How the Coalition vote is ‘trending poor’
Increasingly the Coalition represents the Australian-born working class, as independents deprive it of its previous base of rich professionals.
By Tom Burton, Govt Editor, 29 May 2022 Australian Financial Review
Electoral support for the Coalition is shifting to poorer, less skilled, less educated workers, in line with international trends, according to detailed local analysis of the 2022 federal election.
The analysis also reveals that migrant groups voted as a block, joining Chinese voters in a savage protest against the Morrison government, with East Asian voters recording swings of 10 to 14 per cent.
The analysis of Australian Election Commission polling booth results and hyper-local ABS census community and demographic data was done by Luke Metcalfe, the founder of property and marketing data analytics consultancy Microburbs.
The bottom-up, first-principles analysis of the result used more than 15,000 columns of data and reveals statistically proven patterns in an historic vote that saw second preference votes usher in nearly a dozen independent and Green candidates.
“It’s dangerous making generalisations about broad area level aggregates because they’re not statistically significant,” Mr Metcalfe cautions.
“Looking at electorates or regions alone can over-generalise populations when more granular data is available.
“So [ABC analyst] Antony Green will say that there was a really strong candidate in this electorate. And I’m sure he’s got lots of domain knowledge that I don’t have. But everything that I come up with is statistically significant.
“When you take a narrative approach, and you break it down to some particular story, it often doesn’t fit the overall national pattern.”
The working poor move right
Mr Metcalfe’s main conclusion is that the Coalition is “trending poor”.
“The big takeout is we’re seeing a continuation of the trend in the last federal election where the Coalition’s support base is shifting towards poorer, less skilled, less educated people born in Australia.”
Increasingly the Coalition represents the Australian-born working class, as independents deprive it of its previous base of rich professionals, Mr Metcalfe noted.
“Rich, educated professionals swung 11 to 12 per cent against the Coalition, while the country’s working poor swung only 3 to 4 per cent against them.
“So 20 per cent of polling booths paying the lowest rent, earning the lowest incomes and with the least skills swung 2 to 4 per cent against the government, while the fifth of Australia’s polling booths where such people are the richest saw a 10 to 12 per cent collapse in LNP primary vote.”
The Microburbs work also found Labor was losing social conservatives, seemingly to the minor right-wing parties.
The observation that the Coalition base is becoming the “working poor” is also consistent with what has been seen with right-of-centre voters in the United States (Trump voters), Britain (Brexit voters), and most recently in the presidential race in France.
“In France, like in the US and other countries, the political fight is not between left and right any more,” as University of Queensland economist Lionel Page observed.
Professor Page noted the new paradigm seemed to be a divide between globalists and nationalists.
Mr Metcalfe’s microanalysis supports this trend.
“The top 20 per cent of polling booths with the most international citizens [first and second-generation migrants] swung against the Coalition nearly 12 per cent, while most polling booths where the vast majority had third-generation ancestry only suffered a similar swing against them to what Labor endured nationally,” Mr Metcalfe said.
This partly explains the Tasmanian vote, which bucked the national trend to Labor and saw swings to the Coalition.
Mr Metcalfe ran a multivariate analysis that showed that if you were third-generation Australian and lived in either Tasmania or the two territories, you swung to the Coalition 3.5 per cent.
“Put more simply, rich people in big states really turned off the Coalition. Third, mostly Anglo, generations in Tasmania and the territories defied the national trend and went to the LNP.”
Rich revolt
The analysis found the teal voters were among the most affluent in the country, even within the prosperous electorates the Climate 200 independents won.
“Teal voters are the richest of the rich. Where teals stood, they got only 17 per cent of the primary vote where most people are earning under $1800 per week. It almost doubles to a 32 per cent primary vote where the median income is over $2800.”
Again, this is part of a global trend. According to John Roskam, the retiring head of the right-leaning Institute of Public Affairs, the 10 wealthiest US congressional districts are now represented by Democrats.
The microdata challenges pundits’ observations that the Morrison government lost seats such as Bennelong in Sydney and Chisholm in Melbourne because of its anti-Chinese rhetoric.
“It was migrants in general who swung away from the LNP, not just Chinese. The most Chinese electorates swung against the Coalition 10 per cent, but electorates with more people from elsewhere in Asia [Thais, Indonesians, Malaysians, Japanese, South Koreans] swung even more, 14 per cent.
“Overall the swing was just as strong for Hong Kongers, Taiwanese and Japanese as it was for mainland Chinese, so it suggests that Asians weren’t looking at things based on the geopolitical side for their nationality.
“South Africans, Americans and Irish showed similar swings. So, broadly speaking, it was just a broad migrant swing.”
Also of interest was how the mining community, perhaps not as enthusiastic about the Coalition’s strong anti-China position, moved decisively against the Liberal and National parties across all four mining states.
“Polling booths with at least 43 people in the local area in the mining industry swung to Labor 5 per cent,” Mr Metcalfe noted.
“It wasn’t specifically a WA thing. The swing to Labor in mining polling booths relative to the rest of the states was: NSW 3.4 per cent, Queensland 3.3 per cent, South Australia 9.5 per cent, and WA 3.7 per cent.”
