u/Niscellaneous

The easiest way to avoid responsibility for the causes of extinction is not to investigate them.

Why do a federal environmental assessment if it will delay converting the forest where swift parrots are nesting into a shipload of woodchips? Why save the habitat of the Gouldian finch in Northern Territory savanna from being bulldozed into a treeless cotton crop?

In 2025 alone, the Albanese government facilitated the destruction of more than 57,000 hectares of native forests and woodlands in Australia, including the destruction of 7643 hectares of habitat of the endangered northern quoll.

As if eating invasive poisonous cane toads and being eaten by feral cats is not enough, the government-authorised clearing of the quolls’ habitat is a prime factor in pushing it to extinction.

According to Bush Heritage Australia for every 100 hectares of woodlands cleared, some 2000 birds, 15,000 reptiles and 500 mammals are lost.

In 1997, then prime minister John Howard shifted environmental responsibility for logging to the states. The Albanese government has followed this model, devolving environmental responsibility to state and territory governments which, in turn, are easy pickings for resource extraction corporations such as miners, loggers and tourism entrepreneurs.

The swift parrot is anodyne green with red, yellow and blue trim. It nests in Tasmania’s forests in summer and migrates to the mainland for winter. Before white settlement, there were flocks of thousands of swift parrots in Australia and, on the mainland, they ranged from Adelaide to Brisbane. The parrot has a distinctive, high-pitched, staccato call and raises its young in the hollows of trees that need to be more than 100 years old. It is the fastest parrot on Earth and crosses Bass Strait far more quickly than the Spirit of Tasmania.

Research by the Australian National University reveals that in Tasmania, from the year 2000, “the extent of deforestation, disturbance and degradation impacted approximately a quarter of forests in the swift parrot’s breeding range in 20 years. Over the same time period, the swift parrot population has declined from over 2100 birds to less than 500 birds.”

On its current trajectory, there will be 50 to 100 swift parrots left by 2030. The species is projected to become extinct in the wild later in the 2030s, thanks to Howard’s effective death sentence and the series of federal governments, including Albanese’s, that have endorsed his policy ever since.

It will not be the first Australian species driven to extinction by government policy: the thylacine lasted less than 50 years after the Tasmanian parliament legislated a bounty on its head in 1888.

Now, the swift parrot is very high if not top of the list of species being extirpated by forest clearance and by climate change which, in turn, intensifies bushfires.

While Albanese and his environment minister, Murray Watt, featherbed their logging and land-clearing corporate backers, Forestry Tasmania has proceeded with the broadscale destruction of swift parrot nesting trees. Everyone involved understands that if there are fewer nesting trees there are fewer nests and, inevitably, fewer birds.

The flattening of a large coupe of forest in the Wielangta coastal hills east of Hobart this summer was a case in point.

Forestry Tasmania has proceeded with the broadscale destruction of swift parrot nesting trees. Everyone involved understands that if there are fewer nesting trees there are fewer nests and, inevitably, fewer birds.

The Forest Practices Code, the set of rules under which Forestry Tasmania is supposed to operate, requires that logging must cease within 500 metres of any reported swift parrots. Multiple reports, including recordings of the parrots’ distinctive call in the trees, were sent to Forestry Tasmania by Bob Brown Foundation scientists on site. However, they were ignored and the targeted forest was clear-felled.

Forestry Tasmania, with the full backing of state and federal ministers for the environment, breached its own code for protecting this critically endangered bird. Watt was informed but was submissive to the Tasmanian authorities.

On March 31, he wrote to Jenny Weber, the campaign manager at the Bob Brown Foundation: “Under Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) agreements, state governments are responsible for land use decisions, for ensuring that habitat is protected for the threatened species that live in these areas, and to ensure that any new or altered elements of their systems are developed and implemented to be consistent with relevant Statutory Conservation Planning Documents (that includes the Forest Practices Code).”

Watt continued: “Conservation advices and recovery plans are in place for all threatened species that occur in RFA regions, such as the Greater Glider, Koala and Swift Parrot. Consistent with the RFAs, states are responsible for adapting forest management systems in response to new information such as up-listings, or new science.

“At the end of 2026, the Australian Parliament passed new federal environmental legislation that will remove the long-standing exemption for RFA forestry operations under the EPBC Act. When these reforms commence in mid-2027, forestry operations will be required to meet strengthened national environmental standards where matters of national environmental significance - such as the Swift Parrot - may be affected.”

Let’s not hold our breaths. Watt is saying that, having handed authority to the states, he is not inclined to intervene, even if there is clear evidence that a state is breaching the rules. He is negotiating the new rules with corporate interests rather than frontline environmentalists. On this basis, Australians can expect Canberra to devolve more of its responsibility, on a wide range of environmental issues, to the states and territories.

