On the Sunday programme yesterday (about 6 minutes in), Laurie Oakes asked Ross Garnaut whether it was politically possible to implement the radical reforms needed to reduce carbon emissions.

In his reply Garnaut drew an analogy with trade liberalisation - a reform in which he played a distinguished part during the Hawke government. Public opinion has been consistently protectionist, Garnaut noted, yet politicians successfully implemented Australia’s transition from a highly protected to a largely open economy. They did so without major electoral consequences.

Garnaut argues that, politically speaking, we are starting well ahead of where we were with trade reform, since large majorities accept the need for change. Garnaut acknowledges the difficulties in moving from this generalised support for action to specific measures, but thinks it can be done.

The two issue starting points are, contrary to what Garnaut suggests, quite similar. The basic goal of the economic reform process - essentially to restore Australia’s economic prosperity - was a point of near-consensus, just as the need to do something about climate change is now. It was the means of getting there that generated controversy. Protection was a means, not an end, and we should not compare opinion on that with views on the goal of slowing or stopping climate change. In each reform case, we have a popular aim, but no easy way of getting there.
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This decade has shown the most favourable attitudes towards more government spending since the late 1960s. In a standard question on whether respondents would prefer reduced taxes or more spending on social services, the proportion saying reduced taxes dropped from 57% in 1996 to 34% in 2007. Support for the more spending option increased from 17% support in 1996 to 47% in 2007. (The numbers from 1993 onwards can be seen at p.29 of this compilation of Australian Election Survey results (pdf)).

But why has opinion changed? The Age this morning reports one theory:

Ian McAllister, who has been one of the principal investigators for the ANU study since 1987 and is a professor of political science at the university, says the changing mood reflects greater support for collectivist solutions to social and economic problems.

This is due in some part to a growing cynicism towards privatisation, a view that it has gone too far, or at least far enough…. Then there’s the jump in private school fees and the cost of higher education, and the rise of private health insurance, which almost half the population now has. Juxtapose this with reports of public hospital waiting lists growing and some schools across the country needing major renovations.

Though I am the exception among the handful of public opinion researchers looking at this data, I don’t think this explains what is going on. The AES itself has results which are inconsistent with an ideological shift being a major factor. For this to drive support for more social spending nearly tripling in a decade, we would expect to see a significant leftward shift in the AES question which asks respondents to place themselves on a numbered left (0) to right (10) scale. There is leftward movement, but not by much: from on average 5.46 in 1996 to 5.29 in 2007. The electorate is stable in the political centre, but has substantially changed its opinion on taxing and spending. Read the rest of this entry »

George Megalogenis was in an optimistic mood when he wrote this analysis piece on Newspoll’s carbon emissions trading scheme survey. According to George:

VOTERS want to be led on the issue of climate change, and if leadership means higher prices at the bowser, so be it. …

A strong majority of voters (61 per cent) say a carbon emissions trading scheme could help slow global warming. Almost as many again (56 per cent) are prepared to pay more for energy sources such as petrol, electricity and gas under an ETS.

But another poll, also reported today but in The Age, found that half the population had either never heard of emissions trading or did not know what it was. Only 7% claimed to know a lot about it. This did not, however, stop 72% of voters telling Essential Media Communications (a left-wing PR and polling firm) that they supported a carbon emissions trading scheme.
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The SMH had a report yesterday on the results of the 2007 Australian Election Survey. It comes up with the following unsurprising findings:

■ Industrial relations and global warming were the biggest vote-changing issues.

■ Rising interest rates did not cost the Coalition as dearly as thought.

■ Voters respected Mr Howard but were virtually in love with Mr Rudd, giving him the highest “likeability” rating in the survey’s 20-year history.

■ Low-income battlers moved decisively back to Labor.

■ The Coalition would have struggled under Mr Costello.

But the article doesn’t make use of a useful question in the AES, on which party the respondent voted for in 2004 (with a caveat, of course, on the reliability of 2004 memories). This question can be used to sort the views of people who defected to Labor in 2007 from those who were Labor voters anyway.

When we compare people who switched from Liberal to Labor between 2004 and 2007 with those who remained with the Liberals we can see that the former group was more anti-WorkChoices. Of the 19% of 2004 Liberal voters who voted Labor in 2007, 80% disapproved of WorkChoices. Only 23% of those who stayed with the Liberals disapproved of WorkChoices.
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A small postcript to my post on self-interest and public opinion. All three polls on the Budget - Galaxy yesterday, and ACNielsen and Newspoll today, find very similar proportions of people saying the Budget will make them worse off (33%/30%/32%) or make no difference/uncommitted (44%/39%/39%).

However, ACNielsen finds 61% of people declaring themselves satisfied with the Budget and 57% saying it was ‘fair’. At least some voters who don’t think they will get anything from the Budget or perhaps even think they will be worse off are nevertheless not unhappy with it.

The odd desire of Australian voters to fight inflation with their tax dollars might be coming to an end.

A poll reported this morning in the News Ltd tabloids found, for the first time in recent polling, more for respondents for the tax cuts than against even after they had been alerted to the possible interest rate consequences.

