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Young voters in historic rush to register – and why that may be bad news for ScoMo

The record breaking enrolment of new voters aged 18 to 24 is yet another wild card in an election with a whole deck of them. Dennis Atkins unpicks the numbers.

Apr 27, 2022, updated Apr 27, 2022
Young voters have been enrolling to vote in record numbers of the past few weeks. (AAP image).

Young voters have been enrolling to vote in record numbers of the past few weeks. (AAP image).

The polls for the election might point to a clear win for Anthony Albanese but there are enough unknown/unknowns among the moving parts to dampen any premature enthusiasm.

The biggest probable unknowable is the record number of people getting on the electoral rolls at the last minute, just who these new voters are and where they live.

About 214,000 people signed on in the last 24 hours before the rolls closed, taking the total to 17.2 million likely voters. The fascinating aspect of this is that more than a third of those – some 80,000 – were aged between 18 and 24 years.

These are all record breaking turns and suggest an enthusiasm for having a say that goes against electoral history where there’s a relative disinterest among younger people.

This could be very bad news for Scott Morrison and the Coalition if enough of these under 24-year-olds are in the electorates Labor needs to hold and/or win.

The Ipsos poll in The Australian Financial Review this week has a clue to why this could be crucial: in that survey the demographic breakdown recorded the LNP as having its lowest primary vote support in the 18-24 age group with just 22 percent saying they preferred Morrison’s team.

In contrast, the combined primary vote for the Labor Party and the Greens in this cohort is 58 percent with 32 percent of that being directed towards the ALP. So, for every vote the LNP gets from those under 24, the centre-left picks up three.

Of course, these are small sub-samples of the total surveyed and have much greater margins of error but they do point to trends that should alert the Coalition campaign.

If these trends are borne out it might be an election-winning edge for the ALP in seats they are hotly contesting – and in some particular inner city electorates this vote could push the Greens ahead or assist in the election of one or two of the so-called “Teal” independents.

One noticeable aspect of this election is that it could be won or lost in metropolitan electorates – unlike 2019 where Morrison’s advantage was found in the regions, especially in Queensland and Western Australia.

One pollster tracking the election for corporate clients said it looked like a “same sex marriage effect”, referring to the big sign-on of young voters wanting to take part in the 2017 voluntary plebiscite. That was a then record late enrolment of 98,000 – a record that’s now been smashed.

The marriage equality vote finished with a 61 percent endorsement driven by a vote among those aged from 18 to 24 who showed up in opinion surveys backing the proposition by four to one.

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The other fascinating facts to turn up in the last week or so relate to the number of candidates standing – again a record (in the case of the House of Representatives) with 1203 individuals nominating for the 151 seats. It’s up by just over 150 from the 2019 election and 15 more than the previous 2013 record.

This big number has been boosted by the decision of the two right wing populist parties – Pauling Hanson’s One Nation and Clive Palmer’s United Australia group – to stand in just about every seat.

Palmer’s UAP is fielding candidates in all 151 seats while the Hanson party is in 149, stepping back in Bob Katter’s home of Kennedy and the Melbourne seat of Higgins held by Liberal moderate Katie Allen.

The impact of this large field – there are 28 seats where more than 10 candidates are standing all the way to Chisholm in Melbourne’s inner east where voters will have 19 squares to number – is going to be seen most dramatically in the safety of the votes. All analysts and commentators are predicting an increase in the informal vote of between 1 and 2 per cent.

Then informal vote – which jumped to almost 7 percent in 1984 after the Hawke Government changed the system – has been hovering just over 5 percent for 15 years, although there was a small spike in 2013.

This election could see the number of people accidentally or deliberately spoiling their vote because of the big proliferation of candidates, especially from minor and micro parties as well as all manner of “independents”.

There’s no obvious workaround which doesn’t penalise people standing as a minor party candidate without any genuine support base in a particular electorate. The Senate voting rules have been tweaked to stop easy preference harvesting which allowed people to get elected with ridiculously small levels of support.

These cross currents – a likely surge of young voters counting against Morrison’s chances and a hard to track trend towards higher informal voting – will make this election more interesting and harder to chart. And that’s even before we get to the reemergence of the climate wars.

 

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