Issues favourable to Labor have dominated the political conversation over the past week, the first of Crikey’s Campaign Insights with Isentia shows, illustrating the difficult environment for Scott Morrison to start clawing back support.
During the election campaign, Isentia will be providing detailed data on media coverage of policy issues, personalities and seats, giving us an insight into the issues shaping the campaign and how key players are performing.
In the first report as we approach the calling of the election, covering March 31 to April 6, the government’s woes have been on display.
The dominant issue in the media during the week was aged care, an issue favourable to Labor and which the opposition has sought to make a key element of the campaign. It was well ahead of the cost of living, an issue that breaks both ways for the parties but which the government made the centrepiece of its budget. Wages — another Labor issue — was also prominent. Morrison’s 2007 preselection also received a high level of mentions, along with child care and climate change.
The only unequivocally positive issue for the government — its announced development of hypersonic missiles — came in 13th in terms of volume of mentions.
And while Morrison drew the highest volume of media mentions across internet, press, radio and television and was much higher than Anthony Albanese, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells had the fourth-highest volume of mentions, behind Josh Frydenberg. Labor’s Jim Chalmers was fifth, reflecting his role in the opposition budget response, ahead of Barnaby Joyce, whom Labor will be hoping features heavily in metropolitan media coverage during the campaign, given the high level of animosity he attracts from urban voters.
Just to confirm Morrison’s woes, Catherine Cusack, the former MP who this week detailed why she could never support Morrison, was the eighth-most prominent politician in the media.
In a handful of key electorates, media coverage between candidates has shifted over the past week. Total coverage of the Northern Tasmanian seat of Bass has increased, as Morrison visited the Liberals’ most marginal electorate, and Premier Peter Gutwein retired. The good news for the government is that floor-crossing MP Bridget Archer increased her share of coverage to a whopping 94.1%, while her Labor rival Ross Hart got just 5.2%, though much of that rise is largely attributable to ongoing commentary around Archer’s razor-thin margin.
Coverage of North Sydney, where independent Kylea Tink is mounting a strong challenge to Liberal moderate Trent Zimmerman, also increased. Much of that shift reflects the ongoing court drama surrounding Morrison intervening to save Zimmerman’s preselection. No surprise then that Zimmerman got the lion’s share of coverage (77.8%), while Tink boosted hers to 21.4%.
In key Labor-held marginals Parramatta and Eden-Monaro, there’s been a shift in media coverage towards the Liberals, as the party finally announced candidates. In the past week, Eden-Monaro challenger Jerry Nockles’ coverage surged to 69.2%, compared with 28.3% for sitting MP Kristy McBain. In Parramatta, coverage is deadlocked between Liberal Maria Kovacic and Labor’s controversial captain’s pick Andrew Charlton. Coverage of both Liberal candidates was broadly favourable, following some resolution to the NSW preselection fiasco.
In Wentworth, independent Allegra Spender saw her total coverage surge in the week of April 1 to April 7, getting 54.5% of all mentions, and overcoming Liberal MP Dave Sharma for the first time since Isentia began monitoring. But while Spender’s coverage has increased, the insights team notes much of that coverage has been negative, targeting independents for alleged connections to Labor and the Greens.
Isentia’s Emotional Pulse Index, which tracks the tone of social media, showed a continuing fall in the “Joy” indictor, which had surged during the budget — driven presumably by the handouts on offer from the government, while “Disgust” and “Sadness” indicators both rose back toward long-term levels.
While volatile, the general direction of the indicators will be fascinating to watch in coming weeks as Labor seeks to capitalise on unhappiness with the government and Scott Morrison looks to lure voters back with handouts.
It is truly staggering to contemplate the fact that while albanese is almost an unknown quantity and there are some questionable members of the ALP that so many Australians are still prepared to vote for a person who who will sit with and ‘support’ scumo etc.
Memo. Scotty from Marketing.
Concentrate on local issues, flood and fire mitigation, local participation in who gets elected, cost of housing, new employment opportunities for fossil fuel workers, and better education outcomes. Let’s have some quarantine stations, ICAC, we can even discuss your religious bill, if it is important to the community. Then educate and nuture on these wild schemes that go way above our head like Aukus, missiles, rather than crass megaphone diplomacy via the media
Emmanuel Macron spent many noble hours talking to Russia on not invading Russia, lets’s see how he fares this weekend,
Macron of course doesn’t think that Smirko is a liar, he KNOWS he is a liar.
With that free, fearless and frank assessment of our Prime Minimal’s character is their anything left to say?
He’s had the opportunity to show his colours on all of those imperatives for more than just the last three years.
Yet he has failed at every level on all of those imperatives, and more.
As I finish this post I am left wondering if you were being facetious.
A little cynical and wary of the entire process at the moment,
I have to make my mind up in the next couple of weeks on who to vote for in a calm rational manner, not hostile, megaphone diplomacy carried by the media along with slanging match on goofs. Who cares
I have to make my mind up in the next couple of weeks on who to vote for. Surely an easy task, if you want a federal ICAC or less carbon emissions or more funding for the ABC more funding for aged care no indue card better funding for medicare and child care then vote Labor. If you do not want these things then vote Coalition.Easy peasy.
Why it is “…good news for the government is that floor-crossing MP Bridget Archer increased her share of coverage to a whopping 94.1%…” – she is hardly Team Morrison.
‘All publicity is good publicity’ doesn’t really work these days, does it?
Hope not. Bridget may be a nice person, but until recently she has voted 100% with Morrison, so in my book a vote for her is a vote for Morrison. The advantage for her may be gutwein helping her in the mean time.
And even worse a vote for Bridget is a vote for Barnyardy Joyce.
LNP, Labor, they are both corrupted by the current Australian political processes and continue to blatantly deceive and manipulate their Australian constitutes!! That is my predicament and I suspect the same for many other Australian voters?
What polictical party, can you trust? ………who do you vote for???
Greens! With Labor 2nd
Labor with Greens 2nd.the Greens will never get more than 12% so why waste your vote
The biggest election issue is lying. The Mainstream media (MSM) rightly savage the Coalition over numerous falsehoods but do it in a “Gotcha!” fashion that ignores (a) massive lying by omission by the endlessly self-censoring MSM itself, and (b) the fact that it is lying rather than the lies per se that is critical. There is zero tolerance for lying in science, and science-based risk management crucial for societal security is also sabotaged by government lying and falsehood. Endless Coalition lying, falsehood, deception and spin (see Bernard Keane’s must-read book “Lies and Falsehoods. The Morrison Government and the new culture of deceit”) endangers Australian security and democracy, and instructs “Put the Coalition last”.
Labor is vastly better but is not innocent – thus both Labor and the Coalition falsely deny the evil and repugnant reality of Israeli apartheid that has been exposed as apartheid by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Israeli B’Tselem, Israeli Yesh Din, Harvard Law School, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, by numerous anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish humanitarians (notably by anti-apartheid heroes Nobel Laureates Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu) and indeed by Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of South African Apartheid, who declared that “Israel is an apartheid state”.