News Corp Australia to Stand By Newspoll

News Corp Australia has announced that it will continue to support its partner Newspoll, while looking to 'fix' the polling system. This follows the newspaper group Nine's decision to end its contract with Ipsos over election predictions.

Last week, Australia's politicians and commentators called for opinion polls to be scrapped after the conservative Coalition defied all sixteen polls held since the election was called, in beating the rival Labor party. Craig Young, President of the research association AMSRO, says Australians are now asking the question 'How could all of the polling companies call the Federal Election result incorrectly?', and the body is conducting a review of methods used. On Friday, DRNO reported that Nine News has 'pressed pause' on its relationship with Ipsos, which in common with all the other pollsters in the country, failed to predict the election outcome.

Newspoll, which was founded in 1985 as a joint venture between News Limited and research agency Yann Campbell Hoare Wheeler (later to become part of Millward Brown), was part owned by News Corp until 2015. Its research comes from YouGov, which acquired Australian pollster Galaxy Research in 2017. News Corp says that until the 2019 election, Newspoll had accurately reported the winner of every Australian state and federal election.

In a statement, News Corp group exec Campbell Reid told online publication Mumbrella: 'One of the issues with Saturday's election was a hardwired expectation across the country that a government that deposed two of its own prime ministers could not possibly win. In the face of that expectation polls were definitely showing the gap was closing in the Coalition's favour and polling in individual seats was showing extremely close results. It is true the polls were still interpreted on Election Day predicting an ALP win, but to simply declare 'the polls got it wrong' is simplistic. We would rather work with our polling partners to continue to improve rather than throw up our hands'.

Web sites: www.newscorpaustralia.com and www.newspoll.com.au .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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