Queensland election 2015: Majority of Queenslanders support medical marijuana, Vote Compass finds

Updated

Queenslanders appear to be keen on joining their southern counterparts in legalising medicinal marijuana, according to results from the Vote Compass survey.

The largest poll of the voting public on the subject returned an emphatic verdict - three-quarters of the 69,196 respondents agreed with the idea of making marijuana legal for medicinal purposes.

There was a majority in favour among supporters of all the significant parties contesting Saturday's election.

There was also majority support within all age groups, religious groups and in both regional Queensland and the south-east corner.

Medicinal marijuana was an election issue in the Victorian state election in November, with the freshly installed Labor Government promising to legalise the practice by the end of 2015.

In New South Wales, Liberal Premier Mike Baird has gone one step further and has already promised to launch clinical trials by 2016 at a cost of $6 million.

But in Queensland the major parties seem to be lagging behind public sentiment.

Both Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie and Opposition Leader Annastacia Palaszczuk have said they want to wait for the outcome of clinical trials in other states before proceeding further.

Vote Compass also delivered a majority decision in the area of gay and lesbian rights.

When asked whether same-sex couples should have the right to adopt children, 55 per cent agreed.

Currently, same-sex couples are not allowed to adopt or have children through altruistic surrogacy.

However, they can become foster parents.

Age was a major factor in how respondents answered the survey with 58 per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds strongly agreeing compared to just 18 per cent of over 55s.

The move was also less popular in regional Queensland compared to the South East.

FAQ

What is this?

The ABC launched Vote Compass Queensland on Monday, January 12, in the lead-up to the state election.

It is a tool that allows voters to see how their views compare to the parties' policies.

The data was weighted across a range of demographic factors using the latest population estimates to be a true representation of opinion at the time of the field.

The findings are based on more than 69,000 respondents to Vote Compass from January 13 to January 25, 2015.

Vote Compass is not a random sample. Why are the results being represented as though it is a poll?

Vote Compass is not a poll. It is fundamentally an educational tool intended to promote electoral literacy and stimulate public engagement in the policy aspect of election campaigns.

That said, respondents' views as expressed through Vote Compass can add a meaningful dimension to our understanding of public attitudes and an innovative new medium for self-expression.

Ensuring that the public has a decipherable voice in the affairs of government is a critical function of a robust democracy.

Online surveys are inherently prone to selection bias but statisticians have long been able to correct for this (given the availability of certain variables) by drawing on population estimates such as Census micro-data.

The ABC applies sophisticated weighting techniques to the data to control for the selection effects of the sample, enabling us to make statistical inferences about the Australian population with a high degree of confidence.

How can you stop people from trying to game the system?

There are multiple safeguards in place to ensure the authenticity of each record in the dataset.

Vote Compass does not make its protocols in this regard public so as not to aid those that might attempt to exploit the system, but among standard safeguards such as IP address logging and cookie tracking, it also uses time codes and a series of other measures to prevent users from gaming the system.

Topics: elections, government-and-politics, qld

First posted