Openness. That is the word Reserve Bank governorPhilip Lowechose to emphasise at his first public outing this year.

In Australia there is an "openness and transparency" not always found elsewhere, he told a high-powered business gathering at the Opera House on Thursday night.

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We asked thousands of people across Australia hundreds of questions, and used the answers to look for patterns. It turns out we are a divided bunch.

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Matt Black of Parramatta keeps his cats in a purpose built cat enclosure in his backyard.

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An extraordinary heatwave scorching much of NSW is set to bring yet more grief, with health authorities issuing an air pollution alert for increased levels of ozone in the atmosphere in Sydney. Vision courtesy ABC News 24.

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Liberal Party member and Sky News presenter Ross Cameron has issued an apology of sorts for the remarks he made about homosexuals at a conservative fundraiser. Vision: SKY NEWS.

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More than a hundred anti-racism protesters clashed with people heading to a secret fundraising dinner in Melbourne for the anti-Islam organisation Q Society.

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The luxury cruise ship Norwegian Star is adrift at sea with over 2000 people on board, due to an engine failure, requiring the ship to be towed back to port. Vision: Seven News

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NSW Energy and Utilities Minister Don Harwin has requested the public to make restrictions to their power usage between peak times, in order to prevent potential rolling blackouts, despite claiming we have a power surplus.

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Former Liberal MP Ross Cameron has appeared on SKY NEWS to defend the comments he made about homosexuality and The Sydney Morning Herald at the Q Society fundraising dinner in Sydney. Vision: SKY NEWS.

We asked thousands of people across Australia hundreds of questions, and used the answers to look for patterns. It turns out we are a divided bunch.

And openness to trade and investment has been fundamental to the nation's prosperity.

Australia is "committed to an open international order," Lowe said.

Those sentiments might have seemed routine a few years back. But in the wake of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump "openness" to the world economy often referred to as globalisation is now a hotly contested political issue.

A little over a year ago Marine Le Pen, the leader of France'sfar-right FrontNational partyand a presidential contender, cast political battlelines as being no longer "between the left and the right but the globalists and the patriots". The globalists, she sneered, are for the dissolution of France into a "global magma".

Greg Ip, a Wall Street Journal economics commentator, wrote last month that Le Pen's remarks foreshadowed "the tectonic forces that would shake up the world in 2016".

Opposition to globalisation the increasing movement of goods, money and people across international borders was a key theme of Trump campaign to become president of the US. From now on it is going to be "America First", he says repeatedly.

In Australia, Pauline Hanson has globalisation in her sights.In her maiden speech to the Senate in September she accused national leaders of giving away our sovereignty, our rights, our jobs and even our democracy.

"Their push for globalisation, economic rationalism, free trade and ethnic diversity has seen our country's decline," she said.

In pitting globalists against patriots Le Pen neatly summed up a new and unpredictable political fissure that cuts across old divisions between left and right.

Ip predicts the tussle between globalism and nationalism "will shape the coming era much as the struggle between conservatives and liberals has shaped the last".

This political split has emerged during a period of rapid global economic integration.In the two decades before the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007 international trade in goods and services grew by 7 per cent a year on average a much faster rate than global GDP.

This has been a period of great prosperity for Australia, which has not experienced a recession for a quarter of a century. But there has also been a marked shift in the structure of the economy. Since the mid-1990s manufacturing's share ofAustralia's economic output has fallen from 14 per cent to about 7 per cent.Meanwhile, the importance of knowledge-intensive service industries such as finance and professional services has grown significantly. Similar trends have been at work in other advanced economies.

The flow of migrants to Australia another factor many associate with globalisation has also been strong. The proportion of Australians born overseas reached 28 per cent in 2014-15, the highest proportion in more than 120 years.

There are now signs the tussle Ip describes between globalist and nationalist sentiment has become an important political fault linein Australia.

Polling for the Political Personas Project commissioned by Fairfax Media and conducted by the Australian National University and Netherlands-based political research enterprise Kieskompas, shows public opinion is divided over the merits of trade liberalisation, one of globalisation's fundamentals.

