Religious freedom in Australia - Part III of III

Posted on Friday 16th August 2019 at 7:30pm

Robust national survey data paints a revealing picture of the people behind the current push to legislate “religious freedoms”, and the politicians who are helping them. But electorate winds have recently changed.

In Part I and Part II of this series profiling the campaign for religious freedom in Australia, we explored the predominance of self-referential control amongst religious conservatives, who comprise a small minority (8%) of adult Australians. We also noted the recent collapse of religious faith, with a majority of Australians (54%) now reporting “no religion”.

In this third part, we explore three broad reasons why there’s relatively high support for “religious freedom” amongst federal politicians, even as citizen secularism surges.

The first reason is that our federal politicians are indeed on average more religious than the general population.

Keywords: Attitude research | Behaviour research | Social research | Australia

Religious freedom in Australia - Part II of III

Posted on Friday 16th August 2019 at 7:15pm

Robust national survey data paints a revealing picture of the people behind the current push to legislate “religious freedoms”, and the politicians who are helping them. But electorate winds have recently changed.

In Part I we employed robust national survey data from Australian National University (ANU) to establish that in public attitudes toward four social law reforms — abortion, voluntary assisted dying, marijuana use, and marriage equality — opposition was uniquely high amongst only one psychographic Australian Social Identity (ASI6) segment. That segment is religious conservatives, who comprise a small minority (8%) of the adult population.

While it’s important to remember that each of these characteristics alone doesn’t describe every religious conservative — for example, 15% don’t oppose marriage equality — the ANU data uncovers many other characteristics that are also far more prevalent amongst religious conservatives than others.

Keywords: Attitude research | Behaviour research | Benchmarking research | Social research | Australia

Religious freedom in Australia - Part I of III

Posted on Friday 16th August 2019 at 7:00pm

Robust national survey data paints a revealing picture of the people behind the current push to legislate “religious freedoms”, and the politicians who are helping them. But electorate winds have recently changed.

In political reaction to Australia’s legalisation of marriage equality in 2017, the federal government is about to introduce its “religious freedoms” bill into parliament. But the marriage equality reform explains only a small part of the picture, as robust evidence reveals.

Keywords: Attitude research | Behaviour research | Benchmarking research | Social research | Australia