Centrebet hedges on NZ election call

Last week the Sydney Morning Herald reported Aussie betting agency Centrebet has only been wrong once in the 60 elections.

Last night one new TV poll put the parties neck and neck, while a second placed National ahead, as did the online bookmakers Centrebet, whose only electoral failure in 60 polls worldwide to date has been picking Jeff Kennett to win over Steve Bracks in 1999.

That's a proud record indeed, but as betting closed before the New Zealand poll on Saturday, the agency had Don Brash ahead. Does that make it 2 out of 61?

I put that question to company spokesman Mark Ward today and found he was reluctant to concede the point. I also found he knew the election inside out and back to front.

Ward concedes that Don Brash did cross the line as favourite in Centrebet's odds. However, the betting had been volatile. On Friday, he says it was around 60:40 in favour of National. On Saturday it went to 50:50 and in the last hour Labour led.

While conceding Labour still went over the line a slight underdog, Ward says Centrebet never issued its usual bullish press release calling a result.

"It was one of the very few we couldn't call," he says. $600,000 in bets were placed, he says, the equivalent of a couple of Premier League rounds.

Ward, an Englishman based in Sydney, talks freely, expertly and passionately about the election, right down to the contests in Epsom and Tauranga. And he is hugely critical of the polling delivered in its lead-up.

"A couple of the polling companies have to have a good hard look at themselves," he says, insisting even if Centrebet was wrong at the end, it was still more accurate.

Polls showing 6 and 7 per cent gaps were ludicrous, he says, especially when 20 to 25 per cent of people on Thursday and Friday didn't have a clue how they would vote. He says 20 undecided voters will usually break 12:8 for the incumbent, and that's pretty much what happened. The polls exagerated support for National.

Thursday night's debate was behind the surge in betting support for National, he says, as Brash stood up and arguably carried the night.

"The general feeling was he was a dead-set chance, and that caused a couple of people to get a bit overexcited and take some losses."

So, when he's next asked the question, was Centrebet wrong once or twice?

"It's a matter of public record we went to the line with Labour as underdog," he says. "You could mark it down as a loss but I say we never really called it."

New bottles

It's down to the wire. Neck and neck. Too close to call. Will the Blue states outnumber the Red? Will we be spitting at each other over the barricades?

Or is it, as Act's latest newsletter suggests, the case that the polls could be unreliable because the pollsters can't get a representative group of voters? Is the presence of caller ID, more people having only cellphones or unlisted numbers, and the likely reluctance of 100,000 Chinese-born residents to reveal their true voting intentions making it tough to get a representative sample? Are the people being polled just those with the time and inclination?

It's all academic to me. I've voted. I will be out of the country on election day, as will two other of NZBC's board. It's a move I might firm into policy, given my dislike of the whole results palaver. I trotted along to the nearest voting office, which was only open 10-4 weekdays, oddly I thought, given that the election is on the weekend, and got my “Yes I've voted” sticker.

As I stood there with my thick dark pen ready to make my two ticks, I did pause. Putting aside the arrogance of Labour, its blitheness to the concerns of the middle classes and keenness to boost the lot of the strugglers of society and those with kids (often the same people) rather than all of us, I still found it slightly perplexing that the populace were thinking of voting out a government that has delivered economic stability, an arguably excellent health system and some social cohesion. They did have a healthy economy to help them do it. Or did they help produce and maintain a healthy economy? That's where the ideologues would start to fire up.

I'd love more money, but I am more interested in a more gentle tax threshold shift that didn't mean cuts to services, that insured they were there when I needed them. The personalities don’t interest me. None of the old turks in the Nats impress me – in fact, many of them worry me – but then the faces behind the government's benches don't inspire me particularly either. If it came down to the wire, though, wouldn't you be worried if you led a party and the Exclusive Brethren preferred your lot over the others?

