Ethnic Issues and Voting in the 1987 Federal Election

Abstract

Although ethnic issues have had a higher profile in Australian politics in the 1980s, they still engender few party political differences among voters, showing that bipartisanship on immigration and multiculturalism remains important. However, a plurality of Australian voters now want an end to all immigration, a major change from twenty years ago. The patterns of ethnic voting which were observed in 1979 were maintained in the 1987 federal election, suggesting that the period between 1973 and 1979 represented a political fault-line in ethnic voting in Australia. Overall, Labor is the net beneficiary from the ethnic vote; without support from Southern Europeans in the 1987 election, they would have trailed the Liberal-National coalition by 2 per cent of the total vote.