Canberra Launch of the 20th Lowy Institute Poll

  • Speech, check against delivery

I start by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet and pay my respect to Elders, past and present. 

I extend this acknowledgement to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here with us today. 

Let me begin by congratulating the Lowy Institute on the 20th edition of its poll surveying Australian attitudes to the world.

The Lowy Poll remains the preeminent source of longitudinal data for understanding how the Australian public sees the world around us.

It’s an invaluable body of work that befits the role that the Lowy Institute plays in informing our national foreign policy debate.

The Lowy Poll provides a fascinating track of how Australian public opinion has evolved in the face of the enormous changes in our external circumstances that we have seen over the last two decades.

Now, while the poll is a rich source of material for foreign policy commentators and analysts, it leaves me, as a Minister and a politician, at a slight disadvantage in giving this speech.

For a politician of course, the first rule of polling is not to talk about polling - on the record at least.

There are many good reasons for me to leave the editorialising of the specific ins and outs of this poll to the commentators.

But let me share some high-level reflections on the findings of this year’s poll with you today.

As the Foreign Minister has said, in the Albanese government, our “foreign policy must be an accurate and authentic reflection of our values and interests – of who we are and what we want”.

In this way, we regularly say that our foreign policy begins with our national identity.

To me, our identity is best characterised by Noel Pearson, who wrote that to tell the full story of Australia, of our national identity, you need to tell three stories:

  1. The story of 65,000 years of indigenous heritage which is its foundation;
  2. The story of our Westminster institutions built upon that foundation; and
  3. The story our multicultural migration that has so enriched our nation in recent decades – so that today half of all Australians are either born overseas, or have a parent born overseas.

Australia’s modern national identity is an obvious source of influence for Australian foreign policy – it’s a super-power for our engagement with the world.

As a country where half of us were born overseas or has a parent born overseas, anyone anywhere in the world can look to Australia and see something of themselves reflected.

At the same time, we can look within our own nation and find a point of connection, a point of understanding with any corner of the world.

But this national identity isn’t just a source of international influence, it also informs our values and interests and the strategic priorities that flow from them.

In this context, the Lowy Poll contributes to our understanding of who we are, what we want and how we, as a people, see the world.

Strikingly, it shows extraordinary and enduring public support for Australia’s diverse modern Australian identity.

The poll reports that

“Australians are overwhelmingly positive about Australia’s cultural diversity. Nine in ten think Australia’s culturally diverse population has been either ‘mostly positive’ or ‘entirely positive’ for Australia.”

This is one finding that hasn’t changed over the life of the Lowy Poll.

Frankly, this finding is something that could easily be overlooked as it’s become so fundamental to our national identity that many Australians take it for granted.

But it’s a finding that has implications as much for how we conduct our foreign policy as much as it does for what we seek to achieve through it.

As the Lowy Poll confirms, Australia’s modern diversity is now a fundamental, deeply cherished dimension of our national identity.

But it’s not just the scale of our connection to the world that’s grown over the lifetime of the Lowy Poll, so too has the intensity of this connection.

The Australian people are directly connected to the world around us, with both its opportunities and with its traumas, in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.

Families are connected by transnational group chats, diasporas are connected by social media networks, cultures are connected by international streaming platforms.

As a result, the stakes of events overseas are felt more intensely by many Australians than in the past and as a result, the Australian government’s response to these events is more intensely scrutinised across multiple fronts.

Given the diversity of our society, it’s inevitable that Australians will often disagree on these intensely felt issues – with each other and with their elected representatives.

These disagreements can be exacerbated by the new political and media ecosystem that fuels polarisation and empowers extreme voices.

It’s in this context that we say that preserving our social cohesion as a nation is a priority of the way we do foreign policy.

As I said earlier, this is as much about how we do things as what we are trying to achieve.

Social cohesion is as much a process as it is an end state.

It’s not about seeking unity through homogeneity of opinion.