Education the big predictor
The strongest correlation in the teal seats was around education, with a 0.46 correlation to having a bachelor’s degree. This was similar for those working in professional and scientific services.
“The Libs are losing the university-educated vote,” according to Mr Metcalfe.
“In the top 10 per cent of polling booths with the most educated people (21 per cent having a degree in 2016), the LNP suffered a swing against them of 12 per cent, whereas the swing against them was only 3 per cent in the least educated polling booths in the country (where less than 4 per cent have a degree).
“Interesting, as you go down the socioeconomic spectrum to people who left school before year 10, the least educated people swung 5.7 per cent against Labor.”
Some commentators have suggested the big takeaway from the election was the divide between city and country, with claims geography was the defining feature of Australia’s federal election.
“I would say that’s half right,” Mr Metcalfe said.
“The swing against the LNP was much stronger in the capital cities, 9.6 per cent, but the standard deviation was actually higher outside the capitals. So the performance of the Coalition outside the capitals was more various.
“I don’t see any hard boundaries around metros. They’re richer and more international, and those things correlated with a swing against the LNP.
“The top third most migrant polling booths outside metros swung against the LNP 8 per cent.”
Tom Burton has held senior editorial and publishing roles with The Mandarin, The Sydney Morning Herald and as Canberra bureau chief for The Australian Financial Review.He has won three Walkley awards. Connect with Tom on Twitter. Email Tom at tom.burton@afr.com
Original article here
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Dai Le, the perfect female Liberal candidate - rejected by NSW Liberals
Alexandra Smith State Political Editor
May 26, 2022 — 5.00am SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
Ahead of the 2015 state election, then NSW premier Mike Baird had one task for two of his most junior ministers. They were to secure the preselection of Vietnamese refugee Dai Le to the upper house Liberal ticket.
After her unsuccessful, but strong, tilts as a Liberal lower house candidate in the safe Labor seat of Cabramatta, Baird wanted Le in the upper house. He directed ministers Jai Rowell and Matthew Mason-Cox, from the party’s right faction, to make it happen. Instead, the duo picked a man who remains among the most low-profile MPs in the NSW parliament.
Lou Amato is best known for being one of three MPs who launched a failed leadership spill motion against former premier Gladys Berejiklian during the 2019 abortion decriminalisation debate.
Dai Le, the newly elected federal member for Fowler, was identified by Baird as exactly the sort of candidate the Liberals must get into parliament, but factionalism within the Liberal Party prevailed. Now she is off to Canberra as an independent and Amato is a Liberal MP who has flirted with defecting to One Nation. (Baird ultimately dumped Mason-Cox and Rowell from cabinet for their actions.)
The Liberals’ federal result on Saturday was nothing short of disastrous, largely because of the unpopularity of Scott Morrison but also a monumental failure in candidate selection.
After watching the teal wave roll in, Premier Dominic Perrottet is acutely aware that picking strong, suitable candidates is critical if his ageing state government has any chance of success in the state election next March. But knowing and delivering are very different things.
The Liberals’ track record with preselection is not good. There is a well-documented under-presentation of women in state parliament; state Liberal MPs in both houses number 44, of whom only 12 are female. The two most recent Liberal vacancies in the upper house were handed to men.
Labor has had better success in choosing good candidates, as shown in recent state byelections. Well-known South Coast obstetrician Michael Holland, who had long links to the community, seized Bega from the Liberals while Jason Yatsen-Li, a second generation Chinese-Australian, held Strathfield for Labor.
Of course, Labor does not always get it right. You need no more proof than Le’s win in Fowler in the federal election on Saturday. Kristina Keneally, the former premier who led NSW Labor to a crushing defeat in 2011, was parachuted into Fowler to sort out Labor’s internal squabbles over the party’s Senate ticket. The voters saw straight through Labor and turned to the local candidate who was far more representative than Keneally of the diverse community. The result? Labor lost a safe seat to an independent (who the Liberals had failed to keep).
Labor may have a slight edge in picking suitable candidates but its path to victory in March is far more complex than simply choosing good representatives. The federal result also reveals an ominously low primary vote for Labor in the area – too low, if it translates to the state election, for the party to win in western Sydney, where it will matter.
Federal Labor went backwards in Lindsay, which encompasses the ultra-marginal state Liberal seat of Penrith, and the result in Fowler spells disaster for the newly created state seat of Leppington, which is notionally Labor but by a wafer-thin margin.
There were mixed results for Labor in Banks on Saturday, and in what would worry party strategists, the ALP took a hit in booths in East Hills and Revesby – exactly in the areas where it needs to be picking up votes, not losing them, if it has any hope in the state election.
The federal election showed that the rule book has been rewritten – for both the Liberals and Labor. Votes have fragmented, and with an optional preferential system in NSW, primary votes have never been more important. The task ahead is huge for Perrottet and Labor leader Chris Minns.
Original article here
It's hard to understand why any demographic would knowingly vote for their oppressors, so those who support oppressive government likely are either unaware they're being oppressed or are somehow benefitting from the oppression in ways that compensate for the damage inflicted. In the US it appears to be purely tribal. Those who identify as dems support the dems, vociferously and unquestioned. Mass formation psychosis in action. Peaceful resolution seems unlikely. Irreconcilable differences.