Australian Social Attitudes IV is the latest in a series begun in 2005 tracking public opinion. The series aims to communicate with an academic and a broader public about changes in Australian society through a systematic analysis of public opinion surveys. It also aims to address some of the interests and apprehensions of Australians from all walks of life, and to present analysis in ways that make sense of the society around us.

This volume focuses on Australian insecurities. These include, for example, the frustrations and hardships that arise out of insecure work and an unequal economy. And they include the hostilities, confusions and doubts that mark our inability to forge consensus on pressing social challenges – adequate responses to climate change, recognition of social diversity, and the development of inclusive and trusted national institutions.

When the series began, Australia was in the middle of an unprecedented resources boom presided over by a Coalition prime minister who was close to celebrating a decade in office. Within a few years, John Howard was swept aside by a mood for change and an emphatic rejection of WorkChoices industrial relations reforms that voters judged as unfair.

While many Australians would remember the Howard years as a period of temperance, stability and prosperity, others would see it as a time of contentious immigration politics, clashes with unions, and involvement in damaging global conflicts. The Howard government’s economic legacy was considered among the strongest of recent governments. Nevertheless, critics argued later that it had cut taxes too far to sustain balanced budgets into the future. In any case, the Howard years were ones of marked political stability at the top, like the Hawke and Keating years that had preceded them. Between 1983 and 2007 – just under a quarter of a century – Australia had just three prime ministers.

The years since the departure of John Howard from the national political scene have involved much more political uncertainty on some key ‘indicators’. In 2017, for example, only one state premier had been in office more than three years. And, in the four years between the middle of 2013 and the middle of 2017, Australia had four different prime ministers, with governments on both sides replacing national leaders during their first term in office. Both of these governments survived the subsequent national elections with extremely small margins, with Gillard Labor governing in a minority parliament and the Turnbull Coalition winning the barest of majorities (76 seats from 150).

On the policy level, there has been intense and even bitter partisanship on industrial relations and climate policies. At the same time, a new bipartisanship has emerged in favour of offshore detention and ‘border protection’, replacing the major divisions over the Howard government’s Pacific Solution and the Rudd Labor government’s dismantling of that policy. Not surprisingly, as politics and policy have failed to overcome real social and economic divisions, new political actors have flourished. With around 8 to 10 per cent of the national vote, the Greens are now a permanent force on the environmental and socially liberal left. One Nation has returned as the main vehicle for right-wing populism, currently polling at similar levels to the Greens. The two major parties gained just 77 per cent of the federal vote in the House of Representatives in 2016, down from 85 per cent in 2007. Still, this vote share remains high in comparative terms, and Labor and the Coalition continue to win the overwhelming share of seats in the federal parliament.

The ‘new instability’ facing Australia has two discernible and interlocking features, one relating to the national economy and the other to global insecurities. The first is economic insecurity and slower economic growth. The Rudd Labor government’s fiscal stimulus helped Australia through the Global Financial Crisis in 2009, but the slow decline of the terms of trade and the end of the resources boom have meant painful adjustments in Western Australia and Queensland in particular, as well as in many regional centres. Unemployment has risen only slightly since 2007 on official figures, but the labour market continues to fragment into insecure and part-time employment that undermines financial security for many (Stanford 2016; ME Bank 2017). These insecurities are compounded by the extraordinarily high housing costs in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. Australians now borrow vast sums to remain in cities where there are jobs and opportunity. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that measures of income distribution indicate that Australia is more unequal than it has been in many decades. The same analysis suggests that many of the equality gains of the post–World War Two era have been eroded (Knight and Biddle 2015).

The second insecurity relates to the global geopolitical context. Although the Obama years promised greater peace, upheavals in the Middle East and the constant threat of extremist violence in Europe and the United States continued to dominate politics. In turn, these insecurities have fuelled right-wing populism and calls for ever-greater efforts to defend national borders and detect sources of potential terrorist aggression. The victory of Donald J. Trump in November 2016 was a turning point for the success for such populism. The president campaigned hard on the theme of emboldening America to ‘get tough’ on a range of problems that apparently plagued it, from the sociocultural and security threats of risky immigration policies to the decline of American manufacturing. Disaffected Americans responded. At the same time, right-wing populism has swept through Europe, forcefully in some countries like Hungary and Poland. Similar forces threaten to remake the political framework of many other European Union member states, even if right-wing populists continue to fall short of national electoral triumphs.

