Roy Morgan Update May 2, 2023 – Federal Voting Intention, Consumer Confidence, Inflation Expectations, NZ Voting Intention & Unpaid Domestic Work

In this week's Market Research Update, we present the latest data on Federal Voting Intention, Consumer Confidence, Inflation Expectations, New Zealand Voting & Analysis of Unpaid Domestic Work.

Hosted by Roy Morgan CEO, Michele Levine.

Roy Morgan Key Weekly Indicators - Federal Voting Intention, Government Confidence & Consumer Confidence

There have been some interesting political and economic movements this week – economic indicators are up while support for the government is down.

As we know, typically support for the Government goes up when Consumer Confidence goes up.
This week the economic and political indicators have diverged.

Support for the Albanese Government is down, not because we’re worried about economic issues, but due to a drop in preference flow from supporters of other parties and independents.

In particular this includes a lower preference flow from the Greens as the two parties disagree on several key policies such as:

• The Greens calling for an across the board increase to JobSeeker while the ALP has only committed to an increase for Australians aged 55+;
• Housing strategy – The Greens have blocked the passage of Labor’s $10 billion social housing bill in the Senate;
• A rent freeze – The Greens have called for a two year rent freeze to deal with soaring housing costs of renters.

In terms of primary support the ALP was virtually unchanged this week but the Coalition increased its primary support by 2% points.

This was reflected in the two-party preferred result – with the ALP on 53.5%, down 3% points on a week ago compared to the Coalition on 46.5%.

In line with the drop in overall support, Government Confidence has fallen again, down 1 point to 89.5.

Now 47% of Australians say the country is ‘Heading in the Wrong Direction’ and only 36.5% say ‘the Right Direction’.

As mentioned earlier, consumer economic indicators improved this week.

The ANZ-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence Rating was up 1.8 points to 79.8 ahead of the Reserve Bank interest rate decision today and next week’s Federal Budget.

Lower than expected inflation numbers from the ABS last week, suggesting there may be no RBA interest rate increase today, would have helped Consumer Confidence.

The RBA’s decision today to increase official interest rates by +0.25% to 3.85% (an 11-year high) will clearly have an impact on what happens to Consumer Confidence over the next week.