Doctoral Thesis by Nicholas Bromfield
Australian Prime Ministers in the 1970s and early 1980s did not incorporate Anzac into their disc... more Australian Prime Ministers in the 1970s and early 1980s did not incorporate Anzac into their discourse of national identity. However, since 1990 Australian Prime Ministers and their governments have increasingly engaged with Anzac in a manner that has supplanted the traditional role of the Returned and Services League as custodians and drivers of Anzac. This has involved them consistently giving Anzac Day addresses during the last twenty-five years, both at home and at significant sites of Australian war remembrance overseas. But this has not always been the case. Prime Ministerial engagement with Anzac in the past was primarily as a participant, not as a custodian, and was more sporadic, more suburban, and less spectacular.
The thesis explains this shift by tracing the increasing use of Anzac discourse by Australian Prime Ministers from 1972-2007. It will be argued that these Australian Prime Ministers have increasingly shown ‘Anzac entrepreneurship’ – successfully identifying the public’s desire to engage with Anzac and facilitating Anzac’s resurgence by employing the power resources of the state in order to amplify Anzac. Critical discourse analysis is adopted to analyse the integration of Anzac discourse into Prime Ministerial language. Such an approach points to the socially embedded nature of language, whilst simultaneously analysing the linguistic construction of this language.
The thesis identifies that Prime Ministers have engaged with Anzac in order to both constitutively renovate Anzac as a central Australian identity and for instrumental policy ends. These twin developments have pertained especially to the processes of domestic economic reform in a globalising world and the deployment of Australian troops during the War on Terror. Such a study is important, as recent scholarly interest in Australian politicians’ role in the resurgence of Anzac from political scientists and historians has not seen systematic investigation of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day addresses that analyses the evolution of these addresses over time or closely examines their language on a sustained basis.
Journal Articles by Nicholas Bromfield
Australian Journal of Political Science, 2024
Grace Tame's 2021 Australian of the Year (AOTY) award directed public attention towards sexual an... more Grace Tame's 2021 Australian of the Year (AOTY) award directed public attention towards sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), as did Australia Day award recipients Donna Carson in 2004 and Rosie Battie in 2015. We use mixed-method textual analysis of a corpus of prime minister's Australia Day speeches between 1990 and 2021 to show how conservative Liberal Party prime ministers have narrated a discourse of idealised national identity to manage activist demands regarding SGBV policy. We quantitatively find that prime ministers promote masculine and heteronormative representations of Australian identity and then develop a qualitative typology of conservative SGBV frames employed by prime ministers that gloss over SGBV as a pressing and chronic policy issue and position idealised Australian femininity to condone and obscure SGBV. This paper builds upon scholarship on public policy and gendered nationalism to explain this pattern of SGBV problem definition and framing by conservative prime ministers.
International Review of Administrative Sciences, 2021
Australia and New Zealand are routinely presented as sharing more in common than the federal and ... more Australia and New Zealand are routinely presented as sharing more in common than the federal and unitary systems separating them. As two modernising Antipodean settler societies, their governing trajectories have embraced waves of public administration/ management reform. Shared pathways seem matched by their relative, although precarious and fragile, early successes in the crisis challenges of COVID-19. This article contextualises and examines one crucial point of separation: two very different crisis governance routes to such outcomes. Australia's federal variant of multi-level governance, more used to addressing diverse regional challenges than shared national threats, has been characterised by an evolving balancing act of multi-jurisdictional agendas and bureaucratic-political conflicts. By contrast, New Zealand's unitary system of governance, well-versed in the centralisation of power, has produced lower levels of intergovernmental conflict. Our analysis of these differing pathways also makes a contribution to our conceptual understanding of successful crisis governance.
