The AC Nielsen poll has the ALP on 54% two party preferred, an increase of 3 points on the last poll, and with a primary vote of 40%. sitting in a highly competitive position.
The polling reported in The SMH this morning also confirms previous polls which show voters prefer spending on services to tax cuts.
Such polls are usually contested on the basis that they might be outliers, and that that voters pick a “virtuous� answer as opposed to wanting to seem as if they place their personal advantage over social benefit. The first may well be so, and we’ll have to wait and see if a trend emerges, but the second is almost certainly wrong.
There has been a secular shift since the 1970s, with surveys taken over time showing a diminished level of support for tax cuts and a greater propensity to demand spending on services. This of course stands to reason, as over the same period the infrastructure of public services has deteriorated, and through measures such as the private health insurance rebate, citizens have been incited to privatise their risks. The particular problem the government has at the moment is that a decrease in consumer confidence, and increases in interest rates along with high petrol prices and importantly the uncertainty created by WorkChoices, add up to the ingredients for a further shift in opinion. It’s easy enough to assume that you’ll be able to look after yourself and your family if your wealth and wages are going up. But with the foundations of that wealth always being very shaky for most citizens, a few more dollars in your pocket after tax doesn’t ensure security. Only investment in the future can do that. A common future where risk is socialised. The short termism of the Coalition’s economic policy has the potential to bite back.
Elsewhere: More commentary from Guy at Polemica, while Andrew Leigh cautions that polls may not be all they seem methodologically.
Update: Andrew Norton has an interesting post over at Catallaxy which takes issue with my interpretation.
three points.
1) to paraphrase Antony Green on Simon Crean’s time as leader, for all Howard’s ‘dominance’ in politics it hasn’t translated into votes via the polls.
Why the disconnect between the commentariat and the polls.
perhaps they simply don’t understand basic statistics.
2)this result is similar to the Libs polling
3) shortly after receiving this polling Howard changed his view on nuclear power ( sounding remarkably like the Iranian president minus anti-Jewish rants)
oops.
Economic elite opinion heavily criticised the budget for making reduced taxes and increased spending on a one-off commodity price boom.
The Super tax change could also be seen as very short-term vision stuff.
perhaps this has permeated down to the punters or even when everyone is a winner people are cheesed off they aren’t as big a winner as their neighbour!!
Trackback. Sooner or later, one of the major parties (let’s face it - probably the ALP) is going to have to throw some caution to the wind and give public services a big boost rather than try to out-tax-cut the government.
With respect to “virtuous” responding, I reckon that may well be over-analysing the figures. I’d love to see the ALP test the waters in this area by offering significantly less tax cuts than the government and significantly more public service funding.
Will it happen? Err, well I’m not sure I would hold my breath, but you never know…
Keating did in 1992. It worked.
No he didn’t.
He matched Hewson’s tax cuts without the pain of the GST ans then increased sales tax by more than Hewson would have imposed with the GST!
Sorry, I stand corrected, BBEP, on the size of the tax cuts - though it’s worth noting that they were to be delivered over a longer time frame. When I said “it worked”, I was referring to the 93 election. The thing was to neutralise Hewson on tax and offer something positive (the programs for infrastructure in “One Nation”).
It’s interesting to note that Megalogenis’ recent book suggests that Keating feels that Dawkins destroyed the party’s chances with the 94 budget. That’s about right.
BBEP, I doubt the nuclear power debate is having much effect one way or the other on voters right now, for the very simple reason that it’s a debate in the abstract.
There’s no legislation currently before a parliament anywhere in Australia about the topic. Nobody has made a serious proposal to build one, or establish an enrichment plant (a very strange comment from Downer which I will get back to on my own blog). Heck, at the moment I don’t think there’s even a uranium miner seeking approval to open a new mine -though that will inevitably happen over the next couple of years given the rise in uranium prices and the burst of exploration.
The debate won’t really fire up (if you pardon the pun) until somebody tries to build a new baseload power plant somewhere in Australia.
One thing that I really don’t understand from the poll data is the claim that voters would prefer petrol tax cuts to other forms of tax cuts. Is that just an artefact of a dumb poll question, or do punters not understand that a dollar of tax is a dollar of tax, whether it’s collected when you buy petrol, buy something else, or it gets taken out of your paycheck?
The commentariat always take a while to catch up with the prevailing mood in the community - this isn’t a new phenomenon.
It is possible that the people have in fact turned on Howard, but that wouldn’t fit with the Howard-as-everyman/political-genius storyline.
On the other hand, there’s always another scare campaign in the bottom drawer come election time.
Robert,
you are missing the point.
Howard is attempting to:
a) change the subject
b) create mischief and mayhem in the ALP over the issue
Mark,
Smoking Joe resigned not long after having delivered that budget. He had no options given Keating’s extravagance.
Repealing the tax cuts was impossible, so was a drastic cutting of expenditure which left the lift in sales tax.
Keating would have known this.
Yes, Keating accepts that he wears the blame too. But there’s no doubt that the perception that people had voted against a GST and got large scale indirect tax rises was damning for the party’s chances.
it was fatal and caused the landslide of 96.
Keating thought he could ride it out and the liberals has no one of substance to lead them.
Even when Howard became leader again he didn’t think people would vote for him given howard’s record and the good economic times.
Fool
If only he’d called an election while Dolly was leader…
Now all they need to to is to ‘BOUNCE’ Beazley and they might have a chance at the next election.
Mark, I’d be interested to know why you think this is wrong. It seems to me to be a perfectly sensible statement about telephone interviewing, for the same reason lots of people describe themselves in the Census as being religious though they don’t observe religious custom or ever attend worship.
…or why people vote left in the states and right in the feds. I’ve actually spoken to two people who voted (I kid you not):
local: Green
state: Labour
federal: Liberal
i.e. “I want MY environment looked after, and want to feel like MY council is looking at the big picture environmentally (local). I want MY kids to have good state schools. I want MY parents to be cared for in old age (state). I want MY country to compete economically (federal)”
How is an opposition supposed to appeal to a voter like that?
Liam: haven’t you got the memo? Greed has been re-labelled “aspiration”, and aspiration is good. Not one of my Lib/Nat voting friends was ever shy of saying that taxes should be cut, or that government was too large and too generous to too many of the undeserving.
sorry bout the syntax there.
Liam - inevitably those making the argument are righties who support lower taxes, and it seems to me there’s a bit of special pleading in there. It may well be that there are some who are in this category, but when you get a poll that’s designed to ask people about something concrete and pose alternatives (ie when you know you’re getting $6 or $10 a week from the budget tax cuts), then you can have more confidence that people aren’t just saying whatever sounds good when questions are posed very generally.
It’s also worth reiterating that *not everyone* has to have the view that things are like this - we just need 4% more of voters to shift then Howard’s gone.
Also, Liam, the religious question in the census is worded in such a way that it produces responses which equate to a vague statement of identity as well as strong religiosity. There are surveys which can and do pin people down more.
Fair enough.
Long ago I used to work on the phones for a market research company and I’m accordingly highly sceptical of most of their social science technique. The scripts we used had some eye-wateringly confusing and leading questions.
It’d be interesting to correlate voting trends with stagnation in the property market - anyone know if this has been done historically?
Liam, it’s also worth remembering that there’s a degree of accountability with surveys - if they’re consistently proved wrong, no one will pay for them.
Andrew Leigh has some cautions about polls in general though:
[link]
If the papers I read and media I listen to and watch are any guide, Tanya P seems to have built up a head of steam around support for childcare and working parents, and is one of the few Labor frontbenchers who is getting press for her criticisms of the Government rather than of other ALP members and ALP policies. Childcare and support for working parents is perhaps the main area where Costello failed to deliver on pre-budget promise. How big a factor might this be in the poll bounce?
I’m interested in FDB’s point about why people vote different ways for different levels of government.
There is a theory that people like a balance. That is, they like different parties to be in power at the state and federal level. I have always doubted, without any evidence, that this is so. I suspect that the answer is much more related to the individual psychology of voters. I think the vast majority of voters are not interested in the ideology at all. They wouldn’t even think of themselves as voting “left” at one level and “right” at another.
(I’ll leave aside the question of how “left” the votes of someone who has been voting for Bob Carr, for example, are.)
Incumbency seems to be a pretty big advantage in Australia most of the time. The Australian voter is a cautious beast. I’m not sure what psychological factors are at work, but I believe it is a real influence on elections.
I have one friend, that I know for a fact, has voted for the incumbent at every single election, state and federal, since he has been able to vote. (1st election 1990). I have another friend who nearly always supports the opposition. To someone who knows them well, this is not all that surprising. It is a comfortable fit with their general approach to life.
Answering FDB’s question, I believe it is almost impossible for an opposition to appeal to some people. Australian voters are risk averse. Governments really have to make a hash of it for them even to consider voting for change.
On childcare, it’d be interesting to see some disaggregation by gender, Paul.
Update: Andrew Norton has an interesting post over at Catallaxy which takes issue with my interpretation.
I agree with FDB’s Green/Labor/Liberal divide, although I think the general pattern is independents locally (want people who understand local issues; generally centrists), Labor in states (want more spending on infrastructure), and Liberal federally (want Australia to be competitive economically and to give them more economic freedom). So, economically speaking (because socially speaking the parties are all over the place), they want fraternity from their local council, equality from the states, and liberty from the feds. If one wishes to get poetic, it’s essentially libertĂ©, Ă©galitĂ©, fraternitĂ©, which one could say are the three essential elements of a healthy democracy.
Of course, I’m not sure if the figures stack up to my view of it, but it certainly looks neat, doesn’t it?