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.
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):
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. While we can see a clear but relatively small trend in the national level polling estimates, the demographic cross tabs are not showing the increase as coming from any particular place – apart from recent gains in the 18-34 year group and strong recent growth in NSW.
First up – by State and geography:
Next up by age and gender:
Finally, it’s worth putting the vote trends of the Greens in some perspective: Newspoll monthly averages of the primary votes of all parties.
43 Comments
Not much to it is there? funny because I had the impression the increase was larger.
Looks like the Greens still teeter on the brink of political irrelevancy.
How long have they been the third rail in politics now?
One would imagine they would have increased their presence substantially during that time – if only by osmosis in embracing those abdicating with disillusionment from the major parties.
New membership must be at all time low.
That 90%+ of the country don’t vote Green is a endless source of comfort in the democratic process.
It all looks pretty flat really, although at least this shows that what support the Greens have is reasonably loyal (you often hear that the Green’s vote it ‘soft’ compared to the major parties, an assertion I haven’t seen a lot of evidence for).
One thing that is surprising is the phone poll vs non-phone difference. I would have expected that since phone polls require a landline, that they would if anything be biased (if only by a small amount) against the Greens who have more support amongst the younger demographics more likely to live in no landline dwellings. I can’t really understand why that difference sits the way it does, although the statistical significance is probably not very high.
They are the third party in politics which is a lot more then they used to be. The possibility of holding the balance of power in the senate after the next election means they are anything but irrelevant. Compared to the other minor parties the Greens are very, very relevant. What do you expect from a third party?
Possum,
Using averages like this is very much looking in the rear view mirror. The interesting thing about the current Newspoll is the drop from 12 to 9% Primary for the Greens which has fed into a lower TPP for Labor.
The question is whether it’s a one off or the beginning of a new trend.
GG the whole point of combining polls is to wash out the noise of one off polls, which will hit a party with a lower vote like the Greens much more than the majors. Of course that means you are looking ‘in the rear view mirror’ but you can’t see future polls numbers!
The question you asked will be answered in a few months time when more polls accumulate. Until then it can’t be answered objectively.
The trouble with looking at Greens polling numbers is that when you poll 10% any random fluctuation of 0.5-1% happening two months in a row looks like a trend.
I think the Greens like to bang the drum of “surges in support” every time they get a 2% bump in the poll. Plus poll followers are desperate for something interesting to be happening so any surge in Greens, FF, One Nation, etc… is good fodder.
Whats interesting to look at is a longer term history (if possible) taking quarterly averages for the last 5+ years (hopefully including 2 election results). I think what you would see is a gradually rise in Greens polls, but lower figures at the elections (e.g. 07 election they got just under 8%, but polls suggest support of closer to 10%).
Energy Pedant,
Fluctuations of that order are with in the MOE. However, 3% is outside the MOE. (Check on Possum’s poll cruncher if you don’t believe me).
Aggregating data over too long a period means you miss turning points.
I have made this point before, but I’ll make it again.
When considering the Greens it is important to realise that they are not a political party in the traditional sense. They have policies which have to exist in the political sphere, but the basis of their policies is the environment. The environmental support for human life is under sustained attack and it is giving out (the environment of course will not be destroyed in an absiolute sense if this trend continues, it will merely no longer support human life). This is not a political issue, it is not an option not to address AGW, or behind that the more difficult question of use of resources and population (unless you think doing nothing and dying is an option).
In a sense it doesn’t really matter what the Green vote is, the Green vote is an index of how many people in society have recognised the above points and are prepared to vote for a party that forgrounds them. However, events in the physical world will catch up with everyone.
If the Greens decide to go for ‘politics’ and possibly attract more votes then that’s up to them, but they would lose the support of people who understand the urgency of environmental issues. In the case of Rudd’s ETS they did well not to do a deal. Rudd’s ETS would do nothing to address AGW. Green amendments that were proposed would have moved the scheme towards one that would do something, but these were rejected, in keeping with Labor’s anti-green vendetta.
Possum, what’s the margin of error surrounding these polls? Is it big enough to be concerned about? I have some (possibly misguided) impression that the margin of error with the minor parties is quite a lot larger than the margin of error with the major parties, just because of things to do with statistics and the small amount of voters who’d vote Green.
@calyptorhynchus, as much as I’m sympathic to the Australian Greens (I wouldn’t quite call myself a supporter, although I vote for them more often than not) I disagree completely with the way you have painted the picture.
The Greens are a political party and they have (quite rightly) policies in all areas, not just those that deal directly or indirectly with the environment. An individual may be strongly committed to environment conservation and yet disagree with the approach of the political party called ‘the Greens’ in order to achieve the results they want. You may not agree with them, but it doesn’t mean that the ~90% of Australians not voting Greens do not consider the environment when they vote.
