Just 15% of voters are watching events in Canberra intently – and 15% have no interest at all

Australians are largely tuned out of federal politics, with the latest Guardian Essential poll suggesting only 15% are following events in Canberra closely.

A further 15% of the sample professed absolutely no interest in politics at all, with the rest casual consumers of national affairs.

The fortnightly survey of 1,075 respondents found that 38% monitored political events sufficiently to know what’s afoot, 23% said they tuned in when something big was happening, and 8% engaged only during election seasons.

The general disengagement is consistent with a range of other surveys that suggest Australians are disillusioned with politics after a decade of leadership infighting and unproductive hyper-partisan battles over important policy issues, including climate change.

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The cohort most tuned in are men, people aged over 55, and Coalition voters. Perhaps electing to hit mute after Bill Shorten’s election loss in May, 20% of Labor voters say they have no interest in the federal scene (compared with 6% of Coalition voters). Women, and voters aged between 18 and 34, are also more heavily represented in the tuned-out column, as are voters who are intending to vote for someone other than the major parties.

Voters in the fortnightly survey were asked to specify their level of interest across a range of topics. When the question was posed in that way, 19% professed a lot of interest in federal politics, but that response compares with 26% of the sample saying they had a lot of interest in the upcoming football finals.

Politics was trumped by sport but not by reality television. While 19% reported having a lot of interest in the federal scene, 16% said they watched international events closely, 15% watched politics in their state – but only 9% reported having a lot of interest in The Block and 7% in The Bachelor.

The Australian Election Survey – a research project tracking post-election voter sentiment since 1987 – found in 2016 that disillusionment had now reached a threshold where Australia was beginning to see the beginnings of corrosive popular disaffection with the political class of the type that had led to events including Donald Trump’s presidential victory and Brexit in the UK.

While the general voter tune-out captured in the latest Guardian Essential survey is likely to be a longstanding phenomenon in Australia, it coincides with a concerted effort by both Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese to quieten the often frenzied political news cycle post-election.

Since the rise of 24/7 media coverage, politicians have found it more difficult to govern because proposals are subjected to rolling contention. Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull have all attempted to calm the pace of politics, with little success. But Morrison and Albanese are showing signs of persisting with the effort to get politics off the news channels, and off the front pages, in an effort to engineer a reset.

The Guardian Essential survey this fortnight suggests that voters, having made their choice on 18 May, are more likely to think the Morrison government’s policies will make a positive difference to Australia (41%) than a negative one (23%).

Voters were also asked about their family backgrounds and their attitudes to various statements about racism. The results of the survey suggest over a third of Australians who are first- or second-generation immigrants agree that they have personally experienced racism (36%) or racial discrimination in Australia (38%).

Despite this lived experience, a majority in the sample seem to think there is too much political correctness. Almost two-thirds (62%) agree with the statement: “People are scared to say what they really think because they don’t want to be labelled as racist.”

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Half the sample (50%) thinks Australia is less racist in 2019 than it has been in the past, but less than half of Indigenous Australians in the sample (41%) agree with that proposition. Indigenous Australians in the sample are also more likely to agree with the statement “Australia is a racist country” (41%) than the sample as a whole (36%).

There has been controversy post-election about the reliability of opinion polling because none of the major surveys – Newspoll, Ipsos, Galaxy or Essential – correctly predicted a Coalition victory on 18 May, projecting Labor in front on a two-party-preferred vote of 51-49 and 52-48.

The lack of precision in the polling has prompted public reflection at Essential, as has been flagged by its executive director, Peter Lewis.

Guardian Australia is not now publishing measurements of primary votes or a two-party-preferred calculation, but is continuing to publish survey results of responses to questions about the leaders and a range of policy issues.

The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 3%.