Pollytics

Politics, elections and piffle plinking

Essential Report – National Curriculum Edition

March 9, 2010 – 4:05 pm, by Possum Comitatus

This week’s Essential Report comes in with the primaries running 43 (up 1)/ 40 (steady) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 54/46 the same way – a one point gain to Labor since last week. The Greens and the broad “Others” are steady on 9 a piece. This comes from a rolling two week sample of 1889, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.3% mark.

Additional questions this week covered which level of government the public believes should be responsible for an array of issues, perceptions of gender wage differentials in the workplace, why people vote the way they do at both State and Fed elections, as well as public opinion on Rudd’s national curriculum.

These additional questions ran off a sample of 1129, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.9% mark.

Do you think the following services should be mainly the responsibility of the Federal Government or State Governments?

fedstate1

On the cross-tabs we have:

People in Western Australia (50%) and Victoria (43%) wee more likely to think that health should be the responsibility of both State and Federal Governments.

35% of those surveyed think that water supply should be the responsibility of the State Governments and 25% think it should be the
responsibility of the Federal Government.

People in South Australia (42%) were more likely to think that water supply should be the responsibility of the Federal Government.

If we ever wonder why Federal governments have centralist tendencies, we should probably look in the mirror occasionally. I suppose, as a consolation,  we think States should do water :-D

Read More »

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Are confident consumers good for the government?

March 9, 2010 – 11:06 am, by Possum Comitatus

This is an expanded version of something I wrote for the Crikey daily mail last week.

Does increasing consumer confidence boost the government vote? Orthodox wisdom would have us “yes” – good consumers are good government voters. If people are happy with their economic lot, if they’re happy with their economic expectations about the future, then they will – so the theory goes – reward the government for overseeing a fortuitous economic environment that boosts prosperity and their material well being.

However, the actual answer is somewhat different. Once upon a time there was indeed a strong relationship between consumer confidence and government political stocks -back in the boom/bust of the late 80’s and into the 1990’s recession period – and that probably explains why this myth is so enduring.

But a myth it generally is – at least in terms of the strength of the relationship – as we shall see.

To have a proper look we’ll need to go and get some data. For consumer confidence we’ll use the monthly Westpac-Melbourne Institute Consumer Sentiment Index.It doesn’t really matter what consumer sentiment metric we use here since they all move together anyway.For those that want the actual data, you can download it from the RBA as an Excel file here.

For our polling data, we’ll use Newspoll – but we’ll take the monthly average of the Newspoll figures to keep the Newspoll data chronologically consistent with our monthly consumer sentiment data, and it also knocks out a little of the polling noise. Combined, these give us a series of data running from December 1985 through until February 2010. Throwing them in a simple comparative line chart to see what we’re dealing with gives us:

voteconsen1The consumer sentiment is on the left hand axis, the government primary vote is on the right. From the beginning, what stands out is the early correlation in the series up until around 1993 and the way they lost their connective dynamics around 1994 and never really regained it in any substantial manner. If we just run this chart again, but split it into the two periods of pre and post 1993, it becomes a bit more obvious. Read More »

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Nielsen Part 2 – Health Plan and Issue Management

March 8, 2010 – 11:21 am, by Possum Comitatus

Continuing on from Part 1 where we had a look at the vote estimates and win expectations, we now move on to the additional questions that were asked on greater federal government involvement in the hospital system and a question on which party is best to handle a number of issues.

The hospital question and its results – including cross-tabs – came in like this:

hospitalplan1

The results here could become a little problematic for the Coalition when it comes to them adopting a political position on Rudd’s health plan. With large, almost super majorities, supporting greater Federal involvement in funding the nation’s hospital system, any opposition to the plan will have to walk the tightrope between arguing that, yes, the Coalition wants greater Fed involvement too – but just not Rudd’s particular flavour of Federal involvement.

Lines like “they can’t manage insulation, how can they manage health” are effectively an argument against greater Federal funding – especially without any alternative Coalition funding plan – carrying with it what looks like a pretty significant political risk.

