Push-and-poll of persuasion

It goes under many names - persuasion, canvassing-in-disguise, mind manipulation - and involves asking loaded questions to sway undecided voters. Known as push-polling, it was the new weapon in campaign managers' arsenals for this election.

Nowhere was it more successful than in Epsom, where telephone tactics proved effective in bringing Act MP Rodney Hide back from the dead.

"If you want to euphemistically describe it as a negative, it's push-polling," says Act's campaign manager Ian Kortlang, from Australia.

"But the nature of the call was: 'Do you realise that if ... '

"You can call that persuasion or push-polling and I don't resile from the fact that it can be described as push-polling.

"But it's really taking people in a discussion which they needn't engage in because they can say; 'Thank you very much I'm too busy, I'm feeding the kids'. Or they would listen to the conversation and be taken through the logic."

The logic in this case was: "A vote for Rodney was Rodney plus Worth plus the Act team and a vote for Worth equals Worth."

Kortlang says the telephone technology, including predictive dialling, and the routing of calls out of other countries, makes such telemarketing a viable, cheap option.

As well as push-polling, Act used telemarketing to send out an automated recorded voice message from Hide. Kortlang says the nature of the message wasn't important and he is sure most people bleeped it out. "What was important was to demonstrate to the people of Epsom that Rodney Hide wants this seat."

Despite accusations to contrary, National campaign manager Steven Joyce maintains the party didn't push-poll. "I made a decision at the outset of the campaign that we weren't going to do any push-polling.

"We do canvassing where we seek to poll people and find out who will vote National and whether they are supporters. But we don't say to them, 'Are you going to vote Labour? Oh, you know they are anti-family', or anything like that."

Joyce says there were a couple of occasions when over-zealous volunteers might have strayed from the canvassing script, and action was taken to stop that.

But he also received complaints about Labour push-polling and incorrectly advising voters that Don Brash would be raising the eligibility age for superannuation to 70. Or that National would be selling state assets.

Labour campaign manager Mike Williams says the party does telephone canvassing only "to find where the support is and firm things up on the day".

He had reports of National push-polling in the Hawkes Bay area and Invercargill. "It all comes down to the script that's used. It's a sort of mind manipulation technique."

He gives an example of sort of script they came across: "Hi, I'm calling on behalf of Eric Roy, the National candidate. Are you voting to change the government?"

Undecided voters are then fed a line like: "You will be aware that Eric Roy is a family man ... "