Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report

AUS T R AL IAN S OCIAL AT T I T UDE S Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report offers a new level of insight into ...

Author: Shaun Wilson | Gabrielle Meagher | Rachel Gibson | David Denemark | Mark Western

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AUS T R AL IAN S OCIAL AT T I T UDE S

Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report offers a new level of insight into the dynamics of Australian social life. Its 14 chapters develop an in-depth and accessible understanding of how Australia is responding to the new realities of work, globalisation, family and community life. The book draws on the latest social research and analysis from many of Australia’s leading social scientists to challenge conventional wisdom about Australia, and assesses the impact of the Howard government on the attitudes and behaviour of Australians of all ages and social backgrounds. Australian Social Attitudes: • is the ﬁ rst major report on what Australians think about topics as diverse as the use of human genetic information, what makes a family, the costs and beneﬁts of immigration, and crime and punishment • combines analysis of public opinion and social attitudes with reported behaviour and policy developments • compares Australian attitudes to those in other countries. Australian Social Attitudes will prove an excellent resource for students, teachers, researchers and policy makers, and anyone interested in understanding the social dynamics of contemporary Australia.

AUS TR ALIAN SOCIAL AT TIT UDES THE FIRST R E P O R T

edited by WILSON

UNSW PRESS ISBN 0-86840-671-6

MEAGHER GIBSON DENEMARK WESTERN

� 9 780868 406718 �

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Shaun WILSON Gabrielle MEAGHER Rachel GIBSON David DENEMARK Mark WESTERN EDITED BY

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AUSTRALIAN S OC I A L AT T I T U DE S

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AUSTRALIAN SOCIAL ATTITUDES The First Report

Edited by Shaun Wilson, Gabrielle Meagher, Rachel Gibson, David Denemark and Mark Western

UNSW PRESS

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A UNSW Press book Published by University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA www.unswpress.com.au © The Australian National University 2005 First published 2005 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. While copyright of the work as a whole is vested in The Australian National University, copyright of individual chapters is retained by the chapter authors. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Australian social attitudes: the first report. Includes index. ISBN 0 86840 671 6. 1. Public opinion - Australia. 2. Australia - Social conditions - Public opinion. 3. Australia - Economic conditions - Public opinion. 4. Australia - Politics and government - Public opinion. I. Wilson, Shaun, 1971– . 303.380994 Layout Stan Lamond Cover art Di Quick Print Ligare

Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report has been produced with the support of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

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CONTENTS FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ix

CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

x

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Rachel Gibson, Shaun Wilson, Gabrielle Meagher, David Denemark and Mark Western

CHAPTER 2

WHAT MAKES AN AUSTRALIAN FAMILY? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Ann Evans and Edith Gray

CHAPTER 3

MAKING FAMILIES WORK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Deborah Mitchell

CHAPTER 4

HOW DO AUSTRALIANS FEEL ABOUT THEIR WORK? . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Bill Martin and Jocelyn Pixley

CHAPTER 5

VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION . . . . 62 Andrew Passey and Mark Lyons

CHAPTER 6

ARE POSTMATERIALISTS ENGAGED CITIZENS? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Mark Western and Bruce Tranter

CHAPTER 7

WHERE TO FOR THE WELFARE STATE? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Shaun Wilson, Gabrielle Meagher and Trevor Breusch

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CHAPTER 8

IS THERE A CRISIS OF TRUST IN AUSTRALIA? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 Clive Bean

CHAPTER 9

PERCEPTIONS OF CRIME AND JUSTICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 David Indermaur and Lynne Roberts

CHAPTER 10

HAVE AUSTRALIANS EMBRACED ECONOMIC REFORM? . . . . . . . . 161 Michael Pusey and Nick Turnbull

CHAPTER 11

IMMIGRATION, MULTICULTURALISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY . .182 Murray Goot and Ian Watson

CHAPTER 12

KNOWING YOUR GENES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 Kristine Barlow-Stewart, Sandra Taylor and Margaret Otlowski

CHAPTER 13

MASS MEDIA AND MEDIA POWER IN AUSTRALIA . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 David Denemark

CHAPTER 14

ARE AUSTRALIANS OPEN TO GLOBALISATION? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240 Ian Marsh, Gabrielle Meagher and Shaun Wilson

APPENDICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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FOREWORD More than at any time in the past, the design of effective public policy requires the assistance of accurate, informed social surveys. What aspects of social policy concern people most? How do people view the reform of the health services? What level of immigration do most people regard as appropriate for Australian society? These and a host of other questions can only be properly addressed if we know what people feel about these issues and how their views are formed and have changed over time. Even when public policy has consistently been at odds with popular opinion – as in the case of capital punishment, for example – knowing what people feel about an issue provides an important backdrop to how political elites explain their policy decisions to the public. Yet Australia, despite a long history of innovative policy-making, has lagged behind other advanced societies in developing these critical empirical tools. In the United States, the General Social Survey is in its fourth decade of operation and provides an important adjunct to national policy, on everything from drug abuse to education policy. In Britain, a Social Attitudes Survey has been conducted since the 1980s, and the annual publication based on it is widely used by government to monitor public opinion. The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA), inaugurated in 2003, fills this important gap in our knowledge of what ordinary Australians feel about the major social, economic and political issues of the day. As policy problems and solutions have become more transnational through the inexorable spread of globalisation, we have seen a proliferation in comparative surveys. In Europe, the Eurobarometer surveys and, more recently, the European Social Survey, have monitored public opinion in the European Union states, as well as among aspiring members in Eastern Europe, while in Africa there is the Afrobarometer and in Asia, the East Asian Social Survey. In politics, the unprecedented wave of democratisation is tracked by the 50-nation Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project. In this comparative dimension, AuSSA again makes an important contribution, by placing Australia within this international context, notably as the Australian member of the International Social Survey Program and the World Values Survey. AuSSA is the brainchild of a new generation of enterprising social scientists, drawn mainly from political science and sociology. They come

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FOREWORD

from across Australia, with co-ordination from the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Their dedication and foresight has enabled this ambitious project to reach fruition. In addition to providing important insights into what ordinary Australians feel about major issues, they have rejected the view that Australia is sui generis and instead placed it within a rich tradition of comparative social research. AuSSA’s success will depend on the extent to which it comes to influence the policy discourse. Based on the quality of the contributions to this first volume, the omens look decidedly good. Professor Ian McAllister Political Science Research School of Social Sciences The Australian National University

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report is the product of extensive collaboration. The editors and contributors would like to acknowledge the role of the ACSPRI Centre for Social Research (ACSR) in the Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS) at the Australian National University in establishing the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes. AuSSA is a significant new resource for Australian social sciences, and the primary resource for this report. In particular, we would like to thank Deborah Mitchell, Director of the ACSR, and Professor Ian McAllister, Director of the RSSS 1997–2004, for their commitment to AuSSA. We would also like to thank the AuSSA Advisory Team, whose experience and inspiration enabled us to develop this new questionnaire. In addition to the editors, the national team included Clive Bean, David Charnock, David de Vaus, Murray Goot, David Gow, Bill Martin, Ian McAllister, Deborah Mitchell, Jocelyn Pixley, Michael Pusey, Heather Strang and Bruce Tranter. International advisers included Roger Jowell, Hermann Schmitt, Stefan Svallfors, Yang-Chih Fu and Pippa Norris. The Australian Social Science Data Archive fielded the survey and delivered the AuSSA 2003 data with promptness and professionalism; for this Sophie Holloway, Rachelle Graham, Andrew Grubb and Stephen Gray deserve special thanks. We are grateful to the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, which generously sponsored a workshop for contributors at the Australian National University in June 2004. ACSR Senior Research Fellow Trevor Breusch provided expert advice on the more recondite points of statistical method. Peter McCarthy helped the editors polish the report’s prose. We also thank Brigid van Wanrooy for data assistance. Christel Cools and Louise Sims ensured that AuSSA meetings and workshops ran smoothly. Finally, we thank Phillipa McGuinness and John Elliot of UNSW Press for their confidence in this project.

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CONTRIBUTORS Dr Kristine Barlow-Stewart is Director of the Centre for Genetics Education at Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney. Dr Clive Bean is Professor in the School of Humanities and Human Services at the Queensland University of Technology. Dr Trevor Breusch is Senior Research Fellow in the ACSPRI Centre for Social Research in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Dr David Denemark is Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. Dr Ann Evans is Research Fellow in the ACSPRI Centre for Social Research in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Dr Rachel Gibson is Deputy Director of the ACSPRI Centre for Social Research in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Murray Goot is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University. Dr Edith Gray is Research Fellow in the Demography and Sociology Program in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Dr David Indermaur is Senior Research Fellow in the Crime Research Centre at the University of Western Australia. Mark Lyons is Adjunct Professor in the Australian Centre for Co-operative Research and Development at the University of Technology, Sydney. Dr Ian Marsh is ANZSOG Professor of Government at the University of Sydney. Dr Bill Martin is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Flinders University.

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Dr Gabrielle Meagher is Senior Lecturer in Political Economy in the School of Economics and Political Science at the University of Sydney. Dr Deborah Mitchell is Director of the ACSPRI Centre for Social Research in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Professor Margaret Otlowski is in the School of Law at the University of Tasmania. Dr Andrew Passey is Senior Research Fellow in the Australian Centre for Co-operative Research and Development at the University of Technology, Sydney. Dr Jocelyn Pixley is Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales. Professor Michael Pusey is Visiting Fellow in the School of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales. Dr Lynne Roberts is Research Fellow in the Crime Research Centre at the University of Western Australia. Dr Sandra Taylor is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work and Applied Human Sciences at the University of Queensland. Dr Bruce Tranter is Senior Lecturer in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. Dr Nick Turnbull is Lecturer in Government and International Relations in the School of Economics and Political Science at the University of Sydney. Dr Ian Watson is Senior Researcher in the Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training at the University of Sydney. Dr Mark Western is Associate Professor in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland and Director of the University of Queensland Social Research Centre. Dr Shaun Wilson is Research Fellow in the ACSPRI Centre for Social Research in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION R a c h e l G i b s o n , S h a u n Wi l s o n , G a b r i e l l e M e a g h e r, D a v i d D e n e m a r k a n d M a r k We s t e r n

BRINGING TOGETHER SOCIAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC POLICY Australians and their policy-makers demand sophisticated insights into social attitudes and behaviour and how these shape work, families, politics and Australia’s links to a larger world. Living in a dynamic and educated society, Australians increasingly reflect on the state of their institutions and their different ways of living. But this kind of self-reflection depends not only on values, but also on facts, which are often not available when they are needed most. Evidence – including feedback from the public, systematic social analysis, legal opinion, expert judgment and overseas experiences – is increasingly part of policy-making, as Meredith Edwards (2004) recognises in her exploration of the future policy role of Australian social scientists. And as German sociologist Claus Offe points out, many policy problems can no longer be ‘solved’ from above without a diverse public’s input and co-operation (Offe 1996, pp. 111–19). As governments are obliged to deal with active and informed citizens, considered social research will increasingly be important to make policy work. Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report takes up the challenge of providing high-quality social research to the Australian community and to policy-makers, research that informs both public debate and sound decision-making. The empirical social research found in this book also contributes to the development of the social sciences themselves. As well-known sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen (2000, pp. 72–5) makes clear, the future for the social sciences is to engage deeply with our changing community, and to answer the many hundreds of questions about

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A U S T R A L I A N S O C I A L AT T I T U D E S : T H E F I R S T R E P O R T

contemporary society that interest the public at large. Reporting his findings to the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, another prominent social scientist, Immanuel Wallerstein, also affirmed the need for social sciences to engage in empirical research that combines researchers from different backgrounds to develop new methods and to construct research problems in innovative ways (Gulbenkian Commission 1996). In addressing the twin challenges to contribute to public debate and to the social sciences, Australian Social Attitudes is positioned between public opinion research, social commentary and ‘pure’ academic research. Public opinion polling is able to read the public pulse, but rarely tries to understand how social attitudes and social behaviour change over time, or to tell us why different constituencies find themselves in conflict. Social commentary reflects back to us images of Australian society that can prick our collective conscience and stir our emotions. But, without the support of detailed evidence, commentary risks repeating conventional wisdom or perpetuating myths. At the same time, ‘pure’ academic research can tell us about a subject in great detail, but often fails to speak to interested citizens beyond the walls of the university. This report brings together a widely shared interest in addressing topics at the top of the social agenda with a commitment to the social sciences. Our main tool for undertaking this report is the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA), a statistically representative national survey of Australians, first conducted by the Centre for Social Research at the Australian National University in late 2003 (Gibson et al. 2004). Drawing on a systematic analysis of the survey data, we track the attitudes and activities of a large and diverse sample of Australians – more than most of us could hope to meet and know well in a lifetime. We do this aware of the limitations of survey research. Conducting surveys is not the same as engaging in face-to-face communication, which gives us a more complete, nuanced picture of how people think and act. This report does not intend to have the ‘final say’, but seeks instead to add to the resources of the national conversation.

AUSTRALIA IN THE HOWARD YEARS As well as a reflection of Australia now, Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report is also a wide-ranging assessment of how social attitudes have changed during the Howard government, now in its tenth year. Many commentators feel that the country has become more conservative. They argue that this new conservatism is evident, for example, in the rejection

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of a republic in 1997, in hostility to immigration and welfare, and in narrower ideals of family and the priority of affluence (see, for example, Manne 2004). Other commentators fear a decline of trust in others and in institutions, and falling participation in voluntary life as an affluent Australia ‘cocoons’ itself at home (see, for example, Cox 2002). The findings we present in this report do not entirely confirm this picture. Using data from AuSSA 2003 and from Australian Election Studies and other major surveys, this report reveals instead the nuances in public opinion – and some surprising patterns in Australian social attitudes. Below we give readers a sense of this complexity. Deborah Mitchell confirms in chapter 3 that family does remain central to Australian identity – three-quarters of all respondents to AuSSA 2003 list their family as one of the three groups most important to who they are. However, Ann Evans and Edith Gray show in chapter 2 that our understanding of what relationships make a family is quite broadly defined, especially among women and younger generations. Among these Australians, a majority believe that gay and lesbian couples with children, and single-parent households, are indeed families. And despite Health Minister Tony Abbott’s attempts to reopen the abortion debate after Howard’s election victory in October 2004, Evans and Gray find that Australians overwhelmingly support women’s right to choose. On welfare, Shaun Wilson, Gabrielle Meagher and Trevor Breusch also make surprising findings in chapter 7. Australians are less preoccupied with lower taxes than at any time in the last quarter century, with more now preferring higher social spending. A large majority of Australians are even prepared for taxes to rise to support more spending on health, Medicare and education. Still, the public appears to support the Howard government’s emphasis on increasing obligations on welfare recipients to find work. But this does not add up to support for cutting welfare, which is rejected by the majority. We find similarly complex patterns in attitudes to immigration, multiculturalism and national identity. In chapter 11, Murray Goot and Ian Watson report that a declining number of Australians support lower immigration: two-thirds wanted this in 1996, compared to less than two-fifths now. Attitudes to the economic impacts of migrants have also become more positive, as the economy has boomed through the 1990s and early 2000s. While attitudes to multiculturalism remain complex, there is little sign that there has been any great shift in public opinion on this question. Goot and Watson do find, however, that, compared to the

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mid-1990s, fewer Australians now are ashamed of things Australia has done. Though Australia’s long period of economic growth has sustained a new prosperity and affluence, some fear that the costs of this growth are higher debt, longer working hours and a degraded community and environment (see, for example, Hamilton 2003). Are Australians feeling prosperous? Certainly, a majority of respondents indicate that, with the ways things are at the moment, they feel that they have a good chance of improving their standard of living. But most telling is Goot and Watson’s finding that Australians are much more confident in the Australian economy than they were in the mid-1990s, with some 80 per cent now proud of Australia’s economic achievements (up 32 per cent since 1995). How this economic prosperity has assisted the Howard government is a story that will be revisited by many after the government’s easy win in 2004. One benefit of economic prosperity is relatively low job insecurity. As Bill Martin and Jocelyn Pixley show in chapter 4, only 13 per cent of AuSSA 2003 respondents feel insecure about their employment. But the costs of prosperity for work are also registered. Most working Australians see long working hours as a social problem, and many recognise the effects of long hours on personal and family life. A picture emerges, then, of low job insecurity, a desire for more spending on key public services and more confidence about Australia’s economic performance. But how are economic and social achievements anchored in social and community life? We have already mentioned that younger Australians and women have a broader idea of family and family life. But are we less trusting and more isolated in our communities? In chapter 8, Clive Bean shows that, on the figures, Australians are not losing trust in each other, but that their trust in some institutions – including major Australian companies and churches – has declined since the mid-1990s. The armed forces, active in campaigns in the region from East Timor in 1999 to the Asian tsunami operations of 2005, remain the institution in which Australians have most confidence, a finding mirrored in many other countries. When it comes to participation in civil society, Andrew Passey and Mark Lyons, in chapter 5, find that Australia is a nation of joiners: 86 per cent of AuSSA 2003 respondents belong to at least one voluntary association, and more than a quarter of members are officeholders or active members. Participation in voluntary associations is strongly linked to the political participation that is the lifeblood of democracy. Members

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of these associations are nearly three times more likely than nonmembers to undertake political activity, such as contacting a politician or taking part in a protest. Participation also seems to be closely linked to our values. Although material happiness has featured a great deal in Australian life in recent years, many Australians continue to support environmental protection and other ‘quality of life’ or ‘postmaterial’ values. As Mark Western and Bruce Tranter show in chapter 6, Australians who hold postmaterial values are eager participants in environmental and social causes. No doubt, how we view the world is shaped by mass media, and, as David Denemark finds in chapter 13, television is our primary source of news, information and entertainment at home. But although we are absorbed by the electronic media, we are not uncritical of it. Most Australians think that television violence contributes to social violence and that media ownership is far too concentrated among a few rich families. The media may be playing some role in the contradictory reality that David Indermaur and Lynne Roberts find in chapter 9 when it comes to crime. They show that crime rates in most categories are actually falling in Australia, but perceptions of crime are yet to register this. As their international evidence suggests, the media (and politicians) have played a part in creating a climate of fear about crime in which public misperceptions thrive. And what of the future? Do we want more engagement in Asia, as former Prime Minister Paul Keating urged? Do we want further economic reform? And how are Australians responding to the potential benefits and threats of new biotechnologies? Australian engagement in the Asian region is bound to become increasingly important in the coming years. Yet, as Ian Marsh, Gabrielle Meagher and Shaun Wilson show in chapter 14, Australia is not particularly exposed to international trade compared to other small advanced democracies – and this is reflected in our comparatively protectionist attitudes to trade, local film content and the role of international organisations in national affairs. Australians want closer economic relations with Asia, but are less enthusiastic about closer political and cultural ties; few report feeling close to Asia. Many Australians also believe that globalisation is increasing insecurity at home. Marsh, Meagher and Wilson suggest that this might explain why attitudes to Australia’s future global engagement have been slow to change. The Howard government stunned political pundits when it managed to secure the first Senate majority in a generation after the 2004

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elections, which means it can pass legislation without the support of other parliamentary parties. Do Australians support further privatisation and freeing up of the labour market as the government intends? According to Michael Pusey and Nick Turnbull in chapter 10, Australians still want government ownership of key services like Telstra and strongly support award wages as the foundation of industrial relations. Pusey and Turnbull find that Australians are not ‘neo-liberals’, but rather economic pragmatists, continuing to envisage an active role for the government in utilities ownership, the economy and service delivery. Finally, Australians are enthusiastic about the potential freedoms to be gained from applying human genetic tests. But when pressed on the use of tests in insurance and employment, they are strongly opposed. Low trust appears to be a factor here. As Kristine Barlow-Stewart, Sandra Taylor and Margaret Otlowski argue in chapter 12, Australians will need to be convinced of the merits of extending these technologies to new areas of social and economic life.

