Thumbs Up for Australian Sunday Polling

Communications watchdog the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has backed down on plans to prevent researchers from making calls on Sundays.

Charitable and religious organisations, political parties and candidates, and social and market researchers can now all make calls on Sundays between 9am and 5pm. Sundays are off limits for telemarketers regardless of whether a household has signed the Government's 'Do Not Call' register or not.

In a statement, authority Chairman Chris Chapman said: 'ACMA has decided to vary the industry standard because of evidence that the prohibition could undermine the value of longitudinal data sets where data had previously been collected on Sundays, as well as increase the potential for bias because samples were not representative.'

Last month Communications Minister Helen Coonan argued that the exemption was needed to enable pollsters to produce political opinion surveys prior to this year's federal election (www.mrweb.com/drno/news6649.htm ).

The President of the Association of Market and Social Research Organisations (AMSRO), Travyn Rhall (who is also CEO for Millward Brown in Africa and Asia Pacific), welcomed the decision, saying: 'Sunday is when we get our best response rates. If we had lost that then it would have made it a lot harder to get those results during the week.'

AMSRO contended that had it lost Sunday it would have been unable to reach certain groups, and would have missed out on obtaining early feedback on events that had taken place on Saturdays.

John Davis, Project Director of political pollster Newspoll, said: 'We are speaking to our field people to get Sunday back on line this weekend. Sunday is one of the best days for polling and it's a terrific outcome.'

Web sites are at www.acma.gov.au, www.amro.com.au and www.newspoll.com.au . More details of the Research Calling Standards are at www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD//pc=PC_310263 .