I had the pleasure of meeting with John Stanley of 2GB/4BC for a captivating conversation about Australian and international demographics. We didn’t shy away from the pressing current events either, delving into the intersection of demographics and the ever-evolving world around us. I hope you find it informative.
🎓I put on my Education Geographics hat today to write an opinion piece for the Australian Financial Review for Tuesday’s paper and you’ll find it now in the online edition on this link (behind the paywall):
The story discusses the choices confronting all parents when they choose a school for their kids. Essentially, my experience profiling schools over the last 20 years doing hundreds of detailed school profiles points to the balance between aspiration and affordability as being the key determinant of school choice. 🏣
As more women have entered the workforce during the last two decades, they have been able to afford a greater range of choices for their kids, across the three sectors. You can see that in the little chart here on Australian Female Participation Rates and Independent School Market share. As the female jobs increased, so did Independent Market Share. It’s the job itself that pays the school fees and the actual size of the pay check is not as significant.
I caught up with John Stanley from 2GB/4BC on Tuesday night for an informal chat about an election review article I’d written for the Australian Financial Review on Monday. Here is a 
.pdf link to that page.
John and I talked about demographic and political events and themes over the timeline since the May 21, Federal 2022 election, including the curious cases of State and Federal leaders from supposedly opposing parties, and why they manage to share what, for them and their constituents, can be a mutually beneficial political relationship, as Frenemies.
As I was often told when I was a member of the Australian Senate: Your enemies aren’t the ones sitting opposite you mate, they’re the ones behind you.
I’ve just finished writing a longer piece for the AFR on the long term Australian demographic trends dominating Federal politics now and into the next decade, which is in the AFR Easter Edition today. I hope you enjoy it.
Health Geographics has won the prestigious InfoSol 2024 Award for the Best Business Dashboard 2024, for its Private Health Care Australia Dash App.
Paul Grill, the CEO of Infosol personally congratulated HGS and its CEO Dr Jeanine McMullan on the achievement which has previously been won by major international marketing companies such as Salesforce.
Paul said: “Congratulations to you and your team for an outstanding presentation and submission. The Best Business Dashboard represents the best business use case and result and the judges really liked your use of the cube.”
The nine-cell Cube was developed by Dr McMullan to explain the profiles of more than 14 million Australians with private health insurance. It shows increasing per capita membership of health care funds on one axis and increase benefits paid per member on the other axis.
Dr McMullan said: “Some demographics on the Cube have very high levels of private health insurance, but draw very little in benefits per member, while others have relatively low levels of insurance, but rely heavily on benefits provided by health insurance, due to chronic illness.
“We used the Cube as a consistent measure across both the Dashboard and the associated Map, as it explains not just the importance of demographic profiles of PHA members, but also the significance of where they live for policy makers and politicians.”
Health Geographics is a sister company of Education Geographics, which won the InfoSol 2023 Award for the Most Valuable Dashboard.
EGS and HGS were established, using the knowledge base developed by their parent company Australian Development Strategies over 50 years of profiling spatial data on political, demographic and economic trends across Australia.
Former Australian Senator and ADS Founder John Black congratulated the HGS team on the new interactive dashboard design and its associated online Esri map.
Mr Black said: “As a former Australian Senator, I know how hard it can be to access National Cabinet Ministers and to hold their attention for more than 30 seconds when you do.
“So, when Private Healthcare Australia asked us to help, we looked at it from the point of view of the person on the other side of the desk, the Cabinet Minister, who wants to know who pays and who benefits.
“We worked with our stats team to break down and model a huge wall of data from the health bureaucracy into two dependent variables: the percentage of persons with health insurance and the benefits per member.
“Our Health Geographics CEO Dr Jeanine McMullan then designed an innovative multi-dimensional cube, tracking who pays on one axis and who benefits on the other and describing each coloured and numbered cell with its own key political stereotype which was displayed on a map of Australian electorates.
“Our award-winning designer Reg Kernke linked the stereotypes to an Infosol Dashboard which summarised each cell in the Cube in both words and tables.
“In a series of moving dials for each Australian electorate, the dashboard goes on to show health indicators – along with the numbers of swinging voters and how they voted last election.
“The dashboard does a deep dive into the demographics of each cell on the cube and links that with our national database with a thousand variables across 50 detailed interactive charts and tables of the top seats.
