PM's spin turns off childless

The chart shows them swinging strongly to the Coalition.

The number of children didn't matter: if they had them, their votes swung towards Rudd. If they didn't, they swung towards Howard. For the first time since 1966, the second age group went in the opposite direction to the first.

There are two things of relevance when you look at the profile of women without children. The first is how many voters are you talking about, to get an estimate of the national swing, and the second is where do they live, so you can get an estimate of the seats at stake.

Someone should tell the spin doctors writing all those Labor speeches with the words working families before every full stop that there are about four million women aged 15 to 44 in Australia and half of them don't have children. For the crucial 25-34 group, the figure is almost the same.

These women, who could be gay or unable or unwilling to have children, clearly felt that the ALP's focus on working families meant Rudd was going to be handing their tax dollars over to those with children. And they voted accordingly. Not only are there a lot of them, but they're living in clusters across the capital cities: totally different seats to the group with children.

When you rank the seats by the proportion of 30 to 34-year-old women without children, the list is topped by seats such as Melbourne, Sydney, Wentworth, Grayndler and Batman.

Griffith, an inner Brisbane seat held by Rudd, rounds off the top 10 seats. This was the missing link from the group that had swung against Labor at the previous election. The mystery was explained.

Further analysis shows that this is the former left-wing ALP group that swung heavily to first the Greens and then the Liberals, nearly unseating Labor in Melbourne and certainly returning Malcolm Turnbull in Wentworth in Sydney.

A continuation of this trend in 2010 could give the Greens enough primary votes to come ahead of the Liberals at the next election and could cost Rudd Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne), Housing Minister Tanya Plibersek (Sydney), Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese (Grayndler) and Resources Minister Martin Ferguson (Batman).

These seats look safe on the pendulum, but 6 per cent swings to the Greens from Labor wipes out some of Rudd's top ministers.

The problem for the Rudd Government is that it's not just his ministers who look like they're about to throw up if they say working families one more time; it's a growing number of voters - not just pensioners - who think perhaps it's time for the Government to drop the campaign slogans and focus on governing for all Australians.