Nau mai haere mai.

To borrow a phrase from Chris Hipkins, opinion polls can be the bread and butter of political journalism, especially in an election year. Even an unsurprising poll, largely unchanged since the previous one, can generate breathless headlines and coverage. Brace for plenty of that as the election date draws nearer.

But all polls should be approached with some degree of caution. As Grant Duncan wrote earlier this year, the record of political polling leading up to the 2020 election was hardly stellar, with a considerable gap between poll results and the eventual outcome.

Today’s guide to reading the polls should help put some of this in perspective. For starters, polls are snapshots of the period in which they were taken, not predictors of an election result. Of course they are a guide to the way public opinion is trending, but using them to project seats in parliament and the likely shape of the next government is to ascribe them too much power.

Staying with the election, Tim Welch has looked at the National Party’s just-released transport policy and found what the pollsters might call a potential margin of error. The projected cost of National’s new roads, he writes, looks on the light side when compared to the costs (and cost overruns) of recent big projects.

Furthermore, the plan looks very much like the kind of road-centric policies that for the past 70 years have been contributing to the very problems the world is now trying to solve: “In hindsight, massive roading infrastructure projects weren’t the solution they might have seemed 70 years ago. But they have at least provided a lesson in what not to do today.”

Stay tuned for more election coverage as the party campaigns get properly under way. Thanks for reading, until next week, mā te wā.