Australians are more worried about their financial wellbeing than they were at the end of last year, and confidence in the Morrison government has declined in recent months, according to new research from the Australian National University.
The survey of more than 3,000 respondents, part of the ANU Centre for Social Research Methods’ Covid-19 monitoring program, charts fluctuations in public sentiment in Australia during the pandemic and the first recession in three decades.
The ANU research shows when the Morrison government rolled out economic supports to households during the opening months of the pandemic, there was a large decline in the proportion of Australians reporting that it was difficult to get by on present income.
This positive trend continued through much of last year.
But with the government signalling the jobkeeper wage subsidy will end in March, and with a lack of clarity about the level of unemployment benefits that will apply during the recovery, the survey recorded a five-point jump in the survey’s measure of financial distress between November 2020 and January 2021.
The researchers note this negative shift in public sentiment could reflect “seasonal patterns” but it says “a return to a more standard fiscal setting and easing of government support appears to be apparent in our tracking data”.
On Thursday, the Treasury secretary, Stephen Kennedy, said he expected some jobs would be lost when the government wound back income support. But he added, provided the public health response remained strong, Treasury was “quietly confident that the recovery is now locked in”.
The secretary said from the vantage point of households, the period ahead was highly unusual. “It will be a period of transition that we rarely see, where we’ve increased the balance sheet very dramatically – the household savings ration must be up 18-odd%, but in the period ahead, household income will actually fall and we expect consumption to rise”.
“It’s not very often we forecast that ... we don’t get to forecast recovery from pandemics very often,” Kennedy said.
The ANU’s research, to be released on Friday, points to a significant rebound in trust in Australian governments and institutions during the pandemic, which is consistent with findings in a number of other surveys, including the Guardian Essential poll and the Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion report.
But while the overall trend is positive, the latest research also points to “a statistically significant and moderately large decline in confidence in the federal government between November 2020 and January 2021”.
Again, consistent with other surveys, ANU survey respondents are continuing to express a high level of satisfaction with how Australia is managing the Covid-19 crisis – in January 2021, 78.9% of respondents expressed this view. But confidence in the commonwealth ebbed between November and January.
The researchers note for context that confidence in the Morrison government currently remains far higher than it was at the peak of the 2020 bushfire disaster. But they say the latest data points to “some potential early signs of a drop in confidence for the federal government”.
While the shift was negative for the Morrison government (with the measure moving from 59.9% saying they were confident to 54.3% in the latest survey) – confidence in the competence of the public service remained steady between November and January (64.5%), as did the levels of public confidence expressed in state and territory governments (70.4%).
The researchers note the pandemic has raised the prominence of state and territory governments because of their responsibility for managing internal borders, deciding on many of the physical distancing measures, and managing the quarantine of international arrivals, despite quarantine being ultimately a federal responsibility.
“While there have been a number of missteps with these roles, it would appear that on balance the Australian public is generally quite confident in the ability of their premiers, chief ministers, and the governments that they lead to deliver on these roles,” the ANU researchers say.
The survey indicates that Australians have maintained steady levels of confidence in the health and hospital system (85.3%) and the police force (78.1%) through the crisis. On the ANU’s five measures of institutional confidence, hospitals currently sit at the top and the commonwealth at the bottom.
The study’s co-author, Prof Nicholas Biddle, says compared to January 2020, “when much of the country was suffocating from smoke and battling deadly and destructive blazes, confidence in the federal government is much higher”.
But he said there were “some early signs that confidence may be waning as the pandemic response enters a new phase – something for the federal government to keep a close eye on”.
