Voters have little faith in Labor’s ability to handle another financial crisis if it eventuates, according to today’s Essential Report.
A significant majority of voters say that if there was another global financial crisis, they would trust the Coalition to handle it more than Labor, 43% to 27%. Labor’s handling of the GFC, involving bank guarantees and rapid stimulus packages, was the high point of the Rudd government and has been lauded internationally as one of the best responses to the crisis. But Labor has proved unable to fend off a campaign by sections of the media and the Coalition to portray its stimulus packages as incompetent and wasteful, and in dumping Kevin Rudd been unwilling to emphasise his successes. However, responses do strongly follow party lines, with 77% of Labor voters saying they trust Labor more, 86% of Liberal voters saying they trust the Liberals more, and 42% of Greens saying there’s no difference between the parties, in addition to 41% saying they trust Labor more.
Responses following party lines are inevitably bad news for Labor, because it has drifted further down on voting intention. The Coalition’s primary vote is now back at 50% (up one point in a week), where it was four weeks ago, and Labor’s vote is back at 30% (down one point) as well, yielding a 57%-43% 2PP result.
The survey also revealed remarkable levels of ignorance about the numbers of asylum seekers coming to Australia. 36% of voters believe that the number of asylum seekers arriving by boat has “increased a lot” in the past 12 months, and 26% say it has “increased a little”, with 20% saying numbers have stayed the same. Only 7% of voters believe the number of asylum seekers has fallen. When told that the number of asylum seekers arriving by boat has fallen by more than half this year, the proportion of people “very concerned” about asylum seekers falls from 43% to 33% and those “a little” or “not at all” concerned goes from from 30% to 39%.
On this question, too, there’s a strong level of partisanship: 54% of Liberal voters are “very concerned” about asylum seekers, although the number drops to 43% when they are told how numbers have fallen this year; 36% of Labor voters are concerned (which falls to 24%) and only 12% of Greens voters are very concerned. Greens voters are much more likely to believe numbers have “stayed the same” or “increased a little”, certainly than Liberal voters, 50% of whom believe numbers have “increased a lot”.
That’s a bit disappointing. I trust the Coalition less than the ALP, because Abbott’s one big idea is “reducing public debt”. That makes him likely to jump on the austerity bandwagon. The problem is that austerity measures have been disastrous for the economy in UK and the US.
@ESSENTIAL
You’ll need to push much harder than that if your results are to show anything other than the truth.
What was Garnaut’s phrase? “Diabolical problem”?
Joe’s missus won’t even let him manage the family budget.
Gawd help us!
I cant believe how the Aussie public can be so … misinformed…
There is much about Labor that annoys me, but I am not going to rewrite history!
Rudd oversaw one of the only modern western nations to avoid the first GFC for goodness sake. If the libs had been in they would not have had the big spend, (with managable debt schedules to pay it off). They would have let the country fall into recession and they would have said “it is beyond us to manage: it is a global thing”. But Rudd showed that some good old Keynesian economics works and he was one of the only leaders of a modern industrialised trading nation, that kept his country from falling into huge unemployment and serious recession!
But lets just talk about the debt and think that somehow that was a mistake.
I am stunned! Ignorance and fear wins again.
Jim Reiher
I wonder if the families of those who dies and had their homes turned to ashes because of the pink batt fiasco which we apparently needed agreed with you, no Rudd’s management of the GFC was Deadly to say the least and left the ALP with blood on their hands.