The message conveyed in yesterday’s Essential Report polling on Labor’s brand was bad enough, but a closer look at the numbers shows it’s even worse than it looks. Labor, it appears, is losing middle Australia.
The demographics where Labor is most on the nose in terms of the values and characteristics voters attribute to it are over 35s and middle and higher-income earners. Higher-income earners are not Labor’s home base of course, and like over-65s their views on Labor aren’t as important as those of middle Australia, which is the battleground on which the major parties fight.
A few examples: does Labor keep its promises? Just 17% of 35-44s agree, the lowest of any age group. 28% of people earning $52-83,000 pa agree, compared to 28% of lower income earners.
Does it understand the problems facing Australia? 35% of 35 to 44-year-olds agree, the second lowest after over 65s, and far below the 47% of 25 to 34-year-olds who agree. 39% of middle-income earners agree, compared to 47% of lower income earners. What about the very raison d’être of the ALP, that it looks after the interests of working people? Just 35% of 35 to 44-year-olds agree, compared to 44% of 25 to 34-year-olds and 41% of 18-24s, and 41% of middle-income earners against 46% for lower income earners. That’s supposed to be Labor’s core business.
Now, these are raw numbers, so we shouldn’t learn to heavily on individual results — we’re dealing with sample sizes of a couple of hundred. But there’s a consistent pattern. Some of the results suggest a simple dislike of Labor and a willingness to agree to anything negative about it. The ALP is hardly an “extreme” party and yet 43% of middle-income earners think that of Labor. There are also some sentiments that appear universal.
“Will do anything to win votes” scores highly across all demographics, although, again, very high among middle-income earners. But other indicators are also revealing. “Clear about what they stand for” sees Labor score weakest among 35-44s (23%), and weak with middle income earners — 34% — although that’s not as bad as 18-24s — 27%. “Has a vision for the future” is again poorest among 35 to 44 -year-olds — 36% — and only slightly better among middle-income earners — 45%.
These are the demographics that Labor desperately pitched to last year, with its anti-immigration rhetoric, the hard line against asylum seekers and increases to Family Tax Benefit payments. If it worked well enough to narrowly stave off defeat in August, it’s not working anymore — middle-income Australians, voters with kids and mortgages — have turned against Labor.
There are only two, faint comforts for Labor. One is that the Coalition had worse — in some cases much worse — numbers on such attributes in 2009 and 2010, and has now pulled them back to the extent that they lead Labor on nearly all indicators (lead on positive ones, trail on negative ones). Sentiment can be reversed, without necessarily dumping leaders (the previous Essential question was in March 2010, when Tony Abbott had been settled into the job for some months), though the Coalition has the luxury of not governing, enabling it to shape sentiment purely by the way it presents itself, whereas Labor is marked by voters both on presentation and on action.
And even though the Coalition leads on most indicators, it partly does so because of the big advantage it has amongst older voters, who almost reflexively back whatever is positive about the Coalition. In middle Australia, the parties are more evenly-matched on many indicators, although Labor still generally trails.
This is toxic stuff for Labor, and means that even if they got the act together on selling a reform agenda tomorrow, it would be to a hostile audience that believes whatever they say is simply designed to win votes. This means, for example, that efforts to sell a carbon price by saying “millions will be better off” will be less effective because they simply won’t be believed.
Indeed, the whole focus group strategy of governing by feeding back to voters what they want to hear is likely to simply make people even more sceptical of Labor — and make efforts to sell complex reforms all the more difficult.
And that’s before you even begin to address the long-term task of turning around the fact that nearly three-quarters of Australians simply think Labor doesn’t really know what it stands for.
That problem isn’t a media confection or Press Gallery game, it’s the hollow core of so many in senior positions in the ALP becoming apparent.
[Now, these are raw numbers, so we shouldn’t learn to heavily on individual results — we’re dealing with sample sizes of a couple of hundred. But there’s a consistent pattern…]
Thankyou…we are dealing with sizes of a couple of hundred, a couple of bloody hundred!!!!!!!!!!!
Lets get on with the Royal wedding, it will have more substance than this absurd poll that Crikey are going into a spin about…obviously there is not much happening out there in news land, if this is how the Crikey Political political reporter spends his time. Take tomorrow off Bernard and watch the TV, perhaps there will be a royal assissination to report on.
Watching “SS Labor” being navigated around the “Cape of Gawd Hope”, you have to wonder, “Is it Peter “W.W.” Peachfuzz or Mr Magoo’s turn at the wheel?”
IMHO, Labor can survice if they get Swan off the main stage, he oozes doubt every time he opens his mouth, get Wong back into centre stage and somehow get Lindsay Tanner to say a few nice things about the rest of them, and see if they cant give him a consulting role to the new treasurer. And definetly punish Paul Howes and get him out of the picture. I cant see any other way to do it. At the moment I just want to cry into my beer for what these clowns have created.
Hopefully, middle Australia are moving to the Greens with me.
Labor have a credibility problem: they do not appear to have vision or ideals that they want for the nation. They seem to be worried about polls and focus groups more than having an actual plan for the future. If they have a plan and a vision, they are pathetic at selling it!
But then look at the opposition – the coalition. What is their plan and their vision for the nation? More wealth for the wealthy and more pampering to the mining companies? Sounds worse than Labor.
Honestly: the Greens are the only party that seem to really stand for something meaningful for all Australians. I’m sticking with them.
Bernard Keane, you really are disappearing up your own inflated sense of self-worth in the Canberra Press Gallery and world of political punditry. You auditioning for a role as a Coalition Press Secretary or something? The amount of negativity that spews forth from you about the ALP these days is distressing. It’s verging on the misogynistic as well. I suppose you will hide behind the ‘I’m just reporting the facts, ma’m’, line, but it’s what you so gleefully make of them that is the problem, almost as if you are willing the Labor ship to sink so that you can stand to one side with a smirk on your face and say, “I told you so.”
Does it not matter to you that the alternative to a Labor government is a government full of mendacious liars and representatives of the oligarchical kleptocracy? Oh, but they’re sooo much better at politics and Labor are so lame and don’t even know what they stand for anymore, except they do and they are trying to prove it to naysayers like you everyday to very little acclamation, that it seems you are more than prepared to put the steel-capped boots, suspenders and tight white jeans on, and after downing Moloko for breakfast every morning, dream up new ways to lay into the Gillard government for the pleasure, it seems to me, of the Menzies House readers who Crikey are trying to get to pay for subscriptions.
Politics is all about perception, as you know. So is political opinion writing, and crowing from the rooftops and predicting the political death rattle of the Labor Party based upon a pissy little poll of only a couple of hundred people, makes me think that you were only too happy to write this story. I mean, it’s such a pity that the cult of Social Darwinism appears to have infected your brain. Saw that execrable Ayn Rand movie recently did you?