Not-A-Poll Reset: Palaszczuk Resigns

It's time to reset the Next Leader To Go Not-A-Poll in the sidebar after the resignation of Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and her replacement by Steven Miles.  Yet again there was the appearance of a Labor leadership contest that could in theory have gone to a lengthy ballot but for the third time this year the potential contest evaporated.  Member ballots in the Labor Party have been effective in putting a stop to coup culture but far from giving members a much greater say in leadership contests they have instead resulted in there hardly being any contests!

Palaszczuk won the 2015 Queensland election from opposition in a stunning result after her party had been reduced to just seven seats in the 2012 landslide.  Initially governing in minority, she won a majority in 2017 and increased it in the 2020 pandemic election.  Palaszczuk's was in general a steady, middle of the road, almost apolitical government that did not arouse passions either way in the manner of its Victorian counterpart.  If politics in Queensland was not wildly exciting since 2015, Palaszczuk at least deserves credit for restoring it to sanity and stability after the chaos of the Bligh and Newman years.  She is also the only Australian female Premier thus far to win two elections, let alone three, and is still the only female Opposition Leader state or federal to lead her party into government. 

Palaszczuk's ratings were at times mediocre.  She had a -7 netsat in the final 2017 Newspoll, though this was far better than her opponent's.  She slipped to a net -15 in YouGov in early 2020 before being boosted into the low +30s by her handling of the lockdown phase later that year.  She was quite popular towards the end of 2022 but started recording her worst ratings in 2023, especially from mid-year on.  Voters perceived that she had been a good Premier but was no longer in touch.  

Mid-Term Queensland Polling, And The Misreporting Thereof

Just a reminder before I start this one that tomorrow is Button Press Day in Victoria and the action can be followed on the thread below this one.  It's not really democracy but it can still be fun!  I am working on some wrap-up material for the Victorian lower house too, but am being held up by some unclarities regarding 2PP issues (mainly an apparent error in the seat of Pascoe Vale.)

Yesterday Queensland was treated to not one but two state voting intention polls, but also, alas, to some of the worst poll reporting I have seen.  In the recent Victorian state election the Herald-Sun engaged in absurd poll-spinning and stairs-fall-truthing only to embarrass itself completely as the eight-year old Andrews government returned with a slightly increased majority (the oldest state government to do so since 1986).  The Courier-Mail, which has kept playing the same silly game although the side it barracks for has won just one and a half of the last twelve elections, also seems determined not to learn. 

Queensland 2020: Final Results And Poll Accuracy

 Queensland: ALP 52 LNP 34 KAP 3 GREEN 2 PHON 1 IND 1

2PP Estimate 53.13% to Labor (+1.9% from 2017)

Another Queensland election is over.  In 2017 I wrote that the 2017 election had been "one where a great many dramatic things could have happened, but virtually none of them did", and in some ways this one has been similar.  Nonetheless, the Queensland election has again thrown up more than its fair share of electoral curiosities.  

Historic patterns

This election yet again showed that state and federal politics are fundamentally different and that projecting state elections from federal elections (just because it's easy) is false consciousness.  The 2PP result was over eleven points different from the 2019 federal election in Queensland.

In the leadup to the election I was curious about whether not being in government federally should provide an ongoing boost to the Palaszczuk Government so I wrote this.  Based on the age of this Queensland government and the fact that Labor is in opposition federally, the average expected result was a net gain of 2.5 seats.  The actual result, after two very close seat wins and one close loss, was a four-seat gain, so very close to the historic expectation.  The government was helped, perhaps decisively, by the pro-incumbency mood during COVID-19, but had also had some wear and tear during the term.  By election day the government was polling very well in terms of personal approvals of Annastacia Palaszczuk and which party was best to handle the economy, and it seems these polls were telling us something the voting intention polls were not.

Queensland 2020: Rolling Final Days Roundup

I'll be covering the Queensland election here on election night and in detail throughout the postcount, though on some days I may be busy with other things during the day.  

