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During February support for National rose by 2% to 48% now well ahead of a potential Labour/ Greens alliance 39% (down 0.5%).
If a New Zealand Election was held now the latest New Zealand Roy Morgan Poll shows National would retain Government with the support of minor party allies.
Support for the National partners was virtually unchanged with the Maori Party unchanged at 2%, Act NZ was 1% (up 0.5%) and United Future was 0% (down 0.5%).
Of the three Parliamentary Opposition parties - Labour’s support was at 26% (down 1%), Greens 13% (up 0.5%) and New Zealand First 8% (down 1%). Of the parties outside Parliament the Internet Party was 0% (unchanged), Conservative Party of NZ was 0% (down 0.5%) and support for Independent/ Others was 2% (unchanged).
In addition the New Zealand Roy Morgan Government Confidence Rating is unchanged at 140pts in February with 63.5% (up 0.5%) of NZ electors saying NZ is ‘heading in the right direction’ compared to 23.5% (up 0.5%) that say NZ is ‘heading in the wrong direction’.
Gary Morgan, Executive Chairman, Roy Morgan Research, says:
“Today’s New Zealand Roy Morgan Poll shows growing support for the Government of new Prime Minister Bill English with National 48% (up 2%) now at their highest since English became Prime Minister in early December.
“National is well ahead of a potential Labour/Greens alliance 39% (down 0.5%) and in a position to retain Government with the support of minor party allies the Maori Party 2% (unchanged) and Act NZ 1% (up 0.5%) and without the support of the fourth largest party NZ First 8% (down 1%).
“The strong support for National comes as PM English welcomed his first foreign visitor last week, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Both leaders face pressing issues in the area of Housing including – including Housing affordability and the Homeless/ Homelessness, however the problem is more acute in New Zealand than Australia.
“Today’s special Roy Morgan analysis of New Zealand’s ‘Housing Crisis’ reveals 26% of respondents in NZ said either Housing affordability/ Increasing house prices (15%) or Housing shortage/ Homelessness (11%) were the biggest problems facing New Zealand. In New Zealand’s largest city of Auckland Housing issues were mentioned by an even higher 32% of respondents.
“These figures show that the most effective way English can secure a fourth successive term of Government for National is to convince New Zealand electors that it is National that has the answers to deal with these inter-related Housing issues rather than their opponents Labour, the Greens, or even New Zealand First.”
Electors were asked: “If a New Zealand Election were held today which party would receive your party vote?” This latest New Zealand Roy Morgan Poll on voting intention was conducted by telephone – both landline and mobile telephone – with a NZ wide cross-section of 852 electors between January 30 – February 12, 2017. Of all electors surveyed 5.5% (down 1%) didn’t name a party.
The original report is here.
70 Comments
People that are happy cannot be bothered posting here, why bother to get ripped to shreds by all the National haters and other that think their life sucks because of the government. Its human nature to always blame someone else but at the end of the day its the decisions you make and not the government that dictates your success.
The trouble with centre right parties is that they have a somewhat better understanding of money. Enough to balance the budget partly by putting up business taxation (removal of depreciation allowance on commercial property is effectively a substantial tax increase on all businesses using business premises). Not enough to understand that it's the overseas money being force fed into the country under the capital account that is causing the exchange rate to be too high. Instead they listen to the bankers who tell them the savings rate is too low, therefore they need to borrow from overseas to keep house prices going up, oops, sorry, to "fund investment". Meanwhile the productive sector is degraded a little more each year and has to use cheap migrant labour from overseas because they can't afford to pay decent wages and we close down engineering works because the high exchange rate means it's cheaper to buy train carriages from Korea. I despair.
That's odd - I know plenty of people who have worked hard and done very well - and have beautiful houses - who no longer support National because they've abandoned the next generations. They know their kids and grandkids will suffer.
It could be the difference is the ability to see beyond one's own well being.
It's a limited pool and a lot of this depends on calling people's landlines. This misses out on the demographic that doesn't have a landline and the 18-49 male demographic that doesn't want to talk to them. Some will be answering with what they think would be expected rather than what they think themselves.
You'll also find that taking the sample now is kind of pointless as opinions shift dramatically on the run up to the election. The election propaganda hasn't gotten underway yet.
Interesting that they use mobile phones. I know a number of places that don't for their polling. I can say I wouldn't be too happy to receive calls from these outfits on my mobile. It was a welcome relief having the number of these random calls dramatically reduced after getting rid of my landline.
Who cares. If this affects how you vote, then I find that odd. If it makes you go and vote, great.
But it's a poll, a sample of people who actually responded. A sample. It's not a survey of every single person so expecting that this may tell the outcome of an election or how the entire country will vote is just wrong.
