Did you see the headlines this week about young men’s preference for Peter Dutton? I think many of them were misleading. Let me explain why. The reporting stemmed from an article in the Australian Financial Review ($) on January 28th, based on polling by Freshwater Strategy about the federal election. Here are some of them:

Freshwater Strategy is a polling company that has an exclusive publishing arrangement with AFR, just like Newspoll does with The Australian, Resolve Monitor and SMH/The Age, and Essential and Guardian Australia. The polls are run independently by these companies, but they agree to only provide the data to their partner publication. This means all subsequent reporting in other outlets is based only on the data that the AFR shared in its reporting – so, mostly this graphic:

Based on this data, do you feel that the above headlines fairly represent the findings of the poll?

I don’t. By focusing on a single data point – the 10-point difference in the percentage of young men and young women who would prefer Dutton – these headlines imply that most young men prefer Dutton and are embracing his neo-conservative, Trump-style ideology. Which is strange, because the poll shows the majority (55%) of young men actually prefer Albanese as prime minister. That’s an 18pt preference for Albanese over Dutton among young men – almost double the Dutton gender gap that headlines have focused on.

Here are some other headline options that media outlets could have run for this story, based on the exact same set of data:

• Young men wildly more keen on Anthony Albanese than Peter Dutton, research finds
  Use of “wildly more keen” was used by Pedestrian to describe a 10pt difference (27% of women compared to 37% of men prefer Dutton). This could just as easily apply to the 18pt difference in young men’s preference for Albanese over Dutton, or the fact that young men gave Albanese an approval rating 12pts higher than Dutton (+6 Albanese, -6 Dutton). Young women’s clear disapproval of both leaders makes arguably makes the male positive approval of Albanese more intriguing – what’s going on there?
  

• Majority of young voters prefer Anthony Albanese as PM over Peter Dutton
  58% of young women and 55% of young men said they preferred Albo as PM – not a huge majority, but a majority nonetheless. The headlines focused only on the respondents who said they preferred Dutton, even though those people were in the minority.
  

• Young men more likely to vote Labor than young women
  According to this survey, not only are young men more likely to vote for Labor than young women, they are more likely to vote Labor than for the Coalition. This does not seem like the type of finding you would expect to read in an article with the headline “Young men gravitating towards Dutton”.
  

• Even young men who don’t intend to vote Labor prefer Anthony Albanese over Peter Dutton
  The voting intention data for young men has 36% saying they’ll vote Labor, but in the preferred PM section 55% say they prefer Albanese. That means, when given the choice between Albanese and Dutton, 19% of non-Labor voting guys would still pick Albanese. It’s safe to assume this comes entirely from the young male Greens voters (20%).
  

• Young women deeply unsatisfied with both Albanese and Dutton
  It’s interesting that young women weren’t chosen as the focus of headlines for any of these outlets, given their low approval rating for both party leaders and the fact that almost one-third of women said they will vote for the Greens. If it is newsworthy that some young men prefer Dutton despite giving him a -6 approval rating, surely it’s even more surprising that such a high portion of young women would still choose him despite giving him a worse approval rating (-11)?
  

• Who do young voters prefer as Prime Minister? It depends on who they intend to vote for
  This is bad headline, because it’s so boring and obvious. But that’s the point - it matches the polling data which shows a clear link between voting intention and preferred PM. 25% of young women say they’ll vote LNP, and 27% say they prefer Dutton as PM. 32% of men say they’ll vote LNP, and 37% say they prefer Dutton. That seems entirely reasonable.
  
  64% of young women would vote either Greens or ALP, and 52% of men. Given that Adam Bandt is not an option for PM, it makes sense that most of these voters would prefer Albanese (58% F, 55% M). 

Where is evidence for the “shift”?

Are young Australian men moving to the neo-conservative right? I’m not saying the trend doesn’t exist, but it is not present in the polling data that the AFR and Freshwater published. The polling data was based on the Nov 2024 to Jan 2025 period, and the articles did not make comparisons to previous time periods, so did not state whether there had been a change in young men’s preferences or voting intention. A headline that says a group is “gravitating”, indicating a change in status – I’d expect to see data from two different points in time to show that change. If it exists, the original AFR article did not include that, and nor did the Pedestrian or News Corp reports that I’ve referenced.

For the record, I think there could be a rightward shift among young men… but those of us in the media don’t just get to declare it to be so. If it’s happening, we have to prove that and then explore the reasons why. Federal election studies up to 2022 have tracked the generation change in political beliefs (in general, young people are moving left), but the generation data is not broken down by gender. I think it is unfair to young Australian men that their political beliefs and voting intention is being assumed and served up for public debate without due diligence.

As Pedestrian and Zee Feed both focus on youth audiences, I contacted them for comment before publishing today’s newsletter. A representative said that Pedestrian stands by its journalist’s reporting.

THE TAKEAWAY: As the federal election gets closer, we need to be careful about how we consume media and how we discuss what we consume. Taking the headlines at face value can spread and legitimise ideas that don’t quite exist the way they’ve been presented. In this case, my feeling is that some outlets are keen to piggy-back off trends from the US election because those topics perform really well. So they are shaping Australian election and political stories to fit those narratives – even though our political and sociocultural landscapes are not the same. We deserve a more thorough examination of what is really happening in this country, in this election.  

Headlines are not a summary of the article, so if there is a takeaway here it’s that we shouldn’t be discussing news stories if a headline is all we’ve read. That doesn’t mean you have to read, watch or listen in full to everything you see, but it does mean being responsible for the conversations you have with others about politics and the election.

Take care of each other this Sunday. We’re gonna need stamina over the coming months.

– Crystal
Founder & Chief of Everything at Zee Feed
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