Fine print (too dull to include in main post)

• Once upon a time the measuring of preferences didn't matter that much - getting the primary vote right was kind of close enough - but with the Greens on the rise, and taking much of Labor's vote but returning - about 70-90 percent - to Labor, those days are over. 

• From what I can gather, Newspoll actually changed about half way through last year from notionally distributing according to aggregate preference flows to doing them party by party. This was better, but still understated Labor's two party preferred vote. Difficult to tell, because Sol Lebovic isn't keen on talking about these things.

• Newspoll publishes only rounded figures, while their notional calculations are based on the raw unrounded data. But I can only use the rounded numbers. The purple part of the graph is unrounded, basically for presentation purposes.

• Now (from Jan '04) they ask who voters' second preferences will go to, and extrapolate that. It's better than last year's, but they should do what Nielsen and Morgan do - press for full preferences.

• You can read more at this long page.