Nothing but Truthiness: Public Discourses on the Adani Carmichael Mine in Australia

Abstract

“Post-truth” has been celebrated by the Oxford and Maquarie Dictionaries as the 2016 Word of the Year, after dominating media and political discourses during the American Election campaign and the Brexit debate in the UK. Defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (Oxford dictionaries 2016) post-truth politics has thus been identified as a hallmark of the current era in the US and UK, downplaying the fact that forms of political communication and spin that favoured feelings and emotions over policy are spreading globally. To explore some of the ways that post truth politics and “truthiness” are not only American/British phenomena, this chapter explores the way in which politicians and the media in Australia have debated the establishment of the one of the biggest coal mines in the world, the Adani Corporation’s Carmichael mine in central Queensland (Taylor and Meinshausen 2014; Amos and Swann 2015). We suggest that post-truth politics is not merely a replacement of “truth” with “lies,” but instead a complex, overlapping set of discursive strategies that work together to produce very particular political effects.