This Extremely Weird Turnbull/Shorten Opinion Poll Proves The Election Has Jumped The Shark
"Which party leader would you most trust to look after your pet?" What.
It’s Day 23 of the Long Night, otherwise known as the 2016 federal election campaign, and things are grim. Barnaby Joyce is spraying conspiracy theories around like a chain email, the first official leaders’ debate on Sunday night ensured everyone got a great night’s sleep before work the next morning, and the Great Barrier Reef is half-dead.
Best part is, it’s not even half over — we’ve still got just over a month until voters have to drag their sorry butts to the polls and choose which leader gets to be Prime Minister until they’re inevitably rolled by their own party about 15 months in. As the nation wearily makes up its mind about who to pick over June, it’ll be ‘helped’ by polling companies blowing people’s phones to ask them extremely weird questions like these:
That’s the latest poll from Essential Media Communications which, besides asking more mundane questions like which party people are planning to vote for and who they’d prefer as Prime Minister, has gone off on a jag and quizzed more than 1,000 people on a bunch of things no one has ever, ever thought about or would want to know.
EMC director Peter Lewis describes the new set of questions as a “Leadership Sniff Test” — a phrase which, besides invoking the delightful mental image of voters picking a new Prime Minister by gently smelling the candidates, kind of explains what they’re driving at by asking people which major political figure they’d rather help them with their laundry. By making people imagine Bill Shorten carrying the groceries or Malcolm Turnbull changing the gas bottle on the barbecue, they’re trying to see which guy voters find more relatable.
But there’s still something chronically weird about some of these questions. I hope I never meet anyone super keen to go on holiday with Malcolm Turnbull or get Bill Shorten to help build a deck. It’s also worth noting that the most popular response by far to almost every question was “don’t know”, which is a pretty polite way of saying “I don’t fucking know which federal political leader I’d prefer to wash my cat, please let me get off the phone, I’m trying to make dinner”.
If you’re going to ask people random questions about their politicians, why not go all in? Hopefully the next Essential poll will quiz punters on real-life scenarios they can relate to, like who they’d bingewatch Survivor with, or who they’d trust to smuggle booze into a music festival. Only 31 days to go, kids!