Public Opinion, Campaign Politics & Media Audiences: New Australian Perspectives

Scalmer

Introduction

Bridget Griffen-Foley and Sean Scalmer

‘Public opinion’ remains a preoccupation of Australian politicians, and a touchstone of political commentary. It is also a major category of scholarly analysis, and a central concept of Jürgen Habermas’s celebrated The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.¹ Our collection brings together innovative research concerned with the history and transformation of Australian public opinion, from political science, history and media studies. It investigates three linked problems in the study of politics: the meaning, measurement and mobilisation of ‘public opinion’; the techniques of political campaigning, especially political oratory; and the nature of media audiences and spectatorship. The chapters are based on papers delivered as part of a festschrift held in December 2014 to honour Murray Goot, Distinguished Professor of Politics and International Relations, on his retirement from Macquarie University. Contributors, many of whom have collaborated or worked with Murray, are inspired by his scholarship and example. We seek to honour his work and his spirit by extending that scholarship in new and sometimes original ways.

Murray’s professional life encompasses a great arc in the development of the study of politics. Born at the beginning of the postwar era, schooled first in New Zealand and then at Vaucluse Boys High, Murray entered the University of Sydney to study Arts-Law in 1964. The Department of Government and Public Administration at Sydney had been established in wartime, as a means of providing advanced training to members of an expanding civil service. Murray’s arrival coincided with a period of sustained growth, as a rising generation of students sought to practise and study politics in a fresh and more radical spirit.

As a student in first-year Government, Murray joined fellow neophytes in a year-long course that included three lectures per week, extended across three terms of ten, eleven, or twelve weeks.² Introduced to the study of Australian politics by Ken Turner, he joined, from 1965, the honours class taught by Professor Henry Mayer (1919–91). Mayer’s intellectual influence was particularly profound, and he would supervise Murray’s sub-thesis in third year (an examination of public opinion and democratic theory) and his thesis in fourth year (an investigation of the patterns found in Australian public opinion polls, 1941–67).

Murray had won success as a high-school debater (challenging at the rostrum the noted future barrister Geoffrey Robertson, among others). A flair for the analysis of argument and a delight in the Socratic method (expressed also in Murray’s undergraduate studies in philosophy) were harnessed and directed under Mayer’s mentorship. Mayer’s honours seminars were organised around the interrogation of key texts—Murray recalls that these included Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, 1962, and Seymour Martin Lipset’s Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, 1960. Mayer’s published work evinced a consistently critical spirit, matched with a principled commitment to pluralism, and these would become enduring elements of Murray’s own intellectual style. In 1986 Murray published a descriptive bibliography, Henry Mayer’s ‘Immortal Works’: Scholarly, Semi-Scholarly and Not Very Scholarly at All. The first part of the title came from Mayer himself; the subtitle reflected something of Murray’s humorous and irreverent style.³

The fledgling scholar’s first major publications were critical examinations of established verities of Australian political analysis: the common-sense division between parties of ‘initiative’ and parties of ‘resistance’, a defence and elaboration of Mayer’s famous article on the party system;⁴ the notion that Australian politics had become ‘presidential’ in style;⁵ and the concept of ‘party identification’.⁶ In succeeding decades, he would interrogate a still greater collection of accepted truths: the idea that previously disparate parties had only recently converged;⁷ the argument that class voting had greatly declined;⁸ the suggestion that politics has become increasingly ‘poll-driven’;⁹ and much else besides.

But even as Murray began to sharpen his scalpel under Mayer’s guidance, the young scholar’s opportunities to study politics also began to extend beyond the lecture halls of the University of Sydney. In only his second year of undergraduate study, Murray attended his first Australasian (later Australian) Political Studies Association Conference.¹⁰ He participated fully in the gatherings of the Australian Institute of Political Science, including its summer schools. And a passion for book collecting that would abide brought him into contact with booksellers and enthusiasts on the Sydney campus and beyond.

