What the People Want: Graham Young’s first batch of Budget Polling
Graham Young has started releasing a polling series measuring the impact of the Rudd Government’s first budget. Graham is On Line Opinion’s founder and chief, and our colleague in the ARC citizen journalism project. But he’s also been pioneering the use of online qualitative polling over an extended period, and lately he’s been testing new tools that analyse his panel’s responses in innovative ways.
Although there’s more to come, Graham’s results so far suggest that the Government got the politics of the budget right. WTPW’s real interest is in its qualitative insights, but the raw numbers show that Swan’s budget was a hit with the Labor base, and has entrenched the sense that Dr Nelson is incompetent, even among Liberal voters. Graham concludes:
This poll was taken before (Nelson’s) address-in-reply so it may have improved after that. However, what it says is that while the budget didn’t win Rudd any votes, it lost Nelson some. You’ll have to wait for the qual to find out why, but my strong suspicion would be that it is to do with his performance.
In the first batch of qual, Graham analyses what the panel said they approved of in the budget, and uses lexical analysis software Leximancer to pull out the main threads, or “concepts”, in their responses.
It seems that the budget has managed to please people (insofar as they are pleased) in those areas that the Government were aiming to deliver on. “Tax” and “Education” loom large in responses, so the promise on tax cuts and the “education revolution” are seen by voters as having been delivered, or as on their way. Tax matters were particularly prominent as a reason for approving among Coalition voters.
The word “rich”, “means” and “testing” are coming through as reasons to approve from Labor voters, and Graham suggests that they’re happy about the Government’s moves to deny so-called “middle-class welfare” to the well-off. On “means testing”, Graham writes:
Contained in this concept is also a sense of equity. Why should someone who doesn’t need the benefit get it? I also detect a satisfaction in some responses that people who were seen to undeservedly prosper under the Howard regime are not doing so well under Rudd.
There will be more, I presume, on further survey questions - so far, though, it looks like Labor is pressing the right buttons with the base, and also with some of those “Rudd wets” they’ll be keen to hold on to.
This is part of a broader blogosphere response to the budget which, for mine, has left the MSM in it’s wake in terms of quality of analysis and timeliness. Graham’s polling analysis has been refined over the years, is consistently interesting, and has reached us much sooner on this occasion than Newspoll or Galaxy, and is probably more informative and finer-grained.
There are other telling comparisons to be made on bloggers and journos on the budget, of which I’ll just give you one. Go read this Glen Milne piece from the Sunday tabloids, and tell me what it adds to Possum’s summary? For mine, the major differences are that it’s three days later, two bucks dearer, and less engagingly-written - shouldn’t we expect more than this from well-paid Gallery journalists?
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