ABOUT AuSSA 2003 The research in this report is mainly drawn from the first Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, completed in late 2003. AuSSA is a product of the Centre for Social Research at the Australian National University in collaboration with researchers from other Australian and overseas universities. AuSSA is also the official Australian contribution to the world’s two leading social surveys: the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), covering 39 countries, and the World Values Survey, covering around 90 countries. AuSSA 2003 included the ISSP’s 2003 National Identity module. AuSSA 2005 will field the next World Values Survey and the ISSP’s Citizenship and Work Orientations module. AuSSA takes the form of a mail questionnaire sent to more than 10 000 Australian citizens every two years. The survey itself was prepared by five Principal Investigators – Shaun Wilson, Rachel Gibson, Gabrielle Meagher, David Denemark and Mark Western – in co-operation with the AuSSA Advisory Panel, which met to draft the survey in early 2003. Survey questions were derived from national and international sources and the inspiration of AuSSA advisers.1 In developing the survey, the aim was to ensure not only that AuSSA questions provide comparability over time and with other surveys cross-nationally, but also to take up new topics and to contribute to ongoing innovation in social survey design. AuSSA 2003 was distributed to a stratified systematic random sample of 11 380 Australians aged 18 or over, who were selected from a

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2002 updated version of the Australian Electoral Commission’s Electoral Roll.2 The sample reflects the state-by-state distribution of the Australian population. The overall net response rate for AuSSA 2003 was 44 per cent, with 4270 valid responses collected. Two versions of the survey were distributed between August and December 2003, providing samples with approximately the same number of respondents for each. Surveys A and B had a common core of about 130 items, and then included separate modules on bushrangers, genetic awareness and testing, share ownership, national identity (for the ISSP) and group membership in Australia. To view the AuSSA 2003 questionnaires, see the AuSSA website at: The Australian Social Science Data Archive (ASSDA) conducted the fieldwork. Survey results are available publicly through ASSDA’s online data analysis system, NESSTAR at: or by contacting ASSDA at [email protected], which can also supply the dataset in machine-readable formats as well as provide the AuSSA 2003 User’s Guide (Study no. 1070).

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK This book combines two main types of evidence. The first type includes statistics about the social world (for example, government social expenditures, immigration statistics, trade data) and policy statements (for example, laws on genetic discrimination and insurance, laws on marriage, trade agreements with other countries, income-support regulations). The second type of evidence is data collected from individuals in surveys like AuSSA and the Australian Election Study (AES), which ask questions about social attitudes (for example, about family, work, politics), behaviour (for example, membership of organisations, media consumption) and demographics (for example, respondents’ education, place of residence, family type). Most of this data is presented in tabular form, and is easy to follow. In detailing survey questions and presenting data, we have aimed for simplicity and accessibility. We have been pragmatic in what we have presented, aiming to communicate the story to the reader without unnecessary detail. Chapters generally mention the full wording of survey questions except where they are obvious from the surrounding text. And, in tables and in data reporting, response categories like ‘strongly agree’ and ‘agree’ are regularly collapsed to ‘agree’. Tables do not report the numbers of

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responses in every cell; instead, tables include the frequency of responses where it matters for understanding the sample properties, and for making inferences. Some data is presented in more complex forms, mainly as regression models, which are included in the appendices at the back of the book. Readers will find that most chapters analyse the relationship between patterns in social attitudes and real-world developments, such as political behaviour (for example, voting patterns, protests), public policy change (for example, family payments, labour market deregulation, trade liberalisation) and economic and social trends (for example, economic growth, abortion rates, crime rates). Contributors do not try to ‘prove’ that social attitudes are decisive in producing public policy, but rather point out connections, tensions and feedback between the two.3 People interested in surveys often ask about the reliability of their findings. This is an important topic for both interested users of social science data and survey researchers, which we cannot elaborate fully here. However, we will briefly touch on three problems: survey method, sample bias and non-responses. All survey methods have benefits and limits. In the past, mail surveys have been criticised for not getting a good spread of responses across the community, and, as David de Vaus mentions, for obtaining lower response rates than face-to-face or telephone interviews (de Vaus 2002, p. 127). But mail surveys are making something of a comeback. The costs of interviewing large samples face-to-face in a country the size of Australia are increasingly prohibitive. At the same time, telephone surveys are having increasing problems with obtaining representative samples, as fragmentation in the telecommunications market makes compiling a comprehensive sampling frame difficult. Increasingly, too, people screen out social researchers along with market researchers. Using mail surveys, ASSDA consistently achieves net response rates in the 40–60 per cent range with the AES and now AuSSA, which compare well internationally. No matter what method is used, patterns of bias in social surveys are surprisingly consistent. The major known biases in the AuSSA sample are: age (the median age is older than the median age of the Census population), education (an over-representation of persons with post-secondary school qualifications), and gender (a slight overrepresentation of women). We provide some basic information about these biases in AuSSA 2003 by comparing its sample demographics with equivalent statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

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(see table 1.1). Because the sampling frame of AuSSA 2003 includes registered voters, who are overwhelmingly Australian citizens, we have compiled the comparative ABS data for Australian citizens only. We hope that in the future AuSSA will also survey the 8 per cent or so of adult Australians who are not registered voters; that is, Australians who are not currently citizens. One way we can compensate for sample bias is by using weights that better align the characteristics of the sample with a population about which we have accurate information. This method is commonly used, for instance, in political opinion polling and in election forecasts. Although a sample weight is included in the AuSSA 2003 datafile (available from ASSDA), contributions to this book rely on unweighted data for a couple of reasons. Sample biases do not affect most of the headline frequencies used in this book enough to justify using weighted data. Researchers often use subsamples as one avenue for dealing with biases in an overall sample. More often than not, social researchers are interested in subgroups of the population (for example, blue-collar workers or Liberal voters) and their attitudes and behaviour, and perhaps how they compare to other subgroups. The contrast between the attitudes of subgroups can give accurate and useful clues about the likely social causes of differences. Weighted data also poses additional problems for statistical modelling, such as some kinds of regression analysis.

Table 1.1 Comparing AuSSA 2003 sample with Census 2001* AuSSA 2003

Census 2001

Sex Males

47.0

48.8

Females

53.0

51.2

20–34

17.0

29.9

35–49

30.5

31.6

50–64

30.6

22.7

65 and over

21.9

15.8

Year 12 and below

43.7

59.2

Trade qualification or certificate/diploma

34.0

25.7

22.3

15.1

Age

Education

Bachelor’s degree or higher n

(4270)

* Comparison is made for Australian citizens aged 20 years and over. SOURCES The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003; Australian Bureau of Statistics Census 2001

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For some questions, survey researchers are confronted with a high level of non-response, which can add to our difficulties in understanding the true state of public opinion. This can be registered in different ways: respondents do not answer a given question, choose the ‘Can’t choose’ option, or choose ‘Neither agree nor disagree’. Some questions attract a higher level of non-response than others, and there are essentially two reasons for this. The first reason is the difficulty of the question (see Berinsky 2004). For instance, a question about the likely effects of a free trade agreement between Thailand and Australia might require a lot of knowledge of current affairs and economics. The second reason involves what Adam Berinsky (2004) calls ‘social complexity’, which obliges the respondent to give a potentially socially undesirable answer (on subjects such as racism and sexuality). Sometimes respondents will avoid revealing their true beliefs. Our strategies for dealing with non-responses are understandably limited. AuSSA tries to ask respondents questions in the simplest way possible, to maximise respondent participation. Additionally, the anonymous context of filling out a mail questionnaire no doubt encourages respondents to answer controversial questions. These are some of the problems confronted by social survey researchers and the ways that they can be accommodated. Acknowledging a few of these may help readers to use this book (and this series) to its fullest potential. We trust our readers will find the insights gathered in the first Australian Social Attitudes as fascinating as we have. NOTES

1

2

3

In particular, we drew on items included in British Social Attitudes (commenced 1983), the General Social Survey for the United States (commenced 1972), modules for ISSP (commenced 1984), the European Social Survey (commenced 2003), Australian Election Studies (commenced 1987) and the National Social Science Survey (commenced 1984). The Electoral Roll excludes permanent and temporary residents of Australia who are not citizens and any other adults in Australia who are non-citizens, except for British subjects on a Commonwealth electoral roll as at 25 January 1984. These exclusions amount to approximately 8 per cent of the adult population. The relationship between public opinion and public policy is comprehensively discussed in Manza, Cook and Page (2002).

REFERENCES

Berinsky, AJ (2004) Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

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INTRODUCTION

• 11

Cox, E (2002) ‘Australia: Making the Lucky Country’, in R Putnam (ed.) Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 333–58. de Vaus, D (2002) Surveys in Social Research, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Edwards, M (2004) ‘Social science research and public policy: Narrowing the divide’, Occasional Policy Paper no. 2, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Canberra. Esping-Andersen, G (2000) ‘Two societies, one sociology, and no theory’, British Journal of Sociology, 51(1): 59–77. Gibson, R, Wilson, S, Meagher, G, Denemark, D & Western, M (2004) Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003, Data file, Australian Social Science Data Archive, The Australian National University, Canberra. Gulbenkian Commission (1996) Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Hamilton, C (2003) Growth Fetish, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Manne, R (ed.) (2004) The Howard Years, Black Inc. Agenda, Melbourne. Manza, J, Cook, FL & Page, BI (eds) (2002) Navigating Public Opinion: Polls, Policy, and the Future of American Democracy, Oxford University Press, New York. Offe, C (1996) Modernity and the State: East, West, Polity Press, Cambridge.

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CHAPTER 2

W H AT M A K E S A N A U S T R A L I A N FA M I LY ? Ann Evans and Edith Gray

INTRODUCTION Like other modern industrialised countries, Australia has seen enormous change in family relationships and childbearing over the course of the 20th century. Median age at first marriage has increased to around 28 years, couples cohabit before more than 70 per cent of marriages, 31 per cent of births are exnuptial, and the median age of mothers is 30 (ABS 2003a; ABS 2003b). Additionally, many argue that cohabitation has become an alternative rather than a pathway to marriage (Hantrais & Letablier 1996), with many exnuptial births now occurring within cohabiting relationships. The speed of change has been rapid. Only 20 years ago, the median age at first marriage was about 22 years for women (ABS 2003a), only 14 per cent of all births were exnuptial (ABS 2003b), and only a fifth of marriages were preceded by cohabitation (ABS 1999). Over the same time, divorce has risen dramatically. In 2001, there were 55 300 divorces granted in Australia, the highest number in 20 years and a 34 per cent increase on the number granted in 1981 (ABS 2002). In 2001, 17 per cent of couples had divorced within the first five years of marriage, while a further 26 per cent had divorced in the following five-year period (ABS 2002). In this chapter, we answer two general questions: How much do Australian social attitudes reflect these rapid changes in family formation? How do social and demographic characteristics, such as gender, age, level of education, marital status and religion, shape attitudes about family life? We start by looking at what kinds of relationships Australians think constitute a family today. Given how much family life has changed,

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W H AT M A K E S A N A U S T R A L I A N F A M I L Y ?

• 13

do Australians consider some relationships to be more ‘like a family’ than others? We investigate the extent to which Australians view married and cohabiting couples as families, how the presence of children influences their judgment of the relationships that make a family, and attitudes about same-sex relationships. After exploring which relationships are considered to define family in contemporary Australia, we examine attitudes about children, reproductive rights and fatherhood.

DOES MARRIAGE MAKE A FAMILY? The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003 (Gibson et al. 2004) asks respondents about which types of relationships they include in their definition of a family. The leading question is: ‘Generally speaking, which of the following living arrangements would you consider to be a family today?’ Respondents are asked about a married couple without children, a married couple with children, an unmarried couple without children, and an unmarried couple with children. The response options allow us to establish the relative importance of marriage and the presence of children in respondents’ views about what living arrangements constitute a family. Table 2.1 shows that marriage is an important defining criterion of the family in Australia: a majority (63 per cent) of respondents agree that a married couple without children is a family, while only 32 per cent agree that an unmarried couple without children is a family. Women (36 per cent) are more likely than men (29

Table 2.1 Attitudes to marriage and cohabitation by sex and age, 2003, per cent ‘Yes, a family’

Married couple Unmarried couple Married couple Unmarried couple without children without children with children with children

Sex Male

61

29

99

77

Female

64

36

99

82

18–34

66

34

100

92

35–49

61

37

99

89

50–64

65

34

99

80

65 and over

59

23

99

56

63

32

99

79

(1955)

(1951)

(2026)

(1955)

Age

Total n

SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

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per cent) to agree that an unmarried couple without children is a family. Agreement also decreases with age: younger people are also more likely to agree that an unmarried couple without children is a family (34 per cent among 18–34 year olds), while respondents aged 65 and over are least likely to agree (23 per cent). Marriage is important, but Australians are even more likely to agree that couples are families if they have children. There is almost universal agreement that a married couple with children is a family, with little variation for sex and age of respondent. However, a majority of respondents also agree that unmarried couples with children are families (79 per cent), although men (77 per cent) and older respondents (56 per cent) are less likely to agree. Significantly, the proportion of respondents agreeing that unmarried couples with children are families is actually higher (79 per cent) than the proportion who agree that a married couple without children is a family (63 per cent). These findings suggest that the presence of children is more important than marital status alone to the way respondents define the family. It seems that only older respondents remain strongly attached to marriage as defining the meaning of family. Using the British Social Attitudes survey, Barlow et al. (2001) found that attitudes to marriage differed by marital status and religious beliefs. But we also know that marital status and religious beliefs both vary with age, so multivariate analysis helps separate out these effects. Such analysis shows that attitudes differ significantly and independently according to the age, gender, marital status, education and religious practice of respondents. Focusing on attitudes to unmarried couples without children, we estimate that 31 per cent of people agree that this living arrangement makes a family. But responses vary widely (see Appendix, table A2.1). Women are more likely to say an unmarried couple without children is a family than are men (35 per cent, compared to 27 per cent). Age also matters, with those aged 65 and over being least likely to say that this type of couple makes a family (25 per cent), while 34 per cent of respondents aged 35–49 years agree. Marital status makes a big difference to attitudes: respondents who are cohabiting themselves are most likely to agree that an unmarried couple makes a family (47 per cent), falling to 30 per cent among married respondents. Education and religion produce significant variations too: respondents with a Bachelor’s degree are more likely to agree (40 per cent), while respondents who attend religious services at least twice or three times a month are much less likely to agree (23 per cent).

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• 15

The same factors – gender, age, education, marital status and religion – shape attitudes to unmarried couples with children, although respondents are much more likely to see them as families (we estimate 84 per cent). But we still find sharp divides: a striking 92 per cent of people aged 18–34 agree that this arrangement makes a family, while only 63 per cent of those 65 and over agree. Similarly, 95 per cent in a cohabiting relationship and 91 per cent with a Bachelor’s degree agree, while only 68 per cent of those regularly attending religious services agree. Clearly, marriage makes a difference to our perceptions about whether living arrangements make a family. Younger, more educated and less religious Australians are less likely to define families using marital status than are older and more religious people. For them, the presence of children becomes relatively more important.

CHILDREN, MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE We have seen that the presence of children is important to defining family. Given this, we examine responses to two statements in AuSSA 2003 that probe norms about marriage and children. The first statement is: ‘People who want children ought to get married’. The second statement is: ‘Children should be the main concern when couples divorce’. There is no strong support for, or opposition to, marriage if people want to have children – just over 50 per cent of AuSSA 2003 respondents agree that people who want children ought to get married, while 20 per cent neither agree nor disagree and one-quarter disagree (see table 2.2). But, again, we find the same variations in support among key groups of respondents that we found in the previous section. Men (56 per cent) are more likely to agree than women (49 per cent) that people who want children should get married. Older respondents are more likely to agree than are the young. Among those 65 and over, 78 per cent agree, while only 34 per cent of those aged 18–34 agree. Religious attendance is also important. Respondents who often attend religious services are more likely to agree that people who want children should marry (78 per cent), compared to 41 per cent of those who never attend religious services. Overall, the large number of respondents who did not agree with this view probably reflects the supportive views of unmarried couples with children that we found earlier. Although only half the respondents to AuSSA 2003 believe that having children demands marriage, almost 85 per cent agree that children should be the main concern in a divorce. And once more, older people and those who attend religious services regularly are more likely

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Table 2.2 Attitudes about children and marriage by demographic group, 2003, per cent People who want children ought to get married

Children should be the main concern when couples divorce

Agree

Neither agree nor disagree

Disagree

Agree


Disagree

Male

56

21

22

83

9

8

Female

49

22

29

83

8

9

18–34

34

19

46

76

11

12

35–49

37

27

34

80

9

10

Sex**

Age**

50–64

58

23

19

83

9

8

65 and over

78

13

8

91

4

3

Single, never married

37

22

40

76

11

12

Living with partner

20

24

55

73

9

18

Married

57

22

21

85

8

6

Separated/divorced

48

25

26

82

9

8

Widowed

77

13

9

91

4

3

Less than Bachelor’s degree

53

22

25

83

8

8

Bachelor’s degree or higher

45

21

33

82

10

7

Never

41

22

35

79

10

11

Sometimes

50

24

25

84

8

7

Marital status**

Education**

Religious attendance**

Often Total n

78

13

9

88

6

4

52

21

25

83

8

8

(2186)

(902)

(1082)

(3499)

(305)

(330)

NOTE ‘Can’t choose’ is the remainder for each distribution.

* p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01 SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

to agree. Among 18–34 year old respondents, 76 per cent agree that children should be the main concern when people divorce, while 91 per cent of those 65 and over agree. That young people have more liberal attitudes towards what makes a family than older people is not surprising, and is confirmed here. What makes this finding particularly interesting is that young people are more likely than previous generations to have experienced the divorce of their parents, following increasing divorce rates since the 1970s.

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• 17

I S A S I N G L E - PA R E N T H O U S E H O L D A FA M I LY ? We have seen that AuSSA 2003 respondents are much more likely to define couples with children as a family than they are couples without children. So do they consider a single-parent household to be a family? A large majority (74 per cent) do (see table 2.3). This proportion is greater than the percentage who agree that married or cohabiting couples without children make a family, but lower than the percentage who agree that married or cohabiting couples with children are a family (see table 2.1). Again, we see that men are more conservative than women on this question. Thus, men are less likely to recognise a single-parent household as a family (69 per cent, compared to 78 per cent of women), a pattern found in earlier analysis, though the difference is larger. This is not surprising, given that the majority of single parents are women. The fact that two-thirds of divorces in Australia are initiated by women (Wolcott & Hughes 1999) probably explains some of this gender difference too. And again, agreement drops with age: among 18–34 year olds, 92 per cent consider a single-parent household to be a family, compared to 70 per cent of the 50–64 year age group and just 48 per cent of those aged 65 and over. AuSSA 2003 also asks respondents to express their agreement with the statement ‘A single parent can bring up children as well as a couple’.

Table 2.3 Attitudes to single parents by age and sex, 2003, per cent Agree that a single-parent household is a family

Agree that single parents can bring up children as well as couple parents

Male

69

34

Female

78

49

18–34

92

55

35–49

85

45

50–64

70

39

65 and over

48

33

74

42

(1987)

(4205)

Sex**

Age**

Total n


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Overall, 42 per cent of AuSSA 2003 respondents agree with this statement. Table 2.3 shows that men are less likely to agree (34 per cent) than women (49 per cent). Age matters, too. Among 18–34 year olds, 55 per cent agree, falling to 33 per cent of those aged 65 and over. Young women are the group most likely to agree that single parenthood is as good as two-parent arrangements. To predict the percentage of respondents who agree that single parents with children make a family, we modelled the effect of religious attendance, marital status, education, age and sex on respondent attitudes to single-parent families (see Appendix, table A2.1). Consistent with the patterns found so far in this chapter, women, younger respondents and more educated respondents are significantly more likely to see single-parent households as families. Those who agree that a single parent can bring up children as well as a couple are also significantly more likely to see single parents with children as a family (88 per cent), regardless of their age or sex. Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, religious attendance by itself does not shift attitudes about single-parent families (81 per cent of those who never attend religious services see single-parent households as families, compared to 79 per cent of those who attend often).