Australian Journal of Political Science, 2020
Australia Day and Anzac Day, held on January 26 and April 25 annually, are key moments used by pr... more Australia Day and Anzac Day, held on January 26 and April 25 annually, are key moments used by prime ministers to share, shape, and reproduce their understanding of what and whom is representative of a unique Australian identity and nationalism. This paper uses qualitative and quantitative methods with content analysis to evaluate and compare prime ministerial and party rhetoric in their Australia Day and Anzac Day speeches between 1990 and 2017 regarding class and economic relations, gender and sexuality, and race and national identity. We ask: How have prime ministers as reflexive actors used their speeches on Australia Day and Anzac Day to represent what it means to be Australian? The study reveals that despite prime ministers sometimes using intentionally inclusive discourses, they simultaneously reproduce a classless, hetero-masculine, and Anglocentric Australianness as a normative representation of national identity in Australian society.
Australian Journal of Politics & History, 2018
The last quarter of a century has seen an explosion in prime ministerial engagement with Anzac, a... more The last quarter of a century has seen an explosion in prime ministerial engagement with Anzac, and in particular, the marking of Anzac Day with a national address. Correspondingly, there has also been enormous interest in Anzac from members of the academy, but there has been little systematic analysis of the breadth and depth of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses. This paper seeks to correct this omission by conducting a critical discourse analysis of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses from 1973 to 2016 in order to sketch their imprecise, but increasingly institutionalised and consistent, genre boundaries. The paper delineates the various thematic and characteristic features of these addresses, including where and when the addresses have been delivered; the fixity and hybridisation of the prime ministerial Anzac speech genre; the thematic and tonal representations of Anzac; the wars and battles prime ministers associate Anzac with; and who Anzac's agents are. As will be shown, whilst Australian prime ministers may closely adhere to the traditions of Anzac with their addresses, they also subtly renovate understandings of Anzac in alignment with their policy agendas.
Recent studies regarding reconciliation have argued that restorative justice creates depoliticise... more Recent studies regarding reconciliation have argued that restorative justice creates depoliticised consensus. This paper tests this argument by exploring the Hawke government’s role in the reconciliation of the Australian public with Vietnam veterans in 1987, and the opportunities that this resolution created to mark Anzac Day free of the complicating tensions that had characterised the day in the period since the Vietnam War. It argues that the restorative justice evident in the reincorporation of Vietnam veterans into national narratives of Anzac provided opportunities for political elites like Hawke to convincingly employ Anzac as an ideograph and inscribe the day with new meaning. This process had profound continuing effects for the marking of Anzac Day that demonstrate the politically limiting effects of restorative justice.
Book chapters by Nicholas Bromfield
Research Handbook on Public Management and COVID-19, 2024
This chapter assesses the dynamics of uncertainty and ambiguity during crisis management and the ... more This chapter assesses the dynamics of uncertainty and ambiguity during crisis management and the implications these have for crisis response success or failure in public management contexts. During crises, lack of information and policymaker bounded rationality heightens and worsens uncertainty. Ambiguity is similarly heightened during a crisis as new frames about crisis causes and solutions compete with unproductive or harmful older frames that reproduce poorer outcomes and inequitable power dynamics. The chapter demonstrates these dynamics and their implications with a comparative case study analysis of responses to COVID-19 in three Anglophone public management states: the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The comparison finds that whilst each country grappled with the dynamics of uncertainty and ambiguity under public management, the existence of an institutional venue for crisis cooperation, coordination and collaboration helped alleviate the worst effects of uncertainty and ambiguity during the acute phase of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020.
Australian Politics and Policy: Senior Edition 2023, 2023
COVID-19, a coronavirus emerging in late 2019, quickly snowballed into a global public health cri... more COVID-19, a coronavirus emerging in late 2019, quickly snowballed into a global public health crisis on a scale not seen in generations. Crisis, ‘a set of circumstances in which individuals, institutions or societies face threats beyond the norms of routine day-to-day functioning’, is a situation that governments must face as both an objective fact and subjective perception. These dual dynamics of fact and perception have shaped the responses of Australian governments to COVID-19 at both the federal and state level. While there are many ways we can examine the policy process (see Weible and Sabatier’s Theories of the policy process for an excellent introduction), a relevant introductory method to examine the governance of COVID-19 in Australia is the crisis management cycle. This applies the cycle of prevention, preparation, response, and recovery and learning, and points to the role of actors, institutions and policy design, and tools in crisis management across these stages. The chapter demonstrates that crisis evaluation is a tricky and political activity characterised by contested perceptions and complicating evidence.