These contexts are in some ways not new. They reflect severe and persistent tensions in geopolitics and in the global economic order. In Australia, themes of global insecurity have resonated in policies on ‘border protection’, in immigration and asylum seeker policy (the Operation Sovereign Borders policy of the Coalition), and in amplified political discourse about threats facing Australia. Such discourses are now active across a wide political space, but are most potent when parties like One Nation, who seek restrictions on immigration and a ban on so-called Muslim immigration, take them up.

Insecurities, trust and risks in Australia – contributions to this volume

In developing the chapters for this volume, authors were given a wide brief to interpret these developments in their areas of expertise, exploring insecurities as they relate to sociocultural identities, the economy and employment, and electoral responses to changing national circumstances. The choice to focus on insecurities was further justified by some interesting results reported for the Australian Election Study (AES) 2016 (Belot 2016; Cameron and McAllister 2016). After a long period of stability, AES 2016 picked up signs of deteriorating political trust in Australia. Study author Ian McAllister noted at the time: ‘What we are seeing in Australia are the beginnings of a popular disaffection with the political class that has emerged so dramatically in Britain, United States and Italy’ (Belot 2016). Several chapters in this volume draw connections between insecurities and such disaffections as they manifest in falling trust, populist voting patterns, suspicions about climate science, and hostilities to immigration. However, the Australian Social Attitudes series has a wider ambition. It also aims to keep track of broader changes in Australian society, or at least the expression of those changes as stated by thousands of Australians who respond to social surveys.

The rest of this Introduction describes the main content and findings of the individual chapter contributions, identifying broader thematic continuities where they emerge. The logical place to start is Clive Bean’s analysis in Chapter 1 of recent trends in political trust in Australia. Bean acknowledges the most recent decline in political trust is an interesting and unsettling development. Nevertheless, he is cautious about drawing conclusions about the future based on the most recent data. Bean is able to demonstrate that political trust is somewhat dependent on the political cycle – old governments reduce it, new governments restore it. Time will tell if these declines turn out to be more secular and long-term, and bring with them some of the syndromes of ‘low-trust politics’. Bean also addresses the complex relationship between political trust and different dimensions of insecurity – cultural, socioeconomic, and military/geopolitical. It turns out that insecurities tend to undermine trust in the predicted fashion. Worried and stressed citizens are less trusting of governments and politicians. Nevertheless, sociocultural insecurities (related to perceptions of immigration) turn out to have the largest impact on the erosion of political trust in Australia. Not surprisingly, immigration politics is central to the insecurities described in this book.

Chapter 2 by Shaun Ratcliff offers a synoptic account of federal election results from 2016, using a large post-election study conducted by VoxPop Labs. This huge dataset provides Ratcliff with a sufficiently large sample to explore political-sociological trends in voting behaviour right across the political spectrum. He explores the data in detail, to look for explanations for the rising vote for minor parties (many of which are protest parties). He finds that a ‘representation gap’ – where voter preferences are not adequately reflected in the platforms of either major party – drives support for the Greens, the ‘micro left’, the Christian right, and populist right parties. The diversity and complexity of the interests and value commitments of voters appear to be driving the fragmentation of voter blocs for the established parties. For example, Ratcliff shows that voters for the populist right are to the right of the Coalition on social issues, but slightly to the left on economics. Such a policy space is not well represented by either major party. Whether the fragmentation of major voter blocs will continue is a matter for speculation. The UK election of 2017, where voters faced a genuine left–right choice, saw a strong return to two-party voting.

In Chapter 3, Shaun Wilson looks at trends in public opinion in one policy area that has produced enormous division in Australia and elsewhere, that of immigration and policy responses to refugees and asylum seekers. Australia for some time now has maintained a ‘balancing act’ of high migration and tough ‘border protection’ policies. Wilson finds that, in fact, anti-immigration sentiment has cooled, and argues that this is limiting opportunities for right-wing populism in Australia. In fact, younger voters, city-dwellers and even Coalition voters have all moved towards greater support for current immigration levels. Just as pro-immigration sentiment seems to have developed a broader constituency, policies towards refugees, boat arrivals and asylum seekers continue to polarise Australians. Here, the tough response developed in the Howard years won over voters in the battle of public opinion and at election time. However, Wilson points out that AES data suggests that there is now a permanent opposition to ‘boat turnbacks’ – one emblematic policy of hard-line border protection. He also suggests that hostility towards Muslims in Australia has not reached levels that suggest majority support for banning so-called ‘Muslim’ immigration – the policy position of One Nation.

