Australians want the rich taxed more, public spending on health and education increased, and their own tax rate left exactly where it is, according to a survey released on Friday.



In sharp contrast to measures in the federal budget, Australians polled by the thinktank Per Capita revealed a dramatic shift towards support for spending more on publicly funded services, and an increase in the perception that the nation’s wealthiest are not doing their fair share of the heavy lifting.

“Between 2010 and late 2012, our views of the tax system became steadily less generous – we felt increasingly that we were paying too much tax and our support for public spending, while high, was falling,” said the annual survey’s summary.

“These sentiments have now reversed … [Australians] now reject the approach to spending cuts mooted by the government’s commission of audit.”

The survey, conducted in February shortly after the first Commission of Audit report, found 70% of Australians think the government should spend more on public services. Just 8% believed it should spend less.

The survey also found that 53% of people believed they were paying the right amount of tax, an approximate 17% swing away from the proportion who believe they pay too much tax, when compared to the 2012 results.

“It’s a striking reversal from a pretty consistent trend across the first three years of the survey that saw Australians feeling less generous about their tax contributions, to a position now where people are saying, ‘We don’t feel over taxed and instead we want to make sure our public services are protected and expanded,’ ” Per Capita’s executive director, David Hetherington, told Guardian Australia.

The survey found that more than seven out of 10 people believe high income earners don’t pay their fair share, but the results revealed a level of “cognitive dissonance” among people who don’t think they count in the category.

Almost half the respondents who earned a high income and who said they paid too much tax also believed that other high income earners pay too little.

“We’ve seen over a number of years that high income earners’ perception of what a high income is in Australia aren’t well grounded,” Hetherington said. “People who are wealthy on an objective basis, don’t see themselves as wealthy or high income earning.”

“We did ask how people would like to see public services funded, and one of the responses was ‘higher income tax rates on the top 5% of earners’ and that was the most popular.”

Next in line, with 23%, was removal of tax concessions on superannuation and housing.

Hetherington said the survey occurred weeks outside the usual “policy wonk” discussion that heats up shortly before a federal budget, so it was unlikely people were influenced by speculation around what the treasurer, Joe Hockey, would reveal.

“However, I would say though that the broader political debate is a factor that affects the survey results,” he said.

“I think what it shows is that the government has misread the mood of the Australian people, and in particular misread the importance that people place on public services. We see a lot of talk about cost of living pressures, but one of the things that feeds into the way households perceive cost of living is access to high quality, low cost public services.

“If suddenly the kids’ Tafe course has gone up by a factor of four or five, we’re going to charge you $7 to go to the doctor, we are continuing to subsidise non government schools at the expense of public schools, I think people feel that.”

More than half of respondents said that if the government is to increase funding to public schools, it should be done by cutting spending on non-government schools.

