The ABC’s Vote Compass is back for a fifth election cycle

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Vote Compass is back to help Australians understand the political landscape. You put in your postcode to narrow down to your electorate, answer 30 questions, and can explore the results to see how your views compare with parties and politicians.

Transcript

00:00Vote Compass is a tool that was designed by political scientists to allow all voters to

00:07see where they fit on the political spectrum and to compare their views to that of the

00:13major parties.

00:14So it's pretty easy to do.

00:15It takes about 10 minutes.

00:16Head online, you put your postcode in, select your electorate, you'll be asked about 30

00:21questions.

00:22Things like, should Australia be doing more to combat climate change?

00:26Should you support nuclear power facilities being built in Australia?

00:30And at the end of it, you'll get a plot, something that kind of looks like a compass, North,

00:35South, East, West, except it's conservative to progressive.

00:38And you will appear on the Vote Compass plot as a little dot.

00:41And you can see how you compare to the major parties, ALP, the Coalition, the Greens.

00:48So it gives you information to make decisions in this upcoming election.

00:52And the questions are really focused broadly around all of the issues that have come up

00:56so far that have been talked about for the last couple of years, aren't they?

01:00Yeah, social and economic issues.

01:02I mean, if anyone's been following the election campaign, cost of living comes up every day

01:07multiple times.

01:08So there's lots of questions about that, but also some questions that maybe could have

01:11been on any election for decades, like, do you support a republic?

01:16Questions about climate change.

01:18So there's a variety in there.

01:20And it just went live last night.

01:23What have you seen so far?

01:25Have you already got a sense of some of the results or perhaps some of the trends?

01:29Well, we've been doing this for five election cycles now, so since 2013, we're expecting

01:34a lot of engagement.

01:35The last election, we got 1.5 million respondents, which is huge, bigger than a lot of other

01:42major polls that you would see.

01:44They're usually from like a thousand to 40,000.

01:46So this is really big.

01:48It's launched already.

01:50There's over 80,000 people who've logged online and filled it out.

01:54We haven't taken a look at any of that data yet.

01:56We work with a team of political scientists, Vox Pop Labs.

02:00They're over in Canada.

02:01And all of the data that we get, we will tell stories with for the ABC, but it will all

02:06be made demographically representative.

02:09That's why we ask you questions about your age and things like that.

02:13And it's important to say any of the answers that you put in, they're not going to be sold

02:16to third parties.

02:17It's just kept with the ABC.

02:18It'll all be depersonalised and it's a great way for the ABC to see what issues matter

02:24around the country and to be able to tell those stories to our audiences.

02:28Yeah, I think you don't even have to put your name or details in at the end, if I remember

02:33rightly, until the very end.

02:34If you don't want to, you don't have to.

02:35And no one will ever know what you put in or things like that.

02:39But we think a lot about the questions and how we design this thing.

02:42As I said, we've been doing it for a while, but this year we were really trying to make

02:45sure it reflected the fact that a lot of people in Australia aren't voting for the

02:50major parties anymore.

02:52They're looking to independents.

02:54So for the first time Vote Compass actually has the views of those incumbent independents.

03:00So once you fill out all those questions and you see yourself on the plot, you can scroll

03:05down and you'll get information about your electorate, all of the candidates, and you'll

03:08be able to see any independents in there now, not just the major parties.

03:12So it gives you, as I said, a lot of information to make decisions about public policy.

03:17And I guess you've been doing this for quite a while now.

03:19And there has, as you mentioned, been a lot of thinking around the questions and how it's

03:22structured.

03:23Is there anything that is new or perhaps different this election?

03:27That's the big new thing, that we really are trying to be inclusive and representative

03:31of those independents, the incumbent independents.

03:35And as I said, we think a lot about the questions that we're asking.

03:39This time specifically there are some of those new questions around cost of living, questions

03:43around supermarket pricing and government intervention.

03:47So there's some of the new things for this year.

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