Voice Referendum Polling: Nothing Has Stopped This Trendline

Two-answer estimate Yes trails 41.7-58.3 (rate of decline is slowing)
No still leads in every state in model but leads in Tasmania in recent tiny breakdowns
Estimate includes data to October 1

Major updates added at bottom: Morgan (Sep 25), DemosAU (Sep 28), Essential (Oct 3), YouGov (Oct 4), Morgan (Oct 5)

Key to colours: Green  - Newspoll, Dark Green - YouGov, Magenta - Resolve, Grey - Essential, Dark blue - JWS, Light blue - Freshwater, Black - Morgan, Red - Redbridge, Orange - DemosAU

This is my seventh Voice polling roundup; I expect there will be one more in the final week, but if polls are sparse over the next fortnight I will probably just add those that do arrive in that time to this article.  We have only three weeks to go til referendum day and remote voting has started as I write. 

Oops!... I Did It Again: Multiple Participation In Opt-In "Polls"

Recently I was involved in a Twitter exchange (of sorts, given the other party's predilection for blocking people they are arguing with) with the founder of a boutique poll-shaped object that I consider to be pretty much complete nonsense.  This "poll" operates by a combination of panel surveying (I wouldn't call it a panel poll as such, since every panel member can respond) and opt-in responses.  

During the (mostly now deleted) tweets in question I have formed the view that the person involved has some unusually serious mental health issues (at least intermittently). Given the way they characterised the experience of being replied to by me and another chap with similar interests, I'd rather soften the impact by not naming them.  However, during the exchange they dared me to vote multiple times in their poll (implying they would detect and remove duplicates), and I said I would do it.  In the interests of science, I publish the details and offer a hypothesis for falsification - if the other party is up to it.  My hypothesis is that I can participate multiple times in this agency's polling and the founder will not be able to catch me.  

Poll-Shaped Objects: January 2022

Welcome to a new irregular series for this site.  From time to time I will do a post that covers and comments on all of the poll-shaped objects that come to my attention in a given month.  Where relevant, the article may also discuss real polling on the same issue.  Once I've decided there is enough material and time to put out an issue for a given month, all others that I see in that month will be added to the piece.  However I won't necessarily put out a PSO article every month; usually I will release such articles when there seem to be far too many of the things around and I feel that the proper order of things needs to be restored.  An early version of this idea can be seen in a 2017 article Poll Roundup: Attack Of The Poll-Shaped Objects.

The term poll-shaped object is one that I use to deride the overly credulous reporting of unsound or insufficiently transparent polls in media articles, and also the peddling of such polls by pressure groups, so-called think tanks, parties and other groups that cling to the foolish belief that you can influence public opinion by telling fibs about it.   A PSO can, for instance, be any of (i) something that is claimed to be a poll but isn't (ii) an especially unsound poll or (iii) a possibly sound poll for which the level of reported detail has been woefully lacking.  (The term is by analogy with piano-shaped object, something that appears to be a piano but sounds horrible or is impossible to play - whether by reason of shoddy construction, mistreatment or decay.)

What's This Then? Commissioned Poll Claims Liberals In Trouble

 Australia Institute uComms: Liberal 41.4 Labor 32.1 Greens 12.4 IND 11 Other 3.1

If accurate Government would probably lose majority (approx 12-10-2-1 or 12-9-3-1, perhaps more INDs)

Handle with caution - commissioned robopoll, IND figure looks exaggerated

Aggregate-based model of vaguely recent vaguely public polling: approx 13-8-3-1

A week out from the 2021 Tasmanian state election (link to guide main page) there remains no public polling that is less than two months old.  This is a parlous situation and I feel that relying on the media to commission useful polling at a useful time has failed and that for future state elections it will be necessary to look at crowdfunding reputable polling to fill the void a few weeks out.  If, that is, such a thing proves viable.  

Polling And The Proposed Pulp Mill

What's big, doesn't exist and eats Tasmanian Premiers?

