Polling on the Mt Wellington Cable Car Proposal

The only cable car I expect to be going up any time soon - Fjellheisen, Tromso, Norway (image: Franklin Henderson)

This article is updated with new cable car polls and claimed polls as they arrive.  


Advance Summary (2014)

1. A new poll - the first to examine the issue credibly - shows statewide figures of 59% support 24% opposition for the proposed Mt Wellington cable car project.

2. Although these figures represent strong support statewide, they are weaker than those claimed for the proposal on the basis of a previous opt-in survey and a previous commissioned poll.

3. The likely main reason for weaker support in this poll is that it did not use a one-sided preamble likely to have skewed the poll results.

4. While the poll shows support in all electorates, opinion is most divided in Denison.

5. Modelling taking into account differences in party support across Denison suggests that within the crucial Hobart municipal area, public sentiment on the proposal is likely to be very closely divided.

6. On this basis while the project is generally welcomed statewide as a potential job creator and tourism opportunity, it will continue to encounter significant opposition in the area in which it is to be built.

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Cable cars have been proposed for Mt Wellington/kunanyi (near Hobart, Tasmania) since before there was even a road up it.  The idea has come and gone over at least 109 years, and has often generated a lot of noise for and against, but it has been difficult to tell where the public overall stood on the issue.

In one of the more popular pieces published here last year, Public Opinion And The Mt Wellington Cable Car Proposal, I took a very sceptical look at the claims of the current proponent to have used a massive opt-in survey to have proven very strong support for the proposal.  The opt-in survey reported results of 78% in favour, 19% against, from respondents who were almost entirely Tasmanian.  No specific breakdown was given by electorate but for the electorate the proposal concerns, Denison, it looks like about 66% of responses were supportive.

Since then, two things have happened.  The first is the appearance, on the Mt Wellington Cable Car Company website, of a commissioned poll conducted by the previous proponent in 2009.  The second, far more significantly, is the publication of a new ReachTEL poll on the subject commissioned by The Mercury.

The 2009 Poll

I'll start with the fishy 2009 poll because it is another good example of the kind of dubious evidence concerning public opinion that has been present in the debate to date.

The November 2009 survey was conducted by regular Tasmanian phone pollster EMRS for a previous cable car proponent and is published on the MWCC page here.  It is included there under the heading "Independent Poll Results" but it was funded by a project proponent.  (The current ReachTEL, on the other hand, is truly independent).  The result of the poll was: 50% strongly support, 28% somewhat support, 6% somewhat oppose, 9% strongly oppose, 7% unsure, but only after respondents' brains had first been marinated in the following preamble, doubtless at the behest of the commissioning source:

 A group of private investors are proposing an aerial tramway for Mt Wellingon [sic]. It would be entirely funded by the private sector and the public would be able to subscribe to shares in the operating company.

Under this proposed scheme, the take-off point would be in South Hobart or Lenah Valley. The Pinnacle terminal would be located below the access road near the WIN TV tower and contain a viewing area, restaurant, cafe, function rooms and other public amenities. The tramway system would be located and designed to minimise visual impact and would not be readily visible from the city.

The developers say that the tramway would provide a world class facility designed to accommodate more than 500,000 patrons each year, the existing access road would remain open and the pinnacle terminal would be open to all. 

This is a classic example of how the use of a preamble can create or amplify a favourable poll response.  The poll purports to show very strong support for a cable car.  In fact it at best shows that level of support only on the conditions that:

* the scheme is entirely funded by the private sector
* the public could subscribe to shares in the operating company
* the terminal would support a viable restaurant, cafe, function rooms and so on, open to all
* the system would minimise visual impact and not be readily visible from Hobart
* the facility would be "world class"
* the facility would be used by more than 500,000 patrons
* the current pinnacle road would stay open
* the unstated condition: there is nothing wrong with the project that would have been relevant to mention if known

A respondent might well support the proposal if all of these things are true, but consider one or more individual items on the list above, or perhaps even all of them, to be non-negotiable.  So what we're talking about is a kind of temporary in-principle support that becomes less relevant as soon as any one of these items falls over.  It is not even correct to think of this as a firm expression of conditional support, because the same person when exposed to the other side of the argument might change their view.

Another interesting aspect of this poll is the use of the term "aerial tramway".  Although the term means the same thing as "cable car", some local respondents would not know this, and might picture something different.

