Questions of deception: contested understandings of the polls on WMD, political leaders and governments in Australia, Britain and the United States

Author: Murray Goot
DOI: 10.1080/10357710601142492
Publication Frequency: 4 issues per year
Published in: Australian Journal of International Affairs, Volume 61, Issue 1 March 2007 , pages 41 - 64
Previously published as: Australian Outlook (0004-9913) until 1990

Abstract
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.
By May 2003, when the war in Iraq appeared to have been won, whatever interest the Australian press had in commissioning polls on Australia's engagement appeared to be over. Winning the peace, a much more difficult and prolonged process, was only likely to send the media back to commissioning polls if there were Australian casualties, if Australia's continuing commitment became a major source of debate between the Coalition government and the Labor opposition, or if it were clear that the public had not, in the words of the Prime Minister, John Howard, 'moved on'. But there were few Australian troops in Iraq—for all the coverage they got, one might have been excused for thinking that there were none—and no Australian casualties. Labor, fearful lest it be seen as weak on security, was not keen to re-engage in any very robust debate. And with few if any demonstrations on the streets and evidence that defence had slipped as an issue in the polls,2 there were grounds for concluding that the interest of the public had indeed declined. The only surveys that continued to include items on the war were those conducted for organisations not connected with the press.

What brought Australia's involvement back as a poll item was not any debate in Australia or setback in Iraq, but an accusation in Britain that in making its case for war the office of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had been involved in 'sexing up' the evidence handed to it by its intelligence agencies. Reported by the BBC's Andrew Gilligan on the morning of 29 May 2003, and elaborated by him in the Mail on Sunday on 1 June, the accusation that Alistair Campbell, Blair's media advisor, had been a party to deceiving the British people produced not only a crisis for the Blair government—a parliamentary inquiry, a judicial investigation led by Lord Hutton, and the suicide of the scientist Dr David Kelly, Gilligan's source—but also raised questions about what the other partners in the 'coalition of the willing' had known and to what extent they may have been involved—wittingly or otherwise—in retailing information to the public that was of doubtful validity or simply untrue.

In Australia, the question of whether the government had deceived the public took a while to find its way on to the pollsters' agenda; and, for reasons that have to do with which polls get noticed, it took even longer to feed back into the political debate. When it did, the debate—conducted largely within the elite media3—turned partly on how the figures were to be understood, partly on what they meant for the standing of the leaders and the state of the parties, especially compared to the impact perceptions of dishonesty were said to have had in Britain and the United States, and partly on what they implied about Australian attitudes to politics more generally.

This article traces this debate and offers a critique of the terms in which it was conducted. It raises questions about the comparisons made between polled opinion in Australia and polled opinion in Britain and the US. It works through the implications for public opinion of Howard's view that what mattered was whether his government had sought to deceive or had just inadvertently misled the public. And it documents the moral panic induced by polling that suggested that Australians were prepared to support a government that had misled them—deliberately or otherwise.

Two misses and one hit

The first poll on whether the public had been misled received very little publicity. Conducted by UMR Research for Hawker Britton (HB) at the end of the third week in June 2003, it suggested an even split between those who thought Howard had 'mislead [sic] Australians about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction' (44 per cent), and those who thought he had not (44 per cent). Released to the Sydney Morning Herald, the results appeared, somewhat belatedly, on 10 July not as a front-page story, as Hawker Britton had hoped, but on an inside page with readers invited to register their own answer to the question 'was Howard misleading?' on the Herald's website (Riley 2003a).4 The rest of the press ignored the poll. Nearly two weeks later, when the Canberra Times reported the results (Peake 2003), the Prime Minister was fending off accusations of deceptive behaviour registered by a new poll—this one conducted by Newspoll for Rupert Murdoch's flagship in the antipodes, the Australian.

Newspoll conducted its poll on 18-20 July, and both the question it posed and the results it reported were different from those associated with the HB-UMR poll, a month earlier. Newspoll offered respondents three options, not just two. Just over one-third (36 per cent) of those questioned agreed that the Howard government 'knowingly misled the Australian public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction', just under one-third (31 per cent) preferred to say the government had 'unknowingly misled' the public, while a slightly smaller proportion (25 per cent) said the government 'did not mislead the Australian public'.

If the comment occasioned by the HB-UMR poll was little more than a trickle, the discussion generated by Newspoll came as a torrent: only the one mention of the UMR poll in the press after its release; nearly 50 explicit references to the Newspoll in the first five days after its release. Published on the front page of the Australian on Tuesday 22 July, and the subject of an editorial inside, Newspoll's results were noted on the same day by two other papers in the News Ltd group; by the ABC's news service, as well as by the national broadcaster's radio programs AM and The World Today, and its television program, Lateline; by the wire services AAP, Reuters, and Agence France Presse; and by London's Financial Times, the Kyoto News, and Asia Pulse. The following day, the poll was reported or discussed by a string of News Ltd reporters and columnists; by the Melbourne Age, in two separate pieces, and by the Canberra Times; by news agencies and by the overseas press. Most of the weekend papers discussed it, too—the Weekend Australian referring to the poll in no fewer than three articles, and the Courier-Mail in two. And the poll continued to be cited, if not by name, through August (on nine occasions), September (four), October (two), and November (once).

The difference in the treatment of the Newspoll and the HB-UMR poll is easily explained. It has nothing to do with the merits of the two polls. Rather it has to do with three other factors. First, the Australian commissions Newspoll—News Ltd is a half-owner—and polls that papers commission are always given space. No paper commissions or has an interest in promoting the HB-UMR poll. Second, in Australia the amount of comment generated by a poll is not a function of the 'improbable' nature of its findings, as appears to be the case in Britain (Crewe 1982: 122-5; 1986: 250-1), but of its general reputation (Goot 1996: 37; 2000: 41-2, 45); and among political commentators Newspoll was the best regarded of the polls even if its record did not wholly justify its rank (Goot 2002a: 83). In addition, while Newspoll polls for a paper that was a strong supporter of the war it does not poll for any political party. UMR, by contrast, had no track record and, as the Herald noted in reporting its results, it conducts polls for Labor, a party that opposed the war; Hawker Britton, too, is a public affairs organisation with Labor connections. Third, Newspoll's results were much more dramatic—and more probable—than those produced by HB-UMR. Whereas the HB-UMR poll suggested an even division between those who thought the Prime Minister had misled the public and those who thought he had not, what Newspoll showed, in the words of the Australian, was that 'two-thirds of Australians' thought they had been 'misled over the war against Iraq' (Shanahan 2003a); only one-quarter thought they had not.

