ANU’s Australian Election Study paints a grim tale for the Libs, Anthony Albanese
Voters may not like Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as much as Kevin Rudd, and unsurprisingly, the Libs aren’t favoured by Gen Z — but there’s another far more worrying trend brewing.
The beauty of the ANU’s Australian Election Study, which dropped last week, is not just what it tells us about what happened last May but about the changes that have taken place over nearly four decades.
Unsurprisingly the reporting focused on the finding that Peter Dutton was the most unpopular leader of a major party in its history, even worse than Scott Morrison was in 2022.
But if you read on, that was almost the least of Liberals’ problems.
What about Albo?
It seemed to me his numbers could be seen two ways.
The survey allocates each leader a number out of 10 with 0 being ‘strongly dislike’ and 10 being ‘what-are-you-doing-later?’ with 5 being ‘meh’.
Compared to the Ruddster, whose 6.31 in 2007 made him the most popular leader since it started in 1987, Albo’s 5.14 this year is not only pretty anaemic but a step down from his 5.26 in 2022.
But Rudd’s performance in 2007 was both an all-time high and the start of a general downturn in leaders’ popularity.
The next three election winners — Julia Gillard (4.89), Tony Abbott (4.29) and Malcolm Turnbull (4.94) — were not just a lot less popular than Rudd, they were, with the exception of Paul Keating in 1993, the first to win elections from negative territory.
In other words, the history of the survey can be roughly divided into two halves — the first 20 years in which the public tended to like the winning leader and the period since 2007 when prime ministers were, compared to their predecessors, barely tolerated.
So, yeah, compared to Bob Hawke, Albo is toxic, but by 2025 standards, he is in his own little way a rock star.
Reading the survey, a few things leap out.
The first is how huge a slice of the population feel they can get by without needing to take any interest in politics.
For 20 years only a third of people have said they took a good deal of interest in the last election while for the past decade only around 60 per cent cared much who won.
If you worked for the Guardian you could probably work those stats up into a piece lamenting the disillusionment of the people – especially its yoof – and their alienation from The System.
But you could just as easily celebrate how lucky we are to live in a country where tuning in or out of politics is a matter of choice like following football.
The survey also showed how completely we have moved into a world where elections are decided online, with the number of people saying they followed it through the internet for the first time being greater than the number who followed it from newspapers, radio and television combined.
This has been accompanied by a really big change in when we make up our mind about voting.
Until about ten years ago it was more usual for voters to say they had made up their minds ‘a long time ago’ compared to those who said they had decided during the election campaign.
This has now reversed, with only 32 per cent saying they had already decided before this year’s campaign compared to 37 per cent who said they made their mind up during it.
This finding, along with the fact one-in-five voters are visiting party and candidate websites while nearly a third are going to the AEC and even five per cent to parliament’s site, suggests that for a lot of people deciding how you vote is now like buying a camera or a phone or any other bit of gear from the internet where you do your research online before getting out your credit card.
Anything else?
Well it wouldn’t be 2025 if there weren’t some really grim news in there for the Liberal Party would it?
Even worse, as I said, than having the most unpopular leader since records began.
Even worse than the fact, voters preferred Labor’s policies on cost-of-living, housing, economic management, health, education, climate change, immigration – immigration! – and tax.
Even worse than the fact that since 2019 they’ve gone from being comfortably ahead with Gen X to being just behind Labor while over the same period their share of the Millennial vote has fallen off a cliff and every year more and more Gen Zs (who they lose 67-33) join the roll.
No, to me, the worst thing is the steady increase in the share of voters who just say they don’t like them.
Using the same 0 to 10 rating system as it does for leaders’, the survey found since 2004 they’ve fallen from 5.8 to 4.2 while for the past 15 years the ALP has been steady at around 5.
You can’t overstate how hard it is to get voters to listen if they’re actively hostile to you.
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Originally published as ANU’s Australian Election Study paints a grim tale for the Libs, Anthony Albanese
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