To highlight this direction, two of Watt’s recent decisions show him refusing to have Commonwealth experts review environmentally damaging projects supported by state and territory administrations. In January, experts at the Environment Centre NT were stunned by Watt’s decision to give Claravale Station, north-west of Katherine, the go-ahead to bulldoze nearly 3000 hectares of tropical savanna without the need for federal assessment.

Claravale had earlier been exonerated by the Northern Territory authorities for having illegally cleared hundreds of hectares of woodlands.

The Claravale cattle station, with a long frontage to the Daly River, is in the heart of the most intact tropical savanna left on Earth. That savanna stretches across northern Queensland, the NT and Western Australia.

According to the Environment Centre NT, Claravale is one of the last strongholds for ghost bats, Gouldian finches, pig-nosed turtles and red goshawks. Bulldozing savanna and the inevitable run-off also threatens the Daly River’s critically endangered freshwater sawfish.

The NT government ticked off on the proposal, but the Environment Centre NT remained sure that, with the consequences being so great, the federal minister for the environment would review and overturn that decision.

In January, Watt decided against a federal assessment. This was true to form: only one other pastoral land-clearing application in the NT has ever been referred for federal assessment under Howard’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, despite more than 250,000 hectares of land clearing being approved in the Territory since 2003.

Research led by Professor Brett Murphy from Charles Darwin University shows that, on average, each area cleared in the NT between 2000 and 2020 overlaps with the modelled distribution of 12 species listed as threatened.

Earlier this month, Watt followed his Claravale handwash by deciding not to review the Tasmanian government’s plan for a multimillion-dollar tourism track and resorts in the heart of the fragile, high-grade Tyndall Range wilderness, north of Queenstown. The plan includes a large lodge and ranger station on the verge of scenic Lake Huntley. It will be wild no more.

The helicopter-serviced lodge will dominate the scene from every angle. The 31 kilometre all-weather walking track and tourist accommodation will not only wreck the Tyndall Range’s wilderness quality, it will injure the pristine vegetation and fauna of this high-rainfall region.

Watt fell in line with the Tasmanian Liberal government’s assurances that it will “minimise” the impacts of this “Next Iconic Walk”.

The state Environmental Impact Statement highlighted risks to significant alpine vegetation, cushion moorlands and glacial landscapes, but Watt scuppered calls from environmentalists for an independent federal assessment.

Wilderness is one of Tasmania’s fastest-disappearing resources. Authentic wilderness – the wild Earth as inhabited by our human forebears: remote, natural country unmarred by the impact of modern infrastructure – is being rapidly eroded by “Next Iconic Walks” designed for transient experiences for a rich, elite clientele.

There are dozens of options on private land for walks and tourist lodges in spectacular country, but why pay for that when public lands of World Heritage value such as the Tyndall Range cost nothing?

Wilderness is priceless. For the Tasmanian government, no member of which has ever lifted a finger to save the Tasmanian wilderness, that means having no price: of no value, until it is exploited or destroyed for monetary gain. Obviously Watt agrees. He has no measure of the loss of wilderness value this project will cause.

On form it is likely that, having used public funds to invade the Tyndall Range with its “Next Iconic Walk”, the state government will pass the infrastructure to private hands.

Up north, Claravale is owned by the Top End Pastoral Company, which bought it for $8.5 million in 2021. The company is controlled by Queensland businessmen Michael Simmich and Clayton Coleman. Claravale is up for sale again, for an estimated $30-40 million.

What a windfall that the sale is now enhanced by the Watt-authorised licence to bulldoze nearly 3000 more hectares of savanna and its wildlife for sorghum or cotton.

The local Wagiman people get nothing in this deal but a lament for the loss of their savanna homeland. Traditional Owner Theresa Banderson says, “This my country. I love this country … ahh! Those trees they are knocking … it makes you cry!”

Faced with the policy void offered by previous Liberal Party leaders, the current leader, Angus Taylor, has returned to traditional Liberal policy mantras and announced that taxation would always be lower under a Liberal government.

Yet if taxation is to be responsibly lowered and debt is to be contained, this means less spending.

Before the oil crisis this year, Treasury was projecting budget deficits equivalent to 2 per cent of gross domestic product for at least the next 10 years. In addition, the new shadow defence minister wants to increase defence spending by 50 per cent, or 1 per cent of GDP. This means the Liberals would need to find savings equivalent to as much as 3 per cent of GDP before they could even start thinking about tax cuts.

Furthermore, if oil supplies do not return to normal soon and the risks of stagflation mount, a Liberal policy that continues to rule out tax increases will need to find even bigger spending cuts.

