Majority say no to Charter, but 'ayes' close behind
A THREE-DAY text-message survey has found that respondents were almost evenly split on the whether People's Charter for Change, Peace and Progress would be good for Fiji.
The "nays" held the majority by a narrow margin of just 0.4 per cent.
This comes as around 46.2 percent of respondents (761) in this weekend's Txt Times survey disagreed with the plan to set up a People's Charter.
The three-day survey also found that 45.8 per cent (755) agreed that the Charter would be good for Fiji.
The survey, which ran from 8am Friday to 6pm Sunday, saw around 7.9 per cent of respondents (130) unclear in their response.
The survey was only available to prepay users of Vodafone and Inkk services.
The greater majority of respondents - 1141 people - were Vodafone prepay users (69.3 per cent) while Inkk users made up 30.7 per cent of the responses (505).
The statistics generated also showed an interesting difference between the users of the two types of prepay services.
Vodafone prepay users made up of a mixture of youth and more mature customers were more inclined to say that the Charter was not good for Fiji (49.4 per cent - 564).
Six per cent of Vodafone prepay respondents were unclear on the issue (68), while 44.6 percent agreed that the Charter would be good (509).
Some of the responses that disagreed with the Charter said: "It's a waste of time and taxpayers' money", "money spent on it could be better utilised in priority areas like health, education, road and sea transport and at this point in time not good. Only when elected Government in office, people will freely express and participate with clear conscience".
Inkk users on the other hand - made up mostly of the younger people were more inclined to agree that the Charter would be good for Fiji (48.7 per cent - 246).
Around 12.3 per cent of Inkk respondents (62) were unclear on the Charter, while 39 per cent did not agree with the Charter (197).
Some of the responses that agreed said: "If they can decrease the prices of goods and for them to think of the poor than I think it is yes", "because there will be peace in our environment" and "it should be possible so that we may progress in a successful way because if not crime will increase rapidly in Fiji".
Txt Times plans to run this survey again when post pay users are able to enter, as well as conduct similar surveys on other issues of national interest.