Newspoll: 53 to 47 in Labor’s favour
Today’s Australian has the latest Newspoll results. The poll predicted that 53 per cent of the national two-party preferred (TPP) vote would flow to Labor and 47 per cent to the Coalition.
The primary vote predictions were 39 per cent for the Coalition (down five points on the previous Newspoll), 41 per cent for Labor (down one), 6 per cent for the Greens (up one), and 14 per cent for independents and others (up five).
In my view, the Coalition’s primary vote prediction looks anomalous. It is the old rule: a five-point jump between polls without an obvious explanation is more likely to be noise than signal. While Dennis Shanahan attributed the sudden movement to changes in Parliamentarian’s superannuation, I don’t buy that explanation. The primary vote jump also brings into question the scale of the TPP results for this fortnight, though not direction of those results.
One of the reasons I look at the moving average is to smooth out these sorts of anomalies. Like ACNielsen, using the preference flows from the last election, Nespoll has the predicted national two-party preferred vote hovering around 51 to 49 per cent in Labor’s favour. I suspect it is a more accurate reading of the electorate at the moment.
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