What’s interesting here is not only the broad bipartisan support for greater Federal funding, but also the large size of the “strongly support” responses across all demographics. Greater federal funding of the hospital system seems to something held with a large dose of conviction.

Next up, Nielsen asked the following question: Read More »

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Nielsen Part 1 – The Vote Estimates

March 8, 2010 – 7:02 am, by Possum Comitatus

Today’s Nielsen via the Fairfax press has the Coalition up 1 on the primaries and Labor steady to come in at 42/42, washing out into a two party preferred of 53/47 to Labor – a one point gain to the Coalition since last month. The Greens are on 9 (down 1) while the broad “Others” are on 5 (down 2). This comes from a sample of 1400, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.6% mark. You can see the full demographic tables here.

We’re going to do something a bit different today and look at approval ratings, preferred PM and win expectations by party vote. To start with, approval ratings for both Rudd and Abbott.

ruddapproval1

abbottapproval1

Next up, preferred PM ratings by party vote: Read More »

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Betting Market Friday

March 5, 2010 – 5:39 am, by Possum Comitatus

Another Friday, another sweep around the betting markets to see where the money is running for the federal election contest. Among the 5 agencies we watch, this week saw changes in the ALP price run in both directions, while changes in the Coalition price were all one way when they happened. Sportsbet pulled the ALP down from $1.26 to $1.25 over the week while Centerbet and Sportingbet bumped their price up for Labor by 2 and 3 cents respectively. On the Coalition side, Centerbet, Sportingbet and Betfair all showed contraction in their prices over the week of between 10 and 20 cents.

weeklychangemar5

bettingsidebarmar5

Another good Newspoll for Abbott this week Read More »

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A closer look at the Green vote

March 3, 2010 – 8:19 am, by Possum Comitatus

From comments yesterday, it might be a good time to have a bit of a squiz at how the Greens have been performing in the vote estimates over the last 12 months. The common theme with the Greens has been on how their vote has been growing substantially over recent times, and while that is certainly happening in some states at the state election level, federally the growth has been much more tempered over the last year.

Rather than use every poll result from every pollster and end up with a whole lot of noise – what we’ll do is take a broader look at any trends that may be apparent by using monthly averages for each pollster on their vote estimates. The Morgan poll in this mix is their face-to-face poll – the monthly averages have been rounded to the nearest half a percent.

Greenallpollsters

The first thing that pops up is how phone polls are more favourable than non-phone polls for the Greens. In fact, over the period the phone polls have been , on average, over 1.5% more favourable to the Greens than their non-phone poll counterparts.

We can see this better by comparing the phone pollster average, the non-phone pollster average and the all pollster average (click to enlarge):

greenphonenonphone

While all pollsters have shown a trend towards the Greens over the last 12 months, the phone polls have it as around a 2% gain, while the non-phone polls come in as around a 1% gain.

On the demographic front – and for this we’ll use just the Newspoll quarterly aggregates – it gets a little more complicated. Read More »

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Newspoll – not quite whacking day

March 2, 2010 – 6:22 am, by Possum Comitatus

Via The Oz, this fortnight’s Newpoll comes in with the primaries running 41/40 to the Coalition (a one point increase for both), washing out into a two party preferred of 52/48 for Labor – a one point gain to the Coalition. The Greens are on 9 (down 3), while the broad “Others” are on 10 (up 1). This comes from a sample of 1162, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 3% mark.

Whacking Day never quite arrived this poll for Rudd – although one could argue that Rudd has been getting whacked for 4 months now. I’d imagine Labor Party types are now regretting gifting Abbott a free ride over the Christmas period.

The polls this year – particularly the last month or so – have suggested that the government has been in a bit of a public opinion holding pattern. PM Satisfaction hasn’t moved, dissatisfaction had a jump in late January and has held constant since, the vote hasn’t moved, Rudd’s Better PM hasn’t moved. In fact, the only thing that has really moved are Abbott’s personal ratings.