It’s about recognising that Australia is a diverse, pluralistic society and that we will always have differences of view, but that despite this, what we have in common as Australians matters more.

That despite our differences, we have more in common.

That no matter any individual disagreement, we have a shared future as Australians and every citizen has a stake in the success our nation.

That our shared success relies on us being able to work together in our diversity, in our schools, in our universities, in our workplaces, in our sporting teams, in our local communities – even with people who may disagree with us.

And that because of this, there’s value in disagreeing respectfully and listening empathetically to those with different views, because regardless of the issue, there’s a bigger picture that unites us.

In this context, the Lowy Poll’s findings on Australian attitudes to our democracy have for many years provided a salutary warning.

One of the things that unites us as Australians is our shared commitment to democratic values.

The second pillar of Noel Pearson’s conception of our national identity.

Despite this, many of us are worried about the health of our democracy.

That’s why we’re taking action to address challenges to our democracy on multiple fronts, through our Strengthening Democracy Taskforce, our Counter Foreign Interference Taskforce and the newly announced TechFIT, the Technology Foreign Interference Taskforce, through our whistleblower reforms, through our upcoming reforms to political donations and electoral spending and through the establishment of the National Anti-Corruption Commission.

We’re also taking steps to ensure that every Australian feels safe and included in our democracy through initiatives like the appointment of our Envoys to Counter Antisemitism and Islamophobia; and the appointment of Peter Khalil as Special Envoy for Social Cohesion.

This is important work, but let me emphasise to you what I emphasise to every school group that I speak to at Parliament House – our democracy belongs to all of us as Australians.

We all have agency in how it operates.

We all have a choice in how we exercise our democratic rights and how we treat our fellow citizens.

A choice of whether to listen rather than to shout, to show empathy rather than contempt, to seek to understand rather than instinctively condemn.

Usefully, the Lowy Poll gives some ballast to our understanding of Australian public opinion in this respect.

A consistent finding across the Lowy Poll’s twenty-year history is how few Australians position themselves on the extremes of the spectrum of opinion offered by the poll’s questions.

It’s a reminder that while the extremes may be loud, the bulk of Australian public opinion remains in the middle ground.

In this way, it’s a reminder that it’s a mistake to empower the extremes expressed in our political debate by giving them undue weight.

That it’s a mistake to assume that the most extreme voice you might see on social media is an accurate representation of the bulk of people with a different view to yours.

That it’s a mistake to buy into their artificial binaries and allow their tactics of division and polarisation to become a self-fulfilling prophecy for our community.

I’ve had thousands of conversations with Australians about foreign policy in my role, and very few of them match the caricatures that you see on social media or in our more excitable news outlets.

The loud and visible extremes simply don’t represent the way most Australians engage in these issues.

The vast majority of Australians don’t assume their fellow Australians are acting in bad faith or project the worst possible motives onto their words or actions.

Similarly, the vast majority of Australians don’t think that terrible things happening on the other side of the world justifies treating fellow citizens in Australia terribly.

Australians understand that we face complex and consequential challenges in our engagement with the world.

But they also understand the importance of ensuring that these international challenges do not divide us in acrimony at home.

The overwhelming majority of Australians love the country that we have built together and the three stories that make us one as Australians.

We are proud of our indigenous heritage, we treasure our democratic values and we have embraced our modern multicultural identity.

Amidst all the changes in our international circumstances over the past 20 years, the way we see ourselves as Australians, and as a nation, has remained consistent through the life of the Lowy Poll.

So as I hand over to the panel, the analysts and the audience for today’s conversation, I want to leave you with this thought.

There’s plenty to discuss, and debate, and disagree about in the findings of this latest Lowy Poll, and in Australia’s engagement with the world more broadly.

But regardless of our differences, all of us in this room and beyond have more in common as Australians than the things that divide us.

I’m looking forward to listening to a fantastic discussion by our panellists tonight.

Thank you all for coming and thank you to the Lowy Institute for an outstanding public resource.

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