News Corp’s lips are sealed over no Newspoll in lead-up to Voice referendum

News Corp has refused to rule on the future of its widely read Newspoll, which appears to have been put on pause after two of its most senior architects left to start their own polling outfit.

Poll watchers conceded late on Sunday evening that another week was set to pass without a fresh Newspoll, some four weeks after the last one, leaving the polling field one survey short just months before the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum. The poll has previously been released at an interval that rarely stretches beyond three weeks.

A News Corp spokesman declined to comment on Newspoll’s absence, saying its return is “an editorial issue” subject to the decisions of editorial leadership.

The unofficial hiatus of The Australian’s Newspoll comes as YouGov, the survey’s provider, reckons with the departures of Campbell White, the organisation’s former head of public affairs and polling unit, and Simon Levy, a former senior research manager, to start their own polling firm, Pyxis Polling & Insights.

YouGov did not respond to a request for comment.

Until Newspoll returns, the field has been left to Essential Research’s fortnightly survey, which Guardian Australia has an active partnership with, the monthly Resolve Strategic poll for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and the more sparsely published Freshwater Strategy polls, published by The Australian Financial Review.

William Bowe, an election analyst in Perth who runs The Poll Bludger, said Newspoll’s interruption is more likely to be the result of a staff shortage at YouGov than The Australian deciding to pull the plug at the pointy end of the referendum campaigns.

“But whether they have to hire a new pollster or wait for YouGov to get a new team in place, it presumably won’t be back any time soon,” Bowe told Crikey.

At YouGov, White and Levy described themselves as “the engine” of the research team responsible for the top-down redesign of Newspoll after the results of the 2019 federal election. They went on to lead internal polling for Labor’s 2022 federal election campaign, which delivered Labor only its third win from opposition in some 40 years.

White declined to comment on Newspoll’s future, and said his new company isn’t likely to produce polling related to the referendum.

“Pyxis Polling & Insights is a new polling business providing strategic research for private clients and internal polling services,” he told Crikey. “We have no plans to conduct public-facing polling at this point in time unless our clients choose to release such polling.”

Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly framed a News Corp spokesman’s comments on Newspoll as though he was speaking on its future. He declined to comment on the poll’s absence, which he said was a matter for editorial.