Annual Scanlon report on social cohesion finds a generally tolerant and confident country. But there is a loss of faith in Canberra’s politicians and more Australians from ethnic minorities are reporting discrimination
We are fed up with government. The rise of Malcolm Turnbull hasn’t eased our frustration. Party loyalty is virtually irrelevant. Coalition voters are almost as unhappy as Labor voters. Forty per cent of Australians in 2016 are calling for our system of government to be ditched or radically changed.
Dissatisfaction with Canberra is the most dramatic finding of the ninth annual survey of social cohesion conducted by Andrew Markus of Monash University for the Scanlon Foundation.
“There’s a high level of community unease about the quality of government,” says Markus. “We don’t seem to be within a bull’s roar of getting anywhere with that because the political class is so divided.”
The mission of the foundation since 2007 has been to measure how this migrant nation is hanging together. Since the work began, 35,000 Australians have been questioned in depth about their views on race, migration, discrimination and the state of our democracy.
Australia remains a profoundly tolerant country but Markus reports there is more anger is the air. “The proportion of people who feel strongly negative is rising.”
The 2016 survey shows signs of fresh hostility to multi-ethnic immigration and to multiculturalism. The shifts are small but in the wrong direction. And the survey indicates 6 million Australians hold very or somewhat negative views of Muslims.
Scanlon pollsters were in the field in July and August, immediately after Turnbull’s re-election. Even then, commentators were talking about a revolt underway against the elites that was supposed to be transforming politics. Since Trump’s victory, that’s become a given.
But Markus finds little evidence of upheaval in this year’s survey results. Australian attitudes are divided roughly along the same sort of lines as they are in America. “In all countries the ones who are going to be most disaffected are those who haven’t done as well in life as they would have liked,” he says.
“But it’s certainly not a mirror image.”
Despite worrying findings in the 2016 survey, Australians remain more welcoming than almost any nation on earth to large-scale immigration. The politics of that are unique to this country. “A big issue overseas is border control,” says Markus. “What we have in Australia is rigid border control.”
And Australia survived better than most the economic upheaval of the last half dozen years. “The terrible impact of the GFC across the board on employment, housing prices and so on – we didn’t have that in Australia.”
The 2016 survey shows nothing that’s befallen the nation lately has quenched Australia’s sunny optimism:
• 91% feel they belong in Australia
• 85% reckon they’ve had a happy year
• 79% see Australia as a land of opportunity where hard work brings a better life
• 72% are satisfied with their financial position
* 42% are confident their lives will be even better in three or four years’ time.
But there is a dark side to the findings. The hostile have become more hostile and reports of discrimination have risen sharply to the highest level recorded since the Scanlon Foundation began its work nine years ago.
Things had seemed to be improving, but one in five non-Anglo Australians born abroad reported discrimination in 2016. They spoke of verbal and sometimes physical abuse. It’s not a finding to encourage wholesale repeal of protections from abuse in section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
Half the victims were the brunt of such behaviour only once or twice a year. But for some it was a weekly occurrence. The place of discrimination for a third of the victims was the workplace where they felt themselves being denied jobs or promotion because of their background.
And the 2016 survey also showed Australian neighbourhoods become a little less welcoming to people from different national or ethnic groups. Markus links this to a notable change in the numbers concerned about becoming victims of crime: a big jump from 26% in 2015 to 36% in 2016.
Yet in a nation increasingly sceptical about the good intentions of government, those who trust it most are the most prosperous, the best educated, the most cosmopolitan, the very old and Australians of non-English speaking background.
The Rudd effect
The question asked in the survey was: can Canberra be trusted to do the right thing for the Australian people “almost always” or “most of the time”?
The response was alarming. Only a little over a quarter of Australians born in Australia had basic faith in its government. But 36% of non-English speakers who have come to live in Australia gave Canberra a tick. It’s a modest vote of confidence from a cohort that may have experienced far worse.
Quality of government is a major concern of Australians. Each year the Scanlon survey asks people to name the single most important problem they feel we are facing as a nation. The economy is always the top score. But in five of the last six years, worries about government have beaten even fears over terrorism into second place on this test.
Markus has been charting this collapse for years. He sheets it home to Australia’s disappointment with Kevin Rudd when he abandoned his great plans in 2010 to deal with global warming. From that year to the next, support for government in this country fell from 48% to 31%.
It has never recovered.
Markus sees the Scanlon survey coming into its own here: “Doing something year after year means you get perspective. When we looked at that data in 2010 we didn’t have perspective.”
