polling - thegoodwills.com

Albo in poll position to win election

albo-poll-election — Image: Australians casting votes, circa 1940s (who were the flowers for?) Wikimedia CC.

Now there’s a headline that could come back to bite me on the bum – election polling being the unreliable artifice it always has been.

Polling is a mainstay of Australian electioneering. Various polls take the social temperature of a broad cross-section of the community. From this, they distil the information into numbers which they hope will predict who will win the election.

Before we get into that, I consulted my preferred pollster, on-line bookmaker Sportsbet. Labor was and still is a clear favourite at $1.55, but this has eased somewhat from $1.35 a month ago. The LNP has tightened from $3.00 to $2.55 with ‘all others’ at 67-1.

Pollsters meanwhile have the Labor Party holding onto a 53/47 lead (it was 57/46 a few weeks ago) over the Liberal National Party (LNP). But polls are notoriously unreliable. In 2019, most polls were predicting a win by then-Labor leader Bill Shorten, even though Scott Morrison was the preferred leader.

As we now know, Shorten lost to Scott Morrison, with analysts falling over each other in hindsight to explain that ‘the people’ didn’t like Bill’s long and complicated list of fiscal policies.

The first week of the election campaign reminded me of those Three Stooges movies where the so-called comics trip each other up and mash cream pies in each other’s faces. First there was the ‘gotcha’ moment when a journalist asked Labor leader Anthony Albanese if he knew the official interest rate. Albanese said he didn’t, then later gave an incorrect answer to a question about the unemployment rate. The Honest John approach then morphed into a press statement that if he (Anthony) made a mistake, he would fess up to it (not berate his minders for not predicting the obvious).

Albo’s not quick on his feet. He could have dismissed the question as trivial and suggest that the reporter do what we’d all do (look it up on our phones). I never thought I’d agree with John Howard about anything but I admire his coming to Albanese’s defence.

Howard was asked by reporters in Perth if he thought Albanese’s incorrect answer to unemployment rates was unsatisfactory.

“Is that a serious question? Okay, well Anthony Albanese didn’t know the unemployment rate. So what?” Howard said.

Howard himself had a similar pre-election bungle over interest rates in 2007, in an on-air interview with A Current Affair.

It’s time we moved on from the “gotcha’ question, where journalists try to put campaigning politicians on the spot by asking them if they know the price of milk or what the inflation rate is. Who could forget John Hewson’s failure in 1993 to work out the GST on a birthday cake (he was at the time promoting GST as a saviour for the economy). The ‘gotcha’ questions, I suspect, are set by editors of my vintage, who revelled in the black humour of Monty Python.

Why else would they want to promote these pointless public gaffes as front-page news. It’s like the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the bridge keeper casts people into the abyss if they cannot answer questions.

As he asks Arthur (King of the Britons):

“What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?” (It’s 20.1 miles an hour, apparently).

Arthur thinks about this for a moment and asks: “African or European swallow?”

Bridge keeper: “What? I don’t know that!” (then he is cast into the abyss and Arthur’s convoy proceeds).

Gotcha questions aside, much is made of ‘preferred PM’ polls, the numbers from which will vary depending on whether you read The Guardian and listen to the ABC or read The Australian and watch Sky News.

What is clear about personal polling is that Scott Morrison has blown the 68/32 advantage he had in April 2020 (when he was creating the JobKeeper and JobSeeker schemes and doling out relief payments to all and sundry).

Morrison’s personal popularity has now slipped to 44% or so, but still ahead of Albo at 39%.

The latest two-party preferred polling has Labor slipping from 57% to 53% with the LNP at 47% (up from 43%). Despite Labor slipping in the polls, the party is in front in all six States. Albanese might still be Labor’s best chance of winning government since Kevin Rudd in 2007.

The major problem for both parties is that neither the PM nor the Opposition leader can muster personal support of 50% or more.

This simply means that the voting public are not inspired by either party leader, at least not in the way they responded to Rudd, Hawke, Howard or Whitlam at the peak of their powers.

Bob Hawke’s popularity peaked at 75% in November 1984, Kevin Rudd commanded 74% in March 2009 and John Howard 67% in January 2005. Gough Whitlam, the great reformer, was polling 67% in 1973.

If you don’t trust polling, don’t understand the UAP’s billboards and still have no idea who to vote for, there are several things you can do. The first is to make sure you are on the electoral roll. You need to do it by 8pm on Easter Monday (April 18). To enrol, complete the online form.

If you are confused about who to vote for, the ABC’s Vote Compass will give you a fair idea. I completed mine this morning and was chastened to find that 6/10 was the best I could do for a preferred leader.

