The poll was conducted for a client who has not given permission to release the full data. Mr Lonergan said the poll was so different from rivals' polls that he suppressed the results. Loading "Given that we felt it was out of step with the general sentiment that we had seen reported in the media, we were concerned that the report might not be accurate and made a decision not to publicly release the data," he said. "This is the first time we have actually chosen not to release a poll at all that would have otherwise been released." Mr Lonergan first revealed the decision in a forthcoming episode of the TalkTrack podcast published by the Public Relations Institute of Australia.

Polling companies have been at a loss to explain the Coalition's triumph on May 18 when all major opinion polls had pointed to a comfortable Labor victory: a rare failure in the world of Australian political polling, which has a good track record when it comes to accuracy. Mr Lonergan said it was possible a degree of "herding" had taken place – a phenomenon whereby pollsters "basically weight your data until you get a result which is in line with the result that you would like to publish, which is not out of step [with competitors]". Pollsters also interrogated data that seemed "wrong" much more vigorously than if the data matched expectations, Mr Lonergan said. "If you feel the results of a poll are suspicious you are much more thorough in investigating these issues than if the poll is showing data that is intuitively right," he said. An aggregation of Newspolls during the campaign put Labor's primary vote in Queensland at 33 per cent, with the Liberal National Party on 36 per cent. However, a Newspoll in the final week of the campaign had Labor on 30 and the LNP on 35, translating to a 52-48 two-party preferred lead for the LNP.

Ipsos polls conducted for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in May had Labor on a primary vote of 30 in Queensland and the LNP on 37. At the election, the LNP recorded a primary vote of 43.7 in that state. After the 2015 British general election, pollster Survation admitted to suppressing a survey that pointed to a significant Conservative victory because the results "seemed so out of line" with previous polls. The company's founder Damian Lyons Lowe said he "chickened out" of publishing the figures – "something I'm sure I'll always regret". Australian election analyst Kevin Bonham said it was not known how frequently pollsters engaged in such behaviour but it "has often been a suspected part of herding". "Even then you still don’t know what to make of that because it wasn't published before the fact so you can't go back and verify that it was real in the first place," he said.