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and if there's a better way forward. Find ABC News Daily's five-part series on the ABC Listen app. As Western Australians head to the voting booth, the result, well, it seems pretty clear. It looks like... a Labor win. But federally, we know that Labor are on shakier ground. So what are the key themes WA voters are raising? And what are the key themes that generally voters care about at the moment?
And what could all of that mean? Welcome to Politics Now. Hi, I'm PK and on the eve of the West Australian election, I'm joined by David... Talbot, who's a pollster and strategist with Talbot Mills. And they've been instrumental to Labor's WA campaign and also have a hand in the federal campaign, the last one and the next one.
for a podcast exclusive. David, welcome. Thanks for having me. David, West Australians will be going to the polls this weekend, but come on, let's be frank here. The probability of a change of government is... extremely low. I mean, it's almost more likely that I'll become prime minister tomorrow. That's how I feel. And that is very unlikely, like very unlikely. I'm not even in the parliament. Labor holds 52 of the 59 seats.
at the moment, but as WA Labor is angling for a third term, just give me the incumbency effect. What you've been hearing as you've been doing your work. I should probably start by saying that in my experience in the modern political environment, nobody takes anything for granted anymore. And so wherever the numbers might be lying, I think modern political parties look at voters, they see volatility and aren't taking anything for granted. In terms of the big factors, I think...
Voters are under increasing personal pressures and COVID sort of sped politics up at the same time as the media environment's fragmented. So all of those factors are making voters increasingly fickle. Those are the kind of underlying reasons that...
takes anything for granted now. And every election is a bit different. In 2021, obviously, there was the kind of heat of the pandemic, Mark McGowan at the height of his political power, you know, and they landed on a fantastic result. And I don't think we'll ever see that. kind of repeated possibly. And so I think we will see kind of a natural correction from that really high watermark. And, you know, now with COVID in the rearview mirror, a lot of voters are still giving...
WA Labor credit for getting the state through those things. So there is also an incumbency effect that we talk about around the world. So incumbent governments haven't been doing well because of the cost of living crisis. But I speak to a lot of political heads, as you know, and they tell me there's something different about WA, even federally for Labor too. What is it, what's going on in WA that's different?
So I think their economy is in a very different state. And when you ask people about whether things are heading in the right direction or off on the wrong track in WA, they give you a quite different answer than they give in almost any other jurisdiction that we work across.
So you've got that, you've got the kind of economy driving sort of more optimistic perceptions of the way things are going. And then kind of on top of that politically, you've got all these other things which are about kind of experience of the current. team, the sort of steady hand framing
that people will kind of give you around Roger Cook, having seen a bit of him through the pandemic as health minister. So I think you've got both some sort of societal factors and some political ones that kind of make it quite unique, really. It is quite unique. So that high water mark of the last election has to, there's only one way, which is kind of down and you call it a correction. I think that's right. So that 52 out of 59 seats at the moment. I mean, that's, that's like.
It's the stuff of fiction, but it actually happened. So Labor will lose seats. Where do you see that friction? Like, where is that coming from? Is that just a bit of disappointment with generally the cost of living and that things need to be more competitive in politics?
I think you will have heard this kind of all over the place, but when people's lives are feeling tough, they look for answers and often they look for change. And so there are a lot of... jurisdictions we work across where even when people can't put
point to a kind of a single thing they just have that very kind of natural human reaction that when their lives are feeling tough and they're feeling those economic pressures that they're you know casting around for answers and often not answers that they might you know have a lot of
over, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. So tell me about focus groups. For our listeners who don't really get what that is, how do you really make sure you get a representative group of people and spark... them to speak authentically that isn't pushing them in a particular direction.
