Four Year Terms? Fixed Terms? Fixed Four Year Terms? Part One - Polling

This week there was an article regarding a report released by a lobby group called 4 Year Terms Australia, which supports "fixed" four year terms for federal parliament.  The SMH report contained this very brief comment regarding polling:

"Polling commissioned from JWS Research found just one in five Australians supported the current system of three-year terms and the prime minister choosing the election date."

Well, from that it may sound like Australians would strongly support "fixed" four year terms, right?  In fact the polling cited tells a rather different story.

I've decided to write one article on this subject dealing mainly with the polling, to be probably (subject to time) followed by another in the near future dealing with the (de)merits of the issue.  That said there will be few surprises on the latter front to anyone who's seen my article re fixed terms in Tasmania or my 2025 JSCEM submission.   To summarise my views, I'm totally against "fixed" federal terms, whether by legislation or referendum.  I think that fixed term laws either fail to genuinely secure fixed dates or else prevent Prime Ministers from calling elections in circumstances where they should be able to.  I'm also against four year federal terms if it means eight year Senators.  

Voice Referendum: Turnout and Informal Votes

I haven't seen any other articles on these subjects so some coverage of turnout and informal votes in the Voice referendum.  

The most important thing to know about Voice turnout is that it was a lot higher than many people said it was going to be.  It indeed managed to just beat the 2022 House of Representatives turnout, but this is no great miracle alone given that the 2022 election was COVID-blighted.  What makes it more impressive was that it was acheived against the backdrop of an enrolment drive that made the roll more complete than ever before, putting more voters on the roll who had a relatively low chance of voting.  Another factor that makes the near-90% turnout commendable is that six years ago there was a mass voting type exercise that was voluntary, and there was some potential for confusion about whether voting in the referendum was required.

Just a disclaimer before I get much further: when I post graphs with low r-squared values (percentage of variation explained) I come across a few readers for whom a little knowledge of statistics is a dangerous thing and who will, sometimes irately, insist that anything below r-squared equals 0.3 or so is worthless.  In fact electoral statistics are very messy and even r-squared values of a few percent can be statistically significant if there are enough data points.  The important thing with such values is to be especially cautious about assuming causation since the causes of such patterns are often to be found elsewhere.  For instance, in the 1999 Republic referendum, seats with high Yes votes had low turnout, but that isn't because high support for Yes in an area caused people to not vote, it is mainly because inner city seats that tended naturally to vote Yes also have high numbers of transient young voters (who themselves would be likely to vote Yes if they voted at all).  

2023 Voice Referendum Live

No has won the Voice referendum and will win every state and NT

Yes will win ACT (does not count for double majority)

Yes tracking for vote just below 40% but exact vote still to settle.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Donations Welcome!

If you'd like to help support my coverage, there's a Paypal in the sidebar, or click on my profile to email me for account details.  

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Things We Won't Know Tonight

I am putting this paragraph at the top because every election some people jump the gun with comments about two issues before the count is finished.  We will not know the final turnout tonight or tomorrow - it will rise over the next two weeks as postal and absent votes are added.  Always there are articles and tweets complaining about how bad the turnout is at elections without waiting to see what the turnout ends as. 

Unless the result is very high or very low for Yes we won't know tonight which polls were the most accurate.    The referendum vote will shift in coming weeks, probably more so than a normal election.  Also, assessing polling accuracy at a referendum is complicated because many pollsters release final results with an undecided figure included.  We should have a rough idea of how good the polls were overall.

Also a note that nearly all informal votes will be deliberate (and not crosses).

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Live Comments

1:15 Signing off here after a result that after months of watching polling ended up extremely unsurprising.  It is also unsurprising by historic standards, a typical thrashing for a mid-term Labor referendum without bipartisan support.  There will be more to look at in coming days but for the moment, goodnight all!

Losing The Republic Like It's 1999: The Polling

The current Voice referendum with its rapidly declining support has brought back memories of referendums past.  Surprisingly, given that it's our most recent referendum, there has been little information available about the polling trajectory of the 1999 Republic defeat.  The received wisdom is that support for the Republic started off very high and ended up low, as happened with several other referendums (especially the 1988 quadruple failure) and as is so far happening with the Voice.

It turns out to be not so simple.  The story of the 1999 Republic referendum polling is one where only the last few months of data are all that usable, and in public polls at least, Yes was never all that much in front.

