A new poll by the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union shows that almost half of respondents oppose the Cook Islands having automatic New Zealand citizenship.

Thirty percent of the 1000-person sample supported Cook Islanders retaining citizenship, 46 percent were opposed and 24 percent were unsure.

• The Cook Islands government is pursuing closer strategic ties with China, ignoring New Zealand’s wishes and not consulting with the New Zealand government. Given this, should the Cook Islands continue to enjoy automatic access to New Zealand passports, citizenship, health care and education when its government pursues a foreign policy against the wishes of the New Zealand government?
• READ MORE: Other Cook Islands reports

Taxpayers’ Union head of communications Tory Relf said the framing of the question was “fair”.

“If the Cook Islands wants to continue enjoying a close relationship with New Zealand, then, of course, we will support that,” he said.

“However, if they are looking in a different direction, then I think it is entirely fair that taxpayers can have a right to say whether they want their money sent there or not.”

But New Zealand Labour Party deputy leader Carmel Sepuloni said it was a “leading question”.

‘Dead end’ assumption
“It asserts or assumes that we have hit a dead end here and that we cannot resolve the relationship issues that have unfolded between New Zealand and the Cook Islands,” Sepuloni said.

“We want a resolution. We do not want to assume or assert that it is all done and dusted and the relationship is broken.”

The two nations have been in free association since 1965.

Relf said that adding historical context of the two countries relationship would be a different question.

“We were polling on the Cook Islands current policy, asking about historic ties would introduce an emotive element that would influence the response.”

New Zealand has paused nearly $20 million in development assistance to the realm nation.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters said the decision was made because the Cook Islands failed to adequately inform his government about several agreements signed with Beijing in February.

‘An extreme response’
Sepuloni, who is also Labour’s Pacific Peoples spokesperson, said her party agreed with the government that the Cook Islands had acted outside of the free association agreement.

“[The aid pause is] an extreme response, however, in saying that we don’t have all of the information in front of us that the government have. I’m very mindful that in terms of pausing or stopping aid, the scenarios where I can recall that happening are scenarios like when Fiji was having their coup.”

In response to questions from Cook Islands News, Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown said that, while he acknowledged the concerns raised in the recent poll, he believed it was important to place the discussion within the full context of Cook Islands’ longstanding and unique relationship with New Zealand.

“The Cook Islands and New Zealand share a deep, enduring constitutional bond underpinned by shared history, family ties, and mutual responsibility,” Brown told the Rarotonga-based newspaper.

“Cook Islanders are New Zealand citizens not by privilege, but by right. A right rooted in decades of shared sacrifice, contribution, and identity.

“More than 100,000 Cook Islanders live in New Zealand, contributing to its economy, culture, and communities. In return, our people have always looked to New Zealand not just as a partner but as family.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

A new poll shows a significant number of New Zealanders support recognising Palestine as a state and applying sanctions against Israel.

Commissioned by advocacy group Justice for Palestine and conducted by Talbot-Mills, the poll found support for recognising Palestinian statehood and sanctions for Israel was higher among young people.

It also showed many people were not sure where they stood.

• READ MORE: Israel war on Gaza live: More than 11,000 students killed in Gaza, West Bank
• Call for UN sanctions on Israel to implement ICJ ruling on illegality of Palestine occupation

While Israel’s embassy questioned the neutrality of the poll, the Minister of Foreign Affairs said it was a matter of “when, not if” for Palestinian statehood — but the main priority for now was a ceasefire.

The poll found 40 percent of the 1116 people surveyed supported recognising Palestine as a state, while 19 percent did not.

Forty-two percent of the respondents supported sanctioning Israel, while 29 percent did not.

Laura Agel, a Palestinian-British woman and a member of Justice for Palestine — the group which commissioned the poll — said it sent a clear message to the government.

“I think that the government needs to respond to the needs of its citizens, and the wants of its citizens and sanction Israel fully. I think we can see that other countries, whether small or big have taken strong action against Israel,” she said.

Many respondents without opinion
Although the poll showed strong support for Palestine, many respondents did not give an opinion either way.

Forty-one percent were not sure whether New Zealand should recognise Palestine as a state, and 30 percent were not sure whether the government should sanction Israel.

Agel put this down to the issues New Zealanders were facing in their day-to-day lives, and a lack of knowledge.

“Issues such as the cost-of-living crisis, and I think it also shows that the Israel-Palestine issue is one that people don’t necessarily think they’re very informed about,” she said.

She also blamed the government and media for not showing the extent of what was happening in Gaza.

“What they’ve done to civilians and infrastructure in Gaza. What they’ve done bombing hospitals and schools since October 7th. But also within a context of decades-long oppression.”

Long-standing conflict
Israel and Hamas have been locked in a number of battles since 2008 — with people on both sides being killed.

The current 12 month bombardment of the Gaza Strip by Israel followed a Hamas attack last October.

About 1139 people were killed and about 240 hostages were taken. Some were freed, some died and about 97 were still unaccounted for.

More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

The military campaign also led to what the United Nations said was a “massive human rights crisis and a humanitarian disaster”.

Israeli embassy responds
Israel’s embassy in Wellington told RNZ Checkpoint in a statement that Israel was defending its citizens from Hamas, and the focus should remain on “dismantling terrorism” and releasing the remaining hostages.

It added that while polls could be informative, those commissioned by advocacy groups would not always provide a comprehensive or neutral view.

It said the poll’s respondents might not be familiar with the complex roots of the Middle East conflict and the positions of all parties involved, and a question should have been added to reflect that.

Marilyn Garson, co-founder of Alternative Jewish Voices of Aotearoa, said the poll’s result that 51 percent of New Zealanders under the age of 30 supported recognising Palestinian statehood reflected a growing movement of young people rejecting Zionism — the ideology that supported the creation of a Jewish state.

That was playing out in New Zealand and overseas, she said.

“An unprecedented number of Jews are taking part in demonstrations, joining organisations for justice — for dignified solutions. And they are disproportionately young people. I think that’s magnificent.”

Garson did not care whether the solution to the crisis involved two states or 12, she said, as long both Palestinian and Jewish people were involved in the process.

“I don’t care what the number of administrative entities is, I just want to know that two peoples sat down and made a dignified choice that represent their peoples. I’ll support any outcome.”

Minister of Foreign Affairs responds
In May this year, Spain, Ireland and Norway officially recognised a Palestinian state — 146 of the 193 UN members (more than 75 percent) have now recognised Palestine as a sovereign state.

A spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said the government had supported the establishment of a Palestinian state for decades and it was a matter of “when not if”.

But asserting Palestinian statehood at this point would not alleviate the plight of the Palestinian people, he said. The immediate focus should be on a ceasefire and the provision of aid in Gaza.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Two polls out tonight both have Winston Peters firmly in the drivers’ seat for forming a government with Aotearoa New Zealand’s general election this Saturday, though the left bloc has increased its overall support.

With 1News and Newshub each releasing their final polls ahead of the election, the trends are showing a last-minute boost for Labour and the Greens — but still far short of forming a government without Winston Peters’ support — which he has vowed not to provide them.

While Newshub’s poll featured a dramatic 4.6-point fall for National, TVNZ’s had National up 1 point but ACT down by the same amount — the right bloc staying steady.

• READ MORE: Other NZ election 2023 reports

That could be partly explained by the difference in each poll’s survey period: Newshub’s was comparing to numbers from 17 days before, while TVNZ’s poll has been on a weekly release schedule — which makes for smaller shifts in the numbers.

Newshub’s poll also showed a smaller majority for the combined National-ACT-NZ First grouping, with 63 seats, and with trends showing an increase in the left vote, the final days could be crucial.

RNZ political editor Jane Patterson told Checkpoint the rise for the left bloc would be putting the pressure on National.

“Chris Hipkins has of course been talking about that, he said, ‘Look, I feel the momentum, that the left bloc is starting to pick up’ and these polls are starting to show that — however they are not being put in the position where they are in a commanding enough position to form a government.

Second election threats
“If you look at the timeframe, both of them basically covered the weekend . . .  that covered the threats of a second election on Sunday from National, it covered Chris Hipkins back on the campaign trail, and obviously a lot of policy debate we know over the tax package.”

She said Labour was also really starting to hone in on the impact of a National government on rental tenants and beneficiaries, “so there’s been a lot of very assertive, aggressive campaigning from Labour against the National Party policy platform”.

Poll mania. Video: RNZ News

Patterson said ACT and NZ First were typically battling each other for voters, and ACT would have been hoping to see their support increase to help consolidate their chances of a two-party government.

“It’s more difficult because of the rhetoric that Chris Luxon has been rolling out about Winston Peters — that tactic has not worked, on these numbers . . .  so they could basically cut New Zealand First out he was saying, ‘please, don’t vote for New Zealand First, it’s not going to be good.'”

Despite National doubling down on this by raising the risk of a second election, Peters had remained statesman-like during that time, she said, and NZ First support base were unlikely to like being told what to do.

“The supporters are anti-government, a protest against the government, and not just against Labour — an anti-establishment type vote, so I don’t think that tactic’s worked either.”

Biggest risk
She said the biggest risk to Labour, meanwhile, would be people coming to the conclusion the election result had already been decided.

“I think they’re just going to have to keep carrying on and campaigning until Saturday.”

National also have an advantage, likely to pick up another seat after the Port Waikato by-election in November.

Both had Labour leader Chris Hipkins’ personal popularity also on the rise — but still equal with or just below that of National’s Christopher Luxon. That said, Luxon’s popularity is still well below voters’ preference for his wider party.

This all must be taken with a grain of salt, however.

Individual polls compare their numbers to the most recent poll by the same polling company, as different polls can use different methodologies.

They are intended to track trends in voting preferences, showing a snapshot in time, rather than be a completely accurate predictor of the final election result.

Because of those differences in how they collect and calculate the numbers, which includes revising the calculations to account for demographic differences compared to the wider population (known as ‘weighting’), the different companies’ polls shouldn’t be compared against one another directly.

However, with both showing similar general trends and numbers, it gives a good idea of what voters’ thinking was through to yesterday.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Nothing much changed in a 1News Verian poll released last Monday. However, some commentators treated the boring results as a blank canvas on which to express their creativity.

1News presenter Simon Dallow described the results of the newly named 1News Verian poll on Monday as a harsh verdict on the government.

“It is just under three months until the election and Labour seems to have been dented by a series of ministerial distractions,” he said as he introduced the story at the top of the bulletin.

• READ MORE: Other NZ elections reports
• LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: NZ election poll analysis

Despite that effort to dress up the poll as a tough verdict on the government, it was mostly notable for how un-notable it was.

Few parties moved more than the margin of error from the last 1News poll in May, which also showed National and Act with the numbers to form the next government — just. National and Labour both dropped the same amount: 2 percent.

You might have thought the damp squib of a result would put the clamps on our political commentators’ narrative-crafting abilities.

Instead, for some it proved to be a blank canvas on which they could express their creativity.

‘Centre-right surge’
At Stuff, chief politics editor Luke Malpass called the poll a “fillip for the right” under a headline hailing a “centre-right surge”.

One issue with that: the poll showed a 1 percent overall drop for the right bloc of National and Act.

“Fillips” generally involve polls going up not down. Similarly, a drop in support doesn’t traditionally meet the definition of a surge in support.

The lack of big statistical swings wasn’t enough to deter some commentators from making big calls.

On Newstalk ZB, political editor Jason Walls said Labour was plunging due to its disunity.

“All [Chris Hipkins] has been really able to talk about is what’s happening within the Labour Party — be it Stuart Nash, be it other ministers who are behaving badly. Jan Tinetti. Voters punish that. And we’ve seen that from the Nats in opposition. They punish disunity.”

It’s uncertain what National’s equivalent 2 percent drop was down to. Perhaps voters punish unity as well.

Wider trends context
Mutch-McKay’s own commentary was a bit more nuanced, placing the poll in the context of wider trends.

On TVNZ’s Breakfast the day after the poll’s release, she said some people inside Labour couldn’t believe the results hadn’t been worse for the party.

Perhaps that air of disbelief also extended to the parliamentary press gallery.

After all, the commentators are right: Labour has had a terrible few months, with high-ranking ministers defecting, being stood down, being censured by the parliamentary privileges committee, facing allegations of mistreating staff, or struggling with the apparently near-impossible task of selling shares in Auckland Airport.

Maybe a sense of inertia propelled some of our gallery members to keep rolling with the narrative of the last few months, in spite of the actual poll result.

Or maybe part of the issue is that hyping up the significance of these polls is a financial necessity for news organisations which pay a lot to commission them.

“You’ve got to squeeze the hell of it. You’ve paid $11,000 or $12,000 for a poll, it’s got to be the top story. It’s got to be your lead. It’s got to have the fancy graphics,” Stuff’s political reporter and commentator Andrea Vance said recently on the organisation’s daily podcast Newsable.

‘Manufacturing news’
“It just feels like we’re manufacturing news. We’re taking a piece of information that’s a snapshot in time and we’re pretending that we know the future,” she said.

Vance went on to say these kinds of snapshot polls don’t actually tell us all much — but she said long-term polling trends are worth paying attention to.

It’s probably no coincidence then that the most useful analysis of this latest poll focused on those macro patterns.

In a piece for 1News.co.nz, John Campbell noted the electorate’s slow drift away from the centre, with Labour losing 20 percent of the electorate’s support since 2020 and National failing to fully capitalise on that drop-off.

He quoted Yeats line, “the centre cannot hold”, before asking the question: “What do Labour and National stand for? Really? Perhaps, just perhaps, this is a growing section of the electorate saying — you’re almost as bad as each other.”

That sentiment has been echoed by other commentators. In his latest column for Metro magazine, commentator and former National Party comms man Matthew Hooton decried the major parties’ lack of ambition.

“At least Act, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori aren’t insulting you with bullshit. Instead they offer ideas they think will make your life better, even if they’ll never happen. So here’s a better idea than falling for the big scare from National or Labour.

‘Reward ideas-based parties’
“How about using your ballot paper to tell them to f*** off and reward one of the three ideas-based parties with your vote instead?” he wrote.

And on his podcast The Kaka, financial journalist Bernard Hickey and commentator Danyl McLauchlan criticised our major parties for their grey managerialism.

“You kind of have to go back to the mid-1990s when so many people just hated the two major parties because they didn’t trust them,” he said.

“We seem to be going through a similar phase now. The two major parties are just these managerial centrist parties. They don’t have much to offer by way of a vision.”

Maybe it’s a little shaky to say anyone’s surging or flopping on the basis of a couple of percentage points shifting in a single poll.

But if you zoom out a bit, at least one narrative does have a strong foundation — voters saying, to quote Shakespeare this time — “a plague on both your (untaxed) houses”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Tuesday, February 7, at 2pm. That’s when New Zealand’s new Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ parliamentary year begins and he faces National leader Christopher Luxon in the debating chamber for the first question time of 2023.

He needs to “Win the House”, as the saying goes. That means getting the better of the other side, and Hipkins has to show his caucus that he is up to it.

Hipkins is a vastly experienced parliamentarian, but there is nothing like being in the hot seat directly facing the leader of the opposition.

• READ MORE: Other NZ politics reports

He can be expected to take it to Luxon and ACT leader David Seymour more aggressively than Jacinda Ardern did, he is more of a “take no prisoners” politician than she was and he needs to get some hits in early on.

Hipkins has had a great start with two opinion polls showing Labour has regained the ground it lost to National.

The 1News Kantar poll showed Labour up five points to 38 percent and National down one point to 37 percent.

Newshub’s Reid Research poll had Labour up 5.7 points to 38 percent and National down 4.1 points to 36.6 percent.

Hipkins slightly ahead
In the preferred prime minister stakes, Hipkins was slightly ahead of Luxon in both polls.

Stuff‘s political editor Luke Malpass said the polls showed what no Labour figures dared to consider a fortnight ago — that the party might have better prospects under a leader other than Jacinda Ardern.

“Hipkins, it now appears, could be that person,” he said.

“In other words, by the time Ardern left she might have been a drag on the party vote.”

Luxon dismissed the poll results, saying nothing had changed.

“It’s the same government, and a new leader who can’t deliver,” he said. “It’s going to be an incredibly tight race.”

The poll details, and what the results would mean in terms of seats if an election was held now, are on RNZ’s website.

Labour’s new champion
After settling in to his debating chamber role as Labour’s new champion, Hipkins has to get his next big agenda item off the blocks — ditching policies and programmes that are in the way of his pledge to totally focus on “bread and butter” issues that affect people, which means the cost of living.

This process was started by Ardern at the end of last year and Hipkins needs to get it done and dusted because there’s sure to be the usual cries of “U-turn, U-turn”.

Although Ardern and Hipkins have explained it as necessary to the new focus on dealing with inflation and the cost of living crisis, there Is also an obvious political need in election year.

Labour wants to get rid of liabilities, policies and programmes that are causing trouble and are easy targets for the opposition.

Hipkins needs what MPs call clear air to explain and implement policies Labour hopes will reset the party’s direction, entrench the lead over National and ACT, and deliver a platform for the election campaign.

The new prime minister may be in his honeymoon period but the media knows he has to deliver.

“He will have to show there is more on the tin than just a new sticker, and in pretty short order,” said Malpass.

“It won’t be enough to just chuck the odd media merger and dank old bits of legislation over the side: It will have to be replaced by some actions on the ‘bread and butter’ issues Chris Hipkins says he is concerned about.”

Plagued by troubles
The New Zealand Herald’s political editor Claire Trevett said Hipkins’ job was to convince voters that Labour was focused “on the various troubles plaguing them now — from potholes to hip ops to the price of bread”.

“The talk is one thing, the delivery is another. Hipkins has no real option but to deliver.”

There’s been speculation about which policies and programmes will get the chop or be put on the slow track, and Stuff published a list with the top three being the RNZ/TVNZ merger, the Income Insurance Scheme (which National calls a jobs tax) and Auckland Light Rail.

It said other lesser known projects could join the list.

Hipkins must also deal with Three Waters, which has given the government more problems than anything else.

That’s more difficult because the legislation has been passed, but Hipkins has acknowledged he has to do something about it.

“We are going to look closely at the Three Waters programme,” he told Trevett in an interview. “There’s no question there has to be change. I don’t think we can just sit back and say ‘this is not our problem, this is a council problem’.

“I don’t think that would be responsible. But we also need to bring people along with us and what we are doing.”

Policy clear-out
When it comes to the policy clear-out, Hipkins has much more freedom than Ardern would have had.

She would have faced ferocious opposition attacks for dumping policies she had supported, her words would have been thrown back at her.

But Hipkins is a new prime minister, doing things his way, just as Ardern told him when she said “you must do you”. She was giving him free rein to do it his way.

Did she know Labour was heading in the wrong direction under her leadership, and that it wouldn’t win the next election unless there was drastic change?

One commentator who thinks so is Matthew Hooton.

Writing in the Herald, Hooton said Ardern so badly wanted her government to win a third term that she was prepared to step down.

“Labour’s masterful transition was carefully planned before Christmas by Ardern and her closest allies, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins, and flawlessly executed,” he said.

Capturing the initiative
“Political strategists spend every December working out how to capture the initiative in January, especially in election year. None has ever succeeded like Labour over the last week.”

Luxon hasn’t had a good run-up to the new parliamentary year.

Inevitably, he’s been eclipsed by Hipkins simply because he is the new prime minister but when Luxon has been able to get into the media he might have wished he hadn’t.

“National strategists seem dumbstruck,” Hooton said in his article. “Christopher Luxon was more incoherent than usual trying to explain where he stands on co-governance, the Māori seats, and whether women politicians receive worse abuse than males, pleasing neither the liberal nor conservative wings of his party.”

Stuff’s Andrea Vance said Luxon had actually helped ease Hipkins into the job “by being more mediocre than usual”.

“Somehow Luxon — whose one job last week was to stay on message — managed to drive down a co-governance cul-de-sac at`Rātana, and then spend the rest of the week doing bunny-hop u-turns to get out of it,” she said.

“And how did he manage to piss off women, again? The correct answer was ‘yes’, Christopher. Female politicians patently face more abuse than men.”

Abuse of women
She was referring to Luxon responding to a question about whether women politicians suffered more abuse than men by saying he wasn’t sure.

When Hipkins takes his seat in Parliament on Tuesday he’ll have his revamped front bench alongside him.

The cabinet reshuffle, as RNZ reported, means some of the government’s most contentious portfolios will have a fresh face.

One of the most interesting facets was Hipkins’ decision to appoint Michael Wood as Minister for Auckland.

Hipkins explained the need to “get Auckland pumping” after a difficult couple of years, but there’s a political imperative behind it as well which the Herald’s Trevett saw.

“It is aimed as a pre-emptive counter to the inevitable attacks from Auckland-based opposition leaders such as Christopher Luxon and David Seymour that the Wellington-based Hipkins is a beltway creation and out of touch with Auckland’s concerns,” she said.

“It sends a signal that Hipkins has his eye on Auckland and knows its importance.”

Peter Wilson is a life member of Parliament’s press gallery, 22 years as NZPA’s political editor and seven as parliamentary bureau chief for NZ Newswire. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

With a new prime minister sworn in and a cabinet reshuffle imminent, it is no exaggeration to say the election year in Aotearoa New Zealand has begun with a bang. Already the punditry and speculation are ramping up, with anticipation building for the first opinion polls.

There will be more polls to come, of course, but a word of caution is in order: don’t treat them as gospel, and try not to let them become self-fulfilling prophecies.

At this point, we cannot predict who will form New Zealand’s next government, and it could yet be a tight race.

• READ MORE: Here’s how to make opinion polls more representative and honest
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• Chris Hipkins becomes NZ’s new prime minister – there are two ways it can go from here

Furthermore, political polling has not had a stellar record in recent times. Former prime minister Jim Bolger’s famous remark from 1993, after he didn’t get the election majority he expected, still resonates: “Bugger the polls.”

It’s not just a local phenomenon, either. The results of the Brexit referendum and the Trump–Clinton presidential contest in 2016, and the 2019 Australian election, were all out of line with preceding opinion polls.

In 2020, the US presidential polls were off by about four percentage points. And the 2022 US midterm elections didn’t produce the landslide (or “red tsunami”) many Republicans had predicted.

The 2020 election miss
It is a similar story in Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2020, the polls immediately prior to the election overestimated the National vote and underestimated Labour’s.

Taking the averages of the results of all six polls published during the month before election day, National emerged on 30.9 percent and Labour on 47.2 percent. In the final three polls during the two weeks when advance voting was open, the averages were National 31.4 percent and Labour 46.3 percent.

The gap was closing and Labour would land on about 46 percent, or so it seemed. As Labour’s trend in the polls since mid-2020 was already downward, 45 percent looked plausible. But predictions based on the opinion polls were significantly wrong.

Labour’s election result was 50 pecent, National’s only 25.6 percent.

The polls in the final fortnight were overestimating National by an average of 5.8 percentage points. They were underestimating Labour by 3.7 points. The Green and Māori parties were also underestimated (1.1 and 0.7 points, respectively).

There were even bigger failures in polls showing Green candidate Chlöe Swarbrick running third in Auckland Central with about 25 percent of the vote. Instead, she got 35 percent and won the seat.

Statistics 101
The opinion polls and the election — the only poll that counts, as the saying goes — use different methods with different samples. They are intended for different purposes, and hence their results will differ, too.

An opinion poll is a snapshot of a sample of potential voters. By the time it’s published, it’s already in the past. Surveys normally ask which party you would vote for if the election were held tomorrow.

But you may change your mind by the time you actually vote, if you vote at all.

Furthermore, surveys are prone to random error. So, no matter how scientifically rigorous, they only estimate — and cannot replicate — the relevant population. It is in the interests of the polling companies to be accurate, of course, especially when close to an election.

But we need to read their results critically.

Samples are normally about 1000 people, and pollsters try to ensure they closely resemble the demographic makeup (ideally by age, gender, ethnicity, education and location) of the eligible population, giving voters of all kinds an equal voice.

Post-survey weighting boosts results from social groups with low response rates.
The proportion of the population that holds a specified preference is estimated, and all estimates are subject to variance.

This is expressed as a margin of error, which is normally plus or minus three percentage points.

The margin of error is the range in which the pollster bets the “true” results should probably fall, with the true figures being outside that range only 5 percent of the time. In other words, pollsters are 95 percent confident the actual results will fall within that range. It is only a statistical estimate.

But the quoted margin of error doesn’t apply evenly. If a given party is polling at 50 percent, then the quoted margin of error applies. If a party is polling higher or lower, then the margin of error narrows percent the further you get from 50 percent, the narrower the margin of error.

Beyond the margin of error
Another concern is whether respondents will give honest answers. Some may be unwilling to reveal their voting intentions or they will wilfully mislead the poll.

And often a large proportion of a sample doesn’t know yet whether they’ll actually vote, or for whom they’ll vote. Responsible pollsters will report the percentage of “don’t know” responses.

But the conservative bias in the pre-election 2020 opinion polls was systematically outside of the margins of error, and hence not due only to random variation.

Apparently, pollsters did not obtain samples that resembled the population that actually voted. It looks like younger leftwing voters were especially hard to reach or unwilling to participate.

Or their election turnout may have been underestimated.

Polling companies are now using online panels to help correct such biases. We’ll have to wait for the next election’s results to judge how it’s working.

Reading the tea leaves
A series of opinion polls can reveal trends and thus serve a purpose as public information. But they’re not suited for forecasting. One result taken out of context may be misleading, so it is disappointing when major news organisations over-hype polls.

When party-vote percentages get converted into numbers of seats, journalists are reading tea leaves and not reporting news. Meanwhile, the market research firms are getting massive publicity.

Accurate or not, opinion poll results can have self-fulfilling or “bandwagon” effects on people’s voting behaviour. People might want to back a winner, or not waste their vote on a party that’s polling below 5 percent. Or some might vote for a party other than their favourite, with an eye to post-electoral negotiations.

Perhaps the best advice for voters is this: when deciding which party to vote for, try not to think about the polls. And poll-watchers should prepare for surprises on election night.

Dr Grant Duncan, associate professor, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

“So many detractors were saying, ‘no you won’t get it, the Supervisor of Elections won’t allow it’. I said, ‘well let him just do his work’. And I believe in the goodness of the man. We got it and we’re happy.” — Sitiveni Rabuka, CFL/FijiVillage interview. 8 September 2021

The leader of the new People’s Alliance has given Frank Bainimarama and Aiyaz Sayed-Kahyum yet another masterclass in how to win friends and influence people in the Fijian political context.

Of course, he doesn’t necessarily “believe in the goodness” of Elections Supervisor Mohammed Saneen, who tried to prevent him from contesting the 2018 election and will do his damnedest to try to exclude him from the 2022 election.

Or maybe he does. It doesn’t matter because Sitiveni Rabuka has spoken well of someone who everyone regards as his nemesis and in doing so has presented himself as magnanimous and humble.

• READ MORE: Other articles on the Fiji elections

Fijians like that and Rabuka knows it. Which makes it all the more astonishing that Frank Bainimarama and Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum still don’t know it after 15 years in power.

It was Rabuka’s humility and forbearance in the face of an ordeal in the courts before the 2018 election that triggered a wave of community sympathy that manifested itself on election day and took the Bai-Kai duo to the brink of defeat.

Readers of my website will know that in the immediate aftermath of the election, I tried and failed to get Bainimarama to realise that the FijiFirst government’s appearance of arrogance — its vei beci, viavialevu attitude to everything — was the prime cause of its electoral collapse.

But they still don’t get it. And having given them a fright in 2018 but still not having learnt their lesson, I suspect that the Rabuka juggernaut is going to bear down on them in the coming months and flatten them like toads on hot bitumen.

Why? Because the Fijian people are fed up with them, not just the usual burden of longevity in government and people tiring of their increasingly tired faces but a visceral distaste for the manner in which they conduct themselves.

Always right. Never wrong. Always contemptuous. Never, ever humble.

Even some of my closest friends say Rabuka cannot win — that the burden of his two coups in 1987 and the hatred and bitterness that lingers — especially among Indo-Fijians – is too much of a cross to bear, let alone such things as the fiasco of the National Bank collapse under his watch when he was eventually elected prime minister.

But politics is more about perception than substance wherever it is practiced in the world. And is equally true that electors have notoriously short memories, never mind that a great many voters weren’t even born when Rabuka held the reins of power.

I am coming to the view that not only can Rabuka win the next election but probably will.

For many Fijians, the events of 1987, let alone Rabuka’s period in government, aren’t a part of their lived experience. In any event, Bainimarama and Khaiyum have yet to learn the most basic lesson of politics — that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them.

And these two conjoined twins — with their chronic hubris and arrogance — are doing everything they possibly can to lose.

I’ve chosen the accompanying selection of photos to illustrate Rabuka’s extraordinary journey from coup-maker in 1987 to the benign figure that the opinion polls now tell us is set to make the most extraordinary comeback in Fijian political history. Provided of course, that Bainimarama and Khaiyum keep to the election timetable and the people still get their say.

There’s “Rambo” – the smiling tough guy and defender of iTaukei rights who forced thousands of Indo-Fijians to leave Fiji post 1987. And there’s Rabuka as Prime Minister in the 1990s forming a warm partnership with the main Indo-Fijian politician, Jai Ram Reddy, that produced the 1997 Constitution and eventually led to Rabuka’s defeat.

There’s the “treasonous” soldier who abolished the monarchy and took Fiji out of the Commonwealth when it wouldn’t accept his takeover. And there is the barefooted Prime Minister at Buckingham Palace making a formal apology to HM the Queen for his act of lese majeste and it being graciously accepted.

The man has had an incredible journey, that’s for sure. And maybe, just maybe, he is going to cement his place in Fijian history next year with an incredible final twist.

Is it in the stars? It doesn’t matter. It’s already in the opinion polls.

And you can bet your last saqamoli that it’s keeping Frank Bainimarama and his puppet master, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, awake at night with agonising intimations of their own political mortality.

Fiji-born Graham Davis is a Walkley Award and Logie Award-winning Australian-based journalist and media consultant. He is publisher of the Grubsheet blog on Fiji affairs. This commentary is republished with permission.

New Zealand’s opposition National Party leader Judith Collins has suffered a sharp dip in support in the preferred prime minister stakes, in the latest Newshub Reid Research poll.

The new poll has Labour on 52.7 percent while National has improved slightly to 27 percent support – an increase of 1.4 percentage points on election night.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is on 48.1 percent in the preferred prime minister stakes, while Collins has slipped to 5.6 percent – a drop of 12.8 percent.

This is despite plenty of media coverage since she began accusing the government of introducing separatism for Māori “by stealth” when dealing with poverty and lack of opportunity in New Zealand.

Labour keeps its majority stranglehold on Parliament on 52.7 percent, up 2.7 points on the election result.

The Green Party is on 7.1 percent – down 0.8 – and ACT is just below on 6.9 percent, down 0.7.

The Māori Party remains on 1.2.

The poll was conducted between 7 and 13 May with a margin of error of 3.1 percent.

The last opinion poll before Saturday’s general election on Saturday last night put Labour on 46 percent and National on 31 percent. Both are down 1 percent.

Behind is ACT on 8 percent and the Green Party on 8 percent, up two.

New Zealand First is up on 3 percent, according to the 1 News Colmar Brunton poll.

• READ MORE: Final leaders debate – a showdown, then a love-in

It would mean Labour would get 59 seats, 40 for National, 11 for the Greens and 10 for ACT. Labour would need the Green Party to form a government on these results.

In the preferred prime minister stakes, Jacinda Ardern is on 55 percent and Judith Collins is on 20 percent.

More than 1.5 million people have already voted.

The poll was conducted by landline and mobile phone between October 10-14.

What the commentators think
Former National MP Jonathan Coleman thinks Labour will not be pleased with the result.

“I think people might be quite surprised they have gone to 46 percent,” he said.

New Zealand First’s slight increase might “make things interesting”.

“New Zealand First voters might be the sort of people who don’t necessarily tell pollsters how they are going to vote, so I wouldn’t say this is exactly how it’s exactly going to play out on election night.”

But former Green Party policy director, now consultant, David Cormack, said today’s results were “effectively an exit poll”.

“We’ve had such a large chunk of the electorate already vote, so I think this is going to be the most accurate representation of what is going to be the final result.”

Coleman said polls had been incorrect in the past, but Cormack said this was best poll he had seen in a long time.

‘Terrifying scenario’
“We get out of the terrifying scenario of Labour governing alone. The Greens look well comfortable.”

Coleman thinks opposition leader Judith Collins has done an excellent job with the leadership of National.

“Judith has an opinion and many people will back her on that. She’s had to make some calls, I think at times she’s been let down by people on her team who should have backed her up.

“They should have at least stayed quiet because that’s what you do. You back the leader if you want to win.”

Cormack is standing by his call that NZ First will be gone at the election.

But Coleman said Winston Peters had surprised in the past and said there could be twists and turns before the election results were known.

The previous political poll – published by 1 News Colmar Brunton on October 8 – had support for Labour steady on 47 percent, National on 32, ACT on 8, the Greens on 6 and NZ First on 2.

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

Have you ever noticed, when percentages are used in the print media in reporting political polls, that they almost never add up?

I think this is due to three practices:

1. Only some of the results are published,
2. Don’t know/Refused to Answer are seldom published or included in totals, and
3. the effects of “rounding.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Media Centre elections stories

This would not happen if the media used tables to show percentages, and if Colmar-Brunton, which conducts polls for 1News, and Reid for Newshub, immediately released the poll.

Instead, they wait until 48 hours after the media has published the results.

So, use tables. They would show the complete results, and in most cases be easier to understand than the efforts of journalists to report them in text alone.

Here’s a topical example. Note especially note 2:

Note 1: Poll taken between 3-7 October 2020. n = 1005. Margin of error ± 3.1%.
Note 2: Don’t know/Refused to Answer who accounted for 130 of those polled were excluded from the party totals which should, therefore, be reduced to total 874, not the 1005 stated..
Note 3: Context. The third Leaders Debate, concerns about NZ First finances and supposed internal divisions within National occurred during this poll period.

Graphs could also be used, and they sometimes are, to good effect but graphs are picture summaries of tables, and conceal whether or not the percentages total one hundred.

Margins of error and weighting
The media usually publish poll margins of error but make no effort to explain their importance. Indeed, they often comment enthusiastically about results that have absolutely no significance, making for misleading information.

The margin of error in most 1News/Colmar Brunton and Newshub/Reid polls is usually ± 3.1 percent. That means for a party that had 50 percent of the vote the actual result would be between 46.9 and 53.1 percent. But for a party with 10 percent of the vote the margin of error is much lower, ± 1.9 percent, and for a party with 5 percent, ± 1.4 percent.

What this usually means is that with the exception of Labour and to a lesser extent National, the results for all the other parties are statistically insignificant. They could all have occcurred by chance.

Similar results over several polls makes low scoring results look more plausible, but minor changes between polls are unworthy of comment.

ACT’s recent increased support to 8 percent and the Greens steady on over the critical 5 percent threshold to get into Parliament are certainly worth a comment but not the minor inter-poll changes for the other small parties.

One other poll method practice is weighting. To make random polls of about 1,000 people accurately reflect the actual compositon of our population in terms of sex, ethnicity, region and landline cellphone access, some of the poll’s composition will be increased and another reduced.

For example, if women are underpresented in the poll, weighting increases the proportion of women and reduces the proportion of men.

It is important to remember this, especially when looking at lower percentages.

Finally, polls take place over several days when other things are happening that could influence how the people polled responded. Context is very important.

Different contexts over different polls could be the “swinging factor” and not other supposed differences over time. The media should always note these happenings, and seldom do.

Dr Crosbie Walsh is a retired founding development studies professor at Massey University and the University of the South Pacific, and a blogger on Pacific affairs. The Pacific Media Centre collaborates with Dr Walsh.

With just under three weeks until the election, Newshub’s new political poll shows the gap is closing between Labour and National, but Labour could still govern alone.

The Newshub Reid Research Poll had Labour at 50.1 percent – down 10 percent on the last poll – but well above National at 29.6 percent.

ACT is on 6.3 percent and the Greens are at 6.5 percent. NZ First is at 1.9 percent.

• READ MORE: NZ election and opinion polls

On those figures, Labour would have 65 seats in Parliament, National 38, and the Greens and ACT eight each.

As for the minor parties, the New Conservatives are polling at 2.1 percent, the Māori party at 1.5 percent and The Opportunities Party at .9 percent.

In the preferred prime minister stakes, Jacinda Ardern is on 53.2 percent and Judith Collins is on 17.7 percent.

Last week’s TVNZ Colmar Brunton poll had Labour at 48 percent, National on 31 percent, ACT on 7 percent, Greens on 6 percent and NZ First on 2 percent.

Newshub’s last poll in late July had on 60.9 percent and National at 25.1 percent.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will face National Leader Judith Collins in the second leaders debate on Wednesday night, this time on television Three.