My Vote Compass result was identical to 2019 when polling showed Scott Morrison (46%). ahead of Bill Shorten (34%) as preferred Prime Minister. Even though that poll was on the money, polls like these can be decidedly inaccurate.

Paul Keating went into 1992 with a personal approval rating of just 25%, ebbing to 17% just before he won the 1993 election. Other PMs who failed to garner support as preferred leaders (at their lowest point) include Julia Gillard (23%), Tony Abbott (24%) and Malcolm Turnbull (34%). Yet they all prevailed at various points in the political cycle.

I cited the online magazine www.startsat60.com earlier and now remind you of a survey from a 2019 FOMM. The survey asked readers to rank Australian PMs between 1968 and 2018.

John Winston Howard won in a hand-canter with 58.3%; despite saying he’d never say sorry, despite the children overboard mistruths, despite following George Bush Jnr and Tony Blair into an unwinnable and unjustifiable war. Bob Hawke ranked second in the over-60 survey with 17%, just behind Gough Whitlam (15.2%).

The other nine leaders all scored less than 5%. Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd polled equally poorly with 0.6% while with Malcom Fraser and Scott Morrison attracted no votes at all..

This survey is what we would call a ‘straw poll,’ meaning it has no real authority or influence. But it is illuminating to find that this one small segment of the over-60s cohort rated our former leaders so poorly.

We were driving from Melbourne to Warwick this week so will bring you our impressions of Tasmania next week. The election circus can keep rolling on without us, what do you say?

Last week: Wayne Goss lost the Queensland election in 1996, not 1989 (when he broke the Gerrymander and beat Joh Bjelke-Petersen). Thanks to Ted for the alert.

FOMM back pages

Volunteering and election fatigue

Image: Volunteers for Habitat for Humanity building a new home on Vancouver Island. Photo by Jon Toogood

It’s National Volunteer Week, as good a time as any to encourage people to offer their skills and labour to community organisations and causes they believe in.

For those who donated their time to support a political party or independent candidate, though, battle fatigue has set in.

More than four million Australians voted during the three weeks leading up to last Saturday’s Federal election. This was more than double the pre-poll vote in 2016. Instead of election volunteers concentrating their efforts on just one day, it meant putting in that sort of effort for 17 consecutive days.

University of Sydney senior lecturer Stephen Mills says the pre-polling trend is changing the traditional election campaign in unexpected ways.

“Candidates are spending less time campaigning in the community and more time at pre-polling stations. Parties are announcing their more attractive promises earlier. Party volunteers are being exhausted by long weekday shifts on the hustings. And many voters are casting their votes with incomplete knowledge.”

Mills and co-researcher Martin Drum of the University of Notre Dame Australia found that three weeks of pre-polling stretched the resources of the smaller parties.

“Early voting is not a level playing field, Recruiting and organising volunteers for three weeks is more of a challenge for smaller parties and independents than for the major parties.

“Incumbent MPs are more available to stand at pre-poll centres all day than, say, a minor party candidate with a job and other non-campaign commitments.”

While the long-term trend towards volunteering is down, 5.8 million Australians aged 18 and over carry out volunteer work every year. Volunteering can range from high-risk activities (bush fire brigades, surf lifesaving and State emergency services), to delivering for meals on wheels or selling raffle tickets outside the local Neighbourhood Centre.

My father (and maybe yours as well) would often use a barracks catch-phrase from time serving in WWII – “Never volunteer for anything.” So I can use that as an excuse for rarely volunteering, apart from local fairs, fetes and music festivals.

Big music festivals like Woodford and the National Folk Festival need thousands of volunteers to ensure that they run smoothly. This year in Canberra, the NFF engaged 1,300 volunteers on tasks ranging from MCs and stage managers to garbage detail. Even small festivals, like the re-born Maleny Music Festival, need about 180 volunteers. Music festival volunteers are given weekend tickets in exchange for an agreed number of volunteer hours ranging from 20 (NFF) to 25 (Woodford).

Volunteering for an election campaign is a bit like being one of the 45,000 Australians who held their hand up to help run the Sydney Olympics. It’s a massive job, but once it’s over you won’t have to think about it again for years.

In 2019, tens of thousands volunteered for political parties large and small. The Greens said in an email last week they needed 10,000 people for Election Day alone.

In any one of the 151 electorates, parties needed two to four people to hand out how-to-vote cards in each booth. An average sized electorate with 30 polling booths would need 120 volunteers over a 10-hour period for this one job. Each party also needed volunteers for door knocking and phoning campaigns and then to help staff pre-poll centres for two or three weeks.

