This much is clear: 100% of pollsters have got no idea

OPINION: Enough is enough/not enough! New Zealanders have/haven't spoken. They are clearly unhappy/delighted with the road this Government is taking and support/don't support the Opposition's Budget tactics. Simon Bridges may be in trouble.

If you are a TV One viewer, then read the first of the options above. If you prefer TV3, then read the second. That's the only way I can accurately comment on the two TV political polls released on Sunday night.

TV One's poll had the Government ahead of the Opposition by 66 seats to 54. The worrying trend for Labour is that National is up four points on the last poll and Labour down six. However, trying to say that National "won" the poll in an MMP environment is like saying the Phoenix is the best A-League team because Roy Krishna scored the most goals.

Meanwhile, over on TV3, the poll was totally different. The Labour ship was up three to a buoyant 50.8 per cent, while National sank four points, dangerously below the 40 per cent Plimsoll line of leadership challenges, to 37.4 per cent.

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Obviously, National supporters looked to TV One's poll for hope while Labourites crowed about the TV3 poll. I suspect mathematicians on both sides preferred the TV3 poll because Newshub used a decimal point.

I found it very difficult watching Dancing with the Stars straight after the polls. When Clint Randell didn't score as highly for his beautiful waltz as I thought he deserved, I found myself switching to TV One to see what the judges on that channel scored him.

The major factor common to both polls was the slow and painful demise of Simon Bridges. As a leftie who closely watched Phil Goff, David Shearer, David Cunliffe and Andrew Little fail to capture the imagination of the public and then be mercilessly cast aside – with the notable exception of Little, who mercilessly cast himself aside – I feel I am a world authority on slow and painful demises. I could write a PhD thesis entitled The Slow and Painful Demises of New Zealand Opposition Party Leaders in the Shadow of a Beloved and Charismatic Prime Minister (2008-2019).

Bridges secured a good hit on the Government with the Treasury "hack" that was not a hack. Trouble is, it was the way he did it that saw – if the polls are to be believed, and they are not – the majority of New Zealanders and a third of National Party supporters disapprove of his behaviour.

Think what Jacinda Ardern would have done had she been Opposition leader. She would have announced that the Treasury website was "vulnerable". She would then, in her best Head Prefect voice, refuse to release Budget details early, subtly dropping hints that effectively spelled out details of the Budget. "I'm only here because I'm worried about the security of the Treasury website," she would say. "I've informed Treasury of the breach, they've fixed it, but I'm not going to use it to score petty political points."

People would be impressed that she found a weakness in the Treasury website and even more impressed that she didn't try to make political capital out of it. Trying not to score political points on an issue is the best way I know of to score political points.  

So what is there to learn from the two polls? Very little. The polls in the recent Australian election got it wrong. The polls in Britain are not telling us much about the possible makeup of the next government, with four parties regularly getting between 15 per cent and 25 per cent. Britain's first past the post system makes predictions even more difficult and opinion polls even more useless.

However, the polls in the US that said Hillary Clinton was more popular than Donald Trump were accurate, as she scored a couple of million more votes. It was the ones that said she would win that were wrong.

I find myself in agreement with former prime minister Jim Bolger, when he famously said, in 1993, "bugger the pollsters". The polls had predicted a comfortable National win and, on election night, it looked like a hung Parliament, with Jim Anderton holding the balance of power.

It's probably Bolger's most famous and affectionately known line, though I suspect that if he had asked pollsters what to say, they would have organised expensive polling and focus groups that would have recommended something like "despite pre-election predictions turning out to be inaccurate, we may be looking at a hung Parliament or a very small majority".

Opinion polls are vitally important to the media and the pundit industry. That's why, even though it was obvious that the two TV polls showed very different results, neither TV channel would acknowledge that the poll on the other channel existed.

In the past, politicians often ignored polls, but not today. They are as poll-driven as everyone else. Watch nervous National Party reef-fish MPs slowly but surely see to the slow and painful demise of Simon Bridges with death by a thousand polls, surveys, workshops and focus groups.