Two months later ACNielsen, polling for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, produced another three-way split. According to the front-page of the Herald, 'Almost 70 per cent of Australians' believed 'John Howard misled them on his case for war'—the figure, 68 per cent, being almost identical to the corresponding figure reported by Newspoll. Partly because it hardly seemed new, the ACNielsen poll received little coverage outside the Fairfax press: a mention in the Canberra Times, on Melbourne's 3AW (during one of Howard's regular appearances with radio host Neil Mitchell), in the Green Weekly (which picked up the Mitchell interview from the PM's website), on ABC News Online, and in the 'Editor' supplement to the Weekend Australian—this last reflecting the reluctance of News Ltd to acknowledge any poll not its own.

While the ACNeilsen and Newspoll results may seem similar, there are important differences. About a quarter (26 per cent) of those interviewed by ACNielsen felt 'deliberately misled' about 'the reasons for going to war with Iraq'—rather fewer (by ten percentage points) than the proportion that told Newspoll they felt misled over whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A greater proportion (42 per cent) felt 'unintentionally misled' about the reasons for going to war—unintentionally misled, in this case, because Howard 'was misled by others'; this was 11 percentage points more than the proportion in the Newspoll that felt Howard had 'unknowingly misled the Australian public' over whether Iraq possessed WMD.

Another intriguing difference is the proportion of respondents registered as 'don't know': 12 per cent in the HB-UMR poll; 8 per cent in the Newspoll; and just 2 per cent in the ACNielsen poll. One might speculate that the 'don't know' figure is higher in the HB-UMR poll because the options presented to respondents in that poll were fewer than the number offered in the Newspoll or the ACNielsen poll; that the figure is lower for both Newspoll and ACNielsen because both organisations repeated the question to respondents who gave a qualified answer, like 'it depends'; and that ACNielsen may have recorded the lowest proportion of 'don't knows' because it spelled out why the Prime Minister may have behaved in a way that unintentionally misled people. It is also likely that between June and September more respondents had simply made up their minds.

Polls apart? Australia, Britain and the US
The news that most respondents felt misled by Howard was not the only element of drama in the way the Australian chose to report its findings. When the Newspoll results were published readers were invited to compare the distribution of opinion in Australia with the distribution of opinion in Britain and the US, Australia's principal partners in the 'coalition of the willing'. According to the Australian, a poll conducted in Britain on 10-12 July by ICM Research for the Daily Mirror found that 67 per cent believed that Tony Blair had 'knowingly or unknowingly misled his country about the presence of WMDs in Iraq'. In the US, a poll conducted on 27-29 June by Gallup for CNN and USA Today reported 37 per cent believing that 'the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction'; of the rest, 61 per cent thought 'they had not been misled at all'.

If the figures across Australia, Britain and the US seemed comparable, the political consequences for the countries' leaders, the Australian argued, were not. 'Two-thirds of Australians' may have felt that they had been misled over the war, knowingly or unknowingly, yet it had 'not changed how they would vote'. This contrasted with 'the US and Britain, where Mr Bush's popularity has fallen and Mr Blair is facing disastrous polling and calls from within the Labour Party for his resignation'. On Newspoll's figures, the Liberal-National Coalition enjoyed a lead over Labor of ten percentage points, 45:35; Howard's approval rating was still high, having dropped from 60 per cent a fortnight earlier, to 55 per cent; and, as preferred prime minister, he maintained a lead over the Leader of the Opposition, Simon Crean, of 40 percentage points. By contrast, 35 per cent were said to have lost faith in Blair (Shanahan 2003a, 2003b).

The contrast between Howard's continuing popularity, on the one hand, and the ratings of Blair and George W. Bush, on the other, was picked up and reproduced across much of the media, notwithstanding that for Blair and Bush the levels of support indicated by the Australian were either difficult to understand (Blair) or not reported at all (Bush). Thus, in foreshadowing a discussion of the poll, the ABC's Lateline informed viewers that, unlike Howard's popularity, support for the British and American leaders had 'slumped' (ABC 2003a); Cameron Stewart (2003), writing a few days later in the Weekend Australian, asserted that Blair and Bush had 'suffered deep declines in their ratings in the face of claims they misled their publics over Iraq'; and in the Sunday Age, Ray Cassin (2003) sought to explain the difference between Australia and its two Anglophone allies in terms of Australia's 'low' expectations of public officeholders (see also ABC 2003c; Adams 2003a; Farr 2003a; Seccombe 2003a). The publication of the ACNielsen poll was accompanied by similar comparisons. In the Sydney Morning Herald, for example, Geoff Kitney (2003a) opined that the 'key' to understanding how the Australian Prime Minister had come out of the war in better standing than Bush or Blair—he gave no figures and cited no polls—lay in the fact that 'Australians appear to believe that he acted honestly' (see also Riley 2003b).5

Reasons for going to war and WMD
While the Australian presented the results of the questions on Iraq, asked in each of the three countries, as if they were directly comparable, they were not (see Table 1). The ICM Research question was closer to the one that would be asked by ACNielsen than to the question Newspoll asked. And the one asked by Gallup was more like the one used by HB-UMR than the one asked by Newspoll. It follows that if comparisons are made between the Australian polls and the two polls from Britain and the US, they have to be pair-wise rather than three-way comparisons, they have to involve polls other than Newspoll, and they have to exclude one of the comparisons with Newspoll made by the Australian itself.

Table 1. Whether the Blair, Bush or Howard governments misled the public over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or the reasons for going to war, June-September 2003 (percentages)

Weapons of mass destruction
Reasons for war

HB-UMR 20-22 June
Gallup 27-29 June
Newspoll 18-20 July
ICM Research 10-12 July
ACNielsen 19-21 Sept
Misled …
Australia
USA
Australia
Britain
Australia
na: not asked
Questions:
'Do you think John Howard mislead [sic] Australians about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?' (UMR Research for Hawker Britton)
'Do you think the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or not?' (Gallup)
'In the lead up to the war in Iraq, do you think the Howard government knowingly misled the Australian public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, unknowingly misled the Australian public, or did not mislead the Australian public?' (Newspoll)
'In his decision to go to war, do you think Tony Blair: misled the British people but not knowingly; did not mislead the British people; knowingly misled the British people?' (ICM Research)
'Which of the following statements best describes your views about the reasons given for going to war in Iraq? [READ OUT AND ROTATE]
a. Prime Minister Howard deliberately misled the Australian people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq.
b. Prime Minister Howard unintentionally misled the Australian people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq, because he was misled by others.
c. Prime Minister Howard did not mislead the Australian people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq'. (ACNielsen)
Sources:Hawker Britton 2003; Australian 2003, for Newspoll; Gallup 2003; ICM Research 2003; ACNielsen 2003.
Deliberately
na
37
36
27
26
Unintentionally
na
na
31
39
42
TOTAL
44
37
67
66
68