Australian Politics and Policy: Senior Edition 2023, 2023
Thomas R. Dye’s much cited definition of public policy as whatever governments choose to do or no... more Thomas R. Dye’s much cited definition of public policy as whatever governments choose to do or not do – that is, government action and inaction – helps us to understand the parameters of what policy is but says very little about the dynamics that produce government policy choice. The field of critical policy studies offers one way to understand these dynamics, the power relations that produce them and a means to evaluate policy against democratic and social justice values. Critical policy studies is different from more rationalist forms of policy analysis in that it rejects the notion that policy can be designed and implemented in a neutral and scientific fashion, free from interests, values and ideologies. This claim, and scholarly focus, is important to note as it underpins the research themes of critical policy studies – the analysis of the social construction of policies to unpack common knowledge, perceptions, values, ideologies and power relations, and evaluate them against social justice and democratic ideals and values. The chapter proceeds in three main sections. Firstly, the origins of critical policy studies are examined and critical policy studies is defined. The relation, and reaction, of critical policy studies to the work of Harold Lasswell and the policy sciences is especially examined. Secondly, the relation of critical theory to critical policy studies is unpacked, sketching the links between Marxist theory to present-day critical theory. In the third section, three common critical policy studies themes are analysed: technocratic policy, power and democracy; social construction in the policy process; and policy discourses. The chapter concludes by drawing out key themes for students of critical policy studies to use in their own analyses and evaluations of policy.
When Politicians Talk, 2021
Australia’s Black Summer Bushfires of 2019–2020 were an unprecedented crisis in scale and impact.... more Australia’s Black Summer Bushfires of 2019–2020 were an unprecedented crisis in scale and impact. In response, Australian political leaders employed a collective understanding of purportedly unique cultural tropes in their rhetoric to make sense of the crisis to the public. Here we explore how and why these cultural discourses are utilized during moments of ecological and existential crisis, and how they differ according to party and ideology. Using qualitative critical discourse analysis of a key address to the media and the federal parliament, we examine the rhetoric of four Australian political party representatives in their responses regarding these bushfires: Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Liberal Party of Australia; Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, Australian Labor Party; Richard Di Natale, The Australian Greens; Malcolm Roberts, Senator for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. We show how each actor’s rhetoric interacts with and weaves together their discursive climate policy positions, and adopts Australian cultural signs, symbols, and practices relative to new circumstances. Each actor may vary in expressing cultural tropes; we reveal how culture can be negotiated to align with partisan political agendas, even in moments of unprecedented destruction.
Australian Politics and Policy: Senior Edition 2021, 2021
COVID-19, a coronavirus emerging in late 2019, quickly snowballed into a global public health cri... more COVID-19, a coronavirus emerging in late 2019, quickly snowballed into a global public health crisis of scale not seen in generations. Crisis, ‘a set of circumstances in which individuals, institutions or societies face threats beyond the norms of routine day-to-day functioning’, is a situation that governments must face as both an objective fact and subjective perception. These dual dynamics of fact and perception have shaped the responses of Australian governments to COVID-19 at both the federal and state level. Whilst there are many ways we can examine the policy process (see Weible and Sabatier’s Theories of the policy process for an excellent introduction), a relevant introductory method to examine the governance of COVID-19 in Australia is the crisis management cycle. This applies the cycle of prevention, preparation, response, and recovery and learning, and points to the role of actors, institutions and policy design, and tools in crisis management across these stages. The chapter demonstrates that crisis evaluation is a tricky and political activity characterised by contested perceptions and complicating evidence.
