Voters’ Voices: Demographic Divides

I'm Nick Harvey Doyle, a Ngunnawan man from the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales. The Yarn Podcast is made on the unceded land of the Wurundjeri, Woburrung and Bunurong people. We'd like to acknowledge First Nations people as the first storytellers. We pay our respects to elders past and present. Always was. Always will be. Aboriginal land.

From the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, this is The Yarn. I'm Ruby Perryman. Ahead of Australia's federal election on May 3rd, we're bringing you the second episode of Voters Voices. Last week, we focused on Generation Now. They're the young, disaffected voters struggling through the cost-of-living crisis. And they're also turning their backs on major parties. For part two, our reporters zoomed out.

They went to a broader mix of voters, from retirees to small business owners. They found values were front of mind this year, from political honesty to social and environmental concerns. Maxine Ford interviews former neuroscientist Dr Sharon Orman Rossiter. She votes in the Victorian electorate of McNamara, and she has an unusual plan to personally hold local politicians accountable there.

Before this election, I'm going to be interviewing, if they will agree to it, individually, the three most likely candidates to win in this electorate. You were saying you've been thinking of doing this for a while. I've been thinking of doing this for at least five or more years, perhaps potentially even ten. But I've just been so busy with my own business.

Now I have time and I'm going to make time to go and see them. You were talking a bit about how you want to lean on your career background when interviewing them. Yes. I do. So from a neuroscience perspective, I want to disarm them as much as possible so that I get to talk to the real person. I realise that there'll be a political facade for each person. So I want to find out, do they merit my vote as a person? And then does their party merit my vote with their policies?

So my aim is no matter who gets in to make them accountable. And I intend to go and visit them quarterly with their key performance indicators. So I'll be saying to them, okay, just this is your job. In any job, you get KPIs. Here are your key performance indicators. How are you measuring up? Are you going to deduct those KPIs from them?

personal statements of the kind of things they were saying they would do before getting to the election? Or are you going to make them up yourself based on what they've said? A combination of both. I'm going to find out what's important to them. So I'll say, all right, that's important to you. Let's have that as part of your KPIs. This is important to me. Let's put them together. Let's design your KPIs right now. How do you expect to perform?

And then let's have a look at how you do perform because what I'm interested in is integrity in politics. Have you always been interested in politics? Why take such a direct? approach now? As an adult, I wanted to start the Honest Politicians Party. I wanted us to have a massive landslide. I wanted me to be Prime Minister and I wanted to clean up Australian society and get rid of lies in politics. And someone I really respect. Well, Sharon, if you...

go into politics, you'll be eaten alive, but what's more, you'll never be able to go for a run and have your own space running ever again. And so I thought, okay, I've got to actually influence in a different way. What inspiration do you hope that people can take away from this endeavour of yours? I will be telling.

pretty much everyone I know that I'm going to go and do this. I don't expect that many people will go and do it, but they might tell other people who might do it. So we might have the ripple effect. I think you can have a conversation in private that has a bigger impact than a big community meeting. That was Maxine Ford interviewing Dr Sharon Orman-Rossitar.

Some voters are conflicted over the clash between personal values and business interests. One such person is dental clinic owner Dr Ishan Verma. He believes liberal policies would help his business. but he opposes party leader Peter Dutton's stance on marriage equality. A tax deduction proposed by Dutton would allow small businesses to claim back $20,000 on meal and entertainment expenses. Reporter Morgan Reinwald asked Dr Verma what impact it would have on his business.

I think I would be very happy because currently it is difficult to claim. There is a limit of $300 per staff at a particular occasion and rest comes under fringe benefit tax, which you have to then pay even more. So having that would be. pretty good for not just mine, but any other small business as well. You have benefited from the instant asset write-off for small businesses. It's $20,000 currently and Dutton has announced if elected, he will increase it to $30,000. So...

