Does your suburb influence your vote?
We are asked in this recent article, “does your suburb influence your vote?” Without going any further, I’ll drop the bomb-shell now and tell you it probably does!
Yes, if you live in one of Sydney’s many million dollar plus suburbs, they is a very high probability that you have a Federal Liberal Member of Parliament representing you. It would also seem you have a much higher probability of owning at least one other investment property and take advantage of negative gearing to lower your tax burden.
The Blue areas have excellent, expensive investment properties
There are a couple of suburbs that are bucking the trend but it is not necessarily the home owners of the area who are not voting Liberal but more likely to be their tenants living in an investment property in one of the popular ‘hipster’ suburbs like Surrey Hills. High earning renters in these areas tend to have other priorities apart from housing such as priorities relating to gay marriage and the housing affordability crisis but are less interest in the economy. These are the voters that can convert safe Labor seats into Greens seats.
An examination of the 15 electorates with the most expensive median property price in NSW shows that 11 of the 15 are Liberal seats.
If we examine the median house price in NSW for Liberal voters, the figure is $1.13 million while for Labor seats it’s a paltry $790,000 according to Domain!
There are a few million-dollar seats that have firmly remained more left of centre. These include the suburbs that have gentrified over time and become expensive due to demand, rather than due to their prestige status but still maintain a good percentage of traditional Labor voters. Electorates such as Newtown, Glebe and Surry Hills, has a strong 12.9 per cent Labor trend despite a price tag of about $1.5 million.
So here is another article that should help to clear up some thoughts for Election Day. The inference seems to be that in general if you are well-off middle class you are likely to vote Liberal but if you are not-so-well-off blue collar working class, you are likely to vote Labor! Who would have thought?
Read more: http://goo.gl/jkxdyu
