Pre And Post Budget Federal Poll Roundup

2PP Aggregate 52.4 to Labor vs Coalition (term low, -0.8 since last week)

Shadow-2PP 52.9 to Labor vs One Nation (-0.6 since last week)

Labor would win election"held now" but most likely with only a small majority

This is my usual annual post about federal voting intention polling after the Budget, plus a summary of what's been happening in the months leading up.

The briefest summary of what happened in the months leading up is "not much".  In terms of my Labor vs Coalition two-party preferred aggregate, Labor dipped down to the high 52s in mid-January (off not a lot of polling at the time) but got back above 54 during Coalition leadership tensions in early February.  Since Angus Taylor replaced Sussan Ley Labor's 2PP has bobbed around the 53s with no real evidence of signal.

Not-A-Poll Reset 1 of 2026: Ley Rolled

Well at least she lasted longer than Alexander Downer.

As expected by a strong plurality of voters in my sidebar Not-A-Poll, Sussan Ley, who replaced Peter Dutton, was the next of the canvassed leaders to depart.  However for a while prior to the 2025 Tasmanian election, Jeremy Rockliff was in the lead.  Rockliff would have got a fair few more votes except that I closed off the poll while the Tasmanian election was being resolved.  This is something I do so people don't get credit for voting for a leader who was in the process of losing an election in the count on the night, but in Rockliff's case the uncertainty about whether he had survived dragged on for over a month.  In recent weeks almost all the action has been on Ley, who between 28 and 31 Jan got 37 votes in a row, but there was still the odd flash of dissent (someone voted for Chris Minns on Tuesday!)

This is Not-A-Poll's fifth successful prediction in the last six changes, improving the overall record for this series to 7/14.  

In Search Of Australia's Most Ratioed Political Tweets

Note added Feb 2025: I really enjoyed maintaining this article but stopped updating it early in 2024.  At the moment I don't feel inclined to resume it because of dissatisfaction with Elon Musk's undesirable influence on the platform, which has taken the fun out of ratio-spotting for me.

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(This article is updated regularly - original introductory text below.  To save people the effort of scrolling through to see if a very recent tweet has been added, I will be noting the most recent addition at the top, when I remember that is.  The most recent addition was by ABC Insiders added 5 Mar 24)

Note new rule added 1 Dec 2020 to address tweets with replies disabled.

Revised new rule added 28 Sep 2023 to address tweets with replies disabled partway and regarding quote-tweet changes to above rule.

RULE CHANGES: Effective 1 Jan 2022 new tweets will need to have a ratio over 10:1 to qualify.  They can qualify by either the Replies/Likes method or the Quote Tweet/Retweet method, whichever is higher, subject to at least 100 Replies or Quote Tweets respectively.  However I will only track the latter if (i) replies have been disabled or (ii) I have been notified or otherwise become aware that a given tweet is scoring highly on this score.   Selected tweets with ratios between 5 and 10 will still be added if they are of unusual interest to me - which includes tweets by the left of politics or relating to opinion polling or elections.  )

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Following the 2019 federal election defeat, Labor is having a hard time reappraising its relationship with coal.  The party was smacked senseless in mining towns in Queensland and copped a 9.5% swing against it in Hunter (NSW), where Labor voters deserted to One Nation in droves.  At the same time, mixed messages on Adani probably saw it lose votes in the other direction to the Greens in the Queensland Senate race.  Labor MHR for Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon, has been particularly keen to reconnect with the coal industry following his own somewhere-near-death experience, but when he tried this on Twitter this week, it mostly did not go down well with the natives:

Fitzgibbon's tweet attracted far more replies than likes.  On Twitter this (with varying definitions, eg including or not including retweets as well as or instead of likes, where to set the cutoff etc) is known as being ratioed. The formula I use is simply (number of replies)/(number of likes), counting anything over 1 as an instance.  While there are cases where tweets attract more replies than likes because they provoke a genuinely long discussion or outpourings of sympathy, these exceptions are very rare indeed (especially in politics).  As a general rule, a tweet that is ratioed is so because it has been piled onto by opponents.  Frequently there is a very good reason for that, but in politics the response can be affected by partisan bias.

MPs Who Do Not Have Citizesnhip Of New Zeland

Now would I misspell a title twice?  Read on and all will be revealed ...

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Scott Morrison (Liberal, Cook)

Today there was a curious development in the long-running Section 44 citizenship farce.  Margaret Simons in the Guardian reported that Prime Minister Scott Morrison appears to have given incomplete/incorrect citizenship declarations that fail to address a manner in which he could in theory have become a citizen of New Zealand.  That is not to say he is a citizen of New Zealand, but that his explanation of why he is not is apparently wrong, or as Dr Anna Hood puts it in Simons' article, "problematic".

Simons has published that fine print in a change in New Zealand law, passed in 1948 and effective 1/1/1949, conferred full citizenship on then-living females (but not males) who were the offspring of British subject fathers born in New Zealand.  That full citizenship then allowed the offspring of those females to be potentially registered as New Zealand citizens by virtue of being "the minor child of a New Zealand citizen".  If so registered, they would now be ineligible to sit in the Australian parliament under Section 44, unless they had subsequently renounced.  (The British Nationality and New Zealand Citizenship Act 1948 was repealed effective 1 Jan 1978 by the Citizenship Act 1977, but those who were citizens under the former Act at that stage remained so. For this reason as well as Morrison no longer being a "minor child", there is no issue of an existing entitlement to become a citizen.)