Poll denial always leads to disaster

One of my number one rules of politics is that the polls are never wrong, and you ignore them at your peril.*

Sure, polls are a snapshot in time and don’t necessarily reflect the actual outcome on election day, but they do provide a reliable guide to community sentiment at the time that they are taken.

Ignore the self-serving rubbish from politicians that they don’t take note of them – of course they do, they watch them closely and for good and bad they have a major influence on our political discourse.

Remember for example when Malcolm Turnbull challenged Tony Abbott for the Prime Ministership because, he said, the Coalition had lost 30 Newspolls in a row? Only to have that very same benchmark result in his own undoing as Prime Minister. 

Recently, Tasmania’s most respected pollster, Enterprise Marketing and Research Services (of which this columnist is a co-owner) released its quarterly State Voting Intentions survey.

This poll saw the State Liberal vote in Tasmania fall to just 29 per cent, its lowest level in the series since August 2005 – nearly 20 years ago. A breakdown of the electorates showed that the decline of the Liberal vote was the greatest in the north (minus eight per cent) and north west of the state (-10 per cent).

At the same time, the Labor vote crept forward to 31 per cent (plus one per cent), putting them ahead of the Liberals for the first time since May 2009.

Respectively, the Greens were up one per cent to 14, the JLN down two per cent to six, and the big movers were “independents” up five per cent to 17.

Needless to say, the numbers as a whole painted an ugly picture for the Liberals and point to them being defeated at the next election, which remember can be held essentially whenever Labor wants simply by moving a no confidence motion on any matter they care to (TT-Line Ferry Fiasco, budget debt and deficit disaster, for example).

Surprisingly, however, it wasn’t the voting intention numbers from EMRS that caused a collective bout of poll denial (even from Labor!), it was the separate question asked about “issues” which caused the most controversy.

This question found that that, unprompted, the Macquarie Point Stadium had risen to equal second with “cost of living” as an issue of importance to voters on 13 per cent (up from two per cent the previous poll), behind only “health” (21 per cent).

This finding drew the rather obvious conclusion that the rise in the importance of the Stadium as an issue was the main reason behind the apparent collapse in the Liberal vote, particularly in the north.

Logic and commonsense, however, is not a common trait in politicians stubbornly determined to stick to their course, no matter what.

“The poll is rigged”, some naïve Stadium supporting Liberal politicians claimed. “It asked the Stadium question first, therefore leading people to mark the Government down.”

Leaving aside the rather obvious point that with this argument these Stadium supporters appear to be conceding the Stadium is somewhat unpopular, the claim is false.

To be clear, EMRS’ methodology for the quarterly State Voting Intention survey has not changed one jot either this poll, or from previous ownership. 

Consistent with long established practice, the first substantive question after asking a person’s gender and age-range is “if the Tasmanian State Election for the House of Assembly was held today, what is the most important issue to you which would influence the way you vote?”

This is an open-ended, unprompted question where people can answer anything they like – they are not given a list to choose from.  To suggest that question somehow lead people to mark the Government down really is poll-denial in the extreme.

The only thing worse than poll-denial is election-denial. Last Saturday, there were three Legislative Council elections. In the north-west seat of Montgomery, the Liberals suffered a 15 per cent swing against them, losing the seat. In the eastern Hobart-shore seat of Pembroke, Labor easily won, with a five per cent swing in their favour (albeit the Liberals didn’t contest the seat).

And in the Hobart seat of Nelson, independent Meg Webb thrashed the amicable and hard-working Liberal candidate Marcus Vermey on a roughly 65-35 two candidate preferred outcome.

Together with the EMRS poll the week prior which portended these results, you might have thought that these outcomes would be cause for concern for the Liberal Government. Not so, it seems. Apparently, the Montgomery result was “not bad” and a reflection of the recent Federal Liberal wipeout. And the strong Labor result in Pembroke was actually evidence that voters supported the Liberals’ stadium policy! 

Nelson didn’t get a mention in dispatches, for some strange reason – although I would suggest that with Ms Webb’s anti-stadium views well known and Mr Vermey campaigning heavily on a pro-Stadium platform, the results indicates that the “no stadium, no team” argument had very little political salience. In other words, while some people might want an AFL team, when given the choice it wasn’t a vote-changer for them.

Never mind the Stadium Cargo Cult which even the Labor opposition and large parts of the mainstream media have signed up to, the undeniable truth is that the proposed Macquarie Point Stadium is extremely unpopular among voters, particularly in Tasmania’s north, and it is hastening the Liberal Government’s demise. 

The Liberals need to urgently change course if they are to avoid imminent defeat.

Denying the facts is not a winning strategy. Just ask Peter Dutton.

[Yes, the Coalition’s internal pollster was wrong in the recent election campaign – but he was so markedly different to every other pollster who without exception had the Coalition losing, that the Coalition campaigners were mad to listen exclusively to him.]

• Brad Stansfield is a partner at Font PR and Font Publishing, owner of this newspaper. He is also a part-owner of Enterprise Marketing and Research Services.