Category: Public opinion

Is opinion turning back against tax and spend?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

Regular readers will know that I have a distinctive explanation of why public opinion has shifted since the mid-1990s to favour more taxing and spending. Most researchers in this field think it is an ideological shift towards government services, while I argue that it is linked to household finances. Under my theory, when economic times are good people tend towards spending more on everything, including those services they pay for via taxation. When economic times are not so good, people want to protect their household budgets, and opinion tends towards preferring lower taxation.*

According to my theory, in a mild recession we should be starting to see a shift in opinion back towards lower tax. One indicator of perceptions of household finances I used in my original research, Roy Morgan’s consumer confidence poll, shows that while confidence is rising again it is still well below its 2007 levels, when pro-tax opinion was high.

An Essential Research poll published on Pollytics blog earlier this week on whether tax increases to fund more spending have support appears consistent with that theory. Continue reading “Is opinion turning back against tax and spend?” →

Inevitable gay marriage?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 25 Comments

The latest gay marriage public opinion survey confirms earlier research that this issue is now on a near-inevitable path. There are large majorities of younger voters in favour: 74% of 16-24 year olds, 71% of 25-34 year olds, and 68% of 35-49 year olds. Only the 50+ age group are opposed, by a small plurality: 49% against to 45% in favour.

This opinon has arisen with surprisingly little debate compared to other countries, suggesting that is evolving out of general changed views on homosexuality rather than issue-specific campaigning. The downside of this is that there isn’t much pressure on the government to actually alter the law. Rudd’s personal conservatism is probably an obstacle to the law changing, and so it is not likely to occur without significant pressure.

What does the public think prisons are for?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

The Australian Institute of Criminology has a new report out on public perceptions of crime levels and the performance of courts, prisons and police.

One curious result in the AIC survey is that while there is strong majority support for tougher sentencing (though it has trended down since the 1980s), most people say that they have ‘not very much confidence’ or no confidence in the prison system as a way of rehabilitating prisoners, of punishing them, of deterring future offending, or of teaching skills to prisoners. So perhaps the only thing prisons do effectively is keep habitual offenders off the streets for a while.

Except for protecting defendants’ rights, there is not much confidence in the court system either. Only the barest majority (51.5%) agrees with the proposition that the courts ‘deal with matters fairly’, and certainly not promptly, with only 22% of people believing that the courts deal with matters quickly. I wonder if this has implications for the bill/charter of rights debate. It’s not just that the public might not believe that the courts would do a good job in balancing rights. It’s that the courts could do without further possible causes of diminished public standing.

What will stop Liberal demographic decline?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

Recently commenter Robert asked about my views on Scott Steel’s demographic political analysis. Using 2007 polling data, Steel finds what several others – including me, Andrew Leigh, and Ian Watson – have found before: that the Coalition relies heavily on older voters.

While I agree with the broad thrust of Steel’s analysis, I have a slightly different way of looking at it. The 2007 polling results he reports are for me the combination of three different dynamics – long-term trends in party identification, medium-term trends in the issue cycle which affect what those with weak or no party affiliation want out of the political system (which I have discussed before), and shorter-term factors that may affect particular polls and elections but don’t necessarily in themselves affect long-term perceptions of parties (for examples, pick any newspaper from any day at random).

On party ID, as can be seen below the trends are very much against the Coalition, making elections increasingly difficult to win because base support is too low. On the other hand, the arguments that the Greens would emerge as the new third party don’t seem likely either. Even in the most indoctrinated and fashion-prone age group, the 18-30s, the Coalition has nearly three times the base support of the Greens. Labor’s security as the natural party of government comes not from an increase in its base, which apart from the Labor-leaning forty-somethings is consistent across age groups, but from its two major rivals hating each other more than they hate Labor.

partyidage
Question: ‘Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as Liberal, Labor, National, or what?’, in the Australian Election Survey 2007 n=1,711
Continue reading “What will stop Liberal demographic decline?” →

No bribes needed to support the budget

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

Like last year, Australian voters have shown that they don’t need to be bribed to approve of budgets.

The Nielsen poll, like other polls, found between one in four and one in five voters thought that they would personally be better off as a result of the budget (there are a lot of pensioners). But heading on to three times than number thought that it was fair (56%) or said that they were satisfied with it (58%).

The Newspoll reported in The Australian found that twice as many voters thought that it would be good for the economy (45%) as thought it would be good for them personally (22%).

Whatever its merits as an economic document, the Budget was well handled politically by the government. The manipulation of expectations I noted last week in higher education was successful across portfolios. The Essential Research before-and-after question shows that good reactions exceeded forecast good reactions, and actual negative reactions were lower than anticipated negative reactions.

The only problems for the government are a narrow majority (56%) against lifting the retirement age in the Neilsen poll, and in the Newspoll only 30% of respondents believing that the budget will be back in surplus in six years. Not even Labor voters (49%) believe the government on this one.

Public divided on tax and spend

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

The first of the Budget tax and spend polls have been released, but it is hard to get a clear reading on whether the long-term trend towards support for more taxing and spending is easing or reversing.

