Remember the collective angst about how badly the opinion polls got it wrong in the 2019 election, with all of them predicting a 51-49 ALP victory?
Back then the (now) Nine newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age led the public handwringing with a vow to do things better. Gone was the Ipsos polling company which, the SMH/Age declared, “can’t walk away from the fact its overall polling forecast the wrong result”.
What’s more, as the SMH/Age declared straight after the election, polling companies were “the main reason Saturday night’s result took voters, the media and many political operatives by surprise. The implications of our major pollsters making the same mistakes in a consistent way are serious”.
So, how has the SMH/Age moved to repair the shattered trust?
Nine’s new pollster, unveiled this week, is Jim Reed, whose polling work for the last 15 years has been tied closely to conservative politics. Reed began with the Liberal-aligned Crosby Textor market research company back in 2006. By 2015 he had risen to the rank of group director of global research and strategy, as conservative parties surged in Australia and the UK (where Crosby Textor has worked closely with the Tory party).
Reed then joined Newgate Research, another Liberal-aligned company set up by former NSW Liberal government adviser Brian Tyson.
Last year as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Reed’s new company, Resolve, was signed up to conduct more than half-a-million dollars of work for the COVID Commission. As Crikey reported, Reed’s company was awarded the lucrative contract without an open tender. Then in June he was handed another $502,000 limited tender contract by the Department of Treasury, again for market research for the government’s economic “comeback” campaign. That contract ended just months ago, on December 31, 2020. The ALP alleged that the job was no more than political messaging research for the Morrison government, done on the taxpayer dime.
Reed was also engaged to conduct research for the Australian Republican Movement, where former Liberal campaigner Sandy Biar is ensconced as national director.
So, how does this sit with Nine’s vow to restore public faith in polling? Particularly given the company’s top-level links to the Liberal Party through Nine chairman Peter Costello and senior editorial executive James Chessell, a one-time adviser to then-Howard government employment minister Joe Hockey?
SMH/Age national editor Tory Maguire told Crikey that it was irrelevant who else Reed had worked for.
“We hired Jim because we wanted to do good quality political research,” she said.
“Our only agenda is to find out what voters are thinking and get behind why they’re voting.”
Reed referred Crikey to the SMH/Age’s explanations covering the new methodology it was applying and the ways in which this would avoid the errors of 2019, as well as reasons for now omitting the two-party preferred poll.
On the question of his independence, Reed said in an email that he was not affiliated with any party. “Nor am I doing any work for any party, government, etc,” he added.
Abandoning the two-party preferred poll
As part of that larger look at how it does polling, Nine has done away with the traditional polling on two-party preferred voting — a measurement that, critics say, has produced a fixation on politics as a two-horse race.
Yet, according to veteran pollster John Utting, the two-party preferred vote is what political polling is ultimately all about.
“If you haven’t got the confidence to make that call, why are you in it?” Utting asked. “It’s what people are ultimately interested in.”
Utting, the managing director of Utting Research, worked as the ALP’s federal pollster for 20 years. He acknowledges that there was “a massive polling failure” in 2019 with respect to the two-party preferred vote that hasn’t yet been “truly explained”.
What of the 2019 polling review?
In the wake of the 2019 failure a review of pollsters’ performance was set up under Macquarie University emeritus Professor Murray Goot.
Goot has previously written of the importance of perceptions of neutrality when it comes to polling.
He told Crikey that Nine had a responsibility to be transparent about Reed’s background.
“I think it’s a good idea for papers to be upfront about this stuff. There may be a perceived conflict of interest,” he said.
He said that while the new survey went some way to address the problems of online polling — by getting samples offline — it did nothing to address the main problem of 2019, which was to do with misreading the primary vote, not the two-party preferred.
“What happened in 2019 was not a matter of how the sample was chosen. It was a problem with all methods of sampling. They over-represented the Labor vote. That may be because they over-represented people interested in politics,” he said.
“There are a lot of things about this poll that are new and interesting. [But] it doesn’t go to what happened in 2019.”
Does this make anything clearer?
Fancy even hoping for any clarity at all when it is obfuscation that is winning the day now! And, when it comes to the next “election,” -maybe this November at this rate of crises, – the P.M. will again hire his spectacularly successful fear-mongering team to stir up another storm, as on the last occasion. Although, I am tending to recall Abe Lincoln’s dictum that “..you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” And this includes even Aussies, as already mixed up as they are in every possible way, not to mention flavour.
Yes it does. As Rundle observed here a few weeks ago the SMH and Age continue to provide ‘serious’ analysis like this polling stuff and in particular have outstanding investigative teams – but their perspective on most things that matter has gone from Centre Left to Centre Right, and this is one more example. Hard to believe that the audience on the Right needs any more outlets to confirm their view of the world – with Rupert’s rags, Sky after dark, Seven, Nine, 2GB, 3AussieWhinger etc etc. But there you go.
I actually don’t think the Pollsters got it wrong in 2019.
Great to know that the LNP is is supported by their cheer squad of affiliation.
… like dags on a sheep, you mean?
Concerning all polls, it seems that too great an emphasis at least in the media has been on expressing a simple knife-edge X vs Y, win vs lose without making clear that there are so-called error bars on all the polling data. Polls would be hard-put to mis-predict the recent WA election, but when the outcome is predicted as close to 50:50, an actual outcome of say 52:48 or 48:52 is often within the margin of error. That’s not to say there are no systematic technical problems in the current polling methods, but it is to say that there is going to be a fuzzy zone and sometimes the polls will predict one way and the big poll, the election, will go the other way.
In the WA election nobody predicted the loss to Labor of most of the blue ribbon Liberal seats and the suggestion was that the Libs might lose 4 or 5 seats. The Nats leader was asked if she’d lead the Opposition if she ended up with more seats than the Libs but that wasn’t seen as seriously likely. Now she leads four Nats and two Libs in the Assembly. In the Legislative Council it was being suggested that, with luck, Labor might be able to cobble together a majority with the Greens. The final result has Labor with a two-thirds majority in the Council and the Greens down to one seat. So no, the polls didn’t really give us much of a picture of the result although a Labor win was obvious.
My belief is that the pollsters didn’t get it wrong for the period they surveyed, but that enolugh voters changed their minds at the last minute based on Morrison’s campaigning. Any pollster would’ve missed such a late shift, though you could see it happening in real time. Morrison’s base, purportedly men at risk of voting Labour, were won back from the precipice purely by the sheer hard work on display (policy be damned). They decided, in comparing that to Shorten’s lazy assumption of victory. to give the bloke a go. In doing so they slipped through the poilsters to the catcher. Hopefully Labor will somehow pull their finger out (no signs yet) and the electorate will have learnt its lesson.
It was Shorten who cost Labor the election . Unfortunately he was toxic with a lot of voters and it had nothing to do with him being lazy.How can one explain a sixty year old engine driver, proud trade unionist and normally a rusted-on Labor voter who said to me, “Sorry mate, but I just can’t vote for Shorten “.Obviously he, like most voters, equated the leader with the party.Also, add in the fact of Clive Palmer’s $50, 000, 000 assault via TV and the press.Also, don’t forget that more and more house phones have been removed due to the installation of the NBN and more people have mobile phones now which reduces the size of the demographic.