By Callum Ludwig
With over 1000 responses received, Voices for Casey are prepping to release results from their recent Community Survey on Tuesday 24 September.
The release of the survey results comes ahead of the group’s preparation to announce their Independent candidate for next year’s Federal Election on Sunday 6 October.
President of Voices for Casey Dr Ani Wierenga said it was delightful to get so many responses.
“We really didn’t know when we went in, we had an aspiration of 1000 people and different voices from all over the electorate but we knew that could be hard to get,” she said,
“We had a team that was out there doing markets and talking to anybody they met, we had a team that was out letterbox dropping and inviting people to be part of this and we had Facebook, so it was a very open call and clearly people have responded,”
“They wanted to have their say, we’ve had people say ‘Nobody’s ever asked me what I prioritise, what I care about before’ and they’ve taken up the opportunity, which has been great.”
A preliminary report revealed to the Star Mail narrowed down nine key findings from the survey which took 1039 responses from the electorate of about 123,000 people, while recounted information from Voices for Casey’s ‘Kitchen Table Conversation’ events also considered, with nine of these events held and over 43 people attending.
Dr Wierenga said they expected diverse opinions from the diverse voices of the electorate and they got them.
“We are sitting here with some of the different findings and the different concerns, especially the free text responses to questions like ‘What did we miss?’ and ‘Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?’ because you don’t want to just go out and ask questions to hear back about your own agendas,”
“We noticed that about 50 per cent of people came to us through direct face-to-face means and the other 50 per cent came in through social media, and we also noticed that there were surges throughout the day on the social media, so clearly people sitting down to do surveys in their evenings on a weekend, so you could watch the numbers ticking over in the survey,”
“But it was really good to have the face-to-face as well because that allowed people to have significant conversations about what was important to them or why it mattered that they were even asked and how, in fact, this report could become the basis for some accountability processes.”
Voices for Casey found from the survey:
Voters ‘want to have a voice’ and are prepared to talk about the issues they are concerned about
Like living in Casey and want political support to maintain and build on it
Want to be listened to and don’t want their representative to be constrained by party politics
Are worried about the cost of living, particularly the prices of groceries, electricity and gas as well as housing affordability and availability
Concerned about mental health, physical health, domestic violence and growing wealth inequality issues and how they are interconnected
Climate and environment are important, including issues regarding emergency preparedness and infrastructure failure
Against the privatisation of essential services and want public funds spent better
Want ‘the big end of town’ to pay tax and stop price-gouging consumers
Want elected representatives to take national security and our international standing seriously.
Dr Wierenga said they’ll now be looking at the elected representatives at the federal, state and local government levels and seeing how their voting behaviours are matching the local people’s expressed priorities.
“What we know is that there are some very clear messages there in terms of people’s priorities and also that we have heard through the focus groups some fairly consistent messaging too about a sense that people are looking for a greater voice and stronger representation of local needs and we’ll be bringing a copy of it to each of our local representatives next week,” she said.
“For example, one of the things that surprised me is the extent to which the Great Forest National Park is a real concern on both sides of a debate and maybe there are more than two sides to it, that’s coming through fairly loudly.”
