Work categories and voting patterns

Roy Morgan have done some interesting research on voting patterns according to how we earn our living. This table shows the work categories most likely to vote for the three major parties:

Roy Morgan_4971_600

To me there is a vague shape of a class analysis, with workers voting Labor and bosses voting Liberal, but one has to be careful about the actual numbers. If Labor gets a first preference vote in the low 30s there is plenty of scope for workers to vote Liberal.

There is interesting detail in the accompanying text. Primary school teachers are split down the middle. With the Greens we have to remember that the vote is low. While social workers are the profession most likely to vote Green only 33% of them do so. I would be interested in how many vote Liberal.

It’s now well known that Green voters earn more on average than other voters. Clearly they have spent more years in education.

I’m wondering what you make of it all.

8 thoughts on “Work categories and voting patterns”

  1. Intelligence Analysts voting Green? Well, it is not that much of a surprise when you think of it. Its probably one of the few jobs where you get to know how bad the world really is. Number of cops voting Liberal is both a surprise and a worry.
    The rest are, I suppose, as one would expect, though the job descriptions are hardly comprehensive

  2. zero surprises in that research, it accords fully with both my biases and general cliches. Though I’m supposed to be voting Green, which I don’t always do…

  3. Seems fine to me.
    ALPers are unionised process followers that need a machine to operate.
    LIBers are analytical problem solvers that face risk.
    GRNies spent far too much time at uni and live off “other peoples money” ( tax $$$).

  4. jumpy, whatever. Workers solve plenty problems. Appropriate management style (not Australian) recognises, appreciates and harnesses worker ingenuity.

    Labor certainly has some thinking to do, but there is still a clear need for a party that sticks up for the workers.

    PB I don’t find police and armed forces voting Liberal surprising. The conservative philosophy sees human nature as essentially bad, but kept in check by the thin veneer of ‘civilisation’ meaning authority expressed by means of the police and the army. The bosses are responsible, they think, by virtue of birth or owning property, in the main.

    Some workers internalise dominant class values, always.

  5. G’day Brian,
    I was just havin a little fun with the list.
    But I we’re serious about class, wealth, perceived discrimination in our political leaders and entrenched nepotism in governments we could start with sortition in the Senate as a first step.
    A jury of our peers in the Peoples House, so to speak.

  6. Brian @ 4,
    I suppose if you spend your life dealing with the lumpenproletariat your view of life does get soured.

    Worse, because the majority of people who fall afoul of the law are in one way or another the dispossessed of our society I suppose one might be inclined to vote Lib. for the sake if retaining your own feeling of security and well-being.

    I have to say most of the crims I’ve known, and I’ve known a few, haven’t filled me with hope for the future of humanity.

  7. My family used to joke about the way my attitudes moved to the right when I moved from technical to operations management jobs and vice versa. (Didn’t change my vote though.) The switch was helped along by having to deal with Pilbara and coal mining unions. So I am not surprised that the management class tends towards the LNP.

    On the other hand, having watched how the Pilbara unions treated their members it is not surprising that the workers ended up tossing out the union in favour of individual contracts.

    It is also worth noting that the seat of Pilbara which used to be rolled gold Labor went to the Nationals at the last state election. This could reflect the workers turning away from the party of the unions? Or simply workers feeling that Labor has let them down?

    The whole thing is a lot more flexible than it used to be?

Comments are closed.