But above all, the problem with this sort of thing is skewing.  In everyday public debate, people who take positions for or against a proposal are not necessarily familiar with all the facts about a proposal, and while some will be familiar with statements made on behalf of a proposal, they may also be familiar with statements made against it.  Measuring what respondents say when they have just heard a preamble giving one side of the story doesn't replicate the state of the debate when the poll is taken, and also isn't a fair representation of what the debate will look like in the future. Project proponents can't dictate how the community receives the debate.  What would happen if they could is quite irrelevant, because they never will.

The 2009 poll was a skew-poll using similar tactics to those often used by green activist groups to create poll results that exaggerate public opinion.  Fortunately we now have a neutral and valid poll to compare it with.

The 2014 Poll

The recent poll (Mercury write-up) was a robopoll conducted by ReachTEL with a sample size of 2646, and was taken on the night of 11 Sep 2014, following questions about voting intention, preferred premier, the state budget, job creation, school retention and tourism development in national parks.  Discussion of results for the first four questions was published in ReachTEL: Liberals With Solid Lead.  Compared with the stew served up to respondents of the EMRS developer-commissioned poll and MWCC opt-in, the ReachTEL poll question is as follows:

"Do you support the proposal for a cable car project on Mt Wellington?"

Options were support, oppose or undecided.  However the polling method would have excluded any respondents who were persistently unable to pick a party they had even a slight leaning for, or pick a preferred Premier from a choice of three.  It is likely many such respondents would have been undecided on this question too.

To start with, the raw state results:

The poll shows the proposal to have strong support statewide, including a majority of respondents in four of the five electorates.  However, the overall 59-24 response (71-29 excluding undecided) is weaker than the 78-15 (83-17 excluding undecided) response of the 2009 EMRS survey.  While someone might argue that support for the proposal has declined by 19 points in five years, it is much more likely that support was simply never as high as in the EMRS poll to begin with and the EMRS poll exaggerated support because of the use of a skewed preamble. Indeed, the worsening of the Tasmanian economy since 2009 provides one reason why support should have increased.

The electorate of Denison is an important comparison point because Denison is the electorate in which the cable car is proposed to be built, and in which its visual impacts (if any) and impacts on road traffic would be most significant.  The Hobart City area is especially significant because the cable car is likely to be built within the Hobart City boundaries, with Hobart City Council a significant decision-maker.  The samples above show 57% support in Denison after removing the undecideds, which is already lower than the c.66% rate for mostly inner-city suburbs in the MWCC opt-in data.  But I think we can use the party support figures to go a little further.

Supporters of both major parties tend to support the proposal while Greens supporters tend to oppose it, but perhaps not as heavily as some people might expect.  (I calculate that supporters of other parties or independents were supportive by about 56% to 30.) Here it's important to bear in mind that not all those who say they vote Green in such polls are actually "greens" ideologically.  Some pick the Greens as a token rebellion against major parties, or because of the Greens' positions on social or economic issues.  Anyway the Green result is quite a contrast to the MWCCC opt-in findings (which had Greens supporters in favour), probably for the reason I suggested: Greens supporters who oppose the project would often not fill in an opt-in survey by its proponent in the first place.

A useful aspect of the breakdowns above is we can use them to look at the electorate figures with more detail.  In the case of Denison, if party preference perfectly predicted views on the cable car then a result of 56% support 27% oppose should be expected, not the actual 48-36.  So there's a tendency for Denison voters to be more anti-cable-car irrespective of their political positioning, and this makes 8-9 points of difference to the Denison results.

The City of Hobart has quite different voting behaviour to Denison as a whole - it has a very high Green vote and a low Labor vote (at booths within Hobart City last election, the Greens got 33% and Labor 25%, compared to 21.6% to 34% in the electorate as a whole).  On that basis alone, the split within Hobart City would be expected to be down to about 46-38, but that's assuming the drag created by the NIMBY factor is the same across the whole electorate.  Almost certainly that drag factor is much stronger in the Hobart part of the electorate than the Glenorchy part (if it even exists in the latter). So while we can be quite confident on these results that Glenorchy voters support the cable car, it's probable on these results that Hobart City voters are very closely split, and possible even that they are on balance very slightly opposed.  

Little wonder then that Glenorchy aldermen are keen to grab the project for their city while even some of the usually pro-development aldermen on Hobart City Council (see also Hobart City Council Voting Patterns) are pretty cautious about it.

The Cable Car: The State Of Play

Nothing in the ReachTEL findings is hugely surprising.  I was expecting to be asked to predict these results and was going to say (if so challenged) that I expected the project to have majority support in electorates other than Denison, with Denison being harder to predict.  After all, for other electorates the project is a potential job creator that could make a trip up the mountain easier while ducking into Hobart. Voters outside Denison are not otherwise affected by it, and do not have the same aesthetic and psychological ties to "the mountain" as some Denison voters.

