PQ – fair go – I will insist that greens take on a defense policy

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look kaiwai yous dont start giving away the plan till after the election, i think Rodney will be amenable to a total restructure, and i for one will be insisting that we take on an Environmental policy,

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You know the scary part – there are a number in the ACT party who could probably work with the Greens quite easily – thats assuming that Franks and Newman are dropped like a hot potato.

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stymied;
watch out for the news clip of Helen at Vic Uni tomorrow – the same people who brought you registry sit-ins & occupations some 2 years ago will be organising to motivate hecklers to ask the sticky questions -

like why has the uni council been able to raise fees by 3% in 2003, a further 4.5% in 2004, and who knows how much they’ll be putting their mitts up for this year.

ain’t much use reducing interest on loans if fees rise by same/better amount per annum (not everyone is studying full-time, by a long chalk, and it hits part-timers harder, also those who go on to post-graduate study)

students are just basically grumpy everywhere in the country! katie

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wizban: Small populations follow a different set of rules. Over a large population (ie, most polls) the distribution of the data isn’t dependant on the population size.

It was interesting see the news clip of Helen at Otago University today.. seems she didn’t get quite the welcome reception the above figures would indicate (well.. assuming that green supporters wouldn’t be heckling her).

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Great point DR.

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Clearly pollsters have been outed as frauds! Pollsters don’t call cellphones, don’t phone residents in rest homes, don’t phone patients in hospitals, don’t call people with unlisted numbers, don’t call workplaces, don’t call pubs, don’t call……just who do they call? I’ve voted in 10 elections and never been phoned once by a pollster, nor have I ever met someone who has ever been called.
Do pollsters makes calls in Samoan, Tongan, Niuean, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and any other number of languages. Oops, do they make calls in Maori?
I think not. Geez, this is really worrying. Lots of city councils claim they have a mandate to do this or that based on telephone surveys! Now we know why Wellington is full of new motorway sites, wrecked heritage buildings, destroyed views, stuffed up waterfront and so much more. It’s because their pollsters call people who only exist in their little black books!

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stymied, I don’t get it . (sorry if im truning this into stats 101)
are you saying that if you have a population of 57 and of them you take a sample of 56, that the marging of error will still be 14% ?

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Actually, you’ll notice that we didn’t ask all 18,000 to respond. We nearly did – and then realised that we would have to collate all their responses using a few columns in Excel! We’re not exactly set up to run a proper poll, so we had a sample of a couple of hundred. 56 replied in time to be included, and several more did later on, so students are not as apathetic as you might think.

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I’m glad to hear that the ACT-Green Coalition is going ahead, what’s the first policy – a 25% Flat Tax on all Carbon Emissions? (15% on the first 38,000 tonnes)

OF course, if 56 responded out of 20,000 Otago Uni students, what does that say about turnout of students on the day?

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thats disgusting fwwog, dont even jokes about it,

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of course 14% margin of error still looks good as that would mean the lowest the greens could be would be 32%

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Stymied: I was, of course, joking, and am well aware that 56 is not a decent sample size

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Frog, I know this isn’t the point, but population size has nothing to do with the margin of error. Mathematically, margin of error of any population of a sample size of 56 is 1/sqrt(56) = 14% or so. For 1000 people it is about 3%. Doesn’t matter if we have 5 or 500 million people.

Of course, this assumes that the polling methodology is getting a true representative sample. As you’ve discussed before (re dodgy SST polls et al) it is rarely the case.

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Thanks for the grin ZenTiger…

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Curses to Labour’s student bribes. You would have had a clear majority.

And then you could safely dump the Mugabe government combo. 38% of labour nibbling at your footpads would still make things tough.

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