No
44
61
25
27
26
DK
12
2
8
5
2
n
(1,000)
(1,003)
(1,200)
(1,012)
(1,423)
The Newspoll question was about the Howard government's misleading the Australian public about Iraq's WMD. The ICM Research (2003) question was about Blair's 'decision to go to war with Iraq', and whether in making it he had 'knowingly misled the British people' (27 per cent), 'misled the British people but not knowingly' (39 per cent) or 'not misled the British people' (29 per cent). Not only was the ICM Research question closer to that which ACNielsen was to ask; so, too, were the results—notwithstanding the absence of a scandal in Australia, at least one of British proportions, about the 'sexing up' of the government's case.6

In America, as Newspoll was asking its question about WMD, Gallup (2003) asked: 'Do you think the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (39 per cent), or not (58 per cent)?' The question was rather like the one used by HB-UMR a week earlier, though the American split on the proposition that the public was 'deliberately misled' was more favourable to the government than the Australian split (44:44). Those who said the Bush administration had 'deliberately misled' the public were then asked whether 'the Bush administration was generally accurate in describing the threat Iraq posed to the US, but exaggerated some of the specific details' (14 per cent) or 'greatly exaggerated the threat posed to the US in order to justify a war with Iraq' (24 per cent)? Those who said the administration had not 'deliberately misled' the American public were asked whether the administration had 'provided information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that was accurate' (25 per cent) or 'provided information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction it thought was accurate but turned out to be inaccurate' (30 per cent)?

In short, in both Australia and Britain only a quarter of those interviewed thought their government had deliberately misled the public over its reasons for going to war—though two-thirds agreed that their governments had misled the public either deliberately or unintentionally. And in both Australia and the US more than a third of those interviewed thought the government had deliberately misled the public over Iraq's WMD.7 The difference between the proportion that felt the public had been deliberately misled about the reasons for going to war and the proportion that felt the public had been deliberately misled about the WMD is as one would expect: fewer respondents felt the public had been deceived about the reasons for going to war than felt the public had been deceived about WMD.

Support for leaders and parties
What of the standing of the respective leaders and their parties? In Australia, the war itself—the period from the invasion to the defeat of Saddam Hussein—boosted the level of satisfaction with the Prime Minister, worked against the Leader of the Opposition in the head-to-head polling with the Prime Minister, and lifted the Coalition's electoral support. What damage subsequent accusations of deceit did to the standing of the Prime Minister is less clear. But if the government was damaged the impact appears to have been slight.

On Newspoll's figures, the invasion of Iraq saw the level of satisfaction with Howard's performance as Prime Minister rise from 48 to 56 per cent. The end of the war saw it edge up a little further. Not until mid-July—in the poll in which respondents were asked about the public being misled about WMD—was there any sign of a turndown, with satisfaction slipping from 60 per cent to 55 per cent. In response to the question of who would make the better prime minister the pattern was slightly different. Howard jumped to a lead of 41 (from 29) percentage points at the beginning of the war, stretched this to 50 by the second half of June, before dropping back to lead by 41 at the beginning of July—after Crean had withstood a challenge to his own position as Labor leader—a margin that was barely affected by the five-point decline in his satisfaction rating in the poll of 18-20 July. Changes in the Coalition's support trace a slightly different path: a rise from 42 to 45 per cent with the beginning of the war (Morgan showed a rise from 39.5 to 44.5 per cent) to a peak of 47 per cent in mid-May (though Morgan recorded no rise); a temporary dip at the end of May and beginning of June (also reported by Morgan)—coincidentally, the weekend on which the BBC story broke—before moving back up to 46 per cent in mid-June (Morgan, 45 per cent) and 45 per cent (Morgan, 44.5 to 43.5 per cent) throughout July (Morgan 2003b. Morgan did not ask about the leaders).

In Britain, too, the beginning of the war saw a rise in both the level of satisfaction with the Prime Minister and the level of support for the Labour government. In the ICM Research poll, the proportion of respondents expressing satisfaction with Blair's performance as prime minister rose from 38 per cent in mid-March, just after the war started, to 49 per cent in mid-April, shortly before Bush declared it won. The proportion saying they would vote Labour rose more modestly, from 38 per cent to 42 per cent. The only other poll to show a rise in the level of support for the government of this magnitude or more was YouGov, the online poll published by the Telegraph; it had Labour on 35 per cent at the end of February and 40 per cent after the start of the war and near the end of it—a jump of five percentage points. In the other polls, the government's gains were less than half this size. According to MORI, among those declaring that they would definitely vote satisfaction with Blair's performance as prime minister rose from 31 per cent in late February to 43 per cent a month later and to 47 per cent in late April, while the proportion saying they would vote Labour rose from 41 to 43 per cent—an increase of just two percentage points. In Populus, the online poll conducted for the Times, support for Labour also rose by two percentage points, from 34 per cent at the beginning of March to 36 per cent in the first week of May.

But evidence from the same sources suggests that both the level of satisfaction with Blair and the level of support for Labour started to decline well before any accusation from the BBC about the government having 'sexed up' its intelligence; that after the accusation was aired neither the loss in support for the Prime Minister nor the decline in support for Labour was any more marked than it had been before the charge was levelled; and that between May and July the decline in the level of satisfaction with Blair's performance (five or six percentage points) was no greater than it was in relation to the performance of Howard. In the ICM Research poll, the decline in Blair's rating (42 per cent, mid-May; 39 per cent, mid-June; 37 per cent, mid-July) was not as steep as it had been before the accusation was levelled, when it slipped from 49 per cent, in mid-April, to 42 per cent, in mid-May. Support for the Labour Party, by contrast, held up until after the accusation of 1 June. In the polling conducted by YouGov, Labour's support dropped from 40 to 37 per cent in May; by the end of July, it had shed another three percentage points. In the MORI poll, the level of satisfaction with Blair's performance had slipped nine percentage points (47 to 38 per cent) in May before sliding another six points (38 to 32 per cent) by late July; Labor, too, slipped four points after the war and another four by the end of June, but suffered no further loss in July. Populus, however, registered no decline in Labor's support from the beginning of May until the beginning of August, after Dr Kelly's death.8

