field period (14-21 Aug) ended a few days before the dramatic events of the weekend, with two of the three Jacqui Lambie Network MPs kicked out of the party before they could leave, and Michael Ferguson resigning as Infrastructure Minister.   We may never know if even these events had had any impact on the government's standing with voters, as by the time the next poll rolls around, any impact may have washed out.

Labor would have us believe that the hung parliament is killing investor confidence, which would presumably flow through to voting intention somewhere, but this poll is indistinguishable statistically from the previous one and also from the March election.  If EMRS is correct, between the election and August nothing lasting happened at all.  An election held in mid-August would, based on this poll, have returned more of the same.  When the survey dashboard goes live I will check for anything notable in the seat-by-seat patterns but on such statewide numbers the Liberals would always be the largest party and would not be near majority.  

The surprise in this poll is that Jeremy Rockliff has jumped to a 45-30 lead as Preferred Premier over Dean Winter, up from 40-32 last time.  Better leader scores skew to incumbents and tend to disadvantage new leaders so to be only eight points behind in the first one was a solid debut for Winter, but now he is 15 behind, which is the biggest gap since Peter Gutwein led by 19 in March 2022.  (At the time Gutwein's COVID bounce in popularity was deflating following reopening of the state's borders).  Only two of the five points Rockliff has gained here come from Winter, with one from don't know and two from the fact that the previous poll, somehow, only summed to 98 (which I don't think even rounding can explain).  The most obviously controversial thing Winter has done in the last three months is announce support for the UTAS city move, which the Hobart City part of Clark voted three to one against in 2022 and nobody else seems to really care that much about.  The dashboard will be worth a look to see where the blowout in Rockliff's lead has occurred.

Once again though I would find it more useful to see approval scores for the leaders individually; better leader scores are always a mess where you don't know if what's happening is that the voters like the leader who has gained more, that they are displeased with the one who has lost ground, or both or even neither. 

Overall this is yet another poll where Labor doesn't break out of the high 20s/low 30s band it has been stuck in seemingly forever.  It's still in theory an extremely long time until the next election, but every time something happens that prompts the question "is this the thing that get's Labor's support moving towards government?" the answer continues to be "no".  

More comments later once the dashboard goes up. 

Not-A-Poll Reset 1 of 2024: Lawler Defeated

The Northern Territory election is over bar the odd seat in doubt with the CLP winning a crushing victory, the first loss by an incumbent Labor government since they won the 2022 federal election.  Lia Finocchiaro is the new Chief Minister and Eva Lawler has become the third NT Chief Minister to lose her seat (following Goff Letts who managed to still win the election and Adam Giles whose CLP was reduced to two seats - one of them Finocchiaro).  Finocchiaro follows Labor's Clare Martin (2001) as only the second female state or territory leader to win a majority from opposition in one go.  

Lawler was Labor's hospital-pass leader after Natasha Fyles succumbed to repeatedly having no idea what a conflict of interest was.  Historically the fate of third leaders in a term is grim, as was covered off in the poll launch article when Fyles resigned.  Lawler probably deserved better for her efforts to clean up the mess than being dumped from her seat with a 21% swing but Palmerston had had a gutful, as had north-east Darwin, and the NT's history of turbulent electoral swings continued.  Can Finocchiaro put a lasting end to the chaos?  

How did the sidebar Not-A-Poll go at predicting that Lawler would be next to get the boot?  This was one where the historic federal drag based argument that she would lose was pretty strong, but there were more votes overall for Steven Miles, who is up in a couple of months.  There were also more for Jeremy Rockliff, who had to deal with two hostile crossbench defectors then called an election that many people probably thought he was going to lose.  Because this site has a lot of Tasmanian readers, if some portion of the Tasmanian readers think the Tasmanian Premier is doomed then the Tasmanian Premier is likely to dominate the voting.  But Rockliff survived.

Looking at votes cast solely after the March 23 Tasmanian state election, Miles led with 91 votes to 70 for Lawler and just 40 for Rockliff and 15 for Dutton.  However late in this Not-A-Poll run awareness grew that Labor was at high risk of losing in the NT first, and from mid-June onwards Lawler received a plurality of votes, getting 44% of votes cast in August.   Not-A-Poll might have done better had the middle of this year not been a pretty quiet time for the site in terms of events that attract high interest levels.  

(A note that in theory Not-A-Poll should be closed during elections but I often forget.  So votes cast after the polls close for an election where the incumbent loses are deleted.)

