Analysis of the 2005 West Australian state election.
...es and make informed decisions. Information gathered from listening to the radio, or watching your favourite television channel nightly news, may be the only knowledge you are exposed to before the election. Who to vote for being based on the media coverage you watched or heard. Then there are those who do not care and cast an informal vote. No matter what category you belong to, your freedom of choice and vote affects the success and stability of our State. The geography, meaning the location of electorates, has enormous bearing on which party is elected. The diversity of city and rural regions must be directed and addressed by the parties’ candidates. What may be considered as an important policy in the suburbs, will have no importance in say Kalgoorlie. In recent elections there has been a trend for constituents to vote against the major parties, choosing to vote for conservative protest parties such as One Nation. One reason for this change is because the people of the bush did not benefit from the economic prosperity of the 1990’s, by way of increased income or better services for country people. The economic state of an electorate is possibly the strongest aspect regarding election outcome. Electorates pay greatest interest to party policies regarding their economic management of funds. Constituents are concerned with issues such as: inflation, unemployment and economic growth. Constituents are concerned with matters that affect them directly or personally, this is income tax, taxation rebates, and the cost of indirect taxes (land, motor vehicle), welfare benefits, health care costs, banking and mortgage interest rates. In the past, The Liberal Party was structured towards the more well-off people, showing leniency to business owners and employers. Labor was associated the lower income families, focusing on lower taxes and higher welfare services “The Aussie Battlers”. Over recent years this has changed, Labor has become more pro-business, not at the exclusion of the lower income, but trying to maintain a better balance between the two and rewarding both ends of the economic scale. Media strongly influences the public on several issues regarding the lead-up to elections. The media is the major source of political information for constituents. The amount of coverage and the image created by the media makers can manipulate the decision of which party to support. The media has a responsibility to its viewers to portray an informative, honest and unbiased presentation of the facts. However, this is not always true. Looking back at the campaign by the media leading up to the 2005 State election, several concerns were raised by candidates: How balanced was the media presentation of all parties involved? Do the media owners have any power to influence the result of an election? Do media techniques create ‘image’ over issues in politics? Do the media ‘set the political agenda’ during elections? Media, through television, newspapers, and radio, is the only source of information available to many people, therefore it is very important that the news makers tell the facts and not show any preference or...