The release of Mercury-commissioned ReachTEL polling about the proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill and its impact on state election voting seems a good time to write something I've been meaning to put up here for some time.  There's a view doing the rounds, among some of the green and gullible, that the last time this proposal was about, a huge body of credible polling showed very strong opposition to it.  As well as discussing the current poll, this article takes a little trip down memory lane and points out why we never knew as much about public views of the pulp mill as some of its more ardent opponents told us that we did.  It also includes a few of my own thoughts on the "issue" of the proposed pulp mill.

Anyway, here is the new pulp mill poll result:

PUP's "Internal Polling" Claims Are Ludicrous

Porcupine Fish Award for Ultra-Fishy Polling (image credit)

Advance Summary:

Clive Palmer has claimed to have internal polling showing the Palmer United Party on track to win the Tasmanian election.  The claim that PUP polling shows any such thing should not be taken even remotely seriously because:

1. The level of detail concerning this "poll" that has been released is grossly inadequate.

2. The poll was not carried out by a neutral polling firm or even one with any demonstrated record of competence.

3. Many Palmer United "internal polling" claims in the leadup to the federal election were shown to be wildly excessive by the actual results.

A Field Guide To Australian Opinion Pollsters

As of September 2016 this is an archived old edition that is no longer being updated.  For the 45th Parliament (2016-) edition go here.


Introduction

There are a lot of polls about in Australia these days.  But how do they all work, which ones have runs on the board and which ones can you trust the most? 

With an increased number of pollsters now polling in Australia, it's been suggested that an article describing what is known of each pollster and its strengths and weaknesses might be useful to many people.  So I thought I'd put one up, and edit it over time as the need arises.  (Now edited post-2013 election.  Last major edit 30 Nov 2013. Last minor edits 21 June 2016.)

The gold standard for success for an opinion pollster is that its polls at election time get the result as close to right as possible.  However, many of the new pollsters are little-tested against actual elections, and getting a specific election right is a combination of skill and luck.  In elections where there is a swing on the last day or two of the campaign, a pollster that is actually not polling correctly may have its errors cancelled out by the swing, and hence record a lucky hit.  There is more to being a good pollster than just getting it right at election time - a good pollster should also provide useful data between elections and do so using well-designed questions that are easy to interpret.  And a pollster should also present their data in a way that makes sense and isn't misleading or confusing.

Public Opinion and the Mt Wellington Cable Car Proposal

Advance Summary

1. Detailed results of a large survey of attitudes to a proposed cable car on Mt Wellington have been claimed to have settled the question of in-principle support for the development once and for all.

2.  They do not do this, because the survey was conducted using opt-in survey methods, which are not statistically reliable irrespective of sample size.

3. Additionally, the use of a preamble stressing a (probably unrealistically) favourable view of the project is likely to have affected the results.

4. Lower support rates in certain inner-city suburbs are probably not just legacy effects from previous cable-car proposals but probably also reflect innate aspects of the cable car debate.

UPDATE: Adrian Bold has responded to this piece.  My response to his response appears at the bottom!

(See also the later piece from September 2014: Polling On The Mt Wellington Cable Car Proposal)

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The mountain from not far from my place.

Not-A-Poll: Best Tasmanian Premier of the Last 30 Years: The Verdict

Federal note: I've updated my piece on Lilley following a new poll; see Silly Lilleys: Is Wayne Swan Losing His Seat?

 Note on WA election: I don't expect to be covering the WA state election on the night because of other commitments on the same weekend, and I don't have much to say about it except that I concur with the general judgement that the incumbent government is extremely likely to be re-elected, probably easily.  I recommend those interested head directly to The Poll Bludger.  I may have follow-up analysis of Upper House seats however, and sporadic comments on Twitter (@kevinbonham).

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 The opt-in "Not-A-Poll" of reader opinions on the best Tasmanian Premier of the last 30 years has just finished after running through February with 150 votes received.  Huge thanks to all who voted; it has been a fun and I hope worthwhile exercise. 