Allowing for the fact that the major parties differ far more in fiscal policy than in parsable social policy – or probably moral liberalness – my vote came down to deciding whether I wanted a return to pre-cup of tea against post-cup of tea. (I should say at this point that the directors of NZBC vary on their voting preference but we all tend towards the socially liberal end of the spectrum.) Certainly the economy in the early 1980s needed loosening up. We certainly weren't the USSR, but there were a lot of controls. I worked in a bank at the time and you had to fill in a little coloured slip for every $200 people took out of the country. I remember a lot of people moving to Perth at the time (and one well-endowed customer being allowed to overdraw her savings account, but that's another story).

But calls year after year for more deregulation, more state asset sales, a little more pain, a little more trickle-down: it all got too much. No country in their right mind had opened its economy to the rest of the world without some restraints, some barriers, some doubts, some thought for the knife-edge manufacturers which employed people who would otherwise go on the dole and suck up our taxes. The ideologues were like the Intelligent Design crowd: they had a theory and by God they would argue it was right regardless of the cost (to others). But ideology is like economics – it often ignores reality.

A couple of things I read recently reminded me that ideology colours the views of even the clearest thinkers.

Mark Steyn, a smart fellow with a great turn of phrase, comes up with an odd coda about political choices during an otherwise useful dig at those in charge of messing up N'Orleens.

Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.

Probably true, but here I was thinking that the US was the perfect dog-eat-dog capitalist society and didn't at all instill welfarism.

Think you can please three-kid families, students, beneficiaries AND impatient businessmen? (Key wouldn't be a 'better' finance minister than Cullen, as some survey was reported; he would just be probably more favourable to businesses. Probably.)

A par in a review by Bryan Appleyard (of Why they don't hate us by Mark LeVine) also reminded me, obliquely, of how little changes beyond the colour of the bottle.

Essentially, the belief that Iraq could be flipped solely by the judicious application of shock and awe sprang from the neocon/neoliberal ideology that, in turn, had its roots in the monetarist and free-market economics of the 1970s. These were all redefinitions of conservatism as a utopian programme. Previously, conservatives had defined themselves as pragmatic and anti-utopian, not least because of the catastrophe of left-wing utopianism in the Soviet Union. But, for the new right, this pragmatism had become too tainted with soft, postwar socialism and so, from Milton Friedman to Francis Fukuyama, the right reformed around the utopian notion of the West’s discovery of the end state of politics and economics, a discovery which was now to be propagated, like penicillin or McDonald’s, across the globe.

Utopia doesn't exist. I hope pragmatism rules. Happy voting.

Spoilt for choice

Duncan Robertson writes:

Living in the leafy streets of the Epsom electorate, it appears I now have the power to change the government. We in Remuera have always thought that was a given, but I digress.

However, unlike some in the more bohemian suburbs, we in leafy Epsom take our electoral responsibilities seriously. So some voting advice please:

Rodney keeps shouting at me to vote Act every time I venture out, but there is something about a grown man humping my leg that I find a little unnerving.

My dear grey haired Mum intends voting Winston, which is why the elderly should lose their vote the moment they can no longer chew solids.

My wife thinks cauliflower; spinach and leeks are edible vegetables so there is a real danger she will vote Green.

My mother-in-law is voting Helen but hopefully dementia will kick in before then.

My father-in-law is voting Don because they both dress well.

My brother-in-law says he's voting Jim Anderton but I'm sure he will switch to that Legalise Cannabis mob the moment his rope sandals slip behind the electoral booth curtains.

The neighbours next door who drink and shout a lot will be voting Christian Heritage.

The neighbours on the other side will be voting the Maori Party because they said they went to one once and it was great.

Benson the Dog can't vote which is fortunate because whoever he supported would be dog tucker.

So I'm torn.

The Outdoor Recreation crowd because they like fishing?

Destiny New Zealand which is apparently promising to take a jar of hair cream and turn it in to Harley Davidsons for the multitude?

Or the One New Zealand Party in case it turns out there are two in the world and that would bugger our tourism industry?