Politics, Media and Campaign Language: Australia's Identity Anxiety
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Politics, Media and Campaign Language: Australia's Identity Anxiety
228Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783085019 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 04/03/2017 |
| Series: | Anthem Studies in Australian Politics, Economics and Society , #1 |
| Pages: | 228 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Politics, Media and Campaign Language
Australia's Identity Anxiety
By Stephanie Brookes
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2017 Stephanie BrookesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-501-9
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Two days before Australians went to the polls in the 2007 federal election, long serving Liberal Party prime minister John Howard took to the stage at the National Press Club in Canberra. He had been on the campaign trail for almost six weeks by the time he faced this room full of journalists in the nation's capital in late November. The Press Club address is one of the staples of modern Australian federal elections, bookending the earlier policy launch speech in which prime ministerial candidates open their party's campaign with an outline of policies, priorities and promises. This was Howard's final major address, at the tail end of a campaign infused with the feeling that a change was in the air. His opponent, Australian Labor Party (ALP) leader Kevin Rudd, had spoken in the same place only the day before, making a case for 'new leadership' after Labor's 11 and a half years in the political wilderness. It was Howard's last chance to explain why Australians should return his government for a fifth term.
Australia, the prime minister boasted, was a 'stronger, prouder and more prosperous nation' than it had been when he was elected in March 1996. He listed his government's achievements in prosperity and productivity; defence and border security; foreign policy; social security; employment; taxes; and welfare. In all of these, Howard repeatedly emphasized that Australia was 'a nation transformed'. He then laid claim to a fundamental transformation in Australian culture:
And finally in the area of national self-confidence this is also a nation transformed. We no longer have perpetual seminars about our national identity, we no longer agonise as to whether we're Asian or European or part-Asian or part-European or too British or not British enough, or too close to the Americans or whatever. We actually rejoice in what has always been the reality, and that is that we are gloriously and distinctively Australian. (Howard 2007f)
Howard's words are incredibly revealing, significant as much for what they say about the nature of Australian identity as for the transformation they describe. He paints an image of an Australian community that has historically 'agonized' about its identity, wondering: how will we deal with the tension between a dominant Western cultural tradition and geographical proximity to a region imagined as the Asia-Pacific? How does the problematic founding notion of terra nullius (or 'empty land') impact on our ability to feel ownership of, and belonging to, the national space? At the same time as he diagnosed this history, however, Howard also reassured voters that these debates were not necessary. They had always been 'gloriously and distinctively Australian'; what was missing was simply confidence. For Howard, the burst of 'self-confidence' that had transformed the nation by the end of 2007 was a direct result of the policies and actions of his government. After the critical self-reflection that had characterized the terms of his Labor predecessors, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, Australians' faith in themselves had been restored. Howard painted a picture of progress, where a mature and newly confident national community left 'navel gazing' behind to take their rightful place as a small but prosperous player in world affairs, with a reputation for being generous and welcoming, committed to 'fairness' and 'opportunity'. However, the prime minister's reassurances betrayed deeper tensions and anxieties. Australian identity will always be in flux, contingent and unsettled; and Howard's self-congratulatory image of a nation finally 'settling' their identity questions only masked its fragile and contingent nature (and indeed, that of identity itself).
This book engages with public and political discourse to argue that the story of Australian identity is not a tale of increasing self-confidence but rather one of recurring cycles of anxiety and reassurance. Australian identity is a work of collective and individual imagination, constantly evolving and influenced by the contexts in which it is developed. The language of federal election campaigns provides a unique window into this process. Federal elections are moments of change and challenge, when citizens are called on to think beyond the local attachments of their daily lives – to friends and family, neighbourhood and community – and imagine themselves as members of a larger national collective. In every election, these voters are promised that their decision is about more than party politics; that it is vital for national development, or prosperity or security. 'My fellow Australians', new Opposition Leader Bob Hawke(1983) told voters in 1983, 'today we set out together on a task much greater than winning an election', the task 'to win the future for Australia and all Australians'.
Election campaign language is distinctive. Its goals, and its audience, differ markedly from other kinds of political language such as press releases, policy documents or the routine communications of governing. More is at stake, and there is a sense that elections are a time when it is possible to engage with those who aren't usually listening to politicians when they speak; a chance to move campaigning politicians' dialogue with their constituents to the centre of the national public stage. At the same time as the words spoken by campaigning leaders aim to attract media coverage and electoral support, they also work on a deeper level, inviting citizens to think and act as guardians of the national interest.
