Here’s a fantastic Esri map done by Australian Development Strategies and Education Geographics Senior Mapper Dr Jeanine McMullan. It’s online, completely interactive, public and you can email it to your fellow election tragics. You can blow it up, reduce it, drag it around or select an address and see how it rated on each layer. Open it up at the link below, and then click on the little button in the top right corner of the page, to get some tips on how t o use it.
Among the other buttons at top right of the map, there are, from left, layers for all the key variables which decided who won the 2019 election, there’s bookmarks for the major regions, so you can go there directly, there’s a score sheet of key indicators under every screen being viewed with standardised scores (move the map around and watch the numbers update), there’s the info button , a share button so you can post the map to social media, a seat button , so you can check out the scores for each individual seat and finally the legend for each layer displayed. Hours of fun from our mapper.
Hello again, political tragics. As we proceed with our 2019 profiling, the longer-term damage Labor has done to itself with working class men just keeps getting uglier.
The chart here tracks the declining profile of miners for the ALP since we first profiled national elections back in 1966.
In 1966 the Labor Party and Labour Movement were the same group in strong mining seats, such as Hunter, held by Labor MPs since 1910.
After male Tradies, male miners were the second most significant driver of the Labor 2PP vote in 1966. The strong mining seat of Hunter recorded a 1966 2PP vote for Labor of 74.4 percent, which was ten percent above the vote predicted by our 1966 model.
So Labor was not only winning the votes from miners, but winning extra votes from mining families, turning mining towns and cities like Newcastle and Broken Hill into Labor fortresses. If you worked in the mines, you were in the union and if you were in the union, you voted Labor and so did your family and your neighbours.
From 1966, the vote for Labor in mining seats began a long-term decline, with the profile for miners falling into negative territory in 1998. By 2019 male miners were as big a negative driver for Labor as they had been a positive driver in 1966. In other words, you were more likely to find miners in Coalition seats than Labor seats and the stats were significant to more than 99.9 percent confidence levels.
In 2019, the three seats with the largest 10 percent plus swings to the Coalition were Dawson, Capricornia and the above seat of Hunter, three of the top eight seats for male miners as a share of the male workforce.
The first two of these mining seats – Dawson and Capricornia – are now held by the Queensland LNP, with Hunter, the former rock-solid Labor seat now reduced to marginal status on 52.5 percent 2PP for Labor.
In fact, of the top eight seats for male miners, all but Hunter now elect non-Labor MPs.
To add insult to injury, when we were modelling the swings to the Coalition across these three mining seats, not only did they record ten percent plus swings to the Coalition, but these swings averaged five percent greater in each seat than the national swing model was predicting.
So miners are voting for the Coalition, so are their families and their neighbours. The model from 1966 has been turned completely on its head.
The mining fortress for Labor among working class men in the mines has fallen. Rebuilding it seems a task too far for the Labor party by 2022, if it remains fixated on fighting back the Green challenge to its MPs in its inner urban Green Left seats. The miners don’t want to pay for them anymore.
To quote Labor’s great Finance Minister from the Hawke Government WA Senator Peter Walsh: if you base your policy on the demands of a minor party, you are destined to become one.
Hi again, election tragics. We’re currently sifting through the statistical entrails of Saturday’s election, looking for key demographic characteristics of the ALP and Coalition votes and swings.
Peeling back the layers to find the underlying linkages between demographics and votes is time consuming and we’re also a bit busy working in the real world at the moment, running Education Geographics.
To keep you entertained, while we rummage around columns of stats, here’s a cute little Excel file which shows correlations going back to the election in 1966 for some key occupational indicators, male Tradies, female Clerks and Professional women.
Female clerks and male Tradies have traditionally been huge groups in the workforce, and they still dominate our Working Family Stereotype across urban marginal seats, but the proportion of Working Families in the labour market has been steadily eroded over recent decades by technological change, now known as digital disruption. Meanwhile, the workplace share of female Professionals is still growing fast and has already overtaken female Clerks, but these professionals are more clustered in the inner-cities and now dominate our Goat Cheese Circle Stereotype.
As Labor’s profile among Tradies declined during the 1980s, it increased among white collar working women, firstly among Clerks, then among Professionals, retaining a broad basis of support for Labor candidates across a majority of seats, while nudging it towards the inner cities, until Kevin Rudd’s Religious Activist profile in 2007 lifted Labor’s votes in the outer suburbs of our major capitals.
