THE THREE Ts DEMOCRATIC FAILURE: are there now two versions of reality?

American political scientist, Robert Lane, describes as a change for the worse, how people feel about themselves—a change caused by the ‘erosion of family solidarity and community integration. This has provided the feedstock for the cultivation of division, conflict and outright manipulation of public opinion polling as a measure of the TTT standards that are critical elements of democracy -Truth, Trust and Transparency.

George Gallup in The Pulse of Democracy defence of the then-nascent polling industry insisted that polls were important for democracy because politicians needed to understand public opinion, even if they chose not to follow it. The primary purpose of the polls was not to predict an election outcome; it was to “test public sentiment on single issues… when public interest is at its height.”

For more than half a century, the media owners of Australian newspapers have presented their own views of what constitutes truth, trust and transparency by publishing their own surveys of public interest in issues that could help sell their coverage.

Testing “public sentiment” in Australia has almost as long a history as in the United States; in September, it will be eighty years since the first Gallup poll, run by Roy Morgan, started gathering Australians’ opinions on a range of issues.

In 1971, when the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald gave us the Australian Sales Research Bureau and the Australian produced its own version of political reality -NEWSPOLL- (Australian Nationwide Opinion Poll) breaking the Independent Polling of Roy Morgan Research. Until recently, issue-based polling has been dominated by the Essential Report, whose findings appear fortnightly in the Guardian Australia.

Until April this year, neither the Herald nor the Age had commissioned regular polling since the May 2019 election, when both mastheads — and the Australian Financial Review — predicted a Labor win. All three relied on Ipsos, which estimated that Labor led 51–49 on the two-party-preferred vote, an error slightly less egregious than that recorded by other pollsters, but an error nonetheless.

Our media masters, and their hired pollsters, have refused to allow public scrutiny of the reasons that they have achieved a high level of consistency in getting results wrong on three continents. Now we have a new claimant for support for the imminent restoration of the Government's standing to level pegging and the consequent advice from the Prime Minister to prepare for early post-Covid recovery of the Conservative leadership.

Jim Reed, has been brought in to conduct polling monthly for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age to show Morrison dominance against the Newspoll that now presents Labor as having an eight point margin ( 54% to 46% two party preferred)..

Jim is a member of the Australian Market & Social Research Society (AMSRS) and has Qualified Professional Researcher (QPR) status. Before creating Resolve, Jim was Group Director of Research & Strategy at C|T Group (formerly Crosby|Textor) and Senior Research Director at Newgate Communications

A Resolve poll for Nine newspapers, conducted August 17-21 from a sample of 1,607, gave the Coalition 40% of the primary vote (up two since August), Labor 32% (down three), the Greens 12% (steady), One Nation 2% (down two) and independents 10% (up three).

Resolve is not publishing a two-party estimate, but analyst Kevin Bonham estimated a 50-50 tie, a two-point gain for the Coalition since July. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said he wouldn't comment on polls but pointed to the Resolve research that put the coalition's primary vote at 40 per cent.

Resolve, which assures potential clients that it does “the best work,” has been set up “to introduce the advanced research techniques practised by political parties to the communications industry,” wasn’t around for that debacle. Reed insists that survey research questions need to be “understood,” response categories need to be “appropriate,” and there could be “no proxy for proper testing.”

Figures published in The Australian show the opposition has a 54 to 46 per cent lead on a two-party preferred basis. This alternative reality, that successfully lead Bill Shorten to the fantasy that he was about to head for the Lodge, in the latest Newspoll quietly asserts that the coalition support is at its lowest level since before the last federal election.

Primary votes for the Greens and One Nation are at the same level as the 2019 election at 10 and three per cent respectively. The Morgan polls over the same period report that primary support for the L-NP is up 0.5% points since early August to 37.5% and is again dead level with the ALP, also up 0.5% points to 37.5%. Greens support was supposed to be unchanged at 12.5%. Newspoll shows support for One Nation up 0.5% points to 3.5% while support for Independents/Others was down by 1.5% points to 9%.

Michele Levine for Roy Morgan Research says her latest poll, conducted over the weekends of August 7/8 & 14/15, 2021 with a nationally representative cross-section of 2,747 Australian electors using a combination of telephone and online interviews (multi-mode) shows ALP support increased to 54% (up 0.5% points since early August) cf. L-NP on 46% (down 0.5% points) on a two-party preferred basis after Melbourne’s sixth lockdown was extended, Sydney’s lockdown was extended to the whole State of NSW and the ACT entered lockdown for the first time in over a year.

Australians now realise that they cannot trust what they see from Sky after dark commentators, Media opinion polls or even the reporting from the national Media Watch that avoids any criticism of the contrasting sources so-called public opinion research.

The Senate needs to shift from a concern with News Ltd and conduct an independent inquiry into the responsibility of the media to establish TTT standards for Truth, Trust and Transparency, in the same way as we can rely on the AAA standards in financial reporting conducted away from media manipulation.

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