Extract from The Guardian
News Corp Australia’s house pollster, Newspoll, will close next
month, ending decades of live fortnightly telephone polling and putting
150 researchers, statisticians and analysts out of work.
Newspoll, published fortnightly in the Australian, drives much of the political coverage in the Australian media.
The Newspoll brand will continue in name only, with the surveys to be conducted by Galaxy Research, an outfit which already handles polls for the News Corp tabloids.
The Galaxy-run Newspoll will not conduct live telephone interviews with participants but will instead adopt the less expensive method of polling using automation – known as “robopolling” – as well as online surveys. With robopolls, computers make calls automatically and participants answer the recorded voice using a keypad on their phone.
As many people have abandoned landlines, the Newspoll landline-only surveys have been difficult to maintain, especially with younger voters who only have a mobile.
Newspoll’s decision follows that last year made by Fairfax Media which ended a 40-year relationship with Nielsen.
The Nielsen poll, published in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age from January 1995 and in the AFR from February 2012, was also central to political coverage. Fairfax polls are now conducted by research company Ipsos Australia.
The union representing the 150 Newspoll workers, including 26 full time staff, the National Union of Workers said the company was not treating the workers with respect or honouring all their entitlements.
NUW organiser Jafar Kazim said staff were told they would lose their jobs only after an article announcing the closure was published in the Australian on 4 May.
At a tense meeting between staff, union and management after the announcement Newspoll’s head researcher told staff the new methodology used by Galaxy was “crap methodology, telephone research is the best way to do it,” sources who were at the meeting told Guardian Australia.
Kazim said some staff planned to protest the company’s treatment of the staff outside Newspoll House in Sydney’s Surry Hills on Friday.
A spokesman for News Corp declined to answer specific questions about how many staff were affected but issued the following statement.
“From the end of June 2015, Newspoll will be conducted by Galaxy Research, one of the country’s best market research and polling companies,” the spokesman said.
“Galaxy Research will ensure that Newspoll’s rigour, integrity and frequency will remain unaffected, and Newspoll will retain its position as Australia’s most authoritative and eagerly awaited political poll. The Australian will continue to publish Newspoll every fortnight.
“The work Galaxy Research will undertake for the Australian under the Newspoll banner will be separate to the research it does for News Corp Australia’s metro mastheads.
“News Corp Australia and WPP thank [Newspoll CEO] Martin O’Shannessy and his team for their outstanding work over the years.”
Sources said the company had refused to provide references to employees or to apologise for not informing staff before the decision was announced in the Australian.
“Some people read about the closure in the Australian before they heard about it from Newspoll,” one source said. “The company is also denying any form of redundancy pay to about 90% of its phone staff, and only meeting the bare standards of our industrial agreement.
“There are some staff members that have worked at Newspoll for upwards of six years who are being denied a redundancy in the current package.”
Newspoll is a joint venture between News Corp Australia and international advertising and public relations firm WPP.
In the report in the Australian on 4 May, the paper’s chief executive, Nicholas Gray, and its editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, said Galaxy Research had “proven its credentials as a highly accurate polling company in both federal and state elections”.
“Recently, it called a Labor win in the recent Queensland election and was again proven reliable in the NSW election,” they said.
“Newspoll’s rigour, integrity and frequency will not be affected, and Newspoll will retain its position as Australia’s most authoritative and eagerly awaited political poll.”
Newspoll, published fortnightly in the Australian, drives much of the political coverage in the Australian media.
The Newspoll brand will continue in name only, with the surveys to be conducted by Galaxy Research, an outfit which already handles polls for the News Corp tabloids.
The Galaxy-run Newspoll will not conduct live telephone interviews with participants but will instead adopt the less expensive method of polling using automation – known as “robopolling” – as well as online surveys. With robopolls, computers make calls automatically and participants answer the recorded voice using a keypad on their phone.
As many people have abandoned landlines, the Newspoll landline-only surveys have been difficult to maintain, especially with younger voters who only have a mobile.
Newspoll’s decision follows that last year made by Fairfax Media which ended a 40-year relationship with Nielsen.
The Nielsen poll, published in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age from January 1995 and in the AFR from February 2012, was also central to political coverage. Fairfax polls are now conducted by research company Ipsos Australia.