Themes of declining trust are no more revelatory than in the area of the science of climate change. The Labor government of Kevin Rudd failed to secure parliamentary agreement for its carbon-trading scheme in 2009, and went on to abandon the proposal, much to the confusion and disappointment of many in the electorate. Later, when prime minister Julia Gillard introduced a ‘carbon tax’, her apparent about-face on a pre-election commitment not to do so steered her government into a political storm. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, a climate change sceptic, campaigned persistently on Gillard’s broken commitment. He then repealed the tax after winning office, even though the tax was judged as highly effective on the evidence.

Australians like to think of themselves as ultimately pragmatic and realistic people. They compare themselves favourably to the ‘crazy Americans’ who ‘believe in aliens’ and who, no doubt, also deny the realities of climate change. However, Bruce Tranter in Chapter 4 maintains that ‘Australians are among the most climate sceptical of people living in advanced industrialised countries’. He builds on his previous work in examining the drivers of what turns out to be a very high level of climate scepticism in Australia, when public opinion is measured comparatively. Partisan divides on this issue suggest that Coalition voters may have followed the lead of climate-sceptical leaders like John Howard and Tony Abbott in doubting climate science. But Tranter also notes strong patterns that relate media habits to climate scepticism: conservative media outlets in Australia play a role in Australia’s high incidence of scepticism. Tranter’s chapter ends, however, with advice about building consensus. He suggests that advocates of climate policies need to design policies that also appeal to conservatives, i.e. to highlight the growth and jobs potential of a robust renewable energy market.

Tranter notes that men are more likely to be climate sceptics than women. In Chapter 5, Katrine Beauregard makes further sociological sense of the 2016 election by pinpointing factors behind a clear ‘gender gap’ in voting. Although modern gender-based voting, where women vote on the centre-left and men on the centre-right, has been observed in (for example) the United States for some time, such a gap has not been particularly apparent in Australia. That changed decisively in 2016, with more women voting Labor (in two-party terms) and more men voting for the Coalition. Beauregard looks for explanations. Clearly, women have better education and work opportunities than in the past (although the gender pay gap remains disturbingly high) and these two trends are accelerating women’s identification with centre-left politics. At the same time, women have more ‘progressive’ issue preferences on social welfare policies that more closely align with current Labor policy positions than Coalition ones.

Running parallel to the gender-voting gap are divisions in the pattern of women’s parliamentary representation, with the Coalition further lagging behind Labor. The clear implication is that Labor’s quota system is working to bring about gender equity, and that women are more supportive than men of various forms of affirmative action. Beauregard’s findings hint at an important implication for the Coalition: a greater commitment to the policies of gender equality as well as efforts to increase women’s representation in politics might help rebuild their support among women.

Chapter 6 continues the focus on the changing political sociology of the national electorate. Ian McAllister and Toni Makkai settle some important debates about what kind of Australians have voted Labor and Coalition over the past few decades. After detailed consideration of possible definitions for both groups, the authors settle on a definition of ‘battlers’ as low-income voters reporting poor household finances. By contrast, ‘aspirationals’ are defined by their orientations towards an economic model of low taxes that also contains the activities of unions. McAllister and Makkai find something startling about the battlers who turned to John Howard in 1996: ‘the stereotypical Howard battler invented by Andrew Robb in 1996 just as rapidly defected from the Liberals in 1998 and did not return for another five elections’. By contrast, aspirationals stayed loyal to the Coalition, though importantly the authors note that, on their definition, these voters are now a smaller share of the electorate as attitudes to lowering taxes and curbing unions have moderated. Taking these findings together, these results suggest that on a very contemporary definition of ‘class politics’ – voting by income level and attitudes to taxes, spending and unions – class continues to shape electoral outcomes. McAllister and Makkai’s analysis also suggests that Labor’s attempts to appeal to aspirationals (as they were urged to do in the 2000s) did not succeed and, more to the point, efforts to do so are now less important given the declining attitudinal basis for aspirational voting.

