Two-thirds of Aussies lose confidence in Morrison Government

The Australian National University’s latest longitudinal survey of wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic, conducted at the end of January, shows that confidence in the Morrison Government has plunged to only 34.5% – its lowest reading since the Black Summer Bushfires:

In January 2022 only 34.5 per cent of adult Australians had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the federal government. This is down from a peak of 60.6 per cent in May 2020, and only slightly above the 27.3 per cent observed prior to the pandemic during the Black Summer bush fires…

One of the potential reasons for the drop in satisfaction with the direction of the country is that Australians feel that key institutions are not handling the pandemic as well as they have in the past, or as well as they should be doing given the current circumstances. One of the aspects of the pandemic in Australia and some other countries, at least early on, is that it provided what has turned out to be a temporary boost to confidence in government and other institutions, as the general public saw that policy settings were on balance leading to much better outcomes than were being observed in other countries, or might have been the case in Australia. As shown in Figure 11, however, this confidence has gradually eroded such that by January 2022 only 34.5 per cent of adult Australians had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the federal government. This is down from a peak of 60.6 per cent in May 2020, and only slightly above the 27.3 per cent observed prior to the pandemic during the Black Summer bush fires…