"Wages" was the biggest talking point ahead of the budget announcement
"Women" spiked after the budget was revealed
But "Climate" dominated on Twitter and Reddit
Wages and Women were the two most talked-about topics around this year’s Federal budget, according to analysis by leading media monitoring and social analytics platforms Meltwater.
Meltwater analysed 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 to 9am this morning, 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.
"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," said Georgina Bitcon, Enterprise Solutions Director at Meltwater.
Negative sentiment about Climate, Foreign Aid, Aged Care
As well as negative sentiment around wages, other topics attracted severely negative feedback. 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.
Topics share of voice across different platforms
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.
ENDS
About Meltwater
Meltwater helps companies make better, more informed decisions based on insights from the outside. We believe that business strategy will be increasingly shaped by insights from online data. Organisations will look outside, beyond their internal reporting systems to a world of data that is constantly growing and changing. Our customers use these insights to make timely decisions based on real-time analysis.
More than 2000 companies use the Meltwater media intelligence platform across ANZ to stay on top of billions of social media conversations and track hundreds of thousands local and international online news publications. Globally, we work with over 34,000 organisations, with 55 local offices across six continents.
Meltwater also operates the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST), a non-profit organisation devoted to nurturing future generations of entrepreneurs.