Either a poll is seen as a thin, ‘follow the leader’ set of numbers guiding cynical politicians to destinations they had already identified, or as a sneaky way help advertisers make you consume more cheese Doritos, rainbow Paddle Pops or sports betting. Or, as has increasingly been the case, pollsters have been so bad at predicting anything – especially election results – that they are pretty much useless: you may as well ask the cat.
In a former career, I used sentiment testing (one of many fancy terms for polling) to get to grips with what people really thought about international students. Around the COVID-19 period, when many students were either trapped in Australia or shut out, some parliamentarians were slinging around nasty pseudo-facts about Chinese students in particular. Either they were spying for the Chinese Government, taking our kids’ jobs, or just taking up our seats on the bus.
We wanted to know whether the public really had these fears, or whether it was just politicians projecting their own. It turned out most people, if they had a view at all, liked international students, saw them as creating jobs, and really contributing in local communities.
That was a pretty simple poll, asking do you agree that international students are a good thing, or not?
When Australian politics and voting patterns were more predictable, and voters were more tribal, polling was more predictable too. Surprise, surprise.
Political sentiment polling is now something else altogether: hugely complex and fascinating. It is about taking the temperature of the nation by actually asking people, in large and small groups, how they feel about their lives, then trying to discern what influences their daily decisions and how that is shifting.
Regular P&I readers will sense where I am going here.
Last week, Kos Samaras joined P&I as a regular writer, and his first column, Angus Taylor may have just created half a million new Labor voters, sparked significant debate. This week, he digs into the profound shift in voting patterns and the stratification of voters into Three Australias.
Kos is a director at Redbridge and a former ALP party official and staffer. He has built a reputation for direct, deeply-informed commentary on the way the political landscape is changing and the human story that fuels that change. His work often bucks prevailing political ‘wisdom’. He has been a friend of P&I for some time, and now we will get a weekly column, written especially for us.
My best bit for the week is close to home, with a beautiful piece from two P&I favourites, Chas Keys and John Frew. Chas is a former Deputy Director General of the NSW State Emergency Service and climate expert; John a public-education legend and former secondary-school principal. Both are also sports fanatics, in cricket and football respectively. It turns out that, 50 years ago, John was one of Chas’s first University of Wollongong students. They have been reacquainted via P&I, and the fruits of this renewed collaboration leads our Sunday line-up. The article reminds us of the importance not just of sport as a spectacle, but as one of the last shared rituals of belonging.
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Catriona Jackson is the Chief Executive and Editor of Pearls and Irritations.