Australian Politics and Policy: Senior Edition, 2019
The foreign and defence policies of Australia have been marked by periods of continuity and chang... more The foreign and defence policies of Australia have been marked by periods of continuity and change since the country slowly decoupled from the UK and forged a more independent international posture from the postwar period to the present. This short introductory chapter cannot do justice to the full scope of Australian foreign and defence policy, which is a process of immense complexity, but rather seeks to highlight the key actors, events and enduring issues that face Australian policy makers from the present and into the future. By necessity, an introductory chapter cannot be comprehensive, and examples are therefore chosen representatively and selectively. We examine the historical context; Australia’s foreign and defence policy machinery; Labor versus Coalition leadership and foreign policy traditions; Liberal internationalism; Economic diplomacy; Defence strategy; Non-traditional security challenges; ‘Asian engagement’; Foreign aid; The rise of China; and the US alliance.
Australian Politics and Policy: Junior Edition, 2019
This chapter takes a thematic approach to looking at Australian foreign and defence policy encaps... more This chapter takes a thematic approach to looking at Australian foreign and defence policy encapsulated in four sections. The first, looks at the historical background, Labor versus Liberal party policy traditions and liberal internationalism, all of which set the stage for Australian policy engagement. The second investigates three core “platforms” of foreign policy engagement: economic policy, defence strategy and non-traditional security. The following section concentrates on Australia’s ‘regionalist’ policies through Asian engagement and foreign aid. The final section considers Australia’s relations with the two ‘superpowers’ in the Indo Pacific: China and the United States.
Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History, 2019
This entry analyzes the gay liberation movement and associated antiwar, feminist, and civil right... more This entry analyzes the gay liberation movement and associated antiwar, feminist, and civil rights movements during the Vietnam War (1955–1975) in the contexts of the United States, Australia, and Vietnam, as well as the diffusion of LGBT culture, politics, and social movement activism. These areas are examined in three sections: (1) masculinity, femininity, sexuality, and defense force service in each country; (2) the exclusion and inclusion of homosexual personnel in the draft; and (3) the causal effects of the diffusion of social movement activism on LGBT culture and politics in these countries. Notably, the diffusion of gay liberation that occurred in the United States and Australia during the Vietnam War was less evident in Vietnam, where commercial accommodation of LGBT desires was tolerated but not politicized and public. The agency of actors and the structure of their societies enabled and constrained this diffusion.
Drafts, pre-published and early versions by Nicholas Bromfield
The Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History
What was the relationship between the gay liberation movement, and associated anti-war, feminist,... more What was the relationship between the gay liberation movement, and associated anti-war, feminist, and civil rights movements during the Vietnam War? This draft paper explores these historical social movements in the contexts of the US, Australia, and Vietnam, and the diffusion (or not) of LGBTQ culture, politics, and social movement activism that was engendered during this process. Several themes will be examined: masculinity, femininity and defence force service; the exclusion (but also inclusion) of gay personnel in the draft; and the effects of the diffusion of social movement activism on LGBTQ culture and politics in these countries. This political history project will make a substantial contribution to knowledge, as it is a relatively understudied aspect of the Vietnam War and the social change of the 1960s and 1970s.
Australia Day and Anzac Day, held on January 26 and April 25 annually, are key moments used by Pr... more Australia Day and Anzac Day, held on January 26 and April 25 annually, are key moments used by Prime Ministers to share, shape, and reproduce their understanding of what and whom is considered to be representative of a unique Australian identity and nationalism. This paper uses both qualitative and quantitative methods via content analysis to evaluate and compare prime ministerial and party rhetoric of race and national identity, class and economic relations, and gender and sexuality in their Australia Day and Anzac Day speeches between 1990-2017. We ask: how have Prime Ministers as reflexive actors used their speeches on Australia Day and Anzac Day to represent what it means to be Australian? The study reveals that despite Prime Ministers sometimes using intentionally inclusive discourses, they simultaneously reproduce the hegemonic classless, hetero-masculine, and Anglospheric Australianness present at the apex of power in Australian society.
Keywords: prime ministers; nationalism; identity; gender; race; class.
Australia’s Politics and Policy Open Textbook , 2018
A draft chapter on Australian foreign and defence policy for senior undergraduate students.
