Why what happened happened

Essential Research chances its arm at some post-election analysis. Also featured: musings on the impact of religion and ethnicity on the result.

The first pollster to put its head above the parapet post-election has been Essential Research, though it’s sensibly refraining from treating us to voting intention results for the time being. As reported in The Guardian yesterday, the pollster’s fortnightly survey focused on what respondents did do rather than what they would do, finding 48% saying their decision was made well in advance of the election, 26% saying they made up their mind in the weeks before the election, and 11% saying they made up their mind on polling day. Lest this seemingly high rate of indecision be cited as an alibi for pollster failure, the historical results of the Australian National University’s Australian Election Study – which you can find displayed on page 18 here – suggest these numbers to be in no way out of the ordinary.

The poll also found those who decided in the final weeks came down 40% for the Coalition and 31% for Labor. However, assuming the sample for this poll was as per the Essential norm of between 1000 and 1100 (which I hope to be able to verify later today), the margin of error on this subset of the total sample would have been over 5%, making these numbers statistically indistinguishable from the almost-final national primary vote totals of 41.4% for the Coalition and 33.3% for Labor. This goes double for the finding that those who decided on election day went Coalition 38% and Labor 27%, remembering this counted for only 11% of the sample.

Perhaps notable is a finding that only 22% of respondents said they had played “close attention” to the election campaign, which compares with results of between 30% and 40% for the Australian Election Study’s almost equivalent response for “a good deal of interest in the election” between 1996 and 2016. Forty-four per cent said they had paid little or no attention, and 34% some attention. These findings may be relevant to the notion that the pollsters failed because they had too many politically engaged respondents in their sample. The Guardian reports breakdowns were provided on this question for voters at different levels of education – perhaps the fact that this question was asked signifies that they will seek to redress the problem by weighting for this in future.

Also featured are unsurprising findings on issue salience, with those more concerned with economic management tending to favour the Coalition, and those prioritising education and climate change favouring Labor and the Greens.

In other post-election analysis news, the Grattan Institute offers further data illustrating some now familiar themes: the high-income areas swung against the Coalition, whereas low-to-middle income ones went solidly the other way; areas with low tertiary education swung to the Coalition, although less so in Victoria than New South Wales and Queensland.

Another popular notion is that Labor owes its defeat to a loss of support among religious voters, as a hangover from the same-sex marriage referendum and, in what may have been a sleeper issue at the cultural level, the Israel Folau controversy. Chris Bowen said in the wake of the defeat that he had encountered a view that “people of faith no longer feel that progressive politics cares about them”, and The Australian reported on Saturday that Labor MPs believed Bill Shorten blundered in castigating Scott Morrison for declining to affirm that he did not believe gay people would go to hell.

In reviewing Labor’s apparent under-performance among ethnic communities in Sydney and Melbourne, Andrew Jakubowicz and Christina Ho in The Conversation downplay the impact of religious factors, pointing to a precipitous decline in support for Christian minor parties, and propose that Labor’s promised expansion of parental reunion visas backfired on them. Intended to capture the Chinese vote in Chisholm, Banks and Reid, the actual effect was to encourage notions of an imminent influx of Muslim immigrants, “scaring both non-Muslim ethnic and non-ethnic voters”.

However, I’m not clear what this is based on, beyond the fact that the Liberals did a lot better in Banks than they did in neighbouring Barton, home to “very much higher numbers of South Asian and Muslim residents”. Two things may be said in response to this. One is that the nation’s most Islamic electorate, Watson and Blaxland, recorded swings of 4% to 5% to the Liberals, no different from Banks. The other is that the boundary between Banks and Barton runs right through the Chinese enclave of Hurstville, but voters on either side of the line behaved very differently. The Hurstville pre-poll voting centre, which serviced both electorates, recorded a 4.8% swing to Labor for Barton, and a 5.7% swing to Liberal for Banks. This may suggest that sitting member factors played an important role, and are perhaps of particular significance for Chinese voters.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,732 comments on “Why what happened happened”

Comments Page 12 of 35
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  2. The Age editorial might hold more weight if we had a media that was more able to “report truthfully, responsibly and without fear or favour.”

    Too often, especially in the private media companies, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

    We have certain journalists and publications that are favoured for “briefings and leaks” by the political Parties as well as some that do little to hide their political leanings.

    The media themselves need to acknowledge their standing and whether they are upholding these standards, when they claim they deserve the protection such standards should rightfully entail.