In this challenging context, could the Liberal Party resurrect itself and build a credible and appealing policy framework around lower taxes and smaller government? The answer is no.

There are two key problems. First, the Liberal position is not credible given the party’s track record on taxing, spending and debt. Second, lower taxes and smaller government are not good for our society, economy, nor even our democracy. Taxation is how we pay for needed services and infrastructure that typically do more for our wellbeing and productivity than a lot of private expenditures.

Between 2021-22 and 2025-26, the average annual growth rate of Australian government spending under Labor was 6 per cent. Under the Coalition the same expenditures between 2012-13 and 2021-22 were only a fraction lower, at 5.6 per cent . Also, while some of that Coalition spending was in response to the Covid pandemic, the Covid spending was temporary and did not significantly alter the long-term rate of spending growth under the Coalition.

The only significant difference between Labor and Coalition spending was the increase in public debt interest payments, which have increased under Labor at an annual average rate of 11.3 per cent compared with an annual average rate of only 4.7 per cent under the Coalition. Public debt has been no higher under Labor, however – higher interest rates have caused the increase in interest payments.

To the second point, the latest budget paper shows that over the past four decades, Coalition governments have had the higher tax takes, except for the current Labor government. This can be partly explained by the need to make up for cuts and underfunding that had run down key services under the preceding Coalition governments. Labor governments have also had a better record of reducing taxes than Coalition governments.

Australia needs to rethink its taxing and spending policies, and it seems clear that the Liberal Party does not have the answers.

More than a decade ago, the Abbott government realised that its lower tax agenda would require major expenditure cuts, and reneged on its promises not to cut health and education. This provoked such an electoral backlash that almost all their proposals for major savings were dropped.

So if Angus Taylor wants lower taxes he must identify major savings options – but where? The Liberal Party has typically been coy about such questions.

Savings in public debt payments are not possible and cutting revenue transfers to the states would be very difficult. In principle, the roughly $6 billion that the Western Australian government gets in additional GST revenue through the special “no worse off” top-up payments could be saved, but would a Coalition government be prepared to do this, seeing that they introduced this special payment?

Similarly, the Liberal Party remains wary of cutting health and education spending. On health, spending has seen greater efficiencies, not increasing faster than required by the ageing of the population. Yet it is still the case that an older population will over time require more health services. On education, it will be another 10 years before the Gonski reforms to school funding are fully achieved, and universities and research funding are still lower in real terms than they were more than a decade ago.

Amid such spending pressures, the former Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, argued that Australians have become too dependent on welfare and subsidies, saying, “We must move from a time of dependency on government.” This suggests that social security and welfare, at 38 per cent of total spending, will be targeted.

The problem is that Australia already has one of the tightest and best targeted income support systems in the world. Our support is about 75 per cent more effective for each dollar spent than the OECD average. As a result of superannuation introduced by the Keating Labor government, data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the federal government’s Intergenerational Report 2023 shows that the proportion of elderly people who receive an age pension has dropped from about 80 per cent in 2010 to less than 70 per cent in 2023-24 and is projected to fall further, to about 55 per cent in 2063-64.

Source: Budget Paper 2025-26, Statement 10

Nevertheless, if a Coalition government really wants to reduce dependency on state funding, the obvious places to start would be to make those who can afford it pay more for private health insurance and aged care, and to reduce the support provided to wealthy private schools.

It is very doubtful that any of these savings options will appeal to the Liberal Party. Given pressing issues such as the rising cost of living, intergenerational inequity, and the long-term degradation of services such as aged care, welfare cuts and a small-government agenda seem misplaced.

Savings might be made on assistance to industries and some capital investment projects, which are too often uneconomic or lacking proper evaluation. However, such spending is not high relative to total budget outlays and cuts here will not save much.

Instead, the tax system needs to raise more revenue, given spending pressures and the risk of worsening inflationary pressures unless oil supplies quickly return to normal. The Liberal Party can be relied on to run negative scare campaigns against any such move. Yet there are huge existing and looming expenditure pressures.

Currently, many services are underfunded, such as income support for unemployed people, aged care, childcare, education, research and development, and social housing – all at least in part a legacy of the Coalition government’s white-anting and underfunding in the decade to 2022. Looking ahead, massive budget pressures are to come in defence, health, aged care, the NDIS, the energy transition and the environment.

Australia needs to increase its revenue by roughly 4 per cent of GDP to help meet these spending needs, and to reduce the budget deficit, which is currently running at  2 per cent of GDP – and so minimise the risks of increasing inflation and rising interest rates.