In the time since I wrote last year's article, there has been a lot of noise about the proposed cable car, but material progress towards its approval has been slow.  (You can see the developer's view on the state of play on the MWCCC site and the main opposing group's at Residents Opposing the Cable Car.) While there has been progress on the removal of developmental vetos affecting the project, it still requires landowner consent from the Hobart City Council to progress on its intended route.  At present there exists a stalemate between the developer and the Hobart City Council in which the developer doesn't want to go to a formal application stage without in-principle approval, and the Council won't provide in-principle approval without a formal application. 

The new Liberal government, while in principle supportive of the project, seems so far to have learnt from the mild embarrassment the issue caused the last state Liberal regime, and doesn't want to do the project's work for it in the absence of a concrete development submission either.  (That said, after seeing the general support for breads and circuses in the first Gutwein Budget, I'll not be surprised should the government be begging to splash out in some way if the project reaches a more concrete stage.)

 Meanwhile, the colourful online debate about the scheme has turned to such things as the identity of fictitious or at best pseudonymous cable car proponent "Nathan Carswell", and the alleged leaking of documents being considered by Hobart City Council (methinks any alderman who opposed the project enough might have done it).

The term "social license" is frequently heard in major development debates.  The idea is that it makes a project's path to success much easier if the project achieves not merely grudging acceptance from the community, but also trust and strong support.  At this stage, although the project has strong support outside the impacted area, opinions within the impacted area are divided closely enough that it is likely the proposal will always have a fight on its hands - court cases, protests and so on.  I have not actually seen any empirical analysis of the "social license" concept and how reliably it predicts the success rates for contentious projects, but for the time being the project remains some way short of clear local acceptance.

ReachTEL July 2017:

A further ReachTEL poll is out finding a narrowing of support since 2014 to 54.1% support 30.6% oppose.  Support by electorate is 60.9-19.2 in Bass, 57.4-24.7 in Braddon, 47.6-40.3 in Denison, 52.3-38.3 in Franklin and 52.5-30.0 in Lyons.  By party, 67.9-19 Liberal, 46-35.7 Labor, 24.8-57.4 Green, 63.5-28.5 Ind/Other, 51.1-28.3 "Undecided".  Interestingly, voters aged over 65 are less sold on the idea than younger voters, although elderly voters tend to vote Liberal.

The wording of the poll question was "Do you support a cable car to Mount Wellington?"  This is arguably subtly different to the 2014 question which might have been taken to be more specific to the current proposal rather than the general concept.

ROCC May 2018:

Residents Opposed To The Cable Car have released a commissioned ReachTEL concerning the cable car based on polling in the electorate of Denison only (soon to be Clark).  ROCC are to be commended for releasing the full poll details, which many sources commissioning such polls fail to do.

Unfortunately the media release by ROCC is nowhere near so laudable, since it claims that the poll shows a swing against the results of the previous polls based on "a comparable The Mercury Reachtel poll of July 2017 that asked the same question." and "declining support for the proposal since a 2014 Reachtel poll (when asked the same question)".  In fact the questions asked by the 2014 and 2017 polls were not quite even the same as each other, but at least they were neutral.  However, the ROCC poll asks a question which, like the 2009 EMRS poll in favour of the proposal, is skewed by the use of a preamble.  The 2014 and 2017 public polls did not include such preambles.  It is not merely false to suggest the question is really the same; it is a monstrous deception as bad as anything in the polling sphere from the project proponents down the years.

This is the question in the current poll:

"The Mount Wellington Cableway Company has proposed a cable car project on Mt Wellington that would carry up to 650 people per hour, from near Old Farm Road in South Hobart, directly over the Organ Pipes cliffs to a large building at the Pinnacle.

Do you support or oppose this proposal for a cable car project on Mt Wellington?"

This question skews the response by drawing attention to several potential negatives of the project (the impact on Old Farm Road, that the line would go "directly over the Organ Pipes", that a building would be "large" - the last being something respondents might or might not agree with based on its actual dimensions.)  The number of passengers per hour could also be perceived as a negative for those (like me) who stand to be impacted by the traffic flows.  The preamble does not mention possible unambiguous positives of the project.

If this level of blatant preamble priming only succeeded in producing an "11% swing against the project" since July 2017 that would be a weak enough result, but the swing isn't even 11%! The swing in Denison is from 47.6-40.3 (support-oppose) to 42.2-44.6.  That is only a 5.4% swing away from Support and a 4.3% swing to Oppose, or 4.85% on a two-answer basis! ROCC seem to have calculated swing as a proportion of supportive respondents who had (supposedly) shifted, but that is not how swing is calculated.

