cam, 74 words, 1 comment, Graph, Australian Election Study, Republican Issue

The republic issue from the Trends in Australian Political Opinion.

Which is consistent with what we know already. Australians are predominantly a republican people (and democratic people from the other graphs). There is enough flag disillusionment that a pluralist flag response would work as a policy; and finally the Queen has lost her position of having civic meaning or purpose in Australia. The graph is not really showing anything new.

cam, 72 words, 2 comments, Graph, Australian Election Study, Interest in Politics

Another interesting graph from the Trends in Australian Political Opinion on the interest of voters in politics.

If you sum the voters that are some[what] interested and a good deal interested in 2004 then it becomes 79% of respondents. This is probably why there is a vibrant Australian political blogopshere and also why the op-ed columnists in the daily rags have a ready audience for their meat throwing trolls.

cam, 81 words, 0 comments, Graph, Australian Election Study

The Trends in Australian Political Opinion is a must read for graph junkies. Tonnes and tonnes of interesting data that is cleanly laid out. One such fascinating graph is voting considerations.

Voters are policy driven and a larger percent is more interested in the party than the party leader or the local representative when considering how they will vote. This paints a far more sophisticated picture of the Australian voter than the celebrity horse race the media prefers.

cam, 332 words, 5 comments, Graph, National Government, State Governments

Peter Martin argues that the Liberal Party is the natural national party and the Labor the natural state party. He writes that the Liberal Party risks making itself the permanent party of opposition if it competes with Labor for services based government. I strongly disagree with that analysis. As little as seven years ago there were four Liberal state governments.

I have created a graph to display it visually. It takes a middling year of when a party was in power at the national level and then counts how many Labor and anti-Labor (Liberal, Country, Progressive Nationals etc) there were at the state level the same year in June. (more)