The polls may be wrong but they are certainly not a waste of time

The voting system does not help the pollster. The party with the most seats wins. A party can get a majority without winning the popular vote. That has happened on several occasions in the past 50 years - most recently in 1998 and, before that, in 1990. Further, the preferential system muddies the water. The number of people voting for minor parties and independents is usually much greater than the polls’ margin of error. Yet their vote trickles through to the major parties and determines the outcomes. Just how that vote trickles through is difficult to measure. The closeness of elections also makes polling difficult. Since World War II, the widest two-party-preferred split was 43/57; the narrowest was 49.9/50.1; and in more than half the elections the margin was less than 2 per cent each way.

It makes it easy for the pollster to get the result wrong, while being basically correct about the state of Australian political opinion as in the place is fairly evenly divided.

So are opinion polls a complete waste of time? Certainly not. They provide a great deal of reader fascination, even if their meaning is stretched. More importantly, they help the working of democracy, especially polls that ask voters’ attitudes to certain issues. Polls help political parties respond to voter concerns while leaving room for a good leader to make decisions which are unpopular in the short term but can be explained and accepted in time. Polls can prompt parties to dump leaders who have no chance of winning, such as Labor’s Simon Crean.

Last and least, they are of great value to the polling companies. Political polling puts their opinion-gathering techniques to the test. Their sampling is tested (and in difficult conditions) because on polling day the whole voting population is counted. If the polling companies get it right, businesses can be confident that the company will also get research on products and consumer attitudes right, and so the polling company is worth paying.

ACNielsen says, “More than 9,000 clients in over 100 countries rely on ACNielsen's dedicated professionals to measure competitive marketplace dynamics, to understand consumer attitudes and behaviour, and to develop advanced analytical insights that generate increased sales and profits.”

Newspoll advertises itself as having “the best record of any Australian market research company in election surveys”. And there are plenty of opportunities - 2000 is the only calendar year since World War II in which there was not a federal, state or territory election somewhere in Australia.

They were the polls that counted.