Optimism prevails
We have become more optimistic about the future of the country even though we are in the middle of a pandemic. By Nick Cater.
If coronavirus consternation were an Olympic sport, Australia would compete with the best. In the latest monthly survey from Ipsos, What Worries the World?, 52 per cent of Australians included Covid-19 in their top three concerns, which ranks us fourth after Malaysia (76 per cent), Japan (59 per cent) and South Korea (57 per cent).
Curiously, the virus is more greatly feared in countries that have escaped the worst of the pandemic. The coronavirus death rate in the four most fearful countries is below the global average. It is as much as 13 times lower in South Korea and 15 times lower here. It demonstrates an aspect of the human psyche well known to torturers and psychiatrists: an anticipated fear, laden with uncertainty, frequently drives emotions more powerfully than the anticipated experience itself.
Coronavirus (COVID-19): % worried in July 2021 in each country
Base: Representative sample of 20,502 adults aged 16-74 in 28 participating countries, June 25th – July 9th 2021.
Source: Ipsos Global Advisor.
A second paradox that emerges from the survey defies a simple explanation. In the middle of the biggest turmoil most of us have experienced, we have become more optimistic about the future of the country. In the September 2019 survey, 57 per cent of Australians agreed that their country was on the wrong track, while 43 per cent thought it was heading in the right direction. In the July 2021 survey, the figures were reversed: 58 per cent thought we were heading in the right direction, with 42 per cent saying we were on the wrong track.
This revival of she’ll-be-rightism is so sudden and unexpected it is tempting to dismiss it as a rogue finding. We’ve clocked up debt that will fall on the shoulders of generations not yet born; some significant strategic gaps have emerged; China has become more aggressive; and we’ve been exposed to a horrible new kind of virus that may have been deliberately made in a Chinese laboratory.
Yet the sanguine story told by the Ipsos data is solid and consistent. Australians flipped from negative to positive between the April 2020 survey and the following month and have remained confident about their nation’s future ever since.
Australians have become less worried about a lot of things since coronavirus jumped to the top of the hierarchy of fretfulness.
Climate change is the exception, which is a top-order concern for 28 per cent of Australians, up 3 per cent since the start of the pandemic. It hardly reflects the consensus of catastrophe some may imagine, but it is high enough to place us third behind Canada (32 per cent) and Germany (30 per cent). We are four points ahead of France, six ahead of the UK and 10 points ahead of Sweden, where they have other threats on their minds, which I’ll come to.
Excessive concern about climate change does appear to be a First World problem, a bogeyman whose claws become more menacing when there are no other fiends in sight. In Russia, 68 per cent say poverty and social inequality is a top-order issue, but only 4 per cent agonise over climate change. Six out of 10 South Africans are concerned about unemployment but only 3 per cent about climate change. More than 50 per cent of Malaysians include political and financial corruption in their top three concerns but only 1 per cent include climate change.
Climate Change: % worried in July 2021 in each country
Base: Representative sample of 20,502 adults aged 16-74 in 28 participating countries, 16 ‒ June 25th – July 9th 2021.
Source: Ipsos Global Advisor.
Australians, if anything, have become less worried about such threats since coronavirus came into view. We’re less anxious about unemployment, which was rated a top-order concern by 30 per cent of Australians in September 2019, but only 26 per cent last month. Barely one in five (22 per cent) Australians is troubled about poverty and social inequality, a fall of 5 per cent since July 2020, placing them third from bottom on the ladder ahead of the US (19 per cent) and Saudi Arabia (18 per cent).
Unemployment and Jobs: % worried in July 2021 in each country
Base: Representative sample of 20,502 adults aged 16-74 in 28 participating countries, 12 ‒ June 25th – July 9th 2021.
Source: Ipsos Global Advisor.
Poverty & Social Inequality: % worried in July 2021 in each country
Base: Representative sample of 20,502 adults aged 16-74 in 28 participating countries, 13 ‒ June 25th – July 9th 2021.
Source: Ipsos Global Advisor.
A federal independent corruption watchdog is hardly the urgent priority that Labor and the Greens would have us believe, judging from this survey. Only 21 per cent of Australians are troubled about corporate or public malfeasance, placing their country some distance behind the winner, South Africa, on 60 per cent. Aficionados of Netflix drug-cartel dramas will not be surprised to learn that Colombia comes in second (55 per cent) and Peru third (53 per cent).
Financial/Political Corruption: % worried in July 2021 in each country
Base: Representative sample of 20,502 adults aged 16-74 in 28 participating countries, 15 ‒ June 25th – July 9th 2021.
Source: Ipsos Global Advisor.
Netflix also helps a little to explain the pattern of concern about crime and violence. Mexico comes in second at 57 per cent and Chile third at 47 per cent. Fourth is South Africa on 41 per cent. The country that outranks all three, however, is Sweden, where 63 per cent say crime and violence is a top-order issue.
Crime & Violence: % worried in July 2021 in each country
Base: Representative sample of 20,502 adults aged 16-74 in 28 participating countries, 15 ‒ June 25th – July 9th 2021.
Source: Ipsos Global Advisor.
The result may come as a surprise to anyone still infatuated with the so-called Scandinavian model, but not those who have been following the consequences of the country’s soft-border policy since the 2015 Middle Eastern refugee crisis, when Sweden admitted more migrants per capita than any other European country.
It has not been a story on which the mainstream media has been comfortable to dwell. Yet Sweden’s official crime statistics paint a disturbing picture: the molestation of women rose by 45 per cent from 2016 to 2019 and rapes by 18 per cent. In recent times the focus has been on the rate of gun violence, once one of the lowest in Europe, but now one of the highest. When six women were shot dead in the space of five weeks earlier this year, the head of the National Organisation for Women’s Shelters, Jenny Westerstrand, tried to blame Covid-19, saying women facing domestic abuse had not been able to seek help. Government minister Marta Stenevi blamed gender inequality, saying violence against women was “deeply, deeply rooted” in Swedish society.
The pattern and location of the crimes, however, heavily concentrated in towns and suburbs where the new migrants settled, suggests a more obvious, if uglier explanation. A report by philanthropic organisation The Good Society early this year found that the number of crimes committed by immigrants outnumbered those of Swedish-born criminals in absolute terms.
Sweden’s experience serves as a reminder of the sound judgment of Australians when they elected Tony Abbott to government in 2013 on a promise to secure the borders. It also becomes clearer why 70 per cent of Swedes think their country is on the wrong track and its political and media elite are frozen in denial while Australia surfs on a wave of sunny optimism.