With budget season over, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey has pulled well ahead of Treasurer Wayne Swan as trusted economic manager, today’s Essential Report shows. However, the Coalition’s hostility to the Gonski education reforms is not popular with voters and, for the first time, voter views on the government’s carbon price scheme are evenly split.

Before the budget, Hockey edged Swan as more trusted to handle the economy 35-32%. After Swan’s sixth budget a fortnight ago and Hockey’s reply last week, he now leads Swan 37-28%.

Some 43% of voters believe Opposition Leader Tony Abbott should implement the Gonski education funding reforms, which would establish a set level of funding for every student in the country, supplemented as necessary by loadings to address different forms of disadvantage, compared with 34% who believe he should stick with the existing model in which Commonwealth funding is skewed to private school. Some 26% of Liberal voters believe Abbott should accept the Gonski reforms, while 18% of Labor voters think Abbott should retain the status quo. The results suggest that, to the extent that Labor is capable of getting its message through any more, Gonski remains a potential fruitful area to improve its vote, given education is routinely identified by voters as one of their top three or four issues.

Labor’s primary vote fell a point to 34%, while the Coalition remained steady on 48% and the Greens remained on 8%, for an unchanged two-party preferred outcome of 55-45%. The Greens now look in real trouble, having slipped bit by bit from double figures, first to 9%, and now 8% over recent weeks, suggesting a sustained slide in their vote. This is the third week they’ve been outpolled by Others/Independents.

However, climate scepticism has now fallen to its lowest level since before the 2009 Copenhagen conference, with 35% of voters saying climate change is simply a normal fluctuation, compared with 51% who say it is caused by humans. Climate scepticism is still conservative territory: 50% of Liberal voters believed it is simply a natural fluctation, compared with 38% who believe it is caused by humans.

Moreover, the carbon price, now nearly 12 months old, now appears to be gaining acceptance. For the first time since Essential began asking about first the government’s plans for a carbon price in 2011 and then the scheme itself after mid-2012, support and opposition are evenly split on 43%, a significant turnaround from 37% support and 50% opposition in January. Meanwhile, 22% of Liberal voters support the carbon price while 18% of Labor voters oppose it.

Moreover, when compared with the Coalition’s policy of “Direct Action”, involving paying polluters to reduce emissions, a carbon price is preferred 39-29%, rather an indictment of opposition climate change spokesman Greg Hunt’s inept selling of the deeply troubled “Direct Action” scheme, given voters’ longstanding hostility to the carbon price.

And interestingly, only 26% of voters actually believe Tony Abbott will fulfill his commitment to axe both the mining tax and carbon price and keep the compensation linked to the latter, as he promised in his budget reply speech. Some 29% believe he won’t keep the compensation, and 28% don’t believe he’ll dump the mining tax and carbon price.

The Gillard government might appear doomed, but it seems the Coalition is having difficulty convincing voters about its policies.