POLL POSITION: A ghost in the mega-poll data?

Poll Position brings you the thrills and spills of the federal election campaign, with daily polling updates, until the Australian people have spoken. For full news and commentary coverage, click here.

August 19, 9pm – A ghost in the mega-poll data?

Wednesday's mega-poll published by Fairfax newspapers is causing more waves than anyone expected.

One day out from election day, it turns out that the company that owns the 'Sample Pages' service – the phone number database used by Telereach to execute the JWS Reseach poll of 28,000 respondents (see 'How accurate was the mega-poll?') – is Magenta Linas Software, a company accused by Senator Eric Abetz in 2007 of having strong links to the Labor Party.

JWS director John Scales vigorously denies Labor influence of any kind on the poll and says he is confident that the Sample Pages data is robust and unbiased.

It would certainly be drawing a long bow to claim that a poll showing Labor winning the election would help the party's prospects. Moreover, Scales has worked in polling for around 20 years, including being director of the Morgan Poll from 1992 to 1995 and spending the past eight years as research director at Crosby Textor.

In 2007, however, Abetz was certain Magenta Linas was doing Labor's work – he claimed Australian Electoral Commission data had been passed to the union movement to assist it with its anti-WorkChoices campaigning. Abetz is recorded in the Senate Hansard as saying: "It would certainly appear that voters' enrolment status, latest addresses et cetera, provided to Magenta Linus [sic] by the Electoral Commission, has been illegally passed to various unions in breach of the Commonwealth Electoral Act."

He continued: "I also saw with interest Ms Gillard, in full slippery mode, describing Magenta Linus as a private company. That may be the case, but it is also a private company that is so closely linked to the ALP that it created and provides Labor's electoral management database, Electrac..."

However, after investigating the claims, the Australian Electoral Commission found there was nothing illegal in the company or unions' actions. It ruled the data was "protected information", and that "Protected information provided to political parties may be used for any purpose in connection with an election or referendum under the Act."

Three years on, Magenta Linas promotes its database thus: "The phone database is a composite phone database sourced from a data pooling arrangement involving a number of parties in a closed pooling system. This is now Australia's premier non Telstra / Sensis phone database. These parties include charities, telemarketing companies and other business entities."

No mention of AEC electoral roll data.

At the time of publication Magenta Linas had not responded to Poll Position's enquiries. One wonders what Eric Abetz will make of all this.


August 19, 2pm – How accurate was the mega-poll?

A clearer picture has emerged of the mega-poll conducted by Echuca-based JWS Research that caused a stir among politicos yesterday by predicting a Labor victory, by four seats, from a huge survey sample of 28,000.

Poll Position contacted JWS director and long-time pollster John Scales who confirmed that the automated phone-call poll was executed by the company Telereach.

This is the first time the Telereach system has been used for a major national political poll in Australia. The company, run by James Lantry (a former chief of staff to Country Liberal Party leader Terry Mills).

However, the Northern Territory News reported Labor Party complaints about another poll conducted by Telereach in early August. Labor suggested that the poll had been skewed to put CLP member Natasha Griggs further ahead in the seat of Solomon.

JWS designed that poll and the paper said of Scales, "[he] said if he wanted to help Ms Griggs he would not have issued a poll showing Ms Griggs would win comfortably.”

Back on the mega-poll, Scales said the phone numbers used in the poll were bought from Sample Pages, which he said was "the approved industry supplier of publicly available phone lists”, and that JWS doubled checked the data before proceeding.

Scales said Sample Pages charged more to "get the data geo-coded”, but as the data was checked again "census collected district [CCD] data” he was confident of which electorate each number called was within.

The poll was self-funded by JWS and Telereach, Scales said, and then given to the Sydney Morning Herald as an exclusive. "These days you can't get a story up unless you make it an exclusive,” Scales told Poll Position.

The big question is how accurate the poll is. "We won't know until the day [August 21] how accurate it is,” said Scales, "but that's the same criticism all poll methodologies are up against.”

Meanwhile, the Association of Market and Social Research Organisations has not taken kindly to the new poll. In a statement, spokesman John Sergeant said: "It is disappointing to see yesterday's polls have used techniques which do not meet basic industry standards. Automated polling methods like this are telephone spam, and, as a research professional, I would question the quality and rigour of this research.

"There are two fundamental problems with machine-generated polling research. First, the low participation rate means that the results have to be viewed with caution. More importantly, because most people hang up on such calls, vast numbers of people are annoyed in order to generate the results.”


