This article is an instalment in a new series, “Peter Dutton is racist”, on Dutton’s history of racism and the role racism has played on both sides of politics since the 1970s.
Being too provocative on race issues is a career hazard for new major party candidates — but it’s been a while since a leader took electoral punishment for an approach seen as racially contentious.
John Howard’s 1988 support for reducing Asian immigration levels was followed by an eight-point drop in his already dire Newspoll net satisfaction rating, but didn’t affect the Coalition’s vote share. It did enable the Hawke government to expose splits in the Coalition with a symbolic Parliamentary motion, which probably contributed to Howard being rolled by Andrew Peacock the next year.
Peacock in turn spent much of the 1990 campaign railing against the Multi-Function Polis, a proposed Japanese high-tech planned community. His claim it would be an “enclave” earnt him a front page declaring him a “danger in the Lodge”, but the Coalition lost the election more narrowly than polling was predicting.
It’s probably a myth that Howard’s handling of the 2001 Tampa incident saved his prime ministership, as the Coalition had been steadily recovering from bad polling earlier in the year anyway. Still, the incident saw a 20-point gain in Howard’s net Newspoll rating (from -10 to +10), the third-largest on record. The Coalition also jumped from about 49% to 52% two-party preferred. The September 11 attacks weeks later made Howard’s Tampa response look prescient, ending the 2001 election as a contest (though Labor in the end did well to avoid losing by more.)
In the current term, opponents hoped Peter Dutton’s opposition to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament would see him punished by voters, but it was never clear why an opposition leader should suffer for opposing a proposal, support for which was already tanking. In fact, the Voice campaign coincided with (and probably helped cause) the end of the long polling honeymoon phases for both Anthony Albanese and his government.
The latest controversy is Dutton’s call to “pause” accepting Palestinian refugees fleeing Gaza. An Essential poll found 44% supporting Dutton’s call versus 30% opposing it. A Redbridge poll that refers instead to “a proposal for Australia to grant visas to Palestinians fleeing Gaza” had an almost identical result (44% oppose, 32% support).
One reason Dutton’s approach here has gone down well with voters is deniability. It is easy to say (as Dutton has done using actual polling that still, somehow, occurs in Gaza) that this is not a race thing at all and is a conceivable terror risk issue. A given voter’s reason for liking what Dutton says may be racist or xenophobic, but they can easily defend that position in other ways without asking themselves any hard questions.
With the Voice, there were plenty of not-obviously-racist arguments out there for voting No, but it also helped the No camp that a lot of Australian voters really are at least a little bit racist. A recent Essential poll with 58% preferring the idea that Indigenous peoples in Australia are disadvantaged because they make bad decisions (albeit in a forced choice against a more complex alternative) created some revulsion among readers, but there is plenty more of such material out there.
Luke Mansillo’s recent PhD thesis presents some disconcerting figures from the 2019 Cooperative Election Study. Only 40% and 47% of respondents firmly rejected the view that economic differences between “Aboriginal and white Australians” were caused by “racial differences in intelligence” and “fundamental genetic differences” respectively. Most respondents thought there was a little or something in these offers. Only around a fifth (23% and 19%) fully rejected explanations that said Aboriginal people lacked will power or did not teach their children necessary values and skills for school. Even fewer thought educational barriers (14%) or discrimination (17%) explained “a great deal”.
No wonder the initial feelgood support for the Voice peeled itself off. Even had the proposal been less glibly approached or campaigned for, many voters don’t really buy that the gap in Indigenous outcomes could ever be closed that much by structural solutions, let alone by talking about them.
Immigration-related polling often seems to suggest high xenophobia, but polls in this area are almost always marred by bad question design. For instance, recent polls regarding post-COVID compensatory increases often fail to state that immediate post-COVID levels are unlikely to be permanent, and hence can scare the voter into a negative response.
There is also a risk of voters jumping at red-meat talkback slogans. A plurality of voters will often say that immigration is too high, but are they comparing a level they know about with a considered ideal, or are they just repeating a slogan because they are concerned about specific perceived negatives of immigration? For these reasons high-quality pollsters are often reluctant to explore the subject, and nuanced questioning is required.
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