“There’s two Australias” Rod Cameron told Lateline last week. And you could pretty much karaoke the rest. “The political class so to speak will be aghast at the brazen wedge the government tried to force … and then there’s the real Australia who are pretty hard-nosed about terrorism…”

“The political classes will be aghast outraged appalled as they were with David Hicks…” Michael Kroger agreed.

How much longer are pollsters and pundits going to delude themselves with cynicism masquerading as realism on these matters? Cameron gave a more sophisticated reading of it but the assumption amounted to the same thing – that polls actually tell you what people are “really” thinking, and that they are unmoved by emotions that are partly or wholly veiled from the pollees themselves.

How else to explain the continued split – going back to the Iraq War – between separate measures such as “preferred prime minister”, voting intentions, and measures of trust?

In 2003, the majority of Australians thought that Howard was lying to them, or at least wrong, on WMDs in Iraq. They also thought he was the best man to lead the country. That split has continued and widened for the simple reason that one question (“who would you vote for”) is concrete, ie foreshadowing a future act, while the other (“preferred prime minister”) is abstract and passive, asking the pollee to ponder things in suspension.

With issues such as Haneef and Hicks, things become even murkier because the politics of shame comes roaring in.

Shame is a ‘magical’ emotion – unlike guilt, it is caused by things you had no control over. If your brother assaults and robs an old age pensioner, none of it is your fault — yet if the shame didn’t burn through you there’d be something wrong with you. But the emotion is very difficult to talk about in a rationalist, individualist culture.

Thus it moves people in ways they can’t present to themselves. Pollees are quite capable of simultaneously agreeing that anti-terror precautions should trump civil liberties and at the same time feeling – in an inexpressible way — that leaving Hicks to twist in the wind makes Howard a bit of a turd and they wouldn’t mind putting some distance between themselves and him. And that is at least part of the irrational gap between the “preferred prime minister” and “voting intention” numbers.

The weird thing is that everyone, in navigating their way through private life, accepts that humans are complex creatures full of contradictory feeling. Yet when we come to assess how people react to the figures who purport to represent our values and hopes, we regress to a rats-in-the-maze model of mind. Why?

Well it makes it easier for quantitative pollsters to sell multi-question polling. And that gives journos something to write about without leaving the desk. And a lot of the players are just dumb. Dumb enough, in the Coalition, to not realise that Hicks was slowly turning from a positive to a big negative … intoxicated as they were by easy notions of the two Australias.