The union representing the 150 Newspoll workers, including 26 full time staff, the National Union of Workers said the company was not treating the workers with respect or honouring all their entitlements.
NUW organiser Jafar Kazim said staff were told they would lose their jobs only after an article announcing the closure was published in the Australian on 4 May.
At a tense meeting between staff, union and management after the announcement Newspoll’s head researcher told staff the new methodology used by Galaxy was “crap methodology, telephone research is the best way to do it,” sources who were at the meeting told Guardian Australia.
Kazim said some staff planned to protest the company’s treatment of the staff outside Newspoll House in Sydney’s Surry Hills on Friday.
A spokesman for News Corp declined to answer specific questions about how many staff were affected but issued the following statement.
“From the end of June 2015, Newspoll will be conducted by Galaxy Research, one of the country’s best market research and polling companies,” the spokesman said.
“Galaxy Research will ensure that Newspoll’s rigour, integrity and frequency will remain unaffected, and Newspoll will retain its position as Australia’s most authoritative and eagerly awaited political poll. The Australian will continue to publish Newspoll every fortnight.
“The work Galaxy Research will undertake for the Australian under the Newspoll banner will be separate to the research it does for News Corp Australia’s metro mastheads.
“News Corp Australia and WPP thank [Newspoll CEO] Martin O’Shannessy and his team for their outstanding work over the years.”
Sources said the company had refused to provide references to employees or to apologise for not informing staff before the decision was announced in the Australian.
“Some people read about the closure in the Australian before they heard about it from Newspoll,” one source said. “The company is also denying any form of redundancy pay to about 90% of its phone staff, and only meeting the bare standards of our industrial agreement.
“There are some staff members that have worked at Newspoll for upwards of six years who are being denied a redundancy in the current package.”
Newspoll is a joint venture between News Corp Australia and international advertising and public relations firm WPP.
In the report in the Australian on 4 May, the paper’s chief executive, Nicholas Gray, and its editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, said Galaxy Research had “proven its credentials as a highly accurate polling company in both federal and state elections”.
“Recently, it called a Labor win in the recent Queensland election and was again proven reliable in the NSW election,” they said.
“Newspoll’s rigour, integrity and frequency will not be affected, and Newspoll will retain its position as Australia’s most authoritative and eagerly awaited political poll.”
On 21 May, the Australian reported that “second-generation Australians involved in terrorism face being stripped of their citizenship, along with dual nationals, as part of the Abbott government’s efforts to tighten national security laws”.
The Daily Telegraph has also reported this imminent development many times, and on Tuesday it informed its readers that the government would that day announce a new citizenship bill that included “controversial measures based on the UK model to also strip nationality from Australians who hold sole Australian citizenship, but only if they have legal access to citizenship of another country”.
Only problem was, the body charged with making government policy – the cabinet – had not approved the policy yet, and on Monday night – presumably after the paper had received its briefing – at least six cabinet ministers refused to support the idea that Australia would strip citizenship from second generation Australians.
According to a leak to the Sydney Morning Herald, verified by the Guardian, those who spoke against the idea were the defence minister, Kevin Andrews, the foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, the attorney general, George Brandis, the agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce, the education minister, Christopher Pyne and the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull.
They were concerned about the substance of the idea, and also about the fact that they were being asked to sign off on it without seeing any formal written proposal either before or during the cabinet discussion and without having any time to consider advice.
Turnbull actually sought an assurance that the Daily Telegraph had not been briefed, and was assured it hadn’t – an assurance the next morning’s paper revealed to be untrue.
The issue of stripping citizenship rights from second generation Australians has now been included in a “discussion paper”.
It would seem the point of the idea is to provide the government with another means to make sure the 100 or so Australians fighting in Iraq or Syria (up to 50 of whom we are told are dual nationals) never make it back to Australia, with a lower evidentiary requirement than last year’s foreign fighters’ laws, which were in part designed to deal with the same problem.
But – despite the many headlines (we still haven’t seen any citizenship legislation and neither has the cabinet) we have no idea what evidence immigration minister Peter Dutton would need to see from intelligence briefings in order to revoke someone’s citizenship, nor any details of the promised judicial review.