This professional support for Labor was lost in 2016, when Malcolm Turnbull led the Liberals, attracting inner urban professionals but at the expense of suburban Working Families. In 2019, under the folksy Scott Morrison as Liberal Leader, professional women turned back to Labor in droves, especially in Goat Cheese Circle seats. While this strategy held up Labor’s vote in higher SES seats, it didn’t work out quite so well with Labor’s traditional Working Families, especially in LNP seats in Queensland.
To sum up: It’s always good for a Party to win a majority of the 2PP national vote, but it’s even better to win a majority of seats. In 2019, Scott Morrison won both by attracting support from marginal seats containing traditional Labor heartland voters and skipping the Goat Cheese Circle set.
Hi there again, election tragics. Sorry I’m late with this short article but I had to ice the cupcakes for our school election day fundraising stall. No, seriously, I did. And I had to stop the five year old eating all the chocolate sprinkles. This is a quick note as I have to drop off the jellies, which have hopefully set. So apologies if there’s any errors in the comments on individual seats.
The previous piece on Stereotypes and Voting drew a big response, so I decided to re-send the same Stereotypes Excel File, which you can download and play with, but with added columns for the Activist Religions which voted against type for Kevin Rudd in 2007, as well as Aged Pensioners and also our mean dollar figures for Superannuation Income in 2015/16.
I’ve been running into a few self-funded retirees this past week and it’s fair to conclude this group won’t be swinging to Labor anytime soon. I also think, given the strong evangelical profile of the Prime Minister Scott Morrison, compared to his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull, that this group will be moving towards the Coalition tonight. Remember here that it’s the swings that are important, not their absolute level of support for either party. A small swing from a big group located in marginal seats is campaign gold for party strategists. A big swing from a small group can also be valuable, if it’s also located in marginal seats.
The Activist Religions. This represented about ten percent of the vote in 2007 and does so again in 2019. In 2007 we took all those religions dominating the swings to Labor and selected the same groups again from the last census for 2019. Normally these religions are clustered in safer Coalition seats, but there’s huge numbers of them across Queensland seats, including quite a few marginals. Of the top 25 seats ranked for Activist Religions, 15 are in Queensland. Given the small national swings we’re seeing, for the reasons I outlined above, I would expect this group to be moving towards the Liberal Leader Scott Morrison. Among the seats which could be impacted by any such movement include Lingiari, Longman and Braddon (Labor), Dickson, Forde, Flynn, Capricornia and Petrie (Liberal). Labor would thus be a little more vulnerable in three seats and have less chance of picking up five marginal Queensland seats. At the other end of the Activist scale, the seats tend to be stonking rich and full of Goat Cheese Circle types, such as Wentworth, the former seat of Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull or inner city Green Left students and professionals, like Wills, the former seat of late Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke. I served as a humble backbencher with Bob and I can still smell his Havana cigars up the corridors in the Old Parliament House. He will be missed.
Aged Pensioners. We model this data every couple of years and these figures are probably a bit dated, but still relevant. I really don’t know how much the hostility to Labor’s policies on franking and capital gains tax are going to flow through to less asset rich persons who have retired on the Aged Pension. I suppose a little, but nowhere near as much as for those on their own super schemes. Still, if you select all columns on the Excel File and rank by Aged Pensioners, you can see some seriously big numbers in marginal seats, including Page, Robertson (Coalition), Richmond, Braddon, Lyons, Bass, Dobell (Labor). These could be real momentum stoppers for a small pro-Labor national swing on election night.
Super Income. We extracted this ATO data and averaged it out over persons for our modelling of income generally. When we rank the federal seats for this figure, the ACT just jumps out as the top of the list, with figures in the thousands, with the next highest seats also looking to be representative of retired public servants. It fairly warms my heart to think we sold Telstra to set up a national Future Fund to achieve these figures. In reality, I’m probably just jealous I can’t put my own retirement savings into the Future Fund, because neither party has had the wit to allow us. When we consider the figures for the seats outside Canberra, we need to discount for the numbers of retired public servants on gold plated super schemes. This means you could probably rule out Eden-Monaro, marginal Labor with a lot of retired public servants. Coalition marginals which could benefit include Gilmore and Corangamite, although the latter is nominally Labor after the redistribution. The only marginal Labor seat which could be impacted is Herbert, although there would be a lot of Herbert retired military service voters on more secure super schemes. That’s about it, really. The per capita Super figures really level right out after the top 20 or so seats. Which probably explains why the ALP adopted the policy it did.
The risk here for the ALP tonight is the extent to which all retirees feel targeted by changes to their retirement incomes generally. As far as the evangelicals go, these voters tend to be pretty quiet at election times and keep their opinions to themselves until they get to the ballot box. I suspect this might be a sleeper for some Queensland marginals.
