Readers are astonished by KC’s exclusive revelations about the Federal government’s bogus $122m postal survey on ‘marriage equality’. Okay, one of you wanted to know what would do the job better and far cheaper.
I’lll recap, using survey language. A voluntary survey is necessarily biassed and unrepresentative of the population. It will most likely produce invalid, unreliable results with very low levels of confidence. A properly-designed survey constructs a representative sample based on demographic information.
Recently Fairfax commissioned an Ipsos phone poll on ‘marriage equality’ of 1400 respondents, which produced 70% YES, 26% NO and 4% don’t know/undecided. With an error margin of 2.6% that’s a clear affirmative result. Better job done for a fraction of the cost!
As noted previously your faithful scribe was a corporate marketing research manager in another life, whose job was to commission all kinds of surveys. That Ipsos job could not have cost more than $50K, so do the math as they say. It’s a massive and disgraceful waste of taxpayer money!
What’s worse is that it gives the illusion of ‘voting’, and some commentators are even referring to a ballot, both of which are incorrect; or slipping back to ‘plebiscite’, which it’s definitely not. As we know, there is nothing binding about this survey, and pollies still have to get their hands dirty, in their newly-fenced parliament.