That the decline in Blair's rating was no greater than that suffered by Howard does not mean that British respondents thought Blair no more dishonest than Australian respondents considered Howard. If anything, Britons were more sceptical of Blair's honesty than Australians of Howard's—though this did not register in the ratings. Asked by YouGov (2003a), at the end of May, whether they felt 'Tony Blair misled the British public on Iraq's possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction', 36 per cent of those who responded said he 'did mislead—but not deliberately' while 27 per cent said he 'deliberately misled'. The first of these figures is the same as, and the second is not very different from, the corresponding figures for Howard reported by Newspoll when the furore over the 'sexing up' of intelligence was at its height—just after the death, on 18 July, of Dr Kelly; in the wake of Kelly's death the figures would very likely have been considerably worse than they had been in May. In another poll, conducted by YouGov (2003b) on 3 June, 46 per cent of respondents said that Blair had not 'told the truth as he saw it' but had 'deliberately' distorted 'the information he had' when he said that 'he was certain that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction'. And asked by Populus (2003), on 10-11 June, whether 'Britain and America deliberately exaggerated the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in order to win support for going to war', no fewer than 58 per cent said they had. In the HB-UMR poll taken later that month, no more than 44 per cent reckoned that Howard had misled Australians about WMD—notwithstanding the absence of any reference to its having been intentional.

In so far as the loss of support for Labour or Blair reflected respondents' judgements about the war it does not follow that these judgements were based on their views about WMD or any of the other reasons Britons were given for going to war. Instead, they may have reflected views of how the war itself was going—or other issues unrelated to the war. According to MORI, between the end of the war and the death of Dr Kelly the proportion of respondents that approved Blair's handling of 'the current situation with Iraq' declined from 47 per cent to 32 per cent (Baines and Worcester 2003: 14).

What of President Bush? Support for his handling of the situation in Iraq, according to Gallup, rose sharply (increasing from 56 per cent, 14-15March, to 71 per cent, on 24-25March) when the bombing began, remained high (71 to 74 per cent) for the duration of the war, then fell back to somewhere between 63 per cent and 53 per cent (a mean of 58 per cent) from mid-June to the end of August (Moore 2003). Other sources report in similar terms. In the CBS News poll, for example, approval for the way Bush was 'handling the situation with Iraq' jumped from 55 per cent, on 15-16 March, to 75 per cent in late March, peaked at 79 per cent around the end of the war, then slipped back to 72 per cent in May before falling to 58 per cent in early July and 57 per cent in mid-August (CBS 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2003d, 2003e).9

To what extent satisfaction with the President's handling of the issue was affected by a sense that the White House had deceived people is another matter. Certainly many respondents did feel misled. In early May, 49 per cent of those interviewed by CBS said that the Bush administration had overestimated Iraq's WMD—a figure that rose to 56 per cent by early July—and, said roughly two-thirds of these respondents, Iraq's arsenal had been exaggerated to build support for the war (CBS 2003c, 2003f).10 In other words, about a third felt deliberately misled—a proportion not ve ry different from that reported, in July, by Newspoll. But neither this sense of the administration's having exaggerated things nor the even more widespread sense that the Bush administration—even Bush himself—had hidden important elements of what they knew about Iraq's WMD necessarily undermined Bush's reputation for integrity. One of the President's 'personal strengths', the CBS analysis argued, was 'the public's perception of his integrity'—a perception that had been 'unaffected' by 'doubts about the administration's honesty' in its account of what it knew about Iraq's WMD.11 The President's reputation might have been damaged if respondents had believed that WMD would not eventually be found. But most respondents believed WMD would eventually be found, and almost as many—though not, by early July, the majority—believed the war was worth fighting even if WMD were never found (CBS 2003c).

As with Blair, therefore, we need to explain the fall in the level of approval for the President's handling of the war without resort to speculation about his reputation for honesty or doubts about the existence of WMD. And as with Blair, the obvious alternative is the state of the war. By early July, the proportion of respondents in the CBS polls that believed the US was 'in control of the situation in Iraq' had plunged from 71 per cent, in late April, to 45 per cent (CBS 2003c);12 and, on the figures produced for the Pew Research Center, the proportion of respondents agreeing that 'the US military effort in Iraq is going very well' had plummeted from 61 per cent, in mid-April, to 23 per cent (Everts and Isernia 2005: 305). As Gallup's analyst was to put it: 'The decline in Bush's rating' for his handling of the war 'paralleled almost exactly the decline in the public's assessment of how well the war [was] going' (Moore 2003).
Contested meanings: deliberately deceived or simply misled?
What do the findings tell us about attitudes to the war? At a press conference, held on the morning that the Newspoll on WMD was released, Howard was asked: 'does it concern you that 66 [sic] per cent of Australians polled think you lied [sic] about Iraq?' Howard had his answer well prepared. Admonishing the journalist for misquoting the poll, he went on to observe that the findings were 'not all that surprising':
36 per cent thought they had been deliberately misled, which is exactly the same number of people who in the final Newspoll on participation in the war opposed Australia's participation, 25 per cent said they didn't think they had been misled knowingly or unknowingly, and 31 per cent said they had been unknowingly misled. And interestingly, those two together is [sic] almost identical to the total number of people who supported our involvement in the war (Howard 2003a).