In a Newspoll published in The Australian, the public is almost equally divided between saying scheduled tax cuts should go ahead (44%) or cancelled to reduce the deficit (47%). The 44% saying go ahead is slightly below the 49% who nearly 12 months ago wanted last year’s tax cuts to go ahead, but the trade-off posed has changed completely: last year the stated risk was higher inflation and interest rates (it seems so long ago…), this year the risk is making the budget deficit even larger. In both cases, however, just under half wanted tax cuts despite a risk of negative consequences later on.

As reported at Pollytics blog, the Essential Report survey found that, when given a choice between reducing the deficit and increasing taxes on high income earners and decreasing spending, 49% went for higher taxes and 42% for less spending.

If we assume that higher taxes and cancelling tax cuts are much the same thing, it seems like pro-tax views are still favoured by more people than the lower-tax perspective. However, the role of deficits in structuring opinion makes it hard to see where the underlying trend is going; it is possible that the deficit may induce support for tax that would not be there in better fiscal circumstances, just at it was possible that the previous large surpluses induced support for more spending that would not have been there if higher taxes were needed to pay for it.

Does Turnbull’s strategy make sense?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

Scott Steel at Pollytics blog does lots of good work crunching the pollsters’ numbers, and there is another interesting post today on the relationship between PM and Opposition Leader satisfaction and support for their respective parties. It’s worth reading in full, but the key findings include:

* the PM’s satisfaction rating has a much stronger relationship to the PM’s vote than does the Leader of the Oppositions satisfaction rating to their primary vote;
* PM satisfaction historically explains just over 50% of the variation of the Opposition’s primary vote – as the PM gains higher levels of satisfaction, the Oppositions primary vote starts dropping;
* the satisfaction rating of the Opposition [leader] has a pretty weak relationship to the government primary vote, explaining only 8% of the variation in the last 23 years worth of data.

On polling history,

Turnbull – like nearly all Opposition Leaders before him – is effectively a slave to the Prime Ministers own personal standing with the electorate.

This analysis seems right to me. But I am not at all sure that his conclusion about Turnbull’s leadership is the right one:
Continue reading “Does Turnbull’s strategy make sense?” →

Views on refugee totals, by boat or plane

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

It’s not quite the question on refugees as such that I was looking for, but if I had not been behind in Pollytics blog reading I would have seen this post reporting an Essential Research poll last year on the size of the refugee program. The table below, taken from Pollytics, shows that a small majority in late July and early August 2008 were opposed to the program at its current size.

refugeenumbers

The same poll found that 62% of respondents thought that previous tough policies on asylum seekers were about right or not tough enough.

Overall, it does look like voters have issues with the refugee program as such, though some of those who are happy with the size of the program seem also to favour tough action against self-selecting refugees.

Unclear public opinion on refugees

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

There is a difficult-to-interpret Newspoll on asylum seekers in this morning’s Australian.

If we are to believe earlier polling, the public wants the government to take a firm line on boat arrivals and illegal migration. Yet according to this Newspoll, only 36% believe that applying tighter immigration laws to asylum seekers attempting to enter Australia would make a difference to their numbers.

With the public almost evenly divided between the government doing a good job managing the asylum seeker issue (37%) and a bad job (40%) this gives neither government nor opposition a clear idea of what the public believes should be done.

With refugee advocates dusting off their rhetoric about the ‘demonising’ of refugees, it’s a pity Newspoll did not fill the big gap in our knowledge: no pollster I am aware of has ever asked what the Australian public thinks of refugee migrants as such, rather than their methods of arrival.

At one level, this is not surprising. The annual number of refugee/humanitarian migrants each year has never attracted much controversy, and has been fairly stable over a prolonged period. All the debate surrounding this issue has just been over whether they self-select or not.

But in understanding public opinion, it is important to know whether voters are concerned about the refugees themselves, in which case the whole refugee/huminatarian program is an issue, or just the method of selection. The racists-under-the-bed left assume it is the former. That’s possible, but hard to fully reconcile with other evidence. For example, support for keeping Muslims out of the country is much lower than previously recorded support for a tough line on boat arrivals.

Capital xenophobes

~ Andrew Norton ~ 30 Comments

Two polls this week confirm that Australians take a largely negative view of foreign direct investment. On Monday, an Essential Media poll reported that only 25% of respondents agreed with the proposition that Chinese investment in mining companies should be welcomed because it helps our economy and provides jobs. Yesterday’s Newspoll, as reported in The Australian, found a small majority against any foreign company being allowed to acquire shares in Australian mineral companies.

As Tom Switzer’s recent paper on attitudes to foreign investment showed, there is nothing new in these attitudes. There also seems to be a particularly xenophobic flavour to some opposition. The Lowy Institute found stronger opposition to investment from Asian countries than from the UK or US.

While there are some political concerns in this as well as ethnic – state-owned companies raise slightly different issues to privately owned companies, particularly when the state involved is not democratic – ethnic or cultural factors do seem to influence attitudes. Japanese investment is strongly opposed along with that from undemocratic countries such as China.
Continue reading “Capital xenophobes” →