Are we in a Rudd political bubble?

April 7, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 28 Comments

Ruddmania may have worn off for RAAF flight crew, but not it seems for the Australian public. Last week’s Nielsen poll showed approval for Kevin Rudd’s performance as PM at 74%, only one percentage point behind Bob Hawke at his peak. Newspoll’s respondents, reported in today’s Australian, are not quite so effusive, but at 68% satisfaction this is still higher than any other PM has received in the 22 years Newspoll has been asking the question.

Newspoll’s survey of leadership characteristics finds that he has the highest ever ratings (since 1992, when the question began) on the characteristic of ‘likeable’, higher even than Kim Beazley, who really was likeable. He’s off his peak for trustworthy, but it was 10 percentage points higher than anyone else had ever received (also since 1992). Though off his peak as well for cares for people, he is still very high on that, though not as high as obvious softy Kim Beazley.

I don’t think it is just my own political biases that prevent me from seeing what so many voters are seeing. He has none of Hawke’s charisma, none of Keating’s style and wit, none (OK, little) of Howard’s Australian everyman persona. He is our first nerd Prime Minister. I’ve got nothing against nerds. I am one. But I’m amazed that 74% of the Australian public approve of a man who must remind them of the annoying kid in grade 4 who answered all the teacher’s questions.
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The unpopularity of war

March 31, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

With a new US strategy on Afghanistan set to be announced and a rising Australian death toll, three pollsters recently surveyed opinion on Australia’s troop deployment. Their results were consistently against expanding our troop commitment, and showed that about half of their respondents did not want our troops there at all.

ACNielsen found 51% of voters against the deployment, and two-thirds against sending more troops, with 30% in favour. Essential Media found 50% in favour of withdrawing and only 14% in favour of sending more troops. Newspoll also found two-thirds of its respondents against sending more troops and 28% in favour. The only real difference is opinon on sending more – this is probably a question effect, with Essential Media having an option of keeping the same number.

While these are negative results for the Afghanistan commitment, there is little evidence that recent Australian deaths have hardened opinion. A Lowy Institute poll last year found 56% against Australia’s military involvement in Afghanistan, up from 46% in 2007. And these figures are not radically different from those recorded on Iraq – for example in 2005 a small majority opposed Australia’s continuing involvement in Iraq.

Generally, it is a good thing that the Australian public is reluctant to support war. But these figures do also give weight to the concerns of conservative pessimists that Western publics have the lost the will to fight for anything, and not just wars without (perhaps) sufficiently clear links to immediate security. If these wars are unpopular with minimal casualties, how unpopular would they be with a large number of deaths?

The economy and elections

March 24, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

Commenter Krystian asks:

Do government get tossed out because of difficult economic times, or more because of their own incompetence plus the presence of difficult economic times?

Andrew Leigh has asked himself exactly that question, and come to the (data-laden) conclusion that unemployment does affect election results but ‘luck’ – global or national economic conditions – counts for more than ‘competence’, how well a jurisdiction is doing relative to the gobal or national economy.

He puts this down to

something psychologists call ‘the fundamental attribution error’, which is the fact that humans aren’t very good at separating situational factors from ability when making assessments.

But it seems voters used to believe that governments have more influence over the economy than they do now. The Australian Election Survey has a question about what effect respondents think the government will have on the economy twelve months from now. The first couple of times the question was asked, in 1987 and 1990, about 60% of respondents thought that the government could have either a good or a bad effect.
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Evidence and economic reform

March 12, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 44 Comments

An article in the latest issue of federal Treasury’s Economic Roundup publication argues for the importance of evidence in ‘creating a broad base of community support for reform’. The authors, Joann Wilkie and Angelia Grant, use the economic reforms since 1983 as their case study.

I’ve no doubt that evidence and analysis was important in shaping elite views on economic reform. I’m not sure, however, that they make a convincing case on public support for the reform process. The main reason for saying this is that the polling we have suggests that the public opposed most of the specific economic reforms, with mixed survey results on their attitudes towards the whole reform process.

The problem is evident in contradictions within the article. The authors say that influential experts and commentators were important in ‘convincing the public to support tariff reform’. But their own data a couple of pages on clearly shows that most people continue to support tariffs. Wilkie and Grant note, as I did in a 2004 article, that polling does show understanding of the argument that free trade benefits consumers. However, on my analysis concern about jobs is the over-riding consideration.

Similarly, privatisation almost always polls poorly, and while there were some mixed results in early industrial relations polling, opinion was strongly against WorkChoices.
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The long-term politics of budget deficits

February 17, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 22 Comments

As a childless person on an above-average income – ie, the principal victim class of the tax-welfare system – I am pleased with the Coalition’s stance on massive budget deficits. I’ll be paying for it in the long run (and consistent with the permanent income hypothesis, I am increasing my savings to maintain stable long-term living standards).

But personal interests aside, I am interested in the long-term politics of this. The most detailed polling on this to date (pdf), though based on an online panel, finds majority public support for the government: 51% supporting Rudd’s approach, 33% Turnbull’s, and 16% undecided.

