Ditching the politics of division is paying off for Albanese. Now it’s the media’s turn
With the passage of landmark legislation to make federal politics cleaner and women who work in the building safer, the Albanese government will spend the final days of the 2022 sittings getting its House in some semblance of order.
Negotiations to secure the package of a national integrity commission and implement the recommendations of the Respect@Work report are critical pieces of civic infrastructure that will make our democracy stronger.
But it is not just the legislation, it is the way it has been developed that has been transformative.
The new government has worked hard to secure the bipartisanship necessary to build longstanding reform rather than serve up fodder for the sort of divisive political fights that have characterised so much of our politics over the past decade.
Even while pushing for greater ambition, the independent champion of the integrity laws, Helen Haines, has been at pains to credit the new government on both the substance of the bill and the way it has approached negotiations.
A similar vibe has permeated even more contentious industrial relations laws, where Tony Burke and unions have worked with employer advocates and independent David Pocock to secure an outcome rather than confect an angry impasse.
This model of jettisoning the politics of division with constructive, collaborative decision-making is delivering politically for the government.
We have not been polling voting intention since May, but we have been registering sustained approval of the PM’s performance since the election.
This week we pull back the curtain againto reveal Labor’s primary and two-party-preferred-plus voting sitting exactly where a first-term government would want it.
If a federal election was held tomorrow, to which party would you give your first preference vote in the House of Representatives (lower house)?
We’ve spent the past six months reviewing our polling in the lead-up to the 2022 election, working through where we think our methodology is providing clear insight and where we can learn and improve.
In short, while estimates based on our final poll were close after preferences were allocated, they were further away than we would have liked on the primary vote. Specifically, we had the major parties too high and the independents (in particular) too low.
That’s consistent with one of our statistical anchors, Party ID, becoming less stable over recent political cycles as people become less attached to traditional parties. Accordingly, we have dropped Party ID from our sampling model, replacing it with more granular actual voting behaviour.
This is what pollsters do after each election: we review, we reflect and we refine. After the 2019 election where, like most polls, we overestimated the base support for Labor, we fundamentally redesigned our polling methodology to make it fit for purpose.
We realised that we had allowed our output to feed a horse-race mentality, ascribing far too much emphasis to the predictive – as opposed to descriptive – powers of a representative sample.
The two big initiatives from that review – to include the undecided voter in our reporting, so we can see them more clearly, and to establish the Australian Polling Council – both materially contributed to the quality of polling insights in this cycle.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup
This increased rigour was critical in repositioning polling in the 2022 campaign: less as a referee but as more of a cartographer, mapping the terrain on which the final voter choice was presented.
So, if our parliament and polling have taken steps to get their houses in order, what of the third “p” of the democratic thrupple: the press gallery?
Findings in this week’s Essential Report suggests the public are not feeling well served in the way the media
covers politics.
Thinking about the way the Australian media covers politics, to what extent do you agree with the following:
A majority of respondents do not agree the media covers issues that matter to them, seeing the media as biased and prone to treat politics as a game. Notably, this sentiment crosses all voter types.
The Victorian election is the latest evidence of this disconnect, with the press pack reinforcing a false narrative that the people were rounding on “Dictator Dan” even as they prepared to return him for a thumping third term.
Despite the efforts of some individual journalists, Murdoch’s bellicose metro tabloids and its execrable Sky After Dark line-up have become not just a political cheer squad but an arm of the conservatives’ political campaign infrastructure.
The ripple effects of this elephant in the room that always swings right drags the centre of political discourse with it, especially with a national broadcaster that has been scarred by decades of intimidation and abuse.
But as the voters keep asserting at the ballot box, the loud and angry version of reality the media is creating bears no relationship to the world real people inhabit – leaving a flotilla of politicians who dance to the media siren’s song washed up on the shore of broken dreams.
The press gallery also had a shocker at the last federal election, piling on Albanese like coyotes to a wounded beast, missing the bigger truth that it was Morrison who was terminal.
The daily campaign circus designed to serve the needs of media by appointment risks being hijacked by the very outlets it’s designed to assist and needs a fundamental rethink.
While the media is terrific at lauding its own efforts with not one, not two, but – if you are a Murdoch journo – three (!) annual award ceremonies to lavish praise on one’s work, there appears no appetite to reflect on the industry’s deficiencies.
Australian media has been the beneficiary of significant policy reforms over the past few years, the bipartisan support for the news media bargaining code seeing an estimated $150m recognition of the impact of big tech’s advertising monopoly.
Without this investment, struggling outlets may have had some sort of excuse in chasing clicks for survival but this justification no longer applies: wellresourced newsrooms can and should do better.
What is curious to someone who enthusiastically participated in a full review into my organisation’s performance at the 2019 election is how lacking in curiosity the media has been into how their reporting could better serve the democratic process.
Elections are humbling experiences for the loser – and elected representatives are all one election away from humility. Pollsters too need to account for their contribution in clear and unambiguous numbers each and every cycle.
But as long as the press gallery can never get it wrong, our democratic house will continue to teeter on unstable foundations.
Peter Lewis will discuss the latest Essential Report with Guardian Australia political editor Katherine Murphy at 1pm today. Free registration here