Category: Public opinion

Are people taking economic growth for granted?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 63 Comments

As commenter Richard notes, Oznomics author Andrew Charlton has an op-ed in today’s SMH arguing that:

The most popular misconception in economics and politics is that if the economy is humming along, the government must be doing a good job – it must be a capable economic manager and its policies must be working. … The truth, however, is that politicians have much less control over the economy than they would have us believe.

But what does the public actually believe? Increasingly, it seems, they have become sceptical of claims that the government deserves credit for a strong economy. At each of the last six elections, the Australian Election Survey has asked:

[compared with 12 months ago], what effect do you think they [the government] have had on the general economic situation in Australia as a whole?

At each election, the proportion saying ‘not much difference’ has increased, starting at 39% in 1990 and reaching 57% in 2004. In the same time, Continue reading “Are people taking economic growth for granted?” →

Will the public support conditional welfare?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 30 Comments

Today in The Australian my CIS colleague Peter Saunders comes out in favour of ‘conditional welfare’, in which some welfare payments for parents deemed irresponsible or incompetent are restricted, so that they can only be spent on items the government deems appropriate.

So far as I am aware, this is not an idea that has been directly tested in an opinion poll. But based on answers to other questions we can take an educated guess as to what the public might say if asked.

Most of the people to whom conditional welfare would apply would presumably be on unemployment or single parent benefits, two groups which have not inspired enthusiasm among Australian voters. For example, a 2001 Saulwick poll asked about benefit levels for various beneficiary groups. Majorities supported higher payments for those who could not reasonably expected to work, the aged and disabled. But only 22% wanted more for single parents, and only 17% for the unemployed.

Both groups, perhaps, are seen as vulnerable to the moral hazards of welfare. Continue reading “Will the public support conditional welfare?” →

Does union power still frighten voters #2?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

According to The Australian‘s take on a Newspoll on unions and political parties on Friday:

…the Coalition’s campaign [on union power] is not resonating with middle Australia as 55 per cent of voters rate Mr Rudd’s handling of unions as good and only 27 per cent rate his performance poorly – including 10 per cent of Labor supporters – while 50 per cent say Mr Howard is not doing a good job. …. while the Coalition claims it is on an election winner with its plans to demonise the unions, the Newspoll suggests voters will be more discerning.

This is a different conclusion to the one I came to a couple of weeks ago, when I argued that though improved union behaviour has been rewarded with significantly fewer people thinking that they have too much power, there was life yet in this issue for the Coalition.

I see two problems with the Newspoll. The first, as I noted in several posts about issue polling, stances on issues and party preferences are often closely tied together, so it is hard to know whether a person supports party X because of their stance on issue Y, or holds their opinion on issue Y because of their support for party X. Mentioning the party in the same question as the issue, as Newspoll does in this case, increases the chance that underlying party preference will drive opinions on issues.
Continue reading “Does union power still frighten voters #2?” →

Does gay marriage have majority support?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

To coincide with the release of a HREOC report on anti-gay discrimination, political spammers GetUp! have released a Galaxy poll (pdf) on the rights of same-sex partners.

This is the first time a survey has found majority support for gay marriage, with 57% of respondents agreeing that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. As GetUp!’s media release notes, this is a big increase on the last poll on gay marriage, a 2004 Newspoll that found 38% in favour. Could things have changed that much in two years?

Actually, less than two years. Over 2005 and 2006 there were three surveys on the seemingly less contentious issue of civil unions, with the proportions in favour ranging from 45% to 52%. That gay marriage now comes out ahead of civil unions, without any major intervening debate or publicity, inevitably raises question about whether opinion has really changed or it is something to do with the survey itself.
Continue reading “Does gay marriage have majority support?” →

Do issues explain Labor’s lead?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 33 Comments

Labor’s lead in the polls is persistent and substantial, but the pundits are having trouble explaining why. Clearly Rudd personally is part of it, but his Newspoll lead over Howard as preferred PM (6%) is only half Labor lead’s on the two-party preferred (12%). The issue polling that has come out from ACNielsen and Newspoll this week helps us see what else might be going on.

Newspoll asks which party would best handle 18 issues, so it provides the widest scope for analysis. As The Australian, ever-keen to find a positive angle for the Coalition, noted this morning Labor has made no progress on probably the most discussed issue, industrial relations. I doubt this is a failure on Gillard’s part though – the labour movement has thrown everything they have into this issue for the last two years, and Labor was probably already as high as it could go.

Another traditional Labor strength, ‘health and Medicare’, has also seen only modest gains (I can’t even remember who their health spokesperson is), but it’s still the equal highest rating (45%) since Newspoll started polling this issue in July 1990. The Coalition on 33% is above their all-time low (26%), but it’s not much to show for the tidal wave of cash that it has sent over the health system- real per person spending up nearly 40% between 1995-96 and 2005-06.
Continue reading “Do issues explain Labor’s lead?” →

Do more people feel better off now than when Howard was elected?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 53 Comments

According to an article in this week’s Bulletin, more people (36.5%) feel that they are not better off than before John Howard was elected PM than feel that they are better off (32.6%). The question seems to have been badly worded, with the apparent options being ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘the same’ – the magazine interpreted ‘no’ as ‘worse off’, but without spelling this out clearly some people who think things haven’t changed much could have answered ‘no’.

Even so, only a third thinking they are better off seems low. Income distribution analysis suggests that the benefits of prosperity have been spread through all socio-economic groups. And it’s been a good eleven years for technology-driven improvements: the internet and mobile phones particularly, but also home entertainment. Unemployment is at a 30-year low, and workforce participation at an all-time high.

