With boring regularity, when voters are asked to rank their choices, “clean” energy is not a top priority. Only 7% of Australians want the government to promote renewables ahead of other major issues. It’s the same old, same old for years, yet the media and both parties are locked in a death spiral trying to turn it into an election issue. Real people put living Standards above Virtue Signalling, says Alan Moran.
Essential Report Oct 2018: Rocketing into top place is the cost of living. Stuck in the dull middle is renewables.
Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.
Split voters into left and right, and remarkably they all want the same things. (So we’re all still human, though it says something about the type of questions asked.)
Conservative / liberal voters want to be able to afford stuff, stay alive, have a home:
Liberal voters put renewables at number 10 out of 13.
Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.
Labor voters want to be able to afford stuff too:
Even Labor voters are only putting renewables at number 6.
Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.
The polarising media makes out we are all so different, but it’s remarkable how closely the answers matched. Nearly the same order, nearly the same percentage. Conservatives spread their answers more (are less homogeneous). They care more about state debt and terrorism, but whatever.
The message to Conservatives for the 58th time is that they can drop the whole Paris thing, the media will go crazy, but the public won’t. Obviously it’s no accident that Abbott, Trump and Dean all won. As for the 17% of conservatives who want renewables, that’ll vanish the moment our nation starts a discussion about how expensive they are, and how pointless. Over to you Scott….