There’s an underlying contradiction in federal election coverage. Elections are deeply consequential for the future of the nation, but they are conducted via daily routines and rituals often trivial to the point of inanity.
We can’t completely ignore the inane bits; the leaders’ shopping mall walks, or visits to childcare centres to discuss finger painting with four-year-olds, the unexpected encounters with voters who accuse them of talking bullshit, or who cheer them like pop stars. Those speeches and interactions, in the glare of television cameras during the weeks when Australians focus on who they want to run the country, can make or break campaigns. They are how many voters get a sense of who leaders are, how they relate, how they react under pressure.
I covered nine federal elections as a federal political reporter and editor for various mastheads, watching many of those moments first-hand and seeing how quickly they could shift perceptions and mood. But viewing a campaign only through this lens risks missing the stories leaders don’t want to talk about, the localised electorate-specific political battles and the policies that need deeper analysis. Reporters on the campaign trail can ask the leaders questions, and that is obviously important, but the opportunities are brief (and now televised live) and the exercise is otherwise a drain on resources and time.
Increasingly, much of what is important during an election happens elsewhere.
As in previous elections, Guardian Australia will for the most part stay off the leaders’ buses in 2022. We will follow each day’s campaign events in our comprehensive live blog, helmed by Amy Remeikis and Tory Shepherd. We’ll wrap every day with a daily briefing, and a short campaign catch-up podcast.
To get beyond the campaign bubble, we’ve already been out across the country, talking to voters in key seats for a series called Anywhere but Canberra, and we’ll revisit some of those conversations to explore whether the campaign is changing people’s views. We’ve collaborated with Griffith University to develop a data-rich seat explorer to get a fuller picture of each electorate and how they compare. Our data team is also tracking electorate-specific or regional spending promises in real time with the Pork-o-meter, to monitor the money pouring into marginal seats as the promises are made, rather than finding out about it afterwards, when the audit office investigates allegations of pork-barrelling. We think this transparency is important, including for voters in the safe seats who might be missing out on the largesse.
We’ll be alert to disinformation, misinformation and the messaging in political advertising, which is now more often targeted online and harder to scrutinise than when it was only on leaflets posted into letterboxes or plastered across billboards by the side of the road.
Our Canberra team, including political editor Katharine Murphy, chief political correspondent Sarah Martin and reporters Paul Karp, Josh Butler, Daniel Hurst and Amy Remeikis will be reporting and analysing the news and the policy announcements from all parties. Karp will also be writing regular fact checks. We’ve also partnered with the Australian National University to bring readers SmartVote, a questionnaire tool to help explore which parties or candidates best match a voter’s own views. We’ll bring in the expertise of our specialist and state reporters and our data team. And Matilda Boseley is creating a video series to explain it all for younger and first time voters, called Voting 101.
We’ll also be bringing you our regular Guardian Essential poll, incorporating the lessons we learned from Scott Morrison’s victory in 2019, which almost no one saw coming, including the pollsters. We stayed off the buses in that campaign too, spending time in marginal seats to try to gauge the mood. But it was hard to square the accounts my reporters brought back, of deep uncertainty about Bill Shorten, with Labor’s commanding lead in every poll.
Afterwards, Peter Lewis from Essential and I considered how we could change both our polling, and also what we read into it and reported from it. We moved from reporting a traditional two-party preferred estimate to what we called a 2PP+, calling out the proportion of undecided voters and calculating a two-party-preferred vote only for those who had expressed some preference. It was a change designed to convey useful information, but avoid numbers that could be construed as a prediction of a result, even when fluctuations were within a poll’s margin of error.
The coming weeks will be fascinating, a domestic contest held after a parliamentary term dominated by disasters and pandemic and against the backdrop of historic challenges, a war in Europe and an unfolding climate crisis more evident every day. I intend that Guardian Australia’s reporting, analysis and data projects will provide readers with the richest information and the fullest possible picture to make their important choices.
