Voters strongly favour putting Australian workers first and narrowly favour the proposition that “racial equality has gone too far”, a poll has found.
The Essential poll of 1,013 voters, released on Tuesday, found that 83% of voters thought “local workers should be given priority over foreign workers” and “the government should bring back manufacturing jobs to Australia”.
Forty-six per cent of respondents said racial equality had gone too far, compared with 40% who disagreed and 15% who didn’t know.
Gender equality was slightly more popular, with 40% saying it had gone too far, 48% disagreeing and 12% undecided.
Coalition voters recorded majorities against both racial equality (56%) and gender equality (52%), as did voters for “other” parties. Support for Australian jobs was high across the board.
Some 52% of respondents said they “would like to see Australia more like it was in the past”, compared with 32% who disagreed. Again, the Coalition (62%) and other voters (67%) were most in favour.
Majorities said the Chinese government had too much influence on the Australian economy (65%), non-citizens who commit crimes should be deported (75%) and the government should do more to stop people entering the country illegally (77%).
And 64% of respondents supported government legislation to reduce the number of overseas workers being brought to Australia under short-term 457 visas, compared with 17% who opposed it.
Asked which immigration issue they were most concerned about, the arrival of asylum seeker boats was of most concern (36%), followed by use of 457 visas (21%), and the overall increase in the population (20%) but 17% of respondents said none of these was a concern.
The results underscore the growing nativist sentiment in Australian politics, with Labor promising its own 457 visa crackdown, the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, arguing that Australia should not have let Lebanese Muslims into the country in the 1970s and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation claiming vindication from the election of Donald Trump in the US.
A majority of voters (56%) backed the government’s proposed resettlement deal for refugees on Manus Island and Nauru to go to the US, compared with 16% who disapproved and 28% who didn’t know.
The Essential poll found Labor on 52% of the two-party preferred vote, compared with 48% for the Coalition, a narrowing of Labor’s lead from 53-47 last week.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and the Nick Xenophon Team were steady on 6% and 3% of the primary vote respectively.
Assuming random sampling, difficult in practice, a poll of this size has a 95% likelihood that results are within a 3% margin of error.