Origin of the concept

I was inspired provoked to run this Not-A-Poll and write up the outcomes by the mainstream "reporting" of the Galaxy "best prime minister in Australia in the last 25 years" poll released in late January.  That was a credible formal opinion poll based on the views of 1000 respondents, but many of the writeups were abysmal.  The figures for that poll, as originally published in The Mercury, can be seen here.  John Howard topped the poll with 35% of votes, or 44% once uncommitted voters are excluded, but that was no call for nonsense such as:

"Australians overwhelmingly rate John Howard as the country's best prime minister of the past quarter century - and Julia Gillard the worst - in a new poll." (Gemma Jones, The Mercury, Jan 25).

In fact the poll suggests that most Australians do not rate John Howard as the country's best PM of this time (there is not even a non-overwhelming majority of decided voters doing so) and all the poll found was that Howard is the favourite of more voters than each of the other four.  Furthermore the poll did not even ask for opinions on who was the worst PM of this time, so to conclude that Gillard was the worst just because the least people thought she was the best is quite unwarranted.  Indeed, had the same sample been asked which of the five PMs had been the worst, Gillard probably would have topped it, but Howard would have scored highly on that question too.

The reason for Howard's large lead in the Galaxy poll is extremely obvious - he was the only Liberal.  While some voters picked a PM from the other major party, most stuck to party lines, resulting in the four Labor PMs racking up 45% of the vote between them compared to Howard's 35%.  Furthermore, the high undecided rate among Labor supporters (14% compared to 6% for Coalition supporters) most likely resulted from some of the Labor supporters being undecided which Labor PM they preferred the most, not from them being undecided between a Labor PM and Mr Howard.

It is not even clear from the Galaxy results whether Howard is Australia's favorite PM of the last quarter-century at all.  Those preferring Rudd, Keating and Gillard, plus the undecided Labor supporters, might very well prefer Hawke over Howard heavily enough to more than cancel out the 20-point primary gap between Howard and Hawke.

I decided it would be fun to run a similar exercise just among readers of this site for Tasmania, and then give an example of how to interpret such results. 

The weaknesses of opt-ins

Opt-ins, including this Not-A-Poll, and most so-called newspaper website polls, have four common weaknesses that make them a useless indicator of the general views of the public.

Firstly, the readership of any given site is typically not politically representative.  If an opt-in survey is conducted of readers of a right-wing newspaper, then you're likely to get a right-wing response.

Secondly, opt-ins are prone to "motivated response".  This applies more to opt-ins that require some effort to vote in (such as those dreadful "elector surveys" circulated by politicians, sometimes as a form of push-polling), but in general those with strong opinions about the subject of the poll are more likely to bother to vote upon seeing it.

Thirdly, online opt-ins are very prone to organised stacking.  An activist with an interest in a Tasmanian opt-in poll can easily use social networks to get people from outside Tasmania or even Australia to vote on an opt-in question on a website/

Fourthly, and most significantly, it is often possible for a voter to vote multiple times.  Some websites take precautions to discourage this, but there is probably no completely failsafe and practical method.  Many opt-in polls are being deliberately stacked not only by activists of both sides, but also by people with an interest in exposing their unreliable nature.

Media Watch recently featured the adventures of Ubermotive, aka Melbourne software engineer Russell Phillips, who has systematically gamed many dozen online polls to create deadlocked results, favour an unlikely response, or reverse the existing result.  The results of these gamed opt-in polls have then been unsuspiciously reported by their host sites as news.

Luke McIlveen of News.com.au has responded: "I have not published a story about the hacker’s activities because I believe this individual should not be afforded any publicity."  But Phillips is not "hacking" as such, and deserves considerable and favourable publicity for exposing ugly truths about opt-ins and encouraging mainstream media websites to lift their game. It is really the original results of "polls" of such kinds that did not deserve publicity of the sort that they were given (and yet got it). Obviously, if Phillips can do what he did, then political parties can do it too.

The relatively small vote number in my own little exercise suggests that if there was any stacking or multiple voting it was on a very low scale, and watching the votes come in I didn't detect anything all that suspicious.  That said, it would have been very easy to do if anyone had wanted to, and I was curious to see if anyone would.  The main reason my results are not representative of Tasmanian voters as a whole is the first reason above - an unrepresentative audience.