IS A SAME-SEX COUPLE A FAMILY? We have seen clear evidence of generational difference in attitudes to what makes a family: younger people are more likely than older people to see unmarried couples (with or without children) and single-parent households as families. Nevertheless, there remains a strong perception that parents are best to make a family and to raise children. So where do same-sex couples fit? Do Australians see them as families too? Evidence from AuSSA 2003 suggests that some do, but also that opinion is much more divided on same-sex relationships than on other household arrangements. Table 2.4 shows that only 20 per cent of AuSSA 2003 respondents agree that a same-sex couple is a family, but, in line with findings on other relationships, the presence of children makes a big difference: about 42 per cent of respondents agree that same-sex couples with children make a family. Again, women are more likely than men to agree that same-sex couples with children are a family and so are the young (65 per cent of those aged 18–34 agree, compared to just 14 per cent of those aged 65 and over). Multivariate analysis confirms that, in addition to significant differences in the attitudes of men and women, and of different age

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• 19

groups, differences in education and religious attendance also affect attitudes to same-sex couples (see Appendix, table A2.1). Religious differences are particularly stark. The model predicts that only 15 per cent of those who regularly attend religious services agree that a same-sex couple with children is a family (compared to 50 per cent of those who never attend), falling to 8 per cent agreement that a same-sex couple without children is a family (compared to 21 per cent of those who never attend). The question about recognising gay couples as families is part of a larger debate about recognising same-sex relationships. In November 2003, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that barring same-sex couples from civil marriage was unconstitutional, sparking renewed debate in the United States and Australia about the virtues of gay marriage. In Australia, the debate has had some high-profile participants. On one side, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, argues that promotion of gay marriage would ‘weaken significantly the place of traditional marriage and bring with it instability and further confusion’ (Pell 2004). On the other, former Australian Medical Association President, Kerryn Phelps, likens the ban on gay marriage to a form of apartheid (Symons 2004). In April 2004, Prime Minister John Howard proposed an amendment to the 1961 Marriage Act to include what he called a ‘commonly accepted definition of a marriage’ as ‘the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life’ (Howard 2004a). The amendment passed the Senate with bipartisan support in August 2004. At the same time, Mr Table 2.4 Attitudes to same-sex couples by age and sex, 2003, per cent Agree that same-sex couple without children is a family

Agree that same-sex couple with children is a family

Agree that the law should recognise same-sex couples

Male

14

34

28

Female

24

50

40

18–34

25

65

49

35–49

26

56

41

50–64

18

36

30

8

14

19

Sex**

Age**

65 and over Total n

20

42

34

(1986)

(1989)

(4207)


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Howard announced changes to superannuation laws so that people who are ‘financially interdependent’, in effect including gay couples, would have the same access to superannuation as married or cohabiting couples (Howard 2004a). So how much support is there for gay marriage? AuSSA 2003 asks respondents a more general question about whether the law should recognise same-sex relationships (see table 2.4). Just over one-third of respondents (34 per cent) agree, while 41 per cent disagree. Again, women and young people are more likely to agree. However, it is interesting to note that the percentage of people aged 65 and over who agree that the law should recognise same-sex relationships is larger than the percentage of the same age group who agree that a same-sex couple with children are a family. A recent Newspoll found similar results when asking specifically about gay marriage. Overall, 38 per cent were in favour of gay marriage, with women and younger respondents more likely to favour them (Newspoll 2004). We develop a model for predicting support for legally recognising same-sex couples (see Appendix, table A2.2). Being a woman, younger and holding a degree remain significant factors in predicting support for legal recognition for same-sex couples. But we also find that respondent sexual identification matters. Heterosexuals are less likely to agree that the law should recognise same-sex relationships than non-heterosexuals (30 per cent, compared to 51 per cent). Frequent attendees of religious services are least likely to agree (15 per cent, compared to 31 per cent who attend sometimes and 42 per cent who never attend). Marital status is also significant: single respondents who have never married and cohabiters are more likely to agree than married, divorced or widowed respondents.

LIFE WITHOUT CHILDREN So far we have suggested that the presence of children is relatively more important than marital status in defining a family. Does this mean Australians devalue life without children? AuSSA 2003 respondents are asked: ‘Thinking about relationships and children today, please tell us how much you agree or disagree with the statement: A life without children is not fully complete’. Respondents do not support this statement as strongly as we might have expected, given the importance of children to defining families: around a quarter of people say that they neither agree nor disagree, 40 per cent agree and 35 per cent disagree. Interestingly, men are more likely to agree (45 per cent) than women

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• 21

(34 per cent) and younger generations are less likely to agree than older ones. We use multivariate analysis to estimate the independent effects of age, gender, marital status, education and religious attendance on agreement with the idea that a life without children is not fully complete (see Appendix, table A2.2). The estimates show that men are still more likely to agree than women. Agreement increases with age, but after controlling for other factors, there is only a difference between the responses of the oldest age group (49 per cent of those aged over 65 agree) and other age groups (all around 35 per cent). The split by marital status shows that those who have been married are much more likely to agree that a life without children is not fully complete (42 per cent) than are those who have never been married (27 per cent). Education has a different impact than we find in previous models. Both certificate/diploma and university degree holders are less likely to agree to this statement than are those with less education. Finally, those who either sometimes or often attend religious services are more likely to say a life without children is not fully complete.

W H AT D O A U S T R A L I A N S T H I N K A B O U T REPRODUCTIVE CHOICE? Reproductive choice raises more highly charged questions about the role of children and marriage in Australian family life. In this section, we consider attitudes to abortion and access to fertility treatment in the form of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). The public debate about abortion has a long history in Australia. Even after abortion laws were relaxed in some states in the early 1970s, some public opposition to abortion has continued. In July 2001, a man shot and killed a security guard at a Melbourne abortion clinic, committing Australia’s first abortion clinic murder. Yet abortion is not a rare procedure in Australia. According to data collected by the Health Insurance Commission, there were between 73 000 and 78 000 abortions performed per year in the late 1990s under the Medicare system (Health Insurance Commission, unpublished data). This figure does not include abortions performed by publicly funded doctors in public or private hospitals. Meyer, Evans and Rahman (2000) estimate a further 16 000 terminations are performed in Australia each year by publicly funded doctors in hospitals. Controversy over fertility treatment for single and lesbian women launched a public debate in 2000 when a Victorian provider, Dr John

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McBain, challenged the legality of Victorian legislation limiting access to IVF treatment to heterosexual married or de facto couples. Dr McBain claimed that this law contravened the federal Sex Discrimination Act (Rabsch 2002). The Federal Court agreed, and Justice Sundberg ruled in favour of McBain. The Australian Catholics Bishops Conference challenged the decision of the Federal Court and the matter was then heard in the High Court. The High Court upheld the decision by Justice Sundberg in April 2002. However, in June 2002, the federal Attorney-General introduced an amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act to allow states and territories to legislate to limit access to assisted reproductive technology services to married couples and couples in de facto relationships. So how do these protests and controversies reflect attitudes to women’s reproductive rights? A B O RT I O N

The majority of AuSSA 2003 respondents (83 per cent) agree that a ‘woman should have the right to choose whether or not she has an abortion’. Agreement differs by gender and by age (see table 2.5). Both men and women express a high level of agreement with a woman’s right to choose abortion (81 per cent and 84 per cent respectively), although women are more likely than men to express strong agreement (49 per cent versus 36 per cent). Men’s agreement is more consistent across the age spectrum: 84 per cent of men aged 18–34 agree with the right to choose, compared to 80 per cent of men aged over 65. By contrast, 90 per cent of young women agree, compared to 76 per cent of women aged over 65. Despite declining support for the right to choose with increasing age, a large majority of older respondents remain supportive. To explore attitudes to abortion further, we model the association between age, relationship status, education and religion with agreement to a woman’s right to choose abortion (see Appendix, table A2.3). We analyse the responses of men and women separately, because of the differences in their responses by age we discussed earlier. The model shows that attitudes to abortion differ significantly with religious beliefs and practices, marital status (for men), and age and education (for women). We use two measures of religion in these models because of the strong religious dimension in debates about abortion. First, we consider answers to the question ‘Do you have a religion?’ Those who indicate a religion are significantly less likely to agree with a woman’s right to choose abortion than are those with no religion. The model for men

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• 23

Table 2.5 Right to choose an abortion by age and sex, 2003, per cent 18–34

35–49

50–64

65 and over

Total

Strongly agree

40

40

34

34

36

Agree

44

42

47

46

45


7

10

8

10

9

Disagree

6

4

6

7

6

Strongly disagree

5

4

6

4

5

Men

n

(306)

(556)

(604)

(448)

(1914)

Strongly agree

57

55

46

39

49

Agree

33

33

38

37

35


4

5

7

10

6

Disagree

3

4

5

8

5

Strongly disagree

4

3

5

7

4

Women**

n

(405)

(691)

(638)

(441)

(2175)


predicts that 81 per cent of men who ascribe to a religion agree with a woman’s right to choose abortion, compared to 89 per cent of men with no religion. This pattern is the same for women. Second, we consider attendance at religious services as a measure of religious belief and practice. We find that the more frequently a person attends religious services, the less likely they are to agree with a woman’s right to choose abortion. Among men who attend religious services often, 60 per cent agree with a woman’s right to choose. Among men who never attend religious services, there is nearly universal agreement (92 per cent) with the right to choose. Again, the pattern for women is the same, with slightly higher levels of agreement (64 per cent agreement by those who attend often; 95 per cent among those who never attend). Among men, marital status is the only other factor that significantly affects their agreement with a woman’s right to choose abortion. Controlling for all other factors, men who are widowed, separated or divorced are less likely to agree with a woman’s right to choose abortion than are those who are married or cohabiting. There is no such difference among women. However, there are some significant differences among women other than religion. The model confirms that those aged 65 and over are less

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likely than are women under 35 years of age to agree with a woman’s right to choose abortion. Education also makes a small but significant difference, independently of religion and age. Women with a university degree (93 per cent) are more likely than those without a degree (90 per cent) to agree with the right to choose. Agreement with a woman’s right to choose abortion is high among AuSSA 2003 respondents. However, agreement is still not universal, and religion and attendance at religious services are crucial predictors of attitudes to abortion for both men and women. This finding reflects a recent study that found that young women are more likely to terminate a pregnancy if they agree with a woman’s right to choose abortion, which in turn, is affected by whether or not she reports having a religion (Evans 2001). IVF FOR UNMARRIED WOMEN

Access to IVF for unmarried women is also an issue of reproductive choice that has generated much public debate in Australia. Two polls conducted at the time of the Federal Court decision that we discussed earlier suggested opposition in the order of 80–90 per cent to single people having access to IVF treatment.1 AuSSA 2003 finds a higher level of agreement with the right of unmarried women to access IVF treatment: 38 per cent of respondents agree that ‘unmarried women should have as much right to fertility treatment (IVF) as married women’. Indeed, table 2.6 shows the now familiar pattern that, overall, women are more likely to agree than men, and that agreement decreases with age. The only variation on this theme is that, at older ages (50 and over), men are more likely to agree (57 per cent) that unmarried women should have the same access to IVF as married women than are women (54 per cent). We use the same model to predict agreement with access to fertility treatment for unmarried women as we did for abortion (see Appendix, table A2.3). However, the results for IVF are quite different. For abortion, religion and religious attendance are the key predictors of agreement. For IVF, other factors – including age, marital status and education – also matter. Controlling for all the other factors in the model, age is still an important predictor. For men, agreement ranges from 34 per cent of those aged 65 and over to 53 per cent of men aged less than 35. The pattern is the same for women, with agreement ranging from 25 per cent to 56 per cent. Older men are more likely to agree than older

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Table 2.6 Unmarried women have as much right to IVF as married women, by sex and age, 2003, per cent 18–34

35–49

50–64

65 and over

Total

Strongly agree

20

12

11

7

Agree

32

23

21

18

23


17

19

15

14

16

Men** 12

Disagree

18

27

30

38

29

Strongly disagree

12

18

24

23

20

(310)

(543)

(601)

(441)

(1895)

Strongly agree

34

25

12

9

Agree

29

26

19

14

22


14

14

18

15

15

Disagree

15

22

33

39

28

8

14

19

24

16

(688)

(639)

(437)

(2159)

n Women**

Strongly disagree n

(395)

19


women. Single men and women are the most likely to agree with IVF for unmarried women (47 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women). Over one-third of men who are married or cohabiting agree (38 per cent), with 40 per cent of men who are divorced, separated or widowed also agreeing. Married and cohabiting women are also less likely to agree with IVF for unmarried women than are women who are divorced, separated or widowed (38 per cent, compared to 44 per cent). Holding a university degree increases acceptance of IVF for unmarried women among both men and women. For men, 47 per cent of those with a Bachelor’s degree or higher agree with IVF for unmarried women, compared to 38 per cent of those with no degree. One half (50 per cent) of all women with a Bachelor’s degree or higher agree that unmarried women should have the same rights to access IVF as married women, compared to 38 per cent of women without a university degree. Religion matters to attitudes to IVF as it did for abortion. For both women and men, those who state that they have a religion are less likely than are those with no religion to agree that unmarried women have the same rights to IVF as married women. And, again, support drops as religious attendance increases. In general, AuSSA 2003 respondents are more supportive of women’s right to choose abortion than they are of unmarried women’s

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access to IVF. Notably, for abortion we see very little difference in the predicted percentages by age, whereas for IVF there is a sharp decline in the percentage agreeing for each successive age group.

W H AT R O L E F O R FAT H E R S ? We have seen that among AuSSA 2003 respondents two parents with children is the most commonly accepted definition of family. So how do respondents view the responsibility of fathers within families? In this section, we examine responses to the question ‘A father should be as heavily involved in the care of his children as the mother’. Over the past ten years, research on fatherhood has increased. Much of this research challenges the way men have been excluded or marginalised in parenthood research because ideas about parenting have too often been developed on the template of mothering (Marsiglio et al. 1998). Research investigating the division of caring between parents finds that shared caregiving (as defined by resident parents sharing the care of children) is not common, but families in which fathers are more involved in caring for children share some characteristics. These characteristics include having fewer and older children, or being older parents (Russell 1983; Ishii-Kuntz & Coltrane 1992), being economically active (Halle & Le Menestrel 2000) and having wives or partners who work (Radin 1994). Although fathers are likely to be more involved in families with these characteristics, mothers perform most child care. Australian estimates based on time-use data find that fathers spend around two hours and 20 minutes per day on child care, compared to mothers’ six hours and 50 minutes (Craig 2002). Further, fathers are more likely to be involved in passive and play-based care (Gray 2001). This much we know about time spent by fathers in intact family units. However, debate rages in Australia about divorced fathers’ involvement in their children’s lives. In this debate, shared care is defined as joint custody after divorce. A recent inquiry into child custody conducted by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs attracted over 1700 submissions (HRSCFCA 2003). The result is a two-year trial of a Families Tribunal that will recommend joint custody for separating parents. The Australian Government has also recently released a proposal to establish Family Relationship Centres to assist separating parents and support joint parenting arrangements (Howard 2004b). On the face of it, AuSSA 2003 findings suggest that there is broad agreement with the idea of shared parenting, despite evidence to the

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Table 2.7 A father should be as heavily involved in the care of his children as the mother by age and sex, 2003, per cent Strongly agree

Agree


Disagree

Strongly disagree

Sex* Male

40

50

8

2

0

Female

45

46

7

2

0

18–34

52

39

8

1

0

35–49

39

49

9

3

0

50–64

39

52

7

2

0

65 and over

45

48

6

1

0

42

48

7

2

0

(1763)

(1995)

(84)

(11)

Age**

Total n

(306)

NOTE ‘Can’t choose’ is the remainder for each distribution.


contrary when it comes to actual behaviour. When respondents are asked whether ‘A father should be as heavily involved in the care of his children as the mother’, 90 per cent agree (table 2.7). Differences in attitudes between men and women, or between different age groups tend to be in the strength of their agreement. Women are more likely than men to strongly agree (45 per cent versus 40 per cent) and those aged 18–34 are most likely to strongly agree (52 per cent), followed by those aged over 65. Respondents aged 35–64 are more likely to agree than strongly agree. An optimistic reading of these findings might signal good prospects for fathering behaviour. Alternatively, they may suggest that while people agree that a father should be as heavily involved as a mother in caring for his children, there are still significant barriers to his taking on this role.

CONCLUSION We can make four generalisations from the evidence that we have considered. First, young respondents accept a wider definition of the family. They are also the generation that has been most exposed to diverse living arrangements and their acceptance of this diversity perhaps reflects these experiences. Young people also take more liberal attitudes to reproductive rights and legal recognition of same-sex relationships. It will be interesting to follow these differences over time to

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see if younger generations become more conservative as they age. Second, with some minor exceptions (for example, older men’s stronger support for IVF for unmarried women), women are more accepting of a wider range of family types, more supportive of reproductive rights, and, intriguingly, less likely to think that a life without children is incomplete. More liberal attitudes among women may reflect their closer involvement in raising children. Third, religious affiliation is associated with less accepting views about family forms other than a married couple with children, and about reproductive rights. Fourth, and perhaps most important, is that the presence of children matters most to our definition of the family. Marriage is not as important: a sizeable majority recognise single parents with children as families, and a sizeable minority now recognise same-sex couples with children in the same way. The family, like other social institutions, is dynamic. Our perceptions of what makes a family are not constant, and family researchers, social commentators and policy-makers should be aware of current attitudes. Questions of family form, legal recognition for different family types, and access to reproductive technologies continue to be debated in Australian society, and policy will continue to respond to changing attitudes and behaviour. NOTE

1

Almost 80 per cent for A Current Affair and over 90 per cent for Melbourne Herald Sun. Cited from .

REFERENCES

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (1999) Marriages and Divorces, Australia, 1998, cat. no. 3310.0, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra. —— (2002) Marriages and Divorces, Australia, 2001, cat. no. 3310.0, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra. —— (2003a) Marriages and Divorces, Australia, 2002, cat. no. 3310.0, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra. —— (2003b) Births, Australia, 2002, cat. no. 3301.0, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra. Barlow, A, Duncan, S, James, G & Park, A (2001) ‘Just a piece of paper? Marriage and cohabitation’, in A Park, J Curtice, K Thomson, L Jarvis & C Bromley (eds) British Social Attitudes: The 18th Report, Sage, London, pp. 29–57. Craig, L (2002) ‘Caring differently: A time use analysis of the type and social context of child care performed by fathers and by mothers’, Social Policy Research Centre Discussion Paper no. 116, Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Evans, A (2001) Abortion or motherhood? Pregnancy resolution decisions of Australian teenagers, PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra.

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Gibson, R, Wilson, S, Meagher, G, Denemark, D & Western, M (2004) Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003, Data file, Australian Social Science Data Archive, The Australian National University, Canberra. Gray, E (2001) Shared parenting in Australia?, PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra. Halle, T & Le Menestrel, S (2000) ‘How do social, economic, and cultural factors influence fathers’ involvement with their children?’, Child Trends Research Brief, Child Trends, Washington, DC. Hantrais, L & Letablier, M-T (1996) Families and Family Policies in Europe, Longman, London. House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs (HRSCFCA) (2003) Every picture tells a story: Report on the inquiry into child custody arrangements in the event of family separation, The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. Howard, J (2004a) Press Conference, Parliament House Canberra, 27th April 2004. Available at: (accessed April 2004). —— (2004b) Reforms to the Family Law System, 29th July 2004. Available at: (accessed August 2004). Ishii-Kuntz, M & Coltrane, S (1992) ‘Predicting the sharing of household labor: Are parenting and housework distinct?’, Sociological Perspectives, 35: 629–47. Marsiglio, W & Day, R (primary authors), Evans, V, Lamb, M, Peters, E, & Braver, S (contributing authors) (1998) ‘Social fatherhood and paternal involvement: Conceptual, data, and policymaking issues. Report of the Working Group on Conceptualizing Male Parenting’, in Nurturing Fatherhood: Improving Data and Research on Male Fertility, Family Formation and Fatherhood, Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, Washington, DC, pp. 99–174. Meyer, P, Evans, A & Rahman, N (2000) Estimating the level of induced abortion in Australia, Paper presented at the Public Health Association of Australia Conference, Canberra, November 2000. Newspoll (2004) Newspoll 4–6 June 2004. Available at: (accessed August 2004). Pell, G (2004) ‘The case against gay marriage’, The Australian, 4 May 2004. Rabsch, M (2002) ‘The fallout from McBain: IVF, standing, international law, and human rights’, Law Society Journal, 40(6): 54–57. Radin, N (1994) ‘Primary-caregiving fathers in intact families’, in A Gottfried & A Gottfried (eds.) Redefining Families: Implications for Children’s Development, Plenum Press, New York, pp. 11–54. Russell, G (1983) The Changing Role of Fathers?, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane. Symons, E (2004) ‘Gay marriage ban just like “apartheid”’, The Australian, 27 April 2004. Wolcott, I & Hughes, J (1999) ‘Towards understanding the reasons for divorce’, Australian Institute of Family Studies Working Paper no. 20, Australian Institute of Family Studies, Melbourne.

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CHAPTER 3

M A K I N G FA M I L I E S W O R K Deborah Mitchell

INTRODUCTION Some social theorists claim that family is less important to how we define ourselves than it used to be. Instead, they argue, we increasingly think of ourselves as individuals and as part of friendship and social networks formed in the workplace and informal associations (Giddens 1991; Beck 1992). At the same time, how we balance family life with other pressures, especially work, continues to be hotly debated. These pressures have received much attention in the media, have come under scrutiny by governments, unions and industry, and have been analysed in publications with titles that have passed into popular usage – ‘juggling time’ (Bittman 1991), the ‘time bind’ (Hochschild 1997) and the ‘work/life collision’ (Pocock 2003). In the realm of policy and practice, ‘family friendly’ policies are much discussed by governments and employers, but work structures and family policies in Australia remain generally anchored in the male ‘breadwinner’ model; that is, a model that presumes men will work full-time while their partners take on family responsibilities (see Apps 2004). Against this background, changing gender roles and income needs have led couples with children to adopt a diverse set of strategies to cope with work and family life – even when these are not strongly supported by public policy (see Moen & Sweet 2003; OECD 2002, pp. 40–41). In this chapter, I use the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003 (Gibson et al. 2004) to discover how different kinds of families are dealing with the problems of the work/life balance in three important policy-related areas – child care, working time, and living standards. My aim is to shed light on the interactions between ideas about identity and family, policies, and families’ strategies for managing work and life in contemporary Australia.

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MAKING FAMILIES WORK

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Throughout the chapter, I focus on families with children aged 16 or under. I divide respondents into members of four family types: singleparent households; households with two full-time earners; ‘neotraditional’ households (with one full-time and one part-time earner); and ‘breadwinner’ households (with one earner and one stay-at-home partner).1 This analysis reveals how members of different types of families see themselves, how they adapt to child-rearing and income pressures, and how they view childcare provision, long working hours and their current and prospective living standards.

FAMILIES, IDENTITY AND THE CARE OF CHILDREN AuSSA 2003 asks respondents to rank the three groups that are most important in describing who they are. Respondents could choose from a list of ten items: their occupation, race or ethnic background, gender, age group, religion, preferred political party, nationality, family or marital status, social class, or the part of Australia that they live in.2 Their responses indicate that family and marital status matter greatly to identity – 52 per cent choose this first. As table 3.1 reports, in total, 74 per cent of respondents nominate their family or marital status as one of their three choices. The second most important choice is occupation – 16 per cent choose this option first, and, in total, 55 per cent of respondents choose work as one of their three choices. Third comes the part of Australia where the respondent lives: only 3 per cent of respondents identify first with the part of Australia they live in, but a high 14 per cent and 26 per cent choose this second or third respectively. Overall, then, despite recent theory to the contrary, these findings suggest that family remains central to Australians’ personal identity. Table 3.2 reports the percentages of those who choose family or marital status and occupation as their first choice by respondent age, sex Table 3.1 Identifying groups, 2003, per cent in rows Groups selected

First choice

Second choice

Third choice

Total

Your family or marital status

52

15

7

74

Your occupation

16

22

17

55

3

14

26

43

The part of Australia that you live in (n ≥ 2082) SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

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and family type. We can see that women are more likely than men to choose their family or marital status as their primary identification (55 per cent, compared to 49 per cent). Age, clearly, is also an important factor distinguishing attitudes to family and identity, in part because our attachment to family follows the lifecourse. We can see that identifying with family rises for the 35–49 year old group and then stays much the same for older cohorts. Some of the 50–64 year old group are ‘emptynesters’ or have adult children still at home. The youngest age group – those 18–34 – show a surprising level of identification with family/marital status. Around 44 per cent identify with family first, and a total of 60 per cent of this group nominate it as one of their three choices. We also see in table 3.2 that identifying with work is highest among respondents aged 35–49 – the prime years in the labour market for many. When it comes to family type, we find strongest attachment to family among respondents from neo-traditional families, where it is usually the female partner who works part-time. Respondents from single-parent families are 10 per cent less likely to cite family as their primary identification than are others, and are a little more likely to choose occupation. Interestingly, we find the strongest attachment to occupation among respondents from breadwinner families (25 per cent). These respondents are overwhelmingly male earners, who presumably see themselves first and foremost as working to provide for their families. Table 3.2 Family and work identification by selected groups, 2003, per cent Family/marital status as first choice

Occupation as first choice

Male

49

15

Female

55

16

18–34

44

15

35–49

53

18

50–64

56

15

65 and over

52

16

Single parent (n = 101)

50

19

Two full-time (n = 122)

62

13

Neo-traditional (n = 197)

68

11

Breadwinner (n = 112)

56

25

Sex

Age

Family type


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Although family remains a mainstay of personal identity, evidence in chapter 2 suggests that Australians are beginning to adopt a more inclusive definition of family and are moving away from traditional family norms. Two examples of this are more accepting attitudes to child-rearing outside marriage and single-parent families. Taken with findings so far, the overall picture suggests that Australians are re-evaluating ideas about, and roles within, the family while still seeing family as central to identity. Tables 3.1 and 3.2 clearly suggest that family and work remain the anchors of personal identity for many Australians. Understandably, then, work and family are often in conflict. The care of children and the conflicting demands placed on working mothers sit at the heart of the family–work balancing act. On the one hand, studies reveal the guilt and anxiety that some working mothers feel when leaving preschool children in the care of others (Himmelweit & Sigala 2003, pp. 8–10). On the other hand, the financial, social and psychological rewards from working increasingly ‘pull’ women back into the labour market. As Pocock points out, virtually all mothers of young children have spent a considerable period in the labour market before childbirth and ‘now come to motherhood with an identity partly rooted in paid jobs’ (Pocock 2003, p. 74). Is this changing experience revealed in views about whether ‘a preschool child is likely to suffer if the mother works’? Policy, norms and experience all condition attitudes on this question. Table 3.3 again shows a marked divergence between the views of men and women. Men are far more likely to agree that preschool children suffer if the mother works as are older respondents.3 Because finding and managing child care are tasks predominantly performed by women (Bittman 1991; Baxter 2002; Pocock 2003), men may be less aware of the quality and impact of these arrangements on children. And younger women have fewer worries for their children because they are more likely to benefit from day care (especially regulated, centre-based care) than were older women who did not have as much access to these facilities when their children were very young. Do respondents in our four family types hold different opinions about child care? The answer is yes, and they hold views that match their actual labour market behaviour. Our breadwinners (with mothers at home) are most likely to agree that a child is likely to suffer if the mother works (46 per cent), compared to 29 per cent agreement among respondents from families in which both partners work full-time, who are presumably most likely to need, and be able to afford, child care. Here, neo-traditional families are much closer to families with two full-time

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Table 3.3 Preschool child likely to suffer if mother works, 2003, per cent Agree

Neither

Disagree

Can’t choose

Male

44

24

30

2

Female

31

23

45

2

18–34

25

28

46

2

35–49

34

22

44

1

50–64

40

22

37

1

65 and over

49

23

25

3

Single parent (n = 187)

35

23

41

2

Two full-time (n = 237)

29

21

49

2

Sex

Age

Family type

Neo-traditional (n = 358)

30

18

51

1

Breadwinner (n = 225)

46

23

31

1


workers, which suggests that ‘juggling’ work and paid child care makes families less likely to think that a small child suffers if their mother works. The question of who is best suited to provide childcare services again provokes interesting patterns of responses among AuSSA 2003 respondents. This policy question matters not only for the care of children; it also matters greatly for the work and income prospects of mothers, especially for low-skilled women (Himmelweit & Sigala 2003, p. 22; for Australia’s current policies see OECD 2002, pp. 86, 100). In table 3.4, we see that nearly two-thirds of respondents think that governments and the private sector are better suited for delivering child care than families and relatives or charities (64 per cent, compared to 30 per cent). There is no difference in responses between men and women. The most striking finding is variation by age: older respondents overwhelmingly endorse government provision, well ahead of private provision or families. Those in the main child-rearing group (35–49 years), however, endorse the private sector just ahead of government provision, with families again being a third choice. Only the youngest cohort of the sample aged 18–34 – those most likely to have experienced non-family based child care – put families well ahead of both government and the private sector. Young respondents – who are either not raising children or have just started families – may lack the wider experience of child-rearing that presumably increases support for government and market-based care provision.

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Table 3.4 Best to deliver childcare services by sex and age, 2003, per cent Governments Charities

Private Families and businesses relatives

Can’t choose

Sex Men

34

4

30

26

6

Women

34

2

29

28

8

18–34

28

3

28

36

5

35–49

30

2

34

26

7

50–64

35

2

32

26

6

65 and over

43

5

23

23

7

Total

34

3

30

27

7

Age

(n ≥1996) SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

Table 3.5 Delivery of childcare services by attitudes to child care, 2003, per cent Best suited to deliver childcare services … Fine for children under three years to be in full-time care

Governments

Charities

Private Families businesses and relatives

Can’t choose

Agree

36

2

34

21

6

Neither/Can’t choose

34

3

29

24

10

Disagree

32

3

26

33

5

(n = 2014) SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

Table 3.5 suggests that attitudes to child-rearing matter quite a bit to our preferences for childcare provision. For the minority who agree that it is fine for children who are under three years to be in full-time care, governments and private businesses are clearly preferred providers. This is true for those who disagree as well, but support for family-based care is 12 per cent higher among this group than among those who agree. These responses suggest that, although there is a broad consensus that governments and private centres are best suited to deliver child care to the community as a whole, the preference for family care is strongly influenced by attitudes to child-rearing. However, again, experience is likely to condition attitudes. In their analysis of the British Household Panel Survey between 1991 and 1999, Himmelweit and Sigala show that British mothers with preschool children who entered employment

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in the previous two years and who thought that preschool children suffered were ‘more likely to change their attitude than their behaviour’ (Himmelweit & Sigala 2003, p. 13).

WORKING HOURS AND FAMILY LIFE When work and life collide for families, especially for families with working mothers, they do so for two main reasons. The first is the increasing length of the working day for many full-time workers. The mid-1980s saw a sustained reversal in the long-term trend of a decline in standard working hours (OECD 2004, p. 42). As the ABS has observed, Australia’s experience has been ‘relatively uncommon’ among OECD nations (ABS 2003, p. 120). Over the past decade, the kinds of jobs demanding long work hours have expanded out from management and professions to include a broad range of occupations and industries. Second is the lack of family-friendly policies in the workplace, especially for casual workers (OECD 2002, pp. 190–91), and the lack of affordable child care, even after recent government reforms (Marriner 2004). Together, longer hours for both men and women and costly childcare options contribute to a larger problem of ‘time-juggling’, which Bittman (1991) identifies as a major stress on families, especially where both parents work. Chapter 4 reports that around two-thirds of AuSSA 2003 respondents now believe that there are too many people working long hours in Australia. Only around one in six respondents disagree. Even so, around half of our respondents (51 per cent) believe that people make this choice freely; while 31 per cent believe that those who work long hours are not in that position by choice. Given talk of the ‘double shift’ for women and juggling work and family time, do working hours have different impacts on different kinds of families, and so shape respondent views about working time? Table 3.6 compares responses from the main earner in our four family types to four statements about work. Single-parent families are least likely to experience time pressure (because only a minority work full-time, a point taken up later). About a fifth say that their work hours are too long or that their employer expects them to work long hours, while around a third say that their hours interfere with family and personal life or that they would like to work fewer hours. Both breadwinner families and families with two full-time working parents experience more time pressure, with more than half respondents from both groups preferring fewer hours and finding that their working hours

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Table 3.6 Attitudes to working hours by family type, 2003, per cent agree Single parent

Two full-time

Neotraditional*

Breadwinner

My hours of work each week are too long

22

29

42

32

Employer expects me to work long hours

22

31

42

39

My hours of work interfere with family and personal life

33

51

61

50

Prefer to work fewer hours each week

30

58

67

51

(50)

(93)

(66)

(78)

n

* For neo-traditional families, respondent is the full-time earner. SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

interfere with their family and personal life. But we find that neotraditional earners really stand out: they are more likely than respondents from any other family type to think that their working hours are too long (42 per cent), to feel pressured to work longer hours by their employer (42 per cent), to feel that work time interferes with family and personal life (61 per cent) and to prefer to work fewer hours (67 per cent). These findings are in broad agreement with qualitative research that shows that the lengthening work day of full-time men particularly affects fathers and interferes with the amount of time they can spend with their children (Pocock 2003, pp. 145–46). The reasons for pressure on neotraditional families seem obvious: they lack the ‘time resources’ of a stayat-home parent to take charge of family responsibilities, and, in the main, lack the ‘income resources’ of families with two full-time working parents to pay for support. Further research into adaptive labour market behaviour by families would provide further insight into the complex choices and binds that underlie the work/life balance.

FA M I LY L I V I N G S TA N D A R D S A N D C O P I N G Stresses on family life from the demands of paid work have led researchers, not to mention time-stretched parents, to wonder ‘why do they do it?’ As I noted earlier, apart from the social and psychological benefits that work and the workplace provide for women, and the pressure that employers place on men, financial benefits play an important role in choices about work participation and working hours. For many families, women’s entry to the labour market offers additional income resources to cope with tough labour markets and additional expenses associated with the lifecourse (mortgages, education and child care), even if income is gained at the cost of time and household work. How does

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women’s entry into the labour market affect how families judge their economic position and prospects? AuSSA 2003 includes several subjective measures of living standards and of expectations about economic mobility. We can use this data to assess how optimistic or pessimistic different kinds of families are, though obviously, other factors, such as income differences within family types, may explain some variation. Table 3.7 shows responses by family type to some subjective measures of living standards and expectations, as well as an objective measure in the form of gross annual household income.4 Optimism is the prevailing mood. Overall, we can see that a majority of respondents believe that their standard of living is better than their parents’. For every family type, more respondents agree that they have a good chance of improving their standard of living than disagree. On balance, respondents think that their children will have a better standard of living than they have. Finally, a majority of respondents from all family types are coping or comfortable on their current income. However, there is a clear divide between one-earner and two-earner families. Families in which both parents work full-time are the most optimistic, and coping best. Respondents from these families are more likely than those from other family types to say that their living standard is better compared to their parents (78 per cent), to expect that their children will have a higher standard of living than they have (45 per cent), to believe themselves to have a good chance of improving their own standard of living (56 per cent), and to be managing comfortably on their current income (33 per cent). These families are also most likely to report a household income in excess of $78 000 per year (57 per cent of this group). By contrast, single-parent families are least optimistic and coping worst (see also OECD 2002, p. 70). Respondents from these families are less likely than respondents from the other family types to say that their living standard is better compared to their parents (59 per cent), to believe themselves to have a good chance of improving their standard of living (38 per cent), and to be managing comfortably on their current income (12 per cent). Single-parent families are also least likely to report a household income in excess of $78 000 per year (9 per cent). Almost two-thirds of single-parent families reported an annual income below $31 199 in 2003 (compared to just 8 per cent and 7 per cent of two full-time earner and neo-traditional families respectively). Single parents are also most likely to report below-average incomes in their own estimation (54 per cent) and a high number indicate financial stress –

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fully 43 per cent of this group find it difficult or very difficult to get by, compared to 17 per cent in families with two earners. The absence of a partner’s income, coupled with often poor labour market experiences, put these families at the bottom of the household income distribution – and in need of government income support to maintain living standards (see McDonald 2001, and chapter 7 on the welfare state). Indeed, 45 per cent of single-parent respondents were not in paid work, similar to findings from the ABS (2004) and the OECD (2002, pp. 65–66). Breadwinners are in the middle, with 46 per cent saying they have a good chance of improving their living standards, presumably lower Table 3.7 Perceptions of current and future living standards by family type, 2003, per cent Single parent

Two full-time

Neotraditional

Breadwinners

Better

59

78

76

69

Same

22

13

16

19

Worse

18

8

7

12

Better

42

45

38

43

Same

22

28

29

22

Worse

29

21

26

25

Agree

38

56

50

46

Neither/Can’t choose

31

26

28

30

Disagree

31

18

22

24

Standard of living compared to parents

Children’s standard of living compared to respondents

Have a good chance of improving standard of living

Family income compared to average Below

54

14

13

34

Average

31

45

46

38

Above

11

41

41

27

How managing on current income Difficult

43

17

16

30

Coping

45

50

52

51

Comfortable

12

33

31

18

Gross household income

n

$0 – 31 199

65

8

7

31

$31 200 – 77 999

26

35

49

47

$78 000 or more

9

57

44

22

(232)

(344)

(214)

(175)

NOTE ‘Can’t choose’ not included for all variables. SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

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than in dual-earner families because of more limited labour market participation. Interestingly, we find breadwinner families more evenly spread across the income distribution. More than a fifth of these families can probably afford a stay-at-home partner, while the bottom third, on both subjective and objective measures, might benefit from more labour market participation. Factors that influence family decisionmaking about female labour force participation include norms about child-rearing and gender roles (Himmelweit & Sigala 2003, p. 8), policy incentives for work or staying at home (Apps 2004), and labour market opportunities.

CONCLUSION This chapter reveals what families share in common as well as their major differences. We find that family life remains central to the identity of Australians, although breadwinning men hold a special attachment to work, perhaps in their role as hard-working providers. The same breadwinners are also more attached to the family for child care, but along with the others, they still prefer governments and private providers to deliver it. Working time pressures are hitting neo-traditional families hardest. These families, with a second part-time worker, have a bit more time than full-timers, and a bit more income than breadwinners – but perhaps not enough of either. Lastly, single parents are feeling the pinch. Fewer than half in the AuSSA 2003 sample have even one full-time income, underlining their reliance on government support. In recent times, public policy has recognised that protecting family incomes is central to living standards and a strong society (see also chapter 7). But policy-makers still face the challenge of understanding and assisting diverse families who, as we have seen in this chapter, face different income and time pressures (see also OECD 2002). A lot of this difference depends on whether women take up paid work and then how much they do. Three decades after Australian women started entering the labour market in large numbers, we find frictions between work and family life. By looking at attitudes and behaviour in different kinds of families, we have revealed the challenges that all families face, some with more resources than others. NOTES

1

Respondent’s work status is based on their hours usually worked. As usual, hours are not known for partners; their work status is based on the main activity they did last week.

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2 3 4

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These items are part of the International Social Survey Program’s 2003 National Identity module fielded in more than 30 countries. See also ISSP findings for 1994–95, cited in OECD (2002, pp. 56–57). Only individual case analysis would allow us to link subjective and objective indicators of living standards to see how closely they match. But our purpose here is to look at how family types, rather than individual families, judge their living standards and compare for household incomes.

REFERENCES

Apps, P (2004) ‘The high taxation of working families’, Australian Review of Public Affairs, 5(1): 1–24. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2003) Australian Social Trends 2003, cat. no. 4102.0, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra. —— (2004) ‘The measures: Family, community, and social cohesion’, Measures of Australia’s Progress, cat. no. 1370.0, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra. Baxter, J (2002) ‘Patterns of change and stability in the gender division of labour in Australia, 1986–1997’, Journal of Sociology, 38(4): 399–424. Beck, U (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge. Bittman, M (1991) Juggling Time: How Australian Families Use Time, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra. Gibson, R, Wilson, S, Meagher, G, Denemark, D & Western, M (2004) Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003, Data file, Australian Social Science Data Archive, The Australian National University, Canberra. Giddens, A (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Blackwell, Cambridge. Himmelweit, S & Sigala, M (2003) ‘Choice and the relationship between attitudes and behaviour for mothers with preschool children: Some implications for policy’, Hawke Research Institute Working Paper Series no. 23, Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia. Hochschild, A (1997) The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, Metropolitan Books, New York. McDonald, P (2001) ‘Family support policy in Australia: The need for a paradigm shift’, People and Place, 9(2): 14–20. Marriner, C (2004) ‘Don’t make me scream’, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 November. Moen, P & Sweet, S (2003) ‘Time clocks: Work-hour strategies’, in P Moen (ed.) It’s About Time: Couples and Careers, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (2002) Babies and Bosses: Reconciling Work and Family Life: Australia, Denmark and the Netherlands, vol. 1, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris. —— (2004) OECD Employment Outlook, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris. Pocock, B (2003) The Work/Life Collision, The Federation Press, Sydney.

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CHAPTER 4

HOW DO AUSTRALIANS FEEL ABOUT THEIR WORK? Bill Martin and Jocelyn Pixley

INTRODUCTION Paid work is an integral part of most Australian lives,1 and the world of work has been dramatically transformed in the past 20 years. Part-time, casual and contract employment have grown rapidly, women’s participation in paid employment continues to rise and most partners in couple families with children are now in paid jobs. The industrial relations landscape is also very different, with reduced rights and protection for many workers and reduced involvement of unions. Many employers have restructured work and sought to increase their flexibility to hire and fire workers (see Hancock 2002; Watson et al. 2003; Wooden 2002). Some commentators argue that recent workplace changes have made the experience of work less positive for many people (Watson et al. 2003; Tiffen & Gittins 2004, pp. 66–86), while others suggest the opposite (Mathews 1989; Wooden 2002). These debates mainly draw on objective indicators such as pay or conditions. In this chapter, we explore people’s attitudes and evaluations to understand how Australians feel about their working lives. Who is satisfied with their job? Who feels most insecure? How are longer working hours affecting us? And what about the work/family balance, or ‘work/life collision’ as Barbara Pocock (2003) calls it? By examining what the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003 (Gibson et al. 2004) tells us, we can build an illuminating picture of how Australians are dealing with the challenges of working life.

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HOW DO AUSTRALIANS FEEL ABOUT THEIR WORK?

