The Score

Explainer

York Park Group is a public strategy firm that specialises in reputation management, advocacy and issues management and crisis communications. To be effective, we seek to understand not only the saliency of our client matters, but the broader environment within which they are seeking to influence.

Reputation management and advocacy in Australia is increasingly complex, with an evolving media landscape, a fast changing and fragmented policy environment, and increasing geopolitical challenges.

There is a never-ending stream of publicly available economic, social and political measures and insights, and the York Park Group PulseCheck brings together high quality, national data to provide a single reference point of the broader environment in which our clients seek to build and manage their reputation and advocate for policy outcomes.

Positivity Returns - Q3 2025 Analysis

Australians are feeling more confident this quarter, with a Pulse of +4, up from -1 in Q2 2025. This positivity is being mirrored at a corporate level, with greater business confidence and associated investment. The rising confidence and conditions are reflective of two remarkable statistics: purchasing costs growing at their slowest rate since 2021, and consumer sentiment at the highest level since February 2022.

With the Rockliff Government re-elected in Tasmania in July, the remaining period of the quarter saw political stability for the first time in 2025, with no elections or ongoing campaigns. The Albanese Government returned to Parliament in July, remaining relatively calm except for the announcement of the 2035 Emissions Reduction Target and the Triple Zero outage at the end of the quarter.

In linking politics, sentiment and business conditions, Q3 2025 highlights that Australians like their politics to be calm, interest rates to be on the decline, and inflation low.

Looking Ahead to Q4

Unemployment rose to 4.5 per cent in September from 4.3 per cent in August, reaching a four-year high, although still low historically. The Pulse for Q4 will see the impact of the Triple Zero outage as well the Prime Minister’s international trips, the geopolitical situation in the Middle East, and the trade relationship between China and the US.

We may also see how consumers are thinking and feeling in the lead up to Christmas and how confident they are to spend their money. Looking back at other recent periods of geopolitical instability, there may be impacts on business confidence and voter/consumer sentiment, but those changes don’t always correlate to business conditions (e.g. the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022).

The world may make us feel objectively concerned, but business decisions and their impact remain subjective.

Q4 2025 Considerations - Looking Ahead

Messaging: Does our organisation’s message match the generally positive mindset, or are we working against public opinion?

Advocacy: There are no elections in Australia until March 2026 (South Australia). Where will political pressure come from?

Reputation: How does our organisation or our sector stay relevant in the current economic/social/political environment? Do we understand if and how our issues are relevant to our audience’s mindset?

History: 2019 to 2025

The graph below, tracking The Pulse over time, clearly illustrates that the last five years has been a period of extreme volatility. As volatility becomes the new normal, the PulseCheck indicators are more consistent, staying within -10 to +10 boundaries.

PulseCheck Methodology

We wanted PulseCheck to be an objective and subjective measurement. In developing the methodology, we considered:

• How do voters in the community feel generally against their actions?
• What are business perceptions against the decisions they make?
• How to answer these questions with data that already exists?

The Pulse is measured on a scale between -50 and +50, with 0 set as a neutral score, indicating that, socially, economically and politically, Australia is neither positive nor negative. The majority of the data sets used date back to 2019. This provides important context of where we are sitting compared to the black swan event of the pandemic.

For context, a record low -47.8 was recorded in April 2020, when business conditions and confidence were at -50 and -34 respectively as the scale of the pandemic became clear. Conversely, and coincidently exactly a year later, a record high of +30.4 is recorded, when the vaccine rollout was in full swing, with record high consumer sentiment and positive business confidence and conditions of 21 and 32 respectively.

Formula

The Pulse is formulated as a weighted sum of normalised scores assigned to each indicator. Data scientists at Klara have created linear spline functions – line segments joined at specified points – to normalise the indicators.

For each indicator, a total of 11 scores between -50 and 50 have been assigned to a representative sample of indicator’s values. The result is an adaptable but consistent and objective methodology that normalises the various indicators into a unified scale.

Once normalised, each indicator is given a weighting that determines the relative influence of the indicators on the overall Pulse score. The weightings were selected to achieve a balance between more objective measures that reflect actual spending or economic conditions (e.g. ABS data and NAB business conditions) and more subjective measures that reflect consumer sentiment, business confidence, and political satisfaction. The weightings for each source are set out below.

Consistent Updates

Together, York Park Group and Klara have built PulseCheck to capture changes in Australia’s economic, social and political climate.

PulseCheck offers a data-driven lens through which organisations can proactively manage their reputation in a dynamic and often unpredictable environment. As new sources emerge, PulseCheck will continue to refine its approach – remaining a reliable, transparent, and relevant guide for decision-making in an increasingly complex world.