For today’s post I am looking at how the Muslim vote changed, using some techniques I’ve previously used to look at voters of Chinese and Indian ancestry in past votes.
At this election we have seen a lot of speculation about Muslim voters switching from Labor, voting for Muslim independents, but also possibly for the Greens, with the war in Gaza being a major influence on that trend. We have seen Muslim groups cease to invite major party politicians to Islamic events that they would have previously attended regularly.
For this post I wanted to be more specific and look at how suburbs with large Muslim populations swung, relative to other parts of their seats and other parts of urban Australia.
Of course the best analysis would be individual survey data, which is coming, but for communities that are geographically concentrated, you can use booth data to get some sense of trends – you just need to be careful. The ecological fallacy can trip you up, but in areas where the Muslim population is very large, I think this can make sense.
To simplify this process, I have grouped election results by suburb, and matched that to the ABS 2021 census data for each suburb. I have also excluded smaller-population suburbs, and in the national charts I have only included metropolitan suburbs.
Let’s start with two-party-preferred votes, although there are a number of seats such as Watson where we don’t currently have 2PP data.
In some seats there isn’t much of a trend, but generally in most of these seats the most Muslim suburbs swung more strongly towards Labor. Blaxland and Calwell are notable. It’s also notable that Bruce, a seat where the Afghan community is prominent and was a major part of the campaign, doesn’t appear to have any trend.
But there was no suggestion that the Coalition was going to be winning Muslim votes off Labor: rather that independents and Greens might. So the Labor primary vote would be more interesting.
The swing against Labor was slightly worse in the more Islamic parts of Calwell, which makes sense considering Labor seems to have been hit from multiple angles, but the slope is much stronger in Watson and Blaxland.
Wills is a seat where most suburbs have less than 10% Muslim residents, but the two suburbs that are over that level had swings of over 10% from the Greens. The most Muslim suburb in Scullin also had the biggest swing in that seat.
The most interesting of these charts was Barton. Most of the suburbs have under 10% Muslim residents, and those suburbs had a mix of swings against Labor and swings to Labor, some quite big swings in their favour. But those more Muslim suburbs consistently showed small swings against Labor. A similar trend can also be detected in Chifley, but a bit less clearly.
I had been trying to work out where to include my booth map of the day for Barton, so let’s throw it in here.
Labor gained a noticeable primary vote swing in those parts of the electorate contained in Georges River council, particularly at the southern end around Kogarah. But in the centre of the seat, around Bexley and Arncliffe, there were double digit swings against Labor.
The Greens gained swings of 19% and 24% in two Arncliffe booths. That suburb had a 19.4% Muslim population in 2021.
While this swing appears to have largely been from Labor to the Greens, it can still be detected on the 2PP map. Labor gained huge swings in the southern end around Kogarah (which has quite a large Chinese population), but had somewhat muted 2PP swings in the centre of the seat.
Anyway so in addition to Labor primary swings, I have also charted the Greens primary swings in these most Muslim electorates.
There is no trend in Blaxland, Watson or Calwell, where prominent independents took the wind out of the Greens’ sails, but almost everywhere else their vote picked up the most in the more Muslim areas: Wills, Werriwa, Macarthur, Barton, Bruce and Chifley all show this trend.
I don’t think this is the full story of the Greens’ boost in suburban seats, but I do think it suggests it is most heavily concentrated in communities with a lot of Muslim voters. I hope we’ll be able to learn more about this over time.