Our representatives in Canberra are playing politics on asylum seekers. That’s the strong view of voters from a new Essential Research poll.
Seventy eight per cent of voters think MPs and Senators are playing politics rather than being genuinely concerned about asylum seekers. Unsurprisingly, the feeling is cross-partisan: 74% of Labor voters, 81% of Liberal voters and 85% of Greens voters hold that view.
Some 32% believe no party is “most concerned about finding a fair and reasonable solution”; 28% believe it’s the Liberals, and in a blow to Labor’s hopes of being seen as the most willing to compromise on the issue, only 14% believe Labor is (the Greens are on 13%).
Partisanship plays a significant role on this question — voters are more likely to believe the party they support is most concerned to find a solution. Sixty per cent of Greens voters think their party is most concerned and 59% of Liberal voters think their party is. The comparable figure for Labor voters, however, is 46%, still the highest, but significantly lower.
Disturbingly for Labor in light of the Labor Right’s recent attacks on the Greens, 30% of Labor voters think the Greens are the party most concerned to find a fair and reasonable solution.
If the government’s goal was to convince voters that it is getting tougher on asylum seekers, there’s some evidence of success: 60% of voters think the government is too soft, down from 63% in October 2010; 12% think it’s too tough, up from 7%. But only 11% of voters think its approach is the right one. And only 26% of Labor voters think its approach on the issue is right.
Labor also trails on possible fallout from the eurozone crisis: 74% of voters think it will have some or a major impact on the Australian economy (only 13% say they haven’t heard something about European events); interestingly, Liberal voters are far more likely to believe Europe will end up having an impact on Australia. Forty two per cent of voters believe Tony Abbott and the Liberals can be trusted to deal with global economic problems compared to 32% who trust Julia Gillard and Labor to handle them.
And while it’s early days yet, 54% of voters say they haven’t seen any price rises due to a carbon price, compared to 31% who say they have. In another demonstration of how partisanship influences what facts people decide to believe in, the comparable figure for Liberal voters is 43% who say they’ve seen no price rises compared to 40% who say they have.
On voting intention, Labor drops another point to 31%; the Liberals and the Greens remain steady on 49% and 11% respectively. The two-party preferred outcome remains the same: 56-44% to the Coalition.
The article says “30% of Labor voters think the Greens are the party most concerned to find a fair and reasonable solution” but in the table this figure is only 11%…
I can usually see other points of view but this one has me stumped. I think it shows either the influence of a mostly highly biased media together with many seeing things depending upon whose side they’re on. It seems obvious to me that the Coalition is playing the refugee issue for political advantage. They could not possibly believe that Nauru is not just another Christmas Island. It worked before when asylum seekers did not know what would happen to them. They and the people smugglers now know that they will probably get to Australia. And TPV’s did not work when they were introduced in 1999 – just look at the graphs. Meanwhile, the Greens are maintaining the purity of their position. Only the ALP has a solution on the table that might work and should at least be given a go.
Also – the line on ‘None of them’ doesn’t add up – the total is 32% while the percentages of those who support Labor, Coalition or Greens are all less than this. Possibly about 10% of those surveyed didn’t vote for one of the three groupings specified and of those, over 80% of thought ‘none of them’, the 32% might be correct , but this seems unlikely.
Classic woods and trees. If the parties are playing politics, who is the audience they are playing politics to? It’s a bizarre poll. The asylum seeker issue, from Children Overboard, Tampa and beyond has been played out as a discourse of raising or allaying, the fears of a (presumably xenophobic ?) Australian public.
If that’s the case, the Australian public can’t really blame the politicians who presumably represent their views.
The boat people problem will always win elections for the coalition. The aggressive tow the boats back policy is the key to coalition electoral success. Tony Abbott was very forceful with the Indonesian President on how we would tow the boats back into Indonesian waters, like it or lump it. Tony Abbott should be made into a national treasure as an outspoken and very direct (let them know where we’re at) polititian when it comes to dealing with the Indonesians