National
What Australians think … by the BBC’s Sydney correspondent
Having recently decried the over-reliance of polling and focus groups in Australian political life (polls here are not so much pseudo news events as the full-blown thing) I am going to devote an entire blog to the findings of a single poll.
In my defence, it is a major survey, and its findings illuminate issues that we’ve been discussing over the past couple of months – from the environment to WikiLeaks, from Afghanistan to China, from asylum seekers to Indonesia. It comes from the Lowy Institute in Sydney, a foreign policy think tank that does a lot of heavy-lifting when it comes to pondering Australia’s role in the world. Someone has to, right?
Before we get to its findings, a quick word on its value. As Bob Carr, the former premier of New South Wales, purred in his rich caramel voice during the panel discussion that launched its publication, polls can be particularly useful in identifying trends and in testing arguments. The Lowy survey not only asked what people thought but why. What makes the study doubly useful is that it has been asking pretty much the same questions for the past seven years.
So what were the headlines?