The statement "free trade with other countries has made Australia better off" could not muster support from the majority of the 2600 voters surveyed 44.7 per cent agreed (but only 7.1 per cent strongly), 27.5 per cent disagreed and 27.8 per cent were neutral.

There is a similar split when voters are asked to assess the impact of globalisation.

A separate Ipsos survey released in December found 48 per cent of Australians considered globalisation a "force for good" while 22 per cent said it was a "force for bad", with 29 per cent undecided.

Carol Johnson, professor of politics and international studies at the University of Adelaide, said many voters have, over time, become more aware of globalisation's drawbacks.

"Twenty years ago, the electorate seemed prepared to believe that while there were some risks to opening up the economy, there would also be benefits," she said.

"Part of what happened is that people are now more aware that many of our competitor countries, including Asian countries, are more than capable of developing these [high-tech and service] industries themselves.

"The assumption that Western countries will always be superior has started to come undone and voters are becoming worried that government hasn't got right the mix of balancing the benefits and downsides of globalisation."

Polling for the Political Personas Project found more than eight in 10 voters believe "we rely too heavily on foreign imports and should manufacture more in Australia" .This statement received more support than any other proposition in the survey, which covered dozens of hot-button political issues.

Jill Sheppard, a researcher from the ANU's Centre for Social Research and Method who was involved in the project, said public concern about the decline of manufacturing was linked to perceptions of globalisation.

"Globalisation seems to manifest in people's minds as manufacturing and jobs going offshore. They think about cheap labour in Asian countries, which seem like a direct threat to us."

The project sheds light on the types of Australians most likely to embrace globalisation and most likely to dislike it.Support for free trade was strongly linked to feeling financially secure, confident in society and optimistic about the future.This is illustrated by differences between seven distinctive political "tribes" identified by the project.

The three most financially secure groups Progressive Cosmopolitans, Ambitious Savers and Lavish Mod-cons (that is, moderate conservatives) were also the strongest supporters of free trade. More than 70 per cent of Cosmopolitans, 68 per cent of Mod-cons and 62 per cent of Savers agreed with the statement: "Free trade with other countries has made Australia better off."

These three groups also had the highest levels of agreement with the statement: "I am feeling pretty good these days about how much money I can spend" and were the most likely to earn high incomes of $91,000 or more.

When it came to optimism about society and the future, Cosmopolitans and Savers were the most likely to agree with the statement: "I have confidence in society" and to disagree with the statements: "I sometimes feel that the future holds nothing for me" and: "I feel let down by society."

At the opposite end of the spectrum, 64 per cent of the group called "Anti-establishment Firebrands" and 51 per cent of tribe called "Disillusioned Pessimists" disagreed that free trade had made Australia better off.

These two tribes were also the most likely to agree with the statements: "I sometimes feel that the future holds nothing for me" and "I feel let down by society,"and to disagree with the statements: "I am feeling pretty good these days about how much money I can spend" and "I have confidence in society."

The project draws attention to another way globalisation is reshaping Australian politics it splits both progressives and conservatives.

Two of the tribes Progressive Cosmopolitans and Activist Egalitarians were distinguished by their socially progressive values and support for left-leaning political parties.

And yet their feelings diverge when it comes to globalisation: the Cosmopolitans are much more comfortable with trade liberalisation.

There are similar divisions among the more conservative tribes. Four groupings the Ambitious Savers, Lavish Mod-Cons,Prudent Traditionalists and Anti-Establishment Firebrands favoured right-leaning political parties. And yet only the first two of those tribes were strongly in favour of free trade. The Prudent Traditionalists are split on the question of free trade and the Anti-Establishment Firebrands (who have much in common with Trump's core support base) are strongly opposed.

Sheppard said voter suspicion about globalisation was likely to increase.

"This generation has seen some very rapid changes towards more liberal social attitudes and I think some of this protectionist sentiment is a reaction to that that we need something to slow down a little bit," she said.

"Globalisation is an obvious target."

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Australia's new political divide: 'globalists' versus 'patriots' - The Sydney Morning Herald