Sydney-based think tank the Centre for Independent Studies puts out a quarterly magazine called Policy. The latest issue features a piece titled ‘The Rise of the Opinionators’ by Peter Saunders which suggests that:
“In the last 50 years, people’s socio-economic characteristics have become much less significant indicators of how they will vote: many working class voters support parties of the right, and large swathes of the middle class vote Labor.
Labor’s strongest support on a two-party preferred basis is not now among manual workers. It is among education, arts and social professionals, people Peter Saunders dubs the ‘opinionators’ for their role in developing, processing, interpreting and transmitting ideas, values and opininons.
The opinionators hold many views at significant variance from the general population. Compared to other voters, for example, the opinonators are less likely to support reducing tax and more likely to favour higher government spending, and they are much more in favour of asylum seekers and much less supportive of defence spending.”
Saunders also suggests that Opinionators stand out from other voters in their strong support for the Greens and their support for, what he calls, “high-visibility election issues like logging, or on touchstone issues like GM crops”.
The article concludes with the comment, “In terms of their wider ideological importance, however, the opinionators occupy many of the key positions within our core educational and cultural institutions. Their political significance should not be measured in votes.”
What has always struck me most about this group is that, yes, they have very definite and strongly held opinions on a range of environmental issues. I have also observed that they are mostly incredibly ignorant on the very same issues for which they hold such definate views. As a consequence I see them as a real threat to the environment. I wrote sometime ago for Policy magazine on this on this issue, the piece was titled Environmental Fundamentalism.
I have also been rather taken-aback when more than once ‘an opinionator’ has declined to discuss an environmental issue with me on the basis that, in their opinion, I knew too much about the particular subject! Most ordinary folk like talking to people who know something about a subject?
What is it about environmental issue and this group, a group that has so much political and cultural clout?
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.