The campus itself was changing. In 1965, students from the University of Sydney would participate in a campaign to document and challenge racial segregation in country New South Wales—the Freedom Ride of Student Action for Aborigines. In 1967, postgraduate students and junior staff, including Terry Irving, Raewyn Connell and Rowan Cahill, would establish a ‘Free University’, in which participants might study class, gender, drugs, and many other topics. Across the later 1960s, new campaigns galvanised the campus and extended beyond it: against conscription and the Vietnam War; for Black Power, women’s liberation and gay liberation. Meanwhile, the Australian union movement launched a major strike wave that would lift the share of national income going to wage-earners by nearly 10 per cent.

Murray’s burgeoning academic career reflected much of this political excitement. Abandoning postgraduate research he had begun at the University of Essex, he moved to the Australian National University as a senior tutor in political science and then, from January 1973, to Macquarie University as a lecturer. Not yet a decade old, Macquarie was part of a significant expansion in the number of universities and students in the 1960s and 1970s. It also hosted impressive experiments in pedagogy. Directed to teach a unit in Australian politics at third year level, Murray (who had dreaded the thought of the mass lecture style at the University of Sydney) resolved not to offer a single course of lectures, but rather a great range of optional seminars in areas only beginning to become the object of academic scrutiny: media politics, women in politics, the politics of education, Australian political thought, the politics of work, political behaviour, and business and the state. Many of these topics also became enduring areas of research interest for Murray.

Reflecting a concern with the social consequences of politics, his published work would eventually encompass many of the issues thrown up by the ascending social movements of the postwar period. Murray would co-publish the first major study of women and voting (with Elizabeth Reid, who organised a Special Minister of State consultancy for Murray to convene the Women and Politics conference in Canberra in 1975, the International Women’s Year);¹¹ examinations of public opinion and politics around Asian immigration,¹² Indigenous affairs,¹³ an Australian Republic,¹⁴ Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party,¹⁵ asylum seekers,¹⁶ unions,¹⁷ privatisation,¹⁸ Australia’s involvement in war,¹⁹ and scientific opinion on climate change.²⁰ These were not works of advocacy. Rather, they applied the tools of social science, the indefatigable energies of a devoted scholar and the capacities of a critical intelligence to Australia’s major social problems. In the combination of a humane sensibility and a rigorous intelligence, a great and distinctive contribution was made.

Although Murray’s work overspills many boundaries, the chapters included in this volume cohere around three areas where he has published especially important and influential work: public opinion; political campaigning and oratory; and media audiences.

Murray’s honours thesis, completed in 1967, was an examination of public opinion. A recent Australian Research Council grant, awarded for 2015–18, will underpin his effort to compose the first history of Australia’s public opinion polls. In the intervening half a century, Murray has consistently led the field.

The quantification of public opinion has illuminated the character of social views and assisted in explaining the constitution of collective judgments. A numerate social scientist, Murray has helped to organise major social surveys, and to use large data sets to ground disciplined political argument. From 1977 to 1980 he collaborated in a major research project hosted by the pioneering Sample Survey Centre at the University of Sydney. But at the same time as he has deployed survey research, Murray has also helped to establish that quantitative surveys do not simply provide a transparent picture of a pre-existing ‘public opinion’ that is waiting to be discovered. He has analysed the ways in which survey questions help to constitute particular versions of opinion, and he has documented the manner in which survey findings are commonly misrepresented or misunderstood. He has also shown how political pollsters have become independent political actors of considerable power and influence. And, unusually among Australian political scientists, Murray has demonstrated a strong interest in political and other history, and made extensive use of archival and newspaper sources.²¹ Since 1987 he has served on the New South Wales Working Party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography and has himself contributed more than a dozen entries on pollsters, market researchers, journalists and broadcasters. He has documented and analysed the role of public opinion throughout Australian history, almost single-handedly leading the charge against the neglect by political historians to which he has pointed repeatedly, including in an authoritative entry in The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics.²² His expertise in this field has become widely recognised internationally.²³

Two chapters included in this collection extend Murray’s critical approach to the study of public opinion. Ian Watson has been an especially frequent collaborator with Murray, particularly over the last two decades. In his chapter, Watson takes up a persistent theme in their earlier collective work: the connections between voting behaviour, public opinion and the political parties. Specifically, Watson considers whether the supporters of the Palmer United Party in 2013 could be considered the progeny of Pauline Hanson’s supporters in 1998 and 2001. Watson uses the innovative method of Multiple Correspondence Analysis in order to investigate this problem. His chapter clarifies the continuities in politics on the Australian Right, while also demonstrating the value of Multiple Correspondence Analysis as a tool of analysis.

