it's time to revisit some statistics

there's an interesting article from John Black (former labor senator) on
the green voters and their effect on labor.
He also talks about the miners stoush. The green vote may not flow 80% to labor. and the miners stoush could cost the ALP 22 seats !

REF: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2010/2932279.htm
Transcript

NB This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

NB This interview was first broadcast on Monday 21st June before Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister
Paul Comrie-Thomson: Two acronyms have signalled game changes in Australian political life, one was ETS. The more recent is RSPT. What precisely does it mean? Our next guest, former Queensland Labor senator John Black, says that what the resource super profits tax could mean is a loss of 22 Labor seats at the next federal election. John Black's company has drilled deep into demographic data and come up with a radical reappraisal of the attitudes and voting preferences of greens. This was discussed recently on ABC TV1's Insiders program, and Bob Brown admitted to Barry Cassidy that just because the Green primary vote goes up, this doesn't automatically imply that the ALP will pick up extra preferences. So a vote for the Greens is not automatically a vote for the ALP. Is that how John Black sees it?
John Black: There's no doubt about that. The impact for the Labor Party is disastrous. If you have 8% or so additional Green votes this time over and above what you had last time, I don't believe that there's any way that you can comfortably assume that 80% or so on average of those are going to end up in Labor's boxes, because they're not.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: Let's drill down a little deeper into what we mean by 'greens'. You refer to French commentators, and they've noted that those who make green noises, they call them the bourgeois bohemians...
John Black: The Bobos.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: In fact the Bobos in France, in Europe, are economic drys. Is this the case in Australia too, on your understanding?
John Black: Well, they're certainly rich, there's no doubt about it,


that the greens are the richest group of voters in Australian politics. The poorest of course are the National Party voters...
Paul Comrie-Thomson: Can we just explore that again? The richest voters are the greens...well, Malcolm Turnbull I suppose wouldn't be surprised by that, looking at his electorate. But across the board..?
John Black: Absolutely, yes, there's no doubt about it.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: And the poorest are the Nationals?
John Black: That's right, the National Party is traditionally run by wealthy people who represent poor people, and the Greens tends to be run by lower income people representing rich people but who seem to have a view that their constituency is decidedly bolshy in terms of economic policy when in fact there's absolutely no evidence of that at all, and in fact the evidence is to the contrary.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: So in fact if green voters see green political parties threatening their income stream, they'll dump them. Is that how you see it?
John Black: In a New York second. This is not rocket science. People vote politically as consumers, and I fall back on my old Marxist historians for that little piece of wisdom. People do not vote to lose money, that's a case in point. Your green voter now has shares, your green voter now doesn't have children. Because they don't have children they have money, they have investment homes, they have shares. The simple correlations between ownership of investments, including shares, and the top income group was +0.94. You don't get any stronger than that. I mean, share ownership is clustered in then top quartile, green votes are clustered in the top quartile. Green voters are born overseas, they're the kind of people who were getting $100,000+ in WA on the old AWAs. They were into them with their ears back. These are rich, cosmopolitan, internationally qualified people.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: Let's try and construct a profile then of a typical green voter in Australia in 2010.
John Black: I can't tell you about 2010 but I can tell you about 2007, and if I can just read down the list...field of study, they're defined by what they studied, and it was creative arts, your conventional arts

degrees, both male and female. And then it gets quite interesting: females in their mid 40s with no kids, female professionals. Religion: other. They're atheists, agnostics, there's no religious faith there. And then you've got other age groups, female age groups, in their 50s with no kids. And then you've got graduates in society and culture type courses. Then you've got 40-year-old women with no kids. Then you've got male professionals, people who work in arts and recreation. Field of study: architecture and building, that's another one. Field of study: eduction, industry education.
So you've got arts type graduates working in education, you've got professionals and overwhelmingly you've got no kids. And then you get down into the country of birth, green voters are overwhelmingly born in other countries, they're internationally qualified, people born in the USA or Canada or Singapore, what have you. It would be no surprise to me, sitting in the senate listening to Norm Sanders. Basically they're an internationally qualified group.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: John, what you're talking about then...a lot of our political rhetoric has been about working families, we've heard it until we're all blue in the face. But you're talking about 'a large agnostic group of younger professionals' who are really important.
John Black: That's right. Basically when you have a look at the charts, as I did, of women by age, for example, we have a situation where if a woman has two children or three children or more, they simply don't vote green. They tend to have less disposable income and they tend to vote Labor, until they're in their 40s and then sort of drift off to the coalition, which is sort of a pattern that's been going on since about 1900, so that's pretty much written in stone.
But if they have no kids, their support for the Greens remains strong right up until their 60s. If they have one, their support for the Greens doesn't start until their late 30s, but if they've had two they're lost to the Greens. So the Greens are a party of the inner city, of the professionals, of the higher incomes, and that's all a function of basically no kids. If you have kids, as a female professional you don't get the job opportunities, you don't get promoted, that's the cruel fact of life.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: So paid parental leave is not a policy that...well, it's interesting, Bob Brown says it's the go but it's not really


