Longstanding market research firm Newspoll has announced plans to drastically scale back its  operations.

The company has been a fixture of Australian public life for decades and has regularly released polls via The Australian newspaper on a range of political and social issues.

“We’ve decided to reduce the scope of our work basically because political polling is just too volatile and expensive these days,” a spokesperson said.

“In addition, the advent of Peter Dutton as Opposition Leader has made our work totally redundant.

“Why should we continue to pour time, resources, and funds into an extensive national polling operation when all we really need to do is listen to what Dutton says on any issue and forecast the exact opposite outcome.

“We confidentially ran such a parallel operation in the lead-up to the Aston by-election last weekend.

“We did our usual very expensive public polling but in the end the actual by-election outcome reflected the exact opposite stance taken by Dutton and the Liberal Party he now leads.

“We firmly believe it will be the same outcome when the Voice to Parliament goes to a referendum.

“We are quite comfortable today to release our prediction that the Voice will pass the referendum test by securing a national majority vote and a majority vote in a majority of states.

“All we have done is noted Dutton’s hard ‘no’ to the Voice which means it will get a big ‘yes’ from voters.

“In fact it’ll probably romp home,” the spokesperson said.