Opinion polls and notions of public opinion
Betts and other conservative populists make big fuss about some very old public opinion polls, which they claim show that migration is unpopular. Occasionally Betts acknowledges that opinion polls results are influenced powerfully by how the questions are asked, and what information is given to the people polled about the issues before they are polled, but she shrugs off this problem and makes much of her proposition that the elites are ignoring public opinion in their support of migration.
In the absence of carefully controlled polling, not overloaded by emotive construction, Betts’s conclusions from her polls have to be treated with great reserve for the same reasons that opponents of the death penalty tend to put aside emotive tabloid polls, which often seem to favour capital punishment.
We now know a great deal about the phenomenon of push polling, and many of Betts’s favoured polls get close this. The deliberately emotive way many public opinion poll questions are posed is the reason that most democrats are very suspicious of the right-wing populist mania for citizen-initiated referendums.
An interesting new development, probably caused by rapid demographic changes in Australia’s major cities, is that recent opinion polls, organised though they are in this fairly emotive way, are beginning to show a fairly substantial swing in favour of migration (article by Murray Goot in The Bulletin of February 15, 2000). What spin Betts and company will put on these changing poll results?
In reality, political outcomes in bourgeois democracies such as Australia are decided by a complex interaction between various aspects of the popular will, and the special interests of the ruling class, expressed through their manipulation of the media. What comes through in the media is much more an expression of the interests of the tiny elite that owns the media than any independent expression of opinion by a so-called new class of media workers.
In elections the voting is decided by a multitude of factors, and “public opinion” is actually a product of the push and pull of assorted interests and pressure groups. It is even possible that, influenced by right-wing populist hysteria against migration, expressed through the tabloid media, a majority of electors may wish for a reduction in migration. When they come to voting, however, many other factors influence their decision as well.
Many people who favour low migration end up voting for parties that will support high migration and, indeed, the reverse also applies because of the many factors that affect voting behaviour. That’s all part of the political process.For example, a clear majority of the population opposes a GST. Nevertheless, the Tories and the ruling class have managed to push through a GST because they succeeded in scraping together a slight majority in an election.
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I believe that highish, humane imigration, non-discrimination in immigration, and reasonable family reunion, are overwhelmingly morally justified.
I believe that one takes advantage of one’s democratic rights to influence the political process in whatever reasonable way is available to get the outcome you want. Everybody else involved in politics does the same thing, and why should those who favour high migration suddenly impose on themselves a self-denying ordinance in these matters when the reactionary tabloid press puts so much effort into whipping up prejudice against perceived minorities, and migration in general.
An underlying British-Australia cultural egotism surfaces repeatedly in Katharine Betts’s book, The Great Divide: Immigration Politics in Australia (Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney, 1999). Her ingenious use of the notion of “markers” in relation to the so called “new class” is very revealing. In her view, implacable hostility to racism, and any sympathy with multiculturalism are evidence either of membership of the “new class”, or “special interests”, by reason of NESB background.
She also indicts her so-called new class for an “anti-national” animosity towards wars and militarism, and associates this anti-militarism with “new class” attitudes on racism and migration. I find this construction extremely curious, as I’m told Ms Betts is herself a Quaker.
I wonder what Ms Betts makes of the almost total transformation of the bulk of the “new class” including myself, into advocates of immediate military action to protect the people of East Timor against the vicious Indonesian army.
I reject celebration of the imperialist bloodbath of the First World War. I spent the most useful part of my life campaigning against the Vietnam War and I take none of that back. Nevertheless, I strongly favour the recent Australian military intervention in East Timor, much to the chagrin of the right-wing populist P.P. McGuinness. (McGuinness and I always seem to be on opposite sides, and this pleases me. On the odd occasion when I’ve agreed with McGuinness, I very carefully examine my reasoning to see where I’ve gone wrong.)
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Curiously, Sydney postmodern theorist Ghassan Hage, who expresses an ostensibly leftist opposition to existing multiculturalism in his exotic book White Nation, actually shares Betts’s methodology, in that he develops his own version of the inaccurate “new class” theory.
What an implacably British-Australia chauvinist construction Katharine Betts’s use of new class rhetoric really is. It has no appeal at all for me, given my largely Irish Catholic background, and it’s not likely to appeal to any social group other than a rapidly declining Anglo upper-class. The industrial working class is largely of NESB background. The nudging 20 per cent of the population who now have degrees, and the 700,000 students are, by definition, infected by this “rampant cosmopolitanism”. The audience for Betts’s now slightly eccentric “new class” theory is really quite small, and declining all the time.
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