It’s not just political parties that need volunteers. Lobby group GetUp said that more than 9,000 volunteers made 712,039 calls to voters and knocked on 36,315 doors. More than 1,800 volunteers put in 5,954 hours on the campaign to elect independent candidate Zali Steggall in Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah.

Even small campaigns need the support of volunteers. Controversial Anglican priest Fr Rod Bower contested a Senate seat for Independents for Climate Action Now. He told me that 50 volunteers worked with him on the campaign. It was a first for Fr Rod, who is best-known for maintaining an ever-changing campaign of political slogans outside his Gosford Parish. It was also a first for ICAN, which gained 18,430 votes in New South Wales (all-up 32,525 votes in a three-state campaign).

Who knows how many of the election volunteers of 2019 will hold their tired heads up again in 2022. Some will probably be part of a trend that began in 2014 when an Australian Bureau of Statistics social survey showed that the rate of volunteering had slipped from 36% in 2010 to 31%. The next ABS social survey can be expected later in 2019.

It may come as a surprise to find that the largest proportion of volunteers is not, as you might think, drawn from the post-retirement age group. As Professor Melanie Oppenheimer, Chair of History at Flinders University, wrote in The Conversation, the highest rates of volunteering are among people aged between 35 and 54, working full-time, with young children.

“Busy people are able to find the time to volunteer, possibly because it is important enough for them to be able to overcome their time limitations.

“The most regularly cited reasons given for not volunteering are ill health, lack of time, and lack of interest.

“With an ageing population, ill health is likely to grow as a barrier, while at the same time (there is) increasing demand for volunteer-provided services such as health or aged care.”

In a separate study, academics from Curtin University and the William Angliss Institute discovered a volunteer crisis unfolding in small rural communities across Western Australia. The researchers surveyed 10,000 people in rural WA, to find that volunteering in that part of the country is a way of life, with participation well above the national average. However, 35% of those actively involved in volunteering said they were planning to move away from rural areas, with more than half citing a lack of essential services or the cost of accessing these services in larger towns.

Australian volunteer participation is ranked second behind the US as a percentage of the adult population. The UN Volunteers global report found it accounts for the equivalent of 109 million full-time workers. The majority (57%) of this figure are women, while in Australia, the percentage is even higher, with 63% of volunteers being women. Another pattern observed in Australia found organisation-based volunteering rates were higher for the youngest group of people (aged 14 to 24) and people over 65.

ABS data shows that Australia’s volunteers each put in an average of 135 hours a year – 783 million hours of unpaid labour per year. According to Volunteering Australia, they are involved in areas including arts/heritage, business/professional/union, welfare/community, education and training, animal welfare, emergency services, environment, health, parenting, children and youth. As the global study found, 70% of volunteering is informal and community-based, including ‘spontaneous volunteering’, after floods, bushfires or cyclones have left communities devastated.

Flinders University researcher Lisel O’Dwyer has estimated the economic contribution of volunteering in Australia at $290 billion, surpassing revenue from major sectors including mining and agriculture. (The figures, revised in 2014, take into account the value of lives saved by volunteers such as firefighters, SES crews and life guards.)

Try telling the mining lobby that.

Many issues in unwinnable Queensland election

election-special-maleny-police — Election special: Photo of old Maleny police station by Bob Wilson

In the interests of better community policing and the fact she had just called an election, Queensland Premier Anastasia Palaszczuk made an unequivocal promise.

The Premier, who somewhere in the Courier-Mail’s Monday election coverage recalls winning a Grade Nine competition to ‘help police fight crime’, made a commitment to hire an extra 400 police officers over the next four years. Based on a First Year Constable’s salary (including shift allowances) of $70,820, that’s a $28.32 million promise

“We back our police with the resources they want, the powers they need and the pay they deserve,” she told the ABC last Sunday.

Crikey, they ought to send a couple up the hill here to Maleny, where the new $2 million police station in Macadamia Drive (staffed by four police officers), has a roaming brief to cover an area from Maleny out to Palmwoods, Beerwah, Conondale and Kenilworth.

Ms Palaszczuk’s election promise to hire more police comes a week before the 1950s-style police station in Maleny’s main street is sold at auction. The 2,344sqm property, which is zoned Community Facilities, includes an office/police station and a residence but excludes a separate lock-up.

On my calculations, this sale alone should provide the Queensland Police Service with enough money to pay the salaries of an extra 21 police officers (over four years).

Against my better judgement, I bought the election special edition of The Courier-Mail on Monday after a three-year hiatus, prompted by a series of inflammatory, misleading and discriminatory front pages. Monday’s page one was no less lurid, presenting unflattering caricatures of the three main party leaders.