Given the heated partisan debates about clause 18C of the federal Racial Discrimination Act 1975, as well as a defence of civil disobedience by the secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Sally McManus, now is the time to consider how Australians compare on a range of questions about civil freedoms. In their comparative study of attitudes to freedom of assembly, Markus Hadler and Anja Eder use data from 34 countries in Chapter 7 to situate Australia. So: when it comes to tolerating the views of outsiders, even extremists, are Australians ‘liberal’ in comparative terms or do we want to keep extreme positions from flourishing or even being heard?

While the emphasis of this book is on the Australian context, data from the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes also feeds into the International Social Survey Programme (http://www.issp.org), which compiles similar data from almost 50 countries around the globe. The latest release of data from this program addressed attitudes towards citizenship, political attitudes, efficacy, and actions (see Scholz et al. 2017). Using International Social Survey Programme data for 2014 on these questions, Hadler and Eder find that Australians sit somewhere in the middle. The United States is the model ‘liberal’ country in allowing freedom of expression. Countries like Austria and the Netherlands, with a history of fascist politics and occupation (and in the Dutch case a high level of ethnic conflict) are much less tolerant. Australia is rated as more tolerant than most European countries, with the authors attributing this to Australia’s participatory democratic life and, despite its multiculturalism, low levels of ethnic fragmentation. When it comes to accounting for social divides in Australia about allowing freedom of assembly, they find that city-dwellers, Greens, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and better-educated citizens emerge as more tolerant – and, interestingly, men emerged as more tolerant than women on these measures.

In Chapter 8, Murray Goot continues to build on his explorations of Australian opinion and election polling. His close overview of polling activities in recent elections, particularly the 2016 federal election, detects something peculiar and worrying: Australian commercial polling (when compared to polling activities in the United Kingdom) is almost singularly focused on voting intentions. It has disengaged, according to Goot, from the regular and detailed survey of voter policy preferences. He concludes: ‘the very limited attempt by the polling organisations to determine respondents’ views on different issue positions signifies the collapse of the Gallup model’.

Goot considers this shortcoming a loss of faith (on the part of poll-commissioning media organisations) in the valuable role that polls can play in the process through which politicians and voters alike come to understand their own and their electorate’s policy interests. We note in passing that there is a promising focus on policy preferences of voters in newer commercial polls like the Essential Poll and in the ABC’s Vote Compass survey conducted at election time. It is also pleasing that there is a greater range of academic surveys on offer that include issue polling – for example, ANUPoll, the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, the Australian Election Study, and the Scanlon Foundation’s polling on immigration and multiculturalism.

The final two chapters break with a considerable focus in this book on the 2016 election. These analyses focus on shifting social attitudes on two important institutions – the monarchy and marriage. In one sense, these topics share a common theme. Efforts both to replace the monarchy (with a republic) and to legislate for gay marriage have either been checked by public opinion or partisan division. The public ultimately sided with monarchists in rejecting change in the 1999 referendum on the republic, and gay marriage reform was hindered by divisions in federal politics, particularly within the ruling Coalition until its legalisation in December 2017.

In Chapter 9, Luke Mansillo tracks the remarkable decline in pro-republic sentiment among voters and the revival in support for Australia remaining a constitutional monarchy with the Queen as head of state. In recalling earlier predictions of a ‘rising tide’ of voters in favour of the republic as younger republicans replaced older monarchists, Mansillo endeavours to explain why such a trend has not been sustained. In a fascinating discovery, he identifies the ‘Whitlam generation’ (voters who first voted in the years of the Whitlam government and who were politically socialised at the time of the dismissal in 1975) as the most pro-republican generation. Their ‘progressiveness’ on the question of replacing the monarchy is all the more remarkable because the Whitlam generation does not hold more socially progressive attitudes on other issues. In accounting for the loss of republican enthusiasm, Mansillo identifies the revival of the monarchy as an institution in the United Kingdom and the failure of the republican movement to absorb younger and less-engaged voters in pressing its cause. No doubt, an insecure and uncertain Australia is also not one likely to find much success in changing its constitutional institutions without stronger national leadership on this question.

