The Carbon Tax is said by some to have played a big role in the New South Wales election so I thought I'd check it against our responses. And the answer is that it didn't play a significant direct role at all. Or if it did it was in electorates that I don't get many responses from in the coal mining or heavy industrial areas of New South Wales.

For what it's worth this analysis tends to be backed-up by Bob Hawke and Nikki Savva.

Out of our entire sample only 5 per cent mentioned the carbon tax as an issue. That's hardly runaway popularity. Those who did mention it were more likely to be from the left. Compared to the whole sample, they were more likely to be Green, equally likely to be Labor, and less likely to be Liberal or National. Reading Greens' comments the tax was an issue when it came to thinking of voting Liberal, not Labor. That is probably why they were much more likely to allocate a preference to Labor (75 per cent) than the Greens in our general sample (40 per cent).

In other words, as a direct issue it actually improved the Labor vote.

Nikki Savva says:

The Liberals tracked all the way through the NSW campaign. Their final figures were less than 1 per cent out from the final result. The numbers blipped upwards slightly with the announcement; mostly it showed up as a reinforcement of all of Labor's negatives.

That's probably right. On the negative side if the issue was still there by election day it was only as a subliminal reinforcement of views that voters had already formed of Labor. On the positive side it was actually a reason for some left of centre voters to stick with Labor.

There is a lesson here for those campaigning on the carbon tax. It's not an issue that is important to many voters in its own right, and those that are most motivated by it are likely to be on the left. What is concerning voters is service delivery and cost of living. To the extent that the carbon tax contributes to a perception that the government doesn't care about these things and is incapable of managing them, it is important, but no more than that.

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