Roy Morgan Update August 13, 2024: ALP & L-NP support at 50%, Consumer Confidence & Unemployment

In this week's update, we present the latest data on Primary Voting Intention, Consumer Confidence & Unemployment

Welcome to the Roy Morgan Weekly Update.

Australia concluded its most successful Olympic campaign of all time on the weekend – winning a record 18 gold medals and our Consumer Confidence improved. But the gloss did not rub off on the Albanese Government this week as local issues came to the fore – like unemployment.

And as we have been saying for weeks the big domestic issue has been the handling of the CFMEU administration. The Coalition are now calling for a Royal Commission to investigate allegations of corruption and potential criminality.

The Albanese Government’s tepid response to handling the CFMEU issue has clearly led to a loss of support.

The latest Roy Morgan survey shows if a Federal Election were held now the result would be too close to call – it’s 50:50.

The ALP is down 1.5% to 50% tied with the Coalition up 1.5% to 50% on a two-party preferred basis.

Either major party would require the support of minor parties and independents to form a minority government.

The result once again highlights the importance of preference flows to determine the overall two-party preferred result.

Government Confidence, whether people think the country is going in the right direction or the wrong direction was virtually unchanged this week; 53% of Australian say the country is going in the wrong direction, while only 31.5%, say the country is heading in the right direction.

This means Roy Morgan Government Confidence is well below the neutral level of 100 at 78.5.

ANZ-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence was up 2.6 points to 83.9 this week and has its highest four-week average since February.

Driving this week’s increase was improved confidence about the Australians’ personal finances after the Reserve Bank left interest rates unchanged.

Now 24% of Australians say they are ‘better off financially’ than this time a year ago (up 3%) and 32% say they expect to be ‘better off financially’ this time next year (up 2%).

The RBA’s decision, combined with our success in Paris, has clearly created positive momentum although longer-term Consumer Confidence has now spent a record 80 weeks (over to 18 months) below the level of 85.

This week Inflation Expectations were unchanged at 5.1%.

The ANZ-Roy Morgan Inflation Expectations indicator shows Australians expect annual inflation to be 5.1% per annum over the next two years.

Longer-term, Inflation Expectations have been remarkably stable and have stayed within a narrow band of 4.8% to 5.3% for 36 weeks (equivalent to more than eight months) since early December.

And today the ABS has released its latest figures for the Wage Price Index showing wages increasing at an annual rate of 4.1% for the June Quarter – unchanged from March Quarter, but slightly higher than the latest ABS annual inflation figures of 3.8%.

Now to employment and unemployment. There is bad news with the labour force in July.

Although over 14 million Australians are now employed (up 375,000 on a year ago) – that’s all about population growth.

The latest Roy Morgan headline real unemployment figure for July is up 1.8% to 10.1% - Roy Morgan estimates almost 1.6 million Australians are now unemployed – the highest figure so far this year.

There is also a continuing high level of ‘under-employment’ (part time workers wanting more hours) – now at 9.7% (up 0.7%) in July – now 1.53 million people are under-employed.

The overall figures show total unemployment and under-employment – what we might call workforce under-utilisation – was 19.8% of the workforce in July – over 3.1 million people.

This is the highest level of labour under-utilisation we have seen in the Australian workforce for nearly four years – since the early days of the pandemic in October 2020.

The figures for July are similar to those for April, two months earlier, with only a short-term boost to part-time employment provided by the Mid-Year sales period in May and June.

As I said earlier, this is the highest figure since the early days of the pandemic when millions of Australians were put out of work as stringent restrictions were implemented.

We are clearly facing a very different situation now with high inflation and interest rates and intense cost of living concerns for many Australians.