Australian voters’ attitudes to climate action and their social-political determinants

RESEARCH ARTICLE Australian voters’ attitudes to climate action and their social-political determinants R. M. ColvinID*, Frank Jotzo Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Acton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia * Rebecca.Colvin@anu.edu.au Abstract Australia is a relative laggard on climate policy, amidst social and political fractures despite rising support for climate policy in opinion polls. In the 2019 Australian federal election, which was dubbed the ‘climate election’, the opposition campaigned on comparatively ambi- tious climate action but the government was returned on a status quo policy. We explore the social-political determinants of climate attitudes and how they are positioned in relation to voting behaviour, in the context of the 2019 election. We use a large nationally representa- tive survey of Australian voters (n = 2,033), and employ univariate and multivariate ordinal logistic regression models to uncover correlates. We find that a large majority of voters think it is important for Australia to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, the importance given to emissions reductions is sharply divided along lines of political party preference. Holding pro-climate action attitudes consistently correlates with voting for progressive politi- cal parties and having higher levels of education. We also find a strong age cohort divide, with younger people holding stronger pro-climate attitudes than older people, raising the question whether we are seeing the emergence of a new generation expressing strong pro-

climate action and progressive political attitudes that will persist over time. We conduct pop- ulation ageing scenarios to project changes to public opinion, by age group, into the future. These indicate that strong support for climate action would increase by about four percent- age points over the coming decade as younger voters replace the old, if attitudes within cohorts remained fixed. We conclude that while cleavages in climate attitudes in Australia are set to continue, efforts to promote climate delay are bound to have a limited shelf life as a growing majority of voters accepts the need for climate action. Introduction Australia, politically and socially, has been failing to achieve, or even seek, a consensus approach to climate policy for over a decade. Climate change has been a prominent and con- tentious political issue, was central to several election campaigns, and implicated in the over- turn of multiple Prime Ministers [1–3]. These political fractures are reflected in Australian public opinion, with social divides on climate change following demographic and political cleavages [4]. Research from the mid-2010s positions Australia as second only to the United States in terms of how divided along left-right political lines are attitudes toward climate PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248268 March 24, 2021 1 / 18 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Colvin RM, Jotzo F (2021) Australian voters’ attitudes to climate action and their social- political determinants. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0248268.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248268 Editor: Ghaffar Ali, Shenzhen University, CHINA Received: December 17, 2020 Accepted: February 24, 2021 Published: March 24, 2021 Copyright: © 2021 Colvin, Jotzo. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files. Funding: Funding for this research was provided by the Australian-German Energy Transition Hub (https://www.energy-transition-hub.org/). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.