Reuters poll trend
The latest Reuters Poll Trend shows John Howard is slowly clawing back support in the lead up to national elections, although his government still trails the Labor Party Opposition.
After 11 years in office, Howard’s government trails Labor by 9.8 points in August on a two-party basis, where minority votes are distributed to the two main parties to decide an election.
Liberal/National Party coalition government support was 45.1 percent compared to 54.9 percent for Labor.
The government has slowly reduced Labor’s poll lead since mid-March, when the government trailed by 19.2 points. August’s result is the first time the government has reduced the gap to less than 10 points since Labor elected Kevin Rudd as leader in December 2006.
The results came after Australia’s central bank increased interest rates in early August to a decade high of 6.5 percent, and before new reports of leadership tension between Howard and his Treasurer Peter Costello.
The Reuters Poll Trend is not a poll; it is an analysis of the three main polls — Newspoll, published in The Australian newspaper, ACNielsen, published in the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers, and the Morgan Poll, published on line. The Trend aims to summarise the polls by compiling them and removing their volatility. It starts by rolling the published data from the major polls into a fortnightly three-poll average, weighting them equally and the smoothing volatility by using a five-term Henderson moving average. The Henderson process dampens short-term up-and-down movement but aims to leave untouched the underlying drift in the data.