Public opinion

The majority of Australians believe that we are not doing enough to meet the country’s infrastructure needs, a new global Infrastructure study by Ipsos has revealed.

Although Australians most likely to believe it makes our country a more interesting place to live.

Treasurer Pallas delivered his first budget on May 5. In his speech Mr Pallas made it very clear that the Andrews government will lead for all Victorians. Leading for all Victorians is about enabling equality. That the Treasurer framed his first budget around equality appears to be well timed, and well aligned with Victorians’ current concerns and general disposition.

In terms of the big issues, the key changes we’ve seen in community concerns in the second quarter of 2015 were in regards to housing and crime, with the former rising sharply and the later decreasing. Whilst the shape and order of the top five issues remains relatively stable, healthcare (40% – down 4%) is now very closely followed by housing (39% – up 7%).

New Ipsos research finds there has been a small drop among Australians saying things in Australia are on the wrong track (now 55%, down from 57% in October).

Victorians continue to be more concerned about ‘Crime’ than the balance of Australians and are currently more worried about ‘Drug abuse’ than ever before. These connected concerns have an impact on how we see ourselves, how we engage with our community and how we sell the state to the world.

It seems that discussion and focus on federal politics and the Government’s performance has dominated NSW citizen’s focus as third quarter results for our NSW Issues Monitor show little movement from the previous quarter. The top four issues remain relatively unchanged with healthcare remaining in top position (41% – up 1%), housing in second (39%), cost of living in third position (28% – down 1%), and unemployment in fourth (26% – down 2%). Transport was also steady at fifth position (23%).

We asked 3,385 Victorians (12,638 Australians) to select the attributes they believe are important in making somewhere a good place to live. We also asked them to rate how well our state and their local areas performed on all attributes.

As a new State Government settles into its first term we can see that Queenslanders are slightly re-shuffling their priorities and concerns. During the last few months of the dying Liberal government, Queenslanders indicated strong concern about unemployment and cost of living.