There is scope to increase revenue. Among 33 OECD countries, Australia has the fourth lowest tax levels as a proportion of GDP. Australia’s total receipts for all governments was just below 36 per cent in 2025. The United States was slightly lower, but only because it had a much bigger budget deficit, while tax receipts in the United Kingdom (40.4 per cent), Canada (42.5 per cent) and the euro area (46.4 per cent) were all substantially higher. Moreover, government debt in Australia is substantially lower than in other OECD countries.

Advanced economies with higher levels of taxation typically have higher income per capita and also perform better according to other measures of wellbeing. Nor is there any evidence that the tax levels of those economies have affected their relative growth in labour productivity, or their labour or capital supply.

As the oil crisis stirs the threat of stagflation, the prime minister has argued, “There is no security in maintaining a status quo that doesn’t work for people”, and that economic reform in times of uncertainty is urgent. The last major tax reform in Australia occurred in 2000 with the introduction of the GST. The current tax system needs reform and its sources of revenue need to change.

If the war-driven disruptions to oil and other products in the Strait of Hormuz are resolved, the economic outlook will be less dire, but the weight of demand will still be a concern, given the size of the continuing budget deficit. If we raise taxes and make it easier to return the budget to surplus, this should reduce inflationary pressures. It would help ease demand and reduce reliance on overworked monetary policy.

The other key consideration for tax reform is that Australia is especially dependent on personal income tax, often exceeding 40 per cent of total tax revenue, which is significantly higher than the OECD average of about 24 per cent.

This heavy reliance on income taxes, rather than on, say, capital and asset taxes, is inequitable. It will also soon confront the reality of a declining workforce in an ageing population. The tax base needs to be broadened by targeting increased taxes on capital and wealth.

The Economist magazine recently reported that the idea of wealth and asset taxes is gaining traction around the world. In this country, there is now growing support for reducing the capital gains discount and limiting the interest deductions from negative gearing on investment income. Surely it is also time to consider reintroducing death duties because taxing inherited wealth helps reduce inequities and is unlikely to harm incentives to save or to work.

The oil crisis has also led to a huge increase in energy prices and export profits, so a tax increase on the rents from energy exports would raise substantial revenue without damaging incentives to invest.

Moreover, with high oil prices there is a strong case for a carbon tax. According to the Superpower Institute, if the carbon tax was equivalent to the European carbon price it would raise $100 billion in its first year. This would help revenue and the energy transition, while the price of renewable energy would not change.

In short, Australia needs to rethink its taxing and spending policies, and it seems clear that the Liberal Party does not have the answers.

All budgets seem important at the time. But not all budgets, and not all treasurers, leave a lasting legacy. Not everyone will remember the centrepiece of last year’s budget – the cost of living – but few can forget former treasurer Joe Hockey’s disastrous, cigar-smoking train wreck in 2014. Likewise, whether they remember it or not, millions of Australians every day enjoy the benefits of the Medicare levy that Paul Keating announced in his first budget in 1983.

With his fifth budget, on May 12, Jim Chalmers is attempting to establish his legacy in the midst of exceptional geopolitical upheaval. With the Iran war, the ensuing supply shock and now the prospect of a deepening cost-of-living crisis, this treasurer has to deal with a range of pressures he didn’t expect while pursuing the reform agenda he has been planning for years.

Nevertheless, he tells The Saturday Paper this week, “It will be an ambitious budget that balances the pressures of the here and now with the demands and obligations of the future.

“As the war continues and new data comes in, we’re crunching and recrunching the numbers to feed into our deliberations and decisions,” says Chalmers. “The story of the last two decades is, every time the global economy starts to build momentum something comes along to disrupt it.

“Every budget is calibrated for the conditions [of the time] but what makes this one different is the more extreme degree of international uncertainty.”

Even under more normal circumstances, the pressure in the lead-up to a budget is enormous. While much is written about the long days and nights, the real pressure is in the fact that budgets spell out, with decimal-place accuracy, who wins and who loses. Every dollar the treasurer gives to one group is a dollar taken from another or added to the deficit. Every other day of the year, government MPs tell every industry and non-government organisation they’re a priority, and once a year it’s the job of the treasurer to tell us the truth.

With the frustrations of younger voters clearly in mind, Chalmers says that this budget will have “a focus on intergenerational issues, and new efforts to boost productivity, find savings and lift the speed limit of our economy”. Just how difficult the economic circumstances and just how ambitious the budget will be will be determined over the course of the next two weeks.

At least the domestic political pressures look weaker than they have in the past. Amid the Coalition’s unravelling, Labor has succeeded in convincing voters it is the more credible steward of the economy. Nevertheless, Commonwealth debt is close to $1 trillion, and while the extra zero is of little economic significance, if the Liberal Party can get their act together it could be a potent political weapon.

