Public Opinion, Campaign Politics & Media Audiences

New Australian Perspectives

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• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780522869613
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This timely book investigates the fascinating landscape of media-driven politics through the prisms of 'public opinion', political campaigning, and audiences.

From Indigenous voting rights and climate change to talkback radio and right-wing populism, Public Opinion, Campaign Politics & Media Audiences showcases new research in political science, history and media studies. Contributors scrutinise the relationship between polls, party policy and voting behaviour, and evaluate the roles of oratory and the media in electioneering and political communication across Australia, Britain and the United States.

The eight chapters are based on papers delivered at a symposium to honour Murray Goot FASSA, Emeritus Professor of Politics and International Relations, on his retirement from Macquarie University.

Part I
Public Opinion

CHAPTER 1

Class, Attitudes and the Climate Crisis

David Peetz and Georgina Murray

There is a widespread scientific consensus on the dangers posed by climate change to human societies and the role of humans in causing the great majority of those climatic changes.¹ Yet action on climate change has been inadequate in dealing with the climate crisis.²

The climate crisis can be seen as an inevitable outcome of the expression of class power. That is, over centuries, owners of the means of production have been able to extract profits through capitalist production, and part of that has involved externalising costs onto others—some have even referred to the capitalist corporation as an ‘externalising machine’.³ This externalising has led to the over-production of carbon emissions that now threaten the planet. While we argue below that the situation is a little more complex than this—for one thing, it is important to understand divisions within the capitalist elite about climate change—it is nonetheless the case that the context for understanding the climate crisis is provided by class, and so class also affects attitudes to dealing with it.

The purpose of this chapter is to ask: What is the relationship between class, attitudes and the climate crisis? We look at this question from two angles—the links between attitudes, collectivism and class; and the link between class and attitudes to the climate crisis. Class and attitudes have been discussed extensively in the work of Murray Goot, who has shattered many shibboleths about both issues.⁴ In this chapter we seek to apply many of the lessons from that scholarship to the climate crisis. Some of the shibboleths on this topic are propagated by opponents of action on climate change, but others by those who seek urgent action.

What if the patterns of class and attitudes are such that it is not possible to deal with the crisis? This could occur if, for example, people saw no crisis in place; or they held no collective values that would support collective behaviour in dealing with it; or they opposed all specific policies proposed. There may, of course, be other reasons for inaction on climate change, relating to the logic of the international political system itself or of particular domestic politics, but they fall outside the scope of this chapter—our interest is in the role of attitudes in shaping responses to the climate crisis and how these may be influenced by possibly changing notions of class. So, we are not investigating the link between occupation and climate attitudes: we are looking at whether the way in which class relations operate these days precludes effective action on climate change.

The climate crisis is fundamentally a problem of individual versus collective interests: the individual interests of particular corporations (and people) in engaging in activities that include the emission of carbon into the atmosphere are at odds with the collective interests of society (and humanity) in minimising carbon emissions and global temperature rises. Yet for some time it has been argued that both class⁵ and collectivism are in decline, the latter often as a result of the former, and that these are promoting individualisation of values. If so, this would create major difficulties for dealing with the climate crisis, as taking action requires collective interests to override those of individuals, and that would become even more difficult in a world where individualism rules. So our first set of questions, which concerns class and attitudes, are as follows: By objective indicators, is class in decline? Is class awareness or class orientation in decline? Is individualism replacing collectivism?

Second, in Australia, political action on climate change has been constrained by, amongst other things, the willingness of politicians to act within, or beyond, what they see as the bounds of public opinion. In varying degrees, the attitudes of some politicians and certain of their constituents have been characterised by what is often referred to as ‘climate denial’: declining to accept the scientific evidence and instead asserting either that climate change is not happening (or even that the world is cooling); or climate change is principally or entirely the result of natural phenomena with little or no human agency; or it will have no adverse effects (or will even be good for plants); or some or all of the above. Political constraints of this type may also have acted, to varying (but perhaps mostly lesser) degrees, in other countries. We therefore ask these questions on attitudes and the climate crisis: What has been, and is, public opinion on climate change? How, and as a result of what, have attitudes changed? Why are some in denial to such an extent?

Very powerful forces appear to be mobilised on the issue of climate change, to prevent action from being undertaken to reduce its extent. These forces appear to be typically associated with certain large corporations or industries, and class analysis would seem to be relevant to understanding them. Yet there also seem to be divisions within both the corporate sector and employee interests that raise doubts about the appropriateness of interpreting climate concerns in binary class terms. Divisions are emerging between different fractions of capital, based upon whether they gain financial benefit from environmental degradation. That is, the divisions arise between those whose profit is increased by the externalisation of costs, including climate costs onto third parties, and those parts of capital that do not gain financial benefit from environmental degradation.⁶ These differences appear to cut across the common interest all capital has in its relationship with labour—to maximise surplus and minimise the costs of production. These divisions within capital over climate may also mean that responses to the climate crisis differ in different contexts—in different industries and different nations—including through the rhetoric deployed and the lobbying practised. In turn this may generate different responses from politicians and different attitudes in the broader public.

Below, we first examine the general pattern of the relationship between class, collectivism and attitudes. We then turn more specifically to how values and attitudes relate to climate change, including the way in which particular patterns of class behaviour may produce particular outcomes. Our initial interest is in Australia, but in substance this is a global problem requiring global solutions and so, where they are available, we draw on international sources in addressing these questions.

Objective Indicators of Class in Decline

The concept of ‘class’ has a long history, focused on relations between groups in society. From the 1970s a movement grew amongst sociologists that there has been a slow death of class as an analytically useful concept.⁷ Sociologists have not universally accepted this death of class.⁸ Yet discussions of class, and particularly its decline, in Australian political science have often proceeded as if class equated to occupation. In particular, ‘working class’ is frequently conceived (if the term is used at all) in occupational terms—in particular, by reference to manual or ‘blue collar’ work.⁹ By this logic, the changing occupational composition of Australia, and other industrialised societies, or the diminishing differences between occupations, signified the decline of class.¹⁰ Certainly, major compositional changes have occurred. In 1976, some 40 per cent of the Australian workforce were in ‘blue collar’ occupations—comprising the three major occupational groups: tradespersons, plant and machine operators and drivers, and labourers and process workers. By 2003 this proportion had fallen to 29 per cent.¹¹ Similar occupational changes in workforce composition occurred in the United Kingdom.¹² However, there are doubts as to how useful this blue/white collar distinction ever was in explaining class, and those doubts are now even better founded. Many people from what might be thought of as ‘working class’ backgrounds work in ‘white collar’ jobs, in fast food outlets or retail stores, in occupations like kitchen hand, café attendant or retail sales assistant. The decline evident in the blue collar/white collar occupational difference in voting behaviour does not equate to a decline in the salience of class.¹³ Nor has it ever been useful to define ‘working class’ as a group of blue collar occupations that between them are four-fifths male and one-fifth female, as if only men could be working class, or which by 2014 accounted for only 13 per cent of female employees.¹⁴

Technological change over decades may have reduced the significance of ‘manual’ labour, but it has not in itself altered class relations. Goot dismissed the view that occupational aggregations equated to class with the remark ‘such an assumption hardly does justice to anything that might pass as class theory, whether classical or contemporary’.¹⁵ The relationship to the means of production (whether one is a worker or an owner who makes profit from others’ labour) was Marx’s guide to class position.

Although occupation is little guide, we still can say there have been major changes in collective class behaviour. Union membership in Australia has declined both in absolute terms—from 2.7 million in 1990 to 1.8 million in 2002 and 1.6 million in 2014—and, by a larger amount, as a proportion of employees—from 41 per cent to 23 and then 15 per cent in those years.¹⁶ Industrial conflict has declined by an even greater amount—from 1.38 million working days lost in 1990 to 259 000 in 2002 and 71 000 in 2014.¹⁷ The majority of other industrialised countries have also experienced declines i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Public Opinion
• Part II Political Campaigning and Oratory
• Part III Spectators and Audiences
• Biographical notes on the contributors
• Index