I have many heritages: Chinese, Irish, Anglo and Japanese among them. I am a journalist. I grew up in the city but have lived in the country for 30 years. How should I define my identity?
Rural life has colonised my writing life. But I would hazard a guess I am not fully accepted as rural in many circles. I am certainly not the mythical bush person of legend.
My fascination lies exactly in that rural myth and why it still holds sway in the national imagination even though city life has long been the default culture. After all, the bush is a minority.
Rural identity was the surprising factor for Rebecca Colvin, Frank Jotzo and Kelly Fielding, researchers from the Australian National University and the University of Queensland, as they set out to answer the question: “Is Australia’s urban-regional schism on climate reality or rhetoric?”
Published this month, their research attempted to measure the urban-regional divide on climate change and a range of social issues, including the friendliness of the relationship between Australia and China, the trustworthiness of universities and whether Australian values are in danger.
The researchers could detect no statistically significant difference between the climate opinions of urban and regional Australians in the survey, which analysed a broadly representative sample of the Australian population.
Rather, it found city and regional Australians’ attitudes differed on one item: the perception of difference between urban and regional people.
Half of the quantitative survey respondents agreed that “city and country people are more different than they are similar”. People living in inner and outer regional areas were almost twice as likely to agree with that statement than were people living in major cities.
“These results indicate that there is a strong perception of difference between urban and regional people that is not borne out by actual measurement of urban and regional people’s views,” the authors found.
It may be the case that because we think we are different, we are different. It’s our perception that creates the difference. Or, as Colvin put it to me: “It’s not necessarily that the individual people are different as such, but we create different cultures and we tell stories about our differences, and that probably does lead to actual differences.
“But it does seem to be much more from the perspective of the rural communities feeling that difference, rather than it being something that’s particularly salient in the cities.”
We know there is a climate divide but in reality it all comes down to politics.
The factors that made the difference on the climate divide were political party alignment, progressive or conservative political ideology and the frequency with which people consumed ABC or Sky News.
These three elements were the most consistently significant variables predicting climate opinion rather than whether respondents lived in cities or regions.
“That’s what we keep finding,” Colvin said. “It’s getting a little bit boring actually, it’s always politics.”
It has been a regular theme if you have watched the climate wars. The Abbott government’s strategy to campaign against the Gillard government’s carbon tax was politically successful in dampening conservative support for climate action because it welded the climate issue on to Labor. Climate science became a matter of who you voted for. In part, that is why we saw a portion of Coalition voters break away to support independents.
But if this research is right, there may be a lot more common ground than first thought, as long as we can shove the politics to one side.
Colvin thinks of it this way. In every community there is a range of views, from climate science denial at one end to kayaking to blockade coal ships on the other. It’s the culture of the group that determines which particular view holds public sway.
For example, I have often heard farmers who support renewables start their sentences with “I am not a greenie but it makes sense to have a drought-proof income”. That is a nod to the dominant culture of a conservative area or an attempt not to offend prevailing views.
The divide is likely less about climate change as a policy issue, the authors found, and more about “cultivating a social division that may reap political benefits”, particularly for those with interests threatened by change to the status quo.
There is a reason that the time-worn country rhetoric about “latte-sippers” and city-based “elites” is repeated by some politicians. We know from Australian-based research that people are more likely to judge a statement as probably true if they had encountered it before. It reinforces the views of regional people who are more likely to agree that there is a divide between city and country.
So at the looming election, look out for politicians who seek to harvest those of us who “identify with rurality”. You don’t need a rural postcode. Rather it is those who see city people as different to country people.
But it also means there is common ground when it comes to substantive policy issues including climate action. On those issues, we are actually not that different.