The election date is October 17.

New Zealand reported two new cases of covid-19 today, both in managed isolation.

In a statement, the Health Ministry said there were no new cases in the community.

One of the new imported cases is a person who arrived on a flight from Germany on September 21 via the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia. The other arrived in New Zealand on a flight from the Philippines via Taiwan on September 23.

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

I’ll be honest, it was a long day yesterday so I only watched the first 10 minutes of the Leader’s debate in the New Zealand general election 2020 last night.

What I saw confirmed the view I expressed some weeks ago that in Judith Collins National have chosen someone who will save their party from oblivion. The rise of ACT in the latest and the appearance of the New Conservative Party, however, I think indicates the political Right is splitting.

The choice between the major parties who want to form the next government now does seem pretty clear.

• READ MORE: 1 NEWS Colmar Brunton poll: Labour drops, National flounders as minor parties lift
• Labour and National leaders contest debate ‘draw’ but sharply different

If you want to pay less tax and have welfare cuts – in short unrepentant neoliberalism and a less caring society that panders to the wealthy – then a National /Act coalition will be what you are hoping for.

On the other hand, if you want the wealth of our country to be shared more equally and see the government driving the marketplace in the post-covid economy rather than big business and big money – then a Labour /Green coalition is what you will want to see once all the votes are in.

A Labour alone government? On current polling it could happen but it would be against the history of MMP voting in our country.

NZ First? You can’t write them off just yet but it seems at this stage that Winston Peters will not be in the position of kingmaker.

I think this is also true of the smaller parties – even if one of them managed to get a candidate elected I doubt they would find themselves in the kingmaker role.

Bryan Bruce is an independent filmmaker and journalist. The Pacific Media Centre is publishing a series of occasional commentaries by him during the NZ election campaign.

Strong team. More jobs. Better economy. So say the National Party’s campaign hoardings. Only thing is, last Sunday’s Newshub-Reid Research poll – which had support for the Labour Party at 60.9 percent and for National at 25.1 percent – suggests the team is not looking that strong at all.

Nor will it be having much to say on jobs or the economy following the general election on September 19 if those numbers are close to the result.

As you might expect, National’s leadership dismissed the poll as “rogue”, saying the party’s internal polling (which hasn’t been publicly released) puts it in a much stronger position.

READ MORE: National gambles on Collins crushing Ardern’s charisma in NZ election

But this latest poll is consistent with three others released since May (June 1, June 25 and July 15). Averaged out, these polls put support for Labour and National at 55.5 percent and 29.1 percent respectively.

[Editor: Yesterday’s 1 News-Colmar Brunton poll put National down to 32 percent while Labour moved up another three points to 53 percent.]

That is quite the gap. Assuming they are broadly accurate, what do they tell us about the state of politics in Aotearoa New Zealand?

The centre is now centre-left
For a start, the political centre appears to be shifting to the left. Across the past four polls, support for Labour and the Greens sits around 62 percent. When nearly two out of three voters in a naturally conservative nation support the centre-left, something is going on.

Correspondingly, as the notional median voter shifts left, parties on the right are being left high and dry. The Reid Research poll put the combined support for National, ACT and New Zealand First at 30.4 percent, a touch under half the level of support for the centre-left.

In 2017, National secured nearly 45 percent of the party vote. Nearly half of that support has bled away – and most of it hasn’t gone to other conservative parties. New Zealand First is on life support; the right-wing ACT party is at 3 percent; and the other centre-right parties (including the New Conservatives, the Outdoors Party and the conspiratorially inclined Advance NZ/Public Party coalition) are well off the pace.

The leadership gap
Then there is the question of leadership. Judith Collins was installed in an attempt to re-establish National’s bona fides as New Zealand’s natural party of government. But she has not had the impact Jacinda Ardern did when she took Labour’s reins several weeks out from the 2017 election.

In fact, while 25 percent of those polled by Reid Research support National, the party’s leader sits at only 14 percent in the preferred prime minister stakes: nearly half of those who would vote National do not rate Collins as the prime minister.

The polling suggests that Collins’s penchant for attack politics is not resonating with voters. She has not been helped by the recent antics of (now departed or demoted) caucus colleagues Hamish Walker, Michael Woodhouse and Andrew Falloon, but the buck stops with her.

National’s default claim of being the better economic manager also took a blow in the most recent poll. Asked who they trusted most with the post-covid economy, 62.3 percent of respondents preferred a Labour-led government and only 26.5 percent a National-led one.

Could we see an outright victory?
Something may be about to happen to the shape of our governments. Under New Zealand’s previous first-past-the-post (FPP) electoral system we saw a string of manufactured governing majorities.

For the better part of the 20th century either National or (less frequently) Labour would win a majority of seats in the House of Representatives with a minority of the popular vote. Indeed, the last time any party won a majority of the popular vote was 1951.

That may be about to change. Since the first mixed member proportional (MMP) election in 1996 we have not had a single-party majority government: multi-party (and often minority) governments have become the norm. That is because MMP does not permit manufactured majorities in the way FPP does. To win an outright majority you need to enjoy the support of a (near) majority of voters.

Labour may be on the verge of doing precisely that. If it does, it will be a very different kind of single-party majority government to those formed after FPP elections.

In 1993, for instance, the National Party formed a single-party majority government on the basis of just 35 percent of the vote. If Labour is in a position to govern alone (even if Ardern looks to some sort of arrangement with the Greens) it will be because a genuine majority of voters want it to.

Rogue poll or outlier on the same trend, Collins has had her honeymoon (if it can even be called that). In a way, though, neither Ardern nor Collins is the real story here. Much can and will happen between now and September 5 when advance voting begins. But something bigger and more fundamental may be going on.

If the pollsters are anywhere near right, New Zealanders will look back at the 2020 election as one of those epochal events when the electoral tectonic plates moved.

Dr Richard Shaw is professor of politics, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

In recent days, Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister Peter O’Neill has announced his resignation, failed to formally resign, and is now taking legal action to prevent a parliamentary vote to remove him from office.

For most of PNG’s more than eight million inhabitants, today will not be substantially different from any other day. It will be a day of toil, hardship, humour, love, fear – and of negotiating how to survive in PNG’s villages and squatter settlements.

There are crises aplenty in the lives of these Papua New Guineans, but most won’t be worrying too much about the crisis unfolding in the nation’s capital, Port Moresby.

READ MORE: If there’s one thing Pacific nations don’t need, it’s yet another infrastructure investment bank

Yet, this dispute is dominating the waking hours of the educated urbanites and social media commentators there and in the country’s major centres – as well as a small group of people watching PNG from Australia, and elsewhere.

Will Peter O’Neill really resign? Will he somehow manage to cling to the prime ministership? Will he leave, only to be replaced by one of his allies through whom he could continue to exercise power?

A reshuffling of political cards
While we acknowledge the divide between the great majority of struggling Papua New Guineans and PNG’s elites, we should not minimise the importance of the current crisis engulfing the country.

O’Neill’s departure has the potential for a wholesale shift in the policy direction taken by PNG’s government.

It could result in PNG moving away from the big spending on major projects of the past few years, which many Papua New Guineans see as having benefited Port Moresby at the expense of everywhere else in this still largely rural nation.

But the suspicion of at least some informed Papua New Guinean observers is that it will result only in the rearranging of the deck chairs. A reshuffling of the cards that will lead to another privileged insider, another member of PNG’s political class, taking over the PM’s role from the mostly unlamented O’Neill.

Rural citizens are disenfranchised and disengaged
Despite their apparent failure in Australia’s recent federal election, most people would still agree that polls and surveys are a valuable way of gauging popular opinion.