Australia’s Politics and Policy Open Textbook , 2018
A draft chapter on Australian foreign and defence policy for junior undergraduate students.
Speeches made by leaders on national celebration days tend to evoke calls to unity and cohesion a... more Speeches made by leaders on national celebration days tend to evoke calls to unity and cohesion amongst all constituents, rejoice in living standards within that particular country, and celebrates the unique identity that one accrues and performs in doing so. However, within a settler colonial context, a racialisation process of dispossession, exclusion, and marginalisation of Indigenous peoples continues into the early twenty-first century. Often the on-going legacy of colonisation and its current day ramifications lack explicit recognition in these statements of nationhood, and concerns for Indigenous peoples are positioned as being on the periphery of the national story and future.
This paper asks: does the date of national celebration cause differences in how Indigenous peoples are represented in the speeches given by political leaders in settler societies? To answer this question, we focus on the speeches given by Prime Ministers and Presidents on national days from 1993 – the International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples – to 2017 in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Australia Day, Waitangi Day, Canada Day, and Independence Day will be examined using a mixed method approach to content analysis and discourse analysis called CADS to explain how Indigenous peoples and nations are represented in the construction of nationalism within continuing settler colonial relations.
We hypothesize that days actively associated with the beginning of their respective colonial projects, such as in Australia Day and Waitangi Day, result in an explicit negotiation of settler identity and on-going white hegemony in the reproduction of nationalism. Inversely, national days that fall outside of the dates associated with the beginnings of colonial invasion, such as in Canada Day and Independence Day, will result in leaders only implicitly inferring to Indigenous nations and peoples as original inhabitants, instead tending to normalize the invisibility of Indigenous presence in the nation-making process.
The literature on Australia Day and Anzac Day suggests that representations of Australianness on ... more The literature on Australia Day and Anzac Day suggests that representations of Australianness on these occasions is varied. Australianness on Australia Day is more plural and more ambiguously celebrated than Australianness on Anzac Day. The genocidal acts that established White Australia have been pointed to by Indigenous scholars and activists, ensuring the challenge to an unambiguously positive reading of Australian nationalism by Prime Ministers on Australia Day. This plural and ambiguous reading of Australian identity and nationalism has largely failed to penetrate Prime Ministerial commemoration of Anzac Day, Australia’s other major national day. Despite considerable scholarly attention and activism, Anzac as commemorated and celebrated by Prime Ministers remains masculine and Anglo-centric.
This paper seeks to test these hypotheses by applying corpus assisted discourse analysis (CADA) to a corpus of Prime Ministerial Australia Day and Anzac Day speeches and media releases from 1990-2017. CADA is a mixed method approach to discourse analysis that employs both quantitative and qualitative inquiry methods. It seeks to accomplish two primary tasks: firstly, to identify and compare the political work of Prime Ministers on these national days; and secondly, to identify and compare the diversity of Australian identities represented on the two national days. In this regard, the paper will especially look at representations of class, gender, and racial/ethnic, identities in Prime Ministerial national day addresses in order to explore how contemporary Australianess is constructed and reproduced across both time and party lines. The paper will therefore make a substantial contribution to the under-studied comparative analysis of the national days of Australia.
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Doctoral Thesis by Nicholas Bromfield
The thesis explains this shift by tracing the increasing use of Anzac discourse by Australian Prime Ministers from 1972-2007. It will be argued that these Australian Prime Ministers have increasingly shown ‘Anzac entrepreneurship’ – successfully identifying the public’s desire to engage with Anzac and facilitating Anzac’s resurgence by employing the power resources of the state in order to amplify Anzac. Critical discourse analysis is adopted to analyse the integration of Anzac discourse into Prime Ministerial language. Such an approach points to the socially embedded nature of language, whilst simultaneously analysing the linguistic construction of this language.
