The latest Newspoll, published on Sunday night, showed on federal voting intentions; Labor and One Nation lost one percentage point to both sit on 29 per cent, while the Coalition also dropped one percentage point to 18 per cent.

All of these polls are dutifully reported not just by the media outlet that pays for them, but by other media too.

Yet, we are just over one year out from the most recent federal election, and two years away from the next. Given this, the way the recent rise in One Nation’s polling in particular has shaped political debate, do we have too many polls?

“Vox populi, vox Dei” is the 1709 idea that the voice of the people is the voice of God. Surely, then, opinion polls – which accurately, scientifically and systematically measure the voice of the people – are one of the most important tools in democracy?

Or are voting intention polls a shallow measure of public opinion — noisy, but telling us little about why opinion is shifting, or what politicians should be doing? Is the obsession with the latest polling distracting us from the actual issues and the long-term problems facing Australia?

According to respected poll tracker William Bowe (aka The Poll Bludger), around 12 polls were released in July 2026 – roughly three every week. We have now had around 140 polls from 10 different pollsters since the 2025 election – roughly two every week.

If it seems it wasn’t like this before, well, you’re half right. While it’s difficult to track precisely the number of published opinion polls, until the early 1970s Australia had only one major polling organisation, Roy Morgan Research, which produced polling for The Bulletin.

According to the Parliamentary Library in the 1990s, there were roughly 38 polls a year – fewer than one a week. That doubled in the 2000s, before jumping to about 130 a........

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