  3. citizen

    Meanwhile, in the real world we now have a total demolition of Morrison’s pre-election claim the LNP has …

    Lies piled on lies, piled on miss information then add a bit more. Bumpkinsville really swallowed the whole shit storm hook, line & sinker.

  7. C@tmomma @ #521 Wednesday, June 5th, 2019 – 7:09 pm

    however, when The Greens’ partisans come on here every day since the election and refuse to take ANY of the blame for Labor’s election loss due to their own easily identifiable actions and statements, then what are you supposed to do?

    Hang on, even if we assume that it’s true that Labor’s loss is the Greens’ fault rather than Labor’s, the Coalition’s, Clive Palmer’s, Murdoch’s, Shorten’s, the media’s, or uninformed voters’, what problem would actually be solved by getting Greens people on an Internet forum to “take blame” for Labor losing?

    It won’t fix the 2019 election result. And it won’t help Labor win in 2022. The best prize you can possibly win is a pyrrhic victory.

    Also, trolls go away when you stop everyone stops feeding them.

  8. BK says:
    Wednesday, June 5, 2019 at 7:45 pm

    What IS this crap as pre-game “entertainment” for the state of origin game?

    It couldn’t be worse than the game itself, could it? 🙂

  10. The media themselves need to acknowledge their standing and whether they are upholding these standards, when they claim they deserve the protection such standards should rightfully entail.

    And this applies especially to the ABC whose board has too often in the past cowed to complaints of bias from the govt (mostly Liberal govts), choosing to instead focus on balance rather than objective facts.

  11. nath says:
    Wednesday, June 5, 2019 at 6:45 pm

    …”an ever increasing diminishing”…

    Er, nope.
    Sorry, just… nope.

  12. frednk says:
    Wednesday, June 5, 2019 at 8:00 pm

    Barney in Makassar
    Trouble is the media is the best option we have; and the alternative is far worse.

    Yep, but the editorial could have been taken from any journalism textbook.

    Reality is very different and the media themselves need to take some responsibility.

  15. The AFP raid on the ABC could turn out to be a massive own goal for Dutton and Morrison if it inspires more journos to do a critical examination of the LNP.

    To remind people of what the AFP raids are about, ABC online has conveniently repeated the original 2017 story.

    The Afghan Files

    Defence leak exposes deadly secrets of Australia’s special forces

    By the National Reporting Team’s Dan Oakes and Sam Clark

    Updated 11 Jul 2017, 8:08am
    Published 11 Jul 2017, 6:06am

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-11/killings-of-unarmed-afghans-by-australian-special-forces/8466642

  17. At what stage will buyers’ remorse kick in?

    Campaign promise to enact tax cuts by 30 June when Morrison got the GG to agree to writs being returned only by 28 June?

    Claim of “strong economy” totally destroyed?

    Politically inspired AFP raids on the media?

  19. Our AFP? How can they know so little?


    “What’s a Tardis?” one AFP officer said when he saw the word. “It’s like an editing suite,” someone replied.

  20. Possum Comitatus@Pollytics
    2h2 hours ago
    Imagine this bloke in 1980s Joh era Qld?

    There is no corruption, the law says they’re not allowed to do it!

    :large

  22. On the “government does not instruct the AFP etc” I’m sure they don’t. Just like newspaper owners don’t instruct editors every single day.

    The trick is putting the right people in the right positions. Ones you know will more than likely act in a way you’d agree with.

    I have no idea why this seems to be a difficult concept for some.

  24. Blobbit

    If you read Duttons statement carefully it is full of holes. For example he says he was not informed of the raid timing before and his office was informed when the raids occurred.

    So somebody else in his office could have been informed of the raids before hand.
    Somebody else in his office could have arranged the timing and had it reported when they occurred.
    He could have instructed somebody else how he wanted the raids to go down.

    He has NOT said his office had no involvement.

  25. Blobbit @ #572 Wednesday, June 5th, 2019 – 6:30 pm

    On the “government does not instruct the AFP etc” I’m sure they don’t. Just like newspaper owners don’t instruct editors every single day.

    The trick is putting the right people in the right positions. Ones you know will more than likely act in a way you’d agree with.

    I have no idea why this seems to be a difficult concept for some.

    To be fair to Bevan Shields that tweet was from 2017.

  27. If these media agencies need to be raided for security reasons, why has it taken more than a year to do so? It obviously wasn’t that important.

