While they typically didn’t have a comparatively modest Aussie winter in mind, philosophers and authors have long insisted that the cold weather can make us stronger. A couple of things were released in July that we thought were especially worth midwinter attention. At least for those out there who are primarily occupied by the task of helping make the Australian economy a much stronger one.
Our argument is that public opinion research reveals a “permission structure” for fiscal and economic reform that budget technocrats cannot establish alone.
Firstly, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) released some new research in July aimed at better understanding how Australians experience and understand our economic system, including public perceptions of the Bank itself. At JWS Research we substantially contributed to the Bank’s thinking via our surveying of the general community to inform their broader analysis. RBA Governor Michele Bullock also spoke about how if the role of the Bank is to serve the public, that starts with hearing what people are experiencing.
The topically adjacent paper to draw attention to (in a research context) was the Australian Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) releasing its 2026-27 Medium-Term Budget Outlook in mid-July. The report again warned that achieving a budget surplus relies heavily on tax bracket creep and optimistic structural assumptions. It also showed that surging costs in debt interest payments, defence expenditure and hospital spending offset a significant amount of the gains from the high-profile National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) policy adjustments that have been covered extensively in news media as ‘the big NDIS savings package’.
All of this is continuing to be carefully digested and debated by economists and public policy experts. What we wanted to draw some considered attention to is how carefully conducted public opinion research can be a navigational complement in a complex economic analysis and decision-making environment.
What Australians are actually worried about
Let’s initially concentrate on the RBA research. The surveying we conducted for the central bank very clearly showed the primary concern for people in relation to the Australian economy remains inflation and the price of goods and services. It is not just that this is the major concern but that it is so by a huge margin compared to anything else. A third of the population pick inflation and prices as their number one worry, compared to just over one in ten for housing, which is the next biggest. It also dominates on a broader measure: 70% of the country rate inflation as a top three economic issue, compared to 41% for the housing market and 29% who pick the impact of global events.
A closer look at the RBA commissioned work reveals a penetrating insight: Australians are now significantly more concerned about government spending than climate change as an economic issue. Back in the spring of last year (September 2025) these issue areas were of equal concern. As winter approached this year, government spending had overtaken climate change as a comparatively bigger worry.
What’s the key research takeaway? When more people want government to focus on addressing inflation than on an existential issue like climate change, and concern about government spending is similarly elevated, it signals a shift in the policy environment. The conditions are now in place for a far more serious national conversation about fiscal policy. That conversation needs to focus on which areas of government spending can realistically be reduced through savings measures that may not be popular but are likely to be accepted by most Australians as necessary.
It is here we turn to some specific passages within the July PBO report that urged spending restraint and revenue raising caution. Specifically, it said: “The design of spending programs will need to be done in a way so as to avoid the kind of rapid growth seen in the NDIS. On the other side of the ledger, revenue will need to be raised with an awareness of its impact on productivity and growth.”
The public's underappreciated appetite for fiscal discipline
What the PBO warns here does not actually confront much challenge when held up to the light of public opinion, if anything it is encouraged to become official policy. When our regular True Issues surveying tested the NDIS savings in the immediate aftermath of the May 2026 Federal Budget it secured net support of +27 points (49% support and 22% oppose). By comparison the Capital Gains Tax Discount changes announced in the Budget – which have since broadly been interpreted as likely to have a negative impact on economic growth – secured net support of +0.5 points (i.e. basically break even).
These insights are supported through a more retrospective research lens too. When True Issues asked the general population in August 2024 if the NDIS should be scaled down to be only available for severe and permanent disabilities (a tough call), a majority 56% said it should. In September last year when we asked people if they would back the task of making savings in the budget to address the deficit and reduce interest costs on our national debt, 58% of the community said they would give that support. And importantly, there is a sharp increase in support (to 72%) among those who have definitely heard about our debt and deficit situation – the very thing the PBO has sought to draw greater attention to this winter in its medium-term outlook.
Indeed, in February of this year when we asked via True Issues if Federal Government spending is likely to place pressure on future generations as they become taxpayers, 65% of the population agreed, an increase of 10 points on where that level of agreement sat back in May 2024. And when we asked in February if Australians would be prepared to accept some financial pain in order to improve our budget and reduce public debt only a third (37%) disagreed, with the remaining two thirds either saying they agreed some financial pain was necessary or at least being potentially open to the proposition.
The data itself doesn’t prescribe a policy path. Our reading of it, however, is that when set against the RBA research referred to above, it is hard not to be convinced that policy makers ought to become much fiscally bolder. To steel themselves to make tough decisions aimed at reining in inflation and curbing the extent of public spending that we have seen become the norm in recent years.
The PBO made this observation too: “Spending on many grant programs are also assumed to decline significantly through the forward estimates period as a share of GDP. Assumed declines of this size are common in budget projections but they have never eventuated due to governments later announcing new programs or extensions to terminating programs.”
From a research standpoint it begs the question of how many, and what type of, spending programs that are currently set to terminate should in fact be allowed to do so by policy decision makers. The time may well have come, even in the court of public opinion, to allow taxpayer funded measures that were initiated with a shelf-life to actually be taken off the shelf. Determining which spending areas are less likely to face public backlash if they are allowed to end is what good research helps solve. We know that confidence is deteriorating in the nation’s economic direction: at net -40 points (13% right direction, 53% wrong direction) it is now at the worst level we have ever recorded in 42 waves of national True Issues surveying.
Trust is the real constraint, not consensus
Yet the underlying values posture is there to talk with Australians openly and maturely about our national economic circumstances and what we need to do. And quite evidently our economic circumstances require a renewed vigour for productivity and growth-based policy reform. When we asked in our RBA benchmarking research whether people think it is important to keep up to date with news about the Australian economy, a very healthy 82% agreed. However, at 61%, there is a much lower proportion that feel they have a good understanding of how the Australian economy works. The accompanying RBA research note stipulates that one reason public trust is critical for central banks is that it can influence expectations. Our public opinion research has shown this applies to fiscal policy decision makers too. The bottom line here is honesty and transparency.
If we want to emerge out of the winter of discontent our national economy has been experiencing for many years now, and find the economic strength that has characterised the Australian story for most of its modern history, we need to expand the themes captured by the RBA and the PBO into a genuine household conversational realm. When everyday Australians are asked about the propositions of tough economic policy, they are more encouragingly open minded than is often first assumed.
The Reserve Bank’s ‘Listening to Australians’ report: “Trust reflects people’s beliefs about whether institutions behave as expected and deliver the outcomes they are accountable for. This is, in turn, shaped by how people perceive decision-making processes and institutional behaviour.”
From an issue polling and public opinion research perspective, we regrettably observe that institutional trust today is very low and that is a big challenge. But with evidence-backed optimism we urge that it can be rebuilt through clear communications, smart expectation management and sound economic policy follow through. The question is not whether we get on with it, but how to do it successfully.