Hi there, election tragics. Here’s some data in Excel form for you to play with, in the lead up to election day and afterwards.
It’s in Excel form, so you can copy it, rank the seats, compare them with the vote and do your own sums with them on election night re the swings. We will try and do the same late next week, when the results are clear in close run seats.
The file shows the official ALP 2PP votes on current boundaries for all seats, plus our five most interesting stereotypes, based on 50 years of my own demographic research, including Labor’s demographic marketing campaign for the 1983 national election, which makes me very mature, indeed. I guess I’m the original tragic as far as demographic profiling is concerned.
As these are 2PP ALP votes, you can calculate the LNP 2PP vote by simply subtracting these figures from 100 percent for each seat, unless of course, it turns out to be won by an Independent.
Here’s a brief run down on the key stereotypes and their significance.
Working Families, are mainstream, average Aussie families, with skilled blue collar dad and a white collar mum, with an anxious eye on the family budget, flatlining real wages, transfer payments and tax cuts. Rank the excel file by this stereotype and you see a lot of them in marginal seats in Queensland and Western Australia. An awful lot. Too many to include here.
Goat Cheese Circle residents are inner city, very high income professionals. Lots of bike pants, Green votes, and senior public servants. They liked Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 but not Tony Abbott. The votes of most of these are wasted in formerly safe Liberal seats, but some of these seats may swing to Independents in NSW or Labor in Victoria. A swing in 2019 against the liberals among this group would shore up my local member in Griffith and help Labor in Macnamara, the old Melbourne Ports. But not help Tony Abbott all that much.
Swinging Voters are made up of the demographics which consistently lead the swings either way at elections since 1966. Look for your local Nappy Valley, with lots of pre-school kids. Motivated by costs of housing, child care and part time jobs. These seats are strongly clustered in WA and any big swing amongst this demographic could turn very ugly for the Coalition, particularly very late on election night. I can still remember Mick Young late on 1969 election night, joking that the 1969 election would have been won for Labor, if there had been another state to the west of Western Australia. Conversely, the seats with fewer swinging voters which would be more likely stick to the Coalition are in Tasmania and National Party strongholds in the bush.
Coming of Age voters are young adults, often first time voters, moving away from parental political influences and starting out on life’s journey for themselves, with fewer visits to the Bank of Mum and Dad. There’s a few of these in marginal Coalition seats, like Brisbane, Chisholm, Swan and Reid and the one-time Labor seat of Ryan. There’s also some marginal Labor seats, like Griffith, Moreton, Hotham, Perth and Macnamara, but given the Newspoll swings in the relevant states, there’s not much joy there for the Coalition.
The Digitally Disrupted are working in blue collar and white collar jobs, currently among the first to be displaced by technology. There’s a big overlap with Working Families, which explains their anxieties at the moment. Typically these jobs are frozen in terms of numbers and then wither as a percentage of the workforce. In terms of seats, this is pretty safe territory for the Labor Opposition, but there are some marginals for the LNP in Queensland in Flynn and Forde. There’s also some marginals for Labor in Lindsay, Braddon and Lyons and if swings in NSW and Tasmania go the Coalition’s way, these would be vulnerable.
We’ve already posted some scatterplots using these stereotypes, showing how Goat Cheese Circle voters influenced the Green Primary vote in 2016 and how the Working Families group dominated those seats swinging to Labor. The full picture can be seen on our 2016 Dashboard under Demographic Profiles, Family Types, Voter Indices. https://www.elaborate.net.au/ADSElect2016%20PostVote.htm
It shows, subject to ecological fallacies of course, seats swinging to Labor in 2016 dominated by Working Families and the Digitally Disrupted and swings to the Coalition dominated by Goat Cheese Circle voters who liked Malcolm Turnbull.
Every ANZAC Day I sit down with my kids and explain to them what their Great Grandfather did in the first World War. Some of it sinks in and that’s all you can ask, really. I’m lucky this ANZAC Day in that last September The Australian published a piece from me about my Pop and Nan and Pop’s small role in the history of the first war in the trenches of Western Europe. Thanks are owed here to The Australian, for its kind permission to run the story in this link, to Angus and Robertson, for publishing the original trench edition of Ginger Mick, to Neil James of the Plain English Foundation for returning Pop’s copy to our family, to Stan Grant and the ABC show Matter of Fact, for running the initial piece on the book, and of course, to my Pop and Nan, for having my Mum and for being the best grandparents a little bloke could ever wish for.
by Jeffrey Peters – serves as director of business development for Esri, playing a key role in strategic planning and corporate leadership.