  28. The secrecy offenses including passing on information relate to the 2018 powers by Christian Porter that Liberal and Labor both voted for. The metadata records were in the 2015 powers drafted by Turnbull. We loony leftwingers objected at the time but Bill and Dreyfus knew better.
    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-05/why-raids-on-australian-media-present-clear-threat-to-democracy/11183396
    And
    https://www.sbs.com.au/news/sweeping-changes-to-espionage-treason-and-secrecy-laws-as-foreign-interference-bills-pass

  29. Dio:

    I asked the same question yesterday in relation to the Smethurst raid. The ABC reports date back even longer to 2017.

  35. Can we just call a spade a freaking shovel here? With the benefit of hindsight the armchair generals can say stuff like this tonight:

    The secrecy offenses including passing on information relate to the 2018 powers by Christian Porter that Liberal and Labor both voted for. The metadata records were in the 2015 powers drafted by Turnbull. We loony leftwingers objected at the time but Bill and Dreyfus knew better.

    But if you care to be honest, instead of just wanting to find a way to keep stabbing at dead men, then you would acknowledge that if Labor HADN’T voted with the government wrt those laws, just before election year, the Morrison/Dutton government would have unleashed the mother of all national security scare campaigns from then until the election.

    The sort of bravery some here are advocating Labor should have engaged in, has a descriptor in politics, and that is ‘crazy brave’.

    So, bravehearts behind the keyboards, what would you rather have had, a wipe out of 2004 proportions, or a virtual status quo result that at least gives Labor some hope of clawing back government next time?

    Don’t forget how impotent are the pure.

  36. Socrates, Blobbit:

    Re Martin Kane.

    I repost my question from 18:11 (before the latest round of complete idiocy took off)…

    Anyone of youse legal eagles know in which court Martin Kane is currently a Registrar?

    In 2017 it was “Nowra Local Court”, which doesn’t seem like it would be a hotbed of threats to national security (though it is close to HMAS Albatross a naval air station and various other defence establishments). Of course any judicial officer meeting the requirements of the legislation is able to sign the AFP warrant, but one would have though that people would be extra careful.

    It seems quite strange that the AFP would use a registrar from Nowra Local Court! I would’ve thought Federal Magistrate (Federal Circuit Court?) or even Federal Court Judge given the obvious implications.

  38. citizen @ #567 Wednesday, June 5th, 2019 – 8:23 pm

    At what stage will buyers’ remorse kick in?

    Campaign promise to enact tax cuts by 30 June when Morrison got the GG to agree to writs being returned only by 28 June?

    Claim of “strong economy” totally destroyed?

    Politically inspired AFP raids on the media?

    It won’t kick in at all. People can still buy umpty dozen investment properties and get eleventy thousand per year free money from the government. What’s not to like?

  41. Local Court Magistrates or Registrars are the usual source for warrants. They take the process of being satisfied of the requirements to issue the warrant very seriously but they are only as good as the info they are given.

  43. Socrates:

    If they keep their jobs the Liberals will be in power till the Arctic has melted.

    So you’re tipping an early election, then?

  45. Remorse is what’s left after the pocket is empty.
    A distance to go before the housing reality, the wages stagnation and the debt collectors knock.
    In the meantime the third world regime elected at the last election are free to pillage at will, the buyers having sold away their rights.
    Good work to all!

  47. citizen @ #567 Wednesday, June 5th, 2019 – 8:23 pm

    At what stage will buyers’ remorse kick in?

    Campaign promise to enact tax cuts by 30 June when Morrison got the GG to agree to writs being returned only by 28 June?

    Claim of “strong economy” totally destroyed?

    Politically inspired AFP raids on the media?

    The reality is none of those. Not in any meaningful way, anyways.

    The next election isn’t until 2022. By then all of this, absolutely all of it, will be gone, forgotten, and forgiven.

    The Coalition is being brutally efficient with their politics. Expect more of it.

  48. Cat

    Medicare for all is called extreme by the GOP. So is doing FDR style government.

    This despite mainstream US voter support. You need to get real. Stop dismissing data you don’t like.

  49. Cat the legislation used for the raids is over 100 years old. As a wedge the Greens have picked a non starter.
    Those that are sick of this; how does labor deal with this misinformation?

  50. guytaur says:
    Wednesday, June 5, 2019 at 9:18 pm

    There is a reason One Nation also went for a People’s Bank as the Greens have.

    The reason is both the Lib-kin and ON are troll-outfits. The ‘People’s Bank’ is an empty box.

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