Another Queensland election count is a day and a bit away and there's a distinct lack of data for the usual polling aggregation/modelling type game, so I've decided to start a rolling roundup article which will cover a number of possible themes.  When new polls appear - assuming they do - new sections covering them will be posted at the top of the article. I also have a new article in The Guardian.  I should clarify that I didn't speak to any of the nameless insiders personally, and was going off other media reports.  There were reports since I filed that one that unnamed Labor insiders were more confident yesterday because internal polls had supposedly shown an uptick following one of those debates that nobody much watches.  This narrative was gleefully and even gullibly snapped up by Sky, perhaps because it was useful for attacking Gladys Berejiklian.  The NSW Premier will doubtless be scapegoated in the event of an LNP loss even if there is nothing special in the early/late voting history to justify such a charge.

Newspoll: The Sound Of Narratives Dying

 This week's Newspoll results have included fresh approval ratings for Labor Premiers Daniel Andrews (Vic) and Annastacia Palaszczuk (Qld), along with a number of issues questions regarding handling of COVID-19.  These are well worthy of comment - Victoria especially - along with some brief comments on less striking results (but strikingly if typically bad reporting) in federal Newspoll land.

Victoria

A widespread narrative in Victoria has been that Premier Daniel Andrews is severely on the nose and his Premiership is in crisis, either because of the second wave of COVID-19 in the state that resulted from avoidable quarantine failures on his watch, or from the severity of lockdowns deployed in response to (so far successfully) bring new case numbers down.  

Victoria has recently seen public voting intention polling, finally, via a 51.5-48.5 lead in Roy Morgan Research's SMS polling.  I am not a fan of SMS polls as a method (I think they are too prone to motivated response), and Morgan's recent state polls have a history of volatility and being rather inaccurate, but at least this is something.  Also, ALP-linked campaigning firm Red Bridge has issued a 53.5-46.5 result for Labor.  These results followed Liberal Party MediaReach polling that had the Liberals picking up massive swings in a group of Labor-held seats (which if applied statewide would see Labor losing), but this is the same firm that, for instance, had the Territory Alliance on course to be the largest party in the NT parliament (it won a single seat very narrowly).  The internal poll also showed a rather heavy fall in the Greens vote, which seemed unlikely in the absence of anything that would cause it and given the general resilience of the Greens vote in recent elections (OK, except for Eden-Monaro.)  

Unpopular State Premiers Still Have Dire Historic Fates

It's been over a month since I posted a new article on this page, though updates to previous articles have continued, especially Eden-Monaro.  I have some vague idea where that time went (a number of distractions from psephology lately) but there hasn't been a huge amount going on lately and I tend not to write just for the sake of having something up.  There will always be something new here eventually!

This article is another piece where I update a previously published article from some time ago and see whether the pattern described in it is still holding up.  Today's target for an update is Unpopular State Premiers Have Dire Historic Fates, from 2013.  This article was inspired by a bad Newspoll for then Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett.  Barnett had been re-elected with a 57.3% 2PP nine months earlier so it probably seemed adventurous to see a single Newspoll still showing his government in a narrow lead as the first of the circling vultures.  But it was - Barnett survived a leadership challenge in 2016 but was dumped by the voters in 2017 with an enormous 12.8% swing.

He wasn't alone.  Since I released the original article, Campbell Newman was dumped by voters with a massive swing, as was Lara Giddings. Jay Weatherill also lost (albeit with a 2PP swing to him) and Mike Baird, who had been very popular in his first term, became somewhat unpopular in his second and resigned.  The four election defeats for unpopular Premiers helped beef up the evidence that it is the voters, and not just the parties, who tend to show them the door.  In the same time, Premiers who had not polled such bad ratings in their terms were re-elected twice in NSW and once each in Queensland, SA, Victoria and Tasmania, with Victoria's Dennis Napthine (worst netsat -4) the sole casualty to not poll a bad rating.  The chart below (click for larger clearer version) shows the fates of every state Premier who has polled a netsat worse than -10 in Newspoll history (which starts in 1985).  Premiers are sorted by the worst netsat they polled during the term.