appealing to the core Green voter.
John Black: Well, the rate of pay is a bit of a joke really, isn't it. I mean, Bob would be better off with Tony Abbott's scheme basically and there's no two ways about it. The scheme that Labor's coming up with is not going to attract Green voters, from what I can see of their profile. It's better than nothing, I suppose, but the Green voters that I'm looking at now who live in the inner cities have a child in long day-care from the age of three to five to six months, and that child will stay in care in some form or another until they're 17. They move seamlessly from childcare into a private school. A private school doesn't cost any more. So they don't blink at putting them straight into pre-prep and the prep, and that child will stay at an inner-city private school right through until they're 17. And I tell you what, they'll come out the other end voting Green too.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: Karl Marx wouldn't be surprised by this, would he, in terms of base and superstructure?
John Black: Yes, well, the 18-year-olds who come out from the government system will be voting Labor. It's interesting, when you look at teenagers, the ones with the private school backgrounds are the ones who are voting Greens, the ones who went to government schools are voting Labor, and then of course in their 20s people get married, they get a job, they get debts, they get liabilities, their votes are in a state of flux. And politicians have known this for years, which is why they tend to spoil them.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: That's why you say that if we look at young professionals in the inner city they produced a time bomb for the ALP demographic base.
John Black: Yes, we started looking at the occupational profiles using census data in the mid '70s and when we looked at safe Labor inner city electorates in those days you would find 60%, 70% of the male workforce, for example, would be employed in skilled blue-collar jobs or unskilled blue-collar jobs, and there was a perfect one-to-one relationship between that and the Labor vote. So there was a really rock-solid Labor vote, particularly at the federal level, it didn't change, and you could just read it like a book. And in fact the percentage of working class jobs was a better guide to the next vote than the previous vote, it was a better guide than the pendulum, statistically.
xxxxxxxxx
Rock solid.
And then over a lengthy period of time what's happened is that the price of inner city real estate has gone up and these richer young professionals have bought back into those suburbs and have shouldered aside all the old working class people, and now these seats are still returning historically strong Labor two-party preferred votes, but the votes now are coming from rich young people who have absolutely nothing in common with the old social mores that typified inner city Labor seats in the '70s. It's a time bomb for the Labor Party and they're just locked in this time warp where they're still looking after what they think is still there.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: We've got a time warp and we've got at time bomb, and then we've got a thing called the resource super profits tax. Does that kick the bomb along?
John Black: The simple truth is when you're looking at this particular professional group, they're rich, they're well qualified, and not withstanding many of them have studied arts they can still add up in a rudimentary way so they know what's to their own advantage, and if they own shares then they know that they're going to be losing money from a super tax on mining, that's where the tax is going to come from, it's going to come from the rich. Let's be frank about it, the ALP has been modelling this for years, we all know that. I mean, I've been modelling this for years. This was a tax designed to come off Liberal voters and go to Labor voters, that's what it's all about, but the Labor Party miscalculated, they didn't realise they had so many rich Labor voters and that they're clustered in a certain number of seats but also spread across a large number of their marginal seats as well.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: Aren't there some caucus hard-heads who privately...I'm thinking of Lindsay Tanner, for example, doesn't he know what's what with the Green voters?
John Black: Yes, and you would think that he would have been consulted, but apparently he wasn't. This is not rocket science, mate, you just have to ask people smarter than yourself, and given the current prime minister and treasurer they've got a lot of people to choose from.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: On your analysis of this RSPT and given the demographic changes,

xxxxxxxxxxx
you see a possibility of a 15-seat majority to Tony Abbott with around 51.6% of the vote.
John Black: Yes, I was simply averaging the news poll and the Nielsen poll and taking into account the distribution of the Green voters across the electorates and the leakage of preferences last time and a range of other things. It wasn't particularly complicated, but I simply wanted to determine whether or not this swing would be bottled up in the safer Liberal seats that wouldn't be affected by a swing, and they weren't. And in fact the swings that we modelled were very close to those which you would get from an average swing model. So the maths stands up, I'm afraid.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: Let's just round up looking at caucus. On your analysis, the Labor federal caucus is experiencing the seven stages of grief at the thought of life without Kevin. That's a wonderful metaphor.
John Black: I've been a member of the caucus and I know how it works and there's varying levels of sophistication in terms of perception, and I think the more perceptive ones are further along the stages of grief. But the first reaction is denial, and then they want to shoot the messenger, so anybody who utters any critical comments gets excoriated. Then they move on to the other stages in terms of bargaining and acceptance and that sort of thing and then moving on. And I just think it's fascinating when you talk to them that they're all going through these stages.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: Speaking of sophistication, a final question; why do you describe Wayne Swan as 'the real sad sack of the seven stages of grief'?
John Black: I think Wayne probably believes in the tax itself and I think that's unfortunate for him really. I think the tax has clearly come out of a limited number of individuals and I just think it's a bit sad really. We've come through a recession which never was, and we've come through it reasonably well, and one of the underpinnings of that was the broader perception in the community that mining and our links to China have kept us strong. I fail to understand the logic behind this, and I know what's going on, clearly the government wanted to raise money and it was clearly unprepared to wind back on the stimulus, and this is what has come out of it. But I think governments avoid these pitfalls if they play the rules, if they release the recommendations as a green paper and then as a white paper, if they invite community discussion, if they allow for feedback from the broader community, and if they move progressively towards a solution. If they'd followed those steps I don't believe that they'd be in this position now and, as I said, that's why I regard that as a little bit unfortunate.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: John Black is a former Queensland Labor senator and managing director of Elaborate, a demographic profiling company. His analysis, 'A Rudd's Mining Tax Could Cost Labor 22 Seats' was published in the Australian Financial Review, for which he writes a regular column. We'll post a link on our website to his comprehensive analysis for the 2007 federal election.