Twice a year Ipsos Mackay produces our Mind & Mood study. Our April version was released last week to clients and features in a story by George Megalogenis in The Australian today.
See: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/jobs-not-voters-main-worry/story-e6frgczf-1225858135860
After finishing the fieldwork for this report, all the researchers were struck by the contrast between the Mind and Mood report we did in early 2007 and this report.
In 2007, all groups were showing signs of engagement with political issues and discussing the impending contest between Howard and Rudd. Here’s a snippet from that report:
We are finding a small but significant shift towards re-engagement with political and social concerns, partly sparked in part by the revitalisation of the environmental debate. Whilst participants in this study were rarely inclined to reveal their party of choice in the forthcoming federal election, there is a strong belief that at least there will be a choice this time around and that the election will be a genuine contest. For some who have been politically adrift over the last decade, there is a palpable feeling that politics has suddenly become interesting again. They are paying attention.
Rudd is a real contender. Before we had that fat bastard who made us fall asleep.
Federal politics has suddenly become a topic, after years of it not being a topic so much. I don’t talk much with my parents about it but when I recently went down to Melbourne to see them, we did, because it has suddenly become interesting. There is a real contest now. It’s not just because it is an election year.
Whilst some participants debated the personal strengths and deficiencies of Howard versus Rudd, the respective policies industrial relations and environment politics of Labor and the Coalition also evoked interest.
I think [John Howard] stuffed up with two things – IR and greenhouse. With greenhouse, suddenly everyone got interested and he hasn’t kept up. With IR, he has bitten off more than he could chew. He misread that. The environment, he has never been interested in that. And neither has the public until recently. With greenhouse he hasn’t changed, but the public has changed. With IR, he wanted change but the public didn’t.
In 2007, discussion about party politics merited an entire chapter in the report. This year it barely filled a paragraph as an afterthought in Chapter 1. There was some lively discussion centred on Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard however. Here are a couple of quotes about them from our recent report:
Man 1: I think Abbott was elevated quicker than even he expected to be. It certainly surprised me.
Man 2: The Libs are split down the middle and Tony Abbott put his hand up. He’s done better than anyone thought.
Man 1: Julia Gillard is a surprise package. It was a marriage of convenience between her and Rudd, but she’s got leadership written all over her
Man 2: Yeah, she’s a doer all right
Man 3: She’s a very intelligent woman. She’s tough too. Kevin Rudd will have to be careful
A future Abbott versus Gillard contest will be one Australians might perk up for.
For Mind & Mood fieldwork this time, I conducted groups in Melbourne but also Ballarat. It was my first visit to the town and it was just lovely, grander than I had anticipated but then I realised walking around that the beautiful buildings and wide streets suited its heritage as a gold town. I conducted a group at the Ballarat East Community Men’s Shed. See their link:
http://www.becs.shed.org.au/
Among many other things, they make wooden objects. See here for a list:
http://www.becs.shed.org.au/index.php/products-to-buy
I bought one of their newer products, a doll’s bed for my daughter’s second birthday.
One of the nicer aspects of my job is the chance to discover towns in regional Australia, meet and listen to the people that live there. As someone who lives most of her life in an inner-city, bourgeois bubble, these trips provide an important reality check.
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