There are theories that explain why perceptions lag objective statistics on issues like this, particularly when the question asks the respondent whether he or she feels better off. The happiness research has made much of the process of adaptation. When our objective standard of living improves we feel better for a while, but after a while we get used to it. Psychologists such as Danny Gilbert argue that we are not very good at recalling past emotional states. But Gilbert’s theory also suggests that because we can’t remember how we felt, we use theories of how we would have felt instead. Do people’s ‘theories’ of 1996 suggest that things were better then than now?
Continue reading “Do more people feel better off now than when Howard was elected?” →

More pointless mixing of polling issues

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

A Newspoll reported in The Australian today asked another of its ‘does X make you more likely to vote for Y’ questions, and like its Budget version last week really only showed what little value these results have.

In a question about the government’s change to WorkChoices (or whatever it is called these days) to introduce a fairness test for AWAs, 12% said that it was more likely to make them vote for the Coalition and 15% less likely. The people most likely to be aggrieved by this change are small-business owning Liberal voters, but only 2% of Coalition voters said that it made them less likely to vote Liberal or National. By contrast 26% of Labor voters declared themselves less likely to vote for the Coalition. As Labor voters are the group most opposed to WorkChoices this backdown by the government should go some way to easing their concerns, but a quarter of them claim that it has made them even less inclined to vote Coalition.

Given that in net terms Newspoll would have us believe that both the Budget and the WorkChoices have made a Coalition vote less likely, we should be seeing the Liberal primary vote falling even more. Yet according to these same Newspolls, that is not happening. Since mid-April, Liberal primary support in the Newspoll series has been 35%, 37%, 36%, and 39%, the last two polls being conducted after the WorkChoices backdown and the Budget. Genuine vote changers, if any, are so mixed in with poll respondents playing the pollster that we cannot identify them and so the question is pointless.

It would have been far more interesting to directly ask people what they thought of the WorkChoices changes. As it is, we learn nothing at all about attitudes towards fairness tests and nothing about partisan preferences that isn’t more accurately recorded in the question about which party the respondent plans to support.

Did the Budget really make people more inclined to vote Labor?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

Today’s Newspoll on the Budget response included the answers to the question:

Overall, would you say the Budget announcements have made you more likely to: vote for Labor/vote for the Coalition/neither?

Though only 12% of voters had rated the Budget as bad for the economy and just 14% of voters thought that they would be worse off as a result (that question is not in The Australian‘s tables, but you can get it from Newspoll’s website), 26% declared themselves more likely to vote Labor as a result, compared to only 19% of respondents who said that they were more likely to vote for the Coalition.

This does seem counter-intuitive and counter-other results. A Galaxy poll reported the previous day had found only 12% less inclined to vote for the Coalition as a result of the Budget and 16% more inclined. And both polls had the two-party preferred bouncing around in the margin of error (Newspoll putting Labor up, Galaxy down) rather than swinging decisively to Labor, as their 7 percentage point Newspoll-claimed premium won from the Budget would seem to indicate.

The trouble with these questions is that some poll respondents answer them strategically, intending to give the party they support anyway a boost. Unsurprisingly, when we look answers to these questions divided by ‘political support’, only 3% of Coalition voters say that the Budget was more likely to make them vote Labor and only 2% of Labor voters say that it was more likely to make them vote for the Coalition.

Newspoll’s ‘more likely to vote Labor/Coalition’ seems to prompt a partisan choice more than Galaxy’s ‘Has the federal Budget made you more or less inclined to vote for the Coalition’, perhaps because it expressly mentions Labor.

But either way I think the question is of little value, especially when it is asked of respondents who have already expressed a clear preference for one or other of the parties.

Tax and don’t spend

~ Andrew Norton ~ 41 Comments

Last week we had an extensive debate on whether tax cuts would be inflationary or not. Over the weekend Newspoll was finding out how many voters buy this line, and the answer seems to be at least 30%. Though both ACNielsen last week and Newspoll this week find 66% of their respondents want a tax cut, Newspoll followed up with this question:

Some economists believe that giving personal income tax cuts in the budget may lead to a rise in interest rates. Given this possibility, would you personally be in favour or against income tax cuts being given in the federal budget?

At which point support for tax cuts dropped to 36%. It seems that Australian public opinion has moved from tax and spend to tax and don’t spend, which is possibly even worse. Winning obscure macroeconomic disputes may be important to attempts to stall Australia’s ever-expanding state.

Labor and same-sex relationships

~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

At its conference last week, the ALP endorsed national legislation

which [would] allow same-sex couples to register their relationship and secure legal recognition of their relationship in areas such as property rights and superannuation benefits.

As usual, the idea did not please everyone:

The national secretary of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, Joe de Bruyn, said the Tasmanian scheme [on which the policy is modelled] gave same-sex couples the same status as married couples, which would demean and undermine marriage. …

He said the policy would be poorly received in suburban Australia and would make it harder for the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, to win the 16 seats that Labor needed to defeat the Howard Government.

We’ve discussed the rather difficult-to-detect logic of the first claim before, and some newly unembargoed questions from the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2005 enable us to consider the second, at least if we consider it a near-equivalent to civil unions.

The overall result, with 48% of respondents being in favour of civil unions, was consistent with two other polls on the issue, which registered 45% and 52% support. As is common with questions on this subject, there was a big ‘neither agree nor disagree’ response of 19%, suggesting that this is still an open debate for many people. A third are opposed to civil unions.
Continue reading “Labor and same-sex relationships” →