Miscellany: Roy Morgan, Coalition age effects, voter turnout and more

With no sign of Newspoll, Roy Morgan finds a widening of its two-party lead after a series of relatively narrow results.

We’re now five weeks without a Newspoll, which is unfortunate from my perspective as it’s time for a new post and I’ve been too busy working on my Victorian election guide (which should be up later this week) to have put much thought into how one might look. There’s always the regular Roy Morgan two-party figures from its weekly update video, which have lately found it moving to the rest of the pack by recording growth in Labor’s leads, the latest result putting it at 55-45 after a 54.5-45.5 result the previous week.

Elsewhere:

• Shaun Ratcliff at YouGov offers findings from its Australian Cooperative Election Survey, conducted during the May election campaign, that appear to suggest the age effect for the Coalition primary vote doesn’t amount to much up to the age of about 40, but accelerates dramatically thereafter. The implication that support for the Coalition is heavily concentrated among the very oldest voters would not appear to bode well for them in the short to medium term.

Antony Green and Adrian Beaumont at The Conversation both sound off against Victoria’s retention of group voting tickets for the Legislative Council, making the state the last bastion of preference harvesting following recent reforms in Western Australia.

• The turnout for the recent state by-election for North West Central in Western Australia, which has the state’s second highest indigenous population share, came in at just 47.7%, or 5335 out of an enrolment of 11,189. The Nationals have blamed the Western Australian Electoral Commission for insufficient advertising. Merome Beard of the Nationals won the seat with 3071 votes after preferences (60.5%) to 2008 for Liberal candidate Kim Baston (39.5%).

• Rod Culleton, who ran at the May election as the lead Senate candidate of the Great Australian Party in Western Australia, has been charged with providing false information on his nomination form. This included a declaration that he was not an undischarged bankrupt when the National Personal Insolvency Index identified him as such, although Culleton insists this was not the case. Culleton was elected as a One Nation Senator in Western Australia in 2016 but subsequently disqualified after being declared bankrupt by the Federal Court.

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.

706 comments on “Miscellany: Roy Morgan, Coalition age effects, voter turnout and more”

Comments Page 15 of 15
1 14 15
  1. Granny Annysays:
    Wednesday, October 12, 2022 at 1:12 am

    It will now be well into tomorrow in the east. I hope you are still there.

    Cookers have claimed that toxins deliberately inserted into mRNA COVID vaccine by the Deep State have bee programmed to activate on the 10th of October. All us sheep who lined up to be vaccinated will drop dead today. Once we are all out of the way the Cookers will rule the world.

    https://twitter.com/MikeCarlton01/status/1579213894333403136?cn=ZmxleGlibGVfcmVjcw%3D%3D&refsrc=email

    So the Cookers are the Deep State, the Deep State is doG and the Cookers are the chosen ones, or the Cookers are full of shit.

  2. Actually it’s a “bit” stupid having everyone dropping off the perch at the same time. All those decomposing bodies will make most places unlivable.

    But no one said they were smart.

  3. Interesting analysis of May election demographics by John Black… he was one of the first to predict the Teal wave

    Updated Oct 11, 2022 – 6.11pm,
    first published at 2.34pm

    Taxpayers in the firing line of the stage three tax cut debate, led by our forgetful Treasurer Jim Chalmers, were the same taxpayers who elected Labor to majority government.
    Our modelling of the election result showed several large and influential traditional Liberal-voting groups had been progressively alienated by decisions made by the Morrison Coalition government.

    Western Australia had become a wasteland for the Coalition after the federal government’s support of mining billionaire Clive Palmer’s legal challenge to border closures imposed by the popular state Labor government of Mark McGowan, and due to miners who were generally sick of the climate wars.
    Across the country, a fast-growing group of female professionals had wearied of Coalition delays on climate change and a national integrity watchdog, and were encouraged by the growth of teal independents.

    And hard-working and high-achieving Chinese Australians were angry at the government’s failure to separate them from its criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. They were joined by other aspirational migrants from the UK, Ireland, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

    At the same time, Australian family doctors, increasingly part-time and female, had seen their practices ground down to the brink of extinction via real cuts to Medicare rebates under successive Coalition governments. Female general practitioners are a group of prodigious networkers who figure prominently among new teal MPs.

    These groups combined across the country to deliver to Labor candidates the seats of Hasluck, Pearce, Swan and Tangney in Western Australia, Bennelong, Reid and Robertson in NSW, Chisholm and Higgins in Victoria, and Boothby in South Australia.

    Labor’s 2022 election promise to retain the Coalition’s stage three income tax cuts meant these disaffected groups of better educated, professional Australians on higher salaries could swing their votes behind Labor, or in some cases, teal candidates, without having to pay for their decision with higher taxes and lower disposable incomes.

    Without these pro-Labor demographic swings, Labor would have lost the 2022 election, as the party’s vote tanked among demographically declining groups of older and increasingly conservative Labor voters in the first- and second-income quartiles, who rely on welfare churn to top up family incomes from insecure, semi-skilled and unskilled blue-collar jobs.

    https://www.afr.com/policy/tax-and-super/political-cost-of-tax-cut-tampering-irreversible-20221011-p5bote

  4. While our risk of death by nuclear war – and from boredom about endless S3 tax cut speculation – has waxed over recent times, the risk of death by asteroid strike might have eased a little:

    https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/nasa-asteroid-strike-successful-results-in-big-nudge-leaving-long-tail-of-debris-20221012-p5bp1d.html

    If the dinosaurs had cracked this technology they’d maybe be with us still today, and our dinosaur equivalents on Poll Bludger would be debating the disturbing development of Dino-wokeness in the saurian world.

Comments Page 15 of 15
1 14 15

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *