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

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;