Vote Compass reveals what Aussies think of our political leaders — and it's not pretty

Updated

Australia's most prominent political leaders have been on the road for weeks now, trying to convince voters they're trustworthy and competent.

Those efforts don't seem to be going all that well, according to the views of 300,000 respondents to the ABC's Vote Compass survey.

Vote Compass asks voters to rate our leaders out of 10 how competent and trustworthy they are. And on average, none of our leaders are getting a passing grade.

While these grades might seem low, La Trobe University associate professor Andrea Carson, a member of the Vote Compass advisory panel, said they were not unusual.

"Past Vote Compass surveys show that Australians are economical with their ratings — often below five out of 10," Dr Carson said.

"Typically Australians vote for parties and for local members.

"Leaders stand out when they are very good or very bad, or dominate the party branding as in One Nation."

Undecided voters can't split Morrison and Shorten

One of the key goals of any election campaign is to win over voters who haven't made up their minds about who to vote for.

Remarkably, those undecided voters score the men facing off for the prime ministership, Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten, exactly equally on both competence and trust.

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ABC election analyst Antony Green said the data suggested neither of the major party leaders was standing out so far in this campaign.

"What we know about leadership is for people who are not partisan for one side or the other, and whose fundamental choices in voting aren't defined by commitment to party, among those groups leadership is a much bigger issue for them," he said.

"But neither leader is standing out to those softly committed or uncommitted voters."

The results suggested this group of votes remained very much up for grabs in the final weeks of the election campaign, Dr Carson said.

Voters rate their own party's leader highest

Dr Carson said that while the overall rankings of Mr Morrison and Mr Shorten might look different from the results of commercial pollsters like Newspoll, this is because Vote Compass asks quite different questions.

Green said Mr Shorten had become more of a known quantity to voters since 2016, and his rating on these questions had climbed since then.

"Whether voters like Bill Shorten or not, he's been around now as a leader for six years. Scott Morrison has come to the job more recently and in a manner which is quite controversial," he said.

Dr Carson said it was interesting to note that high-income voters rated Scott Morrison higher than Bill Shorten, "presumably as his policies are more aligned with voters' interests in these top income brackets".

On both trust and competence, unsurprisingly voters for a given party scored their own leader highest. Curiously, Coalition voters and Labor voters provide almost exact mirror images in the way they rate Mr Morrison and Mr Shorten.

Topics: federal-election, federal-government, federal-parliament, leadership, liberals, liberal-national-party, alp, political-parties, scott-morrison, bill-shorten, australia

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