uComms: Labor Just 23: How Much Stock Should We Put In This?

This article is part of my 2024 Tasmanian election coverage - link to main page including links to electorate guides and effective voting advice.

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

uComms (Australia Institute) Liberal 37.1 Labor 23 Green 13.7 JLN 8.5 IND 12.8 others 5.0
Seat estimate if poll was accurate Lib 14 ALP 10 Green 4 JLN 2-3 IND 4-5
Poll should be treated with caution.

Today saw the the release of the third Tasmanian campaign poll by an established and identified pollster, this one being a uComms for the left-wing Australia Institute.

From the outset I should note some usual cautions.  uComms polls by automated phone polling (formerly all robopolling, lately a mix of SMS and voice robopolling).  The poll employs very primitive weighting (age, gender and location only, with no attempt to weight by any indicator of political engagement such as education).  At the 2021 election an Australia Institute uComms poll which I disputed at the time (What's This Then?  Commissioned Poll Claims Liberals In Trouble) was hopelessly inaccurate, underestimating the Liberals by over 7% and overestimating Labor by nearly 4 and independents by nearly 5.  There was never any attempt to explain why this poll got it so wrong.  

Poll Roundup: 2022 Seat Poll Sludgefest

This is the second part of what was at first intended as a single roundup, and deals with seat polls and seat betting.  Any new seat polls will continue to be updated on this page until election day while a seat betting update will probably be added to a final roundup tomorrow night.

As a general comment, 2022 has seen a major change in the election seat polling landscape.  At previous recent elections, published seat polls were dominated (in public attention if not always in numbers) by major national players - YouGov, ReachTEL, the old Newspoll and so on, or at least by specialised pollsters who were distant from campaigns (JWS).  Often the seat polls still sucked.  In 2013 they skewed to Coalition on average (some firms more than others), in 2016 they were under-dispersed and in 2019 they did well at picking winners but badly when they sat on the fence (and they also skewed to Labor).  But at least they were neutral attempts by pollsters with skin in the national game.  

At this election YouGov has so far given seat polling the flick and instead switched to its MRP model (discussed too briefly in a previous edition).  The seat poll landscape has been dominated by uComms (a union-connected pollster with simplistic weightings and an ordinary recent track record), Redbridge (another campaign-focused pollster with often weird methods decisions and a remarkable ability to detect UAP voters), and to a lesser extent Utting Research and KJC/Telereach, neither of whom have had much public testing and the first of which is not an APC member, with publication of details rarely exceeding a single media article.  The overwhelming method of seat polling has been robopolling of often already saturated seats (one voter in Swan this week told me they'd been polled seven times).  Moreover, the two most commonly seen pollsters have been mostly conducting internal and campaign-adjacent polls rather than media-commissioned polls.   The seat polling landscape has been dominated by strategic or incidental releases of polling for campaigning purposes - mostly fed to journalists to get publicity and (in the case of teal independents in some seats) try to exploit strategic voting arguments.

What Scientists Do: More On That Penalty Rates Poll

In Monday's Crikey subscriber email, Ben Oquist of The Australia Institute (paywalled) took issue with some comments I made about TAI's recent polling in a piece entitled Polling And Penalty Rates.  While I could have just added my reply as an update to the original article, some of Oquist's comments are too cheeky by half - in a way that typifies the general rottenness of commissioned-poll-spruiking in Australia - and I think that dealing with these issues deserves a fresh article.  Peter Brent has also replied and my reply is quite similar.

Oquist's comments concern objections I raised about the use of forced-answer methods in an issue poll conducted by robopolling rather than allowing a don't-know option.   That said, of the two statements he says that I "confidently state", one (“a ‘don’t know’ option would certainly have changed the numbers considerably’’.) was in fact stated by Brent!

It is true that my initial response (on Twitter) that most voters who went for the "stay the same" option would actually have no opinion was overconfident and probably incorrect, but I'd already said that in my article which Oquist links to, so here Oquist is flogging a horse that has already run away, which must be convenient for him. Oh, except that anyone with enough attention span to read my article that he links to will see that this is so!  The problem remains that some substantial number of respondents would have had no actual view, and that these were forced to give an answer (or hang up) and then claimed (by TAI) as supporters of the existing system.  I add that when questions like this have an available "meh!" option ("stay the same"), it is likely some voters would take it when they really had no clue, even with an undecided option included.

Polling And Penalty Rates

(Note: this piece now has a follow-up.  See What Scientists Do)

Penalty rates have been on the political radar lately. A poll on the subject released by The Australia Institute on Sunday has attracted a fair amount of interest.  Many Coalition MPs support cuts to current penalty rates (which are required extra loadings on pay for certain occupations for weekend, evening or public holiday work) and the Labor Opposition is currently campaigning against such cuts.  This will probably be a significant philosophical divide between the parties at the 2016 election.

If we are to believe the poll's sponsor and reporting of the poll by the SMH yesterday, the government will face a massive backlash, including from its own voters, if Sunday penalty rates in the retail sector are reduced as recommended by the Productivity Commission.  The reality is that the views of Coalition supporters on the proposed change are rather less clear.

Uneducated Preferencing: NTEU/UMR Robopoll

Wirrah Award For Fishy Polling (image source)

This article initially covered the report in the Examiner today of a poll commissioned by the National Tertiary Education Union and said to show first-term incumbent Andrew Nikolic trailing in the federal seat of Bass.  However it has since become clear that this poll is part of a national bulk robopoll of 23 marginal (and in some cases not so marginal) electorates and raises enough issues that I've deemed it necessary to rewrite the article and give it a national focus.

The NTEU is not a slavish supporter of the ALP (for instance endorsing independent Andrew Wilkie at the last election) but it is obviously an opponent of the current government's education proposals.  The poll was conducted by UMR, which is best known as the Labor Party's standard pollster for internals (yet is described by the NTEU as "independent"), as part of a large series of national seat robopolls. The NTEU has now published a full data set for all seats (download from link).  The poll claims to find an average 2PP swing of 11% to Labor in the 23 surveyed seats, from 52:48 to Coalition at the election to 41:59 now.   Simultaneously the NTEU has released a message testing poll taken nationally via online panel sampling also by UMR and taken in late May to early June.  The 2PP in that sample is given as 56% to Labor.

ReachTEL Says Tas Labor Still Losing Three

REACHTEL: Bass Liberal 58.4:41.6, Braddon Liberal 56.6:43.4, Lyons Liberal 55.8:44.2, Franklin Labor 50.6:49.4, Denison Wilkie 45.5, Lib 24, ALP 18.7

Approx State 2PP 52:48 to Coalition 

(State analysis will be published on Sunday and some updates on age/gender stuff on Monday).

A new Mercury/ReachTEL poll has been released.   To summarise, the poll results, if reasonably accurate, would result in Labor losing three of its four House of Representatives seats and probably barely saving the fourth.  They would also result in Labor losing its third Senate seat, probably to the Liberals. (See Prospects for the Tasmanian Senate Race)

There are two things that can overturn this picture.  The first is a major turnaround in the national situation to a position in which Labor wins the election - which looks highly unlikely.  The second is that ReachTEL federal polling in one or more of the seats is consistently faulty - a view for which there is no convincing public evidence, but we must remember that this company has not been tested at a federal election in Tasmania before.