There’s not exactly a surplus of charisma across the party, tbh.
Same actually… how political parties choose leaders is rarely explainable to the general public.
Has anyone ever seen Tony Burke and Andrew Gaze in the same room at the same time?
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He needs to bust out a few more of these:
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We get most of the major newspapers at work. On the front cover of the SMH it says no poll bump for the Government from the Budget. On the front page of the Australian it says it almost but nor quite the same words, the Gov got a poll bump from the Budget. Haha who to believe. One of them will be wrong
Not necessarily. Before I explain myself, the way that media analyses polling data is appalling. They constantly fail to account for trend, methodology, margins of error or the growing trend of respondents to either decline or misreport their opinions, and they regard the polling results as fact when it is actually a past snapshot of a small population asked a question such as “if an election was held today” when no such election was held on that day and has not yet been called. As Paul Keating famously said, when he won despite polling data showing the opposite, standing in the booth, chewing on the pencil focuses the voters mind in a way that a poll question does not.
But on to the two polls showing different results, assuming that the two polls have employed the correct methodology and there are no biases in the results, if two or more polls conducted at the same time show varying results it does not mean that one is right and the others wrong. All of them can be right even though they show different results as the population they are polling may be volatile. A volatile electorate will produce wildly varying results.
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They are also within the margin of error of each other.
Polling has consistently shown around a 52.5-47.5 TPP result and neither of the day’s polls change that picture as everything is just moving well within the margin of error of that result.
Also the trend lines are important here because both had anomalously strong results for each party in the previous poll. There’s good analysis here:
https://www.pollbludger.net/2019/04/07/ipsos-53-47-labor-6/
Yeah, one poll was 53-47, the other 52-48. However, the difference can be if they have gone beyond this and down to electorate level (which I doubt they have, because you need to poll a shitload of people to get this, even if you just focus on a selection of electorates).
bearing in mind as well, the proportion of people that are being asked is minuscule. If 1000 people fill out the surveys, it’s still only 0.006% of our population. Hardly a representation of our population.
Sorry, I don’t buy this as a criticism beyond what @Clovis and @CountArach already mentioned about the media tending to ignore the margin of error when reporting apparent changes. The statistical properties of sampling are well-studied, and with such a ‘minuscule’ sample you can confidently get within a couple of percentage points of the truth.
This is a rigorous statistical model based on how well previous polls have predicted recent election results (so somewhat addressing the issue of the question being asked not being the one you want answered), which also accounts for systematic bias in the results of particular pollsters (almost all slightly pro-Labor; see the last graph):
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It’s on for 18 May.
“One of the consequences of calling an election on a Thursday instead of Sunday is to stop Senate Estimates hearings. In my portfolio alone this shuts down questions to the CSIRO about the Adani approval and Murray Darling hearings scheduled for Friday now won’t happen.” - Tony Burke, Labor MP
I may be in Perth on that day.
And so the Australian public is subjected to another cavalcade of verbal vomit that will last for weeks. Have you ever seen a less inspiring political choice? The government has been hijacked by right wing lunatics, all busy staging political coups instead of governing. The Prime Minister is a christian from the Shire for fucks sake. The opposition is run by a grey charisma free party apparatchik who knows nothing of the real world outside of trade union branch offices. The Nationals are sliding into irrelevancy as the country becomes increasingly urban. Their leader is Michael McCormack. Heard of him? No, I haven’t either. The Greens are riven by factionalism and internecine warfare, when they should be more popular than ever but One Nation have somehow managed to become even more of a laughing stock and topped all of them. This will lead to a flood of votes to minor single issue parties and Canberra will become and even bigger ungovernable shit pile.
My only wish is that Tony gets rolled in my seat of Warringah by that toffee nosed private school and ski slope inhabiting matron from Mosman. That in itself is tragic. There is nothing inspiring. Nothing positive. Only brain dead sound bites and petty point scoring. Kill me.
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Excellent rant/10
Not sure if it’s been mentioned, but the election date surely means a Sunday evening A-League final.
My money’s on 7pm AEST, either 5 in Perth or 7 in Sydney or Melbourne.
Fark
I’d be gutted if I miss Antony (“The King of Swing”) Green’s expert prognostications due to the Grand Final.
I do note that with a healthy anticonservative swing and a Sydney win this has the potential to be one of the best weekends in history. Of course it also has the potential to be the worst.
FWIW Eurovision is also on election night
Quality rant Phorm.
You ever run into our Zali on the slopes?