The Reverend Kammy Young has seen the empty pews at Sunday morning service. She has read the surveys that show membership in decline. Once-thriving congregations now depend on part-time volunteers to keep their doors open. At a time when the relevancy of religion is in question, she feels a sense of urgency for churches to connect more deeply with their communities.
The challenges faced by Young and the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast are not unique within the Episcopal Church. In fact, they’re not unique to the Episcopal denomination. During the past decade, the percentage of US adults who say they regularly attend religious services has been declining across every denomination and nearly every religion. The central question is how religious institutions might reverse that trend.
Article snapshot: Faith-based organizations facing declining attendance are hoping to reinvent themselves and engage unreached populations with help from technology traditionally used by businesses to find and retain customers.
Young and many of her Episcopal peers have begun to believe that if they develop a deeper understanding of the communities around their churches, they will be able to connect in new ways with the people who live and work there. With that goal in mind, they’re moving to embrace innovative techniques pioneered by businesses around the world.
In the age of digital transformation, the Episcopal Church is using science to find the faithful.
The Old Ways Don’t Work Well Anymore
The old way of operating simply isn’t working anymore, Young says. “We’re no longer an established church that can just sit back, put our sign out front, and wait for people to walk in the door. We need to be engaged in our communities in significant ways in order to connect with people.”
The Reverend Tom Brackett, denominational manager of planting and redevelopment for the Episcopal Church, agrees. Part of the church’s decline, he says, may stem from complacency with the status quo.
Technically a map is defined as a diagrammatic representation of an area of land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads, etc. As soon as we view a map, we inherently start turning it into information by analyzing its contents and finding patterns, assessing trends, and making decisions about what we are seeing.
Creating apps and software that use map information is nothing new. Platform choices to build on range from Google Maps, native Apple maps, TomTom maps, Mapbox, and many others. What separates each platform apart from one another is their ability to display different times of information over the map. You know – markers, areas of crime, speed traps, routes, etc.
Recently, Esri announced its new developer program which enables app developers to create interactive, world-changing maps that are easy to interpret. Using Esri’s new maps platform, developers have already created mapping apps that display things such as, Interactive Homicide Stats by Distance and Type, Filter Hurricane Data by Shape, even New York Building Footprints.
Max Payson is a solutions engineer at Esri and he spoke with ADM about how the new program is making it easier for developers to transform data into eye-opening visuals, using what they call location intelligence, and how you can get on board!
Integrating the power of location intelligence across an organization
Geospatial cloud platforms, computing power and geographic information system (GIS) software give businesses the ability to analyze massive storehouses of information. The results often reveal new data patterns and stimulate innovative ways to increase success through an understanding of location intelligence.
But rather than spitting out reams of stats, tables, charts and spreadsheets, the geospatial cloud empowers people to plot complex analysis on easy-to-understand smart maps. These digital maps allow leaders, strategists and many levels of workers to visualize important trends across lines of business and take action in mission-focused projects.
The maps, when linked to the massive data streams from the Internet of Things (IoT), can even be updated in real time to monitor subtle trends. The location intelligence derived from these rivers of information can be easily combined with AI and predictive analytics to map out ways to drive productivity or adjust strategies before bigger problems develop.
With the geospatial cloud, people can create maps that can represent thousands of relationships between hundreds of layers of data on demographics, sales, population growth, traits of customers, likely customers, competitors, supply chains, delivery routes and countless other variables.
The results also can be modeled in 3D to support the work of professionals like urban planners and facilities managers, who also benefit from data streaming from the IoT for real-time updates to their models and maps.
With open platforms to stimulate innovative applications, it’s hard to summarize the richness of the tools and growing power of the geospatial cloud. But its influence can be seen in the thousands of leading businesses using it to analyze millions of layers of data and produce billions of maps every day.
Geospatial Cloud Grows in Strength, Flexibility and Accessibility
Increasingly, corporate leaders are realizing that intelligent maps provide an effective way to monitor sales, review assets in the field, keep up to date on national and global social and economic trends, and reinforce common goals across all departments.
The flexibility of tools, apps and data available in the geospatial cloud puts its power within reach of nearly everyone in an organization. Whether employees rely on company servers, desktop computers, laptops, tablets or smartphones, whether they work in the corporate office or are mobile and remote, they all can connect. Such widespread accessibility protects against information silos and allows for wider sharing of knowledge across the organization.
For instance, drawing upon analytic models, predictive algorithms, apps and big data, detailed insights can emerge through computerized analysis of layers of data about customers’ past buying history, their demographics by neighborhood and their interests by age, gender, education or profession. It also can factor in larger trends like local economies, seasonal weather, time of day and national or international political and social trends.