The Labor lean in the results

The five Labor Premiers scored a combined 100 votes, exactly twice as many as the three Liberal Premiers.  To a degree I believe this represents a political leaning to Labor over Liberal of people voting on this site.  This arises from hits on this site in the last month coming from three main sources:

* Pollbludger, which for whatever reason tends to attract an audience of mainly Labor supporters with relatively few Greens and Liberals.

* Twitter, which is generally considered to be somewhat left-wing on the whole (although #politas, the main source of hits other than my follower base, sometimes feels like a bit of an exception to this.)

* Tasmanian Times, posters on which have Green, left-independent or greener-than-Green tendencies. I think the reader base on TT and the poster base are somewhat different but would still expect the reader base to lean left.

However, a lean in the preferences of readers is not the only possible explanation for the two-to-one Labor-to-Liberal margin.  Tasmania last had a Liberal Premier in 1998.  Readers in their early 30s and younger have never voted in an election at which a Liberal was Premier, and voters would have to be in at least their early 40s to have voted in the Robin Gray days.  So, some  readers would be making a choice between the more recent Premiers, all of them Labor, without being that familiar with Gray, Field, Groom or Rundle.

Also, the three Liberal Premiers in the survey all have tainted legacies - Gray as the subject of an adverse finding in a corruption inquiry, Groom as the one who lost his majority after just a single term, and Rundle as the one who co-operated with Labor to reduce the size of parliament, thus sending his party into Opposition for what turned out to be a very long time.

Some other comments on the results

One result that may surprise some is the strong performance of incumbent Premier Lara Giddings, given that she leads one of Tasmania's least popular governments.  Possible explanations for this result include:

* This site would be visited by several readers who have a personal interest in Giddings' political fortunes and who would therefore be inclined to vote for her whether they actually considered her the best of the list or not. 

* It's possible that Green voters would consider Giddings to be the best Premier of those listed on account of her being very socially "progressive" and also having given the most ground to their agenda.  Non-Green voters concerned with gay rights may also rate her the best on policy grounds.

* While the Government is extremely unpopular, there is no evidence that Giddings herself is unpopular.  Approval ratings have not yet been polled in Giddings' term as Premier, but her preferred-premier scores have been about what would be expected given her government's dire polling position.  

I'm inclined to reject the idea that being the only female gave Giddings a big advantage.  This certainly wasn't the case for Gillard in the Galaxy poll.  I noticed Giddings polled especially strongly at two times - when the poll had just started, and when I released analysis of the EMRS poll.

Paul Lennon's distant last place with just four votes (2.7%) - one of them a probable sympathy vote -  may well produce an "ouch!" response, and be seen to give further credit to the view that he was spectacularly unpopular while in office.  In fact, the final-poll 17% result for Lennon often claimed to have been his "approval rating" was actually his preferred-premier score, and it was very likely deflated by Labor voters who preferred David Bartlett to be Premier picking "none of the above".  A true approval rating for Lennon at the time would have been poor, but not that poor.  I reckon it would have been about 30.

I also suspect that the kinds of voters who would be least unlikely to think that Lennon was the best Premier of the last 30 years - most likely elderly, somewhat socially conservative, traditional ALP voters - would not be likely to read websites such as this one.  It's also possible that a lot of the Bacon voters would rank Lennon second. 

(The least popular Premier in Tasmanian polling history, by the way, was Harry Holgate, who in one old Morgan poll polled an approval of 11 and a disapproval of 66, and then followed that with an approval of 15 and a disapproval of 74.  I am not aware of worse figures than this being recorded by any incumbent Premier or PM, although Keating at one stage came close.)

And the winner is ...

And finally, here are the results, together with a quick electoral form guide for each of the eight Premiers in question:

1. Jim Bacon (ALP, 1998-2004) 41 votes
Elections as party leader: 1998 (Won outright from opposition), 2002 (Won, retaining majority)
Elections as candidate: 1996, 1998, 2002 (won all)
Highest personal vote: 35.5% in 2002, as Premier.