Even 30 will be helpful. It will be definitely helpful because there can be certain equipments that can be in that range. But I feel still as a dental business, even $30,000 asset write-off will... not be as great because if you wanted to even get a dental chair that would be at least 50 grand right what was it like growing up gay in India it was not easy it was difficult

You're always judged. So everything had to be hidden. And then it had big mental impact because you would think you're doing something wrong, but you're not. When I got here, it felt like a weight has been lifted off my shoulder and it was so much easier. I was much more happier and mental health was much better. And it gave me confidence to even come out to my parents.

And what age was this? This was at age 25, 26. In the same-sex marriage plebiscite, Dutton was vocal in his support against same-sex marriage. Dutton said, and I quote, I've already voted no and I encourage other people to do the same. Would that impact your vote for the Liberal Party?

Probably not, because, you know, as a business, you have to think practically what is going to support your business. Yes, you want to support the country as well and other people. But at the same time, as a prime minister.

If it's his thought, his thought does not matter. Even if he has some philosophies or anything, it has to pass through his... other party members and even if he wants to make a change or something it has to go through parliament and everything so it has to go through checks in places so Yes, I would prefer someone who is more flexible, but currently, honestly, no politician that I know right now meets the criteria that I would want to vote for. But in the situation...

I need to look at what could be beneficial for my business and for my livelihood. In that scenario, I do think liberal would be helpful for me. That was Morgan Reinwald interviewing Dr. Ishan Verma.

Others are concerned about social issues. One big one is the loneliness epidemic. That's how public health experts describe the social isolation afflicting one in five Australians. Janice Appleton, founding member of co-housing initiative Urban Koo, says communal living provides a remedy, but it needs more government support. She spoke to our reporter Kai Wern Koo.

Co-housing is kind of between having your own apartment and a share house. So we all have our own apartments with our own kitchens and we engage in the community as much as we want. We have chosen to use the governance system of sociocracy, which means that instead of a hierarchy, you're all divided into areas of your interest. And you go into those circles and you make the decisions for the community in those circles. My preference is for people and growth. And so I'm on community care.

and conflict resolution working group and community cluster, which looks after the community generally, on shared meals as well. Would you say that co-housing is a solution in terms of social isolation? Yes, certainly it's wonderful for helping around isolation. We have a number of people here. who have mental illness in one way or another or are on the autism spectrum and who have got the beginnings of dementia. They're desperate for community and we look out for them.

Would you say that you think the government has done a good job in supporting people who are struggling with mental health or health issues? I don't think enough for older people. elderly, clear packages and things. But it seems to take a long time to get those sort of things in place. I think between the need and reaching out and asking, it can be a year before anything actually happens.

And things can get pretty bad in a year. Do you think that the government could do more to encourage initiatives like Urban Coup? Oh, I think that would be wonderful if they did. We had to educate the banks. We had to get them to come on board to supply mortgages for people. They had no idea what co-housing was. And it just took years of educating. I think it's an amazing thing. in the city to have. It's very hard to make a community. It really needs to start much earlier. So if you can...

put together a community and then say, right, okay, we'd like to help you get into a building. We can supply you maybe with the land or land at a cheaper cost and away you go. It'd be fantastic.

That was Kai Wern Koo interviewing Janice Appleton. Young people aren't the only demographic feeling alienated by mainstream parties. Reporter Daniel Gorn speaks to retiree Veerash Ratnika. about his volunteering for independent MP Zoe Daniel. She's campaigning for a second term in Goldstein, Victoria, with a focus on climate action, equality and transparency.

I started volunteering prior to the last election and part of that was such a positive process and such a pleasant outcome that I wanted to be involved with this one again. What sort of volunteering do you undertake in a typical week? I'm a bit unusual because I'm working quite a few hours because I'm running part of the team that's running this office. There's various bits of merchandise that need to be sold and there's things like supporting the door knocking teams in there.

getting together flyers and packing and then unpacking after they do or not processing reports associated with that and keeping contact with people who drop in who are passing by because they've seen that there's a sign outside. So, you know, it's a myriad of things depending on partly what walks through the door, but also partly about the schedule of activities. Are there any major differences between the 2022 election campaign and this year's one? Probably not, really.