So that's a great question. In some ways, you know, focus groups aren't unlike the chats that your listeners might have with each other at a cafe or a pub. But as the name suggests, it's obviously a bit more focused. You know, it's six to eight people. around a table or increasingly we do these online. It's about a 90 minute conversation. So it's quite structured. And you typically in a focus group start broad and get more specific as the group goes on. So warming people.
up might be about having a conversation about how their lives are going you know what they're seeing and hearing in the midst of a campaign what's keeping them awake at night those kinds of questions and really just encouraging them to share their
honest views about things and then as the group goes on you might start presenting them with policy, presenting them with communications material and kind of seeing how they process all of that is really the kind of objective. I think focus groups are often...
kind of, I think, a bit unfairly characterised in politics as encouraging politicians to be sort of populists. You know, you get this kind of caricature almost of what a focus group is politically, but used correctly, they're a really great way to understand how people are viewing issues. to understand their worries, to identify opportunities, to connect policy and to spot unmet needs. And I think used well, they're a super important part of both political and business leaders' tool sets.
so you know I would say this wouldn't I as a kind of a researcher but you know like I think I'm much less sort of cynical and have much more confidence in the way these processes work now than I would have prior to being exposed Roger took the reins from the overwhelmingly popular COVID premier, which you mentioned. Mark McGowan was kind of like a rock star in the state, next level popularity.
So I want to go to the idea of leadership during times of crisis, something we've been looking at on politics now this week amidst, you know, Cyclone Alfred and the expectations people have. I know you worked heavily with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's... campaigns.
particularly also with that horrific Christchurch massacre. Just talk to me about what people were looking for and the way that you saw leadership attributes and what people wanted during that time and during times of crisis. You know, every situation's a bit different, but fundamentally I think people are kind of after three things in those moments. They need to sort of have an understanding of the state of play, like they just need some kind of facts. What's going on is often what they ask.
thing is they're after a kind of a direction of travel from a leader and that's hard in a fast moving situation or a pandemic or something like that but they want you know they're prepared to tolerate some uncertainty but they want a bit of a stare as to kind of where the ship's heading and the third thing is they want to understand the reasons for decisions that are being made and I think if leaders can do those three things you know they're off to a really good start
And then overlaid on top of that, I think there's a piece that came through really strongly with Jacinda, obviously, which was about the sort of kindness and empathy, the kind of human understanding she brought to communication that elevated her from a... a really solid communicator to a quite remarkable one. And... Is that stuff fixed or does it fluctuate? Because different crises require different kind of leadership. Do you find that what people are asking for or critiquing changes based on?
whatever the kind of process is? A little bit, but I guess my job as a kind of a researcher... through the work I do both qualitatively and quantitatively, is to inform, you know, the politicians or the business leaders about what the kind of needs of the audience are. And so I'm often not going into a focus group and sort of bombarding people with the things that those people might want to say, but I'm really kind of just listening for...
what those people need to hear, what their anxieties are, what their challenges are, and the things that they kind of need to understand or hear to process whatever the kind of problem is. So, yeah, it does change. And research is a big part of calibrating the communication in the world that I kind of inhabit to the needs of the audience. So when, and I'm not going to ask you to be specific because you're currently working on campaigns and I understand.
But when you hear something in your history which is maybe very negative about a leader and it keeps getting repeated, how... How does the communications piece work for you to actually communicate that? Like, I think that's fascinating. How do you say, hey, they keep saying that you're a bit of a, I don't know, a wimp or you're a bit of a, insert other negative word.
Yeah, that's a great question. Like some of it is kind of smoothed by the fact that if you have a strong relationship with the person you're advising, whether it's a politician or a business leader, and you can kind of have a safe space is kind of probably not the right. kind of word but like you know you've got an honesty there and you can present it sensitively yourself like I think I see my job as a researcher is to bring those truths to
leaders, and I've had to do that to talk about a context I can discuss. There were a series of Labour leaders in New Zealand who the public really wasn't responding particularly well to, and I had to have really direct conversations with a series. of those leaders about A, what people were saying, and then with a broader team, kind of try to find some ways to deal with those problems. And sometimes they're kind of fairly easily dealt with.