“And finally, the Cabinet Minister could zoom in on our national ESRI map to find their own electorate and see how it scored on the key economic, demographic and political drivers.”
The CEO of Private Healthcare Australia Dr Rachel David congratulated Health Geographics and Dr McMullan.
“Private Healthcare Australia (PHA) engaged Health Geographics to develop and design a dashboard (demographic mapping tool) to assist with its engagement and policy advocacy with the Australian Government, and to support member health funds better understand the changing demographics of private health insurance members and how best to address the needs of their customers.
“Health Geographics developed an accessible, easy to use visual asset which provides a demographic analysis, profiling and mapping of PHI membership across Australia and mapped data from PHA, Australian Bureau of Statistics, including the latest census data to specific federal electorates, including information on age, profession, cultural background and income bands which provides an insight into what members are expecting of both private health insurers and government.
“PHA is working with the Australian Government to ensure the private health system is fit for purpose, the participation levers for private insurance are appropriately targeted and the needs of the Australian public are met now and into the future.
“In 2023, Health Geographics updated the dashboard with the latest demographic data and electorate mapping to ensure it is current and effective. The upgrade included providing secure access to member health funds for use in research, evaluating, delivering and designing better quality products and services, and developing pro-consumer policy.
Political Opinion polls can be pretty unreliable at times, but lately they’ve all been moving in the same direction, which is down for the satisfaction for Anthony Albanese as PM, down for the ALP primary vote, down for the Two Party Preferred Labor vote and down for the job the Albanese Govt is doing on some of it’s key portfolios, such as the Environment, the Economy and Immigration.
On Monday we had two polls telling a similar story: the Resolve Strategic in the Sydney Morning Herald and Freshwater Strategy in the Australian Financial Review and they show a continued slide for Labor in evidence since the Voice Referendum support began fading in mid-2023.
I canvas some of the underlying demographics to this trend with John Stanley on Monday and the link the podcast is here: ……
Last weekend The Australian Financial Review published my short review of the role of religion and ethnicity in Australian politics since the 1960s.
My article was written in the context of the rise of the Muslim vote in the UK election last week and the implications of this outcome for the Australian General election, scheduled for 2025.
Subscribers can find the AFR article here: https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/the-muslim-vote-was-a-disaster-for-starmer-and-could-be-for-albanese-20240705-p5jrfm
I based part of the article on the huge swings which took place against the UK Labour Party in electorates with large Muslim populations and canvassed how this sort of campaign and result could be translated into Australian Federal electorates, virtually all of which are now held by Labor MPs.
I did some follow up interviews with 2GB, including one with John Stanley, which you can access here:
The interview with John Stanley was one of a series of interviews we have done profiling of Australian elections. This time we canvassed the Financial Review article and rise of strategic voting and the additional impact this could have for ALP MPs in 2025 , as it did for Liberal MPs during the 2022 challenges from Teal candidates.
I was interviewed by 2GB’s John Stanley this week, following my articles in the Australian Financial Review and my social media post on last weekend’s Queensland State election.
The interview with John was longer than usual and gave us a chance to deal a bit more in depth with the political implications of the State election for the major political parties and for the Federal election, due next May.
You can listen to the interview here:
https://omny.fm/shows/nights/john-john-black-28th-october
We are pleased to welcome back Australia’s living economic legend Saul Eslake to our Education Geographics Webinars on November 15, when Saul will focus on the impact of the US Presidential Election on the Australian economy in the lead-up to the Australian General Election due by May 2025.
Whoever wins, the outcome of the United States elections for the US President and for the Congress will have profound impacts for the next four years on world trade, on global inflation, and our regional stability.
For example, big increases in US Tariffs could force up inflation in the United States, and this would soon be felt in Australia, increasing inflationary pressures and reducing the likelihood of Interest Rate cuts in the lead-up to the Australian election.
It’s for clients only and If you are a client of Education Geographics, Health Geographics, or Australian Development Strategies and you haven’t yet received your invitation, get in touch with us via https://www.educationgeographics.net.au/contact-us/
Read the full background stories about the Aspirational Left Families now reshaping Australia
Three key decisions that adults in Australia are making about their own lives, and their families, revolve around choosing who to vote for in an election, staying healthy and giving their kids the best education they can.
