Crikey’s political methadone for poll addicts

There was no fortnightly Newspoll published in The Australian yesterday and its absence clearly unsettled the political poll addicts to the point where considerable nonsense was written about the Courier Mail version of a Galaxy Poll on the voting intentions of the people of Queensland.

The story purported to show that Labor was doing poorly with the “Courier-Mail/Galaxy survey shows that federal Labor’s lead over the Coalition in Queensland has been slashed from 10% to just 4% of the two-party-preferred vote … and if the poll result were repeated on election day, Labor would not win the seats required in Queensland and would hand Prime Minister John Howard a fifth term”.

This conclusion of journalist Clinton Porteous was nothing more than nonsense. Galaxy put the two-party-preferred vote of its Queensland sample at Labor 52% to the Coalition’s 48%. At the last federal election, the split was Labor 43% to the Coalition’s 57%. If Labor does manage to gain nine percentage points in Queensland it would win the seats of Bonner (where the required swing is 0.2%), Moreton (2.8% required), Blair (5.7%), Longman (6.6%), Flynn (7.8%), Petrie (7.9%), Hinkler (8.8%) and Bowman (8.9%). Those eight seats would be half of what Labor needs nationally.

And a 9% swing nationally, incidentally, would see Labor become the government with a majority of 48!

What Porteous was writing about I do not know, but he, and the ABC journalists who blithely repeated his gibberish over the airwaves, badly need the poll addict’s equivalent of methadone. As always, Crikey is happy to help, and presented below is the collective wisdom of the readers who entered our Predict the Newspoll contest. The figures show the results that Newspoll would have discovered if they had not postponed their survey work for a week to avoid distortions caused by people not being home to answer their phone over the long weekend.

New entries for the Predict the Newspoll are now open with those whose predictions contributed to these findings having a second chance of winning our prize of a dozen bottles of wine. Click here for the entry form.