Loading But Ipsos can't walk away from the fact its overall polling forecast the wrong result. Moreover, polling companies are the main reason Saturday night's result took voters, the media and many political operatives by surprise. The implications of our major pollsters making the same mistakes in a consistent way are serious. ANU vice-chancellor and Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt wrote in The Guardian earlier this week the likelihood of the 16 polls published during the campaign predicting such a narrow range of results was greater than 100,000 to 1. He went on to suggest that "the polls have been manipulated, probably unintentionally, to give the same answers as each other". Ipsos director Jessica Elgood told me Schmidt's analysis should be included in an industry-wide review, in which Ipsos would gladly participate.

But it's not just the pollsters who need to reflect on their approach in the wake of this election - the Herald and Age newsrooms have some decisions to make. Many months before the election, so therefore not influenced by the polls' failure, we agreed that we would reassess our arrangements after May 18. From this week we have no ongoing contract with Ipsos or any other polling company. This is not to say we will never poll again. As chief political correspondent David Crowe says, accurate polling can be an invaluable reality check when journalists are faced with relentless spinning by political parties, interest groups and think tanks. However, we have a responsibility to put our finite reporting resources into journalism that best serves our readers. During this campaign our best reporting on the mood of the electorate was done by journalists out on the road (and I don't mean the carefully controlled campaign buses organised by the political parties). Michael Koziol's report from Queensland midway through the race, which suggested Labor was in deep trouble north of the Tweed, was informed by old-fashioned boot-leather journalism. Nick Bonyhady detected no dramatic shift to Labor as he travelled from Hobart to Cairns on public transport.

The cadence of polls is also worth examining. Very few would argue the country has been well-served by the political class's obsession with the fortnightly Newspolls, which Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull weaponised to their advantage and their demise. "Did polling create a parallel universe where all the activity of the past few years, especially the leadership coups and prime ministerial changes, were based on illusions, phantoms of public opinion that did not exist," Labor pollster John Utting wrote in The Australian Financial Review. If we do decide to continue publishing polls in the future perhaps we should reconsider the way we report them. After all, polls are even at their very best just a snapshot of a small section of voters at a specific time and place, not a crystal ball. It will take months for us to work out what we're going to do at the Herald and The Age. And our decision will take into account what explanation the pollsters can deliver as they work out where they went wrong. Tory Maguire is the national editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.