2. Lara Giddings (ALP, 2011-) 23 votes
Elections as party leader: None yet
Elections as candidate: 1996 (won), 1998 (lost seat), 1999 (Pembroke LegCo - lost), 2002 (won), 2006 (won), 2010 (won)
Highest personal vote: 15.1% in 2010, as Deputy Premier.

3. Ray Groom (Lib, 1992-6) 21 votes
Elections as party leader: 1992 (Won outright from opposition), 1996 (Lost majority and resigned, but party remained in office)
Elections as candidate: 1986, 1989, 1992, 1996, 1998 (won all)
Highest personal vote: 26.8% in 1992, as Opposition Leader.

4. Robin Gray (Lib, 1983-9) 20 votes
Elections as party leader: 1982 (Won outright from opposition), 1986 (Retained majority), 1989 (Lost majority and government)
Elections as candidate: 1976, 1979, 1982, 1986, 1989, 1992 (won all)
Highest personal vote: 42.2% in 1986, as Premier.

5. Michael Field (ALP, 1989-92) 19 votes
Elections as party leader: 1989 (Won minority government from opposition), 1992 (Lost outright), 1996 (Lost, but Liberal government lost majority)
Elections as candidate: 1976, 1979, 1982, 1986, 1989, 1992, 1996 (won all)

Highest personal vote: 15.6% in 1989, as Opposition Leader.

6. David Bartlett (ALP, 2008-11) 13 votes
Elections as party leader: 2010 (Lost majority but remained Premier)
Elections as candidate: 2002 (lost, but later elected on countback), 2006 (won), 2010 (won)
Highest personal vote: 15.9% in 2010, as Premier.

7. Tony Rundle (Lib, 1996-8) 9 votes
Elections as party leader: 1998 (Lost outright)
Elections as candidate: 1982 (lost), 1986 (won), 1989 (won), 1992 (won), 1996 (won), 1998 (won)
Highest personal vote: 23.0% in 1998, as Premier.

8. Paul Lennon (ALP, 2004-8) 4 votes
Elections as party leader: 2006 (Won, retaining majority)
Elections as candidate: 1992 (lost, but later elected on countback), 1996 (won), 1998 (won), 2002 (won), 2006 (won)
Highest personal vote: 26.1% in 2006, as Premier.

UPDATE (10 March): Vote theft scandal!  Oddly, the poll as displayed on the site now shows Bacon on 40 votes.  

The LegCo's Claimed Reasons For Rejecting Same-Sex Marriage

(See also Legislative Council Voting Patterns since the last state election.)

Advance Summary:

1. Analysis of the speeches of the eight Legislative Councillors who recently opposed the Tasmanian Same-Sex Marriage Bill 2012 shows that at most five spoke against the concept of allowing same-sex marriage at this time in general.  These five were Tania Rattray, Dr Vanessa Goodwin, Adriana Taylor, Ivan Dean and Rosemary Armitage.  (Of these, in Rattray's case the evidence is arguable and limited.)

2. The remaining Legislative Councillors to vote against (Paul Harriss, Jim Wilkinson and Greg Hall) did not indicate an explicit view for or against federal marriage equality, but expressed reservations about the concept of state-based legislation and/or its delivery.

3. The defeat of the bill cannot therefore be interpreted as a rejection of the concept of marriage equality by the Upper House, and represents only the rejection of a given state-based proposal.

4. Every MLC arguing against the bill argued that it was a federal issue, and every MLC arguing against the concept generally supported the idea of marriage as being only between a man and a woman.  

5. Other common arguments against the bill included the risks, success chances and costs of a High Court challenge, the bill being a second-rate version of the concept, that the bill would not end discrimination, and that the State Government lacked a mandate.

6. Some MLCs voting against the bill made extremely unsound arguments about public opinion.  This suggests a need for politicians to be better briefed on how to (and especially how not to) understand and measure public opinion.