The political climate's a bit different because it's three years on and slightly different. But beyond that, you know, the sort of things you're doing much the same, you need to get... signs out, you need to get merchandise worn and replaced. There are teams that do flyering and there are teams that do door knocking. All those sort of things are much the same. It's just...

keeping that going and hopefully learning from last time and doing it a bit better this time. Has the redistribution that happened in Victoria where you gain parts like Bentley East, has that impacted the campaign? Well, it makes it a...

Different focus, right? So one of the interesting things that we find is that the demographic people tell us that there's about 40,000 new people in the electorate who were not in the electorate last time. Partly that's... boundary change but that's also you know people move houses and people turn 18 so 40 000 is a lot because it's about 110 120 000 that's a third roughly so there's a whole lot of people who don't know zoe

and maybe don't know that they're in this electorate, which is also one of the things. So boundary change doesn't necessarily change it. That adds to it. Do you have any memorable stories from your time volunteering? I think the thing that gets you is the... genuine concern most people have and I think that's one of the biggest things after you've talked with a few people that it comes across is that while there's slightly different perspective most people are speaking quite honestly about

things that they're worried about or some sort of vision about what they would like the world to be like. And I think that's one of the things I enjoy about volunteering and talking with the people when I'm volunteering. is to hear those stories and partly to see those perspectives that I don't have. And, you know, these are all people in our community. I live in this community and so this is part of my community and to see the differences within it is...

It's quite interesting. That was Daniel Gorn interviewing Virash Ratnika. Recent opinion data shows Labor is ahead of the coalition, but electoral polls have proved fallible, especially in the recent US election. For today's final interview, Nicole Wong speaks to Melbourne-based polling model developer Danya Frayed Game about what went wrong. Polling comes with uncertainty.

It's not a magic method of knowing exactly what's going to happen. One shouldn't expect from polls to give you an accurate average result. What one should expect from polls is to give you a sense of the uncertainty. The kinds of errors that you got in the 2024 election tended to be lower than the average polling error from the past several decades of polling. The polling industry...

did do a pretty good job. That being said, there was a not insubstantial bias, once again, that polling, on average, underestimated Trump, which probably suggests that there's some systematic issues. in their polling industry, particularly when handling Trump. But overall, polling did pretty well. What do you mean by polling did pretty well if the results are actually quite different from the final election outcome? I mean...

Trump was anticipated to lose in the first poll and tied with Kamala Harris in the second. But at the end of the day, we all know that Trump won by a landslide. It's a very natural question to ask and it comes to the core about... how one should interpret polls and what polls can tell you about an election result. So if you looked at the average of what the polls were saying, you might be inclined to just look at that result and say, well, that's what's going to happen.

And a lot of the polling models that were making predictions about the election predicted, on average, a 50-50 election. But after taking account on the uncertainty inherent to polling, it was just as plausible that Kamala Harris would have won by a substantial margin just as it was that... Donald Trump would have won by a substantial margin. So given the uncertainties of polling, what's the point of having polling results that are actually not accurate?

That's a really good question. And I think the important thing here is to move away from the need to know an exact result in favour of an understanding of what is likelier to happen and what is less likely to happen. Election polling and election forecasting is usually most useful for is understanding which unlikely outcomes are plausible. For example, if, like in the US, there were some third-party candidates that were running.

And the results of the polling and their models, as it's typical over there, could have led you to conclude quite confidently that there was no chance that they were going to win. And where this estimate of uncertainty... is useful is for the general public to be able to have an expectation of what are the probabilities of certain outcomes taking place, which can help people, can help businesses make an assessment of what they should do in case.

different people come to power. That was Nicole Wong speaking to Danya Frayed Game. The Yarn is from the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne. It's produced on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Our executive producer is Louisa Lim. This episode was produced by Thomas Phillips. I'm Ruby Perryman. See you next week.