Newspoll: Record Premier Ratings And A Very Strange Federal Poll

This week Newspoll polled state Premier approval ratings, but not voting intentions (perhaps because samples by state would have been too small for voting intention sampling).  It was to be expected that several state Premiers would have very high approval ratings given their handling of the coronavirus crisis, but perhaps not that the figures would be quite so spectacular:

Prev = previous poll.  *= As opposition leader.  #=YouGov poll not branded as Newspoll.

As high as Scott Morrison's current net rating of +40 is (more on that later), all the Premiers except Palaszczuk have beaten it.  None of them were coming off a particularly high base, though the most recent polling for Victoria and WA is ancient.  For Tasmania this is the first Newspoll of Premier satisfaction since the 2014 state election.

Queensland 2020: Currumbin By-Election and YouGov Poll

(Now added: Bundamba, scroll down)
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Queensland is heading for at least one unexpectedly interesting by-election early in another state election year.  Also, a new YouGov poll has come out that has been the subject of incorrect reporting concerning the Premier's unpopularity.  I thought it would be useful to have a post up covering these two issues in detail.

Currumbin (LNP, 3.3%)
By-election March 28

Currumbin is in Queensland's far south-eastern corner and includes the border town of Coolangatta (now a Gold Coast suburb) and surrounding southern Gold Coast suburbs and rural hinterland to the west of them.  It has been held by the retiring member, Jann Stuckey, since 2004, but before that was held by Labor's Merri Rose for 12 years.  From 1992 (when Rose first ran) until 2001 the seat was more Labor-friendly than the state average, but this ended with Rose's fall from grace and Cabinet in 2004 and since then it has reverted to being slightly LNP-leaning compared to the state average.  It is possible, as the departing incumbent Jann Stuckey suggests, that Currumbin is an electorate where perceptions of the candidate matter more than elsewhere.

Queensland: The Election Polls Forgot

Queensland Aggregate: Labor 35.9 LNP 33.9 One Nation 13.3 Green 9.6 Other 7.3
2PP off this aggregate: 52.5 to Labor
Seat projection off this aggregate: Labor 51 LNP 37 PHON 3 KAP 2 
(Greens may win 1-2 seats instead, but not enough reliable evidence re Greens' chances)
Uncertainties: limited polling dominated by a single pollster, change in preferencing method and likely preferencing behaviour

Nearly three years ago an incumbent Queensland government was leading about 52-48 in the polls and polling analysts generally though that it might lose but would probably be returned.  We were wrong; it did very narrowly lose, mainly because of a radical shift in preferencing behaviour by voters for minor parties.

Three years later, some of the problems are the same.  A radical shift in preferencing behaviour is possible in theory, because Pauline Hanson's One Nation was just a minor presence last election but is now gathering a double-digit vote.  Moreover, some polls have showed One Nation voters as much more likely to preference the conservative side of politics than they used to be - a situation consistent with the party attracting a lot of ex-Coalition supporters.

Divergence In The Queensland Polls Is Caused By Preferences

Newspoll 53-47 to Labor, ReachTEL 52-48 to LNP - what gives?

A Queensland state election is coming soon, possibly very soon.  Electoral history tells us little of what to expect here. First-term state governments are usually returned, as are state governments that are of the opposite party to the party in power federally.  However, the former might not apply when the government was elected almost accidentally, and the latter is most at risk of falling over when a government has been a messy minority regime.  But if we turn to polling for the answers, whether the Palaszczuk government is cruising or crashing depends on which pollster you ask.

Through 2017 there has been a major divergence between the media-commissioned polls of ReachTEL and those by the Galaxy stable (sometimes branded as Galaxy, sometimes as Newspoll).  Three media ReachTEL polls have all shown the government trailing in the two-party-preferred contest (47% in February, 49% in June and 48% just now.)  Three Galaxys and a Newspoll have all shown the government ahead (51% February, 52% May, 51% August, 53% July-September quarterly).  On average, that's a 3.75-point two-party difference between the two stables, way too large over so many polls to be explained by chance or fluctuations from month to month in support.  Either the truth is somewhere in the middle and an election now would be extremely close, or somebody is right and someone's wrong.

