Social Differences Between Australia and America

Journalist Matthew Knott, the North America correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, reflects on the shifting views of America from Down Under in an interview with Foreign Press USA.

America feels like it is in a unique moment in its history. Do most Australians recognize the cultural and political shifts happening in the United States?

Oh, definitely. I mean, I think the whole world is in a unique moment in its history. You have to throw out everything that you think from the past and all the things you had planned. We’re in such a different time with the pandemic regarding how people are voting or what they’re thinking about — the coronavirus has completely smothered all the other issues. The seriousness of the issues people are dealing with — life and death, losing their jobs — means that it is a very, very unique and serious time to be a reporter.

Your recent piece in The Sydney Morning Herald, “America’s Voting System to Face its Reckoning in November,” compared the polarized reactions to the results of the 2016 elections and what might happen this November. Do you see the country more divided in 2020 than four years earlier?

I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a lot of contention after this year’s election as well, just with all the uncertainty about how people are going to vote. It may take a long time to count the results that can create an opportunity for people to create doubt about the legitimacy of the results. We’ve already seen the president suggesting that this is going to be a rigged and fraudulent election. Whichever side loses, passions are running high. I think people are going to be angry about the results, whichever way they go.

Based on 2016 models that predicted a victory for Hillary Clinton, many Americans completely lost faith in polls. What do you think about how much we can trust the U.S. election polls?

The polls are one thing that I think every reporter has to deal with because whenever you write a story mentioning polling results, you get a lot of people, understandably I think, saying, “Well, the polls got it wrong last time. Why should we pay any attention this time?” I think the short answer is that the polls are useful, but they’re not infallible. They can give you a guide of the broad trends, but if we’re over-relying on them for, say, a couple of percentage points for how certain states are going to vote, then we’re going to end up in a similar position. I think it’s important to have some humility about how accurately you can forecast all this. Also, because it can put voters off if they think it’s going to be a landslide one way or the other. I think we have to use polls. There’s no other scientific way to figure out what people are thinking. It’s good to get anecdotal evidence from the ground as well. We shouldn’t over-rely on them, but we shouldn’t ignore them either.

Aside from the elections, what stories in the U.S. are Australians fascinated by?

A: Well, the response to the coronavirus and the way people have reacted to it is so different in my home country of Australia. Major cities are going into almost complete lockdown and curfews, despite having much, much fewer cases than places here that are still very much open and running normally in the U.S. Australians who go back from overseas have to stay in a hotel for two weeks and can’t see another human being. Nothing like that has even been tried here. People back home are shutting their state borders from each other. Seeing the way that this pandemic has played out differently in America and my own home country has made me think a lot about the differences in the way Americans and Australians see the world and the way our political systems work. We think of ourselves as very similar, but the response has been very different.