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HOW DO AUSTRALIANS EXPERIENCE THEIR WORK? Among the questions about working life in AuSSA 2003 is the simple ‘All in all, how satisfied are you with your job?’. The vast majority of respondents express satisfaction. Table 4.1 shows that only 11 per cent express any level of dissatisfaction and, on an 11-point scale, more than 20 per cent place their satisfaction in the top two categories. While these findings certainly indicate that Australians are generally satisfied with their jobs, they are not unusual. A study of 21 countries in 1999 found similar results; only 11 per cent of Britons, 10 per cent of French, 7 per cent of New Zealanders and 4 per cent of Dutch respondents expressed dissatisfaction (Sousa-Poza & Sousa-Poza 2000). Two-thirds of AuSSA 2003 respondents also feel that they are able to use their abilities or qualifications in their jobs, though a fifth say that they do not use their skills at work. This is important, partly because maximising skill use matters for Australia’s economic performance, but also because people are generally happier at work if their skills are used. Indeed, 28 per cent of those who say they do not use their skills also express some dissatisfaction with their jobs, compared to only 6 per cent of those who say they do use their skills. Relations between management and employees are important in people’s everyday experience of work, and most AuSSA 2003 respondents (62 per cent) agree that these relations are ‘good … in my workplace’. However, few feel this emphatically (only 15 per cent strongly agree), and just over a fifth of respondents do not see workplace relations as good. Again, this is important because workplace harmony improves job satisfaction (see table 4.2). According to many commentators, one of the most important effects of workplace and labour market change in recent decades has been to increase people’s insecurity about their ability to keep their jobs and to get a new job if they are retrenched (Watson et al. 2003; Sennett 1998). AuSSA 2003 results partly confirm this view. Around one in eight respondents say that they are ‘very likely’ or ‘fairly likely’ to lose their jobs in the next year, although a little over half think that this is ‘not at all likely’. This level of insecurity appears to be out of proportion to the real risks of job loss, since ABS data shows that about 2 per cent of Australian workers actually experience retrenchment in any 12-month period (ABS 2002). Most Australians also doubt their marketability – that is, their ability to get another job that is at least as good as the one they currently have. Only 15 per cent of respondents say it would be

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Table 4.1 How Australians experience work, 2003, per cent All in all, how satisfied are you with your job? (0 = extremely dissatisfied, 10 = extremely satisfied) 0–4

11

5

10

6–7

33

8

25

9–10

22

I don’t get a chance to use my abilities or qualifications at work Agree

20

Disagree

67

Management and employees have good relations in my workplace Agree

62

Disagree

21

Thinking about the next 12 months, how likely is it that you will lose your job or be retrenched? Very likely

5

Fairly likely

8

Not too likely

34

Not at all likely

54

How easy would it be for you to find a job with another employer that has approximately the same income and conditions? Very easy

15

Somewhat easy

35

Not easy at all

50

I feel under pressure to work harder in my job Agree

43

Disagree

34

(n≥ 2429) SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

‘very easy’ to do so, while exactly half say it would be ‘not easy at all’. Fear of job loss and lack of confidence about one’s marketability may make Australians more compliant when employers demand more of them. Certainly, a large minority of respondents (43 per cent) feel under pressure to work harder, although a sizeable minority (34 per cent) feel no such pressure. Respondents who feel under pressure to work harder are twice as likely to think that they are fairly or very likely to lose their job in the next year as those who do not (25 per cent versus 12 per cent). Together, these initial results give us a picture of overall trends: most respondents like their jobs, think that their skills are used at work, report fairly harmonious management–employee relations and are not afraid of

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losing their jobs. However, responses do vary in some important dimensions of working life, notably perceptions of marketability and feeling under pressure to work harder. We return to these later.

W H AT A F F E C T S J O B S AT I S FA C T I O N ? There is reason to think that some kinds of workers, or workers in some kinds of jobs, are more likely than others to be less satisfied with their jobs – with their pay and conditions, with their job security, and with how compatible their job is with family life. We could speculate that older workers are less satisfied because they are more likely to be retrenched and to find it harder than younger workers to find another job. Perhaps women, too, are less satisfied because they face disadvantage in the labour market, because they are directly discriminated against, because they are concentrated in ‘feminised’ occupations with low pay and poor conditions, or because family responsibilities restrict their ability to demonstrate the outward commitment that many employers require for advancement. Loss of once exemplary pay and working conditions may undermine the job satisfaction of public sector workers as governments cut spending and privatise. People with fewer qualifications and those in casual and part-time jobs, particularly jobs demanding little formal training, might be less satisfied because their income and benefits (such as sick pay, leave entitlements, and job security) have been limited or reduced under new industrial relations rules. Other workers, meanwhile – notably those with higher educational qualifications and full-time managerial or professional jobs – may be more satisfied with their jobs because their rewards have increased. Perhaps surprisingly, many of these factors do not explain job satisfaction: men and women are equally satisfied, people’s hours of work are not related to their satisfaction, nor is their education.2 Even income is very weakly related to job satisfaction. Table 4.2 shows that age, occupation and workplace experience make a difference to job satisfaction. Workers aged 55 and over are more satisfied than those under 55, with an average score of 7.4 on our 11-point job satisfaction scale, compared to 6.9 for the younger age group. Perhaps these over 55s feel privileged just to have a job, and therefore have higher job satisfaction than younger people who feel that they have a right to a job. Table 4.2 also shows that people in some occupations are somewhat more satisfied than others with their jobs. On the 11-point scale, managers average about 7.5, while lower skilled workers (including routine clerical and administrative occupations) average about 6.6. These differences are significant,

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but they are quite small – around 1 point on our 11-point scale. Moreover, average scores obscure some wide variation in job satisfaction within occupational and age groups. For example, although the average job satisfaction level for lower skilled workers is 6.6, more than a third (38 per cent) gave their job satisfaction as 8 or above. Workplace experience makes much more difference to job satisfaction than age and occupation. Table 4.2 shows that being able to use one’s skills, having good workplace relations, and feeling secure in one’s job each make a difference of around two points on our 11-point scale, twice the variation by occupation and nearly four times that by age. Moreover, these factors are much more consistently associated with job satisfaction than occupation or age. For example, we can predict a person’s job satisfaction with much more confidence by knowing whether their workplace relations are good than by knowing their occupation or age. Table 4.3 confirms that workplace experiences are not strongly related to income or occupation. It is true that respondents in Table 4.2 Job satisfaction by occupation, age and workplace experiences, 2003 Mean job satisfaction*

Occupation Managers

7.5

Professionals

7.2

Associate professionals

7.4

Tradespersons

6.9

Advanced clerical and service

7.2

Lower skilled

6.6

Age Under 55

6.9

55 and over

7.4

Workplace experience Good relations between managers and employees

7.4

Not good relations between managers and employees

5.5

Use skills

7.4

Don’t use skills

5.5

Not under pressure to work harder

7.5

Under pressure to work harder

6.4

Not at all likely to lose job

7.5

Not too likely to lose job

6.7

Very or fairly likely to lose job

5.8

(n≥ 2422) * 0 = extremely dissatisfied; 10 = extremely satisfied SOURCE Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

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Table 4.3 Skills and workplace relations by hourly income and occupation, 2003, per cent I don’t get a chance to use my abilities or qualifications at work

(per cent agree)

Income (n = 2353) Earn under $22 per hour

25

Earn over $22 per hour

14

Occupation (n = 2410) Low skill occupation*

30

Other occupation

14

Management and employees have good relations in my workplace

(per cent disagree)

Occupation (n = 2404) Managers

15

Professionals

21


16

Tradespersons

23

Advanced clerical

20

Other (low skill) occupations

25

* Low skill occupations include the following four major groups from the Australian Standard Classification of Occupations (Australian Bureau of Statistics 1997): labourers; elementary clerical, sales and service workers; intermediate production and transport workers; and intermediate clerical, sales and services workers. SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

lower paid jobs and lower skill occupations are less likely to feel that their skills are used. But most people still feel that their skills are used. Among respondents reporting incomes in the bottom 60 per cent of hourly earnings (that is, those earning less than $22 per hour), 25 per cent feel that their skills are not used, compared to 14 per cent in the top 40 per cent of the earnings distribution. And among respondents in lower skill occupations, 30 per cent of people feel that their skills are not used, compared to 14 per cent in other occupations. Those in lower skilled jobs are also more likely than others to report poor workplace relations, but the differences are small: 25 per cent of people in lower skilled jobs indicate that manager–employee relations are not good in their workplace, compared to 15 per cent of managers, 21 per cent of professionals and 20 per cent of advanced clerical workers. Overall, then, these aspects of workplace experience do vary significantly, but we cannot find strong connections between people’s experience and their occupations. Instead, skill use, job security and the quality of relationships seem to be matters internal to workplaces and therefore under the influence of management. Job satisfaction is widely recognised as a relative phenomenon – it largely reflects people’s assessment of various aspects of their job

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against what they think they might reasonably hope for. That status and income have relatively little impact on people’s job satisfaction means that most feel that they could not reasonably expect much more on these dimensions. On the other hand, most people view poor workplace experiences as unacceptable and changeable. Therefore, these experiences do translate quite consistently into lower job satisfaction. Because job satisfaction is quite closely related to people’s overall happiness, employers can significantly promote many employees’ job satisfaction and overall happiness by developing good relations between workers and management, by enhancing job security, by providing employees with opportunities to use their skills, and by ensuring that they do not feel under pressure to work harder. For most Australians, a positive experience of work depends more on resolving these everyday workplace issues than on achieving significantly higher incomes or ‘better’ jobs.

WHO FEELS MOST INSECURE ABOUT THEIR JOBS? Beliefs about job security can give us a sense of people’s perceptions of the wider world of work. Undoubtedly, some managers use the threat of job loss as a way of controlling workers and, as we noted above, Australia offers little legislative job protection (OECD 2004, p. 72; Tiffen & Gittins 2004, pp. 80–81). But factors beyond the control of individual firms, such as changing employment practices in general and growing competition between businesses, also increase the risk of retrenchment for employees. In this section, we find out which workers believe that they are most at risk of job loss, and which expect to have most difficulty finding another job. Surprisingly, some factors we might think are important seem to bear little on job security or people’s confidence about their marketability. AuSSA 2003 respondents who have higher levels of education, those whose jobs are well paid and those who work long hours are no more secure or confident of their marketability than others, once we take account of their occupations. The factors that do matter are gender, age and, as we see in the next section, sector of employment. We find that men are generally a little less confident about their job security and about their marketability than women. Although the differences are not large, this is a robust finding and indicates that, on this score at least, women are not worse off than men. Further, age affects people’s sense of both their job security and their marketability, but in

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different ways. People aged 45–54 are a little less confident about their job security than those older and younger. This probably reflects the tendency for employers to retrench or give early retirement to workers in this age group. But when it comes to confidence about finding another job, there is a strong and unequivocal age gradient. Only 25 per cent of those under 25 believe that it would be ‘not easy at all’ to find an equivalent job to their current one, compared to nearly half (46 per cent) of those aged 35–44 and fully two-thirds (67 per cent) of those aged over 54.

IS THERE A TRADE-OFF BETWEEN JOB S E C U R I T Y A N D F U T U R E M A R K E TA B I L I T Y ? Do people in better jobs feel more secure and have greater confidence in their marketability? Taking security first, respondents in higher skilled occupations are less concerned about losing their jobs. About 63 per cent of managers and professionals respond that it is ‘not at all likely’ that they will be retrenched in the next 12 months, compared to 44 per cent of those in lower skilled jobs. But, as figure 4.1 shows, public sector workers generally feel more secure than those in the private sector. The gap among tradespersons is particularly striking, with public sector tradespersons feeling as secure as all other groups except managers. The exception to this pattern is the large group of public sector workers in the lower skill occupations who feel no more secure than their private sector counterparts. Turning to marketability, it is clear that job security does not necessarily translate into confidence about marketability. Managers and private sector tradespersons provide the most striking examples. While we saw managers are among the most confident about holding their jobs, they are less confident than many others about their marketability; indeed they are the least confident of private sector workers. On the other hand, private sector tradespeople, though among the most uncertain about their job security, are among those most confident of their marketability. The apparent ‘trade-off ’ between security and marketability evident here applies if we compare the public and private sectors. While public sector workers are more likely than those in the private sector to feel secure, they are also more likely to doubt their ability to find a job equivalent to their current one if they were to lose it. The exceptions to this pattern appear to be that public sector managers and professionals feel just as marketable as their private sector equivalents, though they are more secure, and low-skill public sector workers feel no

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Figure 4.1 Perceptions of job security and marketability by occupation, public and private sectors, 2003, per cent

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20

Private Public/Non-profit Low skill occupations

Advanced clericals

Tradespersons


Professionals

10 0

Managers

Not at all likely to lose job (%)

Job security by occupation, public and private sectors

Marketability by occupation, public and private sectors 70 60 50 40 30

Private

20

Public/Non-profit

10

Low skill occupations

Advanced clericals

Tradespersons


Professionals

0

Managers

Very or somewhat easy to find equivalent job (%)

AusSocAtts03


more secure than their private sector compatriots, though they feel less marketable. These results suggest that ‘market’ reforms to public sector employment have benefited more skilled and qualified workers, so that they understand that their skills are valuable in both the public and private sectors, while harming lower skilled workers by undermining their job security without engendering a corresponding increase in their sense of marketability.

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Despite these complications, we interpret figure 4.1 as conveying one very clear message about the contemporary Australian labour market. Professionals are the clear ‘winners’ in job security and marketability – they have better than average job security and great confidence about their marketability – while people with few formal skills are ‘losers’, having low job security and limited confidence about finding another job with equivalent pay and conditions to their current one. Given that the average pay and conditions of such workers have seen the least improvement during the boom of the past ten years (Watson et al. 2003, pp. 123–31), these findings show that the new flexibility does not raise all occupational boats, only yachts.

ARE WE WORKING TOO MUCH? Research suggests that workplace restructuring and deregulation of the labour market have led to a ‘lean’ workforce that is expected to work longer hours (Brenner 1998; Moody 1997). There is good evidence that the proportion of Australians working long and very long hours has been steadily increasing over the last 20 years, particularly among men. In 2002, 29 per cent of men worked very long hours (50 or more per week), compared to 22 per cent in 1982 (Watson et al. 2003, p. 86; see also OECD 2004, p. 42). Indeed, on average, Australians spend longer in their paid jobs than people in many other countries – on one recent analysis, longer than in any comparable country (Tiffen & Gittins 2004, p. 83). In this section, we examine how respondents to AuSSA 2003 feel about their working hours. Do they think that their working hours are too long? Do they want to work fewer hours? Do their working hours interfere with their personal and family life? And do people feel under pressure to work harder? Table 4.4 shows that nearly 30 per cent of respondents agree that their own hours of work are too long (37 per cent of full-time workers), though half disagree. But half want to work fewer hours, indicating that people do not have to feel that they are working too hard to wish to work less! Respondents are fairly evenly split on whether their hours of work interfere with their family and personal life. About half of all respondents agree that most people who work long hours choose to do so, though a sizeable minority (31 per cent) did not agree. Nearly a third say that their employers expect long hours from them (31 per cent of all workers and 36 per cent of fulltime workers). There can be little doubt, though, that long hours are widely perceived as something of a social problem: more than two-thirds agree that too many people work long hours in Australia today.

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Table 4.4 Perceptions of working hours, 2003, per cent My hours of work interfere with my family and personal life Agree

41

Disagree

45

My hours of work each week are too long Agree

29

Disagree

49

I would prefer to work fewer hours each week Agree

49

Disagree

30

My employer expects me to work long hours Agree

31

Disagree

52

There are too many people working long hours in Australia today Agree

68

Disagree

15

Most people who work long hours choose to do so Agree

52

Disagree

31


Unsurprisingly, as table 4.5 shows, Australians who do work long hours are more likely to express negative attitudes to their hours of work. However, only when people work long (more than 44 hours per week) or very long (more than 55) hours do these effects bite sharply. About half of those who work long hours and nearly three-quarters of those working very long hours agree that their hours interfere with their family and personal life and that their hours of work are too long, compared to a third or less of employees working shorter hours. But this is not to say that those working shorter hours feel no work pressure. Even among those who work 20 hours per week or less, nearly a third say that they feel under pressure to work harder in their jobs, while over half of those on very long hours report this. Overall, well over half of Australian full-time workers prefer shorter working hours, with fairly small differences between those working ‘normal’ full-time hours (35–44 hours) and those working long or very long hours. However, even a quarter to a half of those working part-time also want to work fewer hours. Table 4.6 shows strong correlation between feeling pressured to work harder, agreeing that work hours are too long and interfere with family and personal life, and preferring to work fewer hours. These

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Table 4.5 Attitudes to working hours by hours worked, 2003, per cent agree Work hours per week

20 or less

21–34

35–44

45–54

55+

29

39

41

51

55

9

8

20

48

70

Interfere with family/ personal life (n = 1181)

22

31

34

55

72

Prefer fewer hours

23

33

53

64

68

Feel under pressure to work harder (n = 2441) Hours are too long

(n = 1187)


strong relationships indicate something of a syndrome of overwork. But who feels this syndrome? Can we be more specific than just saying it is those who work long hours? Table 4.7 suggests that we can dismiss some explanations. Age has little or no impact on how respondents experience work pressure and working too much. Work pressure varies slightly with age – people in the mid-career age group of 35–49 generally feel a little more pressure to work harder than those older or younger. People aged 50 and over are less likely to feel that work interferes with their family and personal life than those aged under 50. But there are no differences by age in agreement that one’s hours are too long or that one would prefer to work fewer hours. It is striking here that people in the prime childbearing age group do not report suffering the negative effects of long hours any more than other age groups. However, respondents in different occupations experience work pressure and the negative effects of working time quite differently. This is primarily because those in professional and managerial jobs work longer hours than others. Although more secure at work, respondents with these ‘better’ jobs are clearly stressed. Well over half of managers (57 per cent) feel pressure to work harder, as do nearly half of professionals (47 per cent), whereas only just over a third of tradespersons, advanced clerical workers and those in lower skill jobs feel this way. Respondents in higher skill occupations are also more likely to agree that their hours interfere with family and personal life. Managers and associate professionals feel this particularly frequently, perhaps since these groups generally have less control over their hours of work than professionals, but also because their hours of work are simply longer. Indeed, the effects of hours actually worked are substantial enough to account for virtually all of the association with occupation. These patterns confirm

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that higher skill jobs, particularly managerial ones, are demanding and stressful to the point that they interfere with private lives. People in the jobs work very long hours to try to complete all their work, but still feel that they need to work more. Those in higher skilled jobs are also more likely to say that their hours are too long, though most of this effect is because they actually work longer hours. However, managers are especially likely to worry about their hours, even given that they work longer hours than others, and tradespeople seem to be somewhat less likely to worry, considering that they also tend to work long hours. These differences are intriguing, Table 4.6 Attitudes to work pressures, 2003, bivariate correlations Feel under pressure to work harder

Feel under pressure to work harder

Hours too long

0.392**

Hours too long

0.392**

Work interferes

0.393**

0.640**

Prefer to work fewer hours

0.303**

0.544**

Work interferes


0.393**

0.303**

0.640**

0.544** 0.528**

0.528**

(n≥ 1194) ** p < 0.01 SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

Table 4.7 Attitudes to work pressures by age and occupation, 2003, per cent Feel under pressure to work harder

Hours too long

Work interferes


Under 35

41

28

45

48

35–49

47

30

46

51

50 and over

39

28

33

48

(2489)

(1198)

(1191)

(1189)

Age

n Occupation

n

Managers

57

50

52

66

Professionals

47

31

44

53


44

37

49

51

Tradespersons

37

21

35

51

Advanced clericals

38

24

26

54

Lower skill occupations

38

20

36

41

(2421)

(1175)

(1168)

(1166)


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possibly indicating that people assess the appropriateness of their hours within varying ‘occupational cultures’. The ‘long hours’ culture in management is well known and recent publicity and shifts in workplace messages, including moves towards more ‘family friendly’ policies, may have raised awareness among managers of long hours. At the same time, the culture within skilled trades may be much slower to change, especially given its masculine nature (nearly 90 per cent of tradespeople among AuSSA 2003 respondents are male). Another possibility is that work stress heightens concern about long hours. Perhaps managers suffer particularly high levels of workplace stress: they are certainly the ‘meat in the sandwich’ in much public sector budget cutting and private sector restructuring. Tradespeople may suffer less stress of this kind, perhaps because many feel that they can control their hours of work. AuSSA 2003 cannot answer these questions, but they are interesting lines for future research.

