Shaun Wilson, a lecturer in sociology at Sydney’s Macquarie University, helped organise the new Australian Survey of Social Attitudes. He spoke with Tom Barnes about public perceptions of trade unions, tax cuts and welfare policy and how these views square with the policies of the major parties.
Can you explain how the survey works?

I was part of a group of academics that organised the survey. The survey had five chief investigators, which is just a fancy word for people who oversee the survey.

Thousands of copies of the survey are mailed out to a representative sample of people. We got a net response rate of 43 per cent.

Can it be argued that your findings are skewed because of this response rate?

Yes, to an extent. There are various biases in the response patterns. For example, we tend to get responses from older people rather than younger people and also better-educated people. We also tend to slightly over-sample women.

But when you collect a sample numbering in the thousands, you still get very large numbers of people in all groups. That makes it easy to break the sample down into key constituencies and to get reliable trends.

We analyse the data to make sure it is reliable. But most often we find that sample biases do not have a major impact on the overall figures that the survey produces.

What are your main findings about attitudes toward trade unions?

They were relatively positive. The public has certainly registered that there has been a big power shift in society away from trade unions and that was reflected in all the figures we have looked at in the last 25 years.

What's interesting is that the declining perceptions of union power corresponds pretty closely to declining levels of industrial action and falling union representation in the workplace. In this election campaign, the Coalition has attempted to describe unions as a threat to the economy. But our data suggests that the public is not worried about unions anywhere near as much as they used to. Recent public polls are saying the same thing.

So it would be fair to say that most people don't buy the spin about "union bosses"?

Some people do, but I suspect most of them will already be conservative voters. The overall picture is one of a public that believes unions are losing power. Not everybody would think that is a bad thing, but some people would think that it is producing greater inequality at work.

People who are not necessarily union members are also registering some concern. So if there was ever a time to be running a big scare campaign over unions, this isn't it. You just have to read off the trends in public opinion.

About half of all people surveyed say they are "satisfied" not being in a union. But this does not mean they are necessarily hostile to unions, right?

No, not hostile at all. If fact when we asked those "satisfied non-members" whether they thought that unions had a role in the workplace, a large minority thought that they did. So just because people aren't in unions or not interested in being in a union doesn't mean necessarily they support the destruction of unions or their marginalisation through the legal system or employer campaigns.

You discuss the phenomenon of "unrepresented workers". Could you explain this?

In Australian politics for a long time, we've seen a lot of discussion about the "closed shop": a situation in which workers feel either compelled to join a union or are signed up through some kind of deal between the union and the employer.

What we've found is that this kind of union membership has declined; the number of people in the category of "reluctant members" has dropped very dramatically since the 1970s.

The new category that's emerging over time is one that we've described as "unrepresented workers". In some respects, they are the opposite of reluctant or dissatisfied union members. They are willing to join a union but are not in a union at this point in time.

That obviously goes to the question of the lack of opportunities to join, the kind of workplace in which they are employed and the kinds of organising that the union movement is capable of.

But the main story here is that the number of non-members who want to be in a union now far outweigh that group of people who are reluctant union members. So the story today is very different to the 1970s.

The survey shows that 13 per cent of people are "unrepresented workers", representing significant "unmet demand" for unions. Interestingly, this figure rises to 18 per cent for the 18-34 age group.

That's right-although that's not as strongly reflected in the data from the Workplace Research Centre's recent Australia@Work survey. But the general trend is very similar [between the two surveys]. Young people are more likely to say that they are unrepresented at work.

You present some findings on attitudes towards welfare. It seemed to me that these demonstrate that not only do most people believe that services should prioritised over tax cuts-but that they believe this more stridently than at any time since the late 1960s. Fair comment?

That's exactly right. The two major political parties for various reasons prefer to offer tax cuts. That's certainly part of the political ideology of the Coalition.

The problem is that after tax cuts almost every year from the government, the public no longer receives them with much enthusiasm. There's very strong evidence in the data that the public is more interested in spending on a wide range of social services and infrastructure.

Our data is strongly confirmed in a recent Galaxy poll on the government's most recent tax cuts. It asked them whether they would prefer tax cuts or spending on services and infrastructure. We see very large number of voters preferring spending options over tax cuts.

To put it simply, I think voters are tired of tax cuts. They don't believe they do as much for their standard of living as politicians claim and they want attention to the quality of services.

That mood has been obvious for several years now but it's yet to find a strong political voice or adequate reflection in policy decisions.

To what extent do the survey's results show the contradiction between social attitudes and the policies offered by the major parties?

There's some argument about how much the public really influences policy. Some political scientists and policy analysts will say that the public mood does have an impact and that political parties that capitalise on that mood will win votes and office, and implement policies that the public 'demand'.

So the argument goes that if the tide of consent, to quote [American political scientist] James Stimson changes, eventually parties that develop policies that best reflect this will win. But I think the picture is more complex.

To some extent, public opinion is reflected in policy directions, but mostly in areas that suit the prevailing interests of elite politics.

In the previous survey, released in 2005, researchers Michael Pusey and Nick Turnbull showed that 83 per cent of people accepted the market economy but only with some form of state intervention-what they called 'economic pragmatists'. Can it be argued that recent survey results demonstrate the existence of a deeply held social democratic consensus in Australia that is not reflected by the two major parties?

I think that's true. You see this in terms of the opposition to WorkChoices and the preference for more public spending. You also see that in undiminished hostility to privatisation. These are very clear trends and they are as strong as they have ever been in Australia.

The weakness is that there is still are opportunities for the political Right to shift public opinion away from those important areas to what's called "national security".

So the array of policies around immigration and national identity are potential distractions from this and can prevent a full debate about the role of government in producing a more equal society.

Australian Social Attitudes 2: Citizenship, Work and Aspirations edited by David Denemark, Gabrielle Meagher, Shaun Wilson, Mark Western and Timothy Phillips, UNSW Press, $59.95