A summary of Republic polling is available in one paper available online but I thought, surely there was more?  I could not find any usable online archive of Republic referendum polling but what I did find, to my surprise, was some polling commentary in an article I published in Togatus April 1999.  1999 model me - not then a polling analyst so please cut some slack for misusing "push-poll" for a seriously bad polling question - wrote this:

"Poll results are confusing. In the last week of January the Age/AC Nielsen showed a national 41% yes vote, but Newspoll showed 58%.[*] The latter was a virtual push-poll because it included the statement 'this will most likely mean that the head of state will not be a politician' and ARM won't get even that simple message through to a thick republican public that mistakes an extra election with people-power."

[* 59% actually. This Newspoll wording was said to have been sourced from the ARM, and was roundly and rightly condemned by opponents as out of step with other polling at the time.]

In fact, question wording was a major issue in 1999 polling, and a case where public polling itself influenced the ballot paper design for the better.

Does Losing Mid-Term Referendums Help Australian Governments To Win The Next Election?

Short answer: there is no evidence it does.  

During the Voice referendum campaign a common view has emerged that a success for the No campaign will be bad news for the federal Opposition and its leader Peter Dutton for the next federal election.  The theory is that the Coalition's opposition to the Voice is already tying it to some strident political positions and that it will wear the blame for the defeat.  An example of this was a recent George Megalogenis article that initially claimed there was no precedent for an opposition leader taking down a referendum and winning the next election or the one after (which was edited after I and perhaps others pointed out Menzies winning in 1949 after defeating the Rents and Prices referendum in 1948).   Similar themes have also been present in the commentary of Professor Matt Qvortrup (who has incidentally long predicted that the Voice would lose, albeit recently with what looks like an optimistic Yes vote of 48 +/- 2.5%). Prof Qvortrup, who has great experience with overseas referendums, may well have evidence that referendum-defeat boost is a big trend overseas, though at a quick look I did not find any study to this effect.  

So, is there anything in this for Australia?  The paradigm case is supposed to be the 1951 defeat of the Communist Party ban referendum, in which Labor won the battle but lost the war: things said on the referendum trail made it easy for Prime Minister Menzies to tie them to Communism for many years after.  This narrative, however, seems simplistic to me, because the Opposition Leader (Evatt) not only said and did things on the referendum trail that made it easy to tie Labor to communism for campaigning purposes, but kept saying and doing such things forever after.

Voice Referendum Ticks And Crosses Beatup

I thought I should make some quick comments on the matter breaking yesterday (following a Sky News interview) regarding the use of ticks and crosses in the Voice referendum.  There was sudden outrage on various right-leaning outlets and from politicians including the Leader and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party when it was noticed that the AEC's ballot formality guidelines advise that ticks in referendums are treated as formal votes for Yes while crosses are treated as informal.  This has led to a fairly large outbreak of clueless wheel-reinvention and simple-minded outrage on social media.  It is doubtless worse on talkback.

I should note clearly near the top that the ballot paper will instruct voters to vote "Yes" or "No", and they will also be instructed thusly verbally if they are voting in a booth.  This debate only concerns the tiny minority who fail to follow the instructions.

Voice Polling: The Sleeping Double Majority Curse

Yes trails about 45.0-55.0 in aggregated public polling (as of 13 Aug, pending new data)

No now leading on aggregate in every state, but Yes still ahead of national total in four states

Time for another Voice polling roundup.  There has been relatively little new data in the four weeks since the last update and this article includes some historic analysis that suggests that the current state polling picture for the Voice is actually highly unusual.  At the moment the state polling picture is irrelevant because No is ahead nationwide, but a benign state distribution is one thing Yes does have going for it should the national picture improve or if polls are underestimating Yes for some unprecedented reason.  What I find here is that it is almost unprecedented historically for the state picture not to be a drag, so it will be interesting to see if that holds up.  Is the double majority a sleeping curse that will wake up in the months to come or in the final results, or is it really going to be a non-issue this time around?  It turns out that if it is a non-issue, there's a reason for it, and that reason is Queensland.

Voice Referendum Polling: No Leads / Indigenous Support Levels

TWO-ANSWER TREND ESTIMATE YES 47.8 (-2.8 in four weeks)

Aggregated polls have Yes losing in five states and trailing the national average in three (two narrowly)

(Above estimates may be updated if new polls are added in next few weeks)

----

Greetings.  I was going to call this article "Welcome to No" but thought of some wrong ways that that could be taken.

