The Coalition has taken the lead on two party preference at 52% to 48% for the first time since the last election in 2016, according to the latest two-party preferred YouGov-Fifty Acres poll.
This may reflect the Prime Minister’s recent trip to Europe where he met with international leaders on the world stage, taking strong positions on issues including the recent North Korean missile test and reinforcing Australia’s support for the Paris climate agreement with the visit receiving widespread mainstream media coverage.
This is the first time any polling company has shown the Coalition in the lead since the 2016 election. The YouGov-Fifty Acres poll takes a very different approach to ascertain how Australians think and feel. YouGov has a proven record of accuracy in both US and UK politics. In the most recent UK election they were the first polling agency to correctly call the result, showing the country was heading for a hung parliament despite most other organisations showing a large lead for the Conservatives. All polling is subject to a margin of error and it is natural to see some variations from poll to poll. We will continue tracking voting intention fortnightly over the next few months to see if this result is a blip or a trend.
- On the primary vote, the Coalition are 3% ahead of Australian Labour Party, 36% to 33%.
- The Greens are on 12% with One Nation on 7%.
The poll found a large age divide in what issues Australians see as most important issues in decided how they will vote at the next election.
- Overall, Australians say that health and Hospitals (45%) is the most important issue in deciding how they will vote at the next election, followed by Pensions (33%) and Job security and unemployment (31%).
- However, among the youngest voters aged 18-24, the top issues are schools and education (42%) and same-sex marriage (42%).
- There is also overwhelming support for same sex marriage with 60% of Australians saying they would support changing the law to allow same sex couple to marry as opposed to 28% who oppose.
Other highlight results show more than half of Australians support a “robot tax”, and are concerned about Indigenous languages falling into disuse.
- 56% would support a “robot tax” that would be applied to companies who use robots and be used to finance more support for those who lose their jobs.
- 54% are concerned about Indigenous languages falling into disuse, but only 33% think the government should put in place measures to protect Indigenous languages.
Methodology Overview
The YouGov-Fifty Acres poll takes a very different approach to ascertain how Australians think and feel. Leveraging YouGov’s global experience in political polling and deeply profiled proprietary community in Australia, this partnership provides the most accurate data on political views of everyday Australians.
The nationally representative poll is conducted as an online survey amongst 1,000 Australians aged 18+, with quotas based on age, gender, region, education, and past vote. Two-party preference is determined using data from all respondents ranking political parties in order of preference.
Each respondent was shown a list of the parties that stand in their state or territory, as well as that party’s logo. So, for example, those that live in the Northern Territory were shown the name “County Liberals” and those that live in Queensland were shown the “Liberal National Party” in place of just “Liberal” in other areas.
Respondents were then asked to rank all the available parties in order of preference, so as to match as closely as possible the actual ballot paper as closely as possible. We then used this data to create the “Two party preference”, by counting everyone who ranked the Australian Labor Party above all the Coalition parties as a vote for Labor and counting everyone who ranked any of the coalition parties above the Australian Labor Party above all the Coalition parties as a vote for the Coalition.
The data has been weighted to be representative of the Australian Adult population by age, gender and region (interlocked), education, past vote and metro / regional area. All targets were built with data from ABS with the exception of past vote (targets as reported from ABC news). Fieldwork was carried out between 6 July to 11 July 2017.
