Following last month’s questions on the Liberal Party values and leadership, we gave in to public demand and have done the Labor Party this month. We also very briefly touched on Ukraine and the floods to see if they were impacting votes at all.

We’re also aware of a very large audience of new eyes on this poll as we continue to predict that the outcome of the 2022 federal election is uncertain, and Labor may lose. We are not wavering from that point, but note that it is ‘may’, not ‘will’. We have an expanded prediction section at the end after the results.

There’s also a note at the end about the sample – we closed the polling window early for some respondents this month because of the unexpected strong result in the SA election, but the sample is solid.

Let’s start with the numbers.

First Preferences

Very little movement in the first preferences this month. The Independents (-2.2) and undecideds (-0.9) dropped slightly while the Coalition (+0.5%), Labor (+1.1) and Greens (+0.9) gained slightly, which is normal and expected as the election day nears. There’s no sign of momentum either way at this point.

Effective Vote

The effective vote tells us where the preferences are likely to land on a two candidate preferred basis – it’s like a 2PP, but we don’t pretend the cross bench doesn’t exist.

There was a substantial shift from Coalition (-3.4) to the Others (+2.6) in this month’s Effective Vote calculations, returning more towards the projections from January of a larger cross bench. Labor’s effective vote is exactly the same as January.

EFFECTIVE VOTE	Percentage	Seats
ALP	54% (+0.6%)	81 (+1)
Coalition	35.7% (-3.4%)	54 (-5)
Others	10.3% (+2.6%)	16 (+4)

For myriad reasons that will take too long to document, we expect that fluctuation – back and forth between the Coalition and Others – will continue through to election day. We don’t think this is genuine vote shift, but rather that the vote is largely settled, and people who aren’t thrilled are just having a flirtation with voting for someone else… but will end up voting for the incumbent Coalition member. Similarly, we don’t anticipate that Labor will go any higher, and that their share of the vote has basically stabilised. If anything, the Labor vote may fall as election day nears; the Other vote certainly will.

Incumbent v Challenger

The incumbent v Challenger measure continues to stubbornly deny Labor any optimism, although it has moved in favour of the challengers this month. Don’t split hairs over the 50.3 to 49.7, this is a dead heat. And a reminder, this measure – which accurately predicted the Coalition retain in 2019 – has basically been stuck at dead heat for the better part of a year.

Yes, that means that we head into the election with no clear prediction from our two measures, one pointing to a narrow Labor win and the other saying that’s unlikely, maybe hung… Read below for some of our thoughts on why. And remember the point of this exercise is to test if either of these work better than 2PP.

Ukraine

There were two substantial ‘cycle braking events’ in the last month – the war in Ukraine and the huge floods experienced in Queensland and NSW in particular. A cycle breaking event is one that can completely reset the narrative of the election, and render everything before it meaningless. Typically they are only one of three things: major natural disasters resulting in loss of life, terrorist attacks or wars, and change of leader in a major party. Although Hawke’s death so close to the last election did have a cycle breaking effect, sadly for the Labor party.

The war in Ukraine is a particularly interesting thing because it’s so far away, we don’t really have any skin in the game, and yet because so much of it is being waged on social media it is having a significant impact on our news and information flow. Resulting in some 85% of respondents being worried about it.

The near polar opposite responses to the simple questions of whether we should take refugees from Ukraine, or send troops to Ukraine, is very fascinating sociologically. There were lots of comments that ‘we shouldn’t get involved’ and ‘it’s not our problem’ from younger male voters who you would normally expect to be a bit more pro-action… is that a post Afghanistan fatigue? Or fear of Russia? Perhaps something for academics who work in that space to delve into. But the support for refugees was near absolute and unqualified, some arguing that we need the people!

“Australia should stay out of foreign wars but accepting refugees from this particular conflict would be good for the country.”
35-44 year old male voter in Durack

“I don’t think we should send troops to fight but we should send troops to assist in refugee evacuation and humanitarian efforts.”
35-44 year old male voter in Dickson

“Australia should help Ukraine with humanitarian aid and weapons, but not commit troops or become involved in a war with Russia.”
35-44 year old male voter in Warringah

 Sadly, there were a number of comments that the whole thing is a hoax or a conspiracy to distract from COVID, or some kind of political strategy. Seriously friends, Morrison can’t organise a delivery of vaccines from a vaccine factory effectively, he sure as hell can’t pull off a full scale war to kick start an election campaign… good thing only about a quarter of voters will factor in the war in Ukraine to their voting decision.