The Galaxy Poll question read:

Do you think the government was right or wrong to introduce tax cuts, given the risk they may pose to inflation and interest rates on home loans?

49% thought it was right, and 31% said it was wrong. Only last week, The Australian reported a Newspoll that found 53% against the tax cut when told that it might increase interest rates.

The poll also asked a budget better off/worse off question. 23% say they will be better off, which is likely to under-state the real figure, and 33% say they will be worse off, which is unlikely unless they are very heavy alocopop drinkers, a luxury car buyer, or a pensioner about to be hit with hefty private health insurance fund premium increases.

There is a pattern of budget benefits being understated and losses overstated. Even with last year’s budget, which so far as I could tell had no losers beyond new commerce students paying higher HECS, Newspoll managed to find 14% of people who thought that they were worse off, and only 36% who thought that they would be better off.

These polls read the politics of the budget more than its reality. But with pensioner protests in the streets, Labor may now start to realise that by relentlessly droning on about ‘working families’ other households may start to feel like losers. Read the rest of this entry »

The previous government was extraordinarily generous to families.  According to calculations I did from Treasury’s Intergenerational Reports, the FTBs alone increased, in per person terms, 29% per person between the 2002 and 2007 reports. And that’s not counting the baby bonus or childcare handouts.

Yet according to the 2007 Australian Election Survey, only 41% of respondents thought that the Howard government had become more generous over the last 10 years to ‘working couples with children’. 23% of Australians, who must have been holidaying on another planet during the Howard era, even thought that they had become ‘tougher’ on these working families.

But in this familist time, is there any end to the demands of ‘working families’? According to the AES, 49.5% of respondents agree that ‘working couples with children’ deserve more or much more from the social welfare system. My answer, that they deserve ‘much less’, is supported by a miserable 0.8% of respondents. Even the answer that they deserve ‘less’ support has only 4.5% support. And I thought I had a tough task selling higher education reform.

But some hope comes from this morning’s Newspoll reported in The Australian. About two-thirds majorities support means testing the baby bonus and FTB B, and 57% support means testing childcare tax rebates. And there is majority support for the testing to begin at $70,000 a year, which if based on household income would start to make some serious savings.

Of course I think these savings should be directed to tax cuts, which would in part benefit those same families. Yet this Newspoll, like other recent polling on the subject, finds that support for tax cuts drops (in this case from 66% to 36%) if respondents are told that tax cuts might cause interest rates to increase. But tax cuts financed from reduced family spending ought to be neutral for interest rates, since the total amount ending up in consumers’ pockets will be the same.

As various opinion pieces have pointed out this week, the Liberals are playing high-stakes politics with their budget strategy.

They are going against the conventional wisdom that spending cuts are necessary to avoid future interest rate increases, and instead saying that there is a danger the economy could slow too much. Intellectually, I think this is a defensible position. The budget is a very clunky mechanism for macroeconomic fine-tuning, with its measures unlikely to have any significant effects for months and hard to change if they prove to be misjudgments.

Politically, however, the argument is too complex and risks further undermining the historic issue strengths of the Liberals.

The recently released results from the 2007 Australian Election Survey (a mail-out survey, which closed in March 2008) shows that while more respondents prefer the Liberals than Labor on interest rates, the margin has narrowed significantly since 2004. The 29 percentage point lead the Liberals had after the 2004 election had shrunk to 6 percentage points after the 2007 election. By not being seen to be strong on the interest rate question this is put further at risk.
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The Rudd government’s decision to block the ACT government’s civil union plans continued to attract criticism this morning, but also a religious defence.

The Australian Election Survey 2007, conducted after last November’s election, provides some further polling evidence on where the public stands on this issue. In a question about whether same-sex marriage should be recognised by law, the public is now evenly divided, with 43.6% in favour and 43.2% against. That’s less than the June 2007 figure of 57% in favour in a GetUp! Galaxy poll, but I thought at the time that this number was suspiciously high and probably due to it being asked directly after a question on various other forms of discrimination against gays. However the AES result is above the 35% in favour in the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes.

The three polls all had different question wording, but there are some consistent patterns of opinion. Men and women are mirror images on this issue; 34% of men are in favour of same-sex marriage and 53% against, while 52% of women are in favour and 35% against. I can’t immediately think of any other issue on which male and female opinion is so different.
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Polling on federalism is pretty rare, but in a new ANU Poll they have replicated a 1979 question that asked:

Do you think the state governments should give some powers to the federal government, or do you think the federal government has enough powers already?

In the last 30 years, the proportion of people thinking that more powers should be given to the feds has more than doubled, from 17% to 40%. Unfortunately, respondents were not asked which powers should be handed over.

On the question of whether the federal government should provide more money to the states, the proportion opposing it increased from 30% to 38%, perhaps because respondents doubt it would be spent competently.

The second question highlights, however, what is wrong with Australian federalism - not so much the formal division of powers, but the states’ reliance on federal funding. Until that is fixed, the system will never work.