Finally, Ann Evans and Edith Gray focus their efforts in Chapter 10 on changing social attitudes to marriage and family. In noting a continuing overall downward trend in the marriage rate, Evans and Gray’s analysis finds that that marriage is still a ‘high prestige’ institution – even if Australians are less inclined to believe that marriage brings happiness or that marriage is preferable when couples have children. There is an emerging socioeconomic dimension to marriage, with the marriage rates of lower-income and less well-educated Australians dropping faster as job security and home ownership become harder to achieve. In building on research findings in the area, Evans and Gray do not suggest that marriage will disappear or appear ‘outdated’. Rather, they suggest that attitudes to marriage are becoming less ‘institutionalised’ and now tolerate greater flexibility about the place of marriage.

The use of surveys and data in this volume

This book draws on data from a wide range of national and international social and political surveys as well as some commercial opinion polling from Australia and overseas. Some of the most widely used surveys include the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA), the Australian Election Study (AES), the (Survey of) Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA), results from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), the National Social Science Survey (NSSS), and the large post-election survey for the 2016 federal election conducted by VoxPop Labs. Several contributors (for example, Wilson in Chapter 3 and Goot in Chapter 8) also rely on a range of quality commercial polling from Australia and overseas to develop their analyses. The mode of data collection involved in these surveys varies considerably, but increasingly, academic surveys are using online methods to obtain samples. In all instances, teams of experienced social scientists develop the survey questionnaires and the fieldwork depends on ethics processes at the host universities.

Survey data has its limitations – questions are open to interpretation, issues are so complex that they can require multiple questions to measure with adequate validity, and respondents have reasons to give socially desirable answers to surveys or to ignore the requests of desperate field workers to complete their questionnaires. Moreover, even when this data is collected using stratified random sampling with large samples, it is subject not only to sample error but also to sample biases consistent with differing response rates across diverse and sometimes disengaged communities. The researchers who have contributed to this volume are aware of these limitations; and they have used the data with these limits in mind. In more recent years, researchers have had to deal with declining response rates. Accordingly, sample weights are more frequently applied, especially when reporting ‘headline’ data. The use of statistics and professional judgement helps compensate for some of these problems, but matters of interpretation and emphasis are always involved and rightly the subject of debate and discussion in the community of scholars and in the public sphere. As we have discovered over the years of producing these volumes, much of the interesting analysis emerges when responses are compared over time and compared with results from other nations. Through these comparisons, we get a greater sense of how Australia is situated globally, where we have come from, and a few hints about what the future may bring.

Acknowledgements of our colleagues

This book is the result of the timely and professional work of our chapter contributors located at the Australian National University, Macquarie University, Queensland University of Technology, the University of Graz, the University of Sydney and the University of Tasmania. We could not have asked for a more cooperative set of authors. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the staff at Sydney University Press, particularly Susan Murray, Agata Mrva-Montoya, and Denise O’Dea. We express our gratitude for the support of the Public and Social Policy Series editors, Professor Marian Baird and Associate Professor Gaby Ramia, both of the University of Sydney. We would like to thank our copyeditor, Beth Battrick, for her editorial advice and Edith Lanser, administrative assistant to the research group on international comparative research in the Department of Sociology, University of Graz, for her assistance in preparing this manuscript. We are grateful to the Faculty of Arts of Macquarie University for the support, time and resources that allowed us to continue this book series into a fourth volume.

The Introduction is also the place to acknowledge two retirements among our long-time collaborators in the public opinion research community in Australia. We acknowledge the distinguished contributions of Professor Murray Goot of Macquarie University and Professor David Denemark of the University of Western Australia. Known for his remarkable curiosity about Australian history, and his determination to present facts frankly, Murray has shaped writings on Australian politics for decades. Modest and thoughtful of others at all times, David has been an outstanding collaborator in major comparative political science projects that continue to the present. We hope, and fully expect, that retirement from teaching will not mean an end to their fantastic contributions to social and political research.

Finally, it is with much sadness that we put together this volume without the contribution of Professor Bill Martin of the University of Queensland and formerly long-time Flinders University sociologist. Involved in Australian Social Attitudes from the beginning, Bill was invited to contribute to this book just before he became ill and, unfortunately, was not able to add anything further from his ongoing program of research into the Australian workplace. This volume is weaker without his input. Bill’s loss is mourned by all of us. We will remember him as a decent and warm human being as well as an insightful, critical and professional sociologist.

We dedicate this book to Bill’s memory.

References