Floods

While the floods have been absolutely devastating, they have also been patchy in terms of their impact on the nation. Savvy observers may have already noticed that with the telethon done, most of the media have moved on and most voters with them, while those directly affected are facing months of homelessness and try to figure out what to do with what’s left of their businesses and belongings. Just over a quarter of voters have been directly affected or have a loved one who was directly affected. More than half blame climate change for the severity of the floods.

Unsurprisingly, the view of the federal government response to the floods was poor, while State Government performance received a mixed report card. Just over half over voters will factor in the floods to their voting decision, but very few will have it as their sole consideration when deciding who to vote for, and almost all of our respondents who indicated it was a single issue vote for them were in Page (the seat around Lismore).

Labor Party values and leadership

By popular demand, we repeated our questions on values and leadership from last month, this time asking about the Labor Party. This was not as interesting as the Liberal Party responses – as expected, the Liberal Party questions arose from qualitative findings in earlier surveys that Liberal Party members and supporters were really struggling with the leadership’s disconnect from the party ideals.

Labor party values certainly have a split personality, but it’s not the complete loss of identity of the Liberals. Most responses to the question ‘what does the Labor party stand for’ could be split into ‘workers’, ‘equity’, or ‘Liberal Lite’. This last one is kind of amusing given the only identifiable theme of ‘what does the Liberal Party stand for’ in last month’s poll was ‘I don’t know’… so how you can be the lite version of ‘I don’t know’ is interesting. There were a number of comments that the party had somewhat lost its way, but most respondents had a clear idea of what they thought the party stands for.

And a majority felt Albanese was a good leader of the party, who effectively represented those values. The ‘I’m not sure’ factor was high, and it was highest for Labor Party voters who are not members of the party, who are really undecided on Albanese.

The performance of the Labor Party in opposition hasn’t had a considerable impact on likely outcome, but to be fair, it usually doesn’t. Oppositions can’t really do anything.

On the policy front, Climate Change and Refugees were the only two policy areas of those we asked about where less than 50% felt the current party platform is consistent with party values.

When asked to nominate a policy they would like changed, climate change and refugees again were the stand outs where voters would like Labor to do better… and no, not just with 20 something Greens, older voters. And everywhere in the country:

“Absolutely they need to change their policy on refugees. They also need to stop giving so much money to private education and to private health care.”
65-74 year old female voter in Wentworth

“Could be a bit stronger on Climate Change.”
75 year old and over female voter in Kennedy

“Take action on climate change and end indefinite detention of refugees and offshore processing.”
55-64 year old female voter in Franklin

“Asylum seeker policy on “illegal” boat arrivals should be dropped.”
75 year old and over male voter in Curtin

“Definitely change policy about arrivals by boat. Current policy is cruel and inhumane.”
65-74 year old male voter in Cooper

“I would like to see much stronger climate policy (but I also want them to be elected rather than the LNP!) and more humanitarian approach to asylum seekers and refugees.”
65-74 year old female voter in Hunter

“Need to clarify issues around fossil fuels & mining, as well as refugees & asylum seekers.”
65-74 year old female vote in Oxley

“Stop shilly-shallying on the climate catastrophe.”
65-74 year old female voter in Goldstein

Older voters (especially older women) are usually very polite when being critical of anything political, so ‘could be a bit stronger’ or ‘stop shilly-shallying’ (LOVE IT) should be read more like ‘f*!ing do it!’.

Final Prediction: chaos.

As this is the last poll before the election (and at this point we are still mulling the value of further polling before the election) we thought it’s best to put our money where our mouth is, and put a few predictions on record.

Firstly, this election can’t be predicted with any accuracy – not from any polling, modelling or anything else. It’s chaos.

There’s very different behaviours and attitudes being seen in different parts of the country and in different demographics, and, like our two outcome measures, they’re all pointing in different directions. Older women are furious and readying the pitchforks but it’s not clear where their anger is directed or where their votes will land; younger women are eerily quiet and settled, presumably because they’ve made their vote decision and have already logged off the election. Meanwhile younger men are doing the anti-establishment thing more than they should, while older men are quietly focused on economic matters and ‘returning to normal’, also indicating they’ve locked their vote in.

