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)