Our beloved Kevin Rudd is a human pogo stick

Michael says:

05:32am | 27/10/09

He isn’t my beloved Kevin!  The media decide who is popular and who isn’t in this country. The everyday Mums and Dads sitting at home watching their TVs after dinner and reading their newspapers on the porch, are told he is the Mesiah, he can’t do anything wrong he is perfect and indistructable, he is smart, clever, funny, friendly and now towgh but humane!  And lots of little stories like this one.Thank you media for making Kev the most Popular PM ever! Media are a wonderful thing in Australia.

robynne morton says:

05:54am | 27/10/09

What you see is not what you get with Rudd, there are a lot of under lying things that go on htat no one knows about.Truly a wolf in sheeps clothing….or may i say monster…

Harry says:

06:15am | 27/10/09

I can see it now. We are about to get a flood of good news stories about Rudd and his Government,  (just like this article above)They need to take our attention away from the border protection issue as quick as possible because it may effect Rudds polling and we wouldn’t want that now. Usually what they do if there is a sniff of any bad news for them they start telling us about all the wonderful things they are doing,  They will no doubt have something wonderful up their sleave to anounce soon,  We don’t want them to have any more press on border protection or health or indiginious housing or wasted money on BER etc. They tried using Tuckey to get at Turnbull again, only that one back fired LOL

wattty says:

07:13am | 27/10/09

Nice to get an unbiased view of our Kevvie for a change.

Of course we have to rely on a vital cog in the Union’s $multi-million campaign to elect Rudd to gain this insight.

Perhaps the timing of this little “puff piece” is a trifle unfortunate as it coincides with the Messiah handing over some Sri Lankan boat people to the kindly treatment of our friendly neighbours the Indonesians.

Possibly won’t hear or see to much of our Kevvie as he must be due to flit off to sort out the problems of the world.

AFR says:

07:38am | 27/10/09

Well, someone has to try and balance out the rubbish sprouted by the likes of Piers Akenman and Alan Jones.

Vincent says:

08:31am | 27/10/09

Yep here we go, we will be hearing about new incentives and money being put towards this and that anything to take our focus away from the asylum seeker issue of last week. There will also be a barage of stuff about the previous Government on what they neglected and how this Government is solving all these issues. Meanwhile whats going on in Indonesia with the asyum seekers???????and Labors border policy?????

jimmy says:

09:03am | 27/10/09

Wait.. tell me you’re doing some polling using The Punch for the Labor Party right now..
Just testing the issues are you? Seeing if the numbers are adding up?
Where are the votes?

Peter Lewis says:

09:06am | 27/10/09

Hey you Lib-lovers, if you read the stats rather than shooting the messenger, maybe the numbers would get better.

Zeta says:

09:15am | 27/10/09

I take EMC’s Essential Report with a pinch of salt. For starters, these are the results of online interviews, conducted by a separate company called Your Source that randomly selects interviewees from a pool of about 100,000 people to get a sample of 1000 + for each set of questions. That’s a decent sample, but not when you think about how that breaks down.

Although Your Source go to great lengths to claim they persue interviewees off line, and that only the surveys themselves are conducted online, they operate a points-incentive scheme to keep their interviewees interested. Now this is great for Your Source’s core buisness, which is retail and online products; but fails the test when it comes to politics.

I don’t beleive for a second that we’re seeing an equitable split of demographics in Your Source’s subjects. You’re going to see diminished numbers of 55+ respondents in their data, and an over abundance of 18-35s. Their incentive scheme, which offers the usual iPods and island holidays isn’t going to appeal to the sections of the voting public whose opinions real political operatives are desperate to gauge. Instead, The Essential Report, by virtue of their samples, reflects the views of those same people who marketing companies want to pitch products at and whose buying patterns they need to assess. These opinions aren’t as important to politicians as those of the elderly, migrants and those on welfare.

It’s also important to remember that group’s like EMC use a pretty sweet program called Predictive Analytics Software, or what used to be the sinister sounding ‘Statistical Package for Social Sciences’. Using the program’s linear regression model, assuming you have enough data, you can homogenise responses to look like anything. This is obvious enough from the way Health gets ranked so highly as an issue. If your 1000 random respondants are too young, and rank something like ‘climate change’ or ‘employment’ too high when compared to previous samples, the linear regression models can equalise your findings by granting different respondents different weightings.

The best, and only way to get accurate polling on political opinion is to get out on the street and ask people questions the old fashioned way, or sit them down together in focus groups. I imagine both Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd know this.

Which is why neither of them have hired EMC.

John says:

09:45am | 27/10/09

Well as long as Australians keep voting Labor they will get what they deserve. I for one would like to point out only 1 of Kev’s many failures -> Health care. So poorly managed by the States and the PM did promise he would take over but almost 4 months since that promise was broken, an incompetent health minister who has been trying to use doctors as scapgoats for the governments own failure to solve health related issues. This isn’t spin it is reality. Lets get real, solve ALL health care issue by X’mas or quit, a broken promise is as good as a lie.

watty says:

10:00am | 27/10/09

Very very sorry Peter Lewis.

Should have realised that no one is allowed to critcise Messiah Rudd or one of his minions.