Queensland: One Nation Have Peaked, So Now What?

I last looked at Queensland state polling back in February, when a rampant One Nation were polling 23% in state voting intention and threatening to win something like 15 seats at the next state election.  A lot has happened in the few months since.  In the Western Australian state election, both the party itself and the Liberals' preference deal with it got found out in the heat of the campaign. What benefit on preferences accrued from the deal was drowned out by its distraction factor and damage to primary vote support for all involved.

As One Nation 2.0 comes under further scrutiny, it is under attack on two major fronts.  Firstly there's the suggestion that the party is simply corrupt, as seen in the current scandals surrounding the undeclared provision of a plane by a property developer and the recording of a meeting in which James Ashby seems to have seriously suggested a blatant electoral expenses rort.  Secondly, the party sends mixed messages about whether it is a purist party of revolt against existing politics, or an active inside player that wants to supplant the Nationals on the Coalition side.  This is making it harder for it to take votes away from Labor.

Queensland Galaxy Says Game On For PHON Balance Of Power

Queensland Galaxy: Labor 31 LNP 33 PHON 23 Green 8 KAP 3 Other 2

A Queensland state poll by Galaxy, published in the Courier-Mail, tells a story that should have both major parties quite concerned.  If this poll is correct and typical, it is 1998 all over again and a bit more.  Perhaps the current One Nation polling bubble will burst before an election that is possibly still most of a year away.  If it doesn't, then a weakened minority government facing an unpopular opposition presents a dream scenario for Australia's number one nineties nostalgia party to break through at state level and obtain some serious power there.  Whether it would manage to remain remotely united this time if it did, nobody knows. 

 The high One Nation vote should be considered no surprise following polls showing the party at 16% in Western Australia, 16.3% in NSW and 9.4% in Victoria.  Queensland always was the party's strongest state.  It's possible even that the figure is an underestimate, but I am not that convinced that One Nation voters are all that shy anymore.

Sample size issues aside (and I haven't seen the sample size for this poll yet) there is one big reason to treat this poll with unusual caution.  It comes during a lousy news cycle for the government following the resignation of Transport Minister Stirling Hinchcliffe in response to a damning report on the failings of Queensland Rail.  I would expect that event to be deflating Labor's primary vote, and everything I say below should be taken with that caveat.

Queensland: Compulsory Preferencing And Recent Polling

Because of other distractions (see articles below) I've been a bit slow dealing with Queensland's sudden return to compulsory preferencing, but fortunately in this time a new state poll has arrived that is highly relevant to the issue.

For those who spent a couple of hours asleep last Thursday, that was about all it took for Labor to amend an LNP motion to expand the parliament from 89 to 93 seats and make it conditional on a return to compulsory preferencing.  The LNP voted against the amendment but the KAP and ex-Labor crossbenchers supported it and in the end the LNP didn't even vote against the amended bill.  It was vintage roughshod Queensland politics in its execution - moving it as an amendment meant it could be passed without prolonged discussion or a committee process, and Queensland of course has no upper house to get in the way.  It all gave the appearance of a tactical disaster for the Lawrence Springborg-led LNP (allowing such a major concession while fishing for crumbs) and again raised concerns of friends and foes alike as to whether the Queensland Opposition has all that much upstairs strategically.

Strange Times In Queensland Polling

Galaxy Queensland: 52:48 to ALP based on composite preferences
Based on last election preferences 54:46 to ALP
Result based on this poll if election "held now": Easy Labor win (approx 54 ALP, 32 LNP, 2 KAP, 1 Ind)
However, most other polling so far has suggested little change since 2015 election

Update added for Aug-Sep Newspoll (53:47/55:45)

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A new state government has won a remarkable victory, ousting the regime that had thrashed it three years earlier after just one term despite having been almost wiped off the political map.  Six months into its term, and despite a significant scandal that has endangered its already fragile hold on power, its primary vote has been polled at two and a half points above its election result, the Opposition is down a similar amount and the most supportive minor party's share of the third-party vote has improved.  Not the greatest honeymoon in polling history but still, all things considered, pretty good?

