We are pleased to welcome back Australia’s living economic legend Saul Eslake to our Education Geographics Webinars on November 15, when Saul will focus on the impact of the US Presidential Election on the Australian economy in the lead-up to the Australian General Election due by May 2025.
Whoever wins, the outcome of the United States elections for the US President and for the Congress will have profound impacts for the next four years on world trade, on global inflation, and our regional stability.
For example, big increases in US Tariffs could force up inflation in the United States, and this would soon be felt in Australia, increasing inflationary pressures and reducing the likelihood of Interest Rate cuts in the lead-up to the Australian election.
It’s for clients only and If you are a client of Education Geographics, Health Geographics, or Australian Development Strategies and you haven’t yet received your invitation, get in touch with us via https://www.educationgeographics.net.au/contact-us/
I was interviewed by 2GB’s John Stanley this week, following my articles in the Australian Financial Review and my social media post on last weekend’s Queensland State election.
The interview with John was longer than usual and gave us a chance to deal a bit more in-depth with the political implications of the State election for the major political parties and for the Federal election, due next May.
The story is headlined:Queensland vote a pivotal moment for Greens,as it analyses the electoral fortunes of the Greens since the party rose from the ashes of the old Australian Democrats 20 years ago. The story explored the demographics underlying the fact that the Greens’ vote has remained frozen at between eight and ten percent since the early noughties and speculated on what the new aggressive Greens approach to the ALP could mean last weekend for both the Greens and the ALP. And of course for the LNP.
The article is headed Labor can take no comfort from Queensland Election. The implications of the results for Queensland Federal seats are canvassed and this now depends largely on how effectively the new Premier David Crisafulli governs the state during the next six months and on whether State Labor can accept the verdict of the electorate and move to recover its lost support outside the southeast corner of the State. The story outlines the demographics the Greens lost, in pursuit of primary votes from Labor by blocking Labor Legislation in the Senate with the support of the Coalition, rather than by working with the Labor Government to secure acceptable amendments. The story also charts some of the impacts of the election boondoggles offered by the State ALP Government before the election. Did any of them work?
You can do some of your own analysis of these questions by looking at the map prepared by our ADS spatial science expert Dr Jeanine McMullan. https://egs-au.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=3e7a2e2105974c06bf22ea7d4991a32f Jeanine has published the Esri map to the public, so access is free. It shows the ALP/LNP 2PP votes and swings and the Greens Primary votes and Swings. To help you get some feel for the impact of the State seat results for the next Federal election, Jeanine has superimposed the boundaries of Queensland Federal seats over the state seat results.
Last weekend The Australian Financial Review published my short review of the role of religion and ethnicity in Australian politics since the 1960s.
My article was written in the context of the rise of the Muslim vote in the UK election last week and the implications of this outcome for the Australian General election, scheduled for 2025.
I based part of the article on the huge swings which took place against the UK Labour Party in electorates with large Muslim populations and canvassed how this sort of campaign and result could be translated into Australian Federal electorates, virtually all of which are now held by Labor MPs.
I did some follow up interviews with 2GB, including one with John Stanley, which you can access here:
The interview with John Stanley was one of a series of interviews we have done profiling of Australian elections. This time we canvassed the Financial Review article and rise of strategic voting and the additional impact this could have for ALP MPs in 2025 , as it did for Liberal MPs during the 2022 challenges from Teal candidates.
Political Opinion polls can be pretty unreliable at times, but lately they’ve all been moving in the same direction, which is down for the satisfaction for Anthony Albanese as PM, down for the ALP primary vote, down for the Two Party Preferred Labor vote and down for the job the Albanese Govt is doing on some of it’s key portfolios, such as the Environment, the Economy and Immigration.
On Monday we had two polls telling a similar story: the Resolve Strategic in the Sydney Morning Herald and Freshwater Strategy in the Australian Financial Review and they show a continued slide for Labor in evidence since the Voice Referendum support began fading in mid-2023.
I canvas some of the underlying demographics to this trend with John Stanley on Monday and the link the podcast is here: ……
Health Geographics has won the prestigious InfoSol 2024 Award for the Best Business Dashboard 2024, for its Private Health Care Australia Dash App.
Paul Grill, the CEO of Infosol personally congratulated HGS and its CEO Dr Jeanine McMullan on the achievement which has previously been won by major international marketing companies such as Salesforce.
Paul said: “Congratulations to you and your team for an outstanding presentation and submission. The Best Business Dashboard represents the best business use case and result and the judges really liked your use of the cube.”
The nine-cell Cube was developed by Dr McMullan to explain the profiles of more than 14 million Australians with private health insurance. It shows increasing per capita membership of health care funds on one axis and increase benefits paid per member on the other axis.
Dr McMullan said: “Some demographics on the Cube have very high levels of private health insurance, but draw very little in benefits per member, while others have relatively low levels of insurance, but rely heavily on benefits provided by health insurance, due to chronic illness.