Four weeks ago my last Voice update still had Yes very slightly ahead but the lead was not long for this world.  Unsurprisingly in this edition Yes is still going downhill rapidly and is now clearly behind in my aggregated estimate.  The most recently added polls are Newspoll with a 46-54 result and Resolve with 48-52 (and an even worse 36-42-22 prior to the forced-choice question).  

Voice Referendum Polling: The Last Days Of The Yes Ascendancy?

TWO-ANSWER POLLING AVERAGE TREND: 50.1 TO YES (-3.9 in about a month)

(estimate updated 11 July, will be edited if more polls before next article)

(UPDATES ADDED: Notes rejecting the ACM reader survey, the Paterson Tele-Town Hall robopoll and the Australia Institute, plus Essential added 11 July)

----------------------------------------

It's only three weeks since the last one, but this week's Newspoll (among other developments) merits another chapter in the story of the referendum Yes vote's decline.  Sure, maybe I should do a federal roundup sometime, but on the other hand there's still not much to see there.  I can do it in a paragraph: Labor is currently at about 55.8% 2PP as a cross-poll average. While Anthony Albanese himself is being quickly cut down to merely mild popularity, there is no end yet to honeymoon vote shares for his party.  Even this week's 54-46 Newspoll came off primaries that would normally be good for 55.  There are some signs of improvement for Peter Dutton, whose own ratings have gone up just a little and whose deficit on Newspoll Better PM (20 points) is now not much larger than that indicator historically skews by.  So there are a few signs that at least leadership polling has the potential to get more interesting, but for now at least the Voice is where it's at.

Voice Referendum Polling: The Yes Vote Keeps On Falling

Current estimate of national Yes vote (two-answer basis): 54%

(Note added 12 June: an update on the Resolve poll has been added at the bottom of the article.)

---------------

Two months after my first article on Voice referendum polling, it's time for a second.  This week saw the release of a new Newspoll with the worst result for Yes of any reputable poll so far, though Yes was still ahead nationally, just, 46-43.  The poll lead to a spectacular display of unhinging on Twitter from the usual army of drips, megaphones and rusted-ons. Many of these responded by posting completely and obviously false claims about Newspoll's track record, including falsely claiming it had failed to predict Labor victories in recent elections.  I even saw one tweet that claimed Newspoll had wrongly forecast Liberal wins in all state and federal elections in the last three years.  In fact the final Newspolls in every relevant case had Labor winning (with 2PPs in chronological order of 51.5, 66, 53, 54, 54.5 and 54.5) and Labor duly won the lot (with 2PPs of 53.1, 69.7, 52.1, 54.6, 55.0 and 54.3).

One can only wonder what these people will do if, or looking more likely at the moment when, the first poll with No ahead pokes its head above the parapet.  At the current rate of progress, that day might not be far away.  The Yes vote is tanking according to polls.  While it does depend to some degree on which poll one examines and poll wording, the overall downhill trend I highlighted in early April has shown no sign of stopping in the last two months. 

Voice Referendum Polling: Yes Is Well Ahead But It Is Getting Closer

I've been meaning for some time to put up an article about the already very often polled issue that is the upcoming Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, not so much to talk about results of specific polls but to cover general issues that are important in framing discussion of the polling and the outlook for the first referendum since 1999.  Following the release of the question wording and the Coalition's announcement that it will support a No vote to the current wording, now seems as good a time as any (the truth being up til now I simply haven't had the time!)

Some basics: referendums in Australia have a well-known record of mostly failing (8 successes out of 44) but as noted by Peter Brent the record is even worse if introduced by Labor (1 out of 25).  Referendums introduced mid-term are especially prone to being treated like by-elections and thus drubbed.  A mid-term referendum introduced by Labor and lacking bipartisan support is historically the kind of horse whose prospects are summarised in form guides with the word "No."  Can the Voice referendum defy these odds?  

A general trend in polling of referendum-type measures is underestimation of the No vote in final polls, and we saw this most recently here with the same sex marriage postal survey.  But not only can final polls underestimate the No vote, it is also the case that support for referendum measures can decline, sometimes very dramatically, over the course of the debate.