The thesis identifies that Prime Ministers have engaged with Anzac in order to both constitutively renovate Anzac as a central Australian identity and for instrumental policy ends. These twin developments have pertained especially to the processes of domestic economic reform in a globalising world and the deployment of Australian troops during the War on Terror. Such a study is important, as recent scholarly interest in Australian politicians’ role in the resurgence of Anzac from political scientists and historians has not seen systematic investigation of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day addresses that analyses the evolution of these addresses over time or closely examines their language on a sustained basis.
Journal Articles by Nicholas Bromfield
Book chapters by Nicholas Bromfield
Drafts, pre-published and early versions by Nicholas Bromfield
Keywords: prime ministers; nationalism; identity; gender; race; class.
This paper asks: does the date of national celebration cause differences in how Indigenous peoples are represented in the speeches given by political leaders in settler societies? To answer this question, we focus on the speeches given by Prime Ministers and Presidents on national days from 1993 – the International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples – to 2017 in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Australia Day, Waitangi Day, Canada Day, and Independence Day will be examined using a mixed method approach to content analysis and discourse analysis called CADS to explain how Indigenous peoples and nations are represented in the construction of nationalism within continuing settler colonial relations.
We hypothesize that days actively associated with the beginning of their respective colonial projects, such as in Australia Day and Waitangi Day, result in an explicit negotiation of settler identity and on-going white hegemony in the reproduction of nationalism. Inversely, national days that fall outside of the dates associated with the beginnings of colonial invasion, such as in Canada Day and Independence Day, will result in leaders only implicitly inferring to Indigenous nations and peoples as original inhabitants, instead tending to normalize the invisibility of Indigenous presence in the nation-making process.
This paper seeks to test these hypotheses by applying corpus assisted discourse analysis (CADA) to a corpus of Prime Ministerial Australia Day and Anzac Day speeches and media releases from 1990-2017. CADA is a mixed method approach to discourse analysis that employs both quantitative and qualitative inquiry methods. It seeks to accomplish two primary tasks: firstly, to identify and compare the political work of Prime Ministers on these national days; and secondly, to identify and compare the diversity of Australian identities represented on the two national days. In this regard, the paper will especially look at representations of class, gender, and racial/ethnic, identities in Prime Ministerial national day addresses in order to explore how contemporary Australianess is constructed and reproduced across both time and party lines. The paper will therefore make a substantial contribution to the under-studied comparative analysis of the national days of Australia.
The thesis explains this shift by tracing the increasing use of Anzac discourse by Australian Prime Ministers from 1972-2007. It will be argued that these Australian Prime Ministers have increasingly shown ‘Anzac entrepreneurship’ – successfully identifying the public’s desire to engage with Anzac and facilitating Anzac’s resurgence by employing the power resources of the state in order to amplify Anzac. Critical discourse analysis is adopted to analyse the integration of Anzac discourse into Prime Ministerial language. Such an approach points to the socially embedded nature of language, whilst simultaneously analysing the linguistic construction of this language.
The thesis identifies that Prime Ministers have engaged with Anzac in order to both constitutively renovate Anzac as a central Australian identity and for instrumental policy ends. These twin developments have pertained especially to the processes of domestic economic reform in a globalising world and the deployment of Australian troops during the War on Terror. Such a study is important, as recent scholarly interest in Australian politicians’ role in the resurgence of Anzac from political scientists and historians has not seen systematic investigation of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day addresses that analyses the evolution of these addresses over time or closely examines their language on a sustained basis.
Keywords: prime ministers; nationalism; identity; gender; race; class.
This paper asks: does the date of national celebration cause differences in how Indigenous peoples are represented in the speeches given by political leaders in settler societies? To answer this question, we focus on the speeches given by Prime Ministers and Presidents on national days from 1993 – the International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples – to 2017 in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Australia Day, Waitangi Day, Canada Day, and Independence Day will be examined using a mixed method approach to content analysis and discourse analysis called CADS to explain how Indigenous peoples and nations are represented in the construction of nationalism within continuing settler colonial relations.