Not-A-Poll did not do brilliantly re the NT election result either with a narrow plurality only tipping a CLP majority.

The way ahead

It's only two months before the ACT (on Oct 19) and Queensland (Oct 26) have their elections. The Miles government is generally expected to fall (and probably even more likely to do so off the NT's reassertion that federal drag is a theory and a fact).  There is no polling for the ACT where it is historically very difficult for anyone but Labor to win, so it would be brave for anyone to vote for Andrew Barr to be gone before Queensland, but maybe it could happen.  None of the others appear likely to succumb in the next two months though Rockliff has encountered some instability with two crossbenchers who were supporting him kicked out of their party, and the probably forced resignation of the Infrastructure Minister (who is also the Treasurer) from that portfolio.  

2024 NT Election Postcount

RESULT CLP 17 ALP 4 IND 3 GRN 1

Fannie Bay: CLP has narrowly defeated Greens with Labor failing to make final two.

Nightcliff Greens have defeated Labor.

This post will follow the post-counting in remaining seats of interest in the NT election, though at the time of writing only one or two seats are really in doubt.  I've started the thread anyway because a couple of the remaining seats are interesting. The general rule in NT elections is that once the margin goes over 100 that's the end of it, but that's all subject to rechecking, and wins from just outside 100 do happen sometimes (eg Barkly 2020).  If any more seats come into play I will include them in the list below.  

I'm confident that Justine Davis (IND) has won Johnston as she leads Labor by 4.4% and will presumably go further ahead on Greens preferences; I cannot see even the famous tendency of INDs to go badly on absents changing that even in a seat where absents were 12.4% of votes last time around; she would have to get almost no absents at all. I have also had info from scrutineers that the flow to her from Greens is strong enough that she will win. 

Lambie Network Blows Up After Only Five Months

In the beginning there was the Deal, and the Deal was stupid.

Nobody seems to know for sure who actually "negotiated" the JLN side of the confidence and supply arrangement with the Rockliff Government but, for whatever reason, the three elected JLN MPs signed it.  The Deal so needlessly limited the JLN MPs in terms of their ability to vote against the Government that when they broke the Deal by voting for a doomed Greens motion to compel the Government regarding its coastal policy, the Government either didn't notice or ignored the breach and it took the Labor Opposition to point it out.  (Edit: The Government then claimed the Deal hadn't been broken when it had, which soon resulted in the JLN MPs breaking it again on a motion re Forest Reserves.)

Tensions were apparent within the JLN from early on with Rebekah Pentland and Miriam Beswick having one approach and Andrew Jenner another.  Staffing was one issue where this came to a head.  There were further problems in early July when it emerged that the three state MPs had sent Jacqui Lambie a letter in June insisting she keep out of Jacqui Lambie Network state business, and alleging that she was directing state MPs on how to vote.

The catalyst for yesterday's events was the recent news that upgrades to the Devonport ferry terminal, needed for the overdue replacement for the Spirit of Tasmania ferries, had been bungled.  Lambie issued a release on August 15 demanding that Treasurer and Minister for Infrastructure Michael Ferguson resign.  On 19 August JLN MP Andrew Jenner made comments that Ferguson's position was "untenable".  

On 20 August Lambie seems to have issued a press release - the verbatim text of which I have not seen because the Jacqui Lambie Network is beyond hopeless at publishing its output - saying that if Premier Rockliff did not sack Ferguson she would rip up the government's confidence and supply arrangement with the JLN.  This was bizarre to say the least since Lambie herself was not a signatory to the deal which, whoever drafted it, is between the government and the individual JLN MPs.

2024 Northern Territory Election Live

Postcount tracking is continuing here. 

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START POSITION ALP 14 CLP 7 IND 4 (1 IND retiring)

POLLS HAVE CLOSED.  Massive swings to CLP, CLP has won a majority

EXPECTED WINS (some may not be absolutely certain) CLP 14 ALP 4 IND 2

Expected seats changing

Expected CLP gain vs IND (vacancy): Goyder, Blain

Expected CLP gain vs ALP : Karama, Fong Lim, Drysdale, Wanguri, Port Darwin, Sanderson

Seats in doubt:

Barkly: CLP likely to hold vs ALP

Casuarina: CLP likely to gain from ALP

Johnston: IND appears very likely to gain from ALP

.Nightcliff: Likely ALP hold

Fannie Bay: ALP vs Greens (outside chance CLP), Greens ahead.

If all current leaders/favourites hold, CLP 16 ALP 5 IND 3 Green 1

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