“We’re big believers in the NDIS, we’ll always back it, and that’s what this is about. It means more certainty and sustainability of services ...”

The ascendance of One Nation in the polls suggests voters are more than ever willing to embrace populist, if not far-right, solutions to the inequities they experience. While Pauline Hanson validates voter frustrations, only a government can deliver solutions, which means it’s a brave government that pursues a timid agenda.

Like most voters in the world’s remaining democracies, Australians want change. Decades of trickle-down economics have led to lower real wages and rising inequality. While Labor went to the 2025 election with a cautious agenda, they won with a wide landslide. They now govern a country united by little except a rising resentment that ordinary people are yet again being asked to tighten their belts.

What we know of this budget so far is that Labor is looking to tackle housing affordability, and is considering significant changes to capital gains tax concessions and negative gearing.

The government has also hinted at changes to the mining industry’s diesel fuel subsidies. It was no accident that the prime minister’s office leaked his request to Treasury for new options for taxing gas exports. All of those revenue measures would engage powerful interest groups.

Invoking an earlier attempt to stake out an ambitious agenda, Chalmers says the budget “will keep faith with all the effort that went into the reform roundtable; in fact, the major themes hew really closely to the outcomes of those good discussions in the cabinet room, even with everything that’s happened since”.

Last year’s economic reform roundtable seemed like a dull affair dominated by business leaders droning on about the need for productivity growth, by which they meant industrial relations reforms that are good for them and wage cuts that are bad for workers. What few saw was that the treasurer was making space for reforms of his own.

The calls from chief executives for a wide range of big policy changes that weren’t mentioned in the 2025 election drowned out the previous calls for Labor to only pursue issues for which they had an “electoral mandate”. While there is opposition to the government’s mooted changes to capital gains tax, no one is arguing they can’t do it because they didn’t take a plan to the 2025 election.

Likewise, this week’s big changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme weren’t costed before the last election, but not a single journalist saw that at as a problem when Mark Butler fronted the press club on Wednesday. In defence of the plan, to be detailed in the budget, to slash the annual growth in NDIS spending from an 8 per cent target to just 2 per cent over the next four years, the treasurer says, “After a decade of exploitation under our predecessors, the NDIS was out of control. Our reforms are about making vital services for vulnerable Australians more sustainable.

“We’re big believers in the NDIS, we’ll always back it, and that’s what this is about. It means more certainty and sustainability of services that Australians rely on. Reforming the NDIS is the responsible thing to do from a fiscal perspective, and the responsible thing to do for people with a disability.”

Budgets are always about belt-tightening, and there is no doubt that the NDIS needs major reform, but budgets that are only about belt tightening don’t leave legacies, and in this climate there is a real risk that saving money will cost a lot of votes.

Labor knows how to wedge the Liberals, who struggle to oppose spending cuts. With One Nation now outpolling them, however, the real risk to Labor is that their “sensible” budget strategy is “crazy brave” politics. It is a big mistake to think that supporters of Pauline Hanson don’t support “left-wing” policies such as gas export taxes and wealth taxes.

At the same time, ambitious reform for future generations – especially in the context of a global fuel crisis – needs to take account of the economic impact of climate change, and support measures to address it.

While Liberal MP Andrew Hastie has leaned hard into the need to revitalise Australian manufacturing, with an emphasis on fossil fuels, it’s still unclear what provisions the budget will make to further Labor’s vision for the green transition under its Future Made in Australia platform.

The new reality the Albanese government is struggling with is that government spending is popular, and it’s not just the so-called left that wants more cash for their cause. The frigates, drones and cruise missiles that the defence establishment and the United States government want us to buy are expensive, and they add to the $360 billion outlay on AUKUS submarines. Defence spending can only be funded through new taxes, new spending cuts or new debt, which is why the weeks leading up to budget are so high pressure.

That said, one way to avoid the brutal consequences for the national deficit of spending an extra $53 billion on defence is to claim the spending is “off budget” – that is, it will be allocated to government “special vehicles” and supplemented by private investment. This likelihood has already been flagged for the upcoming budget.

This is like the argument that calories in broken biscuits don’t count, or that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. The idea that designating spending as “off budget” means it doesn’t count is as meaningless to an independent observer as it is reassuring to the politician declaring it.

The International Monetary Fund has recently called Australia out for a lack of budget transparency, and while this budget will no doubt include some accounting tricks, in the long run the tricks don’t save money, and they don’t add up to a legacy. 

Chalmers has just a couple more weeks to consider how he wants that legacy to take shape, and he’s clear that it won’t be defined by its context.

