opinion
Paul Murray: How languishing Liberals scored yet another own poll with bizarre leadership spill

What is it about the WA Liberals and dodgy opinion polls? Before the 2017 State election, a group of businessmen — some who have done well out of the victorious Labor Government — leaked a poll they had commissioned which was designed to undermine Premier Colin Barnett. The intention was to have Barnett replaced with Dean Nalder, his disaffected transport minister, who is no longer in State Parliament. That polling wasn’t intended to inform the electorate, which is the usual rationale for such surveys of public opinion. It was a battering ram designed to put pressure on Barnett’s Liberal colleagues. This week, a similar State-based poll, said to have been commissioned by an unnamed businessman, was leaked with the clear intention of sidelining Liberal leader Libby Mettam and replacing her with the unelected Basil Zempilas. The latest poll claimed, among other flattering things about the Lord Mayor, to show a 4 per cent swing away from the Liberals under Mettam, described in this newspaper on Tuesday as “catastrophic”. That was despite a credible survey by pollster DemosAU, done around the same time and also published recently in The West, finding a 14 per cent shift to the Liberals. Both couldn’t be right. The dodgy polls pushed by business interests in 2016 and this week failed the ambitions of those who leaked them, but managed to make the Liberal Party’s position even more parlous by appearing divided. There was the even dodgier faked opinion poll that came out just before the May, 2019 Federal election, promoted by a so-called independent Liberal candidate in blue ribbon Curtin. That fake, also published in this newspaper, claimed a 20 per cent swing against the Liberals in the seat, but what resulted a month later on election day was just a 6 per cent two-party preferred shift and Celia Hammond won comfortably. So what’s that definition of insanity again? Oh yes, doing the same thing and expecting a different result. The Liberals were always going to lose the 2017 State election and very few people expect them to come close on March 8 next year after the massive 2021 wipeout. Changing leaders within sight of an unwinnable election won’t prevent a pre-ordained result. It might only gain or hold a few seats. But a failed putsch might just make the result much worse. The difference between shooting yourself in the foot or blowing your brains out. And that’s what transpired for the Liberals this week. Whether the polling was done with Zempilas’ knowledge or in his name by others is something most voters are probably unable to decide with certainty on what is in the public domain. But, on the basis of the involvement of his mayoral campaign manager in commissioning the poll, many people will conclude the prospective Churchlands MP had something to do with it. And if they think that, they probably also consider he was pushing to get rid of Mettam. Whether it was done without his knowledge or not, Zempilas is tarnished. That those acting in his interests didn’t realise the obvious links to him would be problematic is evidence of the Liberals’ malaise. It was amateur hour by all involved. As I pointed out in February, moving on Mettam before the election would look like Stephen Smith’s failed attempt to topple Mark McGowan as Labor leader in 2016. It goes against our perceptions of fair play. Makes those involved look more interested in their future than the public’s. When the DemosAU poll was released on November 12, the company’s head of research, George Hasanakos, said it showed a significant rebound from 2021 lows for the Liberals. “If this poll is reflected at the March 2025 State election, the Liberals would win a 14 per cent swing after preferences which on a uniform swing would increase their seat tally from 3 to 14,” Hasanakos said. DemosAU uses online panels assembled by the company for their business clients who are occasionally sent political questions which form opinion polls released to build its media profile. The DemosAU poll sampled 948 WA voters statewide between October 30 and November 4, and the questions followed a standard format. The polling which appeared on page one of this newspaper on Tuesday was reported to have been carried out by Sodali & Co and funded by “a Perth business investor.” Nothing about it was “standard”. Sodali is an international consultancy that principally offers shareholder and governance services to businesses. It has no reputation as a political pollster. Its poll differs from DemosAU’s in that it was done by telephone robocalls to 1093 respondents in 14 metropolitan electorates, rather than statewide. Its principal finding was that there had not been a reset of the Liberal Party’s standing since the 2021 wipeout and polling in the 14 electorates showed a 4 percentage point drop in the primary vote. I have shown the polling to two other pollsters who say the massive disparity with DemosAU’s results cannot be explained by one being done in targeted metropolitan seats and the other being statewide. Mettam’s office had the Sodali poll analysed by Sydney-based political strategy outfit Freshwater, which also questioned its veracity. Freshwater published its own WA opinion poll in September, which showed that Labor’s primary vote had fallen by 21 points since the 2021 election to 39 per cent, with the Liberal vote picking up 11 points to 32 per cent. Those figures, from an online poll of 1045 voters statewide, are roughly in line with DemosAU’s 41-34 primary vote findings. That correlation is important. But Sodali’s polling had the Labor Party primary vote at 49 per cent to the Liberals’ 31 with only a very low 5 per cent undecided, which it did not distribute. Both DemosAU and Freshwater had the Greens polling around 11-12 per cent, while Sodali had them strangely at just 5 per cent when it was a metropolitan-based sample. Freshwater’s analysis is highly critical: “The ‘research’ appears to have been designed with a predetermined outcome in mind, that being to create ‘The Basil Effect’, rather than an honest and unbiased (representation) of voter intentions.” Anyone familiar with political opinion polling would be struck with the clear theme of the Sodali poll which focuses on Zempilas. But, in this case, that appears to be what the mystery “businessman” was after, for whatever reasons. And it was his money on the line. Freshwater also takes issue with the way the Sodali poll chose to evaluate the relative standings of Mettam against Zempilas and Premier Roger Cook in a three-way contest. “This is misleading and does not replicate an actual contest between a Labor and Liberal leader,” Freshwater says. “It is not rigorous to ask Cook v Mettam v Zempilas given there is no instance where this is a possible contest. “This comparison is meaningless and again misleading given the likely crossover between voters choosing Mettam and Zempilas. A robust approach would be to compare Cook v Mettam and then Cook v Zempilas.” Tuesday’s page one splash was written by political editor Jessica Page. In an associated opinion column, Page included the caveat “if this opinion poll is to be believed” when drawing conclusions about its contents. But she also stated that the poll “can’t be ignored”, even though Liberal MPs did just that. Maybe it would have been better all round if had been. The public airing of the report came on the morning that everyone in the media and politics knew the Parliamentary Liberal Party would meet for the last time this year. It looked like an ambush in what is delightfully known in political circles as “the killing season”. As it transpired, the remnants of a once-powerful political force didn’t take the bait and rejected 9-1 a motion to sideline Mettam in the run-up to the election. Anyone — Liberal supporter, party apparatchik, aspiring candidate or entrenched MP — who thinks this use of opinion polling reflects well on the party doesn’t understand the public’s revulsion with political game-playing while they are hurting. If the Liberals want to improve their poll figures, they need to put some attractive policies on the table, pre-select people who voters — not factional leaders — will find acceptable and start hitting Labor’s many weak spots more effectively. They are still not giving swinging voters enough reason to endorse them and turn away from Labor. The truth is that many potential Liberal voters are not convinced the party has cleansed itself of The Clan scandal. The human remains of its influence have fingerprints on this mess. Mettam has done as much as a parliamentary leader can to battle Clan influence. Reforming the lay organisation is not the parliamentary leader’s job. Like McGowan in 2016, she has earned the right to contest the election, despite what bed-wetting business interests and factional operatives might think. But her job just got a lot harder, thanks to them.

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Paul Murray: How languishing Liberals scored yet another own poll with bizarre leadership spill

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opinion
Paul Murray: How languishing Liberals scored yet another own poll with bizarre leadership spill