Wednesday 17 February 2010

Leading from the rear 101 - Lindsay is trying but he really isn't very good at it

Peter Lindsay is desperately trying to gee the troops up. That would be the same troops that he has chickened out of leading into battle.

His effort in Tony Raggatt's story in today’s Bulletin is pretty lame though.

To use one poll to predict and election outcome is bad enough – especially when it has a margin of error of ±3.46% (keeping in mind that the Libs margin in Herbert is -0.4%). But to go on to suggest that punters can’t tell the difference between Federal and State Governments and will vote against Rudd because they don’t like Anna Bligh, fly’s in the face of political history.

He’d be better off consulting some of Australia’s more expert psephologists such as Scott Steel at Pollytics.com  or William Bowe at The Poll Bludger  both of whom are showing, that across all of the opinion polls, there’s not a lot of movement and certainly nothing for the Libs to get their hopes up about.

For example Pollytics here has a sophisticated simulation using the same Galaxy Poll which projects a 56% chance of Labor winning 50.4% of the Two Party Preferred vote in Herbert and in total a one seat loss by Labor in Qld.

If that is a tad too sophisticated for poor old Peter, he need only remember back to how he and his mates were convinced that this Galaxy Poll back in June 2007 would deliver them victory later that year. Even Christian Kerr, a former staffer for South Australian Liberal Senators Robert Hill and Amanda Vanstone and former South Australian Premier John Olsen thought they were nuts.

Poor old Peter isn’t turning out to be a very good leader of the troops – even from the rear.

And if I were studying political science at JCU under the apparently new (to me anyway) member of the commentariat, Dr Doug Hunt, I’d be getting a second opinion.  Come to think of it, maybe Tony Raggatt would serve us better if he sought a second opinion too!!

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