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Last Saturday’s (18 May) surprise election outcome has triggered a tsunami of commentary about what went wrong for Shorten’s Labor and what went right for Morrison’s Coalition. The consensus opinion is that:

•   Shorten was offering a class warfare view of our Australian society, pitting young against old, the independent-minded aspirational against the ‘wannabe’ government-cradled and so on. This was expressed in Labor’s tax and other policies.

•   Morrison appealed directly to the non-class conscious, self-reliant, aspirational spirit of Australians.

At Self-Employed Australia our driving belief and faith is in the aspirational, self-reliant desire of people. We see this as the essential DNA of the higher aspect of the human spirit. It’s not about being greedily selfish. People are aspirational for themselves, their families, friends and communities.
Even though our driving belief would seem to align us with one view of politics, our five weeks of election commentary tried to ensure that we were factually based in our commentary.

We ran a substantial social media campaign, particularly on Facebook. Our ‘penetration’ rate was significant.

Our website tax calculator page enabled visitors to input their individual data and discover what additional tax they would pay under Labor’s tax policies.

• 9,262 individuals used our calculator to assess Labor’s tax impact on them.

Our Facebook page had strong traffic reaching 86,183 individuals with active and ‘robust’ commentary and debate involving 2,484 comments. Here’s the Facebook breakdown: These social media stats indicate that our campaign had notable penetration in the self-employed, small business community. These are the people who live and breathe the aspirational spirit in their daily working lives. They and their families are dependent on this aspirational drive for their livelihood. There’s no class warfare here!

Of special note is what we suspect was a hidden ‘sleeper’ issue in the election—the fear of Labor held by the independent truckie community.

Our 14 May post expressed our concern about Labor’s promise to reintroduce the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal. This directly threatened the livelihood of the 50,000 independent truck drivers and their families across Australia. In the four days before the election this post had 18,683 ‘reaches’, a huge number in such a short time.

Moving forward post-election, our focus will return to policies to

• Reform the ATO
• Beef up unfair contract laws
• Defend the role of self-employed people in the gig economy.