Roy Morgan Update August 25, 2026: Federal Vote, Consumer Confidence and Australian Readership

In this week's Market Research Update, we present the latest data on Federal Vote, Consumer Confidence and Australian Readership.

Welcome to the Roy Morgan Weekly update.

Before launching into the numbers, I want to be clear why we measure what we measure. With so many numbers GDP, CPI, exchange rates, commodity prices etc. etc. It’s easy to get lost.

We at Roy Morgan, believe the key indicators of the health of the economy to watch are Consumer Confidence and Inflation Expectations, Monthly Business Confidence, and most importantly Real Unemployment and Under-employment.

This impacts directly mortgage stress, financial stress and indirectly impacts trust or distrust in society and Political support (voting intention)

One Nation’s first elected Member of the Lower House, David Farley, made news on the weekend after saying that One Nation’s ‘Net Overseas Migration’ (“NOM”) target of 130,000 did not include 100,000 migrant workers, especially those from the Pacific brought in to work on Australian farms.

The story made news as Farley conceded this combined figure of 230,000, was virtually identical to the Albanese Government’s target migration figure of 225,000.

The fact is there are millions of Australians who would like to find work, or more work. Roy Morgan’s Real Unemployment shows over 3.2 million Australians – over 20% of the workforce – Unemployed or Under-employed – and ‘workforce under-utilisation’ has been stuck above 3 million since late 2024 – nearly two years ago

The debate would be very different if politicians and the media considered REAL unemployment – not the comforting ABS figure.

The problem is one of barrier – not a lack of people wanting to work. The solution is connecting the people who want to work with jobs and getting rid of the barriers that prevent Australia from optimising its current workforce.

Adding yet one more barrier – a cheap labour band-aid – is not what we need now or into the future.

And this week ALP primary support is down 1.5% to 27%, level with One Nation 27% (up 2%), and both well ahead of the L-NP Coalition, down 2.5% to 21% - Liberals 18.5% (down 2.5%) and Nationals 2.5% (unchanged), Greens, up 2% to 14%, and Independents/ Other Parties up 0.5% to 11% according to the Roy Morgan Poll conducted from August 17-23, 2026, with a representative Australia-wide cross-section of 1,508 electors.

Both major parties ALP and Coalition lost support, while the respective minor parties picked up support – left-wing Greens and right-wing One Nation.

The net result is little change to the two-party preferred result.

If a Federal Election were held now the ALP would win a majority against either One Nation (53-47) or the L-NP Coalition (52-48) – both unchanged, from a week ago.

A clear majority of Australians, 58.5%, say the country is ‘going in the wrong direction’ (down 2%). Only 27% say the country is ‘going in the right direction’ (up 1%).

This view is shared by both genders with 60.5% of men and 56.5% of women saying Australia is ‘going in the wrong direction’.

Analysis by voting intention shows large differences between supporters of different parties.

91% of One Nation voters say the country is ‘going in the wrong direction’ as do 73% of Coalition voters, 57% of minor party voters, and 51% of Greens voters.

This compares to 42% of Independent voters and only 24% of ALP voters. Among ALP supporters a rising majority of 59% (up 3%) say the country is ‘going in the right direction’.

There was good news for Consumer Confidence rising to its highest mark since the Iran War began. This week ANZ-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence was up 1 point to 77.5.

Driving the increase was more confidence about the Australian economy’s performance over the next year.

The renewed spike in petrol prices is flowing through to Inflation Expectations. ANZ-Roy Morgan Inflation Expectations increased 0.3% to 6.1%.

This means Australians expect annual inflation of 6.1% in each of the next two years. Inflation Expectations have now increased six times in the last seven weeks.

Roy Morgan has released the latest quarterly news readership results for the 12 months to June 2026.

The most widely read categories of News are General News with a weekly reach of 19 million reaching over 80% of the population.

In a clear second is Property read by 10.5 million weekly and reaching 45% of the population ahead of Sport, read by over 7 million and reaching over 30% of the population.

The latest Roy Morgan Australian Readership Report shows 62.2% of Australians read magazines in print or online via the web or an app – the ‘cross-platform audience’. (over 14.5 million Australians aged 14+)

And nearly three quarters of this total cross-platform audience, over 10.9 million people, read magazines in their printed form

Paid Magazines with the largest cross-platform audience are Better Homes and Gardens and Woman’s Day – both reaching an audience of over 2.1 million, New Idea and The Australian Women’s Weekly – both reaching over 1.6 million, and Take 5 (Weekly), TV Week, Take 5 Bumper Monthly, National Geographic – all with audiences of well over 1 million.

Just looking at the print magazines – several large categories are read by millions of Australians.

Now 6.3 million read Food & Entertainment Magazines in print.

Almost 4 million read Home & Garden Magazines and General Interest Magazines.

Over 2.3 million read Mass Women’s Magazines.

And Business, Financial & Airline Magazines, Health & Family Magazines, and Motoring Magazines are read by over 1 million.

Finally today Roy Morgan released the latest quarterly survey results on Australia’s most trusted and distrusted brands for the year to June 2026 – and for the eleventh time – Bunnings is Australia’s most trusted brand.

Bunnings is followed by ALDI, Kmart, the Commonwealth Bank, and Apple in the top five places – all unchanged.

The improvers in the latest quarter were Toyota, up two spots to sixth, NRMA, up two places to 12^th, ING, up four places to 15^th, and Officeworks, up two spots to 16^th.

And for a second straight quarter, Optus is Australia’s most distrusted brand following the fatal Triple Zero outage.

In second is Facebook/Meta, and Temu is in third.

Some of the large sliders in the latest results were tech and AI and companies including Google, deteriorating one spot to 14^th most distrusted, Open AI/ChatGPT, down three places to 16^th, and Palantir, down 15 spots to 30^th.

Resource companies also faced rising distrust with BP, Shell, Caltex/Ampol, and Hancock Prospecting all sliding in the rankings.

For more detail on the key changes in Australia’s most trusted and distrusted brands, watch the latest in-depth webinar on the results.