From our ‘Thinking outside the box’ series, Dr Andrea Pellegrini and Professor John Rose share that to ask people whether they care about climate action, better public transport, safer roads, or stronger hospitals and you’ll likely get an enthusiastic “yes” to all of the above. The challenge is that government doesn’t get to fund all of the above, or at least not at the scale everyone wants. Budgets are constrained, and priorities compete with each other.

Right here is where conventional surveys can mislead. Standard polling often captures support in isolation, detached from the reality of trade-offs. The modern toolkit of survey research has become increasingly sophisticated, but it still tends to tackle one question at a time. When everything sounds important, nothing is forced to compete, and yet public policy is exactly that, competition for scarce resources. In this context, participatory budgeting, a novel research paradigm, has changed how we ask questions from what people say they want to what they will choose when money is limited.

It treats the general public as decision-makers, who can’t tick every box, so what comes first? The complication is that participatory budgeting in its full form can be a long tedious exercise, which is why researchers have been developing lighter survey-based versions while still being able to measure salient trade-offs.

One of these versions is represented by the budgetary game, a structured exercise where respondents must spread a fixed pool of resources across competing categories. Researchers have used variants of this approach in different settings, and the logic is simple, when people see the whole budget picture, their preferences can shift because the “opportunity cost” becomes visible.

Transport electrification is often framed as necessary for emissions reduction and increasingly enabled by technological advancements. The problem is that “necessary” is not the same as “top priority”, especially when households are juggling cost-of-living pressure and governments are juggling everything else.

Australia’s transport emissions have been rising over the past two decades, and electrification is widely seen as a key pathway to net zero. Yet Australia still lags behind many countries, particularly outside passenger cars, and the policy package required to accelerate the transition (charging networks, grid coordination, incentives) competes directly with the services people rely on day to day, hospitals, schools, utilities, and roads, just to name a few. So the question becomes “when you force people to spend a fixed public budget, where does electrification actually land?”

Our recent study¹ asked NSW residents to do something politicians rarely ask explicitly. That is, allocate a finite budget across a portfolio of public projects. The survey was run online, with participants recruited to broadly reflect NSW demographics in gender, age and education.

After data-quality screening, the final sample included 727 NSW residents, surveyed between 28 January and 28 February 2025. Participants completed a constant-sum budget allocation task where they were given 100 points (representing shares of a fixed government budget) and asked to distribute them across 12 project types. They could put everything into one bucket or spread it out, and more importantly, they could assign zero to any category, but the total had to add up to 100.

The portfolio included both transport and non-transport options to capture broader public spending sentiment. Alongside healthcare, utilities, education and roads were public transport, parks and recreation, policing, arts and museums, sports facilities, and three separate electrification pathways (private vehicles, freight vehicles, and public transport electrification).

The results suggest that electrification is not a majority “first priority”. When NSW residents had to make trade-offs, the winners were the essentials. Healthcare attracted the strongest support with over 90 percent of respondents allocating it a non-zero budget share, and it also received the largest average allocation among those who funded it. Utilities and road infrastructure followed closely in participation and priority, with education also ranking near the top.

Transport electrification, by contrast, sat noticeably lower in the hierarchy. Across the three electrification options, fewer respondents allocated money than for the top core services, and the average conditional shares were smaller. In other words, electrification was not treated as a dominant spending objective when placed next to hospitals, bills, roads and schools. When we look at the entire portfolio of transport projects, however, transport-related projects (including roads, public transport and electrification) make up about 36.3 percent of the expected budget share, while the electrification projects account for about 18.2 percent. So transport matters, but the “electrify transport” agenda is not perceived as the majority claim on transport investment.

Another key driver is household financial circumstances. Prioritising the decarbonisation of transport through electrification is strongly associated with households’ economic conditions. Individuals experiencing financial distress were less inclined to allocate substantial public resources to cutting transport emissions. The analysis also links electrification support to related behaviours and assets, suggesting that willingness to fund electrification is tied to whether the transition feels personally feasible and beneficial.

It’s tempting to treat electrification as a technical rollout problem. More chargers, more incentives, better supply. But the evidence here suggests the bottleneck is also social. People weigh electrification against immediate needs, and under financial pressure they tend to protect the essentials first. This doesn’t mean NSW residents are anti-electrification. It means that under a binding budget constraint, many residents prioritise basic services ahead of electrification, and support for electrification is unevenly distributed across the community.

For government, the implication is practical. If policymakers want the public to back the transition, they need to design it so electrification is seen as a core priority, not a secondary spend competing with hospitals and power bills.

Policy packages that improve perceived fairness and value, such as targeted support for financially vulnerable groups, visible enabling infrastructure, and complementary measures that deliver co-benefits people already value, are likely to matter. Electrification has to be credible, and in a world of constrained budgets, credibility often starts with affordability.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967070X26000193