Category: Public opinion

Support for tax cuts still low

~ Andrew Norton ~ 18 Comments

Some of the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2009 results are now in the Australian Social Science Data Archive, so we can start looking at some trend data.

I’m sorry to report that support for cutting taxes compared to more spending on social services may have hit an all-time low in the history of Australian opinion polling. Though the precise question varies over time, we have similarly worded questions going back to the late 1960s. In 1967 and 1969, 26% of respondents wanted tax cuts. In 2009, it was just below that on 25% (though the lack of an explicit ‘depends’ option in the 1960s means that there were ‘soft’ supporters of both taxing and spending in their totals). The three most recent surveys are in the figure below.


Continue reading “Support for tax cuts still low” →

Gillard and women

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

Contrary to previous gender politics theories, there was no clear evidence that Tony Abbott coming to the Liberal leadership disproportionately affected the way women saw their political choices.

But if women were not put off by Tony Abbott, will they be particularly attracted to Julia Gillard? Some of the media vox pops of the last couple of days suggest that they might.

The Nielsen poll demographic figures provided at Pollytics blog (here and here) let us start seeing if this will be the case. Like Scott Steel at Pollytics I think we should take these initial polls with some caution, given the general excitement of the last few days. The swooning media will soon return to the gotcha game of trying to catch politicians out. But these polls are the best we have to date.

On preferred PM, there has been a general shift to the Labor leader since Nielsen’s 3-5 June poll (though this was probably a rogue poll in understating Labor support). However women have moved more than men to the Labor leader, up 9% compared to 4% for men. Continue reading “Gillard and women” →

Do Australians know how many migrants we take?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

Pollytics blog points out Essential Research polling showing that most Australians haven’t a clue what proportion of overall immigration is made up of boat arrivals:

From what you have read and heard, what percentage of Australia’s annual immigration intake are asylum seekers arriving by boat?

The correct answer for last year is less than 1%, and maybe 3% this year.

Pollytics thinks this is because most people have no idea how few asylum seekers there are. But could it be because they have no idea how big the official migration program became under Howard and then Rudd? Continue reading “Do Australians know how many migrants we take?” →

Climate change hypocrites make ETS backdown sensible politics

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

The 2010 Lowy Poll allows us to update some of our analysis of the politics of climate change (Pollytics blog has a helpful summary of the climate change questions).

Since the 2009 Lowy Poll conducted in July last year and the 2010 survey in March, climate change scepticism has stabilised, with those believing it is a serious problem requiring taking steps now consistently in the 45-50% range, and the hardcore sceptics at around 13%. Given the publicity given to the ‘Climategate’ story and the changed signals to Coalition partisans since July 2009 that is a good result for those who have been pressing on us the need for urgent action.

However the medium-term failure of the climate change campaign since 2008 is highlighted by this figure from the Lowy report on willingness to pay higher electricity bills: Continue reading “Climate change hypocrites make ETS backdown sensible politics” →

Is the IPA’s climate change poll plausible?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

In a Club Troppo comment, online pollster Graham Young questions recent IPA polling on climate change:

From my research it is certainly true that there has been a decline in support in Australia for the proposition that manmade climate change will be catastrophic. And when you ask questions designed to find how high a priority it is, you find Australians aren’t prepared to pay or do much to avoid it. But the IPA poll has a much larger collapse than I would have thought possible.

I’ve tried to compare the IPA’s 2010 results with the Lowy Poll’s 2008 results on how much extra people are prepared to pay to combat climate change. I had to convert Lowy’s monthly question to match the IPA’s annual question, and so the categories are not an exact match. But as you can see in the table below, particularly by comparing the cumulative totals, the overall patterns are quite similar.

The main difference is that the IPA found significantly more people willing to pay nothing at all. But if we add together the people willing to pay nothing with those only willing to pay a trivial amount we have a consistent just under half of the population who oppose all but the most trivial climate change measures. Continue reading “Is the IPA’s climate change poll plausible?” →

Mixed views on mining taxes

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

I had thought that the proposed resource super profits tax might be a political winner for the government, in a soak the rich sort of way. But this morning’s Nielsen poll reported in the Fairfax broadsheets suggested rather lukewarm support:

In a question which asked ‘Do you support or oppose a tax on the ‘super profits’ of mining companies?’, 47% were against and 44% were in favour. In this poll support for the ‘big new tax’ on shareholders in mining companies remains 14 percentage points behind support for the ‘big new new tax’ on people without dependent children and higher-income earners, aka the ETS. As is often the case, closely linking a tax to something the public supports helps it politically.

However Essential Research found another 8% of the electorate in favour of ‘higher taxes on the profits of large mining companies’, 52% approve, 34% disapprove, with a question that seems less framed to get a positive response than Nielsen’s (without the implication that there is something unfair about ‘super profits’). Perhaps a preceding statement about the Henry review gave the proposal some added credibility.

Political labels to love and hate

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

The Pew Research Centre has conducted a survey on what the American public thinks of various labels.

37% negative reaction to the term ‘capitalism’ seems rather high for the US, even allowing for the current down in the US economy. But we should not forget the number one empirical finding of global public opinion research, that the public knows very little about politics: Continue reading “Political labels to love and hate” →

GST tax and spend

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

On the day the ABS’s annual taxation statistics showed a rare drop in annual average tax paid, Essential Research released a survey which found that 61% of us think that Australians pay too much tax, while only 4% say we pay too little tax.

Tax surveys have a history of being sensitive to the question asked. Another question in this Essential Research survey asked if the respondents were prepared to pay more GST for a series of specific programs. The answers to this question contradicted the answers to the first.

On all five items suggested more than 4% impliedly said we paid too little tax, given that 42% would pay more GST if the money was spent on health and hospitals, 38% said yes to aged pensions, 28% to infrastructure such as roads and railways, 20% to paying off the national debt, and 11% to create a foreign investment fund. And so much for the idea that the GST is to fund the states, too. Continue reading “GST tax and spend” →

Migration opinion turns

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

As recently as last month, a Morgan Poll found that the majority public support for migration that began in 1998 had been maintained. As I noted at the time, this was a little surprising given other polls were identifying concern about the consequences of population growth.

Now the latest Nielsen poll reported in the Fairfax broadsheets finds that finally the polls have turned on support for the migration program, with 54% saying that the number of migrants coming to Australia is too high. 38% say that the number is about right, while 6% say it is too low.

Vertical federal competition

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

The latest Newspoll survey on federalism sponsored by Griffith University has another small piece of evidence that the Pincus position – the idea that Australian federalism works principally through vertical interaction and competition between the Commonwealth and the states rather than horizontal competition between the states – may have popular support.

A question on features of federalism (there are several in the survey, but the answers to most have not been released) asked whether ‘different levels of government being able to collaborate on solutions to problems’ was desirable, and more than 90% said yes. While respondents may have had in mind better bureaucratic coordination, like the two houses in a bicameral system two levels of government in a federal system may offer different perspectives, interests, experiences and abilities.

The current situation in which Victoria, with extensive experience of a case-mix system of hospital funding, is putting an alternative to Kevin Rudd’s hospital funding plan into the national debate is a good example of how the policy competition that is supposed to be a feature of horizontal competition between states can also work vertically. Continue reading “Vertical federal competition” →