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Latest poll 'a nonsense': former Labor pollster

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PM - Tuesday, 1 June , 2004  18:38:41

Reporter: Mark Colvin

MARK COLVIN: Rod Cameron is the Managing Director of ANOP Research and a long time former Labor pollster.

I asked him about the massive fluctuation between this Newspoll and the previous one.

ROD CAMERON: Well it does defy credibility, Mark, I think. I mean to have nearly two million voters apparently change their vote first one way and then another in two weeks is clearly a nonsense.

MARK COLVIN: We're so used to politicians saying, when a poll doesn't go their way, that it's not the poll that matters, or that this particular poll isn't the right one, but in this case you're really convinced that there is something odd going on?

ROD CAMERON: Well I think the polls are being massively overanalysed. I mean most polls, they show small changes from one week till the next, and yet some commentators try and assign reasons for these small changes, look for events, or assume some factor or another is of particular significance to account for them, when in fact nothing much really usually happens in Australian politics.

And then when you get a truly staggering shift that the Newspoll purportedly showed this morning, then a major rewriting of the political landscape has apparently being silently at work in the suburbs the length and breadth of the nation.

MARK COLVIN: When would there have been the last really genuine shift of this size? Would you have to go back to say 1975 – the year of the Senate crisis and the dismissal?

ROD CAMERON: No, it did happen after the Tampa. But I've only seen three or four, what you call seismic shifts, in my 30 years of observing politics.

The last one was the last election. That's why John Howard won, because there was a huge shift following the Tampa, but nothing of the sort has happened in the last week.

Polls do get it wrong some times, no matter how well conducted they are, polls by their nature are just small samples of large populations, and they do get the occasional one wrong.

MARK COLVIN: And is it right that one should really build in the idea that there's two or three per cent sampling error, and that means two or three per cent on either side of any figure that you look at?

ROD CAMERON: Yes. But of course it's there in the small print, and it's paid scant attention to. And of course the other thing which is the pollster's easy answer to is that, oh well there's more volatility. Well that's just not the case. There is no more volatility this week than there was last week or last year. In fact I think there's less. There's certainly less interest in politics or less involvement, less engagement, but there's not more volatility.

MARK COLVIN: All right, well if we can't get any inkling of how the next election's going to turn out, or even how people are feeling by looking at one poll at a time, are there better ways to do it? I mean, is it better to look at the trend over several months? Or is it better to look at a poll of polls, as it were?

ROD CAMERON: Yes, yes, you can only use… and I think the closer to an election you get the more reliable polls start to become, because people focus their mind, they won't answer flippantly, and they'll have actually got it into their consciousness.

You can look at polls over a period of time too and get some sort of trend. The trouble with a result like this morning's, it was so out of the box that it will in fact effect the long term trend.

But generally speaking, it's trends that you look at in polls, not individual polls.

MARK COLVIN: Rod Cameron, and he's the Managing Director of ANOP.
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