Better civics education could encourage constitutional reform

A survey of Australian voters conducted this year as part of a wider project at Charles Sturt University into how to cultivate good citizenship has shown profound lack of knowledge of how the constitution works, but also surprising willingness to contemplate constitutional reform.

That part of the survey relating to knowledge of the constitution revealed that 51% of respondents said that they had never been taught how the constitution works, which suggests either that schools are not including civics and citizenship in the curriculum or that civics education is not making sufficient impact to enable students to recall it when they become adults.    52% of respondents were unaware of the fact that the constitution protects fundamental rights.  28% of respondents incorrectly thought that seats in parliament were allocated in proportion to the percentage votes parties obtained while 40% did not know how they were allocated.

Much of this is unsurprising – previous surveys have revealed similar lack of knowledge about the constitution.  Most concerningly, the civics knowledge of high school students is in decline:  Results of school examinations in 2024 showed that only 28% of Year 10 students were proficient in civics.  This was the lowest rate recorded since the Australian Curriculum Authority began collecting data and represented a 10% decrease as compared to results in 2019.

The obvious remedy for this is a reinvigoration of civics education which, under the Australian Curriculum, is compulsory only to the end of Year 10.  This leaves students without exposure to civics in the two years before they vote for the first time.  Furthermore, the Australian Curriculum is not mandatory.  It is up to the states and territories to determine whether, and to what extent, to follow it, which means that some students may receive even less than is contained in the Curriculum, and that civics may not even be taught as a stand-alone subject.

Civics education was the subject of an inquiry by the Commonwealth parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters earlier this year.  Although the Committee’s report said that civics education be made a stand-alone subject, this was undermined by a recommendation that a mere 10 hours per year be devoted to it.

In contrast to Australia, students in France study civics throughout their school career and in the final year of school take a mandatory subject in philosophy so that knowledge of the mechanics of government is complemented with the intellectual skills necessary to evaluate public affairs from an ethical point of view.  This is something Australia should emulate.

More encouraging were the results of the section of the Charles Sturt survey relating to the effect of civics information on public attitudes to possible constitutional reforms – in this case adopting proportional representation and Australia becoming a republic.  Attitudinal change was ascertained by asking respondents the same question twice: once on its own, and again after being provided with background information.

When asked whether, Australia should have a proportional electoral system in order fairly to reflect the views of voters, 51% of voters supported PR, while 49% opposed it.  The next question countered an argument, commonly made against PR, that it almost inevitably leads to coalition government which, it is alleged, creates political instability.  After being informed that coalition government is not inherently unstable (using evidenced that since World War II there have been the same number of general elections in the United Kingdom which uses a single-member electoral system as in Germany which uses a form of PR) support for PR increased to 59%.

The same effect was observed when it came to support for a republic.  47% of respondents supported the idea of a republic while 53% were against.  When asked how a president should be chosen if there was a republic, 76% of respondents chose direct popular election.  Most significant, however, were the different results obtained when respondents were given information about the powers of the office.

Initially, 60% of respondents indicated they were concerned that an elected president might breach the non-legally enforceable conventions applicable to a Governor-General. This was a key issue that led to the failure of the republic proposal during the 1999 referendum.  When informed that the conventions could be made enforceable by being codified into law, 71% of respondents said that this would allay their concerns about a president abusing their power.

What these responses show is that contrary to the prevailing view that Australian voters are averse to constitutional change, they are willing to contemplate reform – if provided with accurate information.  The problem, however, is that many opponents of constitutional reform devote their energies precisely to ensuring that voters are not properly informed, disseminating half-information, misinformation or outright disinformation.

The 1999 republic referendum saw monarchists advance the spurious argument that the Governor-General is Australia’s head of state, despite the fact that s 61 of the Constitution states that he exercises his powers as the Queen’s representative.  Another falsehood was that it would be impossible to contain a president’s powers by codifying the conventions – despite the fact that this has been done in numerous Commonwealth countries.

During the 2023 Voice referendum the claim was made that the proposed constitutional amendment would bind the government to following advice tendered by the Voice, despite there being nothing in the text that supported that conclusion. Even more bizarre was the claim that the Voice would establish apartheid in Australia – despite the fact that the South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution itself established a National House of Traditional Leaders to give advice on matters affecting traditional communities.

Most pernicious of all was the ‘if you don’t know, vote No’ mantra disseminated by opponents of reform both in1999 and 2023, a tactic which cynically exploited the fact that, given the low level of civic knowledge in Australia, many voters did not understand the issues involved and, like anyone faced with the question of whether to change a machine the workings of which they do not understand, were predisposed to vote No.

Significantly, leaders of the No campaigns in both referenda believed that more was to be gained by focusing not on the substantive constitutional issues, but rather on voters’ lack of knowledge of them – which suggests that the No campaigns were aware of the intellectual weakness of their positions.  It therefore made sense to discourage voters from informing themselves and instead encourage them to retreat into negativity.  The slogan embodied the absolute antithesis of good citizenship – indeed it is difficult to think of an exhortation more subversive of that value.

What this tells us is that poor levels of civics knowledge are as much a fault of political actors who discourage constitutional literacy as it is of the education system.