Murray Goot

One Nation's Electoral Support: Where Does It Come from, What Makes It Different and How Does It Fit?

This paper does three things. First, it offers a critique of the academic literature on the One Nation vote, focusing on the limitations of the work of political geographers and the methodological shortcomings of survey researchers. Second, it re-examines data from the 1998 Australian Election Study in order to explore the demographic and attitudinal forces that both drove the One Nation vote and distinguished it from the votes secured by the Labor Party, the Liberal and National parties and the Australian Democrats; this highlights the importance of gender, geography and class, of political alienation and of attitudes to Aborigines and immigration. Third, it suggests that the basis of One Nations mobilisation did not lie in concerns about economic insecurity so much as in opposition to ‘new class’ values, particularly around race. In doing so, it challenges common understandings of the Partys constituency and of its distinctiveness.

Party convergence reconsidered

That the major parties in Australia have converged is an idea of long standing. But proponents of the idea differ about when it happened, why it happened and what its consequences might be. In revisiting the party convergence thesis, this article does three things. First, it documents the recurrent nature of this thesis and its varying terms, arguing that claims of convergence: focus on some criteria while ignoring others; confuse movements in policy space with changes in party distance; and involve an implicit essentialism, so that any two parties that share an ideology are assumed to share policy positions that can be derived from that ideology. Second, it reviews studies of election speeches since the war, and studies of government expenditure patterns and tax schedules from Whitlam to Hawke, which cast doubt on, or heavily qualify, the idea that the parties have converged or lost their traditional distinctiveness. Third, it shows that on these matters the views of voters are closer to those of the policy analysts than to those of the pundits. Survey respondents continue to distinguish between the parties on particular policies and in Left–Right terms, they care who wins, and they think the party that wins matters.

Whose Mandate? Policy Promises, Strong Bicameralism and Polled Opinion

The political theory of Australian politics has been dominated, since the election of a Liberal-National Party government in 1996, by claims and counterclaims about electoral mandates. The government has privileged its position in the House of Representatives; opposition parties have pointed to their support in the Senate. This paper provides a historical re-examination of the meanings and merits of mandate theories; it outlines the difficulties posed by strong bicameralism for any mandate theory; and it shows how the rise of survey research has strengthened some claims to a mandate, especially in bicameral systems, while weakening others.

Public Opinion, Privatisation and the Electoral Politics of Telstra

During the 1996 election campaign, the Liberal-National Party Coalition pledged that if elected it would partly privatise Telstra. The pledge was a central part of its campaign pitch. This paper argues that the proposal came at a time when the tide of public opinion had moved against privatisation; it shows how the Opposition used poll data both to present its own proposal in the most favourable light and to portray the difference between its position and that of Labor Government’s as minimal; and, using the surveys commissioned by both sides, it evaluates the success of this strategy. More generally, it suggests that in a “post-ideological” age, party ideology remains important. And it illustrates how polls can be used by parties not just to establish what the majority thinks but to galvanise support, neutralise opposition and convert those who harbour doubts.

Multiculturalists, Monoculturalists and the many in between: Attitudes to Cultural Diversity and their Correlates

The most comprehensive survey of Australian attitudes to multiculturalism has been variously interpreted as showing that multiculturalism enjoys a high level of support or very little support at all. A re-analysis of the data suggests that both views are mistaken: while multiculturalists appear to outnumber monoculturalists, many Australians — perhaps most — are caught somewhere in between. Attitudes to multiculturalism correlate strongly with several things: views about assimilation, equal opportunity, government support for ethnic organisations and multicultural programs; the teaching of European as well as Asian languages; and the number, source and kinds of migrants Australia should accept. Attitudes are also related to age, party preference and place of birth. Support for multiculturalism is strongest amongst those who came of age after the official birth of multiculturalism, among those who support Labor or the Australian Democrats, and especially among those born in Europe or Asia. This suggests, other things being equal, that support for multiculturalism is likely to grow.