The Coalition are getting all the right results so far under the Abbott leadership – his dissatisfaction is stable and the undecideds are breaking into his satisfaction column. Better PM is inching up and the vote has improved. So far so good. What must be worrying the Libs though is that with all the media hysteria surrounding the insulation program, 52/48 is all they could manage. A month of full-blown media negativity, in all media consumption demographics, with the threat of little old ladies getting burned alive in their bedrooms and 52/48 is it?

Before we get onto the usual charts, let’s go through that Taverner poll on the weekend of NSW voters and their federal voting intention that suggested a two party preferred of 50/50 in that state. Read More »

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Essential Report – leader attributes

March 1, 2010 – 4:16 pm, by Possum Comitatus

This week’s Essential Report has the primaries running 42 (down 1)/ 40 (steady) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 53/47 the same way – a one point gain to the Coalition since last week’s poll. The Greens are on 9 (up 1), while the broad “Others” are steady on 9. This comes from a two week rolling sample of 1816, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.3% mark.

This is the lowest ALP vote estimate that Essential has produced to date.

Additional questions this week are on attribute rating for Rudd and Abbott, population size and the private health insurance rebate means testing proposed by Labor. These additional questions run off a sample of 1009, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 3.1% mark.

Which of the following describe your opinion of the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd?
Which of the following describe your opinion of the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott?

ruddattributes Read More »

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Betting Market Friday

February 26, 2010 – 6:33 am, by Possum Comitatus

Another Friday, another sweep around the betting markets for the looming Federal Election. Over the past week, the ALP prices offered by our five agencies changed from “not at all” through to increasing by 7 cents. On the Coalition side of the equation, the change over the last week was between zero and a 20 cent reduction in the offered prices:

7daychange

For all the noise over Garrett, the average increase in the probability of a Coalition victory over the last week was less than 1%.I guess the punters were far less excited over it’s consequences than was the Abbotariat in the paramilitary opinion wing of The Oz. The individual probabilities for the five agencies on our watch list come in like this: Read More »

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Did the insulation program actually reduce fire risk?

February 24, 2010 – 12:07 pm, by Possum Comitatus

Has the Garrett insulation scheme actually reduced the rate of installation caused fires? It’s a strange thing to say – well, it’s strange if you don’t think about it too hard. What we often forget is that Garrett’s insulation program dramatically increased standards in an industry where there were previously very few.

First off, some raw numbers. If we go fossicking over on the ABS site, we find some data about the numbers of buildings with insulation in Australia in 2008 – the year before the Garrett insulation program. We’ll use these numbers as our “before” data set.

61% of 5,218,000 dwellings – or 3,183,265 – had insulation in 2008 according to our favourite Bureau. According to Garrett’s department, there were also between 65,000 and 70,000 new installations done per year before the insulation program. Let’s split the difference and call it 67,500 installations.

We also know from Garrett’s department in the same letter than between 80 and 85 fires occurred every year because of insulation. That’s the numbers we need for the pre-Garrett program.

Moving on to the Garret program numbers, we know that during the program, 1.1 million installations were undertaken. So that’s our yearly installation rate and it pushes the number of houses currently with insulation up to 4.28 million homes.

We also know that 93 fires have been linked to the program.

There’s our “after numbers” we need to do the comparison.

With the 2008 figures on the numbers of fires, we don’t know how many of them were as a result of new installations and how many of them were caused by insulation that was already in the ceiling and may have been there for years. So what we need to do is differentiate between the fires caused by the insulation stock (the pre-existing insulation) and new installations.

To do this we’ll create three scenarios:

Scenario 1: 10% of fires were caused by existing insulation and 90% caused by new installations

Scenario 2: 50% of fires were caused by existing insulation and 50% caused by new installations

Senario 3: 90% of fires were caused by existing insulation and 10% caused by new installations

This gives us a range of all possible likely outcomes. If we measure the number of fires caused by new installs using these three scenarios for 2008, and for our known number of 93 for Garrett’s program, this is what we get.

fire3scenarios

From here, we can figure out how many fires there were per new installation in both 2008 (where there were 67,500 new installs) under it’s three scenarios, and with the Garrett program Read More »

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