Much has been made over the last decade or more of the divide between “elite” opinion and popular opinion on a range of issues. George Megalogenis reports on the divide between popular opinion and that of an important category of elites - major party candidates - at the time of the 2007 Federal election, based on the 2007 Australian Candidate Study.
A key issue on which the candidates were out of alignment with the voters is our old friend, global warming. According to the 2007 Australian Election Study, 51.5% of voters considered this issue “Extremely Important” and a further 36.8% considered it “Quite Important”. This compares with 65.5% of Labor candidates who, according to the candidate study, considered the issue important, and contrasts strikingly with Liberal-National Coalition candidates, of whom only 32.4% considered it important.
This raises the further question of what the result would be of polling other right-of-centre elite constituencies on this issue, such as Quadrant contributors and subscribers, conservative media commentators, and staff and directors of right-of-centre think-tanks. One gets the impression it would be lower than 32.4%. Continue reading ‘Elites versus masses on climate change’
We featured some of Marcus Westbury’s commentary on cultural policy here at LP around the time of the 2020 summit. Here’s a guest post which originally appeared at his blog - it’s the text of a talk he gave to a forum on “Creative People” organised by the Department of Culture and The Arts in Perth as part of the process they’re undertaking of developing a policy framework for Western Australia.
One of my obsessions at the moment and the focus of the next series of Not Quite Art is our changing cultural geography. By that I mean how the cultures that we are exposed to, that influence and obsess us are circulating in the world.
I note that Brian Costar has been thinking along similar lines to me and Andrew Bartlett on the subject of the formation of the Liberal National Party. He’s put his finger on the key challenge for the Borg and his crew, who haven’t had any amalgamation bounce if today’s Galaxy Poll is to be believed:
The new party is almost certainly to be more conservative than the pre-existing Liberal party – especially on social issues – and this might not prove attractive to the urban middle classes, who are certainly more numerous in Queensland than when Bjelke-Petersen mis-governed the state. Unless the party can harvest Brisbane seats from Labor it will not win government.
The Clarke inquiry into the Haneef affair has revealed several interesting things. Amongst them is the statement in ASIO’s unclassified submission that they participated in “whole of government” discussions of the possible threat posed by Haneef. As the statement says:
ASIO’s consistent advice to these meetings was that, based on available information, ASIO did not assess Dr Haneef as a threat to security and did not have grounds to issue an adverse security assessment. However, in the early days of the investigation, ASIO nevertheless considered that further investigation of Dr Haneef was warranted.
So even ASIO - who presumably had everything the AFP did - didn’t think Haneef was a threat. Given that, the hypothesis that the AFP has further damning, but classified, information on Haneef that justified the continued detention is looking extremely shaky.
But the most controversy, so far, has arisen due to the AFP’s refusal to release its submission to the inquiry - or even parts of it - publicly.
Tourism promotion is a weird thing. Like the unrolling the huge ball of string come to Melbourne message (?) which hardly survived its unravelling by the Chaser. Something I read recently about the career end of Geoff Dixon as CEO of Qantas pointed out that one of the challenges for an Australian airline is that Australia is only on the way to Antarctica. So how to induce people to come here? Efforts to promote the joint seem to waver between “natural beauty” messages and weird distillations of Ozculture - whatever that might be. Perhaps it’s Lara Bingle? Now we’ve got Baz Luhrmann either leveraging his new movie - Australia - you know the one, our Nic’s in it - for a government sponsored tourism campaign, or, alternatively, leveraging Australia off a movie with the same title. Did I get that right? It’s all very recursive!
Would it just have been simpler if we’d made Lord of the Rings here? Worked for NZ tourism. With tons of Australian actors… How *do* you market/represent/thematise a post-colonial culture?
I haven’t seen any discussion in the blogosphere about the stories in the papers of the report of a major research project on Work, Life and Workplace Culture co-authored by Barbara Pocock and Natalie Skinner. Maybe we’re all too busy juggling work, blogging and life. But it’s a pity.
Since we do a fair bit of dissing the mainstream media round here, I wanted to observe that the story in the Sydney Morning Herald is an exemplary piece of reporting academic research into social issues - summarising the nuts and bolts of the findings and contextualising it with the every day lived experience of citizens.
There’s a great rebuttal to the latest “intertubes r destroyin ejumacation” narrative - the meme of “the death of handwriting” - by Tim Watts at Tree of Knowledge. Poor old Kevin Donnelly must be upset that he’s been scooped on this one by the dreaded Fairfax press. Perhaps Dr Donnelly was composing his ruminations in copperplate on parchment and so got trumped by someone who knew how to use a keyboard?
I was watching Skins on SBS just now - for the first time. I suspect I’ve been missing something I’d have liked, and I’m not sure why I never tuned in before. Anyway, Cass and the crew were having a dinner party and someone (I don’t know all the characters’ names) remarked - “just like adults”.
I can remember when I was at uni in the early 90s, and a sudden dinner party craze hit certain circles I moved in. I don’t think it was that anyone was a stellar cook, and the cooking wasn’t necessarily the point of attraction, but more the sort of enactment of an “adult” ritual. If there was any generation that really did the whole postmodern performative irony thing, it was us Gen X kids. We were caught on the cusp of a transition between fairly fixed social patterns - of our parents’ generation - and complete fluidity and the decay of practices and traditions to the extent where they don’t even have sufficient force for (affectionate) parody to have much meaning. When does “adulthood” begin now, and what marks the transition? Are there bourgeois signifiers like joining service clubs, and dressing for dinner? It’s pretty hard to grasp the force of some of Bunuel’s movies from the sixties which parallel a culture which now seems aeons distant in terms of its purchase on living tradition and lived experience.