“We don’t choose the circumstances here but we choose how to respond to them, and I think it’s shaping up pretty well so far with a couple of weeks to go,” he says.

“We’re hostage to decisions taken in DC, Tehran and Tel Aviv. We’ll respond to the conditions as we find them, but we’ll look beyond this crisis too.”

Tens of millions of Australians are hoping he does.

When One Nation reported its highest polling numbers four weeks ago, the figure was based on the voting intentions of just 291 people.

The poll, completed by RedBridge Group/Accent Research and published in The Australian Financial Review, gave One Nation a primary vote of 29 per cent, 12 points clear of the Coalition and just three points behind Labor. It was based on a sample size of 1003 voters.

There is no doubting the effect of this poll, however, on the wider Australian conservative movement. Both the Liberal and National parties have changed leaders since One Nation began polling higher figures earlier this year. Both parties are now moving further to the right.

Michael Horner, the founder of quantitative research firm Fox & Hedgehog, says despite the small figures the poll can be trusted. While there is a temptation to dismiss polling, recent methodological improvements have made polling data more robust.

In short: One Nation’s surprisingly strong results are not a blip.

A former adviser to then opposition leader Peter Dutton, as well as then special ministers of state Ben Morton and Scott Ryan, Horner says political polling has been substantially revamped since the 2019 election in which Scott Morrison unexpectedly won against Bill Shorten.

“The models that we had back then were very primitive,” Horner tells The Saturday Paper, explaining that most pollsters were weighting their results only by age and gender. Now variables such as education and who the person voted for in the past are routinely added.

“When people calculate a poll, you can have strong weighting or a weak weighting, as a simple way to put it. Strong weighting means you’re correcting lots of variables, and weak weighting means that you’re doing light touch.”

Raw numbers matter far less than the quality of the weighting, says Horner, who weights his polls by age and education as well as other variables such as income, gender and where a person lives.

“Say you’ve got 2000 voters, and after you apply a simple weighting methodology, that might statistically act like it’s now 1800 voters and you’ve lost 10 per cent of the explanatory power by correcting some of the bias in the survey, whereas my samples would reduce it to 1200 or so,” Horner explains.

“A journalist reading a newspaper might go, ‘Well, 1800 is better than 1200 as your sample’, but that’s not necessarily the case because while the 1800-person sample might have a margin of error of 2.3 per cent, and the 1200-size sample might have a bigger margin of error of say 2.8 per cent, the 2.8 per cent margin-of-error poll might still be more accurate than the 2.3 per cent margin-of-error poll because of the underlying weighing assumptions.”

The mechanics behind modern polls have changed beyond recognition over the past decade, with the industry’s wholesale migration from telephone interviews to panels of voters assembled online who can then be called on to participate in a range of surveys.

“The panel that I use has about 40,000 people in it. You don’t ask all of them, you only ask a small segment of them at any given time,” says Horner.

From that pool, the pollster draws a sample, typically between 1000 and 2000 respondents for a national poll, chosen to reflect the broader electorate. The raw sample almost never mirrors the population perfectly, which is where weighting comes in: the results are mathematically adjusted to correct for imbalances in age, gender, education, geography and other factors.

A larger sample weighted crudely can be less accurate than a smaller sample weighted with care. As Horner puts it: if the sample does not reflect the population, “what you’re measuring is the sample, not the population”.

He uses the example of a retirement home to explain this. “Let’s say you walked into a retirement home and you asked for their voting intention. You’re going to have six people who are the care staff and 30 people who are the residents,” he says. “Now, if you were to say, ‘Well, we’re going to weight this by gender’, and then you say, ‘Wow, fantastic. One Nation and the Liberal Party are winning with 80 per cent of the two-party preferred vote!’, but it’s actually not so fantastic because you didn’t correct for the fact that almost everyone is over the age of 80. You are correctly identifying the gender split, but you’re not correctly fixing the age splits.”

Since the 2019 election, the Australian Polling Council was established, which enables member firms to stamp the council’s “quality mark” on their polls, telling readers that the research was conducted impartially and professionally, and with appropriate disclosure of the way the survey was conducted and analysed.

The biggest recent test of current polling methods was last month’s South Australian state election. On the two questions that matter most – who would win and how much support One Nation would attract – the results were unambiguous.

Horner’s final pre-election poll placed every party’s primary vote within two percentage points of the actual result: Labor at 38 per cent against a result of 37.5 per cent, One Nation at 21 per cent versus a result of 22.9 per cent, the Liberals at 18 per cent compared with a result of 18.9 per cent, and the Greens at 11 per cent against a final tally of 10.4 per cent, a remarkable degree of precision in what turned out to be a highly volatile contest.

