News Corp has refused to rule on the future of its widely read Newspoll, which appears to have been put on pause after two of its most senior architects left to start their own polling outfit.
Poll watchers conceded late on Sunday evening that another week was set to pass without a fresh Newspoll, some four weeks after the last one, leaving the polling field one survey short just months before the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum. The poll has previously been released at an interval that rarely stretches beyond three weeks.
A News Corp spokesman declined to comment on Newspoll’s absence, saying its return is “an editorial issue” subject to the decisions of editorial leadership.
The unofficial hiatus of The Australian’s Newspoll comes as YouGov, the survey’s provider, reckons with the departures of Campbell White, the organisation’s former head of public affairs and polling unit, and Simon Levy, a former senior research manager, to start their own polling firm, Pyxis Polling & Insights.
YouGov did not respond to a request for comment.
Until Newspoll returns, the field has been left to Essential Research’s fortnightly survey, which Guardian Australia has an active partnership with, the monthly Resolve Strategic poll for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and the more sparsely published Freshwater Strategy polls, published by The Australian Financial Review.
William Bowe, an election analyst in Perth who runs The Poll Bludger, said Newspoll’s interruption is more likely to be the result of a staff shortage at YouGov than The Australian deciding to pull the plug at the pointy end of the referendum campaigns.
“But whether they have to hire a new pollster or wait for YouGov to get a new team in place, it presumably won’t be back any time soon,” Bowe told Crikey.
At YouGov, White and Levy described themselves as “the engine” of the research team responsible for the top-down redesign of Newspoll after the results of the 2019 federal election. They went on to lead internal polling for Labor’s 2022 federal election campaign, which delivered Labor only its third win from opposition in some 40 years.
White declined to comment on Newspoll’s future, and said his new company isn’t likely to produce polling related to the referendum.
“Pyxis Polling & Insights is a new polling business providing strategic research for private clients and internal polling services,” he told Crikey. “We have no plans to conduct public-facing polling at this point in time unless our clients choose to release such polling.”
Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly framed a News Corp spokesman’s comments on Newspoll as though he was speaking on its future. He declined to comment on the poll’s absence, which he said was a matter for editorial.
As an indication of the cocoon bubble in which most of our insider media exists – “funny”, this and a general discussion on how the Voice is progressing, in the face of the ill-informed negativity generated against it, by those bodies doing their best to spread that misinformation and ‘legitimising’ negativity against it, on Insiders – especially when one considers Ison was on the couch yesterday? The effect of that avalanche of sledging negativity set off by Limited News and their dependents.
Even Crabb’s resurrected ABC politician’s PR puff-piece series got a promo, and Rudd’s portrait : but nothing about an insiders take on that war of negativity, waged against the Voice, by (insider) Ison’s Limited News ….?
“Four weeks without a … Newspoll”. How will we survive?
Probably scared the YES vote is increasing.
No one has polled me about the Referendum. More of us not polled who are voting YES, than those few actually polled.
A well-run poll, with a representative sample, only need to question about 2000 people to get a fairly accurate picture.
Newspoll was only ever there to help Newscorpse drive the news cycle … without the regular release of useless numbers, they’ll have to figure out news ways to distort the narrative
They use AI now! Never read news corpse or take notice of what they say.
While it’s true that the ALP has had only three election wins from opposition in 40 years (1983, 2007 and 2022), it’s worth remembering that the Coalition have only had two over the same period – 1996 and 2013.