“We used the Cube as a consistent measure across both the Dashboard and the associated Map, as it explains not just the importance of demographic profiles of PHA members, but also the significance of where they live for policy makers and politicians.”
Health Geographics is a sister company of Education Geographics, which won the InfoSol 2023 Award for the Most Valuable Dashboard.
EGS and HGS were established, using the knowledge base developed by their parent company Australian Development Strategies over 50 years of profiling spatial data on political, demographic and economic trends across Australia.
Former Australian Senator and ADS Founder John Black congratulated the HGS team on the new interactive dashboard design and its associated online Esri map.
Mr Black said: “As a former Australian Senator, I know how hard it can be to access National Cabinet Ministers and to hold their attention for more than 30 seconds when you do.
“So, when Private Healthcare Australia asked us to help, we looked at it from the point of view of the person on the other side of the desk, the Cabinet Minister, who wants to know who pays and who benefits.
“We worked with our stats team to break down and model a huge wall of data from the health bureaucracy into two dependent variables: the percentage of persons with health insurance and the benefits per member.
“Our Health Geographics CEO Dr Jeanine McMullan then designed an innovative multi-dimensional cube, tracking who pays on one axis and who benefits on the other and describing each coloured and numbered cell with its own key political stereotype which was displayed on a map of Australian electorates.
“Our award-winning designer Reg Kernke linked the stereotypes to an Infosol Dashboard which summarised each cell in the Cube in both words and tables.
“In a series of moving dials for each Australian electorate, the dashboard goes on to show health indicators – along with the numbers of swinging voters and how they voted last election.
“The dashboard does a deep dive into the demographics of each cell on the cube and links that with our national database with a thousand variables across 50 detailed interactive charts and tables of the top seats.
“And finally, the Cabinet Minister could zoom in on our national ESRI map to find their own electorate and see how it scored on the key economic, demographic and political drivers.”
The CEO of Private Healthcare Australia Dr Rachel David congratulated Health Geographics and Dr McMullan.
“Private Healthcare Australia (PHA) engaged Health Geographics to develop and design a dashboard (demographic mapping tool) to assist with its engagement and policy advocacy with the Australian Government, and to support member health funds better understand the changing demographics of private health insurance members and how best to address the needs of their customers.
“Health Geographics developed an accessible, easy to use visual asset which provides a demographic analysis, profiling and mapping of PHI membership across Australia and mapped data from PHA, Australian Bureau of Statistics, including the latest census data to specific federal electorates, including information on age, profession, cultural background and income bands which provides an insight into what members are expecting of both private health insurers and government.
“PHA is working with the Australian Government to ensure the private health system is fit for purpose, the participation levers for private insurance are appropriately targeted and the needs of the Australian public are met now and into the future.
“In 2023, Health Geographics updated the dashboard with the latest demographic data and electorate mapping to ensure it is current and effective. The upgrade included providing secure access to member health funds for use in research, evaluating, delivering and designing better quality products and services, and developing pro-consumer policy.
I caught up with John Stanley from 2GB/4BC on Tuesday night for an informal chat about an election review article I’d written for the Australian Financial Review on Monday. Here is a .pdf link to that page.
John and I talked about demographic and political events and themes over the timeline since the May 21, Federal 2022 election, including the curious cases of State and Federal leaders from supposedly opposing parties, and why they manage to share what, for them and their constituents, can be a mutually beneficial political relationship, as Frenemies.
As I was often told when I was a member of the Australian Senate: Your enemies aren’t the ones sitting opposite you mate, they’re the ones behind you.
I’ve just finished writing a longer piece for the AFR on the long term Australian demographic trends dominating Federal politics now and into the next decade, which is in the AFR Easter Edition today. I hope you enjoy it.
There’s an hilarious cartoon in the Australian Financial Review today, with a story from me below it. My op ed piece runs through the elections and by-elections we’ve had since the last Federal election on May 21 2022. There’s some good news in there for the Government I think, from the evidence and explanations of why it’s occurring.
Opinion polls are useful indicators to track public opinion, but by-elections and elections (including the big Brisbane Council ballot) are even more useful. It’s one thing for voters to tell someone on the phone how they are thinking of voting at the time, but altogether different when they actually front up to the booth and do it. And there’s more of them of course at an election.
Personal votes need to be taken into account here. The swing against Governments at by-elections tends to occur when it’s a Government sitting members personal vote being lost and if the Government is unpopular at the time, then that can get added to it. So they can get pretty big and bad news for a Government, if it is on the nose at the time, as we saw during the Whitlam Government in Bass.
But if a very popular Opposition MP retires, and the Government is travelling reasonably well with its constituents, we need to consider that the personal vote for the Opposition MP retiring was taken from the Government’s local candidate in the first place. The return of this vote to the Government candidate at the by-election isn’t a swing, just a reset. That’s why Aston’s figures looked good for the Albanese Government and the Dunstan figures looked pretty good for the Malinauskas SA State Government last weekend.