Horner uses a measure called root-mean-square error, or RMSE, which is essentially a single number that captures how far off a poll was across all parties simultaneously, with bigger misses penalised more heavily than small ones.

Despite the innovation of recent years, pollsters can still get things wrong, a fact nowhere better illustrated than the experience of Mike Turner, the Liberal Party’s pollster at the 2025 federal election.

On that measure, according to Horner, YouGov came out on top with an RMSE of about 1.0, meaning its estimates were, on average, just one percentage point from the actual result. DemosAU and Fox & Hedgehog followed closely at about 1.3, with Newspoll not far behind at about 1.9.

George Hasanakos, head of research at polling firm DemosAU and a former senior adviser to state Labor politicians in Queensland, says the South Australian election provided incontrovertible proof that today’s pollsters are accurately recording the surge in support for One Nation.

“We got the One Nation vote on the nose,” Hasanakos tells The Saturday Paper. “We said that they would poll 23 per cent and they got 23 per cent.”

Careful not to overstate what that means for the longer term, noting that comparable surges by minor parties in the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand have often receded once those parties faced the scrutiny that comes with being taken seriously as an alternative government, Hasanakos says One Nation is now in unfamiliar territory.

“They’re going to be doing things as a major competitor for the first time, seen as an alternative government for the first time, and there’s no guarantee that they would execute those things correctly.”

The real lesson from South Australia, says Hasanakos, is that the methodological innovations such as the shift to internet panels, as well as more sophisticated modelling techniques such as the multilevel regression with poststratification (MRP) used by YouGov, which produces seat-by-seat estimates, are working.

The three pollsters who performed best in South Australia, Hasanakos points out, all had one thing in common: they used internet panels. Those who missed the result didn’t. It was, in his view, a controlled experiment. The lesson was clear: when it comes to accuracy in predicting election results, public polling since 2019 has been very good.

“One thing we’re always on the lookout for is new demographic cleavages. You have to have a good understanding of the social cleavages in Australia,” says Hasanakos. “Basically, what drives them is their background: so things like what they earn, whether they come from non-English speaking background, all those different demographic cleavages and how different parties appeal to those groups. You have to try and be ahead of the game or you end up with 2019.”

Despite the innovation of recent years, pollsters can still get things wrong, a fact nowhere better illustrated than by the experience of Mike Turner, the Liberal Party’s pollster at the 2025 federal election.

“There is strong consensus that the Party’s faulty polling was a major problem for the campaign, fuelling false confidence, diverting resources from marginal seats to seats that were not winnable and discouraging disagreement or even discussion about the Leader’s campaign strategy,” noted the Liberal Party’s review of the 2025 election, conducted by Pru Goward and Nick Minchin.

“Freshwater’s Mike Turner told us he too, was concerned about the gap between his results and those of other polling companies, as was the Federal Director. The absence of any alternative polling, combined with the National Party’s reliance on the same pollster for both quantitative and qualitative research, blinded the Coalition to the swing underway against them.”

Turner’s numbers painted a picture that was not merely optimistic but, as events would prove, detached from reality. The party went into election night blind to the scale of the swing building against it and believing it was competitive in seats it had no hope of winning. When the results came in, the gap between what the polling had suggested and how the country voted was not a rounding error or a late break – it was a chasm.

Internal party polling is supposed to be the instrument through which a campaign understands the electorate and allocates resources. When that instrument is faulty, everything downstream is corrupted, including strategy, messaging, candidate priorities and the overall ground game.

Goward and Minchin did not miss this point, warning that the additional risk of relying on a single research firm should never be repeated.

“Unfortunately, misleading polling added to the misallocation of financial and booth worker resources,” the Liberal Party review noted. “At least one candidate advised that, since their polling looked good, they lost their booth workers to other seats. In the end, both their seat and the recipient seat were lost. Faulty polling meant Peter Dutton began election day in Victoria, instead of in his own seat in Queensland, which he lost.”

What makes the Liberal Party’s current position all the more precarious is that, having dispensed with Turner after the 2025 disaster, the party’s federal executive still has not approved a successor. In an era when the political landscape is shifting faster than at any point in living memory, and with One Nation eating into the conservative base, the party responsible for governing Australia for most of the past 80 years is now flying blind.

By contrast, Labor’s research program, as noted in the party’s 2025 election review, benefited from the experience of multiple pollsters who had been engaged over an extended period, including some who had worked with Labor over multiple election cycles. Labor’s research included a variety of methods across different areas, allowing for greater monitoring of trends and the identification of issues for concern.

