Three million Australian voters believe homosexuality is immoral and a lot of them vote for the Liberal Party or the Nationals, new research from Roy Morgan has revealed.
Australians who vote for the Coalition parties as a first preference are around 70% more likely than others to believe homosexuality is immoral.
Australians who believe that homosexuality is immoral outnumbered gay people by almost seven to one, although the research acknowledged it was hard to ascertain a true estimate of Australia's LGBT population.
The Coalition government has spent the week fighting off questions on what exactly its proposed plebiscite on same-sex marriage would look like or achieve.
"The political reality is that the Coalition would find it very difficult to win government without these voters," Roy Morgan Research chief executive Michele Levine said.
Eight of the top 10 electorates where voters are most likely to believe that homosexuality is immoral are held by the Coalition government. The second and third most likely seats to believe homosexuality is immoral are held by Labor.
The electorate of Maranoa in Queensland is the second-safest Coalition seat in the country, and also where the most voters believe it’s wrong to be gay (40%).
In prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's seat of Wentworth, 86% of voters disagreed that homosexuality is immoral.
Similarly, on Sydney's northern beaches in the seat of Warringah, held by former prime minister and same-sex marriage opponent Tony Abbott, most voters (89%) do not think homosexuality is immoral.
The seat where voters are most likely to disagree with the statement is Melbourne, the only Greens-held seat in federal parliament, where 95% of voters don’t think there is anything wrong with homosexuality.
In health minister Sussan Ley's electorate of Farrer, 30% of voters believe homosexuality is immoral, while 28% believe it in treasurer Scott Morrison’s seat of Cook.
