Meltwater has found women and wages were the two most talked about topics in this year’s Federal budget.
Analysis from the media monitoring and social analytics platform looked at conversations that took place pre- and post-Federal budget in the news and on social media channels to reveal the topics and issues that were most important to the media and public.
In total, it looked at 119,000 social media posts and 14,000 online news and print articles published from 12am (AEDT) on Tuesday 29th March in advance of Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s budget speech at 9am, Wednesday 30th March.
In anticipation of the budget, #wages were the biggest discussion, but #women surged in discussion once the budget was announced. Top keywords included “families”, “number of women”, “violence against women” and “cost of living”.
Wages also remained a top issue, with upsets over no major changes to real wages to help with the cost of living. Keywords such as “real wages”, “fuel excise”, “unemployment rate”, “cost of living”, “pressures” and “Australian families” dominated.
Georgina Bitcon, enterprise solutions director at Meltwater, said: “Post-announcement we saw a large spike about women, specifically about positive changes to Paid Parental Leave and funding for endometriosis treatment. On the flip side, climate conversations also saw a spike post announcement due to a lack of focus on it in the budget.”
In contrast there was severely negative feedback surrounding wages, climate, foreign aid and aged care
Climate dominated on Twitter and Reddit, receiving the largest volume of negative sentiment out of any of the funding areas, following minimal investment in renewables and another year of inaction by Australia on tackling the climate crisis.
Healthcare was also called out on social, with many general practitioners as well as the Queensland premier calling out underfunding. “Healthcare and flood disaster recovery” and “fair share” were two leading keywords, with a lot of discussion around telehealth and home care issues.
Foreign Aid saw extremely high negativity, with topics including “country welfare payments”, “ongoing natural disasters”, “band-aid solution” and “housing crisis” suggesting a conflict over where Australia’s priorities should lie.
Some of the top Tweets concerned the lack of sufficient response to flood disaster recovery, with Twitter users including Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and former prime minister’s daughter Lucy Turnbull reaching hundreds of thousands of people and sparking high engagement.
The top topics varied across the news channels and social platforms analysed by Meltwater.
• News – Women
• Broadcast – Wages
• Facebook – Wages
• Twitter – Healthcare
• Reddit – Climate
• Forums – Climate
• Blogs – Climate
• Budget “buzz” for top emojis
Angry faces, thumbs down, roll-eyes, swearing and hands-praying icons dominated, intermingled with a few thumbs up and okay signs.
The top emoji used during the budget was a bee, used in 1.4k posts over the last 24 hours. This was due to some of the highest engaged posts of the night being by Twitter users Belinda Jones who signs off with a bee image
