Voters have swung behind the federal government’s controversial Direct Action climate change plan, new polling from Essential Research shows.
Support for carbon pricing, which in May had reached level pegging with opposition to it, has now fallen to 39%, with opposition up to 47%. Age and voting intention are strong indicators for those positions: younger voters, Labor and Greens voters back carbon pricing; older and Coalition voters oppose it. And voters have reversed their hostility to Greg Hunt’s Direct Action plan, in which bureaucrats will pick carbon abatement projects to hand grants to. In May, voters preferred carbon pricing over Direct Action 39-29% — but now favour the latter 35-31%.
Not surprisingly, Labor and Greens voters strongly favour carbon pricing, while Coalition voters back Direct Action.
But voters disapprove of Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott’s new approach of hiding information about asylum seeker boat arrivals. That policy became even sillier in yesterday’s second “briefing” about boat arrivals, in which Morrison and his acting man in uniform both confirmed the arrival of a boat the previous night despite it falling outside the “reporting period”. Some 48% of voters disapprove of hiding the information, but there’s still a strong air of partisanship: 67% of Coalition voters are supportive of the policy, while 75% of Labor and 74% of Greens voters oppose it.
There’s a similar split on the re-establishment of the Australian Building and Construction Commission, albeit with a high level of “don’t knows”: 29% of voters back its re-establishment compared to 22% who oppose it; 25% say they don’t know and another 23% have no view.
There’s greater unanimity on support for manufacturing. Around 65% of voters agreed that “with government support, Australia can have a successful manufacturing industry”, with only 19% agreeing that “there is no future for manufacturing in Australia and government support would be a waste of money”. There was little difference between voters, with Greens voters a little less enthusiastic — on 60% — compared to Coalition voters (65%) and Labor voters (70%).
Greens voters are also least enthusiastic about car manufacturing: 58% of voters agree it is important “that Australia has a car manufacturing industry, even if it costs hundreds of millions of dollars each year in government support and subsidies”, but only 45% of Greens voters agree, compared to 59% of Liberal voters and 63% of Labor voters (31% of Labor voters think it is “very important” that Australia has a car industry, compared to 12% of Greens). That’s despite the Greens having the most blindly protectionist policies on manufacturing.
On voting intention, the government is on 43%, Labor on 36% (down 1) and the Greens on 9%. Others are on 12%; the 2PP outcome is 52-48%.
But how many understand it?
Journalism by algorithm seems to be creeping to Crickey’s usage of Essential data.
How would the respondents know the implications of the DAP plan, when the author of the same plan cannot give a definitive explanation of its’ operation let alone effectiveness .
Polls? Go away.
The Coalition has sworn an “oath in blood” that it will remove the tax on carbon. The Direct Action Plan is being presented as the only available road to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. What choices do Australians have to reduce global warming other than Direct Action? There is no guarantee that it will make any significant reduction unless accompanied by a major taxpayer funded rip off but that is all we are going to get so bring it on. Regrettably.
Planting trees, soil capture and other bio sequestration processes are currently the only available methods to remove excess Co2 from the atmosphere. James Hansen fully supports such methods as a direct compliment to a price on carbon via an emissions trading scheme. We need both bio sequestration and emission caps to reduce Co2 concentrations.
Sadly BK has never understood this and continues to deride bio sequestration as a scam despite climate science leaders like James Hansen clearly saying that trees etc are the only way we can reduce Co2 concentrations to 350PPM.
Gillard also never understood this and made her ministers go out and pour scorn on bio sequestration concepts using dodgy CSIRO reports that were little more than classic examples of government reports commissioned to get the answer they wanted and attack Direct Action with. Intervention aka direct action is the only way we’ll deal with carbon emissions and an ETS or Carbon Tax is just as much a market intervention as subsidizing tree planting and funding changes to farming practices are.
One day we’ll have fusion power stations that will power vast machines that suck the carbon directly out of the atmosphere – but for the next 50 years – trees and soil are the only tools we have to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.