Two months later, on 3AW, Howard's host alluded to the ACNielsen poll published in the Age the day before: 'Are you concerned by the poll that shows that … half of Australians believe the war wasn't justified and more than that think that you misled them about the reasons for sending troops?' Again, Howard, a keen poll-watcher, was ready: 'of course' he had noticed the poll; 'and interestingly 70 per cent of people in that poll … believe that I acted in good faith, 70 per cent' (Howard 2003b).13
For Howard, what mattered was not how many of those interviewed felt that the public had been deceived but the number that believed he had deceived the public deliberately. Not only did he stress it, so did his deputy, John Anderson, his former advisor, Graeme Morris, and—less predictably—former Labor Party pollster, Rod Cameron. Appearing on the ABC's AM program, the morning the Newspoll results were released, Anderson insisted that 'there was no deliberate misleading by the government', that Howard was not the sort of prime minister that did 'that sort of thing', and that even if he had been tempted to lie 'he knows the Australian people' would 'see through something that's not genuine.' On Lateline, Morris made this point more bluntly: 'If they [voters] think somebody is telling a porky deliberately they'll kill you.' Interviewed alongside, Cameron expressed his amazement that 'only a third' had realised that 'we' were 'being dudded'; for two-thirds of those interviewed, he declared, Howard was 'virtually blameless' (ABC 2003d, 2003e).14
However, what most commentators stressed was not the fact that about a third of Newspoll's respondents felt deliberately misled, but the fact that two-thirds felt misled.15 This much larger figure was then set against the poll's other findings—widespread approval for Howard's performance as prime minister, his big margin over Crean as the preferred prime minister, and the high level of support for the Liberal-National Party coalition he led.16 So stark a contrast invited a different way of framing the findings: not around consistency, as Howard had argued, with those who doubted his honesty, those who opposed the war and those who would never vote for him being essentially the same group; but around paradox, the paradox of having most respondents register what was widely seen as a damning indictment of the government's handling of a key issue yet not prepared to mark down either the Prime Minister or his government for it.
The dominant way of framing the data was established by the Australian. Under the heading '“Misled” voters stay loyal to PM', the paper argued that while a third of respondents believed they had been 'knowingly misled' over the war against Iraq and another third believed they had been 'unknowingly misled' this had not changed 'how they would vote'. Indeed, in 'the past two weeks' Howard had maintained his 40-point lead over Crean as the preferred prime minister and the position of the government itself had 'marginally improved' (45:35 compared with a lead of 45:37 a fortnight earlier), so that if an election had been held 'now' Labor (which had polled 37.8 per cent of the vote in 2001) 'would actually lose seats'. 'I don't need a poll to tell me that truth matters in politics', Crean remarked (ABC 2003e). But what the poll suggested was that the truth did not matter. Support for Howard remained 'stronger than for his coalition invasion partners, George W. Bush and Tony Blair'.
The sense of paradox was almost certainly heightened by the Australian's failure to indicate the order in which the questions were asked. Readers could well have assumed that the question about Iraq's WMD had been asked before the questions on support for Howard, Crean and their respective parties. Mark Day (2003) columnist, was quite explicit. 'Something very odd' was 'taking place in the Australian electorate', he observed. Two-thirds of those polled believed that Howard had 'misled us over the reasons for going to war in Iraq' [sic], yet 'in the next question, a clear majority says that deception, knowing or unknowing, was not a reason to change our vote, and John Howard leads Simon Crean as preferred Prime Minister 59 to 19 per cent.' Judgements about leaders and parties had not changed, he was saying—the use of Iraq to prime respondents notwithstanding.
In fact, the voting intention question was not 'the next question': just the reverse. The question about voting intention came first, questions about the leaders followed; only later was there a question about whether the public had been misled about WMD. Nor was this order accidental. On the contrary, for Newspoll (and ACNielsen) this is standard practice designed to ensure that responses to questions about party preference and the performance of party leaders are not influenced by prior questions about particular issues or events.17 Had there been any effect it could only have run the other way, with support for the Coalition dampening criticism of its conduct over Iraq.
Taken at face value, what sort of paradox did the poll results establish? In arguing that a sense of being misled over Iraq had not damaged the Prime Minister or the government, commentators overlooked the possibility that the fall in Howard's lead as 'preferred prime minister'—50 percentage points, 20-22 June, down to 41 percentage points by 4-6 July—was attributable to it. While it is true that the gap between Labor and the Coalition was 10 percentage points on 18-20 July, compared with eight points on 4-6 July, this was not because of any growth in the Coalition's support; rather it reflected a loss in Labor's support—to the most anti-war party, the Greens.
There are more general problems, too, in arguing the idea of a paradox. First, commentators conflated gross change (the total who changed their party support) with net change (changes in the overall level of party support). If there was no change in the level of Coalition support, this may have been because the number rewarding the Coalition for other reasons balanced the number of respondents punishing the Coalition for its having misled the public. Certainly, there is evidence that at the subsequent election Labor gained votes on Iraq even as the Coalition gained votes on other things (Goot 2007: 299). Second, the Coalition may have suffered a net loss but one that sampling variance simply masked. In electoral terms, a loss of just one or two percentage points would have been substantial; but given that what the polls produce are only estimates of a party's support no one can say for sure whether an estimate that remained unchanged between two surveys shows that party support itself remained unchanged. Third, while everyone knew the direction in which support for the Prime Minister or the Liberal-National Party should have moved if a sense of paradox were to be avoided, no one knew how large such a shift would have needed to be. Would a shift of any size have been sufficient? Or should the movement have been as great, say, as the movement to which the polls testified when the war commenced? A report in the Courier-Mail (2003) noted that Howard was 'still the preferred prime minister', as if a poll that showed two-thirds of respondents believing the public had been misled should also have shown that Howard's 40 point lead over Crean had been entirely wiped out.
Those who pointed to a paradox assumed not only that respondents should judge the Coalition and its leader in terms of the truthfulness of the facts they adduced in arguing the case for war, but also that they should judge Howard's decision to go to war solely by the truthfulness of his initial pitch. Neither assumption is persuasive. Respondents judge the performance of the parties and their leaders on various grounds, not just one. And prime ministers who mislead in arguing part of their case do not necessarily destroy their entire case. Told, in February 2004, that 'the governments of the United States and Britain now say there appears to be little or no evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction', the majority of respondents interviewed by Ipsos not only in the US but also in Britain, Canada, Mexico, France and Italy endorsed the proposition that 'there were other reasons besides WMD to justify going to war in Iraq' (Goot 2004: 250). Had the same question been asked in Australia—certainly in June or July—it might have generated a similar result. In May, when Morgan asked whether the US was 'right or wrong to invade Iraq', the majority (53 per cent) said it was 'right' (Morgan 2003a).
Explaining the paradox
If there was a paradox, what might explain it? Journalists and other commentators advanced a range of explanations. Some focused on what had been achieved by the war in Iraq, deceptions notwithstanding. A similar number emphasised Labor's failure to leverage the widespread scepticism about the government's case for war. Others argued that when it came to being misled Australians did not care, some simply accepting that politicians lie. For critics of the war, this last raised real concerns about the state of Australian democracy. However, these were concerns that others challenged.
Ends justifying the means
Explanations that focused on the war itself noted that the allies had won, no Australians had been lost and that, whatever reasons Howard might have given at the beginning, for most Australians the end had justified the means (Day 2003; Kitney 2003b; Ruehl 2003; Stewart 2003; Don Watson in ABC 2003c). Writing before July's Newspoll had been conducted, Malcolm Farr (2003b) observed that Howard appeared to be 'bulletproof'—a tribute to the fact that the public saw Australia's mission as the removal of Saddam Hussein and it was not about to 'quibble over the original justification for the war'. Australia had suffered no casualities, and with the mission accomplished the public had now 'moved on' (see also Day 2003; Ruehl 2003; Peter Maher, of the media monitors Rehame, quoted in Seccombe 2003b).18
Certainly among those who were to tell ACNielsen that the war was justified many more (34 per cent) volunteered the toppling of Saddam Hussein as their reason for thinking this than volunteered any other reason; only 5 per cent, for example, nominated Iraq's loss of its ability to use WMD (Dodson 2003).19 And asked, in the Mitchell interview, whether 'in retrospect' going to war was 'the wrong thing to do', since most people felt misled about the reasons for going to war, Howard gave—as the first of 'a number of reasons' for not thinking it wrong—the answer most commonly given in the poll. 'We have rid Iraq of somebody who was responsible for mass murder and torture over three to four decades', he reminded his audience. 'If the advice that the [leader of the Opposition] … had been followed Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq' (Howard 2003b).
Prominent political scientist, Robert Manne (2003a), put the point about ends and means in a more negative way. He described Australians, in the tradition of W. K. Hancock (1930), as 'genuinely interested in consequences and outcomes and unusually indifferent to principles and ideals'—though how the former might be judged without recourse to the latter he did not say.20 For Raimond Gaita, concerned to make a similar point, all this was relatively new. Australia's culture had 'become vulnerable to simplifying philosophies—notably consequentialism, the philosophy which says the moral character of an action is determined solely by its consequences' (2004: 56). One consequence, stressed earlier by Howard, was the reinforcement of the American alliance and with it a way of ensuring Australia's own defence. Bob Hogg (2003) former Labor Party national secretary, thought this the key to why Howard had 'not been worn down by the post-war flak'.
The weakness of Labor's counter-mobilisation
A second set of explanations centred on the Labor Party. 'The secret of Howard's success is, as always', Miranda Devine (2003) was pleased to note, 'his enemies'. Howard, said Mike Seccombe (2003c), faced 'a weak opposition' (see also Megalogenis 2003b: 202), or what Manne (2003a) decried as a 'feeble opposition'—one that 'spectacularly failed in its quasi-constitutional duty to interrogate and oppose'. Labor, said Geoff Kitney (2003b), was weak on 'two issues voters care about most: stopping boat people and enhancing Australia's security'. On national and international security, Rod Cameron (ABC 2003e) remarked, 'Labor hasn't got a position'. It suffered, said Mark Day (2003), from a 'total lack of credibility'. Perhaps that was why it had failed, as Newspoll's Sol Lebovic put it (ABC 2003g), to gain 'traction'. The Howard government 'is under nothing like the scrutiny that the Blair Government and the Bush Administration face', Michelle Grattan (2003) observed. Some pointed not to Labor's weakness but to the cast-iron discipline Howard exercised over his own party, something Blair could only dream of in relation to his party (Shanahan 2003b).
Party certainly figured more prominently than the press, though when the press was mentioned it was with feeling. News Ltd's Malcolm Farr (2003a), somewhat bravely, rounded on 'a large squad of journalistic supporters, publishers and flunkeys, who quickly mobilise against the fanatics'. Manne (2003b), writing for the Fairfax press, was more pointed. If Iraq had caused Bush and Blair 'political headaches', but not Howard, this was partly because of the 'successful intimidation of the ABC and the Murdoch stranglehold over the tabloid press'. Certainly the support of the Australian press for the war—and not just the Murdoch press—stood out by comparison with the press in Britain.
Apathy
But the most despairing set of explanations was organised around the idea that while respondents were prepared to endorse positions critical of the government, deep down '[n]o one seemed to care' (Manne 2004: 49). Australians 'appeared not at all disturbed, not at any rate in ways that showed in opinion polls' (Gaita 2004: 49).21 They were, or had become, apathetic; they did not want to know; worse, they were actually comforted by lies.

