‘Just an ordinary Australian’: Self‐categorization and the discursive construction of facticity in ‘new racist’ political rhetoric

Abstract

Australia has recently witnessed the resurgence of what has been termed the ‘race debate’. The apparently high levels of popular support from ‘ordinary’ Australians for MP Pauline Hanson's contentious views on immigration, Australia's indigenous peoples and her foreign relations have been a major theme of this debate. This paper employs the framework of discursive psychology to examine, in her maiden speech to Parliament, the way in which Pauline Hanson's political rhetoric is precisely constructed in order to emphasize the ordinariness, reasonableness and commonsensical mass appeal of her views. Particular attention is paid to the discursive deployment of self‐categorization to construct a version of herself as exemplifying ‘ordinary Australian‐ness’. The potential for recent work in discursive psychology both to complement and to challenge aspects of social identity theory inspired studies of political rhetoric is discussed. The analysis presented suggests that not only is it unnecessarily reductionistic to construe identity in talk in terms of dichotomous mental states, but also that the discursive construction of self‐ and social categories, and the establishing of the facticity of a position, need not be construed as separate aspects of the task of racist political rhetoric, but may be understood as mutually supporting components of successful mobilization discourse.