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Trust matters: politics, trust and the republican cause

By Rebecca Huntley - posted Wednesday, 10 January 2007


At a public talk on Generation Y and politics I delivered earlier this year, an audience member asked me whether young Australians were at all enthused about Australia becoming a republic. As much as it pained me to say so, I had to tell her that it just wasn’t on their agenda.

In the research for my book, The World According to Y: inside the new adult generation, I asked young people to nominate the political issues of importance to them. They largely pointed to international issues, in particular climate change, war, terrorism and the immense gap between rich and poor nations. In terms of national issues of relevance, they nominated refugees, the rising cost of housing and education as well as the ageing population. The republic was mentioned by only one of the 50-plus young people I interviewed.

My findings are supported by most national polling, which shows that support for a republic among young Australians struggles to climb above 50 per cent. In 2006, Newspoll found that younger people were lukewarm about a republic, with 45 per cent of the 18 to 34 bracket in favour of a republic.

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But as academic and former ARM chair John Warhurst has rightly pointed out, this percentage of young people supportive of a republic isn’t as telling as the percentage of those designated as uncommitted, what Warhurst describes as “the often-forgotten, very important third category of undecided/don't know/don't care”. In the same 2006 poll, 29 per cent of those young Australians surveyed by Newspoll were undecided either way about a republic, 3 per cent more than those who were against the idea.

Some political scientists and media commentators would label this group “apathetic”. Indeed young people are often described as disinterested and ignorant about formal political processes. While the general political knowledge of young people is not what it could or should be, I would dispute the label “apathetic”. Instead of apathy, what I found in my own work could more accurately be described as “disengagement”.

Disengagement from a political system dominated by the two major parties, which doesn’t seem to provide young voters with a real choice.

Disengagement from a political culture dominated by technocrats, apparatchiks and media advisors.

Disengagement from political parties that don’t allow enough internal democracy to satisfy the needs of a generation who expect flexibility and options in all their endeavours, and who are enthusiastic about direct democracy.

So rather than apathy, what I found among young men and women was something more like powerlessness, either to change the political culture or to make progress with national political issues.

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Why has there been this turning away, this disengagement among young Australians? I believe the tendency of some people in older generations to blame young people themselves - labelling them as selfish, shallow, in the thrall of consumerism or intrinsically conservative - is both unfair and inaccurate, primarily because it ignores two facts.

First, let’s not kid ourselves, Australians have never placed much trust in politicians.

Second, since the beginning of the millennium, social researchers have remarked on a general trend of disengagement across generations, and social classes. Mackay argues that by the turn of the century, Australians were becoming fatigued by the “heavy agenda” of social, economic and political issues including the republic.

Both social research and TV ratings showed that we were beginning to disengage from “the big picture” and turn our attention to more personal, domestic and local matters - home renovation, cooking shows, celebrity weddings and unreality TV. At the same time, Australians were experiencing a long stretch of economic stability and prosperity that is only just now showing signs of wobbling.

This prosperity spread, at the very time the current crop of young Australians were maturing into young adulthood. It was a time when, as journalist George Megalogenis observes, Australians started to “reduce the checklist of things they wanted government to do for them and their sense of what governments should be held accountable for”.

Herein lays the republican movement’s greatest challenge. It is a much harder task than simply developing a model for electing a head of state or deciding on the design for a new flag. Harder but more important and more urgent. Simply stated, it is to give people a reason to engage, to raise their expectations of government.

In a 2003 speech, social commentator and writer Hugh Mackay identified a “disengaged electorate” as one of the republican movement’s significant hurdles. His solution for getting people to engage again was not to wait but to “seize the agenda and promote our cause in a bold and more engaging way”, to “restore our confidence and optimism” in public life. This is particularly true for that uncommitted group of young Australians.

Of course this is all easier said than done. How do we go about doing it? How do we make the republican cause relevant to the new adult generation?

Part of the solution lies recognising the particular character of young people’s political attitudes and behaviours. In my work on the political attitudes of Generation Y, I found that while most young people are turned off by national politics, they are focused on local and community politics.

Similarly political scientist Ari Vromen has found that while young people may not measure high on the scales of traditional political activity (such as donating money, contacting MPs, joining political parties or unions) the majority of them are involved in community, campaigning and protest activities through church groups, parents and citizens groups, environmental and sporting organisations.

It is these groups and NGOs more generally that seem more trustworthy, able and willing to make a difference. We can better reach young Australians by forming relationships with those organisations where they are most active.

Another potential avenue for engagement lays in this a generation’s enthusiasm about direct democracy.

They get to choose the next Australian Idol and the next evicted housemate on Big Brother. One of the reasons there is such comparatively low levels of youth membership of the major parties is that their “tow-the-party-line” mentality seems too simplistic, too constraining for a generation used to direct involvement in decision making. They are also used to having their concerns and issues ignored by political parties eager to chase the votes of self-funded retirees, mortgage holders and three-child families.

Of course this has profound implications for a potential republican model. Generation Y are unlikely to be enthused by a model which denies them a direct say and which is filtered through a political system from which they feel alienated. Despite all the strong arguments in favour of the model presented to the voters in 1999, the direct election model is undoubtedly a better fit for this generation and could help to build a critical sense of ownership of and connection to our public institutions.

If we look back at early republican sentiments, in the pre-federation era, they were largely focused on opposition to tyranny. We are facing a new kind of tyranny of distance, namely, the growing distance between our citizens and our systems of government.

Part of the challenge for our movement is to place our cause at the centre of a broader and braver campaign to build up public trust in those systems. If we don’t, then I believe we may struggle to get young people to care about the republican cause, to believe it matters and has relevance to their lives today and into the future.

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This is an excerpt from The 2006 National Republican Lecture held by the Australian Republican Movement on November 29, 2006, in Canberra.



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About the Author

Rebecca Huntley is a writer and social researcher and the author of the forthcoming The World According to Y (Allen & Unwin).

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