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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