Oz Politics Blog

Newspoll: The latest Newspoll was published in today’s Australian. The headline two-party preferred result from the sample of more than 1700 voters was the best for John Howard since mid-February: 54 to 46 in Labor’s favour.

The usual opinion poll graphs are here. You may need to hit the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the latest graphs.

Yesterday, Labor made policy statements on the Great Barrier Reef, women’s health and the Great Eastern Highway in WA.

The Coalition made a statement on technical colleges.

Betting markets: The latest media statement from Sportingbet Australia included the following, “John Howard will begin this week with the seemingly impossible job of coming from behind at odds $3.25 in the betting market to win. Sportingbet Australia CEO, Michael Sullivan today revealed that such a feat had not been achieved previously to his knowledge in the history of election betting. ‘I’ve been running betting markets on elections for twenty years now and I’ve never seen either Party come from this far behind in the odds to win,’ said Sportingbet CEO Michael Sullivan.”

Before reviewing yesterday’s happenings, let’s start with the latest Newspoll from the weekend, based on an expanded survey of more than 1700 voters. Newspoll’s headline prediction was a national two-party preferred vote share of 58 per cent for Labor and 42 per cent for the Coalition. That is a two point improvement for Labor on the previous Newspoll, and a two point decline for the Coalition. The Australian’s Dennis Shanahan is here. (You may need to hit the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the latest graph).

Last week the movement to the Coalition in the ACNielsen and Galaxy polls gave rise to the possibility of a Coalition recovery. For many, I suspect today’s poll would cast some doubt on that prospect. Simon Jackman argued that the difference between the earlier polls and today’s Newspoll was Labor’s matching of the Coalition tax plan.

Bottom line: public opinion on Friday-Sunday (when both tax proposals were before the voters), was more friendly to Labor than it was Monday-Wednesday, when the Coalition’s tax announcement had yet to draw a response from Labor. Having scored the week as a win for the Coalition, I’d have to revise that to a draw in light of the Newspoll numbers. And the kicker is that the Newspoll numbers are pre-debate.

Yesterday, saw three new policies on the Coalition’s website: from Sunday was the Climate Change fund, and announced yesterday were a dental workforce for Northern Australia and better cancer care and support for women.

Over at the Labor website, we have the first two official election policies: a work and family policy document and an affordable childcare policy document.

If you don’t have high speed broadband, you may not be able to read the Coalition’s policy documents from home as three of the five policy statements on its website are some 2.5 megabytes in length. At around 362 and 154 kilobytes in length, Labor’s policy documents are around 10 percent the size of the Coalition’s policy documents. I am intrigued by the Coalition’s strategy of having high quality cover page images in their policy documents but at the cost of making the documents less accessible over the Internet to mum and dad voters. The Coalition took a similar approach to the size of electronic policy documents in the 2004 election.

Andrew Norton noted that the worm was stratospheric when Kevin Rudd claimed that people are feeling worse off due to rising costs. Norton explored whether this is a case of the objective statistics not capturing the subjective experience of the Australian electorate. He concluded, “Whatever Kevin Rudd says, whatever the worm says, these are good times. The typical family may want more, but they are not worse off than before.” Norton’s discussion reminded me of the effectiveness with which John Howard used the phase “five minutes of economic sunshine” to combat Keating in the 1996 election. It also reminded me of the maxim: perception is reality.

Today’s Australian has the latest Newspoll. This result is very much like many before it.

A Galaxy poll of four Queensland marginal seats in today’s Courier Mail painted a different story (well a less dramatic Labor win if the results are applied nationally).

While voters in the four marginal seats of Bonner, Moreton, Longman and Herbert had a strong opinion of Mr Rudd’s performance, Labor was holding only a slim 2 per cent lead on the two-party preferred vote.

This translates to a healthy swing of 5.6 per cent towards Labor since the 2004 election, but it is dramatically less than the 9 per cent swing to Labor suggested in last month’s national Galaxy poll.

The usual opinion poll graphs are here. I updated some 40 graphs this morning. You may need to hit the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the latest graphs.

Today’s Australian has the latest Newspoll (a day earlier than expected) and the usual commentary from Dennis Shanahan. Shanahan argued that today’s results point to a later rather than earlier election, and he suggested that the “three-point fall in the Labor leader’s satisfaction from a near-record 65 to 62 per cent” points to a possible dulling in Rudd’s sheen.

I agree with Shanahan on the first point. An election before 24 November is highly unlikely. The first and eighth of December are looking better every day. In the next graph we can see that while 2001 and 2004 showed a narrowing throughout the year, the narrowing in 2007 was less pronounced and ceased in June. Since then it has been pretty much a flat line deep in Labor’s favour. Howard can only hold off and hope the polls narrow further immediately before a late election.

On the second point, I suspect Shanahan is reading a little too much into the stochastic perturbations of opinion polling. In this next graph I have plotted the difference between the net satisfaction rating for the prime minister and opposition leaders in 1996 and 2007. Two key points emerge from the graph. First, the 1996 Keating-Howard gap was smaller than the 2007 Howard-Rudd gap. Second, the Howard-Rudd gap has been trending wider over the past three months. (Note: as currently constructed, the graph assumes a 24 November election).

Today’s Newspoll is the second last poll published for September. (Morgan will be the last). So far, almost 9500 people have been polled this month. September is turning out a bit of a shocker for Howard’s re-election strategy.

The usual opinion poll graphs are here. You may need to hit the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the latest graphs.

Newspoll released its quarterly polling results in today’s Australian, where you can read Dennis Shanahan’s take on these results.

The Coalition is behind in all categories except Western Australia.

To see how much things have changed, it’s worth comparing the third quarter in 2007 (ie the previous chart) with the first quarter in 2005.

The big mover over the last quarter was non-capital cities, which posted a significant return to Coalition; although still on the downside of the 2004 election result.

I did a little math to approximate the state by state two-party preferred swings from the Newspoll state-by-state primary vote predictions. You can pop these swings into Antony Green’s election calculator when it comes online later today.

When I popped the Q3 swings into Antony’s pre-production model. it predicted a Labor victory with 103 seats. However, as there has been a small trend back to the Coalition over the period (in all states but Victoria it appears), the Q3 averages probably over-estimate the current state of the state-by-state swings.

The full set of quarterly charts should appear in my last post on the Newspoll quarterly.