Today Newspoll released their Issue Importance poll which comes out every 4 months or so. It tracks which issues the public perceives as being “very important” as well as asking respondents which political party is best at handling each of the issues.
On the question: WOULD YOU SAY EACH OF THE FOLLOWING ISSUES IS VERY IMPORTANT, FAIRLY IMPORTANT OR NOT IMPORTANT ON HOW YOU PERSONALLY WOULD VOTE IN A FEDERAL ELECTION?
Newspoll only releases the results from the “Very Important” response, and for February 2009 the answers came out like this (these are all thumbnails, just click to expand):
We can also track the “Very Important” response for these issues over time. There’s quite a few here so we’ll break it down in two charts – the top five and the bottom five.
Noteworthy is how Industrial Relations and The Environment have fallen over the last12 months in terms of them being rated as very important while the economy has risen sharply – but that’s hardly surprising.
Moving on to the question of which party is perceived as best to handle these issues, we’ll start with the economy.
The Coalition has been slowly falling for 4 years on the economy while the ALP has been growing sharply for the last 3 years – to the point where the two parties are now statistically tied on the question of who can best handle the economy.
On which party is best to handle the next 3 issues perceived as being the most important we have:
The ALP has been breaking away from the Coalition on all of these issues over the last few years, although the high numbers for “other” and “uncommitted” on the water question is dragging both majors down recently.
Interestingly on the IR question:
The Coalition keep on talking about industrial relations despite the fact that it is a very strong Labor issue. They could do worse than to simply STFU about it for a while. Continually mentioning it is not winning them any prizes.
One Comment
It would be an interesting exercise to correlate the ‘very important’ graph results with ‘mentions in the MSM’.
I’m presuming there would be a pretty close relationship, but would it be causal, ie the media bang on about whatever a lot and the public respond by thinking whatever is very important?
Horses and carts?
Of course there would have to be some substance to the media reports.
Or would there?
The MSM, Denis for eg tried to push the economy is king line during the campaign to bolster his teams hopes apparently to little effect..
I’m not suggesting that this currently strong rating of the economy is ‘confected’ ,its fairly obviously important, but just about the relationship between the agenda setters and the public awareness response.