Do you consider self flagellation a suitable punishment?

watty says:

10:05am | 27/10/09

Have a problem with Piers and the Jones Boy AFR?

Perhaps Rudd could do an Obama and declare they are not really part of a “News Agency”?

Suck it up baby.You are way in front with the mainstream in the Canberra Press Gallery

Neil says:

10:12am | 27/10/09

@ Peter Lewis - I didn’t think there were any “Lib-lovers”, according to the polls anyway.

Ian Matthews says:

12:02pm | 27/10/09

Oz is adrift in an ocean of mediocrity. We have a leader, a government and an opposition perfectly suited to the times. Pollsters rule! Government is an end, not a means.

Patrick says:

12:21pm | 27/10/09

More cries of “but teh media!!”. Aparently some of you don’t believe Australians are smart enough to decide who they want to vote for. Nice to see you have so much faith in democracy.

If you want to get back into power, one thing you never ever do is say that the public where wrong, as though “We know better than the rest of you simpletons! now vote us back into office!”

The voters are always right, at least, they are if you want to convince them to vote for you again.

Chris says:

04:11pm | 27/10/09

Paul Kelly’s seminal book “The end of certainty” is regarded as a great read by political junkies because he rightly picked the issues that shaped the changes that Australia underwent in the 80s and early 90s.

His follow up book “March of patriots” raises a debatable thesis (that Keating and Howard had the same agenda but essentially employed different means to acheive it) but nonetheless gives us great insight into how Australia’s dominant figures played the political game.

If Kelly chooses to square off his politcal authorship and finish off with a trilogy devoted to Rudd he will be gravely dissappointed. 

A paradoxical church going politician who pledges to sends asylum seekers back to their slaughter, who prides himself on being the worker’s mate but runs a hundred miles an hour from union affiliation of the party, who says he will save the globe from climate change but proposes to reimburse coal producers, who says he will reduce grocery prices and fuel prices but then scraps proposals to do something about them, who says he will put more money into education but really translates this to funding local tradesmen to instal insulation at ocal primary schools, who says every Australian should get older with dignity but then refuses to increase the SGC to 15% and who says we should forge a strong distintive national indentity within Asia to play a leading role in the region but who refuses to even mention the word republic.  So much for the Summit.!  Maybe the photo shoot of that event could even appear on such a cover!

It could be aptly titled “Surrender at the Summit”.
That’s what Labor did when it electing him a s leader.

proud aussie says:

11:14pm | 27/10/09

If you would rather be Kevin Rudd, does that mean you would like to be parft of the destruction of Australia, our democracy and our freedom to choose how we live our lives?  Shame on you, if this is so.

Australia, over the past 2 years has become a Socialist State, thanks to Kevin Rudd, I love Australia how she used to be, PROUD, HIGHLY RESPECTED, with a prosperous future and happy, confident citizens.

Benno says:

11:53pm | 27/10/09

drills down?

Daniel Alexander-Head says:

10:55am | 28/10/09

In response to Zeta’s comments yesterday on the validity of the results, it was a shame to see that they were so quick to dismiss the report when they neither have an understanding of how the sample is made up and sourced or about representation. What little solution they offered practically contradicts the argument they put forward as to the invalidity of the data Your Source captured.
Having previously worked for Your Source in setting up much of the omnibus over the last five years and ensuring that it was as representative as possible I thought that a response to the sweeping generalisations made was required.

•  It is important to use an independent company that is not tied to any political party to ensure as unbiased data as possible.
•  Your Source recruit heavily off-line. They have to as not only do they conduct online research, but also focus groups, face-to-face interviews, sensory research, telephone interviewing etc. Excluding online, these other methods account for hundreds of thousands of interviews a year. So it is pretty easy for Your Source to recruit people to participate in online research from none online sources.
•  Your Source use a points scheme as it is the most appropriate way of ensuring that we get the widest possible mix of the public to participate in studies. If incentives are not used then you get only two or three types of respondents that would not allow for a more accurate data capture.
•  Yes Your Source’s core business is FMCG but certainly not online products. However a significant amount of research conducted by them falls under professional services and social research. If only one type of research was conducted (say political) then their membership would dwindle through monotony of research topics.
•  The panel is built around representative figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Contrary to Zeta’s comments, it is actually the older generations who have higher participation levels in online research, not the younger generation who are fickle. For the Essential Report quotas are used to ensure that the data captured is as reflective as possible of the ABS figures and then weighted to the population.
•  The idea of getting representation from a focus group is preposterous. How can the opinions of say 8-12 people from a single geographical zone unlikely to be of a greater radius of 15km be more reflective than a representative sample of 1000 Nationwide? Obviously Zeta has never heard of the Wisdom of Crowds. And as for interviewing people on the street, don’t even get me started on the problems there. Next Zeta will be wanting to conduct postal surveys!

I am not going to say that the omnibus is accurate of representation to 0.01% - it is near impossible – even the ABS will openly admit that they are not 100% accurate. However the data captured is as close as it is possible to get to a read on a week-by-week basis, something that no other company in Australia offers. This is important when we live in an era where information moves at incredible speeds and opinions alter far faster than we have ever witnessed before.
So yes, take it with a pinch of salt as any research information should be, but it is a pinch, not a handful.