Sarah Ho, who moved with her family from Hong Kong when she was five, and sends her kids to a private school, is an emerging type of voter who election analyst and political demographer John Black describes as the aspirational migrant population, is drastically altering the shape and direction of culture and politics.
Sarah Ho isn’t wedded to a particular party. The marketing executive and mum of three, who lives in Lidcombe in Sydney’s west, always votes for the candidate whose policies align most with the health needs of her ageing parents, the education outcomes of her children, and someone who has progressive views on climate change.
You can now read the full Australian Financial Review stories about our research into this big emerging demographic group, which is re-shaping Australian political parties and changing the balance between private and public consumption within Australia’s health and education sectors.
With the approval of the AFR and the ABC, we are posting the original March 2 AFR page one and page three stories, together with the feature article and charts covering the Aspirational Left, along with follow-up interviews with John Black by Radio National’s Patricia Karvelas and ABC Brisbane Drive Time host Steve Austin. An ADS (Australian Development Strategies) map of the distribution of the Aspirational Left stereotype across current federal seats is also found in the links below.
Read more…
The rise of the ‘aspirational left’ voter who is remaking politics
Steve Austin interviews John Black on ‘The Aspirational Left’
Podcast – Patricia Karvelas speaking with John Black
🔗https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/could-a-new-demographic-tip-the-nsw-state-election-/102048382
Link to our recent Post: 🔗Rise of the Aspirational Left voters reshaping Australia
Here’s a snip of an ADS/ESRI online map showing dark red shading for the three federal seats of Brisbane, Griffith and Ryan. All three seats were won by the Greens from the Liberals or from Labor in 2022, despite big Two Party Preferred (2PP) swings and votes to the ALP.
These seats are coloured red because they’re among the top-rated seats in Australia for our new Aspirational Left Index prepared by Australian Development Strategies for our new 2021 Census modelling database.
Unfortunately for the ALP Candidates in these three seats, the Coalition was so on the nose with the Aspirational Left in 2022, that the three Coalition candidates each lost more than 10 percent of their 2019 primary vote.
This ten percent loss from the Coalition leaked strongly to local hard-working Green candidates, rather than to Labor, putting the Greens ahead of Labor in the final distribution of preferences, with four out five Labor voters then tipping out the leading Coalition candidate and electing the Green.
This story played out across the nation in 2022, with 20 seats changing hands. The Coalition lost 18 seats, ten to the Labor Party, six to Teal Independents and Ryan and Brisbane to the Greens. Labor lost Griffith to the Greens and Fowler to an Independent.
Of these 20 seats changing hands in 2022, 14 of them are among the list of our top seats on the Aspirational Left Index. In other words, Aspirational Left voters decided which party won Government in 2022 and which MPs dominated the cross benches.
Radio National Podcast on Aspirational Left role in elections, from March 3, 2023:
Could a new demographic tip the NSW state election? – ABC Radio National
Could a new demographic tip the NSW state election? (Unsplash: Daria Nepriakhina)
Australian Financial Review Aspirational Left feature article, from March 2, 2023 for AFR subscribers:
When the Australian Electoral Commission provided the final Two Party Preferred votes and swings from the May election in the second half of 2022, we were able to use the 2021 Census results to re-calculate our 2022 election profiles and all our Stereotypes and models of unemployment, participation rates, wealth, taxable incomes, sources of income, transfer payments, school enrolments and school fees.
We then began using the new census when our Education Geographics (EGS) arm profiled enrolment churn across more than 120 Australian non-government schools and our Health Geographics (HGS) arm profiled an unexplained surge in numbers of Australians taking out private health insurance.
Across these three areas of research by ADS/EGS/HGS we began seeing the influence on voting, choice of education sector and increase of private health insurance by a new aspirational and transactional demographic group we named the Aspirational Left.
Big components of the Aspirational Left include Professional Women and Asian Migrants. Professional women are now the fastest growing occupational group among Australian workers and Migrants now make up more than 50 percent of Australian Population increases since 2001.
These groups are therefore likely to increase in numbers and influence in Australia in the coming decade and exert a strong and growing influence over future state and federal elections and the uptake of private education and private health insurance.
At ADS/EGS and HGS we will be including this new group in all our future modelling.