“A robust research program underpinned every aspect of the campaign. ALP National Secretariat maintained continuous tracking of community sentiment throughout the term, ramping up in the final 12 months,” Labor’s 2025 election review noted. “Insights were shared regularly across campaign units, enabling agile adjustments to communications and strategy. Communications, framing and engagement were consistently research-informed, and the research program’s accuracy was confirmed by the election result.”

One of the few independent voices when it comes to poll analysis in Australia is Dr Kevin Bonham. He agrees that the South Australian election result was reassuring in terms of what it said about polling methods but is less sanguine about what the 2025 federal election revealed, with most polls missing the size of Labor’s winning margin.

The reason, he suggests, is essentially psychological. When pollsters get the winner wrong, as they did in 2019, the recriminations are fierce and the post-mortems exhaustive. When they get the winner right but misread the margin, as happened in 2025, the industry largely moves on.

By Bonham’s reckoning, the scale of the error in 2025 was almost identical to 2019, the difference being that Labor’s victory was large enough to survive it.

“When they’re a few points out, but they get the right winner, nobody cares much,” Bonham tells The Saturday Paper. “It is a convenient form of amnesia and it has allowed a significant methodological question to go largely unexamined.”

What went wrong, he argues, is that some pollsters grew reluctant to publish results that looked too extreme, a kind of institutional timidity that caused them to pull back from numbers that, had they followed the trend line they were likely already tracking, would ultimately have proved correct.

The most pointed example was YouGov’s final poll predicting Labor would win 84 seats, a figure widely derided at the time as implausible. It was, as it turned out, conservative, with Labor securing 94 seats.

“People said, ‘That’s rubbish, YouGov won’t have a reputation anymore,’ ” Bonham recalls.

The episode, he says, points to a broader tension between methodological honesty and the reputational risk of publishing a number that breaks sharply from the pack.

Bonham argues that the lesson runs in only one direction. “It’s important to be aware that any poll can be a few per cent out randomly,” he says, “but beyond that, the theory of random sampling is sound.”

For all the sophistication of modern polling, one problem that cannot easily be solved is predicting outcomes in individual seats, such as the upcoming Farrer byelection. That contest will provide the first major test of One Nation’s support at the federal level.

Online panels work well at a state or national level, where the numbers are large enough to smooth out the noise, but drilling down to a single electorate exposes the method’s limits.

“For an individual seat, there just aren’t that many people who’ve joined a panel who live in that particular electorate,” says Dan Pole, a senior researcher at Ipsos.

Alternative methods, such as assembling telephone lists, calling directly into the seat, are available, but each carries its own distortions.

“The accuracy of the lists that you can put together is fairly rubbery,” says Pole, and unless a pollster is doing seat-level work on a consistent basis they may not even know what biases their tools are introducing.

The Farrer byelection, with Labor not running and the Liberals still without a pollster, is shaping up as precisely the kind of contest where reliable data will be scarce and the temptation to over-interpret thin numbers will be strong.

“Unless someone’s willing to put their hand in their pocket, it’s going to be difficult to get a decent read beforehand,” says Pole.

Whatever happens, the bottom line among political professionals who will staff the next federal election is that published polls in the middle of a term offer a snapshot rather than a forecast. Experienced campaign directors know better than to treat them as anything more than that.

“We don’t get distracted by published polling midterm, which treats politics like it’s a horserace,” one seasoned campaigner tells The Saturday Paper. “It has very little predictive power when the next election is two-plus years away.”

This week, One Nation was the subject of three published polls.

The Resolve Political Monitor, published on Sunday in the Nine papers, with a sample size of 1807 people, showed One Nation’s primary vote easing two points to 22 per cent – its lowest in three months. The Coalition had inched back up to 23 per cent and Labor had recovered to 32 per cent. On two-party preferred, Labor maintained its election-winning lead of 55-45. 

Newspoll, published in The Australian, told a similar story. One Nation’s vote fell from 26 per cent to 24 per cent amid growing scrutiny of the party’s uncosted policies, with Labor steady on 31 per cent and the Coalition on 21 per cent, from a sample of 1235 voters. 

The outlier was the YouGov/Sky News Pulse poll, also conducted between April 14 and 21 from a sample of 1501 people. It had One Nation surging two points to 27 per cent – level with Labor, which recorded its lowest primary vote since 2024. The Coalition was languishing at 20 per cent.

Anthony Albanese is ahead of Liberal leader Angus Taylor as preferred prime minister in the Resolve poll – although by the narrowest of margins, 33 to 32 per cent, with 34 per cent undecided. Newspoll has Albanese in front by nine points.

Taken together, the three polls suggest One Nation’s support, while volatile, remains dramatically higher than its 6.4 per cent result at last year’s election.