One of the more curious (and frustrating) aspects of PNG’s public affairs is that there has never been a successful attempt to conduct systematic and reasonably reliable opinion surveying.

This means that it is basically impossible to say with any certainty what “the average Papua New Guinean” thinks about O’Neill and the current political crisis. We don’t really know if O’Neill’s departure would be celebrated, or mourned.

PNG’s geographical challenges, along with inadequate transport and communication structures, suggest that most people will hear the news of Port Moresby politics at several removes.

Should they feel sufficiently energised to want to act on what they hear – well, events will have moved on by that time.

Most Papua New Guineans living in villages, in highland valleys, islands, or other remote places, are disenfranchised, and certainly disengaged, from what goes on in Port Moresby.

The same observation could be made about the people who live in the mushrooming settlements in Port Moresby, Lae, Mt Hagen, and other centres. Even if they are notionally urban dwellers, their connection with the complexities of these events is remote.

So we tend to rely on what we hear from the city residents who are more engaged in public life, and especially those who are social media-savvy.

City-dwellers resent O’Neill
What this group thinks about the O’Neill situation is fairly apparent. Ever since he replaced the ailing Sir Michael Somare as Prime Minister in 2011, resentment against O’Neill has been expressed in a range of forums (including social media, to the annoyance of O’Neill and his supporters).

The wave of anger has built over the years since then, and has crested recently with the revelations about O’Neill’s involvement with the Oil Search-UBS loan affair, which many regard as confirming every suspicion they held about the Prime Minister’s character.

The A$1.2 billion loan from the Swiss UBS bank, which enabled the PNG government to buy shares in Oil Search Ltd, was, in the words of PNG’s Ombudsman Commission, “highly inappropriate”. It was undertaken in the face of contrary advice from PNG’s then Treasurer, Don Polye, whom O’Neill sacked.

Anti-O’Neill sentiment over the years failed to garner much support from the Members of PNG’s National Parliament. Until very recently, O’Neill’s People’s National Congress (PNC) and its coalition partners dominated the House.

Crucially, and mostly driven by the UBS revelations, this has now changed.

The prime minister is becoming increasingly isolated as more parliamentarians defect from the O’Neill party to join the disparate collection of MPs who are gathering at one of Port Moresby’s luxury hotels.

While some social media commentators reckon that his recent “resignation” may be merely a ploy, it is looking like the game might be up for Peter O’Neill – unless through the cunning and political adeptness he is known for, he is still able to turn the tables on his political enemies.

At the time of writing, O’Neill is pursuing action in the PNG Supreme Court over the legality of a “vote of no confidence” in his government.

Leadership not the only crisis
There is a crisis in PNG at the moment. Indeed, there are several. The country is suffering from significant health issues, ranging from the reappearance of TB and polio to the inadequacy of its pharmaceutical and medical supplies.

In October, the people of Bougainville may vote to secede from the rest of the country, of which they have been part since 1975.

The billions of kina spent on development has largely been confined to the cities, and most Papua New Guineans have experienced little change in their living standards over the past four decades.

These are the real challenges facing PNG, and the current leadership crisis in Port Moresby might – or, as some fear, might not – produce a meaningful response to them.

• Dr Jonathan Ritchie is a senior research fellow at Deakin Universityi in Victoria. The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of Brime Olewale to this story. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
• Parliament erupts in chaos
• More PNG stories

Two big media-related issues have emerged from the federal election: how opinion polls are reported and the polarisation of the main newspaper groups.

Opinion polls have been part of Australia’s political landscape for 90 years, and for most of that time they have been reliable barometers of public opinion.

As a result, they have acquired considerable credibility. Malcolm Turnbull weaponised this for political purposes when he justified his challenge to Tony Abbott’s prime ministership in 2015 on the basis that Abbott had lost 30 consecutive Newspolls.

READ MORE: Morrison leads Coalition to ‘miracle’ win, but how do they govern now?

It was a gross lapse of judgment.

Not only did it set up Turnbull to be judged by the same criterion – as duly happened last year when he lost his 31st Newspoll – but he chose precisely the wrong time to elevate public opinion polls to the status of prime ministerial kingmaker.

Public opinion polls have been living on borrowed time since mobile phones began to displace household fixed-line phones, a gradual but inexorable process over a couple of decades.

Without digressing too far into the complexities of sampling, it is now difficult, time-consuming and expensive to generate a genuinely random sample of voters.

Telephone polling
Telephone polling, introduced in the 1980s, originally drew its samples from the Telstra list of fixed-line numbers – in other words, from the White Pages. There is no equivalent available list of mobile phones so, for practical purposes, drawing a genuine random sample has become impossible.

To cope with these realities, polling organisations have adopted somewhat makeshift sampling and interviewing procedures, drawing on various combinations of fixed-line phones, mobile phones, large panels of available respondents, and robo-polling.

This in turn raises questions about the validity of statements about sampling error, something the election results brought home with a thump.

Yet the media have carried on reporting the polls as if nothing has changed.

Poll results still make banner headlines. Stories are still written on the basis that the data are as good as they have always been.

The public, accustomed to the longstanding reliability of Australian polls, do not know and are not told that this is nonsense.

Polls are useful and interesting stories, but the reporting of them needs to change.

Greater transparency
There needs to be greater transparency about how a poll’s sampling and interviewing are done. The way a poll is done – whether it is a human being or a machine asking the questions, for instance – is significant.

The public is also entitled to know that today’s polls have limitations that polls of the past did not have. They are more indicative and less precise, so statements about sampling error need to be qualified accordingly.

And as the main newspapers have become more partisan, so the reporting of polls has shifted from straightforward accounts of the data to stories dominated by analysis, comment or wishful thinking on the part of the writer or the editor.

Partisanship in the media, especially the newspapers, has always been with us, but analyses by Media Watch and The New Daily show it reached extreme levels in this election.

An audit of metropolitan newspaper front pages by Media Watch showed a heavy anti-Labor bias by News Corp papers, and a roughly equivalent – but less strident – pro-Labor bias by the old Fairfax (now Nine) newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

The New Daily analysed three nights of Sky News coverage – April 30, May 1 and 2 – and found gross anti-Labor bias:

News Corp’s unconstrained anti-Labor bias cannot account entirely for Labor’s disastrous showing, but common sense says it accounts for some.

Virulently anti-Labor
For example, the company has a daily newspaper monopoly in Brisbane through The Courier-Mail. It was virulently anti-Labor and Labor did astonishingly badly in Queensland. Coincidence? Possibly, but unlikely.

If Australia had a half-decent system of media accountability, there would be a public inquiry into the increasing polarisation of Australian newspapers and into the conduct of Sky at night.

However, the newspaper industry’s self-regulator, the Australian Press Council, relies on the two big newspaper organisations for nearly all its funding, so the chances of having such an inquiry approach zero.

And the broadcasting regulator, the Australian Media and Communications Authority, has never shown the slightest interest in reviewing the way commercial television and radio cover elections.

So in an age where polarisation is undermining democracies around the world, Australia is stuck with an increasingly polarised media, a highly concentrated media ownership landscape and no apparent way to do anything about it.

• Dr Denis Muller is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
• Mounting evidence that the tide is turning on News Corp, and its owner

Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama is polling highly in the latest pre-election poll in Fiji.

But two weeks out from the election, the Tebbut-Times poll shows one in five people are still undecided on who they will pick to run the country.

The Fiji Times reports the poll was carried out from Monday to Wednesday last week.

