Federal election 2016: Young mums pushed swing to Labor

When we dissected those seats which swung most strongly to Labor the first group we found didn’t even have a vote.

When we demographically dissected those seats which swung most strongly to Labor on Saturday the first group we found didn’t even have a vote. We are talking kids here, folks, lots of kids, ­especially those up to the age of four.

They may not have had a vote, but their mums and dads did and they thumped Scott Morrison’s budget out of the ballpark on Saturday. They took aim at it because of its failure to ­increase the limit on childcare subsidies, as this meant many working mums in this group ran out of their commonwealth subsidy about the same time Malcolm Turnbull announced the election. They kept working for eight weeks, while the campaign droned on, just to pay inflated childcare fees and taxes.

We’ve been profiling federal elections back to 1966 and this group of young mums has been consistently the most politically volatile, irrespective of the direction of the swing.

The variable contributes to our Swinging Voter Stereotype, along with home buyers, the indebted and those born in Britain. The stereotype dominates the political landscape of Australia’s outer suburbs, especially in Perth.

These mums, on low to upper-middle incomes, don’t have the luxury of staying at home. They need money from a part-time job as they’ve borrowed big for the new mortgage and they are concerned their old job may not be around much longer if they don’t get back into it. They also have husbands and parents who vote and who get roped into childcare duties and the school run when the money for childcare runs out.

When we ranked the seats by the numbers of 25 to 29-year-old mums with one or two kids we found the top seats also ­included Flynn, Capricornia, Lindsay, Herbert, Macarthur and Burt. All of these seats are now either lost to the government or in the undecided columns.

The other group dominating the demographics of the seats swinging to Labor last weekend — such as Macarthur or Paterson — were what we call the Working Family Stereotype, typically a tradie dad and a mum in a skilled white-collar admin job. These big mainstream groups comprise about one in four Australian workers. Labor candidates need them to provide the political grunt for their votes in the middle-class suburbs found nestled between the outer Swinging Voter suburbs and the Goat Cheese Circle suburbs close to the CBDs of our major cities.

These working families also tend to rely on middle-class welfare, like Family Tax Benefit Part A, and they find it difficult to afford co-payments for visits to the doctor. So, just like the swinging voters, they were receptive to Labor’s Mediscare campaign after the Morrison budget froze Medicare payments to doctors until 2020.

This budget move froze the ­incomes of 32,000 GPs for another four years. These doctors provide 140 million services to Australians every year — that’s 23 million ­visits to doctors’ surgeries decor­ated with budget protest posters during the eight-week campaign.

All Labor did was say thank you and capitalise on the damage the Morrison budget had already done to Coalition MPs. From an old hack who has run a few campaigns, this was beyond stupid.

There’s a third group dominating our table of demographics in the top ALP seats and they are what we term the Digitally Disrupted. They include the mainly male blue-collar workers, such as machine operators, whose jobs are at most risk of computerisation, followed by ­female white-collar clerical and admin jobs, and then the predominantly male tradies, with the big group of professionals at low risk.

Despite total jobs growth ­exceeding 1.5 million, the male-dominated semi-skilled and unskilled occupations at most risk of computerisation gained virtually no jobs in this country in the eight years after the GFC.

If you want to know where to find these voters, look at a map showing the swings against the government on Saturday. This is also the group that in the US supported renegade candidates in the primaries and in Britain voted to leave the EU. They’re locally born, white, middle aged and facing the prospect of long-term unemployment in an industry or occupation they thought would keep them in work until retirement. They are angry and lashing out at mainstream parties and economic ­orthodoxy. Really, it’s whichever party is close enough to kick.

They’re not necessarily captives of the Labor Party, as fringe protest parties and populists such as Nick Xenophon and Pauline Hanson also captured their votes.

A much smaller demographic swinging to the Coalition last weekend could be found huddling close to the amenities and commuting convenience of the inner suburbs, the Goat Cheese Circle, where we find two-income professional families with the best ­access to broadband and the most secure jobs, often linked directly or indirectly to the public sector.

This demographic stereotype likes Turnbull a lot more than they liked Tony Abbott. The seats in which they live are mostly safe ­Coalition, but there are also some marginal seats, such as Brisbane, Reid and Chisholm, where this fondness for Turnbull lingers. With a decent budget and ministers with a better rapport with ­ordinary families, Turnbull could have been home and hosed. The other group dominating seats swinging to the ­Coalition ­includes all those with money in the form of income or assets, ­especially ­income from assets. These are ­retired voters, as confirmed by the age profile of the seats swinging to the Coalition. The argument superannuation ­reform drove swings against the Coalition flies in the face of these facts.

Mind you, there are two things to remember when dissecting election results. Firstly, everybody on the winning side claims the ­result was down to them. Secondly, everybody on the losing side claims they would have won, if only the losers had listened. In ­reality, this one was decided by the kids who don’t even have a vote.

John Black is a former Labor senator for Queensland and is now CEO of Australian Development Strategies. His election profiles and maps can be found at www.elaborate.net.au