Like Ian Watson, David Peetz has worked with Murray on many notable publications. In ‘Class Attitudes and the Climate Crisis’, Peetz and Georgina Murray explore the relations between class, attitudes, and the climate crisis. Their chapter establishes the continuing importance of ‘class’ in both objective and attitudinal terms. It also documents the pertinence of class to changing opinions on climate action, and gives particular attention to the role of capital in framing action on climate change.

Political opinion is shaped by the work of persuasion and communication. A second field of Murray’s research extended in this collection is the study of political campaigning. Murray has given this issue special attention over the last decade, most notably in analyses of referendums on conscription and communism,²⁴ and in appraisals of major election campaigns of the past seventy years.²⁵ This research has undermined the rather facile distinction between the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ campaign that animates much of the scholarly literature, disclosing a more complicated history of experiment and adaptation.

Three contributors, all collaborators with Murray at some time, seek to apply this spirit to the examination of political and campaign oratory. Judith Brett offers a sustained study of Alfred Deakin as an orator. Deakin was a leading Liberal of the late nineteenth century, a premier of Victoria, and a prime minister of the Australian Commonwealth. He was also a celebrated political orator. Brett’s chapter outlines the forces that shaped Deakin’s oratory, both political and cultural. She also seeks to understand something of the secret of its powerful impact.

Sean Scalmer considers the invention of the ‘electioneering tour’, comparing developments in the United States, Australia and Great Britain. His aim is not only to provide a fuller knowledge of this important campaign technique, but also to explain the political and historical processes that sustained its development.

Bridget Griffen-Foley’s chapter draws, in part, on Murray’s major 1977 piece on ‘Radio LANG’, one of the first works of scholarship to look at the relationship between commercial radio (in this case 2KY) and political communication.²⁶ Murray’s interest in the media (historical and contemporary) has run throughout his career, from his groundbreaking 1979 study, Newspaper Circulation in Australia 1932–1977, which is still widely cited, to a range of more recent pieces on topics including talkback radio, and Pauline Hanson and the power of the media²⁷, as well as his roles co-editing Media International Australia (1991–97) and, since 2009, as deputy director of Australia’s only Centre for Media History.

While Murray’s core interests have been continuous, he has nonetheless engaged closely with new developments in scholarship and politics. The third section of this book focuses on spectatorship and media audiences. Murray’s major 2014 entry on audience research for A Companion to the Australian Media might be thought of as a successor to his 1979 piece on newspaper circulation, now considering not just sales, but also readership data, industry surveys, regulatory and government research, and academic studies. His ability to straddle academic scholarship and industry research was demonstrated by the very next entry in the same volume—a wholly original piece on the Audit Bureau of Circulations (itself frequently invoked but hitherto never studied).²⁸

Sandey Fitzgerald, who studied under Murray as an undergraduate student, and whose honours and PhD theses were supervised by him, utilises talkback radio summaries from the Iraq War to show how callers can indicate not only that they are listeners and members of a program’s audience, but also political spectators. Her case study is based on a talkback radio database acquired as part of a broader research project on Iraq under Murray and funded by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. The chapter carefully considers how everyday spectatorship gets hidden in the plain view of the language of ‘audience’, the term widely used in media and communications research.

Rodney Tiffen, who first collaborated with Murray twenty-five years ago, has joined with Sharon Coen, David Rowe and James Curran to present some of their findings from a survey undertaken as part of an eleven-nation study of media and citizenship. It considers whether greater political knowledge is associated with greater news consumption, and whether not just the quantity of news consumption, but also the type of media consumed, is important.

