Newspoll: No frills Budget, no frills response

This fortnight’s Newspoll comes in via the Oz with the primaries running 37 (up 2)/ 43 (steady) to the Coalition, washing out into a two party preferred of 50/50 – a one point gain since last fortnight. The Greens are on 12 (up 2), while the broad Others are 8 (down 4). This comes from a sample of 1159, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.9% mark.

This is what last fortnight’s poll should probably have looked like, with the Others vote back down to a sensible 8 and the ALP vote above 35. Only the luck of last election’s preference flows stopped the two party preferred from looking odd last time.

This is probably one of the only times you’ll ever see a 2 point gain to the ALP primary, a 2 point gain to the Greens and yet only a 1 point gain in the ALP two party preferred – it’s not a conspiracy mind you, just the rounding issues playing out with the polls over the last fortnight.

The only number in the satisfaction and better PM ratings that came close to a meaningful change since last fortnight was Abbott’s satisfaction rating which dropped 3 points to 42.

Galaxy, with a welcome return to the federal polling sphere after a long absence, comes in via the News Ltd tabloids with identical primary vote and two party preferred numbers as Newspoll – 37/43 washing out into 50/50 with the Greens on 12 and the Others on 8. The Galaxy had a sample of 994, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 3.1% mark.

In an odd moment of perfect symmetry, not only did Galaxy and Newspoll come in with the same vote estimates, but they also asked an identical question on the budget – where the only difference was in a slight wording of two responses.

Running the results together we get:

It was a no frills budget with a bit of a no frills response by the looks of it. Newspoll also asks this question every year after the budget, giving us a bit of long term context (click to expand)

Finishing off Galaxy before we get to the additional Newspoll questions, Galaxy asked the following on economic credentials in the budget:

That might not look crash hot for Labor , but it’s really little more than a polarisation of the responses on the basis of voting intention.

Next up is a Newspoll question that is again asked every year – but this time on a respondent’s own financial position and whether they believe it will be affected by the budget.

Who loves a boom eh? While that’s a fascinating little graph – if we calculate the net “Total Better Off” position by subtracting the total worse off from the total better off, it becomes even more interesting:

The boom combined with the massive expansion of the middle class welfare state – that perpetual Howard handout machine that became known as the Federal Budget during his last couple of terms – certainly lifted national expectations of our personal financial position.

It was a gravy train, we knew it and apparently we loved it.

The last budget question that Newspoll asked was on whether the public believed the Opposition would have delivered a better budget considering Australia’s current economic conditions:

While the “No” response has been pretty consistent over the last13 years, the “Yes” response has been slowly growing over the same period, this year hitting its highest value since the horror Labor budget of 1993.

Meanwhile, the usual charts come in like this: