Provenance
Official results, census measures and preserved poll records stand under every figure on this site.
The aggregate reads this term’s polls; everything it says is then checked against the Australian Electoral Commission’s election returns, the Bureau of Statistics’ censuses, and the pollsters’ own back-catalogues, kept in the archives below. Each source is named and linked where it lives.
Election results — Australian Electoral Commission
Every past-election figure on this site — the result charts in Past cycles, the baselines the preference-flow charts hang from, the seats’ informal-ballot rates — traces to the Australian Electoral Commission’s official record. The divisions’ two-party counts come from the AEC’s statistics packs through 2001 and its two-party-preferred-by-division downloads from 2004 on; informal ballots from the vote-type counts and, before them, the Parliamentary Library’s election-handbook appendix; and the Senate’s preference streams from the formal-preferences ballot files the AEC has published for every election since 2016. The whole record sits behind the AEC’s results archive and its past federal elections index, and each series on this site is built election by election from those tables.
Seat demographic classifications — AEC
The AEC also rates every House division on its own four-way geography: Inner Metropolitan (established capital-city suburbs), Outer Metropolitan (areas of recent suburban expansion), Provincial (most enrolment in a major provincial city) and Rural (the rest outside the capital cities). Wherever the site groups seats by where they are rather than by who holds them, this is the rating it uses. The series prints on the virtual tally room: the 2025 divisions page, and one like it for every election since 1996, reached through the results archive.
Census and socio-economic measures — Australian Bureau of Statistics
The seats’ socio-economic lanes — the IRSAD, IEO and IER fifths used across the election breakdowns — derive from the Bureau’s census work: the General Community Profile datapacks behind the seats’ demographic frames, and the Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas releases, whose electoral-division distribution files (from the 2006, 2011, 2016 and 2021 censuses) carry each division’s standing. The ABS published no division file for the earlier censuses the site reaches; there the record is the AEC’s own Research Report No. 5, ranking the 150 divisions by the 2001 census’s index, and the Parliamentary Library’s Newman and Kopras and Nelson papers covering the 1996–2006 censuses, kept through the Wayback Machine.
The poll archives
Polls outlive their publishers. Each of the six archives below keeps one house’s long-run record, copied as it was published and linked back to its source — from Trove’s newspapers in 1803 to Morgan’s tables this week.
Newspoll archive
Newspoll’s federal record, poll by poll, in the Federal Newspoll Archive — an interactive chart published on Infogram, shown here as it appears there.
AC Nielsen poll archive
AC Nielsen’s voting intention, leader ratings and preferred prime minister for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, kept as PDFs now the pollster’s site is gone — plus what surfaces of its AGB McNair predecessor’s polls from before 1996.
Morgan Poll archive
Roy Morgan’s four voting-intention tables — primary vote and two-party preferred, each as a current series and as a long-term trend back to 1901 — copied cell for cell as they appear on its site, each with its own CSV file.
Galaxy Research poll archive
Galaxy Research’s federal polls from before 2012: the national polls pieced together from the sources that outlived the pollster, and an index of every page of galaxyresearch.com.au that survives.
AE Forecasts poll database
Daniel Hirst’s federal voting-intention database, the data behind Australian Election Forecasts: thousands of polls from 1943 on, checked against their original sources, copied here byte for byte and refreshed to his latest. The tracker’s Past cycles draw on it where the other sources run thin.
Trove newspaper poll archive
Every article in the National Library’s Trove newspaper archive that mentions a poll, and the ones among them that actually report one. For the years before the pollsters had websites — or successors who kept their records — the newspaper is the only published source left.