I worked there in the broadsheet days, pre-tabloid, pre-redundancies, pre-online editions, four editors ago. No regrets, Coyote, as Joni would say. I entered my 70^th year on Monday, BP 120/80, feeling OK and supremely relieved I had no part to play in the CM’s graphics-laden presentation of an unwinnable election.

The first two pages of the CM’s October 30 election special purport to sell us the idea they have the State’s media covered. In what amounts to a two-page ‘house ad’, the CM confirms what we already knew – Rupert Murdoch’s Queensland media empire owns almost all of the print media titles. So yes, they have it covered, but you’d expect the coverage to be suitably mainstream; about 9% of the eleven-page election coverage was set aside for stories about the Greens and how they hope to win three seats, including Deputy Premier Jackie’s Trad’s seat of South Brisbane. It appears (from vox pops interviews), that some people in West End will be voting Green because of over-development (apartments) in the inner city suburb.

The rest of the coverage focuses on the resurgence of One Nation, how Labor will suffer from its seemingly intractable position on the Adani coal mine (no mention that the LNP are all for it too), a token story about the Katter Party and proportional space for (most of) the party leaders to have their say.

So to the unwinnable election

There’s a fair chance no single party will emerge from the November 25 poll with a workable majority, so in this sense it is unwinnable.

Crikey’s Perth-based election analyst, Poll Bludger, quoted ReachTEL polling figures from September showing the LNP with a 52-48 lead on primary votes. One Nation was polling at 19.5% and Greens at 8.1%.

An earlier Newspoll had Labor on 37% and the LNP on 34%. Some of you might take this to mean that the two parties will take 71% of the primary vote. This is roughly in line with election trends around the world where one in three people did not vote for one of the major parties. This leaves the unallocated 29% to be divided up between the Greens, One Nation, Independents, minor parties and the 2% of the electorate who cast informal votes.

The poll numbers, which focus only on primary votes, are not worth much in light of the return to compulsory preferential voting (CPV). To the uninitiated, this means numbering your preferred candidate 1 and then others in order of preference (meaning the party you like the least goes last). So if no single candidate has a clear majority, second preferences of the party that polled the least number of votes are counted until a winner emerges.

Many people do not understand preferential voting, so when handed a how-to-vote-card at the polling booth, they simply fill in the numbers as suggested (or number all candidates 1 to 6 consecutively, which is known as the “Donkey Vote.”)

An Australian Institute poll last year found that only 29% of respondents knew how to correctly fill in the (preferential) Senate ballot paper. So that is not a good sign for the re-introduction of compulsory preferential voting at this election. As Griffith University’s Paul Williams pointed out (in the CM), the Australian Electoral Commission is yet to conduct an information campaign to ensure CPV is clearly understood.

University of Melbourne honorary associate Adrian Beaumont has more to say about polling and CPV in The Conversation.

The Sydney Morning Herald suggested on Monday that the return of full preferential voting and new electoral boundaries could hand One Nation a balance of power role.

Enter stage right, former Senator Malcolm Roberts, booted out after a High Court decision found he had not renounced his British citizenship.

By challenging the seat of Ipswich for One Nation, Mr Roberts, best known for his climate change conspiracy theories, could attract enough LNP second preferences to win the seat, the article suggests. (I would go ‘aarrgghh’ at this stage but that would be editorialising).

ABC election analyst Antony Green told the SMH Roberts faced an uphill battle.

“It would be highly surprising if One Nation won there on first preferences, which would mean they would have to come from behind on LNP preferences,” he said.

Ipswich West was more likely to fall to One Nation, he said, adding that One Nation also had a good chance of winning the neighbouring seat of Lockyer.

Ipswich was where Pauline Hanson originally built her One Nation party in the 1990s. Should Roberts prevail, he is being tipped to lead One Nation in Queensland. What was that about the Lord Mayor’s show and the dust cart?

On latest polling, One Nation at 19.5% would seem to be in a strong position to win seats in Queensland and maybe also control the balance of power. A scary notion for some, but you have to give credit where it is due: Pauline Hanson has found the ear of disgruntled voters, much as Donald Trump wooed that endangered species US filmmaker Michael Moore called ‘angry white men’.

In Queensland, the angry, the poor and those who feel forgotten are listening and Hanson tells them what they want to hear.

There is only one certainty about the Queensland election, whoever cobbles together a coalition from this mess will have a mandated four years in which to rule – that’s 208 ‘Fridays on our minds’…#aarrgghh