Blog Profile / Pollytics

The trends for February’s ends

The Trends Are Back.

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What’s a 1.8 billion levy look like?

Floods, prices and mortality

A comprehensive look at what we think of our health system

Last month, the Menzies Centre for Health Policy released a health survey where they teamed up with The Nous Group to measure Australian perceptions of our health system. It was a telephone poll with a sample of 1201, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 3% mark. A fairly broad range of questions [...]

Public Opinion on same sex marriage

With three separate polls having been released over the last couple of months gauging public opinion on same sex marriage, it’s worth taking a squiz at how opinion has changed over the last few years, as well as breaking the results down to look at how there is a fairly wide variation on views among [...]

How the mighty fell

One of the more astonishing things about the federal election result is how the ALP managed to destroy such an enormous amount of public goodwill over such a relatively small time frame. To really highlight the drama of it all, it’s worth looking at a couple of charts. Firstly, let’s take every two party preferred [...]

US Midterms and more Reactor responses

That peculiar Tuesday in November has come again, where the US midterm elections will be taking up the mind of your average political tragic today.  Roy Morgan Research has run their Reactor technology over another couple of batches of political advertising, giving us a look at American audience responses. The first batch is from this [...]

How the 2007 election doubled the Greens vote everywhere.

There’s a Victorian state Newspoll out this morning via The Oz that has the Coalition leading the ALP on the primary vote by 40/35, but with the two party preferred running 52/48 the other way. This comes about because the Greens vote is sitting on a high of 19. That’s all good and well, but here’s [...]

Bligh looking to remove optional preferential voting

Today, the Courier Mail reports that Qld Premier Anna Bligh has asked Attorney-General Cameron Dick to look into whether optional preferential voting at the state level is leading to an increase in the informal vote in Qld – presumably with the view of replacing OPV with the compulsory preferential model we have at Federal elections.  [...]

Polling at the moment

You may have noticed that we’re not paying much attention here at the moment to political polling. The reason for that is that since the polling machines started winding back up, the results they’ve produced have been a bit odd. Not necesarrily wrong mind you, but just odd. We’re seeing Satisfaction/Approval ratings and Better/Preferred PM [...]

More Morgan Reactor testing of US mid-term ads

We have a new batch of US mid-term ads that have been run through the Roy Morgan Reactor audience response testing (using US citizens and with the technology deployed online) – giving some pretty interesting results, especially by party breakdown. Looking at the latest batch of ads, they’re all “Vote for me! Vote for me!” [...]

Insulation Fire Risk – The data is in

Back in February of this year when a debate popped up in the media over the insulation program – if one loosely defines “debate” as screeching “OMG!! YOUR HOUSES ARE ALL GOING TO BURN DOWN”  – we thought that it might be worthwhile for someone to take their underpants off their head and have a [...]

Andrew Leigh’s maiden speech

When Andrew Leigh made his move to Parliament, one of the big questions that many of us had was whether Australian economics’ great loss might turn into our great political gain? I think the optimists still outweigh the pessimists by about 2 to 1 (and it’s pretty obvious which side I come down on here!), but [...]

Morgan Reactor and US midterm political ads

You might remember Roy Morgan’s Reactor technology as the real life audience response tracking system that Channel Seven used in its coverage of the leadership debates in Australia at the last election – otherwise known as the Polliegraph. Morgan has deployed that technology to track US audience response to a number of political ads currently [...]

Odd things in the Green vote

A funny little thing about the Greens vote popped up last week when I was trying to estimate the size of the donkey vote at the recent election. Where the Greens candidates sit on the ballot paper has an impact on the size of the vote they receive, beyond a standard donkey vote. Essentially, the closer [...]

Did Greens HTV Cards win Labor any seats?

The AEC has released the preference distribution data from the election, so it’s worth having a bit of a squiz at the way preferences flowed from the Greens to the ALP, as there’s some interesting little bits in there. To start with, it’s worth looking at the broader picture on the vote side – so the [...]

Gibbons throwing poo

As Australia enters a period where we are going to have one of the largest battle of ideas for decades, the noisiest newspaper in the country  – once proudly considered the national broadsheet – has been transformed by its current leadership into such a farcical shadow of its former self, that it has resorted to [...]

A tale of two majorities

With Alex Somlyay cutting a deal with Labor to become deputy Speaker – giving the government support for no confidence bills and budget supply as part of the agreement, but retaining his right to vote on legislation – we end up with a tale of two majorities on the floor of the House. The first majority [...]