Peter Lewis talks us through our love for a nanny state — as long as it doesn’t overstep the mark

The metaphorical nannies are out to control us; to mollycoddle and corrupt us; to intervene and suppress the free spirit in those of us who just want to puff on a ciggie or punt on a pokie or jump off a cliff because the other kids are doing it.

But while collectively we denounce a controlling nanny state, EMC polling shows that most of us actually like a designated grown up. Peter Lewis talks us through the details on 3Q.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3982400.html

Peter Lewis says the public no longer believes that mining has personal benefits – despite an expensive ad campaign from the industry.

The long-running ‘This is our story’ campaign is the soft side of the anti-mining tax’s shock-and-awe bombardment of 2010 that delivered the head of a prime minister and a windfall approaching $20 billion for its sponsors.

But in the intervening 18 months, the national tone has changed from one where the mining industry’s success was seen as central to the national interest to one where the question appears to be: is this ‘our’ story or just theirs?

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3968928.html

Peter Lewis presents polling that shows public opinion is turning in favour of the $40 billion national broadband network.

Until now the NBN has been an abstract debate about national building and future proofing the economy on one hand, and a misguided venture designed purely to waste taxpayers’ money on the other. Now it’s about to shift from rhetoric to reality, with roll out plans for about a third of households and businesses released last week.

As employers push for a flat rate of pay on weekends, most Australians believe weekend work should have a higher value, reflecting the fact that family time, community and sporting involvement is still conducted over the weekend. It’s the difference between an economy and a society, Lewis argues.

The segment also explores surprising support for a Coalition policy to fund nannies, bringing into stark relief the different approaches to social policy between the major parties.

EMC director Peter Lewis looks at the great Australian sickie.

We are still a class act

‘Class’ and ‘zeitgeist’ may seem strange bedfellows, but in the wake of Treasurer Wayne Swan’s much-pilloried call to arms against the very rich, they appear be staging an unexpected hook-up.

The accepted wisdom was that we had moved beyond class, a view propagated by both Tories trying to seduce battlers and Labor apparatchiks reaching out to the aspirationalists, all in a bid to capture a mythical centre.

But according to the Essential Report this week, the vast, vast majority of Australians still subscribe that that relic of Marxist analysis – when asked if class still matter sin Australia, they answer resoundingly in the affirmative.

Q. Do you believe social classes still exist in Australia? 

This is not some trendy leftie proposition for Green voters and latte-sipping inner city trendies, indeed the belief in classes exists across the political spectrum – it’s just that no one talks about it.

What’s more, about a third of the public (interestingly, higher than the Labor primary vote) see themselves as working class, with more than 50 per cent self-identifying as middle class and just a handful self-identifying as Upper Class.

Q. Do you consider yourself:

We also asked people to identify the dollar figure that would define individuals and households as ‘middle income’, ‘well-off’ and wealthy’.

The median results are as follows:

The median of ‘wealthy family’ is critical – $150,0000 of course is the cut off point for the health care rebate which sparked a tabloid outcry – but in the public’s mind $150,000 is beyond the purveyor of the well-off – its is the territory of the welfare

It puts in play a whole range of other Howard middle class welfare measures – the baby bonus, child care rebates, carer allowances, pharmaceutical benefits, student allowances and the much vaunted Family Tax Benefits, to name just a few.

But if the majority of Australians see a combined household income of $150,000 as wealthy, the government has a ready-made limit to reintroduce some constraints on its reverse-taxation payments to the community.

In light of these findings it’s also unsurprising the high level of support for Treasurer’s recent statement that some of Australia’s wealthiest individuals are using their wealth to try to influence public opinion and government policy to further their own commercial interests

* each question was asked of half the total sample.

The interesting point here is that once we took out the fact that Wayne Sawn had made the comments about the very wealthy, even the majority of Liberal voters agreed – although the Labor faithful tapered off a bit.

So if Tony Abbott wants to give Labor a narrow whiff at redemption he should continue to campaign against a mining tax.

While he is at it he should accuse the government of employing the ‘politics of envy’, as mining moguls continue to air their extremely expensive dirty linen in public.

And if he really wants to give the government momentum he should talk about Australia having moved beyond the class, while he proposes more measures that are blind to inequality – like a parental leave scheme that delivers you more depending on how much you earn.

Class and Zeitgeist – who’d a thunk?

All this fighting and cussing in Canberra has at least silenced the elephant in the Lodge, that $28 per tonne price on carbon.

It seems weeks since Tony Abbott strapped on a reflective vest and imposed himself on a Queanbeyan lunch room, but it’s only months until the price takes affect.

At this point one of two things happens – the sky falls in and Abbott blames the carbon tax or the sky doesn’t fall in and Abbott blames the carbon tax.

So as Julia Gillard prepares to strap on the safety helmet and assume (resume?) the position, here are a few clues from the polling to help her though the difficult times ahead.

1. Never again call the Carbon Price a Tax – It’s not and your concession that a price on carbon as part of the transition to an Emissions Trading Scheme was one of the most spectacular own goals in recent political history. Language does matter.

