Word of warning Auntie - your slip is showing

A good example is that since Tony Abbott became Opposition leader there have been 123 polls and 277,276 responses. 5% of them on just one question - "Would you vote for Julia Gillard…?"

Acknowledging these limitations the issues which seem to most motivate the ABC audience are Asylum Seekers, Religion, Health, Politics, Corporate Behaviour, and the Environment.

This isn't what the audience says interests it. One recent poll asks the audience "What [one] policy would you like to hear more about this election?" 29% nominated the arts, followed by 18% the environment, 10% infrastructure and 9% health.

This poll also has an extremely high response rate of 10,233 votes, so it too has possibly been stacked, perhaps by artists' collectives crowding around someone's iMac.

It is certainly out of line with the preferences expressed by the community in other surveys. In July Newspoll reported that the most important issue was "health and medicare" followed by "education", "economy", "leadership", "national security" and "asylum seekers". No mention of the arts.

In our most recent comprehensive On Line Opinion political survey taken in mid-July, only one person out of 2,257 in the total un-weighted sample nominated the arts as an issue. Our top issues were the economy followed by climate change, health and education.

The responses to the ABC poll help to place the political allegiances of the audience and tend to confirm the dichotomy apparent in Bean's paper.

Concern about the arts and the environment normally denote left-wing allegiance, although conservative rural dwellers also have a keen interest in the environment.  Infrastructure is more to the right, and health back again to the left, but also indicative of an older group.

It's more nuanced than that, as the environmental questions show. Two-thirds of them are about climate change and climate change is a very good indicator of voting allegiance (also of age and education). Coalition voters are much less likely to believe it is real or substantially caused by humans, than Labor or Greens voters.

On this ground the Drum audience appears mainstream.

73% of the Drum audience believes that "climate change denial" is "extreme and out of touch", while 73% of those surveyed around the same time by Newspoll think climate change is "currently occurring". Not the same question, but the numbers are very close together.

70% of the Drum audience also appears to believe in an ETS, according to a question posed around October 2009. This also aligns pretty well with Newspoll which found the figure in September 2009 to be 67%.