United front against death penalty a myth

Twenty-five years ago a landmark Australian study was published which found the abolition of capital punishment was not in response to public opinion, but in spite of it.

The paper by two academics from the Australian National University confirmed that “political elites” in the States had imposed their will against community wishes, but predicted that over time abolition might have the effect of shifting public opinion away from capital punishment.

This was despite their study of national opinion polls that showed public support dropped to about 40 per cent after the Ronald Ryan hanging in Victoria in 1967, but recovered to the high 60s by the time WA became the last State to ban the death penalty in 1984.

I was provoked to write this column by a peculiar article on the ABC’s The Drum website headed “Death penalty: are we really united in our opposition?”

Who’s the “we” that “our” ABC suggests is united?

In the article, another ANU academic, political scientist and former journalist Norman Abjorensen voices concerns that Nationals maverick Barnaby Joyce had broken some assumed consensus around the execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran by calling for a discussion about the death penalty.

“How does this square with the supposed steadfast opposition from Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop,” Abjorensen asked.

“Were they sincere in their appeals for clemency or was it just a cheap and cynical political stunt for a hardline Government to look compassionate?”

Abjorensen quoted an exchange between the last Victorian premier to send a man to the gallows, Liberal Henry Bolte, and former Labor leader Clyde Holding:

“For f… sake, Henry, can’t you see that every time someone is hanged, it’s one of you bastards hanging one of us.”

That led Abjorensen to his real point: “The fact of the matter, as the late Holding so succinctly pointed out, is that one side of politics, the conservative side, has always been pro-capital punishment while the other, Labor, has resolutely been opposed to it. It always had a class element to it.”

Well, that was not the finding of the two ANU researchers Jonathan Kelley and John Braithwaite in their study.

“Whereas the US experience suggests a general (if slight) affinity between political conservatism and support for the death penalty, in Australia the picture is mixed,” they wrote. “Supporters of the conservative parties are no different from Labor supporters, once other demographic and attitudinal variables are taken into account.”

The researchers noted the death penalty was abolished by different parties in different Australian States.

“We found that resentment towards outgroups is the aspect of conservatism that most strongly explains support for capital punishment,” they wrote. Principal in the outgroups identified by the ANU pair were criminals — and drug dealers are squarely within that grouping.

Abjorensen noted John Howard supported the death penalty for the Bali bombers in 2003 but declined to add that Labor leader Simon Crean also agreed and that in 2008, as the first executions approached, Kevin Rudd said those convicted “deserve the justice that will be delivered to them”.

Warning of a growing “populist” capital punishment sentiment, he quoted a Morgan poll from last year showing 52.5 per cent support the death penalty for deadly terrorist acts in Australia.

That was up from only 23 per cent in 2009, confounding the predictions of the earlier ANU study. WA, by the way, was at 59 per cent, second only to Tasmania on 63.

But Abjorensen declined to mention a Morgan poll in January specifically about the Bali nine drug smugglers in which 47 per cent of Liberals opposed the Indonesian executions and 42 per cent of Labor voters favoured them.

It clearly didn’t fit his class warfare script. And nowhere does he mention the democratic principle of the will of the people.

That January poll for the ABC’s Triple J, which reported 52 per cent support for the executions, led to a contorted article in the Fairfax press branding it “crude and misleading”. Morgan replicated the findings in another survey two months later.

So it appears not much has changed in 25 years. The political elites — which now clearly include a lot of journalists — impose their views about capital punishment on an often differing public.

It becomes a problem for journalism when there is an attempt to create the perception of a united national position when the evidence points to none.