How Family First made Labor last

Demographic modeling shows Family First voters were composed of two distinct groups.

The first group was what you would have expected from a party founded by religious activists: middle income, professional, evangelical - and Liberal.

But the second group, equal in size, was rusted on Labor voters - agnostic, blue collar, lower income, single parents.

When you rank the correlations of the Family First vote, to determine exactly who lived in Family First neighborhoods, the evangelical religious variables light up like a Christmas tree.

Top religious correlations for Family First were: Pentecostals, Lutherans, Uniting Church (all with high correlations of 0.60 and above), Other Christian, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Church of Christ, Baptists, Salvation Army, Brethren and Mormons.

Of the religions most hostile to Family First, Catholics were the strongest, with correlations of minus 0.36. In addition, Jews and Muslims seemed to agree, along with Hindus, Buddhists and Orthodox Christians, they didn’t like Family First at all.

This may have had something to do with pre-election media publicity for the Victorian Family First leaflet about Satan’s strongholds including: “Brothels, gambling places, bottle shops, mosques, temples - Freemasons, Buddhist, Hindu etc, witchcraft.”

If you insult someone’s religion, or, even worse, threaten to take money out of their pockets, you tend to see the impact highlighted by inferential statistics, which look at what determines the outcome in the House of Representatives, by objectively measuring exactly which demographic groups live in each electorate, and how the same electorates voted.

But, it’s when we get away from religious variables, that the profile of Family First becomes a lot more interesting.

After the very strong positive correlations for the evangelical religions, the large group of agnostics and atheists (no religion or not stated) appears with a significant positive correlation of plus 0.35.

The computer analysis of 500 plus demographic variables, found there were no significant correlations with Family First voters and conventional family couples of any description.

In relation to the actual family status and age, of your typical Family First voter, we saw a single mum or dad, in their late forties or early fifties, with one teenage child.

The Family First typical single parent dad worked in what were once ALP jobs, as a skilled tradesman, in manufacturing, or as an unskilled farm worker, while the single mum would have been an unskilled worker in a factory, or in some sort of skilled trade in the health and community services industries.

In terms of housing, there weren’t a lot of conventional Brady bunch family homes in Family First territory.  If they didn’t rent a flat, house or trailer home for well under $200 a week, your Family First single mum or dad owned their home outright (presumably as the result of a divorce settlement) with a minority paying off a very low mortgage, of $400 to $800 a month.

Income wise, Family First voters dominated the lower two thirds of the income range, having taken over the middle third formerly dominated by Labor, in the pre-Howard era.

Sole parents earning up to $35,000 a year may not have believed in God or Family First, but they saw Labor’s ladder of opportunity, not as something to climb, but leading down to the cellar, and they figured the first person needing a new job was not them, but their local Labor MP.

When we look at the size of the key Family First correlations, of the 2 per cent primary vote for Family First, you’d be hard pressed to argue that half of it, or 1 per cent, came from the evangelicals, a smallish white collar professional group which would have come mainly - but not entirely - from the Liberals in any case.

The agnostic, blue collar, low to middle income group, including single families, that had been rusted on to Labor, was just too big, and would have accounted for at least half of Family First’s primary vote, a picture confirmed by unofficial reports of postal vote preference drifts to Labor, from Family First, of nearly 50 per cent.

So Family First won a primary vote of 2 per cent nationally, up to half from the Liberals and at least half from Labor, but on polling day, 80 per cent of this Family First vote went to the Coalition, leaving Labor down 0.6 per cent nationally after preferences, for every 2 per cent won by Family First.

In Labor-held seats of Bonner, in Queensland, and Wakefield and Kingston in South Australia, Family First primary votes of over 4 per cent therefore handed 1.2 per cent net gains to the Coalition candidates, enough to win all three seats for John Howard, and the 39th Coalition Senator from Queensland.

In the words of the winning Liberal Campaign Director Brian Loughnane, “If you look at the key policies that Mark Latham put forward, such as the family and tax policy … there were losers and very significant groups of losers, as well as winners. And, you know, at the end of the day, you’re in a contest to try and get 50 per cent plus 1 of the vote, and to go to the Australian people with such a divisive series of policies, I found quite remarkable.”

This would, perhaps, be a useful time for the Labor Party Leadership team to acknowledge that you don’t win votes from rusted on Labor voters by insulting their intelligence over Medicare Gold, or by taking away provincial logging jobs to suck up to the Sydney latte sippers or by taking money out of the pockets of single mums because you don’t have the courage to find the spending cuts to fund a proper family tax package.