Anyway, it was all kinda fun, and I have fond memories of some of these nights, including the notorious naked dinner party on Hawken Drive (which I’ll write about one day, maybe, in pursuing my argument that Gen X was more nekkid than Gen Y). One day, we still have to do the Edwardian dinner party, and indeed the Mrs Beeton’s dinner party. They’ll be about wine and dressing up more than food, I think.
For once, Craig Emerson wasn’t indulging in spin or hyperbole on Lateline last Friday when he claimed that there was a new emissions trading scheme policy every day from the Liberals. For Monday’s edition of Liberal lunacy, we reproduce Bernard Keane’s commentary from Crikey today (with permission). Continue reading ‘Liberal lunacy IV’
We’ve featured a couple of posts here about the upheavals in the Anglican Church over conservative bishops’ hatred of teh gay, and the farce that is the Lambeth Conference, where openly gay American Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson has been prohibited from attending - alone of all the 800 something bishops worldwide. At the earlier conservative meeting in Jerusalem, GAFCON, where Sydney’s own Archbishop Jensen was among the movers and shakers, the pr line was that the conservative African bishops were only concerned with the purity of the biblical faith, standing against all the terrible first world postmodern relativism.
In fact, the story of Nigerian Christian gay rights activist Davis Mac-Iyalla, who has just been granted asylum by the British government, goes a long way towards demonstrating what is actually at stake in the alleged Christianity of the Nigerian church’s hierarchy. As does their attitude towards legislation proposed in Nigeria last year. All this is very far from some genteel doctrinal dispute, or a culture war only violent in its rhetoric.
I’m unable to think of any good reasons for parting with $34.95 for Jackman’s book, which is touted as the ultimate insider account of the Labor Party’s campaign strategy in the lead up to last year’s federal election. As noted previously at this blog, any juicy tidbits have already been extracted in the News Limited papers, and the non-story of Peter Costello’s alleged popularity is still rumbling meaninglessly on as I write. (Incidentally, the fact that quite a bit of research mentioned in the book showing Costello as electoral poison wasn’t selected for “news” stories tells a bit of a tale in itself.)
The book’s importance - insofar as it has any - lies in what is in effect an auto-critique of the standard of political journalism in contemporary Australia, in what its publication says about the strategies of university presses and particularly MUP, and in whether it actually adds fuel to the fire of the “hollowmen” narrative of colourless political apparatchiks it tries to counter. Let’s take those in reverse order.
While it’s reasonable to ask, as Lyn at Public Opinion does, whether tracing every twist and turn of the opposition’s twisted trajectory towards some sort of agreed position on an emissions trading scheme, is to pay too much attention to a “policy cycle of sometimes less than 24 hours [which stretches] the notion of novelty a little far.” However, it could also be suggested that the interest lies in watching the moment that a “media narrative” switches, and as with the Costello crud, observing the process of constructing one, as a few bits and pieces of disconnected nonsense get tied together by assorted columnists and reporters and woven into a new thread that will then become - hey presto! - conventional wisdom, dignified as such on Sundays by the usual Insider suspects. You can shine a light on the way the press gallery mob do “the wisdom of crowds each other” by building a story arc, which then shapes the way the story is moved on.
Just a quick post to update some of the stories we’ve been following around the ecclesiastical traps - Irfan Yusuf, writing in New Matilda, contrasts the treatment doled out to Sheikh Al-Hilaly with the response (or lack thereof) from media and political figures to Bishop Anthony Fisher’s comments about survivors of sexual abuse. In an article on the same theme in Crikey, Yusuf links to a rather damning take at Media Watch on the News Limited coverage and commentary of accusations of church indifference to the victims of sexual abuse day raised during the World Youth Day event they were paid sponsors of.
Meanwhile, at the Lambeth Conference, conservative Anglican bishops are taking every opportunity to interrogate their fellow prelates about their ideological soundness on the loud condemnation of teh gay. Probably heretically, the Archbishop of York has suggested that there might just be more important issues for Christians than the ordination of gay bishops.
NATSEM at the University of Canberra has released a report [pdf] on trends in spatial socio-economic inequality from 2001 to 2006 [via Peter Martin]. As Martin suggests, it’s a useful corrective to claims lacking nuance that the Howard years saw a rising tide of prosperity lift all boats equally. There were definite winners in the household income stakes, as this graph demonstrates:
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
Tourism promotion is a weird thing. Like the unrolling the huge ball of string come to Melbourne message (?) which hardly survived its unravelling by the Chaser. Something I read recently about the career end of Geoff Dixon as CEO of Qantas pointed out that one of the challenges for an Australian airline is that Australia is only on the way to Antarctica. So how to induce people to come here? Efforts to promote the joint seem to waver between “natural beauty” messages and weird distillations of Ozculture - whatever that might be. Perhaps it’s Lara Bingle? Now we’ve got Baz Luhrmann either leveraging his new movie - 
I was watching 
Hunter S. Thompson, who’s repeatedly if repetitiously quoted in Christine Jackman’s 
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