Category Archives: National 2019

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Election Analysis 2019 - Esri Map - ADS

ELECTION ANALYSIS 2019

Category:National 2019Tags : 

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 Layer - icon on Esri Map for all the key variables which decided who won the 2019 election, there’s bookmarks Bookmark icon Esri map for the major regions, so you can go there directly, there’s a score sheet of key indicators Score sheet indicator - icon Esri map toolbar 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 Info - icon on Esri map toolbar so you can post the map to social media, a seat button Choose a seat icon on Esri Map Toolbar , 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.

The link is https://egs-au.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=1a84d2f75fe04666a7501c5cd7921c0f


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Labor Digs a Hole with Miners - Federal Election 2019

LABOR DIGS A HOLE WITH MINERS

Category:National 2019Tags : 

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.

Labor Digs a Hole with Miners - Federal Election 2019

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.


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Shifting Demographic Tectonics - National Election 2019

SHIFTING DEMOGRAPHIC TECTONICS

Category:National 2019Tags : 

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.

Shifting Demographic Tectonics - Federal Election 2019

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.

As Morrison would say: How good is that?


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The Religious Rudd and the Grey Voters - Federal Election 2019

THE RELIGIOUS RUDD AND THE GREY VOTERS

Category:National 2019Tags : 

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.

https://www.elaborate.net.au/Excel/Stereotypes 2019 (003).xlsx

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.

The Religious Rudd and Grey Voters - Federal Election 2019

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.


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Stereotypes and Voting - their significance in National Election 2019. Here’s some data in excel form for you to play with, in the lead up to election day.

STEREOTYPES AND VOTING

Category:National 2019Tags : 

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.

https://www.elaborate.net.au/PDF/Stereotypes 2019.xlsx

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.

Stereotypes and Voting - National Election 2019

 

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.


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Longman By-Election 2018

LONGMAN BY-ELECTION 2018

Category:By-Elections,National 2019Tags : 

The ADS team has prepared an exhaustive profile of by-election swings in Bennelong, New England, Longman and Mayo.

A full report of the swings and their implications for the 2019 election appears in the Weekend Australian.

Below is a link to the maps of the swings and the associated demographic drivers for Longman.

Click away and compare the swings to and from the major parties with key demographics in our statistical profile.

Click on the Map to view

Longman By-Election2018, The ADS team has prepared an exhaustive profile of by-election swings in Bennelong, New England, Longman and Mayo.


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Malcolm Turnbull campaigns in Caboolture, in the Queensland seat of Longman.

Divining votes all about swings and roundabouts at by-elections

Category:By-Elections,National 2019Tags : 

Provided your humble correspondent is not eaten by a grizzly bear next week while trout-hunting in the wilds of northwest Canada, he will be back in time to help our team sift through the demographics of Super Saturday.

We will be looking for demographically driven swings across the booths in Longman and Braddon that are consistent with the swings we saw in New Eng­land and Bennelong; and tangible links between these patterns of swing and the policy offerings of the government and the opposition, especially as they relate to the hip-pocket nerve.

I’m looking particularly at swings by voters concerned with imputation tax increases for retirees and ­income tax increases for aspirational voters.

If we can see patterns among bigger demographic groups living in marginal seats then we can draw some inferences as to their impact at the next federal election. The other seats will provide a bit of a sideshow to the main event in Longman and Braddon.

South Australia’s Mayo, for ­example, is a seat a popular, local Liberal should have won back easily from former Nick Xenophon protege Rebekha Sharkie, who won Mayo from the less-than-popular local Liberal MP Jamie Briggs. However, polls show about 60 per cent of Mayo’s new generation of prosperous and professional commuters support Sharkie over the Downer dynasty’s Georgina Downer. After generations of political mulishness that has splintered the ­Coalition vote in South Australia — dating back to the original Liberal Movement — the Adelaide political establishment, like the old French aristocracy, learns nothing and forgets nothing.

The two West Australian by-elections of Fremantle and Perth will be interesting as a guide to how many intending Liberal voters, when denied a candidate, will vote for Labor over the Greens. Way too many to cancel the loss of Mayo, would be my guess.

Let’s look at what we know.

Last year’s by-elections in New England and Bennelong showed an average swing to the government of 1 per cent and a range of swings across the booths of about 12 per cent. The biggest swings against the government were in urban Bennelong booths dominated by progressive Left Sydney voters who hated having to vote yes in the same-sex marriage plebiscite and by conservatives who hated losing.

However, urban middle-class mainstream voters could not see what the fuss was about and quietly saved Liberal John Alexander.

