Dear Anti-Preferencers, November 21st For Australia Day !!!

Support for changing the date of Australia Day has really been on the skids in recent years.  Partly this has been because referendums have consequences and the failed sloppy Voice referendum push seems to have reduced interest in reconciliation generally.  Partly it's because the cost of living crisis that was especially acute during 2024 has created a strong sense of 'now is not the time' and that there are bigger problems than symbolic stuff that doesn't materially affect lives.  It's also likely that in the wake of the Bondi attack, there is an even stronger feeling that now is the time for 'coming together as a nation and not having that old argument again this year'.   As a possible fourth factor I wonder if support for Invasion Day agitation was stronger a few years ago just because the Coalition was in power.  

While a lot of the polling out there on this issue is of low quality and/or conflicted, polling for change the date has overall been in freefall in recent years and my estimate is that support for change could be down below 25% nationwide, from pushing 40% a few years ago.  (Resolve recently even had it down from 39-47 support-oppose to a pathetic 16-68 but I'm doubtful that the change has been quite that large. Morgan's SMS poll still had 39.5% for change on a yes-no basis, albeit after a question that asked if Jan 26 should be called "Australia Day" or "Invasion Day").    Whatever the exact numbers, Australia Day isn't going anywhere any time soon, and I cannot remember a time for decades when the change the date campaign seemed less visible.  

Recent State Election Polling Does Not Skew To Labor

Advance Summary

1. A major polling failure in the 2019 Australian federal election has been attributed to unrepresentative sampling, coupled with inadequate reweighting, that produced a large skew in primary vote and 2PP estimates in Labor's favour.   

2. A recent report argues that a skew in federal 2PP polling was present throughout the period 2010-2019 and was not specific to 2019.  

3. If this was the case, and was so for the same reason, then a skew to the ALP should also be expected from the much larger sample of state-level final polls taken over the same period.

4. However, state level polls in Australia from 2010-2020 do not display any overall two-party skew to the ALP.

5. Also, while federal polling for 2010 overestimated Labor, final 2PP polling at the 2013 and 2016 federal elections was mostly very accurate.

6. While federal polls overall (not all specific polls) do have a record through recent decades of on average overestimating the Labor 2PP, this record is much inflated by a single pollster (Morgan).

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The UK And Australian Elections Weren't That Similar

Last week the UK had its second straight surprising election result.  In 2015 an expected cliffhanger turned into an easy win for the Conservatives while in 2017 an expected landslide turned into a cliffhanger.  The government went to the polls three years early (that's a whole term over here), supposedly in search of a strong mandate for its position on Brexit, yet came away with fewer seats than it went in with.  The real motive seemed to be to turn a big lead in the polls into a bigger majority, and if that was the aim then it backfired spectacularly.

In the wake of this result the Australian commentariat have put out several articles that seek to stress parallels with Australian politics.  The primary themes of these articles are as follows: that Malcolm Turnbull is Theresa May and that Anthony Albanese is Jeremy Corbyn.

Let's start with the Turnbull-May comparison.  Turnbull has no hope of winning the battle of perceptions on this one, because it's the kind of analogy many of those who consume political chatter will congratulate themselves on having thought of first.  But on a factual basis, the comparison is twaddle.

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.

Trump Wins: Another Major Poll And Modelling Failure

Well here we are again.  As with the UK election, as with Brexit, as with many other voluntary voting elections we have an unexpected result with the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the USA.  Pollsters are in disrepute because most had Clinton with a modest popular-vote lead, but overconfident modellers deserve their share of the blame for the level of public surprise at the result.

A few days ago, Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight was the target of a terrible Huffington Post article and an argument broke out about whether it was more accurate to say Donald Trump had about a one in three chance of becoming President, or virtually no chance at all.  HuffPo was to double down with this rather pretentious piece by a stats prof accusing Silver of overstimating Trump's chances - a piece that has proved to have an exceedingly short shelf life indeed.  Silver's model might not look crash hot in the wake of what has happened, but it still looks a great deal better than those that were saying Trump had only a 1% chance of winning.

Poll Roundup: The Turnbull Slide Continues

2PP Aggregate: 51.8 to ALP (-0.1 since last week)
Labor would probably win election "held now" with a small majority

Almost four months since its re-election, the Turnbull coalition government continues to poll ordinarily.  It has still not led in a single poll by anyone, and only now are there some signs that Labor's lead might be stabilising.  With a new bad news cycle hitting the government, oh, about twice a day on average lately, there might even be relief it is not worse ... yet.  An implicit stoush between PM Turnbull and Tony Abbott over the history of rapid-fire shotgun negotiations might have looked like fodder for further movement, but Newspoll suggests it was seen as just beltway stuff.

Most of our polling still comes just from Essential and Newspoll though this week a third player, Morgan, dipped a very tentative toe in the water with one of its irregular phone polls.  The only voting intention result released was 55:45 to ALP, easily Labor's biggest lead from anyone so far.  Given the small sample size and the lack of adequate documentation of 2PP method or primary votes, this only counted for 10% of a normal poll in my aggregate, but even that made some difference.