Class, voting and broad left demography

Brickies used to vote Labour, bankers voted Liberal and the Greens were but a twinkle in Mother Earth’s eye. Have things really changed? Pollytics looks at the data ONE OF THE most historically accurate predictors of the way people vote in Australian elections has always been the notion of “class”. At its most reductionist, working class voters generally support the ALP, owners of capital and employers generally support the Liberal Party and in the post-war years, rural Australia has generally supported anti-Labor candidates of various hues. To a large extent that basic pattern still holds, but class structures are evolving to the point where many of the relationships we used to see are no longer as predictive as they once were. For instance, manual labourers used to be the backbone of the Labor Party voting stock (that and the public service). The more manual labourers that lived in an electorate, generally, the larger was the ALP vote. Yet if we look at the electorate level results of the last election and compare the ALP primary vote with the proportion of people in the last Census that described their occupation as “Labourer”, the relationship has pretty much broken down... Read the full article Photo: Andrew Jeffre