Oz Politics Blog

This blog is a case of ‘better late than never’. My apologies, but I have been travelling for the past few days and I did not get the opportunity to report earlier. On Tuesday, Newspoll released the results from its poll on the weekend of 15-17 April 2005.

First the stunning news. For the first time since his resurrection, Kim Beazley was found to be doing a better job as Opposition leader than John Howard was doing as Prime Minister. The movement was substantial, over the last fortnight Howard declined seven points and Beazley improved one point.

But it was not all good news for Labor. The preferred prime minister poll was unchanged from two weeks ago. And the Coalition improved two points on the important two-party preferred poll, and two points in its primary vote.

I was surprised by these poll results. With the Government’s Medicare safety-net back-flip, I had expected the Coalition to fall in terms of both its two-party preferred and primary vote. One possible explanation is the signal to noise ratio in opinion polls. In practice, opinion polls have confidence intervals of around double that predicted by statistical theory (see here). For Newspoll, this is an error margin of just under plus or minus seven per cent.

In conclusion: while attitudes to Howard’s job satisfaction may have changed as suggested by this poll, it is impossible to tell whether the Coalition is back in winning territory. Somehow I suspect not, but I wont know for certain for a few more polls.

I have updated my opinion poll graphs. You may need to hit the refresh button on your browser to see the latest.