Well, supposedly not.  According to reporting (?) of a newly released Galaxy of Queensland state voting intention, the Palaszczuk Government has "stalled", "stagnated", "received no bounce from handing down last month's state budget".  Apparently it "hasn't been much of a honeymoon period [..] in stark contrast to the burgeoning support being enjoyed by governments in southern states".  The Premier's popularity has "failed to prompt any new love for Labor".  Her government "could scrape over the line" but "would rely heavily on votes flowing strongly from preferences".  The government apparently should be concerned that it's been "unable to convince more Queenslanders they're a competent administration" and unless it can prove it is doing something then "the patience voters have shown will run out".

What is going on here?  What's going on is what happens when you take the Courier-Mail's oft-noted love of curious poll-spinning and combine it with an understandable, but nonetheless unusual, preferencing practice.  This article looks at how the Palaszczuk government is really going in terms of known public polling.

Poll Roundup: Discordant Polls But No Real Change

2PP Aggregate: 52.5 to ALP (+0.1 since last week)
ALP would win election held now with small to moderate majority

As my colleague Mark the Ballot notes, federal polling lately has been decidedly two-tone.  With the exception of Essential (which Mark ignores), once you adjust recent polls for what is known about their house effects, they tend to be either reasonable for the Coalition (the last two Newspolls, the most recent Morgan) or very bad for them (ReachTEL, Ipsos).  Individual poll results that are strong or weak create excited commentary in the media but on average there is not a great deal happening.  Here's the smoothed tracking graph:

There's a weak hint of a slow move to the Coalition over recent weeks, but there's been no significant 2PP change for over a month.  Indeed, because the aggregate had some lag from the Coalition's dire February polling for a few weeks, it may be that nothing has really happened in 2PP voting intention since the beginning of March.

Queensland: LNP Leads After Week One

Queensland Aggregate: LNP 41.4 ALP 37.9 Green 7 PUP 4.6 Other 9
2PP based on last-election preferences: 51.8% to LNP
Election held now would most likely result in LNP majority government (approx 47-37-5)

Polling in late 2014 showed the Liberal National Party government in Queensland in a precarious if probably still just winning position (Beautiful One Day, Lineball The Next).  Following the calling of a snap election for January 31, however, the three polls so far released in the first week are a little less disastrous and suggest that an election held right now would likely result in a narrow LNP majority.

The ReachTEL poll was discussed in the previous article and has been followed by:

* A Galaxy (sample size 800, 7-8 Jan) with a 2PP of 52-48 to the LNP off primaries of 41-38 with 8 for the Greens, a remarkably feeble 3 for Palmer United and 10 for Others including KAP. 

* A Newspoll (sample size 801, 6-8 Jan) with a 2PP of 53-47 to the LNP off primaries of 42-37 with 7 for the Greens, 1 for KAP and 13 for Others including PUP.

Note that these polls were taken entirely before the announcement that Labor deputy leader Tim Mulherin would retire.

Queensland: Beautiful One Day, Lineball The Next

Estimated Queensland state 2PP based on late 2014 polling and first 2015 poll: 50.2-49.8 to LNP (revised from 50.1 to ALP)
LNP would probably retain office in an election "held now", but would be at substantial risk of loss of majority
(This is not a prediction of the election result yet, as voting intentions may change)

With the Victorian election and its unsurprising result out of the way, it is time to look north to a much murkier contest.  The Queensland state election could in theory be held as late as June, but the government's three-year anniversary comes up in late March, and there are persistent rumours that it will be called slightly earlier, for late February or early March.  I previously covered Queensland state polling in four articles last year:

Is Campbell Newman Actually In Trouble? (late April through June)
Careful With That Queensland Pendulum, Eugene (July)
Recent Queensland and Victorian Polling (August)
Recent Polling In Four States (October)

The story for much of 2014 was pretty similar.  The Newman government held a small to modest aggregated 2PP lead and was facing a swing that would cost it dozens of seats but not necessarily government.  Particular polls were sometimes interpreted as showing that the government would actually lose, but either those polls were outliers or the interpretation was dodgy.  The problem always was that one of the doomed seats, all else being equal, was Premier Campbell Newman's own seat of Ashgrove, and all the polling in Ashgrove suggested that all else was in fact equal and that if the election was even remotely close then the Premier's seat would be toast.  Furthermore, Newman at various stages through the year was mildly to distinctly unpopular both in his own seat and in Queensland as a whole.