Dutton also said that if another country got in and revoked their side of a dual citizenship first, Australia – given its obligations not to render anyone stateless – would have to take that person back. That raises a whole lot of questions about whether it wouldn’t be better to deal with people committing or planning acts of political violence by prosecuting them, rather than engaging in some kind of international race to make them another country’s problem. Not to mention the apparent contradiction of cancelling the citizenship of those already fighting overseas so they don’t come back at the same time as Australians are being urged to call the national security hotline with information about anyone planning to travel to the conflict zones so they can be prevented from leaving.
And before this stream of “citizenship crackdown” headlines we had the “crackdown on jihadis on welfare” headlines, which also turned out to be a bit previous.
In February, before Abbott delivered his national security statement, the Telegraph reported that “almost all of the wannabe terrorists who have snuck out of Australia to join jihadist armies in Iraq and Syria were on the dole or some form of welfare payment” and that “most had continued to collect payments from Australian taxpayers while training with Islamic State to become terrorists intent on wanting to kill Australians” and the prime minister said he was “appalled” that the majority of those Australians joining terrorist groups had benefited from the welfare system. The government vowed to cancel welfare payments under the counter-terrorism laws it had passed late last year.
On 23 February, asked about reports that no foreign fighters had actually had their welfare payments cancelled, Abbott told parliament: “This is not correct. To the best of my knowledge and understanding, all of the foreign fighters who are currently overseas have had any welfare payments that they were receiving well and truly cancelled … the last thing we want to see is Australian taxpayers funding terrorism.”
But in an answer provided this week to questions that were asked in a Senate estimates hearing the day after the prime minister’s answer to parliament – 24 February – the Attorney General’s Department said that as of 24 February, “it was established that no individual was in receipt of any welfare benefit payments and it was therefore unnecessary to use the welfare cancellation on security grounds provisions”.
Last Sunday there was another wave of headlines, these ones about how students and teachers were going to get “Lessons in how to spot a jihadi”. Obviously family, friends and peers are the first ones likely to realise that a young person is becoming radicalised, but when the new “jihadi-spotting” plan got to the meeting of state education ministers on Friday, it turned out quite a bit was already being done in schools. The communique from their meeting said they had agreed that “senior officials will collate current initiatives that support youth at risk of radicalisation and identify gaps in prevention and intervention measures for schools.”
“Our senior officials will advise us about what exactly we should be doing, but I am not – I don’t think we should trivialise the issue by saying that we’re going to have a dobbing in of other students,” the education minister, Christopher Pyne, said in response to questions.
One might ask what is to be gained from so many headlines galloping so far ahead of actual decisions, or indeed, actual facts.
Does it help the police and intelligence agencies with their very important task of “keeping Australians safe” either by preventing acts of violence in this country, or preventing dangerous foreign fighters from returning, or the strategy for countering violent extremism aimed at stopping people here from becoming radicalised and dangerous?
Or is it playing to a very different audience – with the much more political aim of keeping security threats at the forefront of the national conversation and, perhaps, goading Labor into disagreement so that they can be portrayed as “weak on terror”?
The prime minister’s most powerful advisor is taking a keen interest in the policy and politics of the issue – his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, told a recent meeting of Coalition staff she was spending at least 40% of her time on the issue.
Another clue might lie in yet more information from the prime minister’s office to the Daily Telegraph, this time in an article entitled “The first cracks in Australia’s bipartisan approach to terrorism could doom Bill Shorten” which revealed that the prime minister received 900 emails in the week after the budget expressing anger at the possibility that “repentant Australian jihadis” might be allowed back into the country.
The article praised the prime minister’s “instinctive” response that “If you go abroad to join a terrorist group and you seek to come back to Australia, you will be arrested, you will be prosecuted and jailed” in comparison with Shorten’s reaction that “There are laws in place, I’m not going to play judge and jury.”
But of course, there are laws in place, and they do have evidentiary requirements. Which means the courts may not in every case implement the prime minister’s “instinct”. Which is presumably where the new policy-thought about citizenship-stripping comes in. And Shorten has been pretty careful to make sure there are no “cracks” in the bipartisanship on these issues, no matter what the government proposes.
There is, of course, an alternative to slap-dash policy in response constituent-email reaction, or policy by cabinet-pre-empting, headline-seeking press leak, and that is that old-fashioned idea of policy developed to address a real problem, thought through and discussed by cabinet, before public announcement.