In my opinion every left leaning party in NZ cannot be considered a viable option for government. It's been so long since they held power that most of them don't even know what a ministers office looks like let alone how to run a country.
They simply don't have the experience/knowledge to do the job
Not to mention the in-fighting and bickering.
I seem to recall the previous govt having had 9 years in govt, exactly the same as this one will have had by the time we hold the next election. National, by your own argument did not have the experience or knowledge to do the job and thus it has turned out to be.
You mean this John Key?
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11414883
The one who had no real world experience with using a hammer?
He left us in the lurch...How kind of him...after cocking up our housing, our immigration, our debt.
Sold out our coal mines, our Electricity...etc.
I am not sure if it was in the National Interest, he came. I think it was to be admired.
Add-mire..is more like it.
A typical Bankers philosophy. Could not make money to save their lives. As we will see when the tide goes out.
JK& the 5th National government are the worst New Zealand has ever seen! A catastrophic drop in living standards, wealth accumulation, and way of life is now baked into the cake for a great many young Kiwis. Evidenced by stagnant wages, dropping home ownership rates, obscenely high house prices, endless Orwellian lies about the extent foreign purchasing, neutering of investigative journalism, Creation of a GCSB surveillance state apparatus. Also the cavalier attitude towards the public evidenced by the flag referendum. The list goes on an on and on.
such a small sample 852 people, I tend to think you can read it many ways.
we will find out election day if they are correct or if it is another trump brexit moment where people are left scratching their heads as to the result not matching the official polls.
many many people I deal with will not be voting national this time around, maybe I am in a bubble and surrounding myself with the minority
It is interesting that there's so much push-back against the current government here. Financial sites very consistently tend to be right-leaning, especially in the commentariat. Is it that the below-the-line rabble here are financial nerds who are paying more attention than the average Joe? I was pretty easy about this pack winning in 2008, but now I've absolutely had my fill of their corruption, self-serving obtuseness, destructiveness and incompetence. They've got a job to do, and they're not performing.
National are just a centre party. If they had right wing or pro-business policies I'd be likely to vote for them. Instead they hate property developers and try to push their costs up. Something I've always found is that business picks up during a Labour Government and drops off with a National Government. The simple spending versus austerity makes a difference to businesses.
At very least we need a change of Government just to clear out the dead wood like Nick Smith, Gerry Brownlee and Bill English.
Even if the Government was led by the Green Party we'd be better off. After one term of them focusing energy into crystals and smoking weed all day we could change to another party with some focus and that actually cares about New Zealand.
they had the opportunity and numbers and reasons in 2009 to make BIG changes on the RMA, roll back WFF, student free loans and many of the other subsidies on the government books.
instead they got themselves bogged down on little non events, bike trails, convention centre, movies, flag
and now they don't have the stomach or numbers to do what is needed to move us to a place we need to be for the next fifty years.
I agree we need a change to flush our the too long in parliament mps
I would love to see something brought in saying you can only be a MP max 15 years, if you cannot achieve what you go in for in that period you never will, second it will bring in the fresh ideas without the old hands stopping it as they do now most of the time to prove whos top dogs.
it is the same as business without new ideas or making sure you keep up with current trends and improvements you will get left behind
Personally - and after having voted for him twice - I think it was down to John Key not wanting to spend his political capital on significant changes that some would be unhappy with. Housing, pension affordability, and all those things you described...he simply kicked them down the road for others to pick up and deal with.
At the same time after saying "We won't raise GST" and "If we're doing a half-decent job economically we won't need to raise GST", he raised GST from 12.5% to 15%, a tax increase that disproportionately affects those who have to spend most or all of their income to get by.
John Key to me was "The Great Disappointment", someone who seemed to hold great promise but delivered little. He seemed to have ambition for his own career - being PM - but not enough ambition for taking action for the benefit of NZ. So in the end, what he was good at was prolonging his time as PM.
Fewer and fewer people have landlines with phones attached to them these days, more and more are ditching them for naked broadband and Wireless broadband, it has probably come to a time when using landlines should not even be being done for polling now. I would hazard a guess and say cellular phones will be getting close to being in the majority now. I would suggest also that in rented houses naked broadband and now wireless broadband would be fast approaching 100% without landlines, as you can take wireless broadband particularly, when you move. The cost of terminating and re-establishing phone lines would now not be feasible in rented property.
It seems there is a general misunderstanding of how random phone calling works. The polster doesn't need a phone book! All they need to know are valid phone prefixes (and they probably don't even need that, but it would save pointless dialling).
From there, their system dials randomly. They will keep doing that till they have the required number of random calls being answered (in the RM case, it looks like 852).
To include mobile phones, all they need do is include mobile prefixes which is easy. Then they can check the overall random responders match the general population profile as they would expect - age, gender, geo, income, ethnic, etc. If that check proves out, then they will have a proper random sample.