2. Take it Back to the Science – our polling shows that the biggest single determinant on supporting action on climate change is not party affiliation, age or gender but belief in the reality of climate change. The ability of the denial movement to cloud the science on climate change was decisive. Once the facts were clouded science never really had a chance, being a discipline based on scepticism as it is. Giving science a voice and then finding a forum to spread its word may be too important to trust to the media.

3. Tell the whole Story – support for a carbon price shifts from majority opposition to majority support if the question changes from support for a price on carbon, to include the compensation and investment in renewables that are part of the package. Getting the airtime to get the whole sentence out is vital to selling the measure.

4. Focus on the Car not the Carburettor – the great myth about the carbon price is that the public went from supporters to opponents in one fell swoop of Abbott vitriol. The reality is that the decline in support was first based on confusion as the Rudd-Wong dream team (and we’re talking sleep here) got obsessed with the detail of the CPRS. After 12 months of technical debate most had lost interest and drifted into indifference and confusion. From there they were easy pickings for a scare campaign.

5. Remember the best response to a scare campaign is a scare campaign – Running the high road of caring about future generations will never trump fear and loathing. Better point out as the most carbon-exposed economy in the developed world there are huge economic dangers if we sit back and wait for others to act. Get the markets scared, there is nothing rational about denial.

6. Remember this is the great moral challenge of our times – on this K Rudd was K Rect; it was the backflip that killed him. Dealing with the challenges of climate change is why we entrust our nations to governments – we expert them to make tough decisions in our long-term interests, even if we don’t always like the medicine.

7. And finally, stop pretending you didn’t do something that was brave and right – Like taxing our natural resources, building a national broadband network and giving the disabled a better deal. These are the anchor points of a Labor Government to be proud of. If only it would let us.

As Labor attempts to re-unite after its very public family spat there is one more piece of dirty linen that needs to be aired – the self-imposed strait-jacket that is the government’s pledge to bring the budget into surplus by 2012.

Listening to both the victor and the vanquished shift the focus to, ermm, moving forward after yesterday’s spill, there was a list of good works that the government insisted it will pursue with renewed vigour: at the top of the list disability reform, education funding, health reform.

Labor does have a strong set of progressive policy positions ready to roll – the Productivity Commission report into a National Disability Insurance Scheme will revolutionise the delivery of services to society’s most vulnerable; the Gonski review sets out a radical reshaping of schools funding that will shift resources to the public system, the Productivity Commission has also produced a major report into improving services of aging Australians.

All of these are potentially great Labor reforms that speak to Labor values; they will all set up key sectors for the decades to come and they will all benefit big slices of the electorate.

But they also come with significant price tags – NDIS $6 billion per year; Gonski $5 billion, with $%1.5 billion from he feds) and the less-known Aged Care reforms a further $6 billion.

With Labor tied to a 2010 election promise, reinforced last year, to bring the Budget back to surplus – regardless of external economic conditions – by 2012-13, all these initiatives are likely to be left in the starting blocks. Worthy reports gathering dust.

Walking away from the surplus would clearly be a big call for the Government – it would play out in the tabloids as another lie; and as the PM has learnt to her chagrin despite their low level of trust in politicians, the punters will pounce on a lie.

But in insisting it will deliver a budget surplus, no matter how wafer-thin, the Gillard Government is sucking up to the wrong crowd.

Give voters a choice between concrete improvements in key policy issues and delivering a surplus to the books and you get a very clear answer, as this week’s Essential Report shows.

Q. The Gonski report recommends a $5 billion increase in education funding with $1.5 billion of this additional funding coming from the Federal Government and the rest from the State Governments. If the Federal Government provides this additional funding it may mean they will not be able to return the budget to surplus next year.

Do you think it is more important to provide this additional funding for schools or more important to return a budget surplus?

This is not just a matter of flaky lefties walking away from self-imposed fiscal confines; indeed Coalition voters are nearly as keen as Labor voters for funds to be released to institute the Gonski reforms.

These findings back more general questions on the budget deficit we asked last November where 69 per cent of respondents favoured delaying a return to surplus if it meant cutting services or raising taxes.

‘Returning the Budget to Surplus’ has become one of those bumper sticker policies that hamstring governments. Like ‘Turning Back the Boats’ it is not only impossible to deliver, it creates a series of knock-on effects that compound the problem.

Worse for Labor, it keeps the economic debate in the abstract frame, the natural territory for conservative governments, rather than placing the economy in its proper context – the forum for improving the lives of ordinary people.

Could they win the argument? Australia’s current debt to GDP ratio is under 10 per cent – many developed OECD nations have levels ten times that rate;  so actually explaining why Australia has set itself this target at a time of falling revenues could shift the conversation.

Indeed, not even Tony Abbott is tying himself to a 2012-13 surplus, so while he would cry ‘liar, liar’ he would not do so from a position of fiscal purity.

Of course, walking away from the surplus guarantee would inflict more pain on a government whose leader already suffers credibility deficit issues. But it might just be that delivering the goods on reform in education, disability and aged care is a better way to establish credibility with the electorate than delivering a wafer-thin surplus as a sop to the business pundits and tabloid press.

After all the hurt and tears for leadership status quo, surely a shift that opened the way for the next wave of social reforms for the young, the aged and the disabled would be a porky worth wearing.