In New England, Nationals flag-bearer Barnaby Joyce had his vote boosted by the big group of Howard battlers who had drifted back to Labor since 2007. We’re talking here about welfare recipients, tradies and hospitality workers living in rented accom­­mo­­­­dation in country towns where they can find affordable housing.

Battlers are also pretty thick on the ground in Longman in Queensland, a state where, in 2004, about one in seven electors voted for Labor premier Peter Beattie at the state election and then for Coalition prime minister John Howard eight months later at the federal election. This splitting of votes at state and federal elections is a characteristic of the Howard battler, a demographic that can be sentimentally supportive of favourite leaders but ruthless towards parties they regard as taking them for granted — especially with their Senate votes.

The trick for politicians is to match the sentimental rhetoric with what these voters see as their economic self-interest.

In Longman, they voted for Beattie because they saw themselves as Labor supporters and they voted for Howard because he stopped the boats, looked after their pensions and made the economy run on time. They had no problem holding what many commentators would regard as contradictory positions.

Plenty of Howard battlers are found in Braddon, where one in seven locals split their primary vote in the last state and federal elections. In mid-2016 the federal primary Liberal vote was 41.5 per cent for MP Brett Whiteley, but the primary vote for state Liberal candidates in March this year was 56.1 per cent.

In Longman and Braddon, polls are showing an average swing towards the Coalition of about 2 per cent, meaning both seats could go either way next Saturday. This is broadly consistent with the 1 per cent average swing to the government in New Eng­land and Bennelong, perhaps even a slight improvement for the Coalition.

Given some of the economic difficulties facing the federal government, compounded by its gaffes, even a small swing to the Coalition on its 2016 figures in these two seats would be exceptional, especially considering that Labor’s new MPs in Long­man and Braddon would have seen their vote rise by a couple of per cent since 2016 because of the personal vote benefits of ­incumbency.

Any opposition should comfortably win by-elections in seats it already holds. It should come close to winning more marginal seats like Bennelong.

Hopefully the demographic range of swings across the booths in Braddon and Longman will shed some light on why the opposition is underperforming and tell us what this could mean at the federal election due before the middle of May next year.

I’ll be paying particular attention to the range of swings across booths dominated by the different income groups to see which tax policies look like winning the most votes — with the opposition favouring those earning below $90,000 a year and the Coalition favouring those earning above that amount, particularly up to $200,000.

Like my Canadian trout taking a breather in a deep pool on their upstream spawning run, taxpayers tend to concentrate in income tax ranges just below a big jump in their marginal tax rate, so we’ll check the reaction from working voters who aspire to earn more.

We will see if we can discern any impact from the reductions in dividend imputation for retirees, although this one could be messy in practice.

With this sort of research, we go where the evidence leads us and we could see, for example, some impact from the campaign run by Catholic education against some of the federal funding ­reforms, which would be easy enough to measure given the ­detail in our education database.

We may see some increased support for the government’s quiet cuts in immigration, which would show as an increased vote for the Coalition among the huge mainstream groups of English-speaking and Australian-born. It’s pretty hard to lose an Australian election when you’re getting a swing towards you from Australian-born voters.

My working hypothesis is that Labor is making gains among younger, professional voters, ­especially those benefiting from the opposition’s big spending promises on new jobs in health and education.

We find these voters in the high-priced houses of the inner cities, the city seaside suburbs or bigger blocks with a view in the outer suburbs. But the Liberals should be able to withstand this sort of movement in what are typically their more comfortable urban seats, unless they repeat the mistakes of Mayo.

Labor is also making gains in Sydney and Melbourne among some conservative, non-English speaking migrant groups living in safe Labor seats, who respond well to big-spending promises as they are direct beneficiaries. However, these gains in votes by Labor often don’t bring commensurate gains in seats.

The Coalition seems to be still going well among middle-class, Australian-born families in mainstream urban areas and among Howard battlers in the middle to outer suburbs and in some pro­vincial city-rural seats. This is not the picture of a comfortable Labor majority, either in votes or in seats.

Roll on, Super Saturday, and I’ll report back if the bears don’t get me first.


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NEW ENGLAND AND BENNELONG BY-ELECTIONS

Category:Election Profiles,National 2019Tags : 

See for yourself in our Esri online map how local demographics fed into the results in New England and Bennelong by-elections and the Same Sex Marriage plebiscite.

Click on the link to the map below. It will open with a default map of the Bennelong estimated 2PP swing to the Liberals, with the dark blue streets swinging slightly to the Liberals and the lighter areas swinging strongly to Labor. Now click on the Layer icon layer-esri-map at top right of your screen to open the Layer list. You can see the legend in the map by clicking on the small arrow to the left of the layer called Bennelong Liberal-Swing Benelong-Liberal-Swing. You can click on the layer Bennelong Polling Booths Benelong-Booths to show each booth and click on the booth icon itself to see the results.

