Medicare worked, CFA didn’t: why we voted how we did

Labor’s Medicare campaign played a key role in driving people to vote for the party at the election, while the vaunted CFA dispute issue had virtually negligible effect, data from Essential Research shows.

Essential asked respondents to self-nominate reasons for their vote, in contrast to usual polling questions that provide a range of responses to select from. The results confirm some and contradict other interpretations for the extremely close outcome.

For example, the CFA dispute, in which the government and News Corp newspapers invested considerable resources to hype as an example of out-of-control unions, has been held as a reason for Labor failing to pick up seats in Victoria. However, it barely registers as an issue in the responses: less than 1% of Coalition voters nominated it as a reason for their vote, confirming on-the-ground reports from Labor that it had little effect and mostly confirmed existing anti-union views of rusted-on Liberal voters. In contrast, the post-Brexit emphasis from the Coalition on “stability” (summarised in the slogan “stick to the plan”) at least had some success: 4% of Coalition voters nominated “stability” as a reason.

[Essential: voters like Shorten more after all]

In contrast, 10% of Labor voters nominated Medicare as a reason for their vote, confirming the success Labor had with that campaign. The most common reason for voting Labor was some variation of “looks after average person/ low incomes, care about people”, nominated by 14%.

Eleven per cent and 12%, respectively, of Labor and Coalition voters said they always vote for their parties; 15% of Coalition voters said the Liberal and National parties were “better than other parties” or that they simply “liked them”, compared to 8% of Labor voters and 4% of Greens voters. The most popular reason for voting for the Coalition was “economic management” (18%) while “don’t like/trust Labor” was nominated by 6%. For Greens voters, the top reason (19%) was “don’t like/trust either Labor or Liberals”; 10% also nominated “don’t like/trust Liberals”, which was nominated by 12% of Labor voters.

Eight per cent of Greens voters nominated climate change or the environment as the reason for their vote. And while 9% of Coalition voters nominated “better policies”, without specifying them, 11% of Labor voters also did so and 10% of Greens voters did too; 8% of Labor voters nominated specific policies they preferred compared to 1% of Liberal voters and 4% of Labor voters; 5% of Coalition voters thought the Coalition was better for the country compared to 1% of Labor and Greens voters who voted for that reason.

As for “other” voters, the overwhelming reason was distrust of the major parties: 37% nominated “don’t like/trust either Labor or Liberals”.