Nielsen poll doesn't quite support a Treaty for Indigenous Australians

According to a recent AC Nielsen Issues Report, a majority of Australians support a treaty with the Aboriginal People. This has been uncritically accepted by supporters of a treaty. Aden Ridgeway was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald on November 8 as saying "the latest poll showed Australians had grasped the need to reconcile and for 'some formal agreement or compact which brings us together, recognising that there are unique circumstances for indigenous people that must be catered for in national life'".

He also credited the Olympics and Cathy Freeman's win as creating a "groundswell of good feeling".

Perhaps Freeman's win did do something enduring for Reconciliation. Talkback radio has been full of the claim that because the country was united in willing her to win it proved that most of us have reconciled. However, the real test is not how the country reacts to her wins, but to her losses. When the tennis player Yvonne Goolagong had a bad day back in the '70s it was nothing to hear people mutter that she had "gone walkabout", which fingered supposed racial or cultural characteristics for her lack of success. What will they say when Cathy fades?

There is a parallel here with a treaty. At the moment, Aboriginal issues are enjoying a late public honeymoon which seems to have started with the bridge walks and was certainly heightened by the Olympics. But how popular will these issues be when the honeymoon is over and the practicalities have to be teased out and put in place? The Issues Report finds three things:

1. 53% (up 7%) support the notion of a treaty. 34% (down 6%) oppose it.
2. 78% of voters (up 4%) support the process of reconciliation.
3. 3. 43% (steady) agree with an apology; 52% (down 1%) disagree.

That seems pretty plain, but it isn't. One of the things to look for in polls is internal contradictions and inconsistencies - they are pointers to areas where people are saying things that they don't really mean. A significant example of such an inconsistency occurs between points 2 and 3. Seventy-eight per cent say they support Reconciliation, but only 43 per cent support an apology (and 52 per cent oppose). Yet, one of the fundamental requirements for Reconciliation is an apology. So true support for Reconciliation cannot be higher than the 43 per cent who support an apology - just over half of what it appears to be at first blush. Put an adjustment of that order of magnitude onto the percentage that supports a treaty and actual support could really be as low as 29 per cent.

Of course, it is not valid to adjust the figure that way, but I would bet that it gives a more realistic figure of support for a treaty than the headline one. The only way to know the real level of support is to test each of the propositions that makes up the whole of the treaty. The level of support for the overall concept will then most likely be the level of support for the least popular part of it.

That is how the Republican debate worked. The vast majority of Australians class themselves as Republicans, but the Republic seems as far off as ever, because we cannot agree on the form of republic that we want. The ideal of a republic is highly popular, but the reality wasn't sufficiently compelling for us to support it. And the closer we drew to the referendum, the lower support for the option on offer fell.

In 1979 the National Aboriginal Conference set out procedures for establishing a treaty which would have involved a convention of indigenous representatives. According to Geoff Clark in a speech on September 7, 2000 at Latrobe University they "wanted the treaty to provide:

1. The protection of languages;
2. Restoration of land in accordance with the Woodward Commission recommendations;
3. Regulation of mining and exploration on Aboriginal land;
4. Compensation for loss of lands and way of life; and
5. Control of Aboriginal affairs".

Yet, neither Liberal nor Labor Governments have implemented a treaty, despite giving it some support at various times. In fact, the whole Reconciliation process is a typical Hawke solution to an insoluble problem - finding a treaty too hard to implement, he postponed the problem beyond his period in government by opting for a 10 year process of consultation instead. Hawke was a good weathervane of public opinion. If he thought the issues too hard to sell, they probably were.

So what issues are involved in a treaty? The first issue is that of sovereignty. The Prime Minister argues that treaties are agreements between sovereign nations, and that to make a Treaty with Aboriginal Australians would be to admit Aboriginal Sovereignty, making us two nations on one continent. While this suggestion has been ridiculed by some, ATSIC Chairman Geoff Clark gives life to it in his speech of September 7. He suggests that there might be a subsisting form of Aboriginal sovereignty, much as Native Title was a subsisting form of land title.

If the poll had asked whether Indigenous Australians should be recognised as a separate nation, what would the level of support have been? Or if it had asked whether tribal spearings should be an acceptable punishment under Australian law, or whether Aborigines should be compensated for the loss of land? Again, all issues which Clark nominates as being addressed in a treaty. Would the public support reserved parliamentary seats for Aborigines, or majority Aboriginal electorates? Or the granting of control over National Parks (what Clark calls unalienated Crown land) to Aborigines? On reflection, my estimate of 29 per cent support might be an optimistic one.

But while asking these questions would give a more complete answer, it would still not be the correct one. When reading polls one has to try to take account of what will happen after there has been substantial debate on the issues. And there will be substantial debate on all of these issues - trenchant political debate.

