Matt Price writing in The Australian this morning was spot on.

“Newspoll’s prognostications”, he commented, “are becoming so predictable it must be tempting for the bean counters to avoid the expense of actually ringing people up and instead simply re-publish last fortnight’s results.”

Or they could just give away a dozen bottles of wine to encourage their readers to predict what Newspoll will show as Crikey does. Once again our Pick the Newspoll contest is round about the mark.

Take the primary voting intention. The only difference between the Crikey team and the pollster was in the vote for the Greens and other candidates.

Crikey Newspoll Difference
Liberal 35 35 –
National 5 5 –
Labor 47 47 –
Green 5 4 +1
Other 8 9 -1

That insignificant difference did result in the Crikey two-party-preferred vote coming in at Coalition 43 to Labor 57 compared to 45 to 55 in Newspoll. We rounded the Labor figure of 56.5 up to 57. Perhaps Newspoll rounded down!

When it came to measuring the approval and disapproval ratings of the two leaders, the Crikey team were slightly harsher markers than the Newspoll sample with the predicted approval for both John Howard and Kevin Rudd a couple of points less than Newspoll found.

Crikey Newspoll Difference
Howard approval rating 43 45 -2
Howard disapproval rating 46 44 +2
Don’t know 11 11 –

Crikey Newspoll Difference
Rudd approval rating 60 62 -2
Rudd disapproval rating 23 22 +1
Don’t know 17 16 +1

Guessing which man Newspoll would find the public thought would make the better Prime Minister saw Crikey more pro-Rudd than Newspoll.

Crikey Newspoll Difference
Howard better PM 40 40 –
Rudd better PM 46 43 +3
Don’t know 14 117 -3

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