@Greensborough Growler, the MOE of a poll is not a hard limit, it’s just an arbitrary line we draw at some point in a distribution. You can’t use it to prove that because something is ‘outside the MOE’ it must be ‘real’ and anything else is just noise. The further the difference between any two points the greater the probability that there is a genuine underlying change, but there is no hard cut-off anywhere. You still need to look more long term.
You can see this with the poll cruncher, if you put the numbers in you will see that there is a ~5% chance that the real change in the Greens vote was less than -1%, and that is just considering the last two polls. This means that around 1 time in 20, you’ll get this large jump even without any significant real change. That’s why you really can’t say very much off just one or two polls.
calyptorhynchus
But the Greens ARE a political party in the traditional sense. Their body of policy stretches far beyond the traditional environmental sphere, for example how does a stated policy of ending our military commitments in Afghanistan immediately and without qualification do anything to address AGW or other environmental issues? What does having an exclusive NFP childcare industry have to do with health of our river systems or the Great Barrier Reef?? On a whole wide range of non environmental policy area’s the Greens stand clearly to the left of Labor. Therefore in reality there are two Greens elements, the true environmentalists and the far leftist who no longer has a home in the left wing of the Labor caucus. A vote for the Greens could a vote for either.
The Greens are not above traditional politics, indeed they have carved out there place on the political spectrum along with everyone else.
Bogdanovist
You beat me to it.
Tim – with the averages up the top, the MoE doesn’t really apply because of what that type of multi-pollster averaging does when it comes to trying to determine sampling error. So the averages are the best estimate where the plus or minus X amount either side of the estimates come down to the consequences of any house effect (non-sampling error) distortion of the pollsters rather sampling error itself. Hopefully those would have washed out by averaging.
On any given individual poll, the margin of error is actually smaller in theory for the minor parties than the majors. However, in practice, we’ll often see larger relative variance happening at some periods with the minor party vote composition.
So while in theory an 1100 sample poll gives an MoE that maxes out at 3% for the two party preferred. For a primary vote of 8%, the MoE is only 1.6% theoretically – but probably more like 2% or more in practice. (that comes about because of non-sampling error as well as the way post stratification weighting and quota sampling impacts as well)
In reality, the MoE on any given poll of 1100 is probably more like 4% rather than 3% – but we’d need to have elections every week for a couple of years to be able to figure it out.
Bogdanovist,
Agree that a one off result outside MOE is just a flag. There may be many explanations. One of which is that it is a turning point.
Statistical analysis is about trends and highlighting what’s different about one set of figures compared to another and whether that difference actually means something.
In the demographic breakdowns, the Election ’07 result is clearly an outlier (one can speculate on the reasons for that, but it is quite apparently the case).
If you remove the outlier, they look considerably flatter (Victoria even appears to be trending _down_).
@calyptorhynchus,
Spot on. They are true representatives of genuine environmental concern, though their social policies in general are worth considering for anyone interested in equitable society instead of enlarging their pile of cash.
The small fluctuations shown above are less important than the politics that Labor certainly will play, handing preferences to right wing religious fanatics of dubious intelligence or outright lying to inner Melbourne electorates where the greens are likely to roll lower house labor candidates.
The Greens strength will be in certain key electorates, which are easily within reach as Rudd tries to out-conservative the mad monk.
Surely the Greens are the 4th rail in Aussie politics? The National Party still exists in some sense, but I guess their votes are aggregated with the Coalition.
Sorry for the double post… the other interesting thing here is the possibility to vote major party in the lower house and Greens/Inde in the Upper House.
I guess these numbers reflect Lower House voting intentions?
If you get bored Poss, is it possible to compare Upper and Lower house votes for the greens? maybe they trend at 8% in the Lower House, but 12% in the Upper, or something like that.
Not sure which poll you are using for the Victorian figures Mr Possum sir. The only mob that does Victoria is Newspoll which came out on Monday. It has the greens bouncing between 14-15 all year (except for one dip to 12 in July-Aug).
Dr Strangelove – those polls above are *federal voting intention* breakdowns for the State of Victoria rather than state government polls for the State of Victoria. You’re talking about State polls.
GG,
Don’t you think your hate filled crusade against The Greens over many years looks a bit embarrassing when your predictions of The Greens demise/irrelevance is just wrong?
As The Greens go from strength to strength your irrationality seems to reach greater heights as the facts get in the way of what you would like to happen.
The Greens will be around for a long time, why don’t you learn to live with the fact?
I guess you enjoy the grumpy old man image, you do it so well.
Eponymous@18
I don’t think the Nats count as they haven’t been a true independent party in years. A vote for the Nationals is a vote for the liberals as they form a combined party room there is no appreciable difference in policy between the two.
The Greens became the true third choice after the demise of the Democrats (a sad day for centrist politics). It seems the electorate has polarised over the last decade which only benefits hard left party like the Greens.