Public Opinion, Political Oratory and Media Audiences showcases new work by distinguished scholars and extends understandings of central issues of political debate. It is offered as an affectionate tribute to Murray’s inspiring work.

Notes

1Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere , Polity Press, Cambridge, 1989.

2For a broader context, see Michael Hogan, Cradle of Australian Political Studies: Sydney’s Department of Government , Connor Court Publishing, Ballarat Vic, 2015.

3Murray Goot, Henry Mayer’s ‘Immortal Works’: Scholarly, Semi-Scholarly and Not Very Scholarly at All , Australian National University for the Australasian Political Studies Association, Canberra, 1986.

4Murray Goot, ‘Parties of Initiative and Resistance: A Reply’, Politics , vol. 4, no. 1, 1969, pp. 84–99; Henry Mayer, ‘Some Conceptions of the Australian Party System, 1910–1950’, Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand , vol. 7, no. 27, 1956, pp. 253–70.

5Murray Goot and RW Connell, ‘Presidential Politics in Australia?’, Australian Quarterly , vol. 44, no. 2, 1972, pp. 188–200.

6Murray Goot, ‘Party Identification and Party Stability’, British Journal of Political Science , vol. 2, no. 1, 1972, pp. 121–5.

7Murray Goot, ‘Party Convergence Reconsidered’, Australian Journal of Political Science , vol. 39, no. 1, 2004, pp. 49–73.

8Murray Goot, ‘Class Voting, Issue Voting and Electoral Volatility’, in Judith Brett, James Gillespie and Murray Goot (eds), Developments in Australian Politics , Macmillan, South Melbourne, Vic. 1994, pp. 151–81.

9Murray Goot, ‘Politicians, Public Policy and Poll Following: Conceptual Difficulties and Empirical Realities’, Australian Journal of Political Science , vol. 40, no. 2, 2005, pp. 189–205.

10 Years later, as a member of the APSA executive, Murray Goot would support the change from ‘Australasian’ to ‘Australian’.

11 Murray Goot and Elizabeth Reid, Women and Voting Studies: Mindless Matrons or Sexist Scientism? , SAGE Professional Papers in Contemporary Political Sociology, London and Beverly Hills, 1975.

12 Murray Goot, Constructing Public Opinion: The Polls and the Asian Immigration Debate , Occasional Paper No. 5, New South Wales Ethnic Affairs Commission, Sydney, 1984.

13 Murray Goot and Tim Rowse (eds), Make A Better Offer: The Politics of Mabo , Pluto, Leichhardt NSW, 1994; Murray Goot and Tim Rowse, Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public , Melbourne University Press, Carlton Vic., 2007.

14 Murray Goot, ‘Monarchy or Republic? An Analysis of the Questions and Answers in Surveys of Australian Public Opinion 1953–1986’, in Report of the Advisory Committee on Executive Government , Constitutional Commission, Canberra, 1987, pp. 85–108, and ‘Contingent Inevitability: Reflections on the Prognosis for Republicanism’, in George Winterton (ed.), We, The People , Allen & Unwin, St Leonards NSW, 1994, pp. 63–96.

15 Editor (with Sean Scalmer), Australian Journal of Politics and History , vol. 47, no. 2, 2001.

16 Murray Goot and Ian Watson, Population, Immigration and Asylum Seekers: Patterns of Australian Public Opinion , Department of Parliamentary Service, Parliament of Australia, Canberra, 2011.

17 For example, Murray Goot and Ian Watson, ‘WorkChoices: An Electoral Issue and its Social, Political and Attitudinal Cleavages’, in Julie Pietsch and Hayden Aarons (eds), Australia: Identity, Fear and Governance in the 21st Century , ANU e-press, Canberra, 2012, pp. 133–70.

18 Murray Goot, ‘Public Opinion, Privatisation and the Electoral Politics of Telstra’, Australian Journal of Politics and History , vol. 45, no. 2, 1999, pp. 214–38.

