Kind offer of training extended to Labour’s Barker

by Jake Quinn

This does sound like rather sensible advice.  It reminds me of a certain Alanis Morissette song, something to do with irony…

Yee adds that the Labour Party could have easily conducted their research themselves without any of the lies that they chose to make: “We understand that the Labour Party would not have wished to identify themselves before interviewing people because respondents’ answers could then be skewed, but all they had to do was explain to potential respondents that they were a political party surveying the public, and that their identity would be revealed at the end of the interview to avoid skewing the results. This workaround would have provided the Labour Party with unbiased results without misleading the public.”

It is from a somewhat breathless and superlative packed press release issued by the Market Research Society of New Zealand and the Association of Market Research Organisations where they “expressed their extreme concern” (really?) demanding Labour apologise to the nation for their “unethical and misleading activities” around Rick Barker’s phone polling which came to light over the long weekend.

The groups have been kind enough to extend an invite to Mr Barker to attend some of their training, if he so wishes:

“Mr Barker is welcome to join the Market Research Society of New Zealand in order to improve his knowledge of market research and ethical polling. We run regular educational events for our members and it would be good to see Mr Barker attending so that he can conduct his future surveys with a greater degree of professionalism”

How utterly decent of them 😉

But seriously, this whole thing shouldn’t really have been an issue as all political parties conduct in-house polling from time to time, but unfortunately the handling of it didn’t seem to go so swimmingly. I blame Labour weekend hangovers. After all its only reasonable that Labour types would celebrate rather hard on their long weekend!

“Barker, when questioned, initially said: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’. When provided with details, including dates, Barker said he would call back,” the Herald on Sunday reported.  Party President Andrew Little noted on the same day that he knew nothing about the operation and that it would concern him very deeply. Whoops.