The shift to cellphone use (like me) should have nothing to do with it. (Although I suspect, a lack of a phone might, if there are significant numbers of people without phones.)
The shift to cellphone use could have an effect David. The over 55s would have a much higher chance of having a landline only, whereas the under 35s would have a much higher chance of having a cellphone only.
Yes, it could be a completely random number each time (assuming 50% were landlines and 50% cellphones), but the randomness would still be skewed towards each age cohort for each type of phone use, which, in turn, would potentially skew the "random" sample towards one party in particular (e.g. National for the over 55s).
Here's how I see that one, David, I reckon there are now many, many more cell phone numbers than there are landline, and I say it because, in one household that might have one landline equaling one number there could be four or more different cell phone numbers. Then take a large business with a few landline contact numbers, each person working there would have their own cellphone. There would be many inactive numbers in the cell phone network, so I reckon the job is still more easily done with landlines. I would really like to know what proportion of people polled are contacted via cell phones, if it turns out to be the smaller proportion, I'd say the survey is very suspect, as another thing I would put money on is that people still with landlines are in homes of their own, are probably more generally older and probably pretty well off. The survey results are not that surprising, its just I do not think they would be that representative and could even put some people off participating in our electoral system, thinking it is not worthwhile
I don't think it is that random. Well ,selecting the phone numbers might be , but they would then ask qualifying questions to ensure they get a wide selection of ages, gender , status, etc . Otherwise the results would be a lot more random , and a larger margin of error would be necessary. Or a larger sample size.
A visit to one of the American "poll of polls" websites gives a good insight into the different methods. Huffington post is one , I think .
Yeah, was a land line. I wonder how many grumpy old buggers like me would have done the same.
You could opine that a higher number of more open trusting people would agree to answer which might skew the sample to perhaps younger folk and (at the risk of having my head shot off), women. Plus the 'strongly committed to kicking this useless lot out' group.
So, is a trusting or younger person more likely to vote further to the left and is the sample likely to contain a higher number of voters that inherently don't support the incumbent party? I suspect the answer to both questions is yes.
also would recently arrived immigrants from certain countries be willing to give an opinion about the government to someone on the phone.
but I bet they will vote as they will feel safer that is harder to track back to them.
I am not sure about main stream polling any more as we are in a new age and I think the methods are a bit out dated as has been shown by some recent elections (mt roskill)
So if the sample has a left leaning skew (even slight), that is even worse news for Labour /Greens/NZ First.
On migrants, my feeling is a bit different to yours, I reckon they might be more inclined to answer - new country, official sounding voice on the phone, sensitive to breaking any rules etc
OK ... so we all know that the country has a massive disconnect between the availability of housing , and the demand from locals , a flood of immigrants , and off-shore investors ... everyone knows that ... and we have a housing minister who bears an uncanny resemblance to Bill English's archetypical youngster , too drugged out to work ... sad and silly Nick ...
... plus we have polluted freshwater systems ... dammit , thanks to dirty dairying , the whole country has turned into a series of cisterns ... we're drowning in cow cr*p ... and the whole of our society knows it ... "100 % Pure ! " .... 100 % bullsh't !!!
And yet , knowing all of that , Wild Bill and the Gnats are still unstoppable in the polls ....
... if little Andy can't gain any traction on the Gnats , given the serious problems that we're facing , but yet the current government is not addressing ... then he is nothing more than keeping the seat warm until Labour can find a leader worthy of our respect ..
People who LOOK know these things. But many, including among the young, simply don't look.
All they knew for 8 years was John Key was a down to earth guy who would be great to have a beer with. And for some of the oldes, all they've known about the left is they're social radicals who want to legalise various sexual proclivities (still an impression some elderly folk I know have).
Some of the young know houses are unaffordable but they don't yet realise that houses once were affordable because of the policies of previous governments, and are now unaffordable likewise for reasons of policy.
finity53,
It certainly is and probably the most powerful of the many biases to which we are all subject. In his book "The Art of Thinking Clearly", Ralf Dobelli lists 99 of them,though many overlap with others.
Our irrationality is demonstrated over and over again in psychology tests and fighting these biases is hard work.
I know many will attack this poll but all the other polls are in the general region and that was the result of the last 3 elections. The problem for the Green/Labour block is that they do not look like a government in waiting. National has changed it's leaders, refreshing its MPs (about 25% every election), and doesn't look tired. One could argue that it's not tired because it hasn't done anything. Of course, one doesn't have to like National but it appears about 45% of the country will vote for them where as Green/Labour won't get 40%. Unless there is major change in Labour and/or National this will remain the case for the forseable future. The election is a forgone conclusion despite what the media will argue to generate more clicks. That will mean it will be 12 years before Labour gets a chance to govern again - and even that doesn't look likely.
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