A ‘WORK/LIFE COLLISION’? Barbara Pocock (2003) has argued that long working hours are harming families and communities. For Pocock, families are at the centre of a ‘work/life collision’ as long hours and changes in the organisation of work limit the time available to care for children and other dependants, and for sustaining intimate relationships. Arlie Hochshild (1997) offers a different image. She finds Americans facing complex dilemmas that produce a ‘time bind’: as women have increased their participation in the labour force and as workplaces increasingly offer social support and stimulating experiences, home life comes to feel more like ‘work’, like an obligation with uncertain rewards and unrelenting demands. Those in better jobs with more positive experiences are particularly likely to feel the resulting dilemma of time allocation. So, are Australians experiencing a ‘work/life collision’ as Pocock argues, or are we confronting Hochschild’s ‘time bind’? The ‘work/life collision’ story implies that respondents in families, particularly those with younger children, are most likely to agree that their work hours interfere with their family and personal life. As table 4.8 shows, respondents in households with at least one child under 13 are more likely to agree (48 per cent). But the difference between them and other households is not overwhelming, and 39 per cent of those in households without younger children also agree. The idea that families feel work/life stress most also suggests that respondents in families in which both partners work full-time will be more stressed than those in

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Table 4.8 Work interferes with family and personal life, by family type, 2003, per cent My hours of work interfere with my family/personal life

Agree

Children aged 12 or under in household Yes

48

No

39

(n = 1176) Partner Male full-time, partner works full-time

46

Male full-time, partner works part-time

54

Male full-time, partner not work for pay

52

Male full-time, no partner

45

Female full-time, partner works full-time

47

Female full-time, no partner

39


traditional arrangements in which a husband works full-time and his partner does not work for pay at all. However, table 4.8 shows that, if anything, men whose partners do not work or who work part-time are more likely to agree that their hours of work interfere, though the difference here is too small to be reliable.3 In short, while family circumstances have some effect on perceptions of time stress, the hours respondents work affect their perceptions of stress much more. A good test of people’s perceptions about their working hours is whether they would actually prefer to work fewer hours. Analysing these preferences helps us understand the trade-offs that people are willing to make. First, we have seen that family factors are unrelated to preferences for shorter hours: neither the presence or absence of children nor whether or not both partners in a household are in paid work makes a difference. Second, and unsurprisingly, table 4.5 shows that those working longer hours are more likely than those working shorter hours to prefer fewer hours. But, again, the differences are not large, so long hours themselves do not appear to be closely related to preferring to work fewer hours. Similarly, occupation makes less difference (table 4.7) on this question than other factors that we have considered. However, table 4.9 shows that whether people want shorter hours is very strongly related to their job satisfaction. Between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of those who express some dissatisfaction with their jobs want shorter hours, compared to

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Table 4.9 Preference for working less by job satisfaction, 2003, per cent Job satisfaction*


0–4

68

5

62

6–7

52

8

46

9–10

36

n

(1198)

* 0 = extremely dissatisfied; 10 = extremely satisfied SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

around a third of those expressing the highest levels of job satisfaction. The reluctance of many with high job satisfaction to work fewer hours suggests that Hochschild’s ‘time bind’ may well be closer to the mark for those Australians than a simple ‘work/life collision’.

FAMILY VALUES AND WORK/LIFE BALANCE Many will be surprised at our conclusion that the day-to-day pressures of managing family life when children are young and both parents work make only a small difference to people’s perceptions of a ‘work/life collision’, and no difference to their desire to work fewer hours. But do differences in attitudes to parenting and domestic responsibilities affect how people perceive a ‘work/life collision’? When assessing their work/life balance, men and women may see the advantages and disadvantages of paid work for parents with children differently now that women are more likely to work. AuSSA 2003 gives us the opportunity to examine how people’s experiences of stresses of work and home might relate to general attitudes about the best ways to share family responsibilities. It may be, for example, that if people are able to establish family/work arrangements that are consistent with their general views about how family responsibilities should be shared, then they are less likely to perceive a ‘work/life collision’ or to prefer shorter hours, even if the demands of paid work and care responsibilities are great. AuSSA 2003 also asks whether a father should be as heavily involved in the care of his children as the mother. Fully 90 per cent of respondents agree, many very strongly. Only 2 per cent disagree. This suggests that Australians have completely egalitarian views about responsibilities for children, a further development from an already high level found in

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the 1980s (Bittman & Pixley 1997, pp. 118–20). However this unanimity is not maintained either in behaviour (see chapter 2) or in attitudes to the care of preschool children: responses to the statement ‘A preschool child is likely to suffer if mother works’ are evenly divided (see table 4.10). Note that the question asks about a mother who undertakes any work other than child care, and not about excessive hours of paid work. Thus we can infer a conservative view on the part of the 37 per cent who agree and a more egalitarian view for those 38 per cent who disagree. A quarter of the respondents are undecided. But how does this division relate to people’s views of whether there is a ‘work/life collision’ about their hours of paid work? Table 4.10 shows that women tend to hold views consistent with their behaviour. Only a quarter of women in paid employment agree that a preschool child is likely to suffer if their mother works, compared to 44 per cent of those not working. And among working women who have most choice about their work situation – those in managerial jobs – only 19 per cent take this conservative view, compared to 33 per cent of women in other occupations. Men are generally more conservative than women on this question: 45 per cent of men agree that preschool children of working mothers suffer, compared to 31 per cent of women. Interestingly, men’s work situation makes little difference to their attitudes – the greatest difference is between men in lower skilled occupations (45 per cent agree) and men whose partners work full-time (37 per cent agree). Women in paid work, then, may be relatively invulnerable to the argument that they should reduce their hours to conform to traditional ideas about gender roles. The perception that work hours interfere with family life clearly depends on comparing experience with a counterfactual ‘ideal’. Women who believe that mothers of preschool children should not work will see any paid work as interfering with family life. But we have found that men are more inclined to this view. Most women do not share this belief, so that their expectations about ‘proper’ family life allow for children to be looked after by others while they work. For these women, work only interferes with family and personal life when it takes up too much time, just as it does for women without children and for men. However, table 4.10 suggests that many men with working wives do not share their partners’ liberal views about paid employment for mothers with young children. We suspect that if AuSSA 2003 had asked men with working wives whether their wives should work fewer hours, the presence of small children would show up a large difference

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Table 4.10 ‘A preschool child is likely to suffer if mother works’ by gender, labour force status and occupation, 2003, per cent Agree


Disagree

Can’t choose

Women Working full-time

21

21

57

0

Working part-time

26

20

54

0

Household duties

44

25

29

3

In household with children

29

20

49

2

Managers and administrators

19

20

60

1

Lower skilled

33

23

42

2

(n = 2208)

31

23

45

1

40

24

35

1

Men Working full-time Working part-time

44

28

27

2

Managers and administrators

43

26

30

1

Lower skilled

45

25

27

3

With a partner who works full-time

37

24

38

1

(n = 1950)

45

24

30

1

(n = 4158)

37

23

38

2


in attitudes. The point is that most men believe that it is women who should reduce their hours of work when work and family strains become excessive.

CONCLUSION Despite a decade or two of rapid workplace and labour market change, most Australians still get satisfaction from their jobs. Even so, people often feel under pressure to work harder and many are worried about their job security and lack confidence about their chances in the new labour market. Still, there are some important differences: people holding jobs requiring limited training tend to feel less secure in their jobs and more concerned about their ability to find another, older people are less confident about their marketability, and so on. But those in better jobs sometimes express the most negative responses, as when managers show the greatest propensity to feel under pressure to work harder. All in all, workers who express a high level of job satisfaction are not identified by their age or occupation, but by the quality of their workplace experiences.

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We do not read these results as challenging the reality of the cleavages identified by researchers who focus on other, more ‘objective’ variables like pay, conditions of employment and risk of unemployment. Rather, our findings remind us that the way people experience work is also important. In particular, we again emphasise that the day-to-day experience of work is affected by key relationships in the workplace, such as those between managers and employees, and by features of work organisation, such as whether workers can use their skills or whether they are under pressure to work harder. These matters vary from workplace to workplace, and employers can clearly choose to change them. American research using a very different approach has come to a similar conclusion (Hodson 2001). Our consideration of attitudes to working time and its effect on private life shows clearly that long hours can have negative effects. As we have emphasised, the ‘time bind’ best describes the experiences of Australians who work long hours, regardless of their family status. The implications of our findings for achieving a better work/life balance, however, turn out to be complex and equivocal. Australians clearly make trade-offs when deciding their work preferences, and these may involve many factors and are intimately tied to their values and beliefs about family and work. While better policies and family-friendly workplaces will make for better trade-offs, as Pocock (2003) suggests, they are unlikely to remove some real dilemmas. As Hochschild (1997) has emphasised, these arise from the fact with which we began – that many people gain great satisfaction from their jobs. NOTES

1

2

3

AuSSA 2003 reflects the overall Australian pattern in that about 68 per cent of respondents aged 18–65 are in paid employment of some kind. The vast majority of the remainder live in households where at least one person is in paid employment, or looking for it. The results we report do not control for any variables not mentioned. However, in multivariate analyses, all relationships we discuss are robust, statistically significant, and of similar magnitude to those shown in the tables, unless we explicitly indicate otherwise. Full multivariate analyses are available from the authors on request. There is no indication that confining attention to men who have younger children makes any difference to this pattern, though the numbers in AuSSA 2003 are too small to be certain.

REFERENCES

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (1997) Australian Standard Classification of Occupations, 2nd edn, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra. —— (2002) Retrenchment and Redundancy, Australia, cat. no. 6266.0, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra.

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Bittman, M & Pixley, J (1997) The Double Life of the Family, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Brenner, R (1998) ‘The economics of global turbulence: A special report on the world economy, 1950–1998’, New Left Review, 229, May–June: 1–265. Gibson, R, Wilson, S, Meagher, G, Denemark, D & Western, M (2004) Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003, Data file, Australian Social Science Data Archive, The Australian National University, Canberra. Hancock, K (2002) ‘Work in an Ungolden Age,’ in Ron Callus & Russell D Lansbury, Working Future: The Changing Nature of Work and Employment in Australia, Federation Press, Leichardt. Hochschild, AR (1997) The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, Metropolitan Books, New York. Hodson, R (2001) Dignity at Work, Cambridge University Press, New York. Mathews, J (1989) Tools of Change: New Technology and the Democratisation of Work, Pluto Press, Sydney. Moody, K (1997) Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy, Verso, New York. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (2004) OECD Employment Outlook, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris. Pocock, B (2003) The Work/Life Collision: What Work Is Doing to Australians and What to Do About It, Federation Press, Leichhardt. Sennett, R (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, WW Norton, New York. Sousa-Poza, A & Sousa-Poza A (2000) ‘Well-being at work: A cross-national analysis of the levels and determinants of job satisfaction’, Journal of SocioEconomics, 29(6): 517–38. Tiffen, R & Gittins, R (2004) How Australia Compares, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Watson, I, Buchanan, J, Campbell, I & Briggs, C (2003) Fragmented Futures: New Challenges in Working Life, Federation Press, Leichhardt. Wooden, Mark (2002) ‘The changing labour market and its impact on work and employment relations’, in R Callus & RD Lansbury (eds) Working Futures: The Changing Nature of Work and Employment in Australia, Federation Press, Leichhardt.

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CHAPTER 5

V O L U N TA R Y A S S O C I AT I O N S A N D P O L I T I C A L PA R T I C I PAT I O N A n d r e w P a s s e y a n d M a r k Ly o n s

INTRODUCTION Do many Australians belong to voluntary associations? Does their membership have any impact on their participation in politics? Would it affect the way Australia is governed if associational membership dramatically declined? These are interesting questions that, surprisingly, have seldom been considered in this country. This chapter draws on the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003 (Gibson et al. 2004) to consider the links between membership of the voluntary or non-profit associations that are so common in Australian social life and different kinds of political activity. Our focus, then, is on behaviour rather than attitudes. We explore two sets of behaviour: membership of voluntary associations and participation in a variety of forms of political activity (other than voting in national, state or local elections). Voluntary association is one of many terms used to describe organisations that are formed and joined by people acting voluntarily and collectively to serve their own interests or those of others, without seeking personal financial benefit. Other terms include non-profit or not-forprofit organisation or (to encompass a slightly wider grouping) third sector, civil society or social economy organisations. Voluntary associations are central to Australian life. It has been estimated that the nation has as many as 700 000 voluntary associations, more than 300 000 of which have obtained a separate legal identity via incorporation. Most are sustained entirely by the voluntary commitment of time by at least some of their members. Only about 35 000 associations employ staff, and the

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large majority of these are small (Lyons & Hocking 2000; Lyons 2001). Nonetheless, voluntary associations are of considerable economic importance. In 2000, they had over 600 000 employees and contributed 3.3 per cent to the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). This is a similar economic contribution to that of the agricultural industry. When the value of voluntary work for all non-profit associations is added in, the contribution to GDP becomes 4.8 per cent, equal to that of the mining industry (ABS 2002). Voluntary associations provide the majority of community and sport and recreation services in Australia. They are major service providers in education, health care and the arts. They are ubiquitous in the representation of interests and religious worship. In 2000, almost 28 per cent of the population performed voluntary work for associations (ABS 2002). In 1997, just under two-thirds of the population made a financial donation to a voluntary association. More importantly, the same percentage of the population belonged to at least one voluntary association (Lyons & Hocking 2000). The most basic form of political activity in Australia is voting in national, state or territory and local government elections. But there are many other ways that individuals or groups engage in political activity. These include writing letters to, or speaking with, bureaucrats, MPs or ministers, or joining a demonstration. They also include lobbying government to act against particular firms or nations, or boycotting certain products to directly encourage firms to change. While voting is compulsory, these other political behaviours and who engages in them interests us here. This is important because participation in these activities is an additional measure of the strength of our democracy. In this context, any relationship between voluntary association and political activity becomes significant for democracy. Does being a member of an association make a difference to people’s levels of political activity? And does the kind of association matter?

V O L U N TA R Y A S S O C I AT I O N S A N D P O L I T I C S Voluntary associations contribute to the political system of democratic polities in two ways. Some associations are formed solely or primarily to lobby governments for a particular set of interests. These may be the interests of their members or of others. Other groups are formed with interest representation or advocacy as one of several goals. We call both these types of organisations ‘political’ associations. Political associations include political parties, only a few of which can realistically hope to

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form a government, as well as lobby groups and those campaigning on particular issues. However, the great majority of associations are formed to pursue non-political interests: to educate children, to support the chronically ill, to organise competition in a particular sport, to enable gardeners to swap exotic plants and so on. From time to time, a few of these associations may engage in political advocacy, but in general they do not. But these non-political associations, along with political associations, contribute to a democratic political system in another way – by encouraging and facilitating the participation of their members in the wider civic system. Voluntary associations do this by engaging members in relationships and concerns beyond the family or workplace; by providing members with a place to discuss politics; and by providing members with experience in organising, in working with others, in running meetings and in the art of compromise (Verba, Schlozman & Brady 1995). The role of voluntary associations in promoting political participation, and thus in underpinning democratic polities, was famously described in Almond and Verba’s Civic Culture (1965). In their comparative study of five countries (United States, United Kingdom, West Germany, Italy and Mexico), Almond and Verba sought to identify the characteristics of political culture most conducive to democracy. They found them in what they called a participant political culture, which was strongest in the United States and the United Kingdom. One of the features of a participant political culture was a high membership and active membership in voluntary associations. Fiftyseven per cent of the United States’ adult population belonged to at least one association, compared to 47 per cent in the United Kingdom and 44 per cent in Germany. In the United States, membership was far higher in religious organisations and in what Almond and Verba called civic political groups and lower in unions than in the United Kingdom. In most countries, 40 per cent to 45 per cent of members claimed that their organisation was engaged in political activity. These were described as ‘political’ organisations. From Almond and Verba we draw four main pointers for our Australian analysis. First, they found that in high-participant countries, membership in voluntary associations was highly correlated with level of education. In the United Kingdom, for example, while only 41 per cent of people with a primary school education belonged to a voluntary association, 92 per cent of those with a university education did. Second, in all countries members of voluntary associations were more confident in

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their ability to influence governments than non-members. This is what later political scientists have called ‘internal political efficacy’ (McAllister & Wanna 2001). Third is the distinction between political and non-political organisations, because internal political efficacy was found to be higher among members of political associations than among members of non-political organisations. Fourth, Almond and Verba found that active members of associations (which they defined as being or having been an officeholder) were markedly more confident in their ability to influence government. This increase in confidence held true for all levels of educational attainment, although it was greater among the less well educated. People who were members of two or more associations were also more likely to have a sense of political efficacy. Subsequent studies took the inequalities in American democracy as their starting point. Research found that people from high socioeconomic status (SES) groups were far more likely to participate in political activities and to express feelings of political efficacy than people from low SES groups. Active associational membership went some of the way to restoring the balance, because it made lower SES respondents more likely to participate in political activity. What made the difference was exposure to political discussion or activities in the organisation, and collective effort to address some community problem (Verba & Nie 1972). Later research pointed to other factors, such as workplace arrangements and practices, which also contributed to increased participation by low SES groups, but confirmed the importance of voluntary associations. Membership of religious congregations was shown to be particularly important in boosting political participation by African Americans (Verba, Schlozman & Brady 1995). The 1990s saw an expanded interest in the ways voluntary associations contributed to a strong society as well as to representative democracy. It was claimed that they helped build trust in society, and in this way, and via the networks they constituted, that they contributed to the production of social capital. A decline in associational membership, therefore, represented a threat to social and economic efficiency (Putnam 1993; 1995; 2000; see also chapter 8). The collapse of communist governments also sparked an interest in the contribution of voluntary associations to building new democracies and in contributing to civil society. Initially, the role of non-political associations was emphasised – Putnam (1993), for example, celebrated North Italy’s soccer clubs and choral groups. But soon some criticised the overemphasis on these groups to the neglect of explicitly political associations (Foley &

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Edwards 1996). Other researchers drew attention to the different capacities of different types of associations to contribute to social capital, civic engagement or political activity (Stolle & Rochon 1998; Eastis 1998; Warren 2001). These are interesting and, arguably, important questions, but they have attracted little interest from Australian researchers. Few studies have even recognised that many Australians belong to voluntary associations. Apart from electoral studies, there has been little research exploring political participation. In their pioneering 1967 survey, Aitkin and Kahn (1974) noted that Australian associational membership was as high as that in the United States (citing Almond & Verba), but did not explore the implications of this for political activity. Kemp (1978) repeated the finding. Curtis, Grabb and Baer (1992) included Australia in a 15-country study of voluntary association membership, drawing on data from World Values Surveys in the early 1980s. They showed Australia with a membership rate of 61 per cent, dropping to 40 per cent when union and church memberships are excluded. This was at the high end of countries in the study. Occasional studies have reported levels of membership in particular kinds of associations: Peetz (1998), for example, studied unions, while Crook and Pakulski (1995) studied environment groups. Others have explored political participation by particular social groups: Bean (1991), for example, studied women; Pusey (2003) studied ‘middle Australia’, and Vromen (2003) studied Generation X. But, so far, there is no research on associational membership generally, and its impact on political participation. This question is central to the discussion that follows.

