One of the biggest jokes politics plays on itself is “secrecy” – secret internal polling that apparently makes public polling wrong, secret campaign tactics that relegate Sun Tzu to the status of mere amateur, through to other various secret and supposedly profound insights into the electorate that are beyond the comprehension of normal mortals.  Cryptic [...]

The data and breakdowns from the largest political poll ever conducted in Australia – all focusing on privatisation and Qld

How two pollsters showing identical results can deliver two completely different accounts of voter behaviour – why timeliness matters if you want to avoid bad analysis

Introducing Tim Nicholls, the man who doesn’t realise he’s the Treasurer

With the flood waters receding in Queensland – giving us our first real look at the size of the damage involved – it might be worth going back and having a bit of a squiz at what happened on the economic front immediately following the last big South East Qld flood drama in January 1974. [...]

Some of you may remember back a few weeks ago early on Qld election night, an Auspoll exit poll was released on Sky Nooz that polled Labor’s 20 most marginal seats. From that result I projected that Labor should win between 51 and 53 seats if that poll were correct. I used some simulations and [...]

Day 1 of the campaign and we have our first poll – but be warned, the most important thing about this poll is the sample size: 752 people giving us an MoE of 3.6%. This compares to the usual Qld Newspolls that have samples of 1100 plus. The smaller the sample size, the larger the [...]

The LNP needs 21 seats (all things being equal) to form government. The swings for seats look like this (using Antony’s redistribution estimates) for the practical middle 50 seats thereabouts. (apologies for anyone that saw the first chart and had a bad case of WTF! – my labels had become a bit denecessaried) So folks, [...]

Rule Number 1: “Today will be the day an election is called for Qld!” Rule Number 2: “If it’s not, then come tomorrow see Rule Number 1” – repeat as necessary. UPDATE: An election has been called for March 21st. – We haven’t had any polling out of Qld since December, but it’s probably worth [...]