The Poll Bludger will be lying low for the following week – he trusts the Prime Minister will do the right thing and not call an election in his absence. Until then, all you opinion poll fans out there can play a game of compare and contrast with the headlines accompanying this effort from The [...]

Because the Poll Bludger does not like to wade out of his depth, the obvious electoral law issues raised by the Seven Sunrise program’s "Vote for Me" contest were not canvassed in this earlier posting. Graham Orr, senior lecturer in Law at Griffith University, has kindly offered the following thoughts.
The show may implicate electoral bribery [...]

At first the "Vote for Me" contest being conducted by Channel Seven’s Sunrise program seemed vaguely distasteful but too trivial to warrant comment. Contestants were required to submit a three-minute policy speech on VHS from which a panel of "political" equivalents of Mark, Marsha and Dicko were to select 18 finalists. One winner would be [...]

Roy Morgan appears to have marked the arrival of election season by moving its schedule from fortnightly to weekly federal polling. Unfortunately their sample sizes have suffered as a result, the polls from the last two weeks surveying fewer than 1100 respondents compared with more than 2000 for most Morgan polls from the first half [...]

On Friday the last piece in the Senate election puzzle fell into place when the National Party held its preselection for the second position on the joint Coalition ticket in Victoria. Incumbent Julian McGauran prevailed in a field of four including Scott Mitchell, a former Young Nationals president who pursued his challenge at the cost [...]