Crikey

Hold the front page: Labor shoots to election-winning opinion poll lead. Well, sort of – the poll comes from the little-reported Morgan face-to-face series, which is noted for leaning heavily to Labor when measured against both election results and other pollsters, and the lead only stands if you allocate minor party and independent preferences according to the result of the previous election. On the primary vote, Labor is at 38.5 per cent (which is half a point higher than the 2010 election result), the Coalition is on 42.5 per cent (43.6 per cent at the election) and the Greens are on 12 per cent. If you assume preferences would behave as they did at the previous election, as most pollsters do, that translates into a 51-49 lead for Labor. However, the Morgan face-to-face series continues to confound by showing minor party and independent voters splitting about 50-50 when asked which of the major parties they would preference, with the result that the Coalition leads 52-48 on the measure Morgan uses at its headline figure. The poll covers the last two weekends of Morgan’s regular surveying, from a total sample of 1921.

Morgan poops Labor’s party a little further with the unheralded publication of voting intention figures from a phone survey of what I take to have been about 600 respondents on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week (from which we’d previously seen only this – the sample quoted is 646 persons over 14, the youngest of whom would not have been included in the voting intention figures), which shows Labor doing only slightly better than the overall trend. This poll has the Coalition leading 46.5 per cent to 35.5 per cent on the primary vote, 53.5-46.5 on previous-election preferences and 54.5-45.5 on respondent-allocated preferences, with the Greens on 9 per cent. The Labor primary vote is the highest they have recorded at any phone poll (Newspoll, Nielsen, Morgan or Galaxy) since the middle of March 2011, although the margin of error on this occasion is a high 4 per cent.

Going back to the middle of the last year, Labor’s respondent-allocated preference share from pollsters who publish figures for this has been 63.1 per cent from Nielsen polls, 61.8 per cent from Morgan phone polls (of which there have been five) and 49.7 per cent from Morgan face-to-face polls. At the 2010 election it was 65.7 per cent.

The latest Essential Research poll is unchanged on last week’s result, except that the Greens are up a point to 10 per cent – Labor is on 35 per cent, the Coalition is on 48 per cent, and two-party preferred is 54-46. Further questions relate to mandatory pre-commitment, with support at 62 per cent (one point higher than when they last asked the question in October) and opposition at 25 per cent (five points lower), and “additional” government assistance to the car industry (58 per cent support, 18 per cent oppose). As they do from time to time, Essential sought to establish whether a popular misconception played a role in the latter issue, in this case that the car industry employs more people than it actually does, but two-thirds of respondents simply said they didn’t know. Also covered: “most important roles of government”, best party to handle issues (Labor leads Liberal only on “providing support to the most disadvantaged”), and the status of manufacturing industry more generally.

UPDATE: We also had from Roy Morgan on Friday their occasional exercise of inquiring about the best leader for both parties, and it has Kevin Rudd’s lead over Julia Gillard widening from 31-24 to 33-19 since early November, and Malcolm Turnbull’s lead over Tony Abbott about stable (from 38-24 to 37-22). As usual, an anyone-but-the-incumbent sentiment from the parties’ opponents was a considerable factor.

Bernard Keane at Crikey reports the first Essential Research poll for the year has the two-party vote at the same place as the final poll last year, with the Coalition leading 54-46. Also featured are leaders’ personal ratings which you can read about at the link. More to follow.

UPDATE: Full post here. The voting intention figures are a rolling average of the last result last year and the first result this year – Essential advises me that in both periods the result was 54-46. Results to questions on leadership approval are derived as always from this week’s sample only. Both leaders are up three on approval and down two on disapproval since a month ago, Julia Gillard to 37 per cent and 52 per cent, Tony Abbott to 35 per cent and 51 per cent. Preferred prime minister is little changed, Gillard’s lead going from 39-35 to 39-36. It should be noted that polls conducted over the new year period are often thought to be unreliable, although neither Essential nor Morgan has produced anything out of the ordinary.

The all-too-brief New Year polling respite has come to an end with the first Morgan face-to-face poll of the year, covering a sample of 934 from the regular weekend survey. It records only minor shifts on the last poll of last year, which combined the results of the weekends of December 10/11 and 17/18: Labor up half a point to 37 per cent, the Coalition up two to 45 per cent and the Greens down 2.5 per cent to 10.5 per cent. Where Labor achieved parity on the previous-election preference method in the last poll, this time the Coalition leads 51.5-48.5. When respondents were asked how they would direct their preferences, the Coalition’s lead was 54-46, up from 53.5-46.5. As always with Morgan over the past year, this result is strangely favourable to the Coalition. One should further query the utility of any poll conducted at this time of year – my intuition is that the absence of holiday-makers from their homes would bias such a poll towards Labor, although I don’t have any actual data to back that up.