W H O J O I N S V O L U N TA R Y A S S O C I AT I O N S ? AuSSA 2003 shows that Australia is a nation of joiners. In table 5.1, we count associational membership for individual respondents (the full list is presented in table 5.2). We find that most AuSSA 2003 respondents belong to at least one voluntary association. Indeed, nearly half (48 per cent) belong to three or more associations, while 22 per cent belong to two associations, and 16 per cent belong to only one association. Just 14 per cent do not belong to any voluntary associations. We find that men and women are equally likely to belong to voluntary associations, and there is little variation by age (although those aged 65 and over are slightly less likely to be members) or by location (people living in rural areas are equally as likely to belong to at least one voluntary association as those living in cities). However, membership varies

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Table 5.1 Membership of voluntary organisation by demographic group, 2003, per cent Sex Female

86

Male

87

Age 18–34

86

35–49

88

50–64

88

65 and over

82

Education Year 12 or less

80

Trade/certificate or diploma

90

Bachelor’s degree and above

95

Occupation Manager/professional

94

Associate professional/trades

87

Advanced/intermediate clerical

86

Elementary clerical and labourers

79

Income $0 to $31 199 per year

79

$31 200 to $77 999 per year

90

$78 000 and over per year

93

Total (n = 2057)

86

NOTE Membership includes all respondents who are members of one or more organisations. SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

markedly with income, level of education and occupational status. As table 5.1 shows, members of voluntary associations are more likely to be found among those who earn $78 000 or more per year, among those who have completed a university degree and among those in professional or managerial occupations. We discuss the importance of these differences later. Not surprisingly, as table 5.2 shows, some associations are far more popular than others. Membership in consumer or automobile associations, such as the NRMA or RACV, is the most typical reported by our respondents (54 per cent). The next most popular are sporting or recreation groups, of which 45 per cent of respondents are members. Almost one in three report being a member of a financial co-operative, such as a credit union, and 24 per cent are members of a religious organisation. At the other end of the scale, around 5 per cent or fewer reported

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Table 5.2 Membership by type of voluntary association, 2003, per cent Consumer or automobile organisation

54

A sporting or recreation group (including registered clubs and service clubs)

45

Financial co-operatives (e.g. credit unions)

29

A religious group

24

A neighbourhood or community-based group

20

A union

19

Professional society

15

A group that helps people with special needs

14

An environmental group or aid organisation (e.g. Greenpeace, Oxfam)

10

Art, music or educational group

10

A self-help/consumer health group

8

A group working to improve the environment (e.g. Landcare)

7

A group that promotes rights (e.g. of women, refugees)

6

Lobby group to change specific government policies

4

A political party

4


membership of groups promoting rights, lobby groups or political parties. There are two categories of associations that to some may not at first appear ‘voluntary’. These are unions and professional societies, of which 19 per cent and 15 per cent of respondents respectively report membership. However, with the almost total decline of closed shops, union membership can be treated as a voluntary decision (Peetz 1998). Professional associations are slightly different, since it is not possible to practise certain professions without being a member of the appropriate association. But such closed shops are relatively few in number. As well, analysis of the data reveals that only nine members of a professional association report no other associational membership. Hence while their membership of a professional society might not be entirely ‘voluntary’, almost all of these members are also members of another kind of voluntary association.

HOW ACTIVE ARE MEMBERS? The research we reviewed at the beginning of this chapter suggests that active members of associations are more confident in their ability to influence government than ordinary members or non-members. AuSSA 2003 distinguishes between these different groups of members by asking people to choose between three categories: member, active member and

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officeholder.1 Many members are content to pay their membership dues and enjoy the benefits that membership brings, such as access to (often subsidised) services or socialising. Here we call them ordinary members. Some members, however, may recognise that they need to be active in an association if it is to continue to operate. These members effectively perform a range of volunteer tasks for the association. We call them active members. There is a further group of ‘active’ members who take legal responsibility for their association, and perform governance activities by acting as officeholders. Unsurprisingly, we find that the majority of memberships (74 per cent) involve people acting as ordinary members, 20 per cent involve people acting as active members and 6 per cent involve people serving as officeholders. However, there are marked variations between different types of association (see table 5.3). The proportion of active members is over 30 per cent among art, music or educational groups, groups helping people with special needs, sporting or recreation groups, and reliTable 5.3 Voluntary membership by level of member commitment (ranked by per cent of active members) Active members

Officeholders

Ordinary members


39

7


38

9

54 53

A sporting or recreation group (including registered clubs and service clubs)

34

12

54

A religious group

34

11

55


27

9

65

A group that promotes rights (e.g. of women, refugees)

26

10

65

A group working to improve the environment (e.g. Landcare)

25

6

69


23

10

68


22

6

73


18

2

80

A political party

16

4

81

An environmental group or aid organisation (e.g. Greenpeace, Oxfam)

14

3

83

A union

86

10

3

Financial co-operatives (e.g. credit unions)

7

0

94

Consumer or automobile organisation

5

0

95


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gious groups. These seem to be more ‘mass participation’ associations. It is likely that most of these organisations will rely solely on the efforts of their members in sustaining their activities. For the few associations that employ staff, there will be limited opportunities (and need) for members to become active as volunteers except as officeholders, and in large associations there are few such positions. Examples include consumer or automobile organisations, financial co-operatives, and unions, where 10 per cent or fewer of members report being active. Those who report being active members of financial co-operatives and consumer or automobile organisations are likely to be those people who vote in annual general meetings. Active membership of a union will involve taking part in meetings and holding union office in the workplace. However, it is clear that in these types of association active membership and officeholding is left to a relatively small cadre.

A R E M E M B E R S O F V O L U N TA R Y A S S O C I AT I O N S M O R E T R U S T I N G ? Although our main focus is on behaviour (membership of voluntary associations and political activity), much of the research we discussed above has examined the links between membership and political efficacy. The AuSSA 2003 questionnaire contains a small number of questions similar to measures of political efficacy, including trust in other people (often called social trust) and confidence in federal parliament (often Table 5.4 Two measures of trust by association membership, 2003, per cent Members

Nonmembers

Total

Confidence in federal parliament A great deal of confidence

4

4

4

Quite a lot of confidence

37

27

36

Not very much confidence

43

42

42

No confidence at all

13

21

14

3

6

Can’t choose n

4

(1738)

(276)

(2014)

Can be trusted

42

25

40

Can’t be too careful

53

68

55

5

7

5

Most people can be trusted …

Can’t choose n SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

(1726)

(268)

(1994)

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seen as a measure of political trust). Like previous research, we do find that members of voluntary associations express higher levels of both types of trust, with 42 per cent agreeing that people can generally be trusted and 41 per cent having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the federal parliament (see table 5.4). Among non-members, by contrast, only 25 per cent express social trust, while 31 per cent express political trust. Chapter 8 looks at trust and participation in more detail.

WHICH AUSTRALIANS ARE POLITICALLY ACTIVE? Unlike much prior research, AuSSA 2003 asks people directly if they have undertaken certain types of political activity in the previous two years. This is because we are interested in the level and range of people’s political behaviour, rather than in their perceptions of whether this behaviour influences political processes (cf. Almond & Verba 1965). Some international comparisons use voter turnout in elections as a measure of political activity. These studies tend to show that in postindustrial countries similar to Australia voter turnout is at best stagnant and at worst falling. In Australia, voting is compulsory, so voter turnout is not a relevant measure. Instead, we need to measure other forms of political action to assess the level of political engagement. The four measures we use include formal and informal activity, some of which will be undertaken as individual citizens, some as part of groups of citizens. Overall, we find that 62 per cent of respondents have undertaken at least one of these activities in the past two years. The most common activity is of the exercise of consumer power – half the respondents say that they have either boycotted or bought particular products (see table 5.5). Some consumers exercise their consumer power positively, by purchasing ‘ethical’ products, such as those not tested on animals or by purchasing products from a particular Table 5.5 Political participation in previous two years, 2001–2003, per cent* Boycotted or bought certain products

50

Contacted a politician or government official

31

Taken part in a protest, march or demonstration

12

Participated in a strike or industrial action (n≥ 4156) SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

8

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Table 5.6 Number of political activities in previous two years, 2001–2003, per cent None

38

One

35

Two

20

Three

6

Four

2


country or group of people. The negative exercise of consumer power in the form of boycotts may also be targeted in these ways. Some consumers, for example, refused to buy French cheese and wine during French nuclear testing in the Pacific. One in three respondents reports having contacted a government official or politician. The least common forms of political activity are in some ways the most costly (in terms of time and effort, and potentially financially and legally) and include protests (12 per cent of respondents) and strike action (8 per cent).2 We find, too, that participating in some form of political activity is the norm for Australians. Table 5.6 shows that only 38 per cent report having done none of these activities in the past two years. About one in three people have participated in one activity, and one in five have participated in two activities. More than 7 per cent of people have either done three or four activities – these are people who express their political interests in several different ways.

I S T H E R E A R E L AT I O N S H I P B E T W E E N MEMBERSHIP AND POLITICAL ACTIVITY? Previous research suggests that, in many nations, members of voluntary associations are more likely to take part in political activity than people who are not members. International evidence also suggests that membership of particular types of voluntary association correlates even more strongly with political activity. What does the evidence show for Australia? First, we find that members of associations are more likely than nonmembers to have engaged in political activity. Table 5.7 shows that 66 per cent report doing so, compared to fewer than 40 per cent of nonmembers. The more memberships people have, the more likely they are to be engaged in political activity. For example, just over half of those with just one association membership (51 per cent) have engaged in

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political activity, compared to 74 per cent of those who are members of three or more associations. In Australia, therefore, as in the United States, multiple memberships seem to be important in bringing people into political activity, either as recorded in people’s views of their political efficacy or through their own reports of political actions. Second, what about the level of commitment of members – might this have some kind of relationship with their political participation more widely? Table 5.8 compares rates of political activity among nonmembers of any voluntary association to ordinary members and active members and/or officeholders. The pattern is clear. Members, especially those who class themselves as active or as officeholders, are much more likely to be engaged in political activity compared to non-members. These people are active not just in their associations, but also more broadly in civic life. We conclude that membership has an effect on polit-

Table 5.7 Membership and political activity, 2001–2003, per cent Members

66

Non-members

39

Respondents with only one associational membership

51

Respondents with three or more associational memberships

74


Table 5.8 Political activity by level of member commitment, 2001–2003, per cent Nonmembers (n≥ 276) Contacted a politician or government official Taken part in a protest, march or demonstration Boycotted or bought certain products Participated in a strike or industrial action SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

16

Ordinary Active members members/ (n≥ 1578) officeholders (n≥ 823) 34

42

5

14

17

32

55

55

3

9

9

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ical activity (although we cannot claim that it is the cause of political activity); and that active members and/or officeholders are more politically active than are ordinary members. So far, the evidence from Australia matches that from overseas. However, there is another important ingredient. International evidence suggests that, not only are more active members of voluntary organisations more likely to be politically active, but also that the kind of association people belong to makes a difference to their level of political activity. We explore this in the Australian case by comparing political activity rates of non-members with those of members for each of our associational categories. Here we make no distinction in member commitment; instead we are interested in the kind of association. We found that being a member of particular categories of association means that people are more likely to engage in political action (see table 5.9). This is most marked in associations geared towards particular causes, especially the environment and aid; or those that more broadly articulate and promote rights, including lobby groups and political parties. Among members of these types of association, more than 80 per cent of respondents have been engaged in political activity – these members are highly active in civic life. However, only a small proportion of respondents belong to such associations – typically 10 per cent or fewer. In a sense, these associations are specialised – relatively few people belong to them, but those who do report high political activity rates, leading us to speculate that these are the Australian equivalent of the ‘political associations’ that Almond and Verba identified in the United States. In contrast, respondents who are members of the kinds of associations that more people commonly join (such as financial co-operatives and sporting or recreation groups) are less likely to participate in political action. The same is true of professional associations, despite their being set up to promote specific interest groups. However, even in these types of association, members are more likely to be politically active compared to non-members. We know from international research that membership of religious organisations is strongly correlated with political participation, especially in the United States. In Australia, however, the evidence suggests no strong relationship, as the last row of table 5.9 shows. We can see that the proportion of members of religious organisations engaged in political activity is only 3 per cent higher than among non-members (this is the only difference that is not statistically significant). Explaining the difference between Australia and the United States requires further

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Table 5.9 Political activity ranked by association type, 2001–2003, per cent Member

Nonmember

An environmental group or aid organisation

89

59

A group that promotes rights

89

61


89

62

A group working to improve the environment

87

61

A political party (e.g. Labor, Liberals, Greens)

83

62

Consumer or automobile organisation

71

52


77

61


75

61

A union (e.g. CFMEU, TWU, ASU, CPSU)

74

60


74

61


73

60

Financial co-operatives

71

60


71

61

A sporting or recreation group

67

59

A religious group

65

62


research, which would need to consider variation in the religious denominations between the two countries, as well as differences in rates of religious attendance.

W H AT A R E T H E I M PA C T S O F M E M B E R S H I P ON POLITICAL ACTIVITY? So far, we have found that members of voluntary associations are more likely to engage in political activity, and that the level of commitment of members, and the types of associations to which they belong, help to shape this interaction. But might not these effects be the consequence of other factors, such as higher education or a professional or managerial job? Can we more precisely measure the impacts of membership? To help us answer this question, we apply more sophisticated statistical testing in the form of regression modelling. Multiple regression allows us to determine the effect of several independent variables on the variable we want to explain, the so-called dependent variable. In our case, independent variables include membership of voluntary associations, age, gender, income, occupation and education, and the dependent variable is political activity.3 As table 5.10

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Table 5.10 Comparing the impact of membership on political activity, 2001–2003 Odds ratio

Member of a voluntary association

2.66**

Qualified with Bachelor’s degree or higher

1.75**

Managerial or professional occupation

1.39**

(n = 2012) ** p < 0.01 SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

reveals, three factors had significant and independent impact on the likelihood of political activity: membership of a voluntary association, level of education, and occupation. Because regression modelling shows that each has a separate impact, we can discuss their individual effects. We measure impact using an odds ratio, which expresses how much a variable contributes to the probability of taking the action expressed by the dependent variable (in our case, engaging in political activity). So, in our model, membership of a voluntary association had the biggest impact, increasing by about 2.7 times the likelihood of a person engaging in political activity. Having a Bachelor’s degree or higher increased the likelihood of political action around 1.8 times, and being in a managerial or professional occupation by 1.4 times. These latter two characteristics have been identified in other nations as important in increasing political activity and efficacy. While we found them to be important predictors of political action here in Australia, they are less important than membership of voluntary associations. Clearly, being a member of a voluntary association is the strongest predictor of political action. But do different types of association have any differential impacts on political action? Table 5.11 suggests that being a member of an environmental group or aid organisation increases almost four-fold the chances of a person taking part in political activity – an impact that is markedly larger than membership of more strictly ‘political’ organisations, such as groups promoting rights, lobby groups or political parties. Perhaps joining one of these ‘political’ associations is itself viewed as a political act by their members, when compared to membership of an environmental or aid organisation. That said, membership in these strictly ‘political’ associations remains among the most significant impacts on political activity. One further interesting finding is the impact of membership in a consumer or automobile organisation, which almost doubles the likelihood of political action when compared to all respondents, even after

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taking into account their membership of other associations. It would appear, then, that membership in these associations is not just about obtaining access to particular services or subscriptions to consumer magazines. We make this point partly because more than half of our respondents report membership in such associations, which means that the impact of membership on political action is likely to be wide ranging, simply because of the number of people involved. All this leads us to our final question. In Australia, are there combinations of association type and levels of member commitment that most impact on political activity? We cannot fully explore this question because of limitations in the data available to us. Accordingly, we focus on member commitment, and distinguish between people who hold some kind of active membership and/or officeholding position, and people who report only having ordinary memberships. We examine Table 5.11 Impact of membership on political activity by association type, 2001–2003 Odds ratio

Member of an environmental group or aid organisation

3.60**

Member of a group that promotes rights

2.58**

Member of a lobby group

2.49*

Member of a political party

2.40**

Member of a self-help / consumer health group

2.09*

Member of a group working to help improve the environment

1.91**

Member of a consumer or automobile organisation

1.86**


1.79**

Member of a union

1.68*

Member of a group that helps people with special needs

1.38**

(n = 2012) * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01 SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

Table 5.12 Impact of member commitment on political activity, 2001–2003 Odds ratio

Active member/officeholder* of a voluntary association

2.99

Ordinary member only of a voluntary association

2.43**


1.73**

Managerial or professional occupation

1.36**

(n = 2012) * Includes ordinary members of other voluntary associations; ** p < 0.01 SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

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whether the act of joining (of being an ordinary member) has less impact on political activity than being an active member. As in other countries, table 5.12 shows that active members of Australian voluntary associations are more likely to engage in political action than ordinary members, setting aside any educational or occupational differences between these groups. People who report being an active member or officeholder of a voluntary association are three times more likely to engage in political activity, compared to about 2.4 times for those reporting only ordinary membership(s). While both the possession of graduate level qualifications or being in high status occupations also increases this likelihood, they do so at a lower rate. Impacts on political activity therefore go beyond simply being a member of an association. Members who make the extra commitment needed to sustain their association are also more likely to make a commitment to participate in civic or political life.

CONCLUSION Australians are joiners – the rate of membership in voluntary associations in Australia is higher than for many other developed nations (Curtis, Grabb & Baer 1992). In Australia, members of voluntary associations are more likely to be involved in political action – not simply voting, but a broader range of activities. As the international research suggests, not all memberships are the same when it comes to assessing their impacts on political activity. In Australia, two important factors emerge, although it is likely that a combination of these increases the odds of political activity. First is the level of member commitment. Simply, more committed members are more engaged in politics. That much the international evidence suggested to us, especially the work of writers like Robert Putnam who lament the decline of active membership and its replacement by ‘cheque book’ membership. However, we should not over-egg this particular pudding. Our findings suggest that while active membership increases three-fold the likelihood of political activity, ordinary membership has a positive impact too, more than doubling the chances of political action. Second, the category of association has an impact – members of some types of association are more likely to be politically engaged than members of others, independent of any other characteristics these people might possess. In Australia this increase in impact is not confined to what some have termed ‘political’ associations – though they are impor-

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tant – but extends to environmental and aid organisations, and to selfhelp associations and those helping people with special needs, for example. It seems that certain associations do perform almost exclusively social functions, such as some clubs, societies and sporting organisations. Others we can identify as predominantly political – lobby groups and political parties, for example. However, many associations perform multiple functions – sometimes operating in the political sphere to represent their members’ interests, at other times providing these members with networking and socialising opportunities. We suggest, then, that trying to classify Australian associations into ‘political’ and ‘non-political’ organisations is not straightforward. Assessing how membership of voluntary associations might affect political activity across the nation is important at a time of heightened concern – raised in the media and elsewhere – about growing Australian disillusionment with, and disengagement from, politics and political processes (see, for example, Burchell & Leigh 2002). Our evidence suggests that membership of voluntary associations plays an important role in sustaining political engagement in Australia. Even the most common form of membership (consumer or automobile organisations) has a positive impact on the chances of a person engaging in political activity. Being a member is not simply about accessing services. Membership has wider consequences for Australian society, even though the majority of associations could not be described as overtly ‘political’. Instead, they seem to be acting as one route into forms of political action. At a time when there is evidence of a decline in the membership of many large traditional types of association, such as service clubs, unions and churches (Lyons 2001), the implications of these findings are important. If the proportion of Australians who claim membership in at least one association falls significantly, then we might expect levels of political participation to fall too. For those concerned with the quality of Australian democracy, this prospect warrants further study. NOTES

1

The questionnaire contains the following definitions: Being a member means you pay membership fees or a subscription or make donations, but you do not get any more involved. Being an active member means you are regularly involved in the group’s activities as well as paying membership fees or a subscription or making donations. Being an officeholder means you have a decision-making role in the group as well as participating in activities and paying your membership fees etc.

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3

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Strike action is obviously the preserve of workers who belong to unions, which raises the potential for circularity in our data. However, with the dismantling of the closed shop, this form of political activity is no longer compulsory for union members when a strike is called. Furthermore, examination of the data reveals that only 16 respondents report undertaking strike action and no other form of political activity, and hence any circularity is having only very marginal impacts on levels of political action (and as we see later, on the relationship between associational membership and political action). We began by entering all the independent variables (membership of voluntary associations, age, gender, income, occupation and education) and testing them for significance. This is the full model, and it allowed us to determine which independent variables were correlated with political activity, and which were not (see Appendix, table A5.1). Previous research suggested that a person’s age, gender and income were important determinants of the level of their political activity. However, our full regression model reveals that these factors were not significant in themselves. Instead, they were important only when they interacted with other characteristics. They were therefore excluded from our reduced model, which only included those factors identified as significant.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the statistical analysis undertaken by Ian Nivison-Smith for this chapter. Any errors are, however, the sole responsibility of the authors. REFERENCES

Aitkin, D & Kahn, M (1974) ‘Australia: Class politics in the New World’, in Richard Rose (ed.) Electoral Behaviour: A Comparative Handbook, The Free Press, New York. Almond, G & Verba, S (1965) The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Countries, Little, Brown & Co, Boston. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2002) Non-Profit Institutions Satellite Account 1999–2000, cat. no. 5256.0, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra. Bean, C (1991) ‘Gender and political participation in Australia’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, 26(4): 276–93. Burchell, D & Leigh, A (eds) (2002) The Prince’s New Clothes: Why Do Australians Dislike their Politicians?, UNSW Press, Sydney. Crook, S & Pakulski, J (1995) ‘Shades of green: Public opinion on environmental issues in Australia’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 30(1): 39–55. Curtis, JE, Grabb, EG & Baer, DE (1992) ‘Voluntary association membership in fifteen countries: A comparative analysis’, American Sociological Review, 57: 139–52. Eastis, CM (1998) ‘Organisational diversity and the production of social capital’, American Behavioral Scientist, 42(1): 66–77. Foley, MW & Edwards, B (1996) ‘The paradox of civil society’, Journal of Democracy, 7 (2): 38–52. Gibson, R, Wilson, S, Meagher, G, Denemark, D & Western, M (2004) Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003, Data file, Australian Social Science Data Archive, The Australian National University, Canberra. Kemp, DA (1978) Society and Electoral Behaviour in Australia: A Study of Three Decades, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane.