Some support for the view that the public did not care much is provided by an analysis of comments made by callers to talkback radio. Conducted between 26 May and 31 July by media monitors Rehame, the analysis found that while the majority (54 per cent) of comments relating to claims of deception involving WMD were 'negative' and few (17 per cent) were 'positive', only 374 of the callers put to air during those nine weeks talked about the topic. By comparison, over 5,000 calls were logged in relation to the arrival of asylum seekers on MV Tampa in 2001 and over 2,000 in relation to the Bali bombing in 2002.22

One journalist thought the Newspoll results pointed to 'a palpable apathy in middle Australia over once fundamental questions of accountability' (Stewart 2003). For Hugh Mackay (2003), social researcher and newspaper columnist, the results provided 'another glimpse into the meaning of disengagement: a government can be perceived as lying to the people and the people, by and large, won't care' (see also Rod Cameron, ABC 2003b). Or as Tariq Ali, put it: 'It's as if [the Australian public] expect politicians to lie—and when they do it's greeted with a shrug of the shoulders' (cited in Fraser 2003; see also Charlton 2003). According to Mackay, the poll figures would not have surprised 'anyone': they were simply 'further proof' of voters 'disengaged' not only from the 'political' agenda, but also from the 'social and economic agenda' (Mackay 2003; see also Mackay 1999: chapter 26, 1993: part 2.7; Lappeman 2003; Adams 2003b; Malcolm Mackerras cited in Julie Macken 2003).23
For some, explanations of this kind became occasions to shift responsibility from the politicians to the public, and from the arena of international politics to the realm of individual psychology. Thus, for Mackay (2003) 'the real explanation' for the government's increased lead over Labor was 'also the simplest: we have taken our eye off the big picture. We don't want to know.' Elaborating on this view, broadcaster and columnist Phillip Adams (2003b) insisted that the devaluing of Australian democracy by those who were 'disengaged' was compounded by the public's ignorance 'on almost every issue', and the determination of those who 'now know they were conned' to not 'want to know'. The public was 'complicit in letting the system down.' Rather than 'being outraged by the lies of our leaders and the gutlessness of the Opposition, we excuse our failure as citizens by saying, “We're not to blame; they've made us cynical.” Sorry, that's not good enough. The public has to lift its game' (Adams 2003a).

On religious programs and among ethicists this line of argument encouraged even darker conclusions about voters proving unequal to the burdens of citizenship and politicians failing to rise to the challenge of responsible government. Chairing a discussion on the ABC's religious program, Geraldine Doogue thought that things had 'got pretty serious', that voters may have been given the impression 'that all politics stinks', and that there may have been 'a fundamental shift in the public's expectation of what they ought to know, the truth' (ABC 2003c). Asked by another ABC journalist to comment on the Newspoll results Dr. Simon Longstaff, of the St. James Ethics Centre, was said to have found the result 'dispiriting'. The 'level of trust in the political class', he remarked, had 'reduced to such a degree that people constantly discount what they're being told'. In a 'state of despair' their support for the government meant they were 'merely clinging to what they know' because they lacked any faith in the Opposition. This risked 'grave potential results', since 'if you don't trust the people who make the laws you run the risk of not trusting the laws they make.' Speaking on the same program, Mackay thought the mood 'very dangerous' for 'the health of our democracy', since 'in a sense politicians can get away with murder' (ABC 2003h; see also Seccombe 2003c).

This despair, however, did not pass without challenge. If voters felt misled but still supported the government perhaps this was because, as the columnist Gerard Henderson argued, the media do not always allow politicians to be honest and 'basically the electorate recognises that' (ABC 2003c). Certainly the polls provided no evidence that most Australians wanted to hear lies. Far from demonstrating their distrust of government, said Hugh White, a defence analyst, Australians were 'showing a unique willingness to trust the government on security issues' (Megalogenis 2003a).24
However, the willingness of voters to support governments that had misled them was hardly new. As George Megalogenis (2003a) noted 'Australians have a history of sticking with governments they felt may have deceived them'. His list of relatively recent examples included: Malcolm Fraser's electoral triumph in 1980, notwithstanding his misleading the electorate over tax cuts—the 'fistful of dollars' as Liberal Party advertisements put it—in 1977; the victories of Bob Hawke in 1990 and Paul Keating in 1993, despite the promised 'soft landing' turning into a 'hard recession'; and Howard's electoral triumph of 1998, after assuring voters in 1996 that there would 'never ever' be a Goods and Services Tax (see also Megalogenis 2003b: 203). To these he might have added: Hawke's 1987 pledge that 'by 1990 no Australian child will be living in poverty' (Mills 1993: 119); the distinction between 'core' and 'non-core' commitments, drawn by Howard after the 1996 election, as he stood by some of his undertakings and scuttled others (Goot 2002b: 24-25, 45 n.14); or any number of other promises made but not kept by governments re-elected over the years.

If governments had acted deceitfully in the past and survived it was difficult to see the polls on Iraq as particularly puzzling, especially when there was widespread acceptance that in relation to Iraq the government had achieved a worthwhile end. 'I don't accept the argument that society's alienated or disenchanted or disengaged', Henderson insisted. 'I think sections of the media feel that people should be more engaged than they are. But I don't see any reason why people should be engaged if they don't want to be' (ABC 2003c). Another columnist on the Right was more direct. The Newspoll results, said Peter Ruehl (2003), were 'killing the leftie pundits, several of whom', he said, 'were reduced to trashing the voters for … well … voting'. The poll, he happily conceded, had thrown up 'a contradiction, but [only] in the sense that liking the Rolling Stones but hating their last seven albums is a contradiction, too.' That most, if not all, of the hand wringing was done by opponents of the war, of Howard, or of both may help explain why Newspoll's findings were so widely misrepresented—taken as a comment on politicians who 'lie' or a government that 'deliberately misleads' (see, for example: Mackay 2003; Tariq Ali, cited in Fraser 2003; Waterford 2003: 7).

Conclusion
At almost every turn most commentators were either mistaken or their conclusions open to doubt. Polls were compared that were not comparable. Contrasts were drawn between public opinion in Australia and public opinion in Britain and the US—in relation to government dishonesty, the standing of the leaders, and party support—that are difficult to support. And a paradox was created—based on the idea that whereas voters felt misled by the government over Iraq support for the government itself had been unaffected—that was less puzzling than was commonly believed.

The polls, interpreted as showing a widespread sense that the public had been misled, created a problem for the government. Howard, skilled at reading the polls, addressed the issue with expedition. His insistence that only those who thought the government had misled the public deliberately could be considered real critics of his position on WMD set the bar very high—much higher than he had set it in opposition when he ruled out 'inadvertence' as a defence (MacCallum 2005: 97). Since the things governments say about their intentions are difficult to disprove, even by those (like Wilkie) who provided the information on which the policy was ostensibly based, this made the bar very difficult to jump.25 The effect of Howard's response was to circumscribe severely the notion of government accountability, notwithstanding his concession that voters could still hold him responsible at the next election if they felt misled; Howard's invocation of the ballot may have been one of the moves Paul Kelly had in mind when he noted that Howard 'invokes public approval to legitimate any changes to governance that might diminish accountability' (2006: 4). In any event, far from Howard thinking the public didn't matter, as Alison Broinowski suggests (2003: 27) in relation to Australia's joining the US in the war on Iraq, Howard's determination to defend his reputation over WMD was based precisely on the premise that the public did matter.

The alternative to the reading of the polls argued by Howard—the one set in train by the Australian—produced a kind of moral panic: a disproportionate reaction, within the media, to what was perceived to be a sudden or unexpected threat, directed at established norms or institutions, and felt by those who traditionally regard themselves as guardians of these institutions or norms (Critcher 2006). In this case, a panic among professional middle class critics of the war in the face of evidence that large numbers of Australians—despite their sense of having been misled—were willing to support the government in general and the Prime Minister in particular, while Britons and Americans were not prepared to let their government or their leader so lightly off the hook. The panic was heightened by a failure to recognise three things: that the problems confronting Blair as a consequence of the charges over 'sexing up' the material he placed before the British public were always going to be more dramatic—especially after the death of Dr Kelly—than those that confronted Howard or Bush over the way they had handled the case for war; that, even so, the British poll against which the Australian chose to compare its own poll showed a loss of government support considerably greater than that shown by any other British poll; and that an explanation for the fall in support for either the government or its leader had to factor in possibilities other than a widespread sense of government by deceit—above all, the electorate's frustration, by the middle of 2003, with the progress of the war.

Notes
1. My thanks to Deb Brennan, Bill Tow and the Journal's referees for comments on an earlier version of this article. The Australian Research Council supported the writing of the article under Grant DP0559334.
2. According to Newspoll, the proportion of respondents that rated 'defence' as 'very important' to how they 'would vote in a federal election' declined from 63 per cent, on 18-20 October 2002, to 53 per cent on 20-22 June 2003, <www.newspoll.com.au>.
3. While this fits Alan Gyngell and Michael Wesley's broader observation that in relation to international affairs 'interested generalists' or the 'attentive public' constitute 'a relatively small minority' and 'are usually … regular consumers of the broadsheet print media and quality electronic media', it is difficult to square this observation with the simultaneous claim that 'twelve or fourteen of Australia's forty federal elections... have featured strong divisions on and reactions to foreign policy issues' (Gyngell and Wesley 2003: 192-3).
4. Other HB-UMR results from the June poll, all of them ignored by other media, are reported in Stephens (2003) and Wade (2003).
5. More recently, John Langmore (2005): 67) has noted that 'Blair's popularity declined, in part because he concealed and misrepresented information about the war'; but he makes no attempt to test this claim against the fate of Howard or even of Bush.
6. The resignation of an intelligence analyst, Andrew Wilkie, on 11 March, before the war (Wilkie 2004: 11ff), had much less of an impact on Australian politics than the suicide of David Kelly, after the war, had on British politics; see Runciman (2004).
7. In the US, it seems, there were no questions about whether the public had been deliberately or unintentionally misled; Philip Everts and Pierangelo Isernia (2005): 282-3) document the findings on whether respondents felt there was deliberate deception, but they do not discuss the findings.
8. The data on voting intentions are available at <www.mori.com/polls/trends/voting-allpub-trends.shtml>, except for the YouGov poll of 22-24 July.
9. Curiously, the review of US polls on Iraq by Everts and Isernia (2005) ignores this question.
10. These data, too, are overlooked by Everts and Isernia (2005).
11. See CBS (2003g) for the remarks about Bush's integrity; and CBS (2003c, 2003h), for the data on whether Bush and/or the administration told all they knew.
12. These data are missing from Everts and Isernia (2005).
13. The proportion that thought Howard had 'unintentionally misled' (42 per cent) or did 'not mislead' (26 per cent) was 68 per cent, not 70 per cent. Implicit in Howard's gloss was a rejection of the view that 'those who... accept government policy … remain largely without influence on the foreign policy process, chiefly by virtue of their low numbers', though Gyngell and Wesley (2003: 192-3) also say that 'public opinion sets the essential parameters of the political and policy process between elections.'
14. A variation on Howard's line was also run by Atkins (2003).
15. Among the relatively small number of commentaries generated by the ACNielsen poll, a much greater proportion accepted—if only implicitly—Howard's point (see Kitney 2003a; Riley 2003b; Hewson 2003). Compare the claim that 'The poll findings on Iraq will give encouragement to the Opposition in its attack on the Government's credibility—in particular its reliance on the warnings about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for sending troops' (Dodson 2003). The Labor leader had a different take, arguing that the poll exposed Howard's disregard for the truth ('deliberately misled') and his incompetence (having allowed himself to be 'misled by others'); Canberra Times (2003) and ABC (2003f).
16. Compare the argument that 'Any meaningful regime of accountability requires that politicians take responsibility for what they say' and that resort to 'evasions' results 'inevitably' in 'an increase in public cynicism as the truth emerges, and a decline in public trust in political leaders' (Barker 2003: 91). However, Geoffrey Barker also argues (2003: 20) that the war was conducted against the 'backdrop' of 'a largely disengaged electorate'. Clearly, the idea of a disengaged electorate being made more cynical by the truth creates a paradox of its own.
17. The reverse may also be true. Glynn et al. (1999: 75-6) warn that asking about voting intentions first may affect responses to subsequent questions but don't consider the consequences of asking about voting intentions after the questions on issues.
18. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told Fox TV that 'Australians are comfortable with what we've done' (Sydney Morning Herald 2003). After the Newspoll was published, Farr (2003a) described Howard as someone who 'knows to the finest calibration how far he can take voters'.
19. Only the first reasons respondents gave were coded. Curiously, opponents of the war were not asked for their reasons.
20. A similar sentiment is expressed by Don Watson (ABC 2003c). For Hancock's influence in spreading the view that 'Australian politics is virtually devoid of ideas', see Connell (1968/1974: 38).
21. But compare his subsequent remarks 'that though [Howard] should have been voted out of office … nothing substantial can be inferred about … the invasion of Iraq from the fact that so many people thought differently' (Gaita 2005: 108).
22. For these data, I am grateful to Matthew Mitchell, Rehame's Sales and Communications Director (Victoria); personal communication 8 December 2003. See also Peter Maher, quoted in Seccombe (2003b).
23. Mackay's emphasis on apathy was not new. He had identified it as 'a dominant theme in social research'—whether 'over the past couple of years', as he was now saying; since the late 1990s, as he had said in 1998; or since as far back as 1972, as he argued in 1983. Australians, having faced 'too many changes coming too quickly', were 'tired of “issues”, disappointed in our leaders and disturbed by our own sense of powerlessness.' Being 'scared', they had 'switched off'. One 'might even say we would prefer to be lied to if that would comfort us' (Mackay 2003). In a subsequent article, Deidre Macken (2003) argued that 'disengagement with politics, broadly, and public ethics in particular, has been gathering pace for at least the last decade'.
24. But compare Brian Fitzpatrick's conclusions about 'a gullible Australian electorate', based on the results of the general election held in December 1955, after the (Petrov) Royal Commission on Espionage:
It is unlikely that any Prime Minister but an Australian Prime Minister, being asked again and again publicly, in parliament and otherwise, to answer accusations of falsehood and bad faith, should simply refrain from answering. And only in Australia, perhaps, would a majority of the electorate, by testimony of votes cast, indicate that the refusal to answer, refusal to so much as notice sworn evidence given by high officials in contradiction of the Prime Minister, was of no account (1956: 100).

25. Compare the rhetorical question posed by the Australian (2003) in an editorial on its Newspoll result: 'Why would three seasoned political operators [Howard, Blair and Bush] have lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, when such lies are bound to be unmasked?'
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List of Tables
Table 1. Whether the Blair, Bush or Howard governments misled the public over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or the reasons for going to war, June-September 2003 (percentages)

Weapons of mass destruction
Reasons for war

HB-UMR 20-22 June
Gallup 27-29 June
Newspoll 18-20 July
ICM Research 10-12 July
ACNielsen 19-21 Sept
Misled …
Australia
USA
Australia
Britain
Australia
na: not asked
Questions:
'Do you think John Howard mislead [sic] Australians about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?' (UMR Research for Hawker Britton)
'Do you think the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or not?' (Gallup)
'In the lead up to the war in Iraq, do you think the Howard government knowingly misled the Australian public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, unknowingly misled the Australian public, or did not mislead the Australian public?' (Newspoll)
'In his decision to go to war, do you think Tony Blair: misled the British people but not knowingly; did not mislead the British people; knowingly misled the British people?' (ICM Research)
'Which of the following statements best describes your views about the reasons given for going to war in Iraq? [READ OUT AND ROTATE]
a. Prime Minister Howard deliberately misled the Australian people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq.
b. Prime Minister Howard unintentionally misled the Australian people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq, because he was misled by others.
c. Prime Minister Howard did not mislead the Australian people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq'. (ACNielsen)
Sources:Hawker Britton 2003; Australian 2003, for Newspoll; Gallup 2003; ICM Research 2003; ACNielsen 2003.