So a crack commando unit of researchers from the University of Western Australia has found that people who place Australian flags on their cars are more likely to express racist attitudes than people who don’t.
The team of researchers discovered this through a comprehensive census of a vast crowd of 102 car-flag-bearing Austrayans havin’ a rip-roarin’ Oz Day barbie in Perth last year. It’s an incredibly groundbreaking and revealing set of data.
Except for the fact it’s a load of codswallop. And we’ve beaten them to the punch, if you’ll excuse the pun.
A year after the crap Uni of WA study was conducted, The Punch can lift the lid on an exhaustive study we’ve been slaving away at over the past 12 months. The study, which involved Punch journalists occasionally gazing at a few people, their cars, and their houses, reveals that there are in fact numerous symbols in society which prove that stuff means stuff to people. And stuff.
For instance:
• THE OWNERS of cars with MyFamily bumper stickers are 180 per cent more likely to have families
• YOUNG MEN with Southern Cross tattoos are 73 per cent less likely to be able to identify the Southern Cross constellation in the sky than trained astronomers
• PEOPLE who wear crucifix necklaces around their necks are 87.5 less likely to celebrate Ramadan than Muslims
Alright, alright.
My point is that this study, as its been presented, reminds me of one of those political polls that asks people leading questions in that it seems to go in with a preconceived notion, comes out with a preconceived notion and doesn’t ask the broader questions about the state of Australian society that you’d think would be the work of top thinkers.
Anyone who has ever sat in an undergrad uni class can tell you that the easiest way to write a research paper is to:
1) SET yourself a question where you can reach a preconceived conclusion
2) IDENTIFY a research strategy with parameters that will bring about this obvious conclusion in a way that makes you sound really smart and gets you to the word limit
3) REACH preconceived conclusion. Pass, probably with flying colours.
This is especially easy when the info you’re using to write a paper doesn’t have to be statistically sound. Like the data used in this study.
It reminds me of an assignment I did at uni where I compared a tabloid and a broadsheet newspaper’s coverage of an issue. I wasn’t exactly shocked when I reached the conclusion that the tabloid newspaper’s coverage was MORE TABLOID than the broadsheet.
I was happy to pass my degree. But you’d think our big thinkers would set out trying to answer a bigger question than whether some Australians who wrap themselves in (or adorn their cars with) the flag are racist.
Obviously, of some people who identify themselves strongly with an Aussie flag, a few are going to have views that are similar to people who have used and abused the flag as a racist weapon in the past.
We all define ourselves with symbols. In the clothing we wear, the bumper stickers on our cars, the footy jerseys we wear.
And at the same time, when it comes to symbols like the Australian flag – and even the MyFamily stickers – many people recoil at the thought of identifying themselves like that.
The kind of questions that our academics - who get paid to think - should be trying to answer are: why are Australians divided about their flag? Why don’t many Australians feel it is an authentic symbol of what Australia is about? What can we do to make it an inclusive, rather than occasionally exclusive, symbol?
And in a late development in The Punch’s survey, 83 per cent of people who read this yarn will agree that this flags and racism study has told us absolutely nothing meaningful about the state of Australian society.
If you want to hear something that challenges our thinking about Australia and its cultural symbols, you’d be much, much, much better off reading off Charlie Teo’s Australia Day address yesterday than contemplating the results of this study.
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