Polls

To begin I must apologise for the complete lack of blogging over the last week or so, it's currently the last week of the university term and so it's been a bit assessment heavy and funnily enough lecturers do not appreciate me using their studying time writing blogs, unless of course it's somehow furthering my studies in a course... of which it's not. But the next couple of weeks are holidays so you should expect an influx of my rantings.... Now on to this week.

Whilst checking up on the news on my trusty ABC website I came across this poll section. You may or may not have come across this webpage before but for those who haven't it's just a page where you can vote on anything from a local or international contentious issue to a question like "Which type of ball should the PM have taken to the Oval Office?" but not only can you vote you can also view the results of the past 534 polls. Now I know I've discussed polls before I can't help but enjoy dwelling over them, looking for interesting results from the past, seeing how the polled issue has actually panned out and whether the general public was actually right in it's decision.
For instance one that is especially poignant this week is this question which was asked around the time of the QLD floods (Mid Jan): "Will the Defence Force investigation into sexual misconduct effect change?" Now if you haven't followed the news this week a young female was filmed having sex with another man without her consent and another lady just this morning said that her niece had been raped whilst at the academy and was told to "suck it up" by an officer, this has made way for fresh new calls for an investigation into the conduct of people at the Defence Force Academy. Interestingly enough the poll asked in January had a result of 86% of people announcing that they thought that the previous investigation would have no effect on the culture at the Academy, so here the public got it right in that there has been no apparent effect of the previous investigation on the Academy. So is a further investigation enough or do we need to do something more drastic? One would hope that after these events the culture within this and many other organisations changes.

There are some strange results in there as well, for instance the question "Has the Government gone about introducing a carbon tax correctly?" polled at only 54% of people saying no, however if the poll was so close then why did Julia Gillard's public rating drop so dramatically as a result of the announcement?

Climate change appears quite often in the questioning and I particularly find this one interesting: "Is the recent extreme weather a symptom of climate change?" where it finished dead even on 50% either way. It's a very good representation of the insecurity of the public at this time about how our nature is behaving and what is just normal earth phenomenon and what the human race has actually caused.

It's also good to see the Australian spirit in some of the answers, for instance when asked "How do you feel about the $1.8billion flood levy?" out of the four possible answers "Happy to pay" won by a margin of 15 pts at 55%.

And finally just to add a little spice to the blog "Does the NBN's business case look solid?" 53% no, 25% yes...

Just before I go a couple of quick links:

Buying the Presidency - If you were interested in my politics course or the American President race then check out this video, the man interviewed (Dr John Hart) is both my lecturer and tutor for that class and really knows his stuff, it was funny listening to his reaction about the interview afterwards and how he thought the questions asked were really stupid.

Q&A - I hope you were watching Q&A the other night with Kevin Rudd on it, I love to see word maps of the transcript afterwards to highlight the key topics of conversation and this little video was a word map of all the twitter comments made during the program (at one stage they got to 500 tweets a second). It's very interesting to see how the tweets and wider public discussion progressed throughout the show, if you've got a spare 60 seconds it's definitely worth a look.

Anyway take a look through the other ABC polls and leave a comment below on any other results you find interesting...

Petey