Surveyors asked over 18-year-olds who they would vote for if there was an election tomorrow.

Sixty-eight percent said they would vote for Bainimarama, the incumbent prime minister.

Twenty-two percent had not decided and ten percent declined to answer the question.

Just under a quarter – 24 percent – picked SODELPA’s Sitiveni Rabuka while the National Federation Party leader Dr Biman Prasad scored five percent

Other party leaders did not make over one percent.

This article is republished under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.

Fiji’s 2018 General Election is going to be a close contest between the ruling FijiFirst and the opposition parties, according to a leading New Zealand-based Fiji academic.

Professor Steven Ratuva, political sociologist and director of the MacMillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury, says the election will be “won and lost” over the undecided, currently a third of the eligible voters.

Dr Ratuva made the comment in response to a Tebbutt-Times poll conducted on February 5-8 with 1000 randomly sampled people who were eligible voters.

According to the results of the poll on the public’s voting intention, a staggering 34 percent said they were not sure who to vote for, 8 percent declined to answer the question and half a percent said they did not intend to vote.

Thirty-two percent said they would vote for FijiFirst, 22 percent for Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA), 3 percent for National Federation Party (NFP) and 1 percent for Fiji Labour Party (FLP).

When looking only at the percentages for those who selected a party (removing the undecided voters), 56 percent selected FijiFirst, 38 percent SODELPA, 5 percent NFP, 1 percent FLP, 0.2 per cent Unity Fiji Party, and 0.1 per cent independent.

Slender lead
Dr Ratuva said of those who expressed their party preferences, FijiFirst had a slender lead of 6 percent with a total of 32 percent (or equivalent to 16 seats) compared with 26 percent (or 13 seats) by all the other opposition parties combined.

“The interesting factor here is the large number of undecided voters totalling 34 percent (or 21 seats).

“This is where the election will be won and lost. So very hypothetically, 21 seats are up for grabs,” said Dr Ratuva.

He said FijiFirst would need at least 18 percent and above of these undecided voters to get over the 50 percent barrier and win the election while the opposition parties needed 24 percent.

“These results show that there have been a lot of movement’s since the last election in terms of people’s preferences as a result of changing perceptions of issues, perceptions of parties, experience of changing circumstances and how they respond to these.

“Whichever way the votes shift, we can be certain that the election might be very close. The next three political party-based polls will begin to provide a much clearer picture of where things are moving as campaigns begin in earnest and the elections come closer.”

Analysing the results, University of the South Pacific economist Dr Neelesh Gounder said the support for FijiFirst had reached an all-time low since the 2014 election, when it had received almost 60 percent of all the votes cast.

Bainimarama’s popularity rises
“While Bainimarama’s popularity has increased by 20 percent in February 2018 compared with February 2017, FijiFirst party as the preferred choice has decreased by 5 percent during the same period (from 37 percent in February 2017 to 32 percent in February 2018),” Dr Gounder said.

He said comparing poll results of preferred party with preferred PM, there was now a clear “delink” between the two.

“It seems there is no clear link between Bainimarama’s popularity as the PM and FijiFirst party as the preferred party.

“On the other hand, both opposition parties SODELPA and NFP have gained in terms of the choice for preferred party.

“SODELPA, in particular, has strengthened its position with a 9 percent increase in preferred party choice (from 13 percent in February 2017 to 22 percent in February 2018).

“Support for NFP has increased from 1 percent to 3 percent.”

He said also interesting was the percent of undecided voters.

“Despite the reduction in undecided voters, 34 percent [from 40 percent] is large and can play a significant role in which party or parties form government after the 2018 election. The challenge for SODELPA and NFP is the continuation of the momentum towards attracting undecided voters towards their party and candidates,” Dr Gounder said.

“For FijiFirst, given how this scenario has evolved since 2014, it might be beneficial to have elections sooner than later. This strategy might avoid FijiFirst 2014 voters who are now undecided from moving to the opposition.”

• Reaction from political parties

The Fiji Times and Fiji Sun perform useful roles in Fiji society by balancing each other, says an executive of the Fiji Media Association.

Stanley Simpson made these comments after viewing a summary of results for the latest Tebbutt/Times poll on public perceptions of the two newspapers.

“I believe both are attracting their own loyal and core readers based on their content and The Fiji Times‘ rich history and wider outlook has continued to give it the edge,” Simpson said.

“However, the Fiji Sun has shown itself to be adaptive and responsive to the current political and market environment and has made inroads.”

He said the divide in the readership of the two newspapers was being sharply defined between those who trusted The Fiji Times and those who trusted the Fiji Sun.

He added both played important roles in providing information and different perspectives, but readers needed to be critical of all information they consumed from the two.

“It will be healthy for people to remain critical about what they read in both newspapers, but appreciate that both newspapers are working hard to gain their attention and loyalty, and a lot of effort is being put into this,” he said.

“People will individually work out who is serving them best — and that is the beauty of media freedom and having a competitive media industry,” Simpson added.

Fiji Times a better newspaper

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The Fiji Times is publicly perceived to be a consistently better newspaper with better reach than its main competitor by readers surveyed in polls conducted recently.

The Tebbutt/Times poll administered by Tebbutt Research was conducted from September 7-10 and measured public perception of each newspaper.

A total of 1020 respondents over the age of 18 across Fiji’s four divisions were surveyed and the perceptions of The Fiji Times were significantly different to those of its main competitor.

“When asked to rate each newspaper on the quality of their content; being committed and supportive of national unity, national identity development and nation building; being committed and supportive of the development of the Fijian economy; being committed and supportive of the welfare of all Fijians; and being unbiased and responsible in educating and informing all Fijians on development and government issues; The Fiji Times was consistently rated higher than the Fiji Sun across geographic regions and all other demographic variables recorded.”

“In each case, the public perception of The Fiji Times was found to be significantly better than the perception of the Fiji Sun.”

Fiji Sun publisher, Peter Lomas, when informed of a summary of the results, said he would have to view the full survey before commenting.

“I can’t comment on a survey which I have not seen. Please send me a copy so we can test its validity,” Lomas said.

Phone interviews
The survey interviews were conducted by telephone in which six questions were asked to respondents to gauge their views with interviewers trained to probe where necessary.

Private landlines and mobile phone numbers were called to achieve a national sample.

Landline numbers were selected from the Fiji White Pages listing, while random digit dialing (RDD) was used for mobile phones, with known prefixes for each carrier.

More than 10,000 numbers were loaded into a Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) system which randomly selected phone numbers to be called.

Speaker of Parliament Dr Jiko Luveni congratulated The Fiji Times, saying “the survey results reflect positively on the readership of The Fiji Times and I congratulate The Fiji Times for this achievement”.

Opposition Leader Ro Teimumu Kepa said The Fiji Times had been the standard bearer for fair and balanced reporting and for decades it had maintained this position.

“It should, above all, strive to maintain this position no matter what the challenges bring,” Ro Teimumu said.

More competitive
Fiji Media Association executive Stanley Simpson said while the results were favourable for The Fiji Times, an important point to note was that the newspaper business was becoming more competitive.

“I think a decade ago when the 2006 coup took place, The Fiji Times then would have had much more superior numbers and greater domination over the Fiji Sun,” Simpson said.

“The Fiji Sun has made a strong challenge to close the gap, but The Fiji Times remains the number one at present. It will be important to continue to observe these trends going forward.

“I think the test will come down to consistency and standards and who can sustain this over a longer term.”

Attempts to obtain a response from Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum were unsuccessful when this edition went to press.

FMA’s Stanley Simpson comments

Statistics from the Tebbutt/Times poll