Distrust The Evidence Of Distrust!
The Tasmanian Integrity Commission was established in 2010 via a bill passed in 2009 by the then Bartlett Labor government. Political tragics and commentators generally view it as at best a modest specimen of the integrity commission genre and at worst the sort of commission you have for the sake of saying you have one.
There has been increasing frustration with the Integrity Commission's powers lately after it ruled that it could not investigate matters relating to Adam Brooks' candidacy at the 2021 state election because the election campaign occurred while parliament was dissolved and was therefore outside its jurisdiction. The Greens made a complaint to the Commission (no they did not "refer" the matter*) asking it to investigate "the circumstances of Adam Brooks' pre selection, the support that the Premier gave him throughout the campaign and the manner of his resignation,". Partly this complaint seems to have been an attempt to fuel the silly and sore-loserly "tainted election" claim surrounding Brooks (the Liberals would have easily won three seats in Braddon anyway), but there are some genuine questions up for grabs here. Was Brooks a recent party donor? Did the tipoff that resulted in Brooks facing charges in Queensland come from a party-connected source, or was it simply coincidence?
There has also been the somewhat confusing matter of "Operation Hyperion" - a name that for whatever reason has been used by several different investigations worldwide. The Tasmanian version investigated claims surrounding a common form of porkbarrelling (by both major parties, but I believe more so the Liberals who were the subject of the complaint) in which community groups are promised grants that are contingent on the promising side winning the election. Unsurprisingly it was finding nothing to see since there is no law against this practice, but the circumstances of its winding up amid jurisdiction and legal issues are such that full detail would be interesting.
But it is one thing to say that political insiders lack faith in the Commission and another to claim that the voters at large have even heard of it. The Australia Institute's press release as published on their website simply asserts that its poll has found that "Nearly one in two Tasmanians (48.5%) distrust the Tasmanian Integrity Commission’s ability to uncover and prevent misconduct in public administration, including 19.6% who strongly distrust." However the release does not include the polling question.
The Mercury on Friday (print edition) took the press release at face value and did not print any comment on the poll from anyone likely to challenge it. It was outperformed in poll reporting in this instance by Tasmanian Times which asked for more detail and obtained and published both the verbatim poll question wording and the Australian Polling Council-required Long Methodology Statement (parts thereof, anyway!)
The poll question was:
"Unlike integrity commissions in some other jurisdictions, the Tasmanian Integrity Commission has never held a public hearing or full inquiry, and does not have the power to investigate third parties who may be involved in public sector misconduct.
To what extent do you trust or distrust the Tasmanian Integrity Commission’s ability to uncover and prevent misconduct in public administration?"
The poll would have been interesting had it asked only the question without the preamble. However, as evidence of what Tasmanians at large believe, the preamble invalidates it. The main reason is that many respondents would not have heard of the Integrity Commission at all, or if they had heard of it, known much about its powers before being given that information. On being given that information, 100% of the sample becomes aware of it, which makes the sample unrepresentative of the public at large. It's rather like turning your entire sample into political junkies for the purposes of the question (though maybe a lot of those still answering robopolls are such by now anyway.) I am not saying that this would cause people who would otherwise say they trust the Commission to say they don't trust it - what I do suggest it would do is drive up the distrust rate at the expense of "don't know".
The second reason is that even when such a preamble is absolutely accurate, it presents selected facts that may lead the respondent to prefer a negative view of the Commission. Had the preamble instead recounted some of the Commission's success stories (such as the critical findings about Brooks in 2018 that were followed soon after by his resignation - though the findings were actually not findings of misconduct and the resignation was for health reasons) then the results could be very different.
One other thing worth noting here is the higher faith expressed by Liberal respondents despite the Integrity Commission being a Labor creation. I suspect this is connected with the government's recent defence of the Commission and the persistent attempts of the left to use it to embarrass the government.
(* Pedantic NB: we often hear of parties "referring" complaints to the Commission when in fact all they are doing is unilaterally making a complaint. This use of "referring" makes the complaints sound like more serious matters than they may actually be. A doctor refers a patient to a specialist. The patient does not refer themselves. A court refers a case to a different court. The parties to the case do not refer the case to a given court themselves. Etc.)
The Difficulties Of Senate Polling
Tasmania has an intriguing race coming up in which very long-serving and controversial Liberal Senator Eric Abetz will try to continue his Senate career from the risky (but far from "unwinnable") number 3 position. Parties are jockeying for position to try to establish themselves as the best possible anti-Abetz vote and the Jacqui Lambie Network has been by far the quickest and loudest out of the blocks in trying to stake its claim in this regard.
The results of the Tasmania Senate poll so far reported are:
Liberal 37.5, Labor 28.5, Green 11.9, JLN 9.0, One Nation 3.8, undecided 4.6
This leaves about 4.7%, which based on the Integrity Commission party choice breakdowns appears to have been split between the fledgling Local Party and undifferentiated Others. The Local Party is at this stage unregistered and is not yet listed as an applicant for registration. One of its founders is Leanne Minshull, the previous TAI state director. Craig Garland, who polled strongly as an independent candidate for Braddon in the state election recently, is also involved.
I haven't seen a table showing who the "undecided" were leaning to yet but pending that and reallocating them proportionally, the results look like this:
Liberal 39.3, Labor 29.9, Green 12.5, JLN 9.4, One Nation 4.0, Others including TLP 4.9
In quota terms:
Lib 2.75, ALP 2.09, Green 0.88, JLN 0.66, ON 0.28, others 0.34
If this picture were exactly correct, there would be a race between the Liberals' Eric Abetz and JLN's lead candidate Tammy Tyrell for the final seat, and Tyrell would probably overtake Abetz on One Nation preferences and win. However, the poll has a reported sample size of 1060, so it's within the poll's in-theory margins of error that the Greens could lose instead, with both Abetz and Tyrell winning, and even that "strategic" votes for JLN as the optimum choice to beat Abetz could cause the winners to be JLN/Abetz as opposed to JLN/Greens.