Other times, they might be more kind of fundamental problems that a campaign has to address or need a kind of different piece of thinking or intervention. Roger Cook said something that went viral nationally this week where he described J.D. Vance as a knob. He's walked it back a bit, but it went viral for a specific reason, right? Tell me how they responded in the focus groups. I think a lot of people kind of sort of sat up and took notice.
and got a bit of a laugh out of it. I mean, politics, for those of us who watch it very closely, is kind of one thing, and for the general public, it can be quite another. And I think those kinds of moments actually do... in the kind of sort of...
general public sphere often just kind of lighten the mood. And voters also like straight talking. So I imagine it may have resonated too. Absolutely they do. And I think also like, you know, the kind of issues that are driving... votes at the moment you know are the kind of really familiar ones that you will have heard again and again sort of cost of living you know health care uh housing you know those you know
politician who makes a comment like that doesn't detract from the good work that they can point to elsewhere that's actually the thing driving their vote. Now, David, while Anthony Albanese was planning to join the WA Premier at the polling booths this weekend and maybe enjoy the glow of a Labor win, which looks inevitable, although, you know, I'll eat my hat if I'm wrong, Cyclone Alfred, of course, has derailed.
Lots of plans. No one's plans more than people actually live in its pathway, can I say? Like they're the plans that really matter. I'm sorry if that's you. But he's been on the ground a lot in WA, visiting the state 28 times since the 2022 election. How beneficial is a strong state Labor brand for a federal party fighting an election? I think it really varies, and it's really hard to say, perhaps, except in retrospect.
like what the effect was. We often run, you know, surveys afterwards to try and unpick what the kind of drivers of people's votes were. But for every voter you get in a focus group that says that their votes for them are intimately entwined. you get another who says that they see them as entirely separate. My sense often is that...
It's state issues driving state voting intention and a separate set of federal issues driving federal vote intention. That's interesting because people say there's low levels of literacy about politics and who's in charge of what, but do you think people actually get it? I think they often do. I think we often don't give them full credit. My guess is often that these things are driven by essentially quite macro factors.
And in WA at the moment, it's things like, as I said, perceptions of an economy that's pretty healthy, you know, perceptions of an experienced team that's delivering, you know, it's those kind of factors rather than sort of other political calculations often that are driving.
people's votes. And do you agree that what's happening in WA is a bit different to the messages we're hearing in the East Coast? How do you mean? Well, voters are more grumpy on the East Coast. I think the pressures are slightly different. And so I think that does, you know, that kind of sense of anxiety that people have about the cost of living is just not quite so pronounced in WA. They're possibly a little bit more optimistic, really, which I think, you know, fundamentally changes the...
you know, the campaign environment. And post-COVID, you said everything's accelerated. Just give me a sense of what you mean by that. Like what's happened post-COVID that you're really noticing in your focus groups, in your research that's changed everything? It just feels like time has sped up a little bit for people, and it's hard to explain exactly kind of what might be driving that, but it just feels like people's tolerance for...
you know, things that take as long as they take is just a bit lower now than it has been previously. I wonder if there's something about our kind of digital lives that's kind of partially responsible there, that we're used to sort of technological innovation moving at such a point.
pace and the fact it takes time to you know build infrastructure is kind of a little bit at odds with our expectations about how fast things can happen in other areas of our lives that's kind of me speculating but I think there has been something over the last
few years that has kind of changed. And, you know, COVID's perhaps part of the explanation, but there might be others as well. And you've done national surveys, which are really different, of course, to a focus group. And you've found that there are gender divides too, in terms of what's appealing. What have you noticed about that? So what's coming through...
you know, sort of most interestingly to me probably is there seems to be a kind of a cohort of particularly young men who sort of see the world a bit differently to the rest of the population. They just show up as outliers on a lot of different questions we ask, whether it's kind of...
or expectations or other things. And we asked a question recently on the favourability of Elon Musk and a bunch of other billionaires. And the only people in our survey to have a positive, to have a favourable impression of Elon Musk were this kind of cohort of...
young men and I think that you know as a question kind of really kind of sums up something bigger that might be happening out there that I think is worthy of some more research that we haven't done but I think an interesting cohort to keep an eye on.
David, I know you're going to have a busy next sort of two months. So yeah, strap in. Thanks for coming on. Brilliant. Thanks so much for having me. And that's it for politics now. But David Spears will be in the feed with Insiders on Background tomorrow. And he'll be speaking with... the ABC federal elections legend, Anthony Green, all about the seats in WA that Anthony will be looking closely at and hopefully some of Anthony's favourite election moments. See ya.