The Flat Field: Another "Polls Are Wrong" Vid Gets It Wrong!

Five years ago I debunked a drippy poll denial video by the supposedly left wing West Media. Now here from Topher Field (not that he deserves that link) is the nearest right-wing equivalent to West's cavalcade of cluelessness.  In a video entitled "Preference Discipline is EVERYTHING" but advertised with images that say "THE POLLS ARE WRONG [AND WHY YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT]" Field, a glibertarian, sets out to show that polls that estimate One Nation vs Labor "2PPs" are underestimating One Nation.  The funny thing is that there are quite strong arguments that that is true.  He doesn't make them.  Within the first ninety seconds, Field has already showed he is totally out of his depth.

Field Doesn't Know How Polls Work

While talking in front of tweeted results of recent Redbridge and Morgan polls, Field says that these pollsters - and not just these pollsters but all the national and state polls - are using out of date data or guesses to calculate preference flows.  But in the case of One Nation vs Labor, neither of these pollsters does this.  Both calculate their preference flows simply by asking respondents which party they would preference higher.  This is hardly obscure information either - Morgan prominently states it uses this method in all its weekly polling reports, and reports on Accent Research's website make it very clear for Redbridge/Accent (see p. 3 on this one, where both methods have results shown for Coalition vs Labor but only respondent for One Nation vs Labor).   The funny thing is that very briefly some pollsters were attempting to use 2025 House of Reps preference flows but were dissuaded from doing so after I and others pointed out that this would make the flows to One Nation too high.

The Amazing 2026 South Australian Election: Final Lower House Results And Poll Performance

SA 2026 ALP 34 (+5) Lib 5 (-9) ON 4 (+4) IND 4 (-)
(Changes from pre-election/notional; Labor gained two seats from Liberal during 2022-6 term)

Estimated 2PP ALP 57.89 vs Liberal (+3.3)

Estimated "Shadow 2PP" ALP 58.19 vs One Nation

The 2026 South Australian lower house was remarkable in so many ways.  It makes Queensland 1998 seem almost boring by comparison, except that Queensland 1998 was there first.  Maybe all elections are going to be like this now and this soon will not seem so unusual but if that's so my colleagues and I are going to have a very busy time in the future!

All manner of curious things happened here.  Finally, someone (Lou Nicholson in Finniss) won a state or federal seat from fourth on primaries; hooray we have lived to see it.  Both majors missed the 2CP in Stuart and Mount Gambier in the first such cases since Nicklin 2001.  The Liberal Opposition missed more 2CPs (29) than they made (18) and were outpolled by One Nation (unprecedented) but are still the Opposition.  Worse than that they missed nine 3CPs as well and even managed to finish fifth in Port Adelaide and Black - Black being a seat they won at the previous election!  And so on.  It was obvious this was going to be a very messy election - a little while out I thought how on earth will we ever make a pendulum from THIS - but aspects of it were even more unique than I saw coming.

Tall Cories: Bernardi's Bunkum About Preferences

I was going to leave a comment about this until the next SA roundup but I feel that Cory Bernardi's nonsense about compulsory preferential voting should be dealt with a little faster than that.  Normally writing a whole article about what may well have just been a two-word misspeak might be considered mountain/molehill territory.  However Bernardi's statement has been reported uncritically by at least one media source, circulated by the party, and strangest by far, given a free pass on social media by some people who have brains.  

One Nation have also claimed off the back of Bernardi's comments that "we will make preference deals a thing of the past by giving voters the choice to distribute their preferences or not. "  But in fact optional preferencing doesn't do that.  It reduces the rate of deals as some parties choose not to recommend preferences, but many parties do still recommend preferences (which is what people often mean when they say "preference deals") and may negotiate about these decisions (actual deals).  There were several accusations about "preference deals" in the 2023 NSW state election.  

Will The Future See An Even Bigger Senate Crossbench?

It's a long way from the next Senate election to be talking about the future of the Senate, and also a strange time to be doing it with most observers far more fixated on the goings-on downstairs.  But someone is talking about it, so I thought I'd have a detailed look at what they are finding.  The Australia Institute has released a report that attempts to use polling to predict what the Senate might look like in 2019 and 2022.  (There's also a report in AFR, which was originally paywalled but at the moment I can access it OK.)

That another double dissolution "held now" would so flood the Senate with new crossbench Senators as to make the 2016 result look tame is really not worth contesting, and I'm not going to bother with double-dissolution projections off the current numbers.   What is of interest is that the report claims that even if the next two elections were half-Senate elections, on current polling the size of the non-Green portion of the crossbench would increase.  The report's headline projection for 2019 is an extra two non-Green crossbench Senators, and for 2022 after two half-Senate elections, an extra four.  Based on the averageing of two poll results, the report suggests that after two half-Senate elections, there could be a non-Greens crossbench of fourteen Senators, dominated by One Nation with six.

Poll Roundup: Feeble In February

2PP Aggregate: 53.5 to Labor (+1.1 since last 2016 reading)
Labor would comfortably win an election "held now"

It is one of nature's most amazing seasonal events.  As wildebeest migrate in vast numbers, as salmon throw themselves up rivers then spawn and die, so each February on the continent of Australia, a federal government disintegrates.  At least it seems this way, with polling for the incumbent government of the time having gone pearshape around this time in six of the last seven years.  Usually the causes for the downturn have been extremely obvious.

In the longer term this hasn't been such a thing, with average 2PP polling in February since 1986 (49.4% for the government) being only a point worse than those polls taken in January (50.4%) and no worse than polls taken in June and September.  But just in recent years there is something about the annual reopening of Parliament that tends to bring with it the smell of chaos.  What is happening with the current government is not (yet) as bad as the Week From Hell experienced by the Gillard government in 2013, but yet again we find a government under assault on multiple issues at once.