The Australian Election Study, a comprehensive post-election survey that sundry political scientists have been conducting after every federal election since 1987, delivered yesterday its report on the May federal election and attendant dataset, which provides results to 316 survey questions from 2070 respondents.
• Questions on the most important election issue reinforce what has long been evident from an array of sources, namely that the cost-of-living was far the most salient issue in the minds of voters. Of note is that only 7% of Coalition voters named health as the most important issue, compared with 18% for Labor voters and 16% for Greens. It was also the biggest area of Labor advantage, 50% rating Labor as having the best policies compared with 14% for the Coalition. Out of ten issues canvassed, the only one on which the Coalition was favoured (by 28% to 22%) was national security. A graph on page six representing results over six elections going back to 2010 shows this was the first at which Labor had the advantage on economic management and taxation.
• Peter Dutton had the worst popularity rating of any leader out of 14 elections since the series’ inception, scoring an average 3.2 on a ten-point scale, substantially defeating the record of 3.8 set by Scott Morrison in 2022. Anthony Albanese’s 5.3 ranked tenth out of 28.
• Party alignment, which has in fact been quite a bit stickier in Australia over time than in other liberal democracies, maintained a progressive decline evident since 2010, with a new peak of 25% saying they do not identify with any political party.
• Support for the Coalition has been tanking among millennials (born 1981 to 1996), which the survey authors interpret as a rebuff to the assumption that voters naturally gravitate to conservatism as they age. The Coalition has maintained its high level of support among the nation’s diminishing flock of boomers. Conversely, no clear generational effect is evident in the decline in the Labor primary vote. Gender gaps remained much as they have since the end of the Howard era, with the Coalition vote nine points higher among men than women and the Labor vote five points lower.
• While satisfaction with democracy is more resilient than recent survey evidence indicates in the United States and United Kingdom, only 74% said they would have voted without compulsory voting, which was supported by 67%, both results being the lowest going back to 1996. One Nation voters were far the most distrustful of government, with 74% holding that those in government “usually look after themselves”, with other categories of voter ranging from 24% to 48%.
• Support for republicanism is on the rise (56-44 in favour), while lowering the voting age to 16 is wildly unpopular (13% support, 87% oppose). Forty-two per cent favour four-year terms, compared with 30% for the status quo; 36% favour term limits for parliamentarians with 31% opposed.
• “Trust in US to defend Australia” collapsed to 54%, far the lowest going back to 1993, and quite a lot lower than during the first Trump administration (69% after the 2019 election). The perception of China as a security threat soared from 18% in 2016 to 32% in 2019 to 55% in 2022, but has now moderated to 41%.
My own preliminary fiddling with the data has focused on the phenomenon of gender differences being especially pronounced among younger voters, as men weaned on Joe Rogan if not Andrew Tate rebel against the feminist and progressive orthodoxies that shape the worldview of most young women. A report in The Guardian cites polling data showing support for Donald Trump was 16% higher among men than women in the 18-to-29 cohort, more than double the effect among the electorate as a whole. Nor was this specific to the United States, with data indicating young men were twice as likely as young women to vote for Reform UK and Germany’s hard right AfD party, and a gap of fully 25% in support for South Korea’s conservative People’s Power party.
Unfortunately, the AES dataset suffers the usual problem of having had a much higher response rate among the old than the young, such that reducing it to under-30s is of limited value. Nonetheless, I offer below age-by-gender breakdowns encompassing the four age cohorts typically used by opinion pollsters for the Labor two-party vote and the Greens primary vote, the latter providing the most striking manifestation of the age-related gender difference. The red and green dots indicate vote share using the weightings provided in the AES, which are placed in the middle of bars recording the spread of the margin of error – these being notably wide in the case of those problematic younger age groups.
Labor’s two-party vote is higher among women than men in each of the four age cohorts, but not remarkably so among 18-to-34 – indeed, the biggest difference is in fact the 17.8% gap for 65-plus, and the outlier the relatively modest 4.6% gap for 50-to-64. The sample for 18-to-34 was low enough that the gender gap, wide as it appears to have been, doesn’t escape the overlap of the error bars, as would be required to demonstrate statistical significance. Conversely, it can be asserted with a high level of confidence that Labor did better among women than men among those aged 65 and over.
By contrast, the Greens primary vote chart indicates gender gaps in the expected direction of clear statistical significance among both the 18-to-34 and 35-to-49 cohorts, beyond which the party’s support is low enough that differences become difficult to discern. Even at the outer ranges of the very wide margins of error for 18-to-34, women outdo men for Greens support by 29.6% to 20.6%, with the probability that the Greens did twice as well among young women approaching 80%.
Can we please keep this thread relevant to the Australian Election Study and broadly related matters. The open thread for general discussion is here.