19 For example, Murray Goot and Rodney Tiffen, ‘Public Opinion and the Politics of the Polls’, in Peter King (ed.), Australia’s Vietnam , George Allen & Unwin, 1983, Sydney, pp. 129–64; Murray Goot and Rodney Tiffen (eds), Australia’s Gulf War , Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic. 1992; Murray Goot and Ben Goldsmith, ‘Australia’, in Richard Sobel, Peter Furia and Bethany Barratt (eds), Public Opinion & International Intervention: Lessons from the War in Iraq , Potomac Books, Dulles, VA, 2012, pp. 47–68.

20 For example, Murray Goot, Climate Scientists and the Consensus on Climate Change: The Bray and von Storch Surveys, 1996 – 2008 , Garnaut Climate Change Review Update, 2011. http://www.garnautreview.org.au/update-2011/commissioned-work.html (viewed 15 April 2016).

21 See, for example, Murray Goot, ‘The Australian Party System, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, and the Party Cartelisation Thesis’, in Ian Marsh (ed.), Australian Parties in Transition? The Australian Party System in an Era of Globalisation , Federation Press, Sydney, 2006, pp. 181–217; ‘The New Millennium’, The Cambridge History of Australia , vol. 2, Stuart Macintyre and Alison Bashford (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and Melbourne, 2013, pp. 187–211; and ‘The Transformation of Australian Electoral Analysis: The Two-Party Preferred Vote − Origins, Impacts, and Critics’, Australian Journal of Politics and History , vol. 62, no. 1, 2016, pp. 59–86.

22 Murray Goot, ‘Public Opinion’, in Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics , Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2007, p. 473.

23 For example, Murray Goot was guest editor of a special issue on Public Opinion and the War in Iraq, International Journal of Public Opinion Research , vol. 16, no. 3, 2004; served on the editorial board of The SAGE Handbook of Public Opinion Research (edited by Wolfgang Donsbach and Michael Traugott), 2008, and was a keynote speaker at the Mass Observation Anniversaries Conference: 75 Years of Mass Observation—Thirty Years of the Mass Observation Project in 2012.

24 For example, Murray Goot and Sean Scalmer, ‘Party Leaders, the Media, and Political Persuasion: The Campaigns of Evatt and Menzies on the Referendum to Protect Australia from Communism’, Australian Historical Studies , vol. 44, no. 1, 2013, pp. 21–88; Murray Goot, ‘The Results of the 1916 and 1917 Conscription Referendums Re-examined’, in Robin Archer, Joy Damousi, Murray Goot and Sean Scalmer (eds), The Conscription Conflict and the Great War , Monash University Publishing, Clayton Vic., 2016.

25 For example, Murray Goot, ‘Underdogs, Bandwagons or Incumbency? Party Support at the Beginning and End of Australian Election Campaigns, 1983–2007’, Australian Cultural History, vol. 28, no. 1, 2010, pp. 69–80 and ‘Labor’s 1943 Landslide: Political Market Research, Evatt, and the Public Opinion Polls’, Labour History, no. 107, 2014, pp. 149–66.

26 Murray Goot, ‘Radio LANG’, in Heather Radi and Peter Spearritt (eds), Jack Lang , Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1977, pp. 119–38, 258–62.

27 Murray Goot, Newspaper Circulation in Australia 1932–1977 , Media Centre Papers No. 11, Centre for the Study of Education Communication and Media, La Trobe University, Bundoora Vic., 1979; ‘Talkback Radio’, in Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts (eds), pp. 579–82; ‘Pauline Hanson and the Power of the Media’, in Ghassan Hage and Rowanne Couch (eds), The Future of Australian Multiculturalism , Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, 1999, pp. 205–32.

28 Murray Goot, ‘Audience Research’, in Bridget Griffen-Foley (ed.), A Companion to Australian Media , Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne Vic., 2014, pp. 31–4; ‘Audit Bureau of Circulations’, pp. 34–5.

