The women voters Morrison needs to woo are not the ones you might think

It may not have looked like it, but this week’s budget was firmly aimed at the female vote. It didn’t reference women too explicitly (apart from the woefully named “Girls of Steel” and “Women in Work Boots” initiatives it announced), but it was absolutely targeted at the hard-to-reach, time-poor women who control family budgets.

Liberal pollsters say that while male voters are more concerned with macro-economic management, female voters who run households tend to be preoccupied with hip-pocket minutiae, for the simple reason that it is usually their problem. They buy school uniforms and plan holidays. They make spending decisions on white goods and kids’ extracurricular activities.

Female voters have been drifting away from the Coalition, but it needs to convince particular groups of women.Credit: Louie Douvis

The Liberals are trying hard to capture this key demographic – non-university-educated women who may lack social capital but are powerful in an electoral sense.

These women are not loyal to any party. They are juggling jobs and children, always multitasking, and if they have an idle moment, they’re more likely to scroll Facebook or Instagram than read the news.

These are female voters who haven’t necessarily followed the blow-by-blow of the various sexual misconduct crises that Prime Minister Scott Morrison has done such a poor job of handling. They don’t have the time or the inclination to march to Canberra, and they would probably not relate to the well-heeled women who turned up to the National Press Club to see Brittany Higgins’ and Grace Tame’s powerful address.

Illustration: Reg Lynch Credit: The Sun-Herald

These women probably quite like Jenny Morrison, at least enough to pay some attention to her, which is why her husband is increasingly using his wife in his publicity. Morrison and the Liberal Party more generally need all the help they can get with the female vote.

Despite what his harshest critics say, it’s not all Morrison’s fault. The female vote is obviously heterogeneous, and it’s impossible to generalise about What Women Want, but clear trends are observable. The most obvious one is that female voters have been drifting away from the Coalition for decades.

The Australian Election Study, which examines voter behaviour after every federal election, showed that at the 2019 election the Coalition attracted the lowest proportion of women’s votes since the survey began in 1987.

The same drift, according to Dr Sarah Cameron, a political science lecturer at the University of Sydney, is happening in advanced democracies all over the world. “Whereas parties on the right used to have an advantage among women, now parties on the left attract more votes from women,” Cameron says.

Political scientists put this down to a few trends, some to do with increasing gender equality. Cameron cites women’s increased participation in the workforce, which means they are a greater proportion of union members, the decline of religiosity, more women getting degrees (university-educated people tend to favour left-wing parties) and generational change – among younger cohorts, women are more left-wing.

That’s the general trend, but surely Morrison is now toxic with female voters? Don’t be so certain.

At the last election he was more popular among men than women, but women didn’t despise him. The Australian Election Study showed that, on a scale of likeability from zero to 10, the Prime Minister’s average popularity score was 5.4 among men compared with 5.0 among women.

But three years later, you would imagine Morrison’s likeability with women has taken a dive, right Actually, according to Newspoll, slightly more women than men name Scott Morrison as the better choice for prime minister.

The gap widens when it comes to Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese – 44 per cent of men say he’d be a better prime minister compared with 37 per cent of women. More women are uncommitted on this measure – 20 per cent don’t have an opinion either way, compared with 14 percent of men.

On primary votes, roughly equal numbers of men and women say they will put the Coalition first – 35 per cent of men and 34 per cent of women.

But women like Labor less than men do – 42 per cent of men say they’ll give their primary vote to Labor compared with 40 per cent of women.

Morrison can’t seem to take a trick at the moment, and last week yet another female – outgoing conservative senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells – publicly labelled him a bully. There is now a substantial club of women who have given Morrison appalling personal reviews. Honorary male members include Barnaby Joyce (who said in a leaked text message last year that Morrison “is a hypocrite and a liar from my observations and that is over a long time”) and French President Emmanuel Macron who famously said “I don’t think, I know” when asked by The Sydney Morning Herald’s now editor, Bevan Shields, if he thought Morrison was a liar.

Fierravanti-Wells might have been motivated by personal animus and self-interest. The Prime Minister pointed out she had just effectively lost her job. But her character attack on the Prime Minister chimed with all the others, and it is especially damning because it comes from yet another person who has known Morrison for a long time, and worked closely with him.

Voters may not care about the career of the NSW senator they’ve barely heard of, but they might pop their heads up to note that yet another person who knows Morrison says he is a phoney with a nasty streak who behaves very differently behind closed doors than he presents in public.

And the more the media is focused on personal attacks on the Prime Minister and his responses, the less clear air the government has to sell its budget to those elusive female voters, not to mention all the others they need to swing behind them, starting right now.

@JacquelineMaley

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