#Election 2016 Australia Tax Education Health – More Is Not Always Better

Australia is due to vote in about one months time for a new Federal Government, and one month into the campaign we examine what the social buzz says about the issues. It’s a case of the most volume not always being the most favourable outcome.

Overall general discussion dominates

The volume of activity is dominated by general #auspol and #election2016 discussion about and from the two contenders – current Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his challenger Bill Shorten. This general discussion overwhelms specific discussions about issues as shown in the volumes below. Health, education and refugees each account for less than 1% of the volume of activity.

Therefore, we need to remove the general discussion to see what we can learn about the specific topics, and we’ve added the economy as another specific topic.

Specific topics dominated by the economy

We can now see that of the topics of health, education, refugees and the economy that the economy dominates the activity, except for one occasion when refugees and Malcolm Turnbull breached the level of activity about the economy (see May 18 below).

The relative share of voice between the specific topics shows that on all topics – the economy, education, health and refugees – Malcolm Turnbull has the highest volume compared to Bill Shorten. On the surface this might be considered a positive, however when we look at sentiment we can see something different.

Higher volume lower positive sentiment

Sentiment analysis of the above topics shows a typical high volume of neutral, or unclassified, sentiment. However what it also shows is that while both leaders are tracking about equally in negative sentiment about the economy, that Malcolm Turnbull has far higher – in relative terms – negative sentiment than Bill Shorten on the issues of health, education and refugees.

That is, it shows that the level of negative Twitter activity about Malcolm Turnbull in association with the issues of health, education and refugees is higher than that associated with Bill Shorten. So in some cases more volume is not necessarily good volume.

The above analysis is over the past 30 days on Twitter conversations in English.