Australian Prime Minister Research Articles

Mungo MacCallum with Frank Bongiorno, The Good, The Bad and the Unlikely: Australian Prime Ministers from Barton to Albanese

Mungo MacCallum with Frank Bongiorno, The Good, The Bad and the Unlikely: Australian Prime Ministers from Barton to Albanese

“Maintain Your Hope and Know That You Are Loved.” Mr. Anthony Albanese’s Discursive Construction of Collective Emotional Resilience

This paper employs Stephanie Paterson’s empathic policy analysis framework to explore the discursive construction of emotional resilience. The research conducted for the paper focuses on Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s notion of emotional resilience during a press conference he delivered on October 15, 2023, in the context of the Voice referendum. Mr. Albanese discursively frames the concept of emotional resilience as emotional stability that builds the community’s resistance to crisis situations, enables progress, and avoids division. The study identifies two emotional discourses influencing this portrayal of emotional resilience: (1) a discourse of emotional stability among opponents of the Voice referendum and (2) a discourse of emotional stability among supporters of the referendum. The article analyzes the assumptions underlying this representation and the silences—that which has been left unspoken or implied—associated with it.

Terrorism Discourse and Emotions: Australia

Terrorism has been often considered to be a subjective label rather than a distinct form of violence. Discourse has played an important role in creating the threat of terrorism, as well as in the legitimisation of counterterrorism level. The importance of studying discourse can thus no longer be denied. This article analysed the character of official discourse on terrorism delivered by Australian prime ministers between 9/11 and the end of 2019, since Australia is one of the countries involved in the War on Terror. The author used the NVivo software to analyse speeches delivered by John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, and Malcolm Turnbull. She applies Norman Fairclough’s three-level Critical Discourse Analysis to study the character of the speeches, positive and negative emotions which were invoked by the speeches and the connections that were drawn to other discourses. She also analyses the context in which the speeches were delivered as well as the adopted counterterrorism measures that were legitimized in the speeches. The results of the analysis demonstrated that all Australian prime ministers used the terrorism label to some extent, however each of them delivered speeches on terrorism that had a different character. All of the analysed prime ministers, with the exception of Kevin Rudd, also presented emotional discourse on terrorism. The article demonstrates how is the terrorism label portrayed differently by each speaker, and that not all discourse on terrorism has to necessarily be emotional.

Whitlam's Economic (Inter)Nationalism

By his own admission, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was not much of an economist, a disclosure that has fuelled criticisms of his government's performance during the economic crises of the 1970s. By contrast, Whitlam was a self‐declared internationalist who promoted the domestic and global possibilities of the international system. Of course, twentieth‐century economics and internationalism were mutual rather than dichotomous. Accordingly, Whitlam's internationalism provides a vantage point to re‐evaluate