National going down | The Jackal

6 Apr 2012

National going down

Yesterday, the Timaru Herald reported:

The Green Party has hit a record high 17 per cent support and National have taken a big hit in a new political poll released today.

The Roy Morgan survey shows National down 4.5 per cent to 44 per cent since the previous polling period that ended on March 11 - virtually a straight switch of support with the Greens who were up 4.5.

But there is little good news for Labour, which was up a marginal 0.5 percentage points at 30.5 per cent.

The poll contrasts with last week's One News survey that had National solid on 51 per cent.

The latest Roy Morgan poll was taken between March 12 and April 1, covering the controversy over ACC and minister Nick Smith's resignation. It polled 948 respondents.

So that's a huge 7% difference between the two polls. Personally I don't think Nick Smith's resignation on the 21 March over the ACC debacle is the only factor, as it's the overall incompetence of National, their economic mismanagement and broken pre-election promises that people are waking up to.

The Colmar Brunton poll was taken between the 24th and 28th of March so would have somewhat taken Smith's disgrace into account. The interesting thing is that both polls would have occurred while National was stonewalling a full ACC enquiry, while Judith Collins' idiotic defamation sideshow over the last week wasn't covered by either poll. So there's likely worse news to come for the Natz.

There's also been a lot of good work done by the Greens lately around the fracking issue, the Christchurch housing crisis and the shameful tax cuts for the wealthy, which have landed us in a huge amount of debt... so we cannot put this entirely down to National shooting themselves in the feet.
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