At the broader other end of the scale, smart maps receiving data from sensors on the IoT allow company analysts see trends mapped out in real time. The visualized location intelligence can show buying trends, population shifts or traffic patterns that affect deliveries, supply chains, asset management and research and development, and take into account trends across hundreds of layers of demographic, economic and political data.
Span of Influence of the Geospatial Cloud
Though vital to the for-profit sector, the power of the geospatial cloud is not the sole province of private business and industry.
It also helps most national, state and local governments map critical issues from health to crime to utility lines and even to eradicating land mines. And it undergirds the work of nongovernmental organizations around the world—groups trying to solve environmental issues, address social justice concerns and develop mission-focused, crisis-response strategies for hurricanes, earthquakes or epidemics.
For example, apps can take ongoing satellite imagery and current weather and temperature data to build a Living Atlas—a real-time picture of the world that shows permanent land masses, changing polar caps, epidemics, rising or falling wages, and trends in local agriculture or regional social culture.
Location-based information also can shape many policy decisions and help people across the political spectrum understand issues and options. The geospatial cloud offers scalable analysis from a single building to a neighborhood to a town, state, nation, continent, or the entire globe.
Keeps Evolving and Adding Depth
Broad in reach and deep in analytic power, the geospatial cloud can engage the minds and spirits of millions around the world through a project like the Living Atlas.
Apps also can be developed that engage people around the world in mission-driven campaigns and social enterprise. Volunteers can work together to track worrisome trends, and businesses can use location-based data and predictive apps to understand what consumers will want and need several years from now.
The geospatial cloud introduces a whole new scale of spatial intelligence, and businesses and organizations of every size and purpose are using it to break new ground and digitally transform their enterprises.
Jack Dangermond is the founder and president of Esri, the world’s sixth largest privately held software company. Founded in 1969 and headquartered in Redlands, California, Esri is widely recognized as the technical and market leader in geographic information systems, or GIS, pioneering innovative solutions for working with spatial data.
Education tends to be a pretty staid, if not conservative, sector, but the underlying analysis and associated data presentation available for the education market is moving very fast.
By way of example, at Education Geographics (EGS) we’re now starting our third year of producing online and interactive school dashboards and maps, and we are already heading up to 115 Non-Government client schools in Australia. At last count, our schools enrol about one in five Independent school children across all fee ranges.
To drive continual improvements in the underlying data, we’ve updated our spatial demand measures to the end of 2018 and we’ve found that these will tend to be a useful measure of demand by middle class families for Independent school places for 2019. During the year we will continue to update the dashboards with six monthly figures, so schools get an idea of demand by mid-2019, as they set fees for 2020. We are now producing the annual demand changes by maps as well, so schools can see which areas in their school catchment may have been impacted by digital disruption. This can come in handy when planning enrolment campaigns and bus routes.
We’ve also updated our roll profiles, which show schools the average fees at every level being paid every year across their catchment by parents, so EGS clients can see whether their parents are spending more or less on school fees than their neighbours. In a prosperous economy, parents are prepared to pay more; in a downturn, the urge is to save money, especially if investments in real estate are heading south. We’ve written on this before on our EGS site: https://www.educationgeographics.net.au/competition-at-the-coalface/
In addition, we now show the same bell curve distribution we’ve been doing for the range of fees, for the range of client school SES scores and for their parental income estimates. We call this our PIE Score as this sounded more polite than some of the alternative acronyms that were available.
The PIE score was tricky, as we can’t match parents with their individual tax returns and we hope that society never becomes so intrusive that we can, so we modelled an average standardised score for school parents for their local neighbourhood, using publicly available data in which privacy is protected. It isn’t the same as the actual figures the Government will be using to determine future funding of Non-Government schools, but it will give schools some idea of the extent to which their parents’ income is out of step with the SES scores and Fees currently paid.
for all the key variables which decided who won the 2019 election, there’s bookmarks 
for the major regions, so you can go there directly, there’s a score sheet of key indicators 
under every screen being viewed with standardised scores (move the map around and watch the numbers update), there’s the info button , a share button 
so you can post the map to social media, a seat button 
, so you can check out the scores for each individual seat and finally the legend for each layer displayed. Hours of fun from our mapper.
Jack Dangermond is the founder and president of Esri, the world’s sixth largest privately held software company. Founded in 1969 and headquartered in Redlands, California, Esri is widely recognized as the technical and market leader in geographic information systems, or GIS, pioneering innovative solutions for working with spatial data.
