OddThinking

Abstract

Julia Gillard is Australia’s new Prime Minister, and our first female Prime Minister. Other people are writing about the gender aspects of the appointment. I wanted to write about another subject: religious belief.

Gillard doesn’t seem to profess a religion. Neither does she seem to have declared herself to be an athiest or agnostic (or any variant of non-thiest.) That separation of her religious beliefs, if any, from her duties as a minister is something I am happy to respect. (Update: It seems that Julia Gillard has now made it clear to the electorate that she does not believe in God.)

Knowing of studies in the US that show most people wouldn’t vote for a President who declared themselves athiests, I wondered if Gillard was the first Australian politician to not publicly align themselves to a church. So I did the research.

I was wrong, and wrong within my voting life-time. Bob Hawke (who left office in late 1991) was an agnostic. I have a short memory, it seems.

Still, I thought, I reckon non-Christians have been under-represented in the past, say, 50 years.

Again I was wrong. I was surprised at how totally wrong I was. Australia has a long history of agnostic Prime Ministers.

I felt compelled to absolve myself for my political ignorance by publishing my negative result here.

Method

The first part was determining the representation of religions in Australia for the past 50 years. I grabbed the Census Data [Ref, Table 14.83].

I made a few approximations. The data went from 1961-2006, every 5 years. I gave each 5 year period equal weighting, and found the average. The edge conditions (1961 versus 1960, 2011 versus 2010) were ignored as they were close enough, and the figures change slowly. There was no attempt to factor in growing population size, or to interpolate trends.

The categories provided are Anglican, Catholic, Other Christian, Other Religions, No religion, Not Stated/Inadequately Described. The last category represents missing data, and could be split any way. I simply dropped it, even though it represents 10.55% of the population and, perhaps, Julia Gillard belongs in this section! I suspect, without evidence, that most of members of this group are non-religious. No doubt it includes the people who entered their religion as “Jedi” as part of a mischievous campaign during the last couple of census-takings.

The second part was determining the representation of religions of Prime Ministers for the past 50 years. I looked through entries for the recent Prime Ministers in Wikipedia and classified them into the same groups (Presbyterian → Other Christian; Agnostic → No religion). I weighted them by the number of days the person served as PM, starting 50 years ago today.

Results

Conclusions

The initial hypothesis that the non-religious are under-represented in PMs is clearly false – with 29.7% of PMs compared to 11.5% of the population (perhaps as high as 23% of the population if you attribute all of the missing data to them). Anglicans are also over-represented, but not to the same degree.

Catholics are under-represented and religious non-Christians have not been represented at all.

Given the sample of PMs is small – only 11 in the 50 year period – and the dominance of a few of the longer-serving ones (e.g. Howard and Hawke), it is not to be expected that the religion of the PMs should accurately reflect the general public. (The idea that some religions would be politically unacceptable, despite having community members, should not be discounted.)

Of course, the professed religion of the PM is only one measure of “representation”, and a poor one at that. I hope that Prime Minister Gillard will represent all Australians, and not just those that agree with her unspoken views on religion.

[Update: Merged two tables into one, while wondering why I didn’t do that in the first place.]