Professionals are squealing about cost of living pressures and seem to be the least settled in their vote; the middle class keep raising refugees, climate change, federal ICAC and other long running issues; and those doing things a bit harder at the moment are largely focused trust and character issues as the frame through which they are assessing government performance. Normally the professionals are focused on climate change and refugees, middle class on character, and those struggling are focused on cost of living. But we can’t deny what we’re seeing, we’ve been tracking this topsy turvy issue profile for months.

Further, there is no national trend to speak of. Queensland has a ‘readying the barricades’ feel of wanting to protect their LNP members and prevent a Labor landslide. The same feeling of pro-Labor momentum that fooled us last election is coming from Victoria, good luck trying to guess if it will actually manifest this time. NSW similarly continues on its 50/50 even keel from last election despite individual seats being likely to flip hard in all kinds of directions. SA is keeping its cards close to the chest like they did in the State election, but that doesn’t mean another big swing to Labor – they are just a likely to go in the other direction to balance out the score. WA is disconnected from the rest of the country entirely and doesn’t seem to care about the federal election at all, while Tasmania smiles knowingly at the silly mainland and just does its thing. Even the ACT and NT are getting into the action with some seats very stable and others extremely volatile. Chaos.

Now, that could mean that the contradictory forces all cancel each other out and we get a similar result with a few deck chairs rearranged… or, it could mean a massive landslide. It doesn’t feel like a landslide, so we’re going to put our money on hung parliament or narrow (1-2 seat) win. But because of the chaos, it’s impossible to say anything more certain than that.

One thing we are confident of is that the cross bench will be getting larger. Zoe Daniel is the safest bet in the country (Sorry Tim). Other possibilities are Sophie Scamps in Mackellar, Jo Dyer in Boothby, and the dark horse to watch is Hannabeth Luke in Page (if she has the stomach to capitalise on the floods and the savvy to do it with dignity and a bit of class). Keep an eye on Andrew Wilke in Clark who may have a swing against him, but like all the other sitting independents should be returned.

We believe Dave Sharma will be returned in Wentworth and Trent Zimmerman will be returned in North Sydney. Although both may be tighter than our confident prediction would indicate, unless they develop into decent three cornered contests and the primary vote of the Liberal candidate is significantly eroded in final days campaigning, there simply isn’t enough momentum to dislodge them. Allegra Spender’s support in particular has been softening, rather than hardening.

Josh Frydenberg was never seriously in doubt. Craig Kelly is gone, but we can’t see who the winner will be in Hughes – that seat is the definition of chaos. We predict Bridget Archer will defy the trend of one-term MPs in Bass and be re-elected with a healthy margin.

That’s all we’ve got in terms of specific seat results.

We expect big and unpredictable moves in border seats like Farrer and Indi, or Richmond and McPherson (and probably also Page and Moncrieff), and outer metro/provincial seats around Sydney like Robertson, Paterson, Macquarie and Cunningham, and the ring around Melbourne from Flinders to Corangamite, due to COVID-19 displacement and population shift. The redistribution in Victoria will also not help matters. Big upsets possible, especially in the open seats (where the sitting member has retired), but where and how big impossible to tell.

So yeah, chaos. But we wish all candidates the best of luck, and all voters an excellent democracy sausage.

Sample note

We made the unusual decision to suspend the recruitment of participants via open links – that is, via the links shared on social media or for snowball recruitment – early this cycle due to the unexpected South Australian election result.

We have known since the last election that the poll is very susceptible to issues of the day, and particularly any frantic political discussion. We have a number of different strategies to control this, including using multiple links so that we can turn off any that are being manipulated (for example, in January when people were sharing the poll and saying it was commissioned by Scott Morrison with ‘send him a message’ type nonsense, we killed those links and issued new ones).

This decision was unusual that we killed all open links, and not because of manipulation but because chatter and media commentary about the SA election and implication for the federal were so widespread. It was an overly cautious move, but we’d rather have done it, than not done it and have a bad sample.

Any KORE Poll has a maximum 50% of respondents that are freshly recruited from either the River (social media and website links), snowball recruitment (links given to panel members to share with friends and family), and direct marketing (emails to participants provided by a sample supplier), and the other half comes from the KORE Panel. This combined sampling method has proven to be more effective than, say, just using a sample provider or standing panel. This sample was slightly skewed as a result of this decision to 59% panel members, and 41% fresh recruits.