If wishes were votes

I've grown invulnerable to most of the mendacious memes of the mainstream media, but one that still gets under my skin is the old "Polls just released show that if an election had been held last weekend, the ALP would have have been swept to power in a landslide, etc", which has been getting quite an outing since the recent AgePoll.

Please. This is like saying, if the Olympics had been held last weekend, and sack racing had been an official event, and nobody else turned up, my mate Dazza would have have won the gold. Federal elections, like the Olympics, are never held 'last weekend'. They're held at the end of a long, long campaign, in which people get to make considered decisions, are deluged with the kind of information and persuasion that form no part of the opinion-polling process, and, ultimately, in which the choice is not some schoolyard hypothetical, but the real thing.