What demographic modelling shows us is an approximation of this personal vote and thus we can take it into account. I started researching personal votes and donkey votes 50 years ago when working for Don Dunstan, the then SA Premier, after whom the SA seat was named. We had a rare occurrence at the time with simultaneous Upper and Lower House elections and a decent set of rolls and, from memory, few minor parties to cloud the major party vote in the upper house. (You can do the same sort of thing with Senate and Reps votes, but it’s a lot harder these days with so many minor parties and more strategic voting.) I was able to isolate the donkey votes, get to the personal votes for the sitting members and the personal vote estimates was very close to demographic residuals for models we were doing at the time. So a strong demographic model, possible then in SA due to a range of demographic, economic and social factors, provided a good estimate of the vote the party could get at the relevant election and a pointer to the personal vote of the candidates.
We’ve been tracking personal votes and party votes ever since for most Federal and some State polls and the evidence tends to hold up pretty well when we look at the outcome for by-elections.
It’s interesting in that the personal vote is just that: personal. An MP in a city seat with a big population turnover tends to have a small personal vote, as the voter who’s been met in electoral office is often voting in another seat the next election and voters meet at social or sporting functions often live in other seats. But a country MP in a stable seat talks to voters who tend to live and play and work and vote in the same seat. This means when the MP meets someone it’s a local voter. And the MP builds up friends and personal contacts. Personal votes can also be negative, for cases where an MP antagonises his or her local constituents on a regular basis. I tend not to mention personal votes in election reports unless they are a couple standard errors of estimate above or below predicted votes. And, for the record, the best performing MPs in the current Parliament are female Labor representatives of regional and rural seats. And long-standing MPs for the Coalition also do well. If you’re ever running a campaign, these factors are taken into account. Or should be.
The other factor taken into account in the article is the voters’ desire for balance between parties at the state and federal levels, especially in Queensland. This is why winning State elections is not necessarily a good thing for Federal Governments of the same party. Anyway, check out the article. I hope its useful.
I’ve written a profile of the by-election on Saturday in Dunkley for the Australian Financial Review, putting it in the context of our 2022 National Election Personal Vote Profiles and our profiles in Aston and Fadden.
The three individual seat profiles use ADS modelling of personal votes to estimate the impact of the retirement or death of an MP with a large personal vote on the subsequent by-election result.
The personal vote for sitting members tends to be higher for provincial city or rural seats, as they are demographically more stable and voters are more likely to live and work in the same seat. These voters are easier for sitting members to locate at work or home and they tend to live in the same seat for a few elections and so are more likely to have a personal knowledge of their MP either socially through family sporting events, or officially, if they seek assistance with a federal Government matter, to do with transfer payments for example. The personal vote therefore builds up over time for these MPs.
To illustrate this point ADS modelling of the 2022 General Election showed a personal vote of more than ten percent for three female ALP MPs in Richmond, (Justine Elliot), Eden-Monaro (Kristy McBain) and Corangamite (Libby Coker) and without this personal vote, Labor would not have won their seats in 2022. So the personal vote is crucial when it comes to winning marginal seats.
Because the average personal vote of sitting Government members is typically about three to five percent, this figure is often confused by commentators with an average by-election swing of three to five percent against the Government if the Government MP leaves office unexpectedly in a by-election.
Unfortunately this simplistic use of swings comes unstuck when an Opposition MP with a big personal vote, such as we saw in Aston, retires and the resultant re-allocation of his personal vote back to the Labor tally produces a swing towards the Government. Oops.
Knowing this personal figure for the seat as a whole, we then profile the range of by-election swings for individual seats across booth catchments and profile these against key demographics across the same booth catchments.
This is a tricky exercise, especially with increasing numbers of pre-poll votes in a limited number of booths and a small number of matched pairs of booths. So caution is exercised.
But when we are looking at a strong inferential relationship significant to more than 99 percent confidence levels between votes and big demographics like Female Professionals and Male Construction workers in Dunkley, it is possible to make some comments, especially when it is consistent with longer term trends at general elections and demographic break downs of regular aggregated polling data.
Our Senior Demographic Mapper Dr Jeanine McMullan used our polling booth catchments to show some of the spatial links between Dunkley vote swings and Dunkley demographics at the by-election. Using the various layers, the reader can form their own impressions from the relationship between the swing to Labor and Professional Women and between the swing to the Liberals and Men working in Construction.
🎓I put on my Education Geographics hat today to write an opinion piece for the Australian Financial Review for Tuesday’s paper and you’ll find it now in the online edition on this link (behind the paywall):
The story discusses the choices confronting all parents when they choose a school for their kids. Essentially, my experience profiling schools over the last 20 years doing hundreds of detailed school profiles points to the balance between aspiration and affordability as being the key determinant of school choice. 🏣
As more women have entered the workforce during the last two decades, they have been able to afford a greater range of choices for their kids, across the three sectors. You can see that in the little chart here on Australian Female Participation Rates and Independent School Market share. As the female jobs increased, so did Independent Market Share. It’s the job itself that pays the school fees and the actual size of the pay check is not as significant.