Poss a little OT but what % to the Australian Democrats make of the “Other” column? Is it possible to do a minor party breakdown?
The poll trends Possum has calculated for the Greens actually compare quite favourably with the levels of support for national Green parties in most other Western democracies, and very favourably with the levels of support received by Green parties elsewhere in the Anglosphere. They also compare favourably with the levels of support sustained **over time** by other third parties in Australian politics. The Labor/non-Labor dualism in Australian Federal politics has proven remarkably resilient for more than a century and any assessment of a third party’s performance needs to have regard to that historical reality.
In response to another comment, the Greens’ Senate vote in 2007 was 9.04% compared with 7.79% for the HoR. This is consistent with the historic pattern of “ticket splitting” by voters in Federal election. I was also quietly informed by one of the ALP booth workers on election day 2007 that she would be voting Labor in the HoR and Greens for the Senate, and similar sentiments are expressed quietly by not a few younger ALP members.
Despite the hopes of some and the fears of others, and vice versa, I think that the two least likely probabilities for the next election and the one after it are (a) a collapse of the Green vote to the political margins and (b) an explosion of the Green vote in mainland Australia to seriously challenge for major party status. The most likely outcome is what Possum’s figures are showing, namely incremental growth.
OBlizzard,
The Dems poll currently around 1%
marsupial , glad you highlited phone polls I did raw calcs on Morgon’s 28 ph polls in yrs 2007 to 2010 vs his 96 face to face in ythose yrs Labor down about 5% in 2009/10 , down 0.4% 2008 , and down 4.3% 2007 in his phone polls vs his face to face pols
All othr partys %’s went up in those phone polls vs his face to face polls So I now ignore his phone polls
The rise since October in the Greens vote is a consequence of the failure of the ETS legislation. Some Labor voters would have preferred a more rigorous ETS to have been negotiated with the Greens rather than the watered down version we ended up with. They are simply telling the Govt to learn to deal with their true partners ( The Greens ) and not with the climate sceptics in the Coalition. I for one will be voting
1- Greens in both houses in the next election and directing preferences to Labor, whereas prior to October I simply would have voted the straight Labor ticket. I am not alone I bet.
MPM and the other conservative choir members, all this just goes to show that the 85% or so who vote for either tweedle as first preference are the reason we get crap governments. My opinion of those who blindly vote for either major is not very high. It’s a sad failing that there isn’t a genuine third option to break the nexus, but that’s just the way the majors like it – so they can pretend there is democracy in this country. As the recent donation analysis by Poss showed – big business owns both parties. They just change places evey now and then to keep the scam going.
Re phone polls vs face to face.
By my count, since the November 2007 election Morgan has conducted 89 polls, 66 face to face, 23 phone.
The average for the Greens from all Morgan polls is 8.39%.
The average for face to face polls is 8.25%
The average for phone polls is 8.7%.
In the same period Newspoll did 52 phone polls, with the average for the Greens 10.04%
If I am correct there is a bigger variation between Morgan and Newspoll phone polls than there is between Morgan phone and face to face polls. Is this due to methodology in the polling rather than whether it is a phone or face to face poll?
Interestingly, Newspoll fairly consistently gives a higher figure for the Greens than the Morgan polls.
So, the Greens are about level with the loose coalition that used to be united behind Pauline Hanson (ducks)
I’m going to regret doing this, but can we stop seeing this debate in such blinkered black and white terms (or is that blue and red?).
Our notion of a political spectrum came from the French (correct me if I’m wrong here) parliament building where various members of parties started sitting together, on either the left or the right side of the room. This has become a METAPHOR for political party stances since. However, given the complexities of modern politics it represents a gross oversimplification of ANY party’s position. It is an idea that had dubious relevance at the start and has become fossilised as some sort of objective ‘fact’ since then, even though it has little explanatory power.
Both the coalition and the ALP support policies that would have horrified their political forebears 50 years ago. Nonetheless we still persist in seeing them as ‘left’ and ‘right’. The Greens represent a new third party, which some choose to call hard left, out of some confusion about the Greens wanting more equity in society, I guess. Yet the Greens also advocate many ‘conservative’ positions, in terms of personal spending, maintaining existing structures and ecosystems, rather than developing them, due to the logic of a ‘sustainable’ ethos.
The limits of space mean that I am oversimplifying to make my point but it still stands. Take off the blinkers of ‘left/right’ thinking, and actually SEE the new political conglomerations/allegiances, for what they are, rather than try and fit them into a one-size-fits-all (mentalities) box.
Enough said…
ROFL
Yaz, the Greens call themselves the left. I’ve had a number of discussions with Greens members and supporters in which I’ve described the direction I’d like the Greens to move in, but I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that the Greens are a left wing party, that those people who founded it and who are the core members consider themselves and the party to be of the left and reject attempts by newer party members to try and steer the party in a slightly different direction.