But having seen support for government stuck on a low plateau year after year in the surveys, Markus is in no doubt that “something very fundamental occurred at that point in time in Australian political history”.
Coalition voters are happier with Canberra right now than Labor voters. But even so, only 40% of Coalition voters are willing to endorse the proposition that government in Canberra can be trusted on the whole to do the right thing by Australians.
Markus almost links Australia’s doubts about government to instability of leadership and the failure to legislate for change. “You ask the question: is it that the government is out of touch with issues which are quite passionately held within the community? And the answer would seem to be yes, it is out of touch. It is unable to legislate for issues that have significant support.”
The 2016 survey identified four popular issues of long standing that are getting nowhere in Australian politics: prescription of medical marijuana to treat painful medical conditions – 83% support; medically approved euthanasia for people suffering terminal illness – 80% support; reduced reliance on coal for electricity generation – 70% support; marriage equality for same sex couples – 66%.
The first three reforms have wide support even among some of the most conservative Australians, even those millions of Australians who confess negative views of Muslims. They are among the least educated, oldest and poorest Australians, but they are not particularly hostile to medical marijuana, euthanasia and effective action against global warming.
But they don’t want equal marriage.
The survey offers some explanation for why a reform with strong popular backing is so difficult for the Coalition to achieve: equal marriage is a vote-changer across conservative Australia. It feeds breakaway independents and threatens the National party base. The survey shows those opposed or strongly opposed to equal marriage in 2016 vote: Greens, 9%; Labor, 18%; Coalition, 29%; independent/minor party, 40%.
That there is a cohort of Australians deeply hostile to Muslims is no news. “Muslim” is code for Middle Eastern. Markus says: “If we asked ‘what do you think about immigrants from Lebanon, Iraq etc?’ we basically got the same result as we got for ‘what do you think about Muslims?’”
Pauline Hanson says Australia is about to be swamped by Muslims. But a glance at Markus’ figures suggests she might trim her rhetoric: Australia’s single biggest source of migrants these days is India, a mainly Hindu country.
There’s lately been clashes between pollsters over the breadth of Australia’s fears of Muslims. Essential reported in September that 49% of Australians wanted a ban on Muslim immigration. That caused headlines across the nation but Markus puts little weight on the figure.
He spruiks the Scanlon method of finding people to question by random sampling. And he is wary of binary questions that may hide the nuances of difficult issues. “Public opinion on social issues defies binary categorisation, it is more accurately understood in terms of a continuum, with a middle ground on may issues that comprises more than half the sample.
He stands by the last half dozen Scanlon surveys that show high – but little changed – levels of hostility in Australians to Muslims. A few more Australians than before have “very negative” views of Muslims these days, but the overall numbers of Australians hostile to Muslims has been nudging 25% for the last six years.
Markus struggles to find a bright side to this: “While concern over national security and the threat of terrorism has significantly increased, there has been no statistically significant shift in negative opinion towards Muslims over the course of six surveys.”
These are not happy figures but Markus comes back to his claim that Australia “is a country where the core is unified on fundamentals but in which there are strong minorities either side”. Does that core make us a conservative or progressive country? “It depends on the issue.”
The core is impressive. The 2016 survey shows 70% of Australians with no particular axe to grind with Muslims; 66% still believe taking migrants from many countries makes Australia stronger; 80% welcome refugees if they come the right way; and 83% reckon multiculturalism has made Australia stronger.
The dark and shade of Australia is everywhere in this report. It’s not the portrait of a sentimental country but a place of decent principles and some inexplicable fears. One or two findings defy simple explanation. Why are tradesmen so particularly hostile to the ethnic mix of today’s Australia?
They aren’t poor. They aren’t unemployed. They aren’t under the gun from Chinese imports. They live in town as well as the bush. But as a bunch they are extraordinarily hostile. One example: 14% of the general population harbour very hostile feelings towards Muslims. That figure for tradesmen is 34%.
They weren’t called Tony’s tradies for nothing.
There are beautiful figures in this report that deserve a little national self-congratulation. From the pulpits of the nation last year came calls to give priority to Christians wanting to flee the fighting in Syria. Archbishops pursued the theme that Christian refugees should have privileged access to a Christian Australia.
But Australians don’t limit their compassion by faith and colour. The survey finds 69% believe when offering help to Syrians, “there should be equal consideration to all religious and ethnic groups”.
That calls for a quiet standing ovation.