YourOpinion Survey Results & News

Honest, conservative, idiot.  Strong, intelligent, backstabber. Strewth—who’d be a politician?

You wouldn’t want to ask people to tell you honestly what they think of you unless you’ve got a thick political skin. But at Auspoll, that’s what we did last week.

The results are graphic, as you can see.  It paints a picture.  It’s not a pretty picture and maybe it tells us as much about ourselves as it does about our contending future Prime Ministers. The news in it is pretty mixed for Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and English teachers. Six people mis-spelt ‘‘liar’’. Time to build that education revolution? It’s interesting to spend a few minutes looking at the resulting ‘‘word cloud’’: the bigger the word appears the more frequently it was used by our respondents. For the record, we had to edit the responses a little. Asked for just one word to sum up our two  leading pollies, some people produced answers that just aren’t right for Australia’s biggest-selling family newspaper.

Mostly, though, you get the sensation of standing in the corner of a crowded pub or cafeteria, listening to the murmur  of people talking about the imminent federal election, just catching the odd word cutting through the background noise.

There’s admiration, vitriol, partisanship, contempt, humour and savagery bubbling up through the crowd chatter. If you were the leader of one of our major political parties, if you were Tony or Julia, you’d hear things in there to hearten and encourage you. But you’d hear plenty more that could seriously dent your selfesteem if you were sensitive to criticism.

So we’ve looked at clouds from both sides now—what are they telling us?

Well, size is strength in an exercise like this, so the size of the big words speaks of the relative degree of currency for the
sentiment they represent. Tony Abbott has a problem with credibility. He has performed a couple of 180-degree turns about a series of issues he once took emphatic positions on: climate change and WorkChoices come to mind.

He cops his share of ‘‘untrustworthy’’, ‘‘dishonest’’ and more bluntly ‘‘liar’’ (however it’s spelt). Yet he also has an engaging and direct style of communication and often appears heartfelt in what he says, earning him big votes for ‘‘honest’’ and good dash of ‘‘genuine’’.

Julia Gillard has vulnerabilities, too. ‘‘Strong’’, ‘‘confident’’ and, interestingly, ‘‘female’’ scored highly. The fact we have
our first woman in the top job is significant to many people. But the circumstances of her ascension to it and some fairly widespread public shock and disillusionment about it is still strongly there in the pub hubbub of ‘‘backstabber’’
and ‘‘untrustworthy’’.

Both these phenomena are things the respective campaign teams would do well to address as best they can in the time
remaining. The cloud also shows our partisanship, especially now when the political contest is on at its most earnest.

People with loyal feelings to one side of politics or the other can express it with vitriolic vigour when prompted about the leader of the ‘‘enemy’’ side. Some of the words volunteered here are obviously the most damaging one a person with strong party loyalties could think of about the leader of their opposing side.

All the research shows, however, that the proportion of people who hold onto such fierce loyalties is decreasing over time and the fastest-growing segment is those whose votes may swing. These are certainly the ones the major parties are most interested in understanding. Sorry loyalists. For the students of gender politics, it’s noteworthy that a word relating to appearance, ‘‘ranga’’, scored strongly for our first woman PM, while there was no equivalent ‘‘buffed’’ or ‘‘budgie’’ registration for her male opponent.

It’s an interesting but not particularly edifying bit of pub chatter you’ve been tuning in to. It’s easy to go home thinking
‘‘I really don’t know clouds, at all.’’

■ Ross Neilson is the Chief Executive Officer of Auspoll

August 8, 2010 THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH www.sundaytelegraph.com.au