I agree with the left/right thing being a gross oversimplification, but every party including the Greens still self-associates using that metric.
Wait – these polls seem to track primary lower house votes. Pollsters never seem to track Senate votes which is where the Greens are most relevant.
Anecdotally, a portion of voters will vote Green in the Senate and a major party in the Lower House (Democrats used to capture votes like this too) – in the voter’s mind, it’s sort of a bet both ways, or a check and balance – or as the Dems would say “keep the bastards honest”.
Rather than the obvious fact that the Greens will remain largely irrelevant in the Lower House in the foreseeable future, I’d like to see some analysis of likely Senate results – could the Greens hold the balance of power post-next-election? What about in a double dissolution?
Yaz
I agree with you. A one dimensional spectrum is in fact inadequate in classifying a political party IMHO. A party may have socialist economic policy but libertarian social policy, should it be considered left or right of the spectrum? The political compass is more on the spot, it charts political beliefs along two axis, traditional left and right (social, free market) for economics and authoritarianism/libertarianism for social values. This was the chart they came up with for the Australian political landscape during the 2007 federal election:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/aus2007
airefuego: The excellent Antony Green did some analysis of the potential Senate outcomes mid last year:
http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2009/07/double-dissolution-versus-halfsenate-election-which-would-be-better-for-labor-in-the-senate.html
The Cliff’s Notes version is that in either half-senate or double-dissolution scenarios, the Greens are likely to hold the balance of power.
Possum did an interesting Reps v Senate analysis a while back that showed some interesting and relevant info for the Greens. See http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2009/09/14/predicting-the-senate/
In a nutshell, the Greens get about 1.25% of the vote in the Senate for every 1% they get in the Reps. But read the full article for the details.
OBlizzard – thanks for that chart – shows why Greens are the only party for me, and I don’t really want to give a second preference to any of that lot in the upper rh quadrant
So deliberate informal votes for me from now on – until we get OPV in all elections.
Bog – If the Greens move into the upper rh quadrant – then I will be totally disenfranchised. Indeed, it can hardly be a true democracy without someone in the upper left quadrant… and pity the sad old Smegocrats keeping a light burning in the bottom rh quadrant.
I think we are oversupplied with rightwing authoritarians… but maybe that says something about the true nature of Australians underneath the mateship/fair go/lackadaisical facade – Godwin is calling.
Critics of the Greens are often inconsistent, one one hand they are evil Communists in disguise or alternately they are ‘dark’ greens who want us all to live in caves and survive on nuts and berries. Actually i suspect that those Greens whose political formation is from the left, rather than specifically environmentalism, the Vic and NSW Greens rather than Tassie, would actually be more pragmatic politically. This has been the case in Germany.
Bogdanovist,
Yes, some of the Greens self-identify as left, and many of them are red-in-the-face about it (and not even ironically, tish!). This can make it hard to be a bit more nuanced about it. Personally I vote Green because they actually have (quite a lot of) policies that I really support, which makes a change from the two majors, who have a lot of policies designed to achieve nothing and offend no-one.
I am seriously impatient with the thought of having to agree about a whole bunch of stuff, just because I might be sitting in a branch meeting with someone. For now the Greens still have some residual healthy diversity, and even the ability to disagree, and I like that. However the party seems to be trending away from that long term, and that will be sad, because I like the heady sense of actually wanting to vote, which was not true when I first stumbled onto the electorial roll.
On the question of the Greens and the left, it depends on what one means by “the left”. I would like to see the Greens include people who embrace the best elements of democratic left values and thinking whilst: (a) recognising and learning from the mistakes of the traditional left; and (b) recognising that acceptance of the imperative of ecological sustainability requires a rethinking of all of the classical ideologies of industrial societies. I would also hope that the Greens can continue to accommodate a range of different tendencies, some of which would identify as left and some which wouldn’t.
The difficulty which arises is that there is a certain kind of person, often from a Labor Left or Marxist Left background, who wants to see the Greens evolve into a more successful version of a traditional left party, who frames every debate within the Greens as “left versus right”, and who won’t understand that traditional socialism doesn’t have all (or even most) of the answers when it comes to achieving ecological sustainability.
Perfectly put, DoctorPaul.
I agree absolutely. It is those latter folk who froth at the mouth when the issue of the Greens having open preferences (or, God forbid, preferencing the Libs) is raised. Why is this so scary? Our only power in a system that favours two large parties is to be willing and able to direct our preferences strategically, and ethically.
I realise Abbott is probably not serious about his maternity leave plan, but on that issue alone, Greens might prefer to preference the Libs over the ALP.
Moving beyond red and blue, to green thinking requires a total rethink, as you suggest.