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Following the prime minister's announcement, in May 2022, that Australians would be asked to decide whether to have an Indigenous Voice to Parliament inscribed in the Constitution, a large number of polls sought to measure the breadth and strength of support for a constitutionally enshrined Voice. Some also sought to measure the appeals that might make support for a Voice either more attractive or more vulnerable. This article shows that support for a constitutional amendment, while broad, was not strong: that while majorities were in favour of change—nationally and in most states—there was no majority strongly committed to change, and the majority in favour of constitutional change was declining. It shows that while most Labor voters and the Greens supported the change, Coalition supporters increasingly did not. And it shows which considerations appeared to resonate with respondents and which did not. In the course of documenting and analysing these findings, this article offers a critique of the polls: the wording and sequencing of some of the questions, some of the response options, and the questions not asked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The weapons of mass destruction (WMD) Saddam Hussein was said to possess were central to the justification the Australian Prime Minister gave for Australia's decision to go to war in Iraq. When no WMD materialised, poll data suggested that the public felt misled. But the same data suggested that support for both the government and the Prime Minister was unaffected. Among critics of the war, this generated a moral panic about Australian democracy and the Australian public—its commitment to the end justifying the means, its failure to receive a lead from the Labor Party, its widespread apathy. It also led to an intense debate about why the charge of not telling the truth had weakened public support for Blair and Bush but not for Howard. This article explores the concerns expressed by critics of the war in the face of polling that suggested that Australians were prepared to support a government and its leader that had misled them—deliberately or otherwise. It raises questions about the contrasts drawn between polled opinion in Australia, Britain and the United States. And it argues that the differences in the pattern of opinion across the three countries were not marked and that what had cost governments support were views about how the war was going, not the failure to find WMD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A report into indigenous Australian children taken from their families recommended that the Government apologize. Three polls on the question of whether the Government should apologize produced three quite different results: a ‘yes’, a ‘no’ and one which was more evenly divided. This paper shows why this happened. It relates the results to three quite different understandings of what opinion polls should model: opinion expressed through plebiscites; ‘real’ opinion; and opinion based on some sort of deliberation. And it explores the relationship between what a poll-following Prime Minister might have done and scholarly judgments about ‘quality’ in public opinion polls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]