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.

As reported The Age this morning, the Climate Institute has released another of its regular public opinion reports. Climate change continues to be another case study in the difference between repeating the conventional wisdom back to pollsters and taking responsibility for an issue that, if the conventional wisdom is right, has consequences for the lifestyles of us all.

As in earlier research, the level of concern about climate change is very high, at around 90%. 80% want the government to give the issue a high priority.

It’s when we get to the solutions that, as usual, things start to unravel. Three-quarters support laws to ensure all new electricity comes from clean energy sources. 87% support 25% of electricity coming from wind and solar sources by 2020. As wind electricity currently costs twice as much as coal-generated electricity, that is going to add significantly to power bills - especially as a hefty carbon charge on coal is going to be needed to make wind power financially feasible.

But how much extra are people prepared to pay for electricity? Even with their previous answers creating pressure for personal responsibility, and no real cost involved, 28% of respondents said that they were not prepared to pay anything more for clean energy. Another 32% said they were only prepared to pay another $10 a month (or about 10% more if the last ABS expenditure survey is a guide). Only 7% were in the more realistic range of $40 or $50 a month (if we can assume some technological advance and economising in response to higher prices).

Back in the real world of politics, Kevin Rudd was today announcing a scheme to reduce rather than increase energy prices.

As I said last year:

This is the greenhouse ‘denialist’ problem - not a few conservatives arguing that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy, but a public that accepts the theory but rejects the consequences of their beliefs.

It is common in public opinion research for people’s average assessment of their own circumstances to differ considerably from their assessment of the average for others. Usually, they think that their own situation is better than other people’s. One reason for this is that media reports more bad news than good, giving us an ubalanced impression of how well other people are doing.

Data published recently (xls) by the US National Center for Education Statistics, based on Gallup Poll surveys, shows this pattern of opinion in American evaluations of public schools. On a scale of 1 to 4 (4 being the most positive) public school parents almost always rate their local community school at least 0.5 higher than they rate the nation’s schools. They also always rate their local community school more highly than people who don’t have kids at school, and usually rate the nation’s schools slightly more highly than people who don’t have kids at school.

While in the case of issues like public schools the whole sample is politically relevant, I would take the views of parents as being the more reliable assessment of what is going on American public schools. Generally, they give their local school around 2.5 out of a possible 4.
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How does your demographic theory work with the “battlers” phenomenon? Was it merely transitory?

- asks commenter Leon Di Stefano.

I don’t think anyone has quite worked out how to define ‘battler’ in an easily defensible way. Peter Brent wrote a paper (pdf) a few years ago showing that Labor had always held on to its traditional seats in low income areas. But people much further up the income scale may still think of themselves as ‘battling’. Even in the top 20% of income earners, the General Social Survey finds a small percentage of people who have been unable to pay bills on time.

But claims that blue collar workers have swung to the Coalition have been easier to test. In the Australian Election Survey, data collated (pdf) by Murray Goot and Ian Watson shows that the Liberals did do better among blue collar voters 1996-2004 than they did 1987-1993, picking up 5% on average (Labor lost twice that, with blue collar voters going to minor parties as well as the Liberals). But except for 1996 Labor still had more blue collar voters than the Liberals.
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I have long been pessimistic about demographic trends in Liberal support. Last May Ian Watson, using data from both the Australian Election Survey and Newspoll, clearly showed problems for the Liberals in that their support was concentrated in older cohorts.

This week, Watson has updated the Newspoll part of his analysis, which confirms the pattern of results in previous studies. Of course in a year the Coalition was defeated that’s hardly surprising in an analysis based on voting intentions. When general swings are on they usually cut across all age groups. The yet-to-be-released 2007 Australian Election Survey, which by asking also about party identification can get beyond some of the transitory factors affecting election outcomes, will be more interesting.

With this proviso, they key figures in Watson’s analysis look at the voting intentions of people in their 50s. We can see the political effects as the dreaded Whitlam generation comes through, replacing more conservative voters born in the 1930s and 1940s (Watson’s data goes back to the 1987 election). A whole generation of Russells!

Fortunately younger Labor politicians are on average far more sensible than their Whitlam-era equivalents, so the effects on public policy shouldn’t be too serious. But it confirms that elections will be harder for the Coalition to win in the future than they were in the past.

The Australian Workers’ Union commissioned Roy Morgan Research to conduct a poll on the idea that half Labor’s promised tax cuts should be diverted to superannuation.

As in the Galaxy poll of Queenslanders a couple of weeks earlier, a bit over a third of voters wanted the tax cuts in full. In the Galaxy poll, 55% wanted all the tax cuts to be put into superannuation. In the Morgan Poll, 50% wanted the money to be split half each between tax cuts and superannuation.

According to AWU National Secretary Paul Howes:

The poll shows voters are economically literate, and politically sophisticated enough to understand that in the fight against inflation and rising interest rates the option of increased superannuation rather than tax dollars in the pocket is smart stuff.

But should workers really be so keen on establishing the idea that budgetary policy should be used to combat inflation? As RBA Governor Glenn Stevens pointed out in a recent speech:
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Stephen Kirchner draws my attention to a Galaxy/Courier-Mail poll of 800 Queenslanders that:

found 55 per cent of respondents would prefer the proposed tax cuts to be delivered as extra payments to their superannuation fund. This included a majority of Labor and Coalition supporters.

Only 38 per cent of people wanted the money upfront through lower taxes.

That’s a very similar result to a Newspoll last May, in which a supplementary tax & spend question warning respondents that tax cuts would be inflationary saw opinion on tax cuts shift from 66% in favour to 33%, with the proportion against going from 19% to 53%.

The public seems to have paid a suprising amount of attention to the macroeconomic debates over the role of fiscal policy in inflation and interest rate outcomes.

There is, however, an important difference between this week’s Galaxy poll and last year’s Newspoll. As Stephen notes, people could get the tax cuts and voluntarily put the money into super. He suggests that the logic might be as follows:
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If this morning’s Newspoll (pdf) on which party would best handle various issues is right, the Coalition’s policy change to support signing of the Kyoto protocol has seen it drop 10% to 15% as the party that would best handle the environment. That’s their lowest score on the evironment ever. Their decision to drop WorkChoices has seen their rating for industrial relations drop 7% to back where it was when the original WorkChoices was in force.

Their decision to defend the Howard government’s record on the economy has seen them drop 9% as the party that would best handle the economy.

Their unknown policies on a range of other issues have seen similar drops in health (9%), education (8%), water planning (7%), welfare and social issues (7%) and national security (11%).

So whether the opposition agrees with the government, disagrees with the government, or has no policies the results are much the same.
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