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Lyons, M (2001) Third Sector: The Contribution of Non-profit and Co-operative Enterprises in Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. —— & Hocking, S (2000) Dimensions of Australia’s Third Sector, Centre for Australian Community Organisations and Management, University of Technology, Sydney, Lindfield. McAllister, I & Wanna, J (2001) ‘Citizens’ expectations and perceptions of governance’, in Glyn Davis & Patrick Weller (eds) Are You Being Served? State, Citizens and Governence, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Peetz, D (1998) Unions in a Contrary World: The Future of the Australian Trade Union Movement, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. Pusey, M (2003) The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. Putnam, R (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. —— (1995) ‘Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital’, Journal of Democracy, 6 (1): 65–78. —— (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, New York. Stolle, D & Rochon, TR (1998) ‘Are all associations alike? Member diversity, associational type, and the creation of social capital’, American Behavioral Scientist, 42(1): 47–65. Verba, S & Nie, NH (1972) Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality, Harper & Row, New York. Verba, S, Schlozman, KL & Brady, HE (1995) Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Vromen, A (2003) ‘“People try to put us down …”: Participatory citizenship of “generation X”’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 38(1): 79–99. Warren, ME (2001) Democracy and Association, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

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CHAPTER 6

A R E P O S T M AT E R I A L I S T S ENGAGED CITIZENS? M a r k We s t e r n a n d B r u c e Tr a n t e r

INTRODUCTION In June 2004, with an election due later in the year, then federal Labor leader, Mark Latham, endorsed and then secured preselection for Peter Garrett in the safe Labor seat of Kingsford Smith, despite opposition from local branch members. As well as being President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Garrett had for 20 years been the lead singer of Midnight Oil whose iconic music dealt with the environment, human rights, indigenous issues and America’s military presence in Australia. Even the Prime Minister, when asked about Garrett’s move to Labor, replied that his favourite Midnight Oil song was ‘Beds are Burning’– a song the band played at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney and that calls for returning Aboriginal land. At the time of the Labor leader’s announcement, Garrett was not even a member of the Labor Party, but went on to win his seat with 59 per cent of the two-party preferred vote – a Labor victory that defied the national swing to the Liberal–National Coalition of almost 2 per cent. Why would the Labor Party leader invite opposition from his own party to support a high-profile environmental activist and popular musician with no experience in Labor politics? And why would the Prime Minister feel obliged to show some familiarity with Midnight Oil’s music and its activist stance? Some clues are found in Australian Election Studies (AES), which show that, since 1990, more than 80 per cent of voters have said that the environment was an ‘extremely important’ or

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‘quite important’ issue in the election (see figure 6.1). In 1998 and 2001, AES findings show that even more voters identified the environment as an election issue than in the 1990 poll, one widely remembered as the first election in which the environment was central (Bean, McAllister & Warhurst 1990).1 The rise of environmental issues and the emergence of the Australian Greens are significant in Australia’s political history. How can we explain their increasing importance, and what implications does the environment have for understanding political engagement in Australia? In this chapter, we answer these questions with the help of one influential account of these new political and cultural developments proposed by American political scientist Ronald Inglehart. We first examine evidence for Inglehart’s central argument – that a fundamental value change has transformed advanced democracies – and then draw out the implications of this change for political and civic engagement. We focus on finding out how widespread so-called ‘postmaterialist’ values are among Australians, and what they tell us about support for environmentalism and our willingness to become engaged citizens. Figure 6.1 Environment as an important election issue, federal elections 1990–2001, per cent 95

90

%

85

80

75

70 1990

1993

1996

Election year SOURCE Australian Election Study 1990, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2001

1998

2001

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T H E R I S E O F P O S T M AT E R I A L I S T VA L U E S According to Inglehart, the basic values held by citizens in advanced democracies are shifting away from ‘material’ concerns about economic and physical security towards ‘postmaterial’ concerns about quality of life and freedom of self-expression (Inglehart 1977, 1990a, 1997). These new values are, in turn, transforming politics, economics and social life. For Inglehart, this value change helps explain the emergence of new social movements, such as the environmental movement and the women’s movement, which are concerned with quality of life and selfrealisation, and which depend on the involvement of their supporters to reach their goals. Green political parties – and the responsiveness of major political parties to environmental issues – also underline the growing importance of postmaterial values among citizens. Scholars have shown that support for the environment – expressed by joining an environmental group, participating in environmental protest, or voting green – is much stronger among postmaterialists than materialists (Inglehart 1990a, 1990b; Tranter 1996, 2004; Papadakis 1993). Postmaterialists are also more likely to see environmental problems as urgent (Crook & Pakulski 1995; Pakulski, Tranter & Crook 1998), and even to accept cuts in their living standard to protect our natural heritage (Bean 1998). Postmaterial values also stress ‘sustainability’ as a desirable condition for economic growth, and inform concepts like ecologically sustainable development (Papadakis 2000). Wide acceptance of sustainability criteria in economic development suggests that mainstream political parties have had to adjust to new social and political awareness. In the past, economic development and environmental protection were seen as trade-offs, but increasingly, industry and business interests are having to respond to interests other than purely material ones (Papadakis 2000). In 1990, for instance, the Business Council of Australia asserted that ‘[W]hile material living standards figure prominently in the welfare of Australian families, how well off we feel depends not only on material things but also our quality of life’ (Business Council of Australia 1990, p. 1, cited in Papadakis 2000, p. 83). Postmaterial values may also prefigure in disenchantment that followed a long period of economic reform and greater competition in Australia (see Pusey 2003; see also chapter 10). According to Michael Pusey, quite a few ordinary Australians feel that their quality of life has been compromised by economic change and that Australian society as a whole is worse off. And several cultural changes might be seen as

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responses to these pressures, such as ‘downshifting’, which rejects a culture of overwork and overconsumption (see Schor 1998), and adopting a ‘seachange’ in favour of a gentler, more meaningful pace of life. Voting for minor political parties like the Australian Greens and Democrats is another possible sign of this change. In short, competitive economic conditions that hit quality of life may also grate against the new postmaterialist outlook, and encourage some to seek out new political and lifestyle choices.

W H O A R E T H E P O S T M AT E R I A L I S T S ? Inglehart understands materialism and postmaterialism as enduring value systems held by individuals. This distinction between values, attitudes and beliefs can be traced to Rokeach (1968), who described values as evaluative beliefs; that is, beliefs that entail some kind of judgment about worth or importance. In Inglehart’s scheme, these values communicate life priorities that are stable and enduring parts of people’s worldviews, and are not fleeting or transitory like other beliefs and attitudes. Inglehart (1977, 1990a, 1997) argues that values are learned in early adolescence from childhood socialisation and experiences and, from there, shape political preferences and behaviour. Those who grow up in circumstances of relative physical safety and economic affluence tend to prioritise quality of life, postmaterial issues to a greater extent than material or economic issues. By contrast, early experiences of economic hardship, war, or major social and political change all contribute to the development of material values (Inglehart 1977, p. 23). According to Inglehart (1997, pp. 34, 46), once values are formed, they tend to endure throughout people’s lives, so early formative experiences are particularly important. Younger generations, particularly those born after the Second World War, have more postmaterial values because they experienced relative affluence and safety during their ‘formative years’. Therefore, generational-based differences in value orientations should be apparent for different age cohorts, with citizens of advanced democracies becoming increasingly postmaterialist as younger generations replace older ones. We would therefore expect that younger Australians are more likely to take on postmaterial concerns like supporting environmental causes than older ones, and that postmaterialists would be more ‘proenvironment’ than materialists are. Inglehart (1997) bases his argument for a major cultural shift from material to postmaterial values on the results from the World Values Survey, an international study of political and cultural change using

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national findings from over 80 countries. Within these surveys, a set of 12 questions asks people to choose national priorities for their country over the next ten years. The 12 items are presented as three sets of four items each, and within each set of four, respondents nominate their first and second choice of national priorities or goals. The 12 items are shown in table 6.1, along with the percentage of respondents in the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003 (Gibson et al. 2004) who nominate each one as either a first or second choice. The economy dominates respondent first choices, with over half of respondents indicating that maintaining a high level of economic growth should be first priority, and 50 per cent choosing a stable economy as their first choice. These are both clearly materialist objectives, as is ‘maintain order in the nation’, which is nominated by over one-third of respondents in the second set. These priorities highlight the material value orientation of many Australians – stability and economic growth still matter to citizens. However, for many, ensuring material wants is not a single priority. The equal third and fourth choices – giving people more say in important government decisions, and giving people more say in their jobs and community – are postmaterial priorities that confirm our desire for free expression and democratic engagement. When we turn to second choices, materialist priorities – the fight against crime, and maintaining a strong defence force – come out on top, nominated by 42 per cent and 31 per cent of respondents respectively. However, two postmaterialist priorities – freedom of speech and giving people more say in their jobs and communities – come equal second and third respectively. Overall, we see that Australians nominate materialist priorities first, but they also substantially endorse postmaterialist ones. These findings reflect the results found for other countries (Inglehart 1990). Table 6.1 does not tell us if some people consistently choose materialist goals while others choose postmaterialist ones or whether some individuals accommodate materialist and postmaterialist values at the same time. Inglehart suggests that people generally value both materialist and postmaterialist priorities, but younger people, with material goals satisfied, prioritise postmaterialist goals in a way that older generations could not. So, in order to classify individuals as materialist or postmaterialist, Inglehart uses two strategies. First, he identifies the postmaterialist items reported in Table 6.1 (C, F, H, J, K) and counts the number of these chosen by respondents from within each of the three sets of items (Abramson & Inglehart 1995, p. 121; Inglehart & Abramson 1999). Individuals are scored between 0 and 5, so that high

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scores reflect a higher number of postmaterial choices (Inglehart 1997, p. 389). We refer to this measure of postmaterialist values as the ‘12item index’. Accordingly, very few people are ‘pure’ materialists or postmaterialists: just over 30 per cent of respondents are at the materialist end of the spectrum (scores of 0 or 1), but 18 per cent are at the postmaterialist end, indicated by scores of 4 and 5 (see table 6.2). Over half of all respondents are mixed, indicated by scores of 2 or 3. These intermediate scores come about when a respondent chooses two or three Table 6.1 Preferences for national priorities over the next ten years, 2003, per cent, within columns and panels First choice

Second choice

25

A

Maintain a high level of economic growth

53

B

Make sure this country has strong defence forces

20

31

C

See that people have more say about how things are done at their jobs and in their communities

25

28

D

Try to make our cities and countryside more beautiful

2

15 17

E

Maintain order in the nation

37

F

Give people more say in important government decisions

37

25

G

Fight rising prices

12

26

H

Protect freedom of speech

14

31

I

A stable economy

50

21

J

Progress towards a less impersonal and more human society

21

19

K

Progress towards a society in which ideas count more than money

10

18

L

The fight against crime

19

42

(n > = 4150) SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

Table 6.2 Materialists and postmaterialists in Australia, 2003 Values score on 12-item index

Per cent of respondents

0 Materialist

7

1

24

2

28

3

23

4

12

5 Postmaterialist (n = 4121) SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

7

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postmaterialist items and two or three materialist ones. It seems that most people endorse both materialist and postmaterialist priorities, with fewer people at each pole. The second way that Inglehart (1977, p. 28) assesses values is by using the second set of four items shown in table 6.1 (items E to H). Respondents choosing options E and G (‘order in the nation’ and ‘fight rising prices’), regardless of the order of their choice, are deemed materialists, while those who choose any combination of options F and H (‘give people more say’ and ‘protect freedom of speech’) are postmaterialists. The third category consists of responses involving any other combinations of items. These respondents hold ‘mixed’ value orientations. This classification again shows that the mixed orientation category among AuSSA 2003 respondents is largest, but now pure postmaterialists outnumber materialists (table 6.3). The results reinforce the view that people with ‘pure’ materialist or postmaterialist values are comparatively few and that most people in fact endorse a mix of materialist and postmaterialist national priorities. These broad patterns are similar to those found in both other countries and in previous Australian research (Abramson & Inglehart 1995; Bean & Papadakis 1994a), although the number of postmaterialists identified in table 6.3 is somewhat higher than in earlier studies (Western & Tranter 2001; Tranter & Western 2003), a finding that may be due to slight differences in question order between AuSSA 2003 and earlier surveys. Our finding – that many people hold ‘mixed’ values – might be a good reason for not opposing materialism and postmaterialism as though citizens can be classified neatly into either. Most people are somewhat materialist and postmaterialist at the same time. Some criticism of Inglehart’s work addresses this very argument (see Bean & Papadakis 1994a, 1994b; Inglehart 1994; and Hellevik 1994 [in reply]). Critics maintain that since materialism and postmaterialism are both desired goals, and since satisfying material needs is a precondition for taking on postmaterialist priorities, it is a Table 6.3 Materialists, postmaterialists and ‘mixed value’ respondents, 2003 Values

Materialist

Per cent of respondents

14

Mixed

64

Postmaterialist

22


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mistake to see postmaterialism and materialism as opposed (Bean & Papadakis 1994a). Inglehart strongly rejects this argument, and even in more recent work (see Inglehart 1997; Inglehart & Baker 2000) that otherwise involves some rethinking of his ideas. It is not important for us to resolve this debate here. What is important is that few people are unambiguously materialist or unambiguously postmaterialist. Most people value economic and physical security and quality of life and selfexpression. Fewer people choose one set of values over the other. Who holds these different values? Inglehart (1997, p. 4) predicts that the most important factor is formative experiences. As we reported earlier, high levels of economic security in advanced democracies after the Second World War contributed to a gradual shift from materialist values to postmaterialist ones as younger people worried less about economic and physical security. As younger generations replace older ones, the citizens of advanced societies become more postmaterialist. This line of reasoning suggests that age should be the key to explaining values across the population, but that other socialising forces, such as gender, religion and education (the latter two changing across generations), should also play some role. We can assess the dispersion of postmaterialist values by examining how they are distributed among different social and demographic groups. Moreover, values may play a role in occupational choice and union membership but, in these instances, values may function as a cause, and not an effect, of behaviour. Regardless of how values are measured or whether values are a cause or effect of group involvement, we find that major social and demographic groups have distinct materialist/postmaterialist profiles (see figures 6.2 and 6.3). We first show average scores on the 12-item postmaterialism index by: gender, age, education level, religion, political party identification, occupation, employment sector, and union membership (see figure 6.2). In figure 6.2, the horizontal line shows the overall average score on the postmaterialism index for AuSSA 2003 respondents, which is about 2.3. The average scores for different groups are also shown. Recall that scores of 4 or 5 indicate a strong postmaterialist value orientation, while a score of 0 or 1 is materialist. Most scores range from between 1.8 and 2.8, consistent with ‘mixed’ value positions. The factors that most differentiate respondents are age, education level, religion and, strongly, political party identification. We find that gender, occupation, employment sector and union membership are less important. AuSSA 2003 data only weakly supports Inglehart’s argument that younger people are more postmaterialist than older people. We find

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that 18–54 year olds are equally postmaterialist, but more postmaterialist than older people. Respondents with university degrees, and with no religion are both more postmaterialist. However, the largest differences are found for party identification. Minor party identifiers – Greens, Australian Democrats and supporters of other minor parties excluding One Nation – are the most postmaterialist, while Liberal Party and National Party identifiers are the most materialist. Australian Labor Party (ALP) identifiers are in the middle, about on a par with professionals, public sector employees, union members and younger respondents. We get a similar picture by examining the numbers of pure postmaterialists on the four-item index (items E to H from table 6.1). Overall, about 22 per cent of AuSSA 2003 respondents are postmaterialists, as we report in both figure 6.3 and table 6.3. Again, party identification most strongly divides the value groups, followed by education level and religion. Minor party identifiers are again most postmaterialist: over 45 per cent are pure postmaterialists, while Liberal and National identifiers are least postmaterialist (see figure 6.3). Respondents with higher educational qualifications are more likely to be postmaterialist than those with fewer qualifications, and the non-religious are more postmaterialist than those with a religion. There is less variation by age on this measure than on the previous one; though, again, younger cohorts stand out as most postmaterialist. Of course, the many social attributes that determine our values orientations frequently occur together; that is, professionals will also have degrees, younger people are more likely to have degrees than older people and less likely to be religious, and so on. By modelling these attributes simultaneously, multivariate analysis allows us to discover what explains these distinct value orientations. We include as independent variables: gender, age, education, religion, partisanship, ‘equivalised’ household income,2 occupation, sector, self-employment status and union membership. Whether we use the four-item or 12-item index to measure values, reliable differences in values are only found for education, party identification and religion. The other demographic variables – age, gender, income, occupation, sector, employment status and union membership – are not significant. Multivariate analysis shows that respondents with more education and university qualifications are more likely to be postmaterialist than people with fewer qualifications. People who are religious, which includes Christians and non-Christians, are less postmaterialist than the non-religious respondents, while Labor, Green, Australian Democrat, and One Nation identifiers (as well as

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Figure 6.2 Average scores on materialism/postmaterialism scale by demographic group, 2003 3.5 Minor

3.0

Mean Values Score

Degree None ALP

2.5

Other

18–54 Female Male

55–64

2.0

Profess.

Public

Yes

Other

Private

No

None HS&Trade

Catholic

Some HS

Protest

One Nat.

65+ Lib/Nat

Union member

Sector

Occupation

Party Identity

Religion

Education

Age

Gender

1.5

NOTE Scoring on vertical axis, 0 = Pure materialist, 5 = Pure postmaterialist. ABBREVIATIONS HS = High school; Protest. = Protestant; Lib./Nat. = Liberal or National Party;

One Nat. = One Nation; Profess. = Professional. SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

Figure 6.3 Postmaterialists by demographic group, 2003, per cent Minor

0.45

Proportion Postmateralist

0.40

0.35 None

Degree

0.30

One Nat. ALP

Profess.

0.25 18–54 55–64

Female Male

0.20

Other Catholic

HS&Trade 65+

None

Other

Public

Yes

Private

No

Some HS Protest

0.15

Lib/Nat

ABBREVIATIONS HS = High school; Protest. = Protestant; Lib./Nat. = Liberal or National Party; One Nat. = One Nation; Profess. = Professional. SOURCE The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2003

Union member

Sector

Occupation

Party Identity

Religion

Education

Age

Gender

0.10

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non-identifiers) are all more likely to be postmaterialist than Liberal–National identifiers. (Green and Australian Democrats identifiers are particularly postmaterialist, followed by Labor identifiers, and finally One Nation and non-identifiers.) Genuine postmaterial values are found among Greens, Australian Democrats and Labor voters, while the apparently slight postmaterial orientation of One Nation voters and non-identifiers has different origins. Detailed studies of the attitudes of One Nation voters highlight their feelings of disenfranchisement, economic insecurity and dissatisfaction with ‘elite’ sponsored policies that favour immigration, Aboriginal rights and globalisation. So, these respondents may look ‘postmaterialist’ because they choose priorities such as protecting freedom of speech and giving people more say in government decisions, but these choices express their alienation from trade and immigration policies that they link to the ‘top-down’ decisions of major parties (see Bean 2000; Gibson, McAllister & Swenson 2002; Charnock & Ellis 2003, 2004; Goot & Watson 2001; Wilson & Turnbull 2001). When One Nation identifiers (and, by extension, respondents who reject all parties) choose these priorities, they perhaps reflect their sense of economic insecurity and personal grievance instead of underlying material security (see also Western & Tranter 2001). Inglehart and others believe that values are important because they shape political and cultural behaviour. But, as stable individual characteristics, do they also shape people’s personal identities, their understandings of who they are? AuSSA 2003 presents an opportunity to examine how values shape our personal identities, especially those parts of our identity embedded in social institutions and structures. AuSSA 2003 respondents were asked: We are all part of different groups. Some are more important to us than others when we think of ourselves. In general, which in the following list is most important to you in describing who you are? The options for identity sources are presented in table 6.4, ordered by their overall importance to respondents. We see that family and marital status are the most important source of identity overall, followed by occupation, nationality (Australian for most respondents), gender, religion and age. Social class and political party are quite unimportant sources of personal identity. These findings closely match earlier research, which used a slightly different wording (see Emmison & Western 1990, 1991; Phillips & Western 2005). The same identities also tend to matter

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Table 6.4 Values and personal identity, 2003, per cent Identity source

Materialist

Mixed

Postmaterialist

Family/marital status

49

55

47

Occupation

15

16

15

Nationality

10

11

8

Gender

6

6

8

Religion

5

5

4

Age group

6

4

6

Part of Australia where respondent lives

3

3

4

Race/ethnicity

3

2

2

Social class

1

2

1

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