All power to young women
It’s an interesting split, I wonder if it will be sustained and when it first appeared?
”
Peter Dutton had the worst popularity rating of any leader out of 14 elections since the series’ inception, scoring an average 3.2 on a ten-point scale, substantially defeating the record of 3.8 set by Scott Morrison in 2022. Anthony Albanese’s 5.3 ranked tenth out of 28.
”
So Albanese is 10th most popular federal leader since Hawke came to power and Dutton is the worst federal leader and not the best thing after sliced bread as Murdoch Press and Sky after dark said. Now they behave as if he did not exist.
HBG
Not only young women. My mother, aged 102, regularly described Dutton as “awful”
Labor are now officially the only party of government.
I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.
Although there is a gender split, a majority of younger males (under 50) were still preferencing Labor over Liberals. However, there does seem to be a widening gulf between the sexes on how far to the left the under 35 are going.
Also the lowering the voting age would be foolish given how unpopular it is. The extra votes it might win for kids could be lost from older voters not approving.
Also the lowering the voting age would be foolish given how unpopular it is. The extra votes it might win for kids could be lost from older voters not approving.
++++++++++
I don’t think people called ‘B. S. Fairman’ should be given the right to vote. It is foolish in the extreme.
But thankfully me voting on your right to vote isn’t a thing – nor should it be a matter for older voters to have an opinion on whether younger people vote. It is a human right. End of story.
If Beasley was so popular in 1998, why didn’t he win the seats required to form government? I think these approvals are useless. Look at the Victorian premiers approval.
Unpopular leaders win all the time I’m afraid, mostly because voters don’t know better/are wrong. And this applies to both sides.
Also just a reminder the coalition has 42 seats, just 5 more losses or defections will mean they will have less than 1/4 seats in the parliament.
Statistics was never my strongest subject in Uni, so could someone explain to me why the female 18-34 vote Labor + Greens = >100? Is it due to the range of the spread lines?
@Catmomma
The reason is that the Labor line indicates 2PP while the Green line indicates primaries. Many of this cohort vote 1 Greens and then preference to Labor so are counted twice hence leading to over 100% if the two figures are added.
Thank you, 2/12/1972! 🙂
I thought they were both Primaries. Silly me!
So, will there be a lot of right-wing young males wondering why they ended up in the INCEL camp?
I assume leftwing females are not going to be impressed by guys going around wearing red MAGA caps while dragging their knuckles on the ground.
The comforting thought is that if there is any genetic reason why some turkeys end up singing Christmas carols, at least their genetic material will not be passed on.
Corleone – It is not a human right that extended to many people in the world – very few countries have gone that far. It is generally seen as a way of increasing voter for the left side of the electorate. It would however lead to arguments over adult laws for crimes committed under 18 etc. I just don’t see it as argument that anyone would like to have.
If Beasley was so popular in 1998, why didn’t he win the seats required to form government?
@Daniel T
Because the vote increased significantly in seats Labor already held. He still won the two party preferred by almost 51% of the vote.
@Corleone
Letting toddlers vote now, are we? Since voting is “a human right”? Anywhere you choose to draw the line will be no less arbitrary than 18. It’s not a fight worth having.
I think it should almost go without saying that the voting age should be identical to the legal age of adulthood. How people were conscripted at 18 but couldn’t vote until 21 beggars belief.
BS Fairman – why are you worried about ‘arguments’ that’s what democracy is for. Only dictatorships can steer away from ‘arguments’.
Zwaktyldsays
Yes they’ve had funny rules like when 16 year olds have enlisted they’ve also been given the vote, but then taken it away again.
If it is true that males don’t really reach ‘maturity’ until at least 25 if not 30, and that was the criterion for the vote, then we would be getting a lot more left-wing governments than seems to worry BS Fairman.
CMsays:
Friday, November 28, 2025 at 12:40 pm
@Corleone
Letting toddlers vote now, are we? Since voting is “a human right”? Anywhere you choose to draw the line will be no less arbitrary than 18. It’s not a fight worth having.
+++++++++++
who is ‘having the fight’? I see no serious proposal to have 16 year olds vote. I would support it, but no such referendum or election platform in front of me right now. I do think we can ‘get by’ with a representative system that happens not to include 16 and 17 right now, but that doesn’t make it right.
And if the line is arbitrary, I would be happy to take away the right of people 70 and older given that much of Australia’s problems from housing to social security to health seem to be caused by them…but the line isn’t arbitrary. People who engage with our public information ecosystem and take their mandatory responsibility seriously should vote.
If people understand what is at stake when voting then they should vote…and I’d rather have a high school kid who is busy learning the issues actively than some washed-up old whatever who never learnt or forgot their learning.