When I started collecting and analysing Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s speeches and interview transcripts over a year ago for a blog post and Shiny app, I hardly believed he would still be Prime Minister come the next election. With the election today, this is very possibly Scott Morrison’s last day as PM. In honour of the occasion, this is a special edition post about ScoMo’s language use during the election campaign.

Since the election was announced on 2022-04-10, ScoMo has given 89 interviews and speeches. In this post, I’ll analyse these transcripts to:

  • Identify common topics during the campaign.
  • Determine whether there are differences in Scott Morrison’s language when he speaks in different states and territories.

What has ScoMo been talking about?

We’ll first take a broad look at the language used throughout the campaign. This wordcloud shows words and phrases that are much more frequently used during the campaign than in the three months before the election was announced:

This shows us immediately that the economy and cost of living have been central to this campaign, with ‘economic plan’, ‘unemployment’, ‘cost of living’, and ‘inflation’ among the most over-represented terms. We can also see hints of other common themes, such Australia’s relationship with the Pacific Islands, Solomon Islands, and China.

To tease out these topics and themes more, I’ll use topic modeling. Topic modeling is a useful method for identifying different topics that are characterised by different combinations of words. The table below shows the top terms associated with each topic:

topic1 topic2 topic3 topic4
regional_australia mental buy bank
university mental_health superannuation shield
mine northern_territory super reserve
mineral faith aspiration reserve_bank
hydrogen greg retirement mortgage
western_australian order leigh north_queensland
hub social_service saving warren
emission alice saturday australian_economy
wa damien house_price relief
critical_mineral religious gear retiree
topic5 topic6 topic7 topic8
economic_plan island forestry coast
albanese solomon forestry_industry andrew
unemployment solomon_island integrity alan
wage chinese page south_coast
cost_of_live chinese_government federal_level tudge
rise peter commission aside
manage_money national_security integrity_commission teach
vote send tasmania alan_tudge
interest_rate pacific_island proposal constance
campaign manufacture product andrew_constance

Three topics (3, 4, and 5) are clearly related to the economy, which supports the impression we get from the wordcloud that the economy has dominated ScoMo’s campaign. This approach allows other major themes to emerge as well, such as foreign policy (topic 6), the integrity commission (topic 7), and the energy and resource sector (topic 1).

Interestingly, some topics include the names of states or regions, suggesting there could be some interesting differences in language use when ScoMo is addressing voters in the different states and territories.

We can also look at the number of interviews and speeches that are classified into each category (you can hover over a bar to see the most common terms associated with the topic):

Topic 5, which includes terms such as ‘cost of living’, ‘interest rate’, ‘economic plan’, and ‘Albanese’ is by far the most frequent topic. Topic 6, which includes terms related to foreign policy (Pacific Islands, Solomon Islands, Chinese government, national security) is the second most frequent topic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the topic that is least mentioned is topic 7, which includes the term ‘integrity commission’.

How has ScoMo’s language use been tailored for different states and territories?

Of the 89 interviews and speeches of the election campaign, 60 have a clear location (either provided explicitly in the title of the transcript, or which can be inferred from the name of the media outlet). My previous post suggested that ScoMo does play favourites with the states and territories, so can we discern any favourites where he seems to be spending more time?

We can see that ScoMo has spoken most in Victoria and NSW, but also has spent a lot of time in Queensland and WA. Tasmania has had a few interviews and speeches, whereas the Northern Territory, South Australia, and the ACT have been fairly neglected.

Because the topic modeling suggested that some topics might be associated with specific locations, I explored this more by identifying the most frequently used terms in transcripts associated with different states and territories. To make it more interesting, I removed words related to state or capital city names as well as those of interviewers. The table below shows the top terms for Victoria, NSW, Queensland, and WA (Tasmania, the Northern Territory, South Australia, and the ACT didn’t have enough transcripts so weren’t included):

VIC NSW QLD WA
wage wage island mineral
mental island electricity island
bank consequence solomon university
mental_health chinese gas defence_industry
coast university solomon_island critical_mineral
reserve bank national_security tourism
reserve_bank electricity chinese green
shield chinese_government downward mine
candidate legislation downward_pressure class
commission debate upgrade hydrogen

As we saw in the topic modeling above, terms relating to mining were far more common when ScoMo speaks in WA. Funny that. While in Victoria ScoMo was more likely to speak about mental health, wages and the Reserve Bank, whereas in both NSW and QLD terms related to foreign policy (‘Chinese’, ‘Chinese government’, and ‘Solomon Islands’) came up more often that in the other states.

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