This book examines the way that campaigning political leaders have used their words to imagine Australian identity for voters, both now and in the past. At a time when people inside and outside politics feel alienated from the national political conversation, it reminds us of the complex and enduring relationship between political leaders and their constituents across Australian history. It asks: who are the leaders that have told the most convincing stories about Australian identity, and how have they aligned their vision and plans for the nation with the values and priorities of citizens? What were the alternative visions presented to the Australian people by prime ministerial candidates who were not successful at the ballot box? How, and why, have concerns about the economic, military and cultural security of Australian identity characterized federal election campaign language for over a century?
In addressing these questions, this book offers a detailed study of Australian political discourse, told through more than a century of election campaign language. It provides an up-to-date analysis of continuities and changes in the Australian identity stories told by campaigning leaders from Federation to the current day, and locates these political constructions of identity in a new way against an ever-changing media landscape in which understanding and responding to emerging forms of political journalism and new communication technologies is vital in appealing to voters. The chapters that follow therefore not only offer new insight into how Australian identity stories (as told by campaigning leaders) have evolved, but also illuminate the ongoing importance of spoken political language in the increasingly professional, 'mediatized' contemporary campaign. They explore the vital role of connection and emotion both in election campaigns and in the construction of individual and collective identity; both processes are about more than rational decision-making. It is for this reason that Robert Menzies, writing about the 'art' of politics in the New York Times magazine in 1948, argued that political speech needs to be 'made to [audiences], not merely in their presence'. For Menzies (1948), the 'essence' of political speech was that it 'reach the hearts and minds of [the] immediate audience'.
National Self-confidence
John Howard's words to the Press Club were underpinned by assumptions that will resonate with anyone familiar with Australian social and political history. Questions of what it means to be Australian, and the security of that identity, have been an ongoing feature of the nation's cultural, social and political life for more than a century (see Burke 2008; Walker 1999). Australians have felt isolated and insecure since their earliest days as a nation, acutely aware of potential threats to their way of life: the regional immigrants who seem to represent a 'Yellow Peril'; the unfamiliar ideologies that might take hold in national space imagined as ours; the asylum seekers whose arrival seems to breach secure national borders; and the danger of being irrelevant on the global stage. In his incisive 2003 study Against Paranoid Nationalism, Australian social theorist and anthropologist Ghassan Hage (2003, 3) argued that during the Howard years, 'a culture of caring' about the nation eroded, replaced by 'the institutionalisation of a culture of worrying'. Hage (2003, 3) characterizes this as inherently narcissistic: 'you worry about the nation', he argues, 'only when you feel threatened' and, 'ultimately, you are only worrying about yourself'. This is driven by long-held feelings of insecurity about the nation and our relationship to it – 'a White paranoia' that has 'structured Australian nationalism from the time of its birth ' (Hage 2003, 47).
The project to more clearly define Australian identity (which historian Richard White [1981, viii] has described as a 'national obsession') operates in this context. It has been a project aimed at providing Australians with what I refer to in this book as identity security – the feeling that their way of life, and the space in which it plays out, is free from threat. Narratives of identity security work through the twin reassurance mechanisms of definition and protection, which have been as consistent in Australian history as the state of anxiety they address. The first is a form of diagnosis that attempts to define both the national community itself, and the potential threats that might cause concern: whether uncontrolled immigration; unfamiliar religions or ideologies; changing global social and economic circumstances; war; or terrorism. The second offers treatment for the symptoms, a reassurance through empowerment, and the promise that we are in control of (and able to protect) both the national way of life and also the national space in which it is lived. This takes both positive and negative forms, manifesting in the inspirational language of nation building as well as the defensive discourse of exclusion.
This distinctive discourse of identity security echoes throughout Australian social and cultural history. It emerges in public and political debates about who we are and where we belong; what makes us unique as a people; whether our way of life is secure against military, economic, cultural and ideological threat; and whether we are able to influence our own future. Seeing concern over, and attempts to provide, a secure sense of identity as cyclical offers a new insight into the nature of Australian identity, and the narratives through which it is constructed and understood. While the specific causes of concern change as social, political and economic contexts in Australia and globally impact on cultural dialogue and public debate, the fundamental underlying condition of insecurity is remarkably consistent.
