SA and the Census Data

SA and the Census Data

Continuing on with our series of combining the Crosby Textor Oztrack 33 swings to the demographics of individual electorates by State, today we’ll have a look at little old South Australia.

So first up, we better have a look what Crosby Textor had to say about the swings in SA:

The big demographic swingers in South Oz apart from parents were part-time workers, the 18-24 age group and the 35-49 age group.

So let’s have a look at how these play out seat by seat, and we’ll use the following:

“18-24” is the number of 18-24 year olds in the seat as a proportion of all people in the electorate aged 18 and over.

“34-49” is the number of 34-49 year olds in the seat as a proportion of all people in the electorate aged 18 and over.

“PTW” is the number of part- time workers as are a proportion of all people in the electorate aged 18 and over.

“HA” is the percentage of the median household income that would be required to make the median home loan repayment for the electorate. This gives us a measure on housing affordability.

“LwUb” measures the number of Lower White/Upper Blue collar workers in the electorate as a proportion of all people in the electorate aged 18 and over. This is the demographic that is having the largest negative experience of Workchoices.

SLA1+ and SLA5+ are the proportions of the electorate that lived in a different statistical local area 1 year before the 2006 Census and 5 years before the 2006 Census. This gives us a bit of an idea of the overall population change of each electorate.

Again, we will just look at the Coalition held seats, and the data is based on the current electoral redistribution.

The current margins of the seat are:
Barker (19.9%), Boothby (5.4%), Grey (13.8%), Kingston (0.1%), Makin (0.9%), Mayo (13.6%), Sturt (6.8%), Wakefield (0.7%)

Seat	18-24	35-49	PTW	HA	LwUb	SLA1+	SLA5+
Barker	9.77	29.54	18.44	27.21	24.49	7.11	20.47
Boothby	11.97	26.09	20.33	29.38	24.49	10.65	28.88
Grey	9.4	28.73	16.99	25.88	22.64	7.1	19.94
Kingston	12.49	29.38	20.26	27.76	31.84	9.88	27.07
Makin	12.47	29.14	19.36	25.46	33.47	8.97	26.08
Mayo	9.81	30.06	22.12	27.11	26.62	8.67	27.63
Sturt	12	26.48	18.76	30.07	24.57	10.79	28.59
Wakefield	12.7	30.3	17.02	29.22	26.53	10.24	28.6
SA Average	11.92	28.29	18.64	28.71	26.31	10.13	27.31

What strikes me about the Coalition held seats in SA is the remarkable blandness of them all. They have the same rough proportions for everything.

The young population is all within 3%, the 35-49’s all within 4%, Part time workers all within 5%, housing affordability all within 5%, Lower White/Upper Blue we finally have a bit of variation at 11% but this wasn’t designated as a key demographic in South Australia by CT. Everything seems to be all very uniform.

So let’s rank them now in terms of which seats would be more likely to swing based on known demographic issues. What we’ll do is take the difference between each measure and the State average. That way, those seats with a higher proportion of swinging groups will have a positive rating, and those with a smaller proportion of swinging groups will have a negative rating. Then we’ll add all the ratings (what are merely the individual differences from the State averages) together and see which seat would be expected to swing the most.

Seat	PT diff	HA diff	18-24 diff	LwUb diff	35-49 diff	Total
Kingston	1.62	-0.95	0.57	5.53	1.09	7.86
Makin	0.72	-3.25	0.55	7.16	0.85	6.03
Wakefield	-1.62	0.51	0.78	0.22	2.01	1.9
Mayo	3.48	-1.6	-2.11	0.31	1.77	1.85
Boothby	1.69	0.67	0.05	-1.82	-2.2	-1.61
Sturt	0.12	1.36	0.08	-1.74	-1.81	-1.99
Barker	-0.2	-1.5	-2.15	-1.82	1.25	-4.42
Grey	-1.65	-2.83	-2.52	-3.67	0.44	-10.23

This suggests that Kingston should swing the most based on demographics, while Grey should swing the least based on these demographics. However, this flies in the face of what we’ve heard about in places like Grey, where a large swing seems to on.

Unlike QLD where the swinging demographics of the CT research explained a lot of what we’ve been seeing and hearing about on the ground, in SA it explains either very little at all and local issues are a large player, or the swing in SA is very uniform.

If it’s uniform, and with a 12.4% swing on at the moment according to last big Newspoll, the member for Barker might be the only one breathing easy (although I’d imagine Dolly Downer is as safe as houses as well).