Mike's Minute: Why do we still listen to polls?

The polling industry, whose only answer to fairly obvious questions seems to be “this is just a snapshot in time”, may have trouble explaining the past week of polling in this country. 

There was one on Tuesday night and one on Wednesday morning. They have completely different results. 

One has Luxon as the most popular leader. 

One has Hipkins as the most popular leader. 

One has National leading Labour. 

One has Labour leading National. 

One has the current Government as the current Government. 

One has a new Government, with the current Government out. 

It doesn’t get a lot more contrasting than that. 

Even if you accept a lot of the numbers are tightish, some of the numbers aren't even within the margin of error. 

It's almost as though the polls aren't accurate. 

It's almost as though you could ring up 1000 people and get one answer, then ring up another set of 1000 people and get a completely different answer. 

If you can do that, why would you pay money to people who will tell you these things mean anything? 

At least TVNZ use commercial money to pay for this stuff. 

Radio New Zealand, who seem to have taken over from TV3, use our money. And given they have just had a budget cut and given they are losing their audience at a rate of knots, I'm not sure this can be classed as quality expenditure. 

I went to their website yesterday. The headline was "What the polls are telling us in 7 charts". 

And there they were. There was lots of colour, lots of lines up and down, and squiggles. 

But I already knew, given I had seen the charts from the night before, that either their charts meant nothing, or if they did mean something, then the other guy's charts weren't up to much. 

Or quite possibly if we did this charade for a third time, they would both be exposed as having shonky numbers. 

But remember: "they are only a snapshot in time". Except given they were done at the same time, they aren't, are they? 

So what are they, other than a very large waste of time and money? 

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