Author: William Bowe

What is presumably the year’s final monthly Resolve Strategic poll for Nine Newspapers reverses a movement in the Coalition’s favour in the last result, with Labor’s two-party lead out from 53-47 to 55-45. Labor is up two on the primary vote to 35% and the Coalition down three to 26%, with the Greens down one to 11% and One Nation up two to 14%. Sussan Ley nonetheless records improved personal ratings, her combined very good and good rating on the question of performance in recent weeks up six to 39% (albeit that the improvement is entirely from “good” rather than “very good”) and combined poor and very poor down four to 37%. Anthony Albanese is up four on very good plus good to 48% and down one on poor plus very poor to 43%, and his lead as preferred prime minister shifts from 39-25 to 41-26.

Also featured are questions on immigration that tell a now familiar story: after being told of a system that features “net migration intake of 316,000 per year and grants permanent visas to 185,000 people per year”, 53% rated the level too high, 4% too low and 33% about right, compared with 49%, 5% and 27% when the question was last asked in September. The 53% were then asked about six possible reasons for holding that view, with 81% ticking the box for pressure on housing prices and 52% doing so for “a loss of Australian culture and identity”. Four further questions on potential immigration policies found the most restrictive most favoured, peaking at 64% support and 13% opposition for “pausing any immigration until our housing situation has caught up”. The poll was conducted Tuesday to Sunday from a sample of 1800.

The Financial Review reports on a “jumbo-sized” poll from RedBridge Group/Accent Research conducted separately from the regular monthly series, the most recent instalment of which had a partly overlapping field work period (November 7 to November 13, compared with November 7 to 26 for the latest result). The sample of 4775, compared with 1011 from the regular poll, allows for “statistically meaningful breakdowns on the result”, notably in relation to the issue I explored by last week’s post on the Australian Election Study, namely the interaction of gender and age.

The headline result from the poll shows a less resounding Labor lead than in the poll from a fortnight ago, at 54-46 on two-party preferred (compared with 56-44), from primary votes of Labor 35% (down three), Coalition 26% (up two), and Greens 10% (up one), while repeating its extraordinary result of 18% for One Nation. Breakdowns for the four largest states have Labor leading 56-44 in New South Wales (55.3-44.7 at the election), 54-46 in Victoria (56.3-43.7) and 58-42 in Western Australia (55.8-44.2), and trailing 48-52 in Queensland (49.4-50.6).

The age-by-gender results sit well with my own findings from the Australian Election Study in showing twice as many women than men supporting the Greens among Gen Z, at 37% and 18%, with Labor doing better among the young men (44% to 31%) and the Coalition doing poorly among both (20% to 16%). In line with international trends, distinctions are much subtler among older cohorts: the gender gap for the Greens reduces to 16% to 11% among millennials, and the only other difference of significance is that One Nation are at 26% among Gen X men and 17% among women, the former eclipsing the Coalition on 24%. (UPDATE: Full report here).

UPDATE (DemosAU MRP poll): In a big day for jumbo-sized polls, DemosAU has reported what I believe to be its first MRP poll for Capital Brief, conducted October 5 to November 11 from a sample of 6528. Its national seat projection is 98 seats for Labor, 29 for the Coalition, 12 for One Nation, 11 for others and none for the Greens. One Nation are deemed to be firm in Capricornia, Flynn and Wright; leaning in Hinkler, Wide Bay, Lyne, Parkes and Riverina; and leading in Calare, Canning, Grey and Groom. Longman, Ryan, Casey and La Trobe are rated more likely than not to be gained by Labor, while teals are rated likely to gain Goldstein and lose Bradfield. Labor leads 56-44 on voting intention, from primary votes of Labor 33%, Coalition 24%, Greens 13% and One Nation 17%.

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.

Highlights from the report:

• 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%.

The latest poll from Essential Research, which seems now to be monthly, has Labor steady on 36%, the Coalition up one to 27%, the Greens up two to 11% (reversing a dip in the previous poll) and One Nation steady on 15%, with the undecided component steady on 6%. The pollster’s 2PP+ measure has Labor’s lead unchanged at 50-44, with the balance undecided. Anthony Albanese is up two on approval to 47% and down one on disapproval to 43%, while Sussan Ley is down one to 31% and up one to 44%.

For the second month in a row (and in the immediate wake of a similar exercise from Newspoll), the pollster asked respondents to name their preferred Liberal leader, recording Sussan Ley at 14% (up one on last month), Jacinta Nampijinpa Price at 11% (up one), Andrew Hastie at 8% (down two), Angus Taylor at 5% (down two), Tim Wilson at 5% (up two), Allegra Spender at 2% (down two), somebody else at 10% (down two) and unsure at 45% (up three).

A regular national mood question has a steady 35% of the view that the country is headed in the right direction compared with 47% for wrong direction, up one. Fifty-two per cent rate the permanent migration cap of 185,000 as too high, down one from September, compared with 39% for about right, down one, and 9% for too low, up two. An even 42% rate immigration generally positive and generally negative for the country, with 16% unsure.

Further questions relate to climate change, with a question on Australia’s efforts to deal with the issue recording 20% of the view that too much is being done, which has steadily mounted from 11% when Labor came to power in May 2022. Thirty per cent rate that Australia is doing enough, and 36% not enough. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Monday from a sample of 1020.

Other recent poll findings:

• As well as featuring extensive results on the government’s proposed overhaul of environment laws, an MRP poll by YouGov for the Climate Council featured a federal voting intention result showing Labor on 34%, the Coalition on 26%, One Nation on 18% and the Greens on 12%. The poll was conducted November 12 to 17 from a sample of 3530.

• Nine Newspapers (print editions – can’t find an online report) reports last week’s Resolve Strategic poll found Vladimir Putin viewed favourably 10% and unfavourably by 63%, with the balance neutral or unfamiliar, and Volodomyr Zelensky favourably by 37% and unfavourably by 12%. Trade sanctions on Russia were supported by 57% and opposed by 8%. The Sun-Herald also reported that New South Wales component of the poll, which had a sample of 551, showed 58% reckoning immigration to be too high, 5% too low and 25% about right. Forty-four per cent rated that “immigration to Australia in recent years” had had a negative impact “on people like you in NSW”, compared with 24% apiece for positive and neutral.