Feel like things are getting worse? New poll shows you’re in good company
Poll numbers released this week by polling group RedBridge reveal that when it comes to the future, just 11 per cent of us think that the next generation will be better off.
Opinion
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Australians, it can be safely said, are not in a good mood.
The contributing factors behind this sourness are not hard to work out: Energy price pressure, housing pressure, the threat of interest rate rises, international tensions, and a sense that our politicians are all talk and no action are just a few.
But what is startling is the depth of this discontent and how pessimistic it has made us about the future.
Poll numbers released this week by polling group RedBridge reveal that when it comes to the future, just 11 per cent of us think that the next generation will have a better or much better standard of living than current generations.
About 15 per cent of us think the next generation will have it the same, but a whopping 68 per cent of Australians think things will be worse or much worse for the coming generation – a negative expectation gap of 57 per cent.
What’s more, this pessimism is felt across the spectrum.
Labor and Coalition voters feel pretty negative, but those who vote Greens or for independent candidates think things will get worse by margins of 69 per cent and 73 per cent respectively.
The numbers hold true across age groups, suburbs, and cities, and even income: 40 per cent of those on more than $3000 a week also think that the next generation is going to have it worse.
RedBridge director Tony Barry, who has spent nearly three decades working in politics, told this column that he “had never seen it like this”.
According to Barry, while voters will also say the country is on the wrong track when asked, getting their thoughts on how things will be in the future is a way to understand their concerns more deeply.
“There’s almost a mourning for the life we once had, almost a sense of grief, that even if things get better they will not be like they were,” he said.
“It’s really an entrenched pessimism.”
Barry said that this is one of the reasons why so many people were flirting with third parties, and why the primary votes of both Labor and the Coalition were so relatively low.
“There’s a frustration with the major parties, that people have heard things all before, and that if they get five bucks a week back in tax they’ll just get slugged for more somewhere else.”
All of this is, of course, bad news for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
But it is not great news – yet – for Peter Dutton either.
According to Barry, while “mood for change” indicators are running against the government, “the problem for the Coalition is they still can’t punch through the 40 per cent primary vote mark” they need to be competitive.
For the Albanese Labor government, the question is whether it can turn things around before the next election (which may be sooner rather than later), or wind up languishing in a second term in a cobbled together minority government.
Yet for a government that too often veers between reactive and downright rudderless, it is increasingly hard to see how this can happen.
Ever since spending vast amounts of first-term goodwill on a Voice to Parliament referendum only to see it go down in a flaming heap, the government has been on the back foot.
On the Middle East, Israel, and Gaza, the government has played a disingenuous double game and in the process has been seen to be controlled by radical voices on its left flank, both in the Greens and in Labor’s own more doctrinaire factions.
In the process, the country’s sometimes uneasy multicultural compact has threatened to break down completely, at a time when the question of how many migrants the country can absorb in any given year has been shoved to the forefront.
Here, again, Albanese has been seen to be following, rather than leading.
For years, polls have shown majorities of Australians wanting immigration to be wound back, but neither party has had the nerve to take up the fight on their behalf.
Just as in Europe and the US, immigration is in Australia the hot button domestic issue of our time, and even if cutting migrant numbers will not by itself solve problems with unaffordable housing and overcrowded infrastructure, it is the issue that separates what can broadly be called the “elites” from everybody else.
It’s a complicated, emotional issue that goes far beyond questions of economics to issues of culture and society and who we are.
In being baited into fighting for its own version of Big Australia by the opposition leader in the wake of Dutton’s budget reply speech, Labor now risks not just fighting on the Coalition’s turf, but over an issue where poll after poll backs in the Coalition’s position.
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