Aims of the Australian Rights Project The Australian Rights Project was designed to measure Australians' attitudes towards a broad range of civil liberties issues. It aimed to establish the level and solidity of Australians' support for civil liberties and civil rights, to explore how Australians make up their minds in specific civil liberties controversies, especially where there are competing sides to a situation, and to identify principal characteristics which might affect the support or rejection of certain civil liberties. Another central objective of the project was to make comparative assessment of support for rights among Australian states and with comparable countries, most particularly Canada and also the United States and the United Kingdom. The data collected by the Project provide a baseline measurement of attitudes after two decades of debate concerning the need for a bill of rights in Australia. During this period the Commonwealth has expanded its rights jurisdiction by means of the external affairs power and legislated against racial and sexual discrimination, but successive Federal Labor governments have failed in their initiatives for a statutory bill of rights in the face of opposition from the coalition parties, some of the states and interest groups. In addition, referenda proposals for the extension of three 'rights' provisions in the Constitution which already bind the Commonwealth to also bind the states were firmly rejected in the 1988 referenda. Yet the views of some influential elites have changed: the Chief Justice of the High Court, for instance, indicated support for a bill of rights in 1988 on the grounds that Australia is out of step with comparable countries like Canada. Amidst this debate, some initiatives have proceeded. The states, which have primary jurisdiction for criminal law and police, have passed legislation to provide protection in a number of human rights areas and have established special commissions and appointed officers to support this legislation. Thus, a measure of what Australians think about rights and freedoms and what difference the absence of a bill of rights makes are significant questions. The Canadian Charter of Rights Project The most significant dataset for comparative research is that collected for the Charter of Rights project in Canada, an important reference for the Australian study. While the Charter project did not seek to make comparisons between Canadian provinces, it fulfilled similar objectives in most other respects. The Charter project included both a national random sample and a purposive elite sample divided into three parts: a legislative sample of national and provincial members; an executive sample made up of officials in the Ministry of the Solicitor General, the Departments of Justice and Attorneys' General, as well as police officers and a legal sample of senior lawyers with at least ten years and fewer than thirty years experience. A particular feature of the Charter project is its approach to measurement of the strength (firmness) and stability of attitudes towards and support for civil liberties when confronted with competing perspectives on a given issue. To present these perspectives, features of computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) were used to randomly vary question content and order within the sample. This use of CATI for survey experiments was developed by one member of the team in particular, Professor Joseph Fletcher, who subsequently joined the Australian Rights Project team to pursue this aspect of the research and to undertake comparative analysis. The Australian Design The Australian Rights Project models the Charter Project in a number of respects: a national and an elite sample, with the latter drawn from some members of the judiciary and various sections of the legal profession and legislative representatives; data collected by telephone interview from a central facility using CATI; and a mail follow-up questionnaire. A first draft of the ARP questionnaire included many of the Canadian questions and some ideas from preliminary drafts of the British Rights Project. The first component of the general household sample survey consisted of a thirty minute telephone interview with a representative sample of 1522 Australians. Data was collected by computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) from a centralised facility within the Research School of Social Sciences. Like the Canadian project, the CASES software was used and features of the CATI instrument implemented survey experiments involving variations in question wording and question order. The second component of the general household sample survey was a mail survey of people who had completed a telephone interview. Questionnaires were sent out soon after completion of the interviews and only to those respondents who had agreed to provide further information. The sixteen page questionnaire was identical in almost all respects to that used in the Charter project.