Recent Victorian and Queensland Polling

This week is officially a "boring week" in federal polling so far, with only Essential appearing to date.  Essential moved back to Labor by one point to 52:48, but that was from a Coalition-friendly excursion that no other pollster had been replicating, and so there is no net move on my aggregate, which stays at 52.3.  However, this will reset to 52.1 if nothing happens before midnight tonight, since the probably unrepresentative result of the Newspoll before last will fall out of the system. If there is nothing else today then the aggregate will briefly be based on just three current polls.  So much for too much polling!  At this stage, the touted Fairfax replacement for Nielsen has yet to surface.

The coming federal polling will be of interest to see whether Bill Shorten's clearing by Victoria Police of a decades-old rape claim has any impact on perceptions of Shorten as a leader; indeed, it will be the first time for quite a while that Shorten's ratings have been of much interest or driven by anything.  I don't think we'll know the answer right away.  There may well be sympathy for him in the short term, and then it depends on whether the whole story dies off or branches out in new directions.  More on that next week.

Queensland Polling: Careful With That Pendulum, Eugene

ReachTEL (Queensland): 51:49 to LNP (LNP 38.7 ALP 34.4 Greens 6.1 PUP 15.4 Other 5.4)
Interpretation based on this poll "if election held now": LNP would probably win; majority status touch and go.
Widespread claim that poll implies c. 40 seat losses and defeat for LNP is wrong.

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I'm currently conducting a poll on the sidebar on whether readers want more shorter federal polling articles instead of longer ones with updates tacked onto the end. The results will also be used to inform how I cover state polls for states other than Tasmania.  This piece (not that it's that short) is a bit of a trial run for the more-but-shorter option and will not be endlessly updated.  One of my main concerns about the shorter option has been how to keep the titles snappy, rather than having an endless procession of pieces called "Poll Roundup Week 37" or "Essential: 51:49 For The Sixth Week In A Row While The Universe Burns". Anyway, I hope that the title for this one passes muster, with apologies to early Pink Floyd and to all readers whose name is actually Eugene.

For an extreme example of how I've approached state polls up til now, see my previous Queensland article Is Campbell Newman Actually In Trouble?, which started in April and ran through to the end of June.  The comments on the recent quarterly Newspoll aggregate (51-49 to Labor) bear repeating: while the result was more generous to Labor than everything else about in recent months, it did put a dampener on weak signs that the LNP were recovering from the low-50s 2PPs they were getting in previous months.  The poll also showed Campbell Newman at a new personal low: a -24 Newspoll netsat, giving him the worst result for any Queensland Premier bar Bjelke-Petersen and Bligh.  I noted that if Newman can win the next election he will equal Bob Carr's record for the worst netsat from which any Australian state premier in the last few decades has been re-elected.  That said, given that the poll was worse for the LNP than others around the same time, it may be exaggerating Newman's plight.

Is Campbell Newman Actually In Trouble?

Updated in May and June - scroll to bottom of article.

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Life isn't easy for conservative state and territory leaders anymore.  Of the five who came to power during the Rudd/Gillard years, Barry O'Farrell, Ted Baillieu and Terry Mills all failed to make it to the next election, and Colin Barnett won re-election comfortably but his polling has been on the skids (see Unpopular Premiers Have Dire Historic Fates).   Now, the future of Campbell Newman, whose government must go to an election by the middle of 2015 and is likely to go to the polls a few months earlier, is also attracting speculation.

Newman's position has always looked dicey because of the nature of the seat he holds, Ashgrove. Newman's electorate had been held by Labor for 26 of the previous 29 years at the time he won it, and it typically runs about six points above the state average for the ALP.  So, all else being equal, the Coalition would only win this seat in years when they recorded about 56% of the two-party preferred vote statewide.