August 19, 8am – Is Conroy conning us on the NBN?

In stark contrast to Gillard and Abbott's grilling by voters last night, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and his Coalition counterpart Tony Smith put on a dismal performance on the ABC's Lateline.

Have either of these men ever uploaded or downloaded a large file? Has Tony never saved a standard-defintion version of 'Howard's End' to his hard drive? And hasn't Julia asked Stephen to download an HD version of the new Chinese film 'A woman, a gun and a noodle shop'?

If they have, you wouldn't know it. Conroy went back to defending the NBN as necessary to provide HD videoconferencing, but as Christopher Joye pointed out on The Drum a few days ago, standard definition video at quite modest speeds is more than adequate for many medical applications. Smith, however, completely failed to pull him up on this point.

And Smith himself floundered on whether or not congestion would reduce wireless speeds in outer-suburban areas under the Coalition's plan, which promises 12 Mbps 'peak speed' but could end up being much slower. So why didn't Conroy then put the boot in and ask him what the upload speeds on these wireless networks would be? And does he even know what upload speed is required to reliably conduct medical consultations online?

Labor has argued that the NBN is needed for 'smart networks'. So why hasn't Smith memorised the argument made by telco analyst Grahame Lynch in The Australian, that completely undermines this assertion:

"…many of the benefits touted by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy of a high-speed broadband world this week – things such as virtual classrooms, smart grids and videoconferenced health care – are as achievable over the platforms envisaged by the Liberal plan as they are over fibre. Conroy's assertions that copper and wireless lack the symmetrical speeds necessary for these applications are not correct. Smart grids, for example, require small strings of information and they are easily facilitated over something as simple as SMS.”

Instead of real debate about what can be achieved by the Coalition's plan, weighed against the practically unlimited but seven-times as expensive NBN plan, Australia was presented with two men who give every indication that they don't have the answers.

Conroy is clearly the more competent of the pair, but if he really does know what speeds are required for which applications, he won't admit it. He will, instead, keep selling the virtues of a 'future proof' system that Australians will get at a $2000 per capita cost, if Labor comes to power. Shame on the Coalition for completely failing to hold him to account.

August 18, 4.00pm - Pyne's blaming the wrong government

Opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne is a brave man. He's shimmied out on a long and flimsy limb today to voice his support for calls from educators for "the major political parties to recognise the valuable contribution that international education plays in Australia”.

If he'd left it at that, Pyne's statement on education would have been bland, but unproblematic. But he just couldn't leave it:

"Our $18 billion international education industry is currently in limbo due to mismanagement by Labor and Julia Gillard

"Growth in violence against students, bungled changes to the Skilled Occupations List, the collapse of colleges across Australian and the industry assurance fund running out of money have all occurred on Ms Gillard's watch.

"Labor's failure and incompetence is putting yet another important sector of our economy at risk.”

There are two levels of hypocrisy in this tirade, however.

First, the Coalition has come out so strongly in favour of reduced immigration, with Joe Hockey confirming early in the campaign that student immigration would be first to get the chop (See Be populist or perish!, July 25).

While temporary student visas and permanent residency are nominally separate issues, a large proportion of students coming to Australia and paying hefty fees to Australian educational institutions, wish to pursue permanent residency after graduation. That, as it happens, is also good for Australia, despite much 'population' bunkum to the contrary during this campaign.

Second, it was the Coalition under John Howard that turned Australia's vocational education and training (VET) sector into a massive migration rort.

A Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations discussion paper released last year shows that the number of occupations on the 'migration occupations in demand list' (MODL), which allowed predominantly VET students to sail through the migration process with qualifications in trades such as hairdressing or catering, increased from 13 to 106 between December 2003 and May 2008. Of those, only 12 were added on Kevin Rudd's watch.

In late 2009, when a series of VET colleges began collapsing, the Rudd government instigated the Baird Review of Education Services for Overseas Students, which was handed to the then education minister Julia Gillard in April of this year.

Baird found that some colleges were: "…'selling' a migration outcome to respond to the demand from some students to 'buy' a migration outcome."

But back in March 2009, Labor had already junked the MODL list and replaced it with a greatly restricted 'critical skills list' (now renamed the Skilled Occupations List) that removed trades such as catering and hairdressing. For other qualification, such as accountancy, it brought in more stringent language requirements for students wishing to take up permanent residency.

So Pyne is dead wrong to blame the Rudd/Gillard government for undermining the education sector. To the contrary, on Gillard's watch as education minister the education-migration nexus was broken and the rorting largely curtailed. That might have had a short-term effect on student numbers, but without it the industry would have slowly fallen apart.