The release also claims "This poll demonstrates a majority of Dension [sic] residents now opposes the cable car." Aaargh! 44.6% is not a majority; it is a plurality, but in any case the poll does not even demonstrate plurality opposition, since the result is too close for the sample size to even show a significant lead.  And even if the poll did show plurality opposition at even, say, a p=0.05 level, the finding would be worthless anyway because of the use of a skewing preamble.

As the first question in the chain of questions about the cable car employs skewing tactics, all the rest of the questions are potentially contaminated and should be ignored.

Five years ago I awarded Adrian Bold of the Mt Wellington Cable Car Company this site's first ever Porcupine Fish Award for Ultra-Fishy Polling.  Following this frankly depressing effort from ROCC, who I hoped just might be better than this, I can only give them one as well.

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

The Bob Brown Foundation has a separate May poll which asks:

‘The state government has allowed the private developer of the proposed cable car to operate on five hectares on top of kunanyi / Mt Wellington free of charge.

Do you support or oppose giving the developer access to the land for free?’

The key to this one is the use of the word "operate", which is wildly ambiguous and could be taken by respondents to mean anything from building the cable car to what it actually is, namely scoping work (including drilling and temporary constructions for visual impact assessment) to develop an application.  So this poll is also useless.  The poll also has some interesting results about what Tasmanians will pay to use the development, but they could be spun in either direction (eg that if there was a discount rate for Tasmanians, over three-quarters of respondents might take it up).  The primary target is, of course, tourists, and asking Tasmanians what they would pay for it is not all that relevant.

MWCC August 2018:

MWCC on their Facebook page this week claimed to have "fresh polls [..] suggesting" 72% support in the south of the state and 92% support in the north.  However these so-called polls were not polls at all; they were unscientific online opt-ins.  Opt-ins are generally blighted by biased respondent selection, motivated response, co-ordinated stacking, lack of scaling and (often) multiple voting.  They are worthless as evidence of public support.

EMRS September 2018:

The Mercury has reported an EMRS poll purported to show the following:

* 62% statewide support 30% [turns out to be 31% - KB] statewide oppose 8% undecided
* 28% say they have read the project proposal, 57% are aware of the project but haven't read it, 15% are unaware of the proposal
* Northern and Liberal voters are more likely to support the project.

However the poll wordings were not published in the Mercury article and the report did not say who if anyone commissioned the poll.

I was subsequently advised the poll was commissioned by the proponent.  While all commissioned polls should be viewed with some caution there is no reason other than it being commissioned to be concerned about this one based on the provided report.  The questions are simple and do not contain any prodding or misleading information.

The poll is similar to other polls in showing high net approval of the project in the north (+43 net in the north-west and +48 in the north-east) but lower in the south (+16), again suggesting that in the Hobart City area support would probably be evenly split at best.

EMRS October 2018:

An EMRS poll conducted for the Council elections surveyed 2680 people and found 548 intending voters (however, the 2680 includes refusals).  43% of the intending voters said the cable car was an important issue to them; this included 22% of the 548 who said it was important and opposed it, 11% who said it was important and supported it, and 10% of the 548 who said it was important but were neutral.  The cable car was the most common issue cited.  The poll appears to not have been scaled.

2019 Mercury Survey:

The Mercury's Future Tasmania reader survey asked questions about whether the cable car should be built and if so where its base station should be.  This was not a poll but was an opt-in and hence completely unscientific.  Opt-ins not only tend to attract a biased response by virtue of being seen by a particular market (such as the readership of a newspaper) but they are also readily stacked by co-ordinated action.  However, this survey had another critical defect - it refused to allow readers to complete the survey with questions left unanswered, and it did not allow a don't-know response to several questions.  Indeed I boycotted the survey for this reason.

For the record the survey, supposedly mostly of southern Tasmanian readers, gave a 54% thumbs down to the cable car concept in a forced yes-no answer, and also 41% supported a Glenorchy base station over one at South Hobart (35%), however I suspect a lot of the former were noes to the project anyway.

An opponent of the project claims that around 2500 responses is "a very healthy sample".  However the methods defects of opt-in polling is such that sample size is irrelevant; all opt-in "polls" are fatally flawed as measures of public opinion for that reason alone.  They say, alongside other adventurous interpretations, "The limitations of the survey methodology thus prevent definitive conclusions but neither can the headline percentages be ignored."  I beg to differ.  The survey isn't evidence.