Some of you may have been wondering why the electoral demographic profiles haven’t been updated of late. The answer is pretty simple, I couldn’t be bothered to create 150 separate posts, nor do the tedious charting work that went into them. So instead of going down that silly route, I found a much better way. All the census and electoral information that was in the profiles is now wrapped up in one simple infographic flash app – a spiffy toy.
Choose the electorates on the left of the app (organised by State), then choose the Economic, Social, Employment and Industry, Occupation and Political tabs at the top to get the relevant information for each Commonwealth Electoral Division. It comes as an swf file that needs more than 600 pixels of width to work at its best (which is what we have here on our humble little blog), so rather than embed it and have everyone squinting and reaching for the magnifying glasses, just click the screenshot below and it will launch in a new window.
Then simply resize your window to whatever dimensions tickle your fancy.
I’ll replace the electorate profiles with a special page for this over the next day or two. And there’s more of these interactive flash jobs to come.
16 Comments
Truly marvelous…
How clever is that! I tips me hat to ya, Possum.
Hi Possum,
I think the Labor 2PP for Melbourne is misleading – 72% for Labor vs the Libs is correct, but shouldn’t it be 54.71% ALP vs 45.29% Greens?
It depends on what we mean by “two party preferred”. If we mean TPP in terms of *any* two parties, then yeah, it’s an ALP vs. Greens contest for a TPP of 54.7/45.3
But if we mean two party preferred in terms of the two actual parties vying for government and just about every other seat in the country – then it’s back up in the 70’s for Labor.
A swing to the Liberals of 8% won’t deliver them the seat of Melbourne – not would it deliver the Greens the seat – so in a national two party regime, the seat cant really be 54.7/45.3, but 72/38
Well done old chap! That’s sensational.
I’d love to see the Libs fall to such a level that it was ALP vs Greens in every seat in Oz… we might get some decent government for a change
Brilliant Possum. Now we just need an election!
Got a couple of questions on that thing…
(1) For the NT seats, why is the CLP counted as ‘others’ instead of ‘coalition’?
(2) Is the ALP/Lib margin back to 1996 taken over booths that are currently in the electorate, or just by the name of the electorate? Redistributions would affect the margin sometimes… I’ve got Calare in mind, which got pushed so far over to the Nat side of things Peter Andren had a go at the senate instead (before he died). There’s a large swing to the Nats there, but I’m not sure what that means bearing in mind 1996-2004 the margin was Andren by about 25%.
Finally, have you noticed there’s only three electorates in Victoria with initials N-Z?
Poss, that is superb.
I am amazed, though, that for New England that Education and Training is not even higher than it is – the prevailing mindset here is that the UNE provides heaps of jobs for the town. Maybe they mean the flowthrough to other jobs like catering and so on.
In particular I am really glad to have income distribution and other social factors included. Are those income figures per week or per fortnight?
But a great program is never finished – in version 2.0, could we have a location map on each of the pages with the particular electorate in a different colour for those of us who are electorate maps challenged?
? why does a green smiley face come out as a monkey?
I say again, we need a help page where we can find the emoticons easily, as well as tell newbies like me how to do quotes and so on.
AND WE NEED A PREVIEW FUNCTION!
wonderful, and I second the call for a map showing where electorates are
The occupational demographics are just begging to have an analysis done by social class, and compared to the TPP levels. How much of the TPP is connected to class-by-occupation and how much to local history of such?
Perhaps you’ve already done something similar, Poss, and I missed it.
Love the charts. Could waste hours…
Very nice Poss -and it even works on a Mac .
Congratulations.
Oh lovely! I’ll be nicking bits from this on a regular basis, thanks Poss,
Thanks for all the feedback folks.
I played around a little with maps for each division, but the file started getting very big very quickly – but it’s a really good idea. I’ll try and figure something out over the next little while – maybe using the google maps API on an additional tab within the app itself.
Yaz – I couldnt tell you. I struggle to get around class based analysis because of the big, but simple problem of actually defining “class” itself.
Don, those income figures are per week.
Bird of Paradox – thanks for picking that up. When I aggregated the electoral data by party, I completely forgot that Territorians feel the need to call their conservatives something completely different to the rest of the country. I’ll fix that up for the next release.
The election result data is for the seats as they were at each election.Booth by booth data would be interesting (and maybe something for the future) – but with over 7000 booths, it would be an absolutely enormous process, not only breaking down election results of the past into seats of today – but also trying to fit 7000+ booths worth of data into a flash app that didnt take 20 minutes to load!
Poss,
I understand the problems of defining class, either statistically, or financially. I was more looking at the crudest simplifications, such as level of tradies vs professionals in a given electorate. It struck me that many places may persist in voting patterns long after their demographic has changed markedly, due to the influence of family patterns of voting, politics of local government etc. etc.
Any thoughts?