Politicians, public policy and poll following: Conceptual difficulties and empirical realities

During election campaigns—though not just at election times—observers of our political processes focus increasingly on the uses that political parties make of data on public opinion. This is hardly surprising. In the media, the polls are everywhere. Across the major parties the resources devoted to public opinion research are much greater now than they were even 10 years ago; since John Howard became their parliamentary leader, in 1995, the Liberals have conducted polls week in week out, most weeks of the year. And since new technologies rarely render earlier technologies entirely obsolete, the measures of public opinion available to the parties have never been so diverse: polls and focus groups; phone-ins and talkback; the soundings that MPs take and the contacts constituents make with them; letters to the editor, now assuming a new significance thanks to the development of electoral databases (Onselen and Ervington 2004, 353); even town-hall meetings, which have enjoyed something of a revival under Mark Latham’s leadership (Simons 2004, 35–42). How much attention should the parties pay to public opinion? ‘American political writers have been most interested either in how to make government express the common will, or in how they prevent the common will from subverting the purposes for which they believe the government exists’, Walter Lippmann observed (1922/1965, 161) on the eve of the ‘Modern Polling Era’ (Converse 1987, 116). In the revolution wrought by the polls, that is one thing that has not changed. Today, political leaders who pay too little attention to public opinion are accused of being ‘arrogant’, of not being ‘in touch’, or of ‘not listening’; even of not having ‘the guts’, in the words of the former Chief Minister for the ACT, Kate Carnell, ‘to represent the silent majority’—a piece of ‘sage advice’, according to the Australian Financial Review, that ‘[s]adly’ comes ‘too often . . . from politicians on the way out rather than the way up’ (AFR 2001). It is not that Politicians Don’t Pander, to quote the title of Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro’s important book on ‘Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness’ in contemporary America; rather, what politicians do when they fail to heed the polls is undermine ‘substantive democracy’ (2000, xv, 302 Page and Shapiro 1992, ch. 10). On the other hand, leaders thought to pay too much attention to what voters think—leaders who, in Don Watson’s words, succumb to the demand to stay ‘“in Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 40, No. 2, June, pp. 189–205

Pluralism in the Polls: Australian Attitudes to Media Ownership, 1948-95

Opposition to foreign ownership of the media is widespread and of long-standing. The polls also testify to broad support for diversity of media ownership, both in principle (diversity is important and concentration could pose risks) and in practice (support for a mixture of state-owned and commercial broadcasting, opposition to cuts in the number of stations, support for new stations deemed to be worthwhile). But it is also clear that public opinion is complex, occasionally contradictory and, like a jury, can be led -not least by the polls themselves.

Political Communication and the Media

Fifty years ago, A. F. Davies told students of Australian Democracy that since the 1930s Australia had moved from ‘an intimate to a mass, from an oral to a literate, style of politics’; that notwithstanding the rise of radio and the emergence of television, newspapers continued ‘to play a uniquely important role’, supplying ‘politicians with most of their stimulus’ as they ‘define[d] and order[ed] the public debate’; and since there was ‘no separation of “quality” and “popular”, nor of party [or] readerships’, the press had succeeded in imposing on politics ‘an impressive uniformity of perception’ (1958, 150). Over 20 years later, Aitkin and Jinks (1980, 113) told students the media were ‘important’ and ‘likely to affect how we look at politics and engage in it’. And another 20 years later, Rod Tiffen, a leading figure in the study of Australian media and politics, told his student readership: ‘Politics as we know it is inconceivable without the news media’ (Tiffen 2004, 201).

Underdogs, bandwagons or incumbency? Party support at the beginning and the end of Australian election campaigns, 1983–2007

In what ways, if any, do campaigns matter? Specifically, what can we say about election campaigns in Australia? If they shift votes, in what direction do voters move? A comparison of opinion poll data taken at the beginning of each of the last ten national elections with the distribution of the vote at the end of each campaign suggests that the gap in first preferences between government and opposition generally narrowed; certainly, it never widened. The data do not suggest that incumbency (being in government) is an advantage. Nor do the figures conjure visions of voters clambering on bandwagons—as we might expect if there were a ‘spiral of silence’. Instead, the data point to an underdog effect, with the party that starts behind making up ground on the party that starts ahead.

Questions of deception: contested understandings of the polls on WMD, political leaders and governments in Australia, Britain and the United States

The weapons of mass destruction (WMD) Saddam Hussein was said to possess were central to the justification the Australian Prime Minister gave for Australias decision to go to war in Iraq. When no WMD materialised, poll data suggested that the public felt misled. But the same data suggested that support for both the government and the Prime Minister was unaffected. Among critics of the war, this generated a moral panic about Australian democracy and the Australian public—its commitment to the end justifying the means, its failure to receive a lead from the Labor Party, its widespread apathy. It also led to an intense debate about why the charge of not telling the truth had weakened public support for Blair and Bush but not for Howard. This article explores the concerns expressed by critics of the war in the face of polling that suggested that Australians were prepared to support a government and its leader that had misled them—deliberately or otherwise. It raises questions about the contrasts drawn between polled opinion in Australia, Britain and the United States. And it argues that the differences in the pattern of opinion across the three countries were not marked and that what had cost governments support were views about how the war was going, not the failure to find WMD.