However, the latest package of handouts hasn’t changed confidence in Australia’s capacity to withstand the GFC, which has been hovering around 60% since October last year. Nor has it changed approval of the government’s performance since November last year. (The Opposition’s disapproval has substantively increased, from 35% to 44%).

The Pollytics blog is convinced that this is a disaster for the Coalition. Maybe. But less that twelve months ago the public was also buying the then media-macroeconomic wisdom that we needed a contractionary fiscal policy, of which the Coalition was sensibly (even more so in retrospect) sceptical.

The medium term politics depend on how Australia’s performance in the GFC is judged, and what effect is attributed to the handouts. The longer-term politics depend on attitudes to public debt and tax. If my theories are right, the underlying tax and spend public opinion dynamic should be turning back towards lower taxes. The Coalition’s current stance, along with their historic advantages as the more-favoured party on tax, could help them take advantage of any swing back towards preferring lower tax.

The resilience of party stereotypes

February 12, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

The Newspoll results reported in this morning’s Australian show the Coalition’s lead over Labor as the party which would best handle the economy has been reduced to a statistically insignificant 1%.

While the paper’s article on the poll rightly sees this as bad news for the Liberals, putting it in the context of other questions asked in the same poll it shows that there is some resilience in party stereotypes when questions are framed broadly.

When Newspoll’s respondents were asked whether the federal government was doing a good job handling the current economic crisis, 63% said yes. Even 31% of Coalition voters agreed. 57% thought that the stimulus would be good for the economy, with again 31% of Coalition voters agreeing. 48% of respondents thought they would be better off over the next 12 months due to the package. When asked whether the Coalition would do a better or worse job handling the crisis, more thought worse (39%) than better (33%). Only 28% of Newspoll’s respondents believed the Coalition would deliver a better stimulus package.

But though the Coalition is clearly well behind on the major economic issue of the day, on the more abstract question of who would better handle the economy they remain fractionally ahead, showing the reserve of credibility on this issue they have built up over many years.

(It would be interesting to know the question order in this survey; this result would be more interesting if this question was asked after rather than before the specific questions.)

All talk and little action on greenpower

November 29, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

We know from previous polling that people are reluctant to pay the increased energy prices that will be required under the ETS.

Yesterday the ABS put out some survey results that let us do a revealed preference test on willingness to pay more for greenpower electricity.

In March this year, just under a third of people indicated that they were willing to pay more. But another question on how many are actually paying more came up with a much lower result – 5%. Talk is cheap, greenpower is expensive.

The question about willingness to pay has been asked four times: in 1999, 2002, 2005, and 2008. In the first three surveys willingness to pay was stable on around a quarter of respondents. So the third recorded in 2008 is a clear change.

Yet given the saturation media coverage of climate change issues – I set myself an even bigger task than I realised in going through the results of a daily Google news search for my monitoring of alarmist, denialist and NIMBY stories – it is a clear but small change. There is a major gap between what is required to reduce carbon emissions and what Australians are prepared to do themselves to achieve that reduction.

A good rule-of-thumb on deficits

November 24, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

Earlier in the year, there were signs that the general public had picked up the then orthodoxy that what we needed was a contractionary fiscal policy, to the point of not wanting their tax cuts in cash (there was support for diverting them to superannuation).

But it seems that the flipside orthodoxy – that we need deficits in the downside of the economic cycle – has not (or not yet) entrenched itself. A Newspoll published today found that 56% of voters would be concerned about the budget going into deficit next year.

As Club Troppo readers would have predicted, Fred Argy isn’t impressed.

Regardless of the purely economic arguments on this subject (few economists think that temporary deficits are of major concern), I think this is quite a good result. On the assumption that few voters will ever acquire sophisticated economic knowledge or understanding, and that they will use rules-of-thumb instead, an anti-deficit rule of thumb is the one to have.

In other countries with weaker anti-deficit cultures, borrowing is used to finance normal recurrent expenditures and avoid budgetary discipline. Australia is in a much better long-term position than most other countries for having taken its anti-deficit attitudes beyond what economic theory would recommend.

The economy rises as an issue

November 22, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

A Newspoll earlier in the month suggested that the issue cycle may have started to turn, with the economy up and the environment down. Now a very differently structured poll from Roy Morgan Research finds the same pattern.

The Newspoll gives respondents a set list of issues, all of which can be rated as important. The Morgan poll asks respondents to say, without prompting, which problem they believe is the most important one facing Australia today. The answers are then coded by the pollster.

Morgan finds that the proportion of people nominating the economy has increased from 23% to 30% in the last six months, and more than doubled since 2005. The environment is down 5% to 25% in the last six months, but still massively above its 2006 low point of 8%.

The big losers as problems since 2005 are terrorism (down from 19% to a *) and since 2006 various issues that preoccupy the middle-class soft left, presumably reflecting the demise of the Howard government.

While health and education continue to rate strongly in Newspoll, health doesn’t rate at all in the Morgan survey and education is only on 2%. This is consistent with my view that though voters want better health and education services, they are not likely to be the top priority when economic hard times hit.