A turning point?

AC Nielson and Newspoll brought out their latest election opinion polls today. AC Nielson (who conducts polls mainly for Fairfax such the SMH) give a two party prefered of 54 to 46 in favour of the ALP, which is an almost certain victory if an election was held tomorrow. Newspoll give 50 to 50, which would be a hung parliament. Certainly divergent views in the opinion poll data. Andrew Leigh makes some comments on the unreliability of opinion poll data at his blog.

When it comes to opinion poll data the trick is to ignore the data but look at general trends. For example, it is NOT 99.9% likely the ALP would have won a landslide victory but it is hard to deny that the ALP has received the breath of life it needed from the Unions' IR campaign. Indeed, this is backed up by the Herald Poll that says 60% of people polled opposed the IR reform proposals.

The trouble for the ALP now is to capitalise on this data. It will be hard to maintain the momentum until 2007. What the ALP need to do is look at what the NSW Liberal party are trying to do to NSW Premier Bob Carr and public transport (etc): make the IR reform like a bad smell that won't go away. Could this be the turning point for the ALP?

Few make comment of the Greens data in these opinion polls. At the fantastic OzPolitics website there is some data from the last few months on the Greens primary vote (the image is reproduced above). The latest AC Nielson data for the Greens has not been added, which puts us at 10%. An excellent result for the Greens.

The IR campaign could be dangerous for the Greens, not because the Greens differ in view from the ALP, but because a large proportion of Greens (almost 75% according to the ANU electoral survey) are ALP who could be wooed back into the ALP fold. The data confirms my guesses that this was not going to occur: the Greens have stayed steady over the past 6 months with data suggesting Green primaries are anywhere between 7% and 10%.

It could perhaps be even suggested that there has been a slight surge in Green support since all three of the polls have seen a rise of one or more percent since late May. Quite likely since Green-friendly issues have dominated politics (such as mandatory detention and the Chen Yonglin defection/Chinese human rights issues).