Save this map of the swing by taking a screen snip or leave it open in another screen and then click off the swing and open the other Bennelong layers. You can open more than one at a time and see the impact of the various demographics on the swing. So you can open Layers for creative arts, Green votes and Agnostics, to see the combined impact of all three. This isn’t rigorous statistical modelling, but it gives you an idea of how it works.

The strongest predictor of the swing was not the Bennelong Chinese born males (or females), but Bennelong Males with No Religion. These Agnostics at the National level were the strongest supporters of the Yes vote in the Same Sex Marriage Plebiscite and when we fed this variable into the modelling, ethnicity did not contribute any additional explaining power. Chinese born persons in Bennelong tend to be Agnostics, but it was their lack of religion, rather than their ethnicity which tended to accompany the biggest political swings to Labor in Bennelong.  This shows us we should look past obvious ethnic stereotypes if we’re trying to explain voting behaviour.

When you have finished with Bennelong, you can click on the Bookmark icon Bookmark at top left and select New England which opens a default map showing the estimated 2PP swing to the Nationals, with the darker green areas registering the largest pro-National swing. Once again, save a copy of this map and compare it to those larger local demographics most strongly linked to the by-election swing to the Nationals: 2016 ALP voters, Tradies, or those demographics dominating the booths with smallest by-election swings to the Nationals: in this case men working in the Agricultural industry.  We reversed the direction of the legend in this last one so the areas with the darker green colouring contain the fewest farmers and farm workers and the biggest pro-National swings. This confirms that the smallest swings to a party often occur in the areas of strongest support for the same party.

Click on the map or link below to view.

New England and Bennelong By-Elections - See for yourself in our Esri online map how local demographics fed into the results in New England and Bennelong by-elections and the Same Sex Marriage plebiscite. See for yourself in our Esri online map how the local demographics fed into the results in New England and Bennelong.

 

https://egs-au.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=cd901e880d5e44aabcae6a86cd8b0edd


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THE ORIGINAL ONE NATION PROFILE

Category:Election Profiles,National 2019Tags : 

Back in 1998 the major parties were under pressure from One Nation, particularly in the State of Queensland, where the fledgling party scored well amongst the older, rural, Australian born, less well educated and those with low-income, blue collar jobs. Fast forward to 2011 and the major parties are again under pressure with Green and Independent votes on the rise. This research piece, originally done for the Courier Mail in 1998, profiles the antecedents of the rural protest vote.

One Nation VoteCourier Mail September 22 1998_1.pdf


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CLERKS REPLACE TRADIES AS DOMINANT ALP BLOC

Category:Election Profiles,National 2019Tags : 

One in four women work as professionals. Their support for Labor candidates steadily increased from 1980 under Coalition Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and by 2004, this support had levelled off to split 50/50 between Labor and the Coalition.

However, the inner-urban professional seats – such as Melbourne Ports and Brisbane – swung to Coalition Leader Malcolm Turnbull in 2016, bucking the national swing back to Labor in 2016.

About one in four men work as Tradies and one in four women work in clerical and admin jobs.

Since the 1966 election, Tradies have been seen as the pro-union, working class foundation for Labor campaigns, with the politically non-aligned female clerks successfully targeted in 1972 and 1974 to provide the more volatile winning margin in the outer suburbs.

Shifting Demographic Tectonics

The political significance of these two demographics switched after the period 1977 to 1980, and by 1998-2001, we were more likely to see safe Labor seats dominated by female clerks than by male Tradies, as white-collar workers became more unionised, and many older, blue collar workers such as the Howard Battlers, switched to the Coalition in the outer suburbs.

These two groups have remained the ALP’s campaign focus as Labor’s Working Family Stereotype and in 2016 seats containing the highest proportions of Working Families -such as Burt and Macarthur –  swung strongly to Labor and Bill Shorten, even as former pro-Labor professionals moved in the reverse direction towards, small-l Liberal Malcolm Turnbull.

So, the Coalition lost Working Family seats across Australia’s outer suburbs, but clung to power by its fingernails across wealthier, inner urban professional seats.

In this ADS update, we’re publishing the last instalment of John Black’s demographic profiles of Australian voting behaviour, stretching back to the 1966 Federal election.

This instalment covers the period of 1977 to 1980, the mid-point of Malcolm Fraser’s Prime Ministership, which marked a watershed era for the demographic alignments of Australia’s biggest occupational voting blocs: Tradies, Clerks and Professionals.

These three groups determined the outcome of the last election, and they are also likely to determine the outcome of the next election. Read how they came of age here.

PROJECT 4 –  Australia : 1977-1980  Project 4-Part One   Project 4 – Part Two