MEDIA POLL MANIPULATION - they are simply unbelievable.

How many Australians are supposed to be offering a judgement when the media polls report a range of the Coalition in the lead to being behind by as much as 15%?

We continue to see a very distorted picture of public opinion provided by the various media polls that are touting their mea-culpa corrections that have virtually destroyed trust in their manipulations of voting intentions.

The ABC Afternoon Briefing is now bringing us panels of pollsters to talk down any effort to hold them to account for their continued practice of the arcane art of giving us our opinions when more and more people know that they have never even been asked to fill in a secret ballot to record their views.

?None of these polls actually go out and get people to fill in a ballot paper with the names of the candidates that are finally being determined. Roy Morgan, the founder of the independent polling organisation, used to give voters the chance to do this and then tally the actual views about candidates in each seat, but Covid, robopolls and online outreach have made that a quaint memory.

The media pollsters do not bother to explain how they determine the intentions of the "undecideds", "don’t knows" and "refuse to take parts" that they choose to allocate to an unbelievable two-party representation of what is no longer a two-horse race. We are asked to accept that they know what we are thinking, (or should be voting.

Most claim to follow the post-poll post mortem of their abject failure to predict the miracle win of Prime Minister Morrison citing the Australian Polling Council standards. Yet they blocked evidence of their manipulation of methods, samples and weighting efforts and provide little reason for confidence in their current efforts.

Newspoll - Murdoch Media's dog in the race, tells us that Morrison is coming back with a 2% margin but still neglects to explain how it manages to avoid providing us with the way that its sampling is done. Its headlines are designed to let us know that the "daggy dad" is heading for another miracle recovery against the weight of independent polls.

An exclusive Newspoll presented Labor’s primary vote falling three points to 38 per cent.??With the Coalition improving a point to 36 per cent, it claims the race has narrowed from a six-point margin three weeks ago to a two-point difference as the election date nears.

Essential Poll, gathered from its fortnightly omnibus with an undisclosed sampling procedure by a Qualtrics online panel, informs the Guardian that their results are adjusted to take into account age, gender, location and an interesting "party ID". They tell us that the Government's cash splash has been well received and that the Coalition is ahead on the primary vote.

Ipsos - the Financial Review’s effort - tells us that Labor is on track to a majority government with a ten-point 2PP margin of 55 to 45 with the Coalition getting only 31% of the primary vote. Morrison’s has a higher disapproval rating among women than among men -– 51-45%.

Phil Coorey suggests a very different Australia writing that the Morrison government will enter the election campaign lagging Labor by up to 10 percentage points, according to AFR’s exclusive new poll.

In the Ipsos poll, Morrison has an approval rating of 33%, with 48% disapproving and 19% uncommitted. Albanese is approved by 30%, disapproved by 32%, with a huge 38% uncommitted, indicating the opposition leader has yet to define himself in the minds of many voters

The latest Morgan Poll after the weekend's coverage of the NSW Court battle to authorise a trifecta of Liberal luminaries to make a dozen captain's picks against the demands of local party members shows the ALP with a staggering 14 point lead of 57% to L-NP 43%.

Sportsbet polling odds, reflecting the smart money across the nation that is free from direct manipulation of telephone and online polls that look back to the miracle Morrison win, ?still has Labor on $1.33 to Coalition $3:10. There are dozens of seat odds that disagree with the margins that the media managers are pushing as likely 2PP results, with the TAB odds approximating a potentially closer result.

Any detailed examination of the huge differences between so-called safe seats and marginal seats needs to give us information about the Palmer, One Nation and Independent Voices voter’s preference allocation rather than in-house media manipulation of assumptions based on previous election patterns. We need public opinion, not media manipulated opinion.

The very least we should expect is open admission of their master's riding instructions and required sampling refusals and acceptance figures, in the absence of a transparent, independent set of secret ballots that remove the obfuscations. Australia needs to have an ANU POLL that asks 500 people to fill in an actual ballot paper for their (now finally being released) names of actual candidates in forty marginal seats or ban media misinformation at the same time as political advertisements are pulled out to leave it to the electors to determine at the only poll that really counts.