I don't think that's actually a very likely scenario, but mainly because Senate polling has other problems. The biggest problem is that a choice of six parties and others doesn't replicate the voter's experience of voting on a ballot paper with 20+ parties, and tends to seriously underestimate the parties that aren't named. The poll has others including Local Party on 4.9%, but others polled 13% in 2019. Some or all of the parties in this poll are bound to be too high, but which ones? If we scale the named parties back proportionally, the Liberals become less competitive and another 2019-style 2-2-1-1 result becomes more likely.
Another accuracy issue is that robopolling (at least with limited reweighting) is possibly on the skids. uComms had a good track record for years despite often odd looking demographic breakdowns (especially in the 18-34 year age group) but its polls were way out at both the WA state election (where it had the excuse of polling a long way out from election day) and the Tasmanian state election (where it didn't have any such excuse). uComms' final Tasmanian state election poll was a larger one than this and yet had a seven point error on the Liberal Party vote and an 11-point error on the major party margin, numbers projecting to a hung parliament that did not occur. Give the Liberal Party another seven points on this one and the Liberals win three seats on raw quotas!
The final issue with this one is the effect of Lambie herself not being a candidate. I think it will have some impact on JLN's BTL vote and BTL preference flows, but I'm not sure if it's likely to be a small impact or a large one. I've found on Twitter that many people don't realise Pauline Hanson's One Nation polled better overall in Queensland in 2019, and not much worse below the line, with Malcolm Roberts on top of the ticket than in 2016 when their ticket was topped by Hanson herself. However Roberts was by that stage a former Senator. It's possible that nearly all the current above the line JLN voters (5.5%) and a significant share of the BTL voters (3.4%) will vote for JLN anyway, which would put JLN clear of anything any of the micro-parties were likely to get and establish them as the most likely competition to the Liberals, but we've really not had a similar case. Tammy Tyrell is a very little known candidate at this stage (with many internet references to her name being misspellings of Tammi Terrell) but it seems JLN will try to turn that into a strength. And a lot of JLN's appeal is to relatively low information voters who may not even notice Lambie herself is not a candidate.
Also, I should mention the poll's two-candidate preferred question between Abetz and an unnamed Lambie Network candidate (57.9% to 32.4% in the latter's favour). This result is unsurprising, and to some degree interesting because polling concerning Abetz himself is virtually never seen! But as a tool for projecting the Senate race it's a good deal worse than useless. This is firstly because many votes from voters who prefer JLN to Abetz will be primary votes for either Labor or the Greens, which will mostly stay with said parties. Secondly, many voters who if pressed would prefer Lambie to Abetz will in fact exhaust their ballots. Thirdly some Liberal voters who prefer the JLN candidate to Abetz will probably choose to vote above the line and not express that preference anyway. In 2016, following a campaign in which he received plenty of negative attention, Abetz beat Lambie herself on Senate 2CP (45.7% to 35.5% with the rest exhausting is what I get via David Barry's preference explorer.)
National Senate Polling (Sigh ...)
I also came across this report from May, which I missed at the time, about some national TAI Senate polling.
Well, seriously, AFR? 490 words of that stuff without even naming the pollster? "Senator Lambie, who will run as a candidate in Tasmania,"??? But the worst thing about the report is that it neither publishes the figures that the seat total estimates are based on nor directs to anywhere where those figures can be found (and I can't find them). It would be nice to see what, if anything, the pollster (who I assume not to be uComms) and/or TAI has done to produce better Senate polling after the 2019 polling and modelling underestimated the Coalition's Senate vote by 10% in their final sample, projected the Coalition's seat tally to four less than they're projecting for them this time, projected One Nation to get 9.5% in Tasmania and 4-5 seats (they got 3.5% and two), and missed on the major party margin in Queensland by 18.6%!
Addendum: Reps Polling (11 July):
I didn't notice it yesterday but the TAI press release also includes House of Reps figures for Tasmania:
Lib 36.7 ALP 29.8 Green 12 JLN 5.9 One Nation 3.4 Local Party 0.3 Ind/Other 4.3 Undecided 7.6
With undecided proportionally redistributed this becomes:
Lib 39.7 ALP 32.3 Green 13 JLN 6.4 One Nation 3.7 Local Party 0.3 Ind/Other 4.7
In 2019 JLN did not contest the Reps, and One Nation contested two of five seats. The 2019 Reps figures were:
Coalition 34.6 (Lib 30.6 Nat 4) ALP 33.6 Green 10.1 One Nation 2.8 Ind/Other 18.9
The Ind/Other consisted of 13% independent (mostly Andrew Wilkie who polled 50% in Clark), 4.9% United Australia and 1% for Animal Justice and FACN combined. The Nats ran in support of their sitting Senator Steve Martin and got an unexpected bonus from the Jessica Whelan disendorsement in Lyons.
It has been seen again and again in Tasmanian federal polling that polls that do not include a specific Wilkie option severely underestimate his vote. For that reason it is very difficult to know what to make of these numbers overall, other than that they look good for the Liberal Party, which I estimate as picking up a 5% 2PP swing if this is accurate. On such numbers they would probably gain Lyons, since Labor's margin there was inflated by the Whelan situation in 2019. One caution I have with that is that a strong Liberal showing may be the result the sponsor wants in order to play up the contest between JLN and Abetz, given staffer history connections between JLN and TAI. If the numbers didn't show that contest, would they have been released? And yet another caution flag is that federal polling could well still be contaminated by the state election and Labor's subsequent state level turmoil.
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