Part I

Public Opinion

CHAPTER 1

Class, Attitudes and the Climate Crisis

David Peetz and Georgina Murray

There is a widespread scientific consensus on the dangers posed by climate change to human societies and the role of humans in causing the great majority of those climatic changes.¹ Yet action on climate change has been inadequate in dealing with the climate crisis.²

The climate crisis can be seen as an inevitable outcome of the expression of class power. That is, over centuries, owners of the means of production have been able to extract profits through capitalist production, and part of that has involved externalising costs onto others—some have even referred to the capitalist corporation as an ‘externalising machine’.³ This externalising has led to the over-production of carbon emissions that now threaten the planet. While we argue below that the situation is a little more complex than this—for one thing, it is important to understand divisions within the capitalist elite about climate change—it is nonetheless the case that the context for understanding the climate crisis is provided by class, and so class also affects attitudes to dealing with it.

The purpose of this chapter is to ask: What is the relationship between class, attitudes and the climate crisis? We look at this question from two angles—the links between attitudes, collectivism and class; and the link between class and attitudes to the climate crisis. Class and attitudes have been discussed extensively in the work of Murray Goot, who has shattered many shibboleths about both issues.⁴ In this chapter we seek to apply many of the lessons from that scholarship to the climate crisis. Some of the shibboleths on this topic are propagated by opponents of action on climate change, but others by those who seek urgent action.

What if the patterns of class and attitudes are such that it is not possible to deal with the crisis? This could occur if, for example, people saw no crisis in place; or they held no collective values that would support collective behaviour in dealing with it; or they opposed all specific policies proposed. There may, of course, be other reasons for inaction on climate change, relating to the logic of the international political system itself or of particular domestic politics, but they fall outside the scope of this chapter—our interest is in the role of attitudes in shaping responses to the climate crisis and how these may be influenced by possibly changing notions of class. So, we are not investigating the link between occupation and climate attitudes: we are looking at whether the way in which class relations operate these days precludes effective action on climate change.

The climate crisis is fundamentally a problem of individual versus collective interests: the individual interests of particular corporations (and people) in engaging in activities that include the emission of carbon into the atmosphere are at odds with the collective interests of society (and humanity) in minimising carbon emissions and global temperature rises. Yet for some time it has been argued that both class⁵ and collectivism are in decline, the latter often as a result of the former, and that these are promoting individualisation of values. If so, this would create major difficulties for dealing with the climate crisis, as taking action requires collective interests to override those of individuals, and that would become even more difficult in a world where individualism rules. So our first set of questions, which concerns class and attitudes, are as follows: By objective indicators, is class in decline? Is class awareness or class orientation in decline? Is individualism replacing collectivism?

Second, in Australia, political action on climate change has been constrained by, amongst other things, the willingness of politicians to act within, or beyond, what they see as the bounds of public opinion. In varying degrees, the attitudes of some politicians and certain of their constituents have been characterised by what is often referred to as ‘climate denial’: declining to accept the scientific evidence and instead asserting either that climate change is not happening (or even that the world is cooling); or climate change is principally or entirely the result of natural phenomena with little or no human agency; or it will have no adverse effects (or will even be good for plants); or some or all of the above. Political constraints of this type may also have acted, to varying (but perhaps mostly lesser) degrees, in other countries. We therefore ask these questions on attitudes and the climate crisis: What has been, and is, public opinion on climate change? How, and as a result of what, have attitudes changed? Why are some in denial to such an extent?

Very powerful forces appear to be mobilised on the issue of climate change, to prevent action from being undertaken to reduce its extent. These forces appear to be typically associated with certain large corporations or industries, and class analysis would seem to be relevant to understanding them. Yet there also seem to be divisions within both the corporate sector and employee interests that raise doubts about the appropriateness of interpreting climate concerns in binary class terms. Divisions are emerging between different fractions of capital, based upon whether they gain financial benefit from environmental degradation. That is, the divisions arise between those whose profit is increased by the externalisation of costs, including climate costs onto third parties,