Prime Minister Howard is opposed to a treaty so it is guaranteed to be a federal issue, but it won't stop there. Clark nominates mining rights as being an issue that should be included in a treaty. It is mining rights that lies at the heart of the arguments between Federal Labor and both Queensland Labor and the Western Australian coalition. Any treaty negotiation would be guaranteed to set off as much intra-party warfare as it will inter-party conflict.

In this atmosphere the issues will be examined microscopically and the blemishes magnified out of all proportion, making them less popular than they would otherwise be. The blemishes don't even have to be real. If enough doubt is thrown on a political proposal most people will opt for the precautionary principle, otherwise known as "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

After all, this is a country that in 1988 refused to amend its constitution to include some basic human rights like freedom of religion because of a scare campaign which claimed that such an amendment would prevent the Federal Government funding Catholic schools. Voters will always opt for the money rather than the box. In the case of a treaty there are plenty of reasons to think that money is involved one way or the other, either as compensation for dispossession or the extraction of minerals, and this will sway quite a few opinions.

It took the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation about 10 years to poll for community attitudes on reconciliation, a course first publicly recommended here - "So Near and Yet So Far". If they had done it at the beginning they would now be better positioned than they are. This AC Nielsen Issues Report should remind those involved in the push for a Treaty that there are a lot of questions that they need to know the answers to, and that relying on publicly available polling information is about the most dangerous path they could take. They should also remember that about the only reliable thing about polls is that they will fluctuate. Perhaps they should commission Nielsen's to do some follow-up.

The following discussion occurred in response to the above article.

Dear Graham,

I have long been interested in the contradiction to which you refer. But it seems to me that you fall prey to an equally common, and presently more important, error, namely the assumption that majority opposition to an apology can be taken at face value. Obviously people who claim to support a treaty but oppose an apology are confused, but this doesn't mean you can ignore their support for a treaty, while relying on their opposition to an apology, which is pretty much what the government is doing.

I'd suggest the following reading of the data:

(1) 40 per cent consistently support the reconciliation agenda (treaty, apology, reconciliation);

(2) 20 per cent consistently oppose the reconciliation agenda;

(3) 20 per cent support reconciliation in the abstract, but tend to oppose specific measures that would involve costs;

(4) 20 per cent want to express goodwill in some sense, but are confused.

I would put Howard in category (3), but his policy has been to court group (2). People in group (4) may not know what they want on this issue, but they are, in my view, coming to recognise that whatever it is, it's not what Howard is offering.

John Quiggin

Australian Research Council Senior Fellow
Department of Economics Faculty of Economics and Commerce Australian National University ACT 0200

Dear John,

I haven't actually thought through what the real support for a treaty is, or reconciliation for that matter. The point of the article was to say that the report overstated it, and that without particulars as to what a treaty consists of, any polling is relatively meaningless.

I think the apology figure is much harder than the figure on a treaty as there has been a lot of debate on the issue. As a result I do not think it is a mistake to say that the Treaty figure is flakier. However, if the Treaty figure stays up where it is for the next twelve months after the issues involved in a Treaty have been adequately ventilated, then I would probably have to change my mind. That doesn't mean that the apology figure is not soft for or against either.To gauge how accurate it is you would need access to figures as to how strong the opposition is and how persuadable people are.

Ultimately I don't think the apology issue is that important in the sense that once Howard is gone as Prime Minister, one way or the other, you are likely to have a Prime Minister who won't have a problem with making a fuller apology than has already been made. I don't think that the same can necessarily be said about a Treaty. An apology is just one element in the mix of Reconciliation, while a Treaty is a cluster of elements. One indicator of the relationship between the apology figure and the Treaty figure is my attitude to a Treaty.

If I had been interviewed for the result I would have ticked the box as being in favour of both Reconciliation and an apology, as well as a Treaty. However, I wouldn't support a Treaty that included all of the elements that I mentioned in the article. On the basis of that insufficient sample I think the support for a Treaty is likely to be below that for an apology, but I would be happy to be contradicted by the facts if someone would design a poll to test them. I'd also love to get some debate going on the forum and see what other thoughts might be out there on this issue.

Graham

"Families adversely affected by the Wik decision are very fearful about the effects of a treaty on their ability to live on, work on and love the land they purchased in good faith. There is no legal clarity about what the Wik decision means, four long years after it was handed down. Confidence in leasehold land tenure seems to now be at an all-time low, affecting the equity of leaseholders. This in turn affects their ability to borrow, improve their land and viability, or plan their futures. It is often suggested that it will take probably twenty years to sort out the resulting land tenure mess. Too long for many, who will be unable to sustain a business plan in the face of such uncertainty."

Lindsay MacDonald. Read the full letter here.

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