Australian identity is characterized by these cycles. In many ways, Australians have been having the same conversations for more than a century. A particular (real or perceived) threat bubbles to the surface, causing a crisis of confidence that requires reassurance. When the crisis passes, the underlying condition – a sense of insecurity – persists. As a national community, we continue to react to this underlying feeling in the same way, seeking treatment in the face of a scary new symptom (or an old one appearing in a new guise). For example, while the perceived threat posed by uncontrolled immigration in Australia has flared up, in different forms, since Federation, the language that has been used to name this threat has changed dramatically. The most striking shift occurred as explicitly race-based language became inappropriate in the latter half of the twentieth century. Australian political leaders therefore worked to exclude those immigrants defined as undesirable from the national space and identity in different ways. In the 1906 election, Prime Minister Alfred Deakin (1906) used his policy launch speech to identify and number the 'kanaka' labourers working in the Queensland sugar plantations, promising to return them to 'the land of their birth' in line with the White Australia Policy. While this kind of language would be out of place today, the construction of threat and accompanying promise to manage the nation's borders resonates. It finds its clearest legacy in language used by both sides of politics to promise, at the start of the twenty-first century, to manage those who come to Australian shores seeking asylum. In these more recent elections, these immigrants are defined by their 'illegal' method of entry or 'incompatible' culture rather than by references to their race, and promises are made to implement offshore processing of arrivals to ensure 'stronger protection of our borders' (see, for example, Gillard 2010a) or to simply 'stop the boats' (Abbott 2010a; 2010b; 2013g; Turnbull 2016d).
However, these defensive reactions are not the only responses that develop from Australia's underlying identity insecurity. Other mechanisms of reassurance lead to identity narratives that are more positive, with the same feeling of insecurity motivating a positive articulation of values and a story Australians can feel proud to be associated with. Anxiety can therefore be harnessed to propel Australians forward as a nation, with the discourse of identity security manifesting in nation-building language that provides inspiration to strive for progress, and calls on Australians to do and be better. The defensive and inspirational outcomes of these cycles of insecurity and reassurance are closely linked. For example, accompanying the exclusive discourses of immigration management discussed above have been elements of the national story that have asked Australians to be welcoming and tolerant, more open in their definitions of who belongs to the national collective and what 'Australianness' looks like. In the language of leaders like Joseph 'Ben' Chifley, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke, Australians have been asked to see themselves as a diverse, multicultural community that accommodates cultural, religious and other differences and welcomes immigrants into the national identity.
The Australian national story is therefore constructed from things that make voters feel good about themselves as well as those that seem to threaten the security of their valuable identity. This has been one of the most powerful and consistent elements in Australia's national political conversation. The lack of confidence that pervades Australian identity is revealed in a new way in this book, through close attention to the identity stories told by campaigning leaders during election campaigns.
I'm Talking to You
The language of campaigning political leaders offers a unique window into the national mood. Campaign speech crystallizes something of what the nation is and who it contains, offering an insight into narratives of identity as they play out in the political realm. The most significant moments in Australian political history are inextricable from the political language that framed them: Andrew Fisher's 1914 campaign pledge of Australian support for Britain in World War I to 'the last man and the last shilling'; Ben Chifley's 1949 description of Labor as the 'light on the hill'; Gough Whitlam's 1972 conviction that It's Time for a change; and John Howard's 2001 assertion that 'we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come'.
The particular relationship between politicians and the people that they represent lends a distinctive dimension to these Australian identity stories. Political leaders are conditioned by and immersed in the same shared histories, values and culture that they work to define once in office. As a result, they are shaped by the same underlying national hopes and anxieties as the rest of the population, members of the same national collective that they hope to rework in line with their own personal and political vision for the future. Political leadership is as much about this desire to change the nation, to make a difference, as it is about specific policy outcomes. Understanding this makes clear how political discourse operates to connect the individual to the national, evoking the collective 'we' in a way that invites citizens to imagine themselves as part of it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Politics, Media and Campaign Language by Stephanie Brookes. Copyright © 2017 Stephanie Brookes. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Storytelling; 3. Belonging; 4. Values; 5. Community; 6. Security; 7. Vision; 8. Hearts and Minds; Appendices; References; Index.What People are Saying About This
‘Beneath the clashing rhetoric of election campaigns lies another contested agenda, the framing of national aspirations and anxieties, barely acknowledged in media commentary. Stephanie Brookes, with her strong historical sweep, reveals how the changing language reflects the changing visions and fears of parties and public.’ —Rodney Tiffen, Emeritus Professor of Government and International Relations, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, University of Sydney, Australia
‘In an age of disillusion, Stephanie Brookes’s analysis of Australian identities imagined, contested and created in campaign rhetoric is a revelation. This novel history of political discourse captures who we believe we are, and why.’ —James Walter, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Australia
‘Stephanie Brookes delves behind the speeches our leaders make at election time to expose what they’re really trying to do. Understanding how and why this is done is an important aid to our democracy.’ —Dennis Glover, speechwriter and author of 'The Art of Great Speeches'