We hypothesize that days actively associated with the beginning of their respective colonial projects, such as in Australia Day and Waitangi Day, result in an explicit negotiation of settler identity and on-going white hegemony in the reproduction of nationalism. Inversely, national days that fall outside of the dates associated with the beginnings of colonial invasion, such as in Canada Day and Independence Day, will result in leaders only implicitly inferring to Indigenous nations and peoples as original inhabitants, instead tending to normalize the invisibility of Indigenous presence in the nation-making process.
This paper seeks to test these hypotheses by applying corpus assisted discourse analysis (CADA) to a corpus of Prime Ministerial Australia Day and Anzac Day speeches and media releases from 1990-2017. CADA is a mixed method approach to discourse analysis that employs both quantitative and qualitative inquiry methods. It seeks to accomplish two primary tasks: firstly, to identify and compare the political work of Prime Ministers on these national days; and secondly, to identify and compare the diversity of Australian identities represented on the two national days. In this regard, the paper will especially look at representations of class, gender, and racial/ethnic, identities in Prime Ministerial national day addresses in order to explore how contemporary Australianess is constructed and reproduced across both time and party lines. The paper will therefore make a substantial contribution to the under-studied comparative analysis of the national days of Australia.
framework of race critical scholarship, settler-colonialism, and the sociology of practice to critically analyse Prime Ministerial speeches on Australia Day and Anzac Day between 1990-2019. Quantitative and qualitative descriptions of these representations demonstrate the ways in which whiteness, Anglo-centrism, colonialism, and conditional representations of Indigeneity are associated with hegemonic constructions of Australianness. Despite the presence of outliers to these patterns – mostly indicative of specific events across the time period of the corpus – we find little variance in these racially-dominant rhetorical paths, regardless of party affiliation or individual Prime Ministerial ideological differences.
This paper seeks to test these hypotheses by applying corpus assisted discourse analysis (CADA) to a corpus of Prime Ministerial Australia Day and Anzac Day speeches and media releases from 1990-2017. CADA is a mixed method approach to discourse analysis that employs both quantitative and qualitative inquiry methods. It seeks to accomplish two primary tasks: firstly, to identify and compare the political work of Prime Ministers on these national days; and secondly, to identify and compare the diversity of Australian identities represented on the two national days. In this regard, the paper will especially look at representations of class, gender, and racial/ethnic, identities in Prime Ministerial national day addresses in order to explore how contemporary Australianess is constructed and reproduced across both time and party lines. The paper will therefore make a substantial contribution to the under-studied comparative analysis of the national days of Australia.
Using the theory of securitzation, the paper will present preliminary findings on successful policy discourses of securitization in Defence White Papers (Wæver 1995; Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998). The paper will consider the following: the securitising actors; the construction of existential threats; the manner in which sought objectives and ideals were framed; and how audience approval was sought textually in the documents. Following Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde we will explore the military, economic, environmental, societal and political sectors that appear in the reports. CADA will be employed to conduct quantitative frequency analysis, identify collocation patterns, and qualitative analysis of the textual representation of securitization catalysts.
They fought up the cliffs from height to height;
And the sun shone down on that scene of strife
Where the ‘Soul of Australia’ came to life,
As the blood of Australians was shed on the sod,
For Australia, for Britain, Humanity, God.
J.H.M.
The Brisbane Courier, 25 April 1916
According to Anderson’s now classic assertion, nations and nationalities are imagined communities. Within this imagined community the roots of nationalism form and take hold; nationalism and national identity are the glue that holds disparate and often competing identities together within the framework of nation. In Australia, the creation of national identity has drawn significantly on the dominant Christian tradition evident in the early part of the 20th century. In contrast to other analyses of this issue, we argue that this can especially be seen in the construction of the Anzac narrative. Themes to be examined include the place of Christian imagery within the Anzac tradition, blood sacrifice as a foundation for secular religion and the role Christianity has played in the development of Australian nationalism. Furthermore, this paper will contend that far from waning over time, the presence of Christian symbolism is still evident in the official discourse of Anzac, as demonstrated by the speeches of former PM John Howard.