August 18, 12.10pm – Do voters talk to Echuca's robots?

The regional Victorian town of Echuca is well-known for several things – water-skiing on the Murray, a handful of fine boutique wines, the remnants of its once inordinate number of breweries and brothels – but it now appears to have another feather in its cap: a national political polling company.

The mega-poll being touted today by Fairfax media, which sampled a whopping 28,000 voters, was conducted by Echuca-based research firm JWS Research.

Poll Position has tried all morning to contact JWS director John Scales, but to not avail.

So the mystery remains – what appears to be a small firm in a regional centre has used automated phone-call technology to compile the nation's biggest poll sample.

The result, based on data that includes around 400 respondents in each marginal electorate (a total of 22,000 marginal voters and 6000 in safe seats), shows Labor winning the election with a four-seat majority.

The size of a company conducting such a poll does not matter, of course. Nor does its regional location – in fact, it's a very good argument in favour of Labor's NBN plan, which is supposed to shift all manner of work to the regions.

The only question of relevance, is whether JWS's automated calls are received well enough by punters to be sampling-error free, or whether, like John Howard's infamous automated calls at the last election, they encourage certain voters to tell the robot to "bugger off!".

Poll Position will keep you posted if any more light can be shed on this mega-poll's methodology.



August 18, 9am – Greens are driving builders mad

Poll Position isn't the only one worried by what the Greens might get up to in the senate from July next year (August 11, 7.30am – Time for the Greens to get real).

The Master Builders Association of Victoria is running print ads in Melbourne's 500,000 circulation Herald Sun newspaper urging voters to "understand the consequences of voting green”.

The ads, which also run in the Geelong Advertiser and Melbourne Times, say Greens policies 'Undermine housing afford ability', 'Threaten job security', 'Increase industrial unrest and workplace thuggery', 'Prevent and delay the construction of vital community infrastructure', and 'Endanger Australia's fragile economic recovery'.

Master Builders Victoria deputy executive director, Radley de Silva says builders are "extremely worried about the future prosperity of Australia under a Greens-controlled federal Senate” and that "the Association has been flooded with concerns from members worried about fringe policies”.

The most important calls on Mr de Silva's list are for: more land releases to make housing cheaper; the ABCC to remain in place to avoid 'thuggery'; and no tightening of planning laws.

Voting Green, says de Silva, is a direct threat to the "building and construction industry … Australia's fifth largest industry [which] employs over 184,000 people in Victoria”.

This is not particularly visionary thinking from Master Builders. The Greens actually have some major building and construction plans on the table – Bob Brown called early this week for "an extended electricity grid” to be built across Australia to "turn South Australia into a renewable energy exporter”. That'd be construction.

On housing, Greens policy includes plans to:

– "Develop a national housing plan and significantly increase funding to public and community housing” (more public money for builders)

– "Provide increased financial assistance to people unable to provide for their own housing” (more leveraged private finance for housing)

– "Require new buildings and retrofit of old buildings to meet high minimum standards of energy-efficiency, noise insulation and water conservation” (umm, that's done by builders too)

– "Develop national urban planning standards that provide for: the location of high density housing and commercial buildings close to high capacity public transport; and the clustering of medium-density housing, community facilities and small-scale businesses around neighbourhood shopping centres and other social facilities (including health care and schooling) linked with public transport” (more building, but without outer-suburban land releases).

Poll Position has already argued vociferously for the Greens to wake up and smell the fair-trade coffee on issues such as the ETS and the mining tax – getting these wrong will do immense damage not only to the economy, but to Australia's prospects of preserving its magnificent natural endowments.

But if the Greens can resist the temptation to scupper the Australian economy on those fronts, it is be hoped that Master Builders Victoria can grasp that it is not building and construction that the Greens say cause environmental damage and carbon pollution, but certain types of building and construction.

Radley de Silva agrees that "medium density housing is a positive” and tells Poll Position that "we don't want to see significant urban sprawl”. But that is what we already have in his own state's capital, Melbourne.

Australia is going to have to get a lot smarter about housing and urban planning to cater with dwelling shortfalls – de Silva puts the shortfall at 29,000 in Victoria alone – but also a heavy national dependency on expensive, carbon intensive private-car-based transport systems.

Master Builders Victoria has a large role to play in that debate – but a bit more consultation with their arch enemy Bob Brown might produce more constructive outcomes than the attacks ads in this week's papers.



August 18, 8.30am – When the party gets boring

'Dull campaign is fault of media' is the headline atop a media release from the Liberal Democratic Party President Peter Whelan this morning. So let's see if we can liven it up.

Whelan, who, let's face it, stands a cat's chance in hell of wielding any kind of power after August 21 complains "most Australians do not know we exist because the media never tells them anything about us."

For some reason lunatic journalists, such as your erstwhile correspondent, are "filtering what [the public] hear so severely it is inhibiting the evolution of our democracy”.

"There are 25 distinct political parties running in this election, but very few of the public would be aware of that. The only ones they ever hear about are the three majors – Labor, Greens and Liberal."

Good point. Hold the front page for the party that at the 2007 election won support from voters that "ranged from 0.1 per cent to 1.6 per cent in the HoR and up to 0.24 per cent in the Senate”. One can't help wondering what those figure would be if their mums hadn't voted for them.

But there is a serious side to this. What Whelan calls a 'major' party, The Greens, was a fringe group a little over twenty years ago with just 0.4 per cent of the Senate vote.

In 2001 the Greens were still well behind the Democrats – holding 4.9 per cent and 7.2 per cent of the Senate vote respectively – though they streaked ahead in 2004 to become the third major in the upper house, with 7.7 per cent of the vote (the Democrats tumbled to 2.1 per cent). At the last election the Greens had 9 per cent.

The Greens are now in a position to make their policies known and receive extensive coverage of their provocative views on the mining tax, their plans to boost public funding of education and the elephant in the chamber, their opposition to Labor's plan to revive the ETS.

That's how 'democracy evolves', to use Whelan's phrase. And the media begins taking your policies seriously when you've put in the hard yards, pounded the pavements and pressed the flesh enough to actually win over substantial portions of the vote.

It's made easier, of course, if you can find a sexy topic to get your party off the ground – the groundswell of activism that followed Bob Brown's 1983 victory in the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam dispute helped launch the Greens.

All of which points to the inconvenient truth that the Liberal Democratic Party must take its share of the blame for making this election 'boring'. Perhaps you could try a trip up a river in a Bob Brown-style canoe, Mr Whelan?



August 18, 7.20 am –  Two kinds of marginal electorate

Andrew Robb's blistering attack on Labor's "sandbagging” of marginal electorates with GP super-clinics and NBN roll-out, is a fine demonstration of unscientific thinking.

Anyone who has even brushed past a book on statistical theory in the library knows that correlation does not imply causation – which is why scientists of all kinds, including social scientists such as economists and sociologists, painstakingly delve into qualitative studies to explain simple correlations in data sets.

Robb, backed up by hard-working journalists at The Australian, has managed to show a correlation between the locations chosen to GP super-clinics and the NBN roll-out, and marginal voting patterns. But there are two problems with leaping from there to the conclusion that 'Labor is sandbagging!'

The first, is that the correlation is actually quite weak. Take, for instance, this line in today's paper: "Calculations by The Australian show that of the 13 super clinics identified by the government as being fully or partially operational, eight are in marginal electorates – five of which are held by the government, and three by the Coalition.”

Put in percentage terms, that means 62 per cent of clinics are in marginal electorates, whereas only 40 out of 150 seats in the House of Reps (27 per cent) are counted by the ABC psephologist Antony Green as being marginal.

Looks dodgy, doesn't it? But then begins the qualitative part of the experiment. Not all marginal seats are dominated by lower socio-economic voters, but a great many of the outer-suburban electorates, mentioned so often by commentators throughout this campaign as the key battleground in this election, are. And they are, mostly, not served well by GPs.

So for Andrew Robb to claim the delivery of super-clinics to such electorates, and the mainland NBN roll-out taking place in a labour-starved region of northern Queensland as "sandbagging strategy designed to buy a dishonourable victory in this election” looks hysterical.

Marginal electorates are, by definition, divided between voters who think John Howard would have delivered them better lives, and those that think the same of Labor.

The fact that Labor's has targeted poor electorates to deliver services does not amount to sandbagging. What it does suggest is that they are targeting that other kind of marginal voter – those on the socio-economic margins.

We can't know, instantly, the socio-economic breakdown of all the areas in question – as AMA president Andrew Pesce told The Australian, the argument needs a bit more scientific rigour. Asked if the GP clinics had been 'located purely on the basis of need' he said: "I'm not sure that's necessarily so, but I'm not going to dispute it because I haven't done the research."


Read previous Poll Position posts here.