With budget season over, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey has pulled well ahead of Treasurer Wayne Swan as trusted economic manager, today’s Essential Report shows. However, the Coalition’s hostility to the Gonski education reforms is not popular with voters and, for the first time, voter views on the government’s carbon price scheme are evenly split.
Before the budget, Hockey edged Swan as more trusted to handle the economy 35-32%. After Swan’s sixth budget a fortnight ago and Hockey’s reply last week, he now leads Swan 37-28%.
Some 43% of voters believe Opposition Leader Tony Abbott should implement the Gonski education funding reforms, which would establish a set level of funding for every student in the country, supplemented as necessary by loadings to address different forms of disadvantage, compared with 34% who believe he should stick with the existing model in which Commonwealth funding is skewed to private school. Some 26% of Liberal voters believe Abbott should accept the Gonski reforms, while 18% of Labor voters think Abbott should retain the status quo. The results suggest that, to the extent that Labor is capable of getting its message through any more, Gonski remains a potential fruitful area to improve its vote, given education is routinely identified by voters as one of their top three or four issues.
Labor’s primary vote fell a point to 34%, while the Coalition remained steady on 48% and the Greens remained on 8%, for an unchanged two-party preferred outcome of 55-45%. The Greens now look in real trouble, having slipped bit by bit from double figures, first to 9%, and now 8% over recent weeks, suggesting a sustained slide in their vote. This is the third week they’ve been outpolled by Others/Independents.
However, climate scepticism has now fallen to its lowest level since before the 2009 Copenhagen conference, with 35% of voters saying climate change is simply a normal fluctuation, compared with 51% who say it is caused by humans. Climate scepticism is still conservative territory: 50% of Liberal voters believed it is simply a natural fluctation, compared with 38% who believe it is caused by humans.
Moreover, the carbon price, now nearly 12 months old, now appears to be gaining acceptance. For the first time since Essential began asking about first the government’s plans for a carbon price in 2011 and then the scheme itself after mid-2012, support and opposition are evenly split on 43%, a significant turnaround from 37% support and 50% opposition in January. Meanwhile, 22% of Liberal voters support the carbon price while 18% of Labor voters oppose it.
Moreover, when compared with the Coalition’s policy of “Direct Action”, involving paying polluters to reduce emissions, a carbon price is preferred 39-29%, rather an indictment of opposition climate change spokesman Greg Hunt’s inept selling of the deeply troubled “Direct Action” scheme, given voters’ longstanding hostility to the carbon price.
And interestingly, only 26% of voters actually believe Tony Abbott will fulfill his commitment to axe both the mining tax and carbon price and keep the compensation linked to the latter, as he promised in his budget reply speech. Some 29% believe he won’t keep the compensation, and 28% don’t believe he’ll dump the mining tax and carbon price.
The Gillard government might appear doomed, but it seems the Coalition is having difficulty convincing voters about its policies.
Packer had his “Bondie”, Whitlam his “Billy Goat”, now it seems Abbott has Talking Heads moment “Once in a lifetime”?
Hockey now attacking and trying to discredit Treasury Officials. Is this a part of the plan not to address Liberal policies based on the numbers? And when the policy goes wrong because it is simply bad policy use the excuse that Treasury provided dud figures?
Hockey,, who has only produced vaporware budgets, versus Swan, who has produced 6 of the best? I guess that gives us some hope, in that polls have been shown to be utterly non-indicative of reality.
Not in 20 million years have C02 levels at 400 ppm been so high.
Everything we do in chasing the cash-cow,“Growth”, increases our risk of societal collapse from what we do, and yet big politics and the mass media disregards it!
Why is there is no challenge for change?
Because the Labor party are weak, and the supposedly incoming Liberal Party is ruled by climate change deniers. The rich do not want to see what will befall us before they reap their rewards.
I shudder every time I hear an aeroplane go over, and that is too many times a day. People jetting off to idyllic adventures overseas, to pollute those parts of the planet – places already over crowded, beyond belief – or those unspoilt, soon to be wrecked by the foot print of middle class humans.
We are past the point of no return: I gave civilisation five years to collapse in March 2011. In lucky Australia all the signs are stronger now, our rainfall since October last year is minimal (“No! “ You will say, “It was like that in c. 1922, My father told me of that year”) – we have May temperatures at c. 2 deg above normal, the rains that used to come from the cold frontal system fail as they pass 60 kms out to sea now that the Hadley vortexes increase in size. Our rainfall since the mid nineties has fallen by 20 %. The creeks rarely run, the aquifers fall and the water from them is more saline.
The oceans acidify.
Take time to look at this:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
How much more do you want to know?
It is time for politics to be responsible, not just puppets to big business.
A vote for the major parties will only hasten our demise.
K.D. Afford
Laughable that Floppy is perceived by the electorate as a better treasurer than Swan. Would have thought his budget reply & white anting treasury would have put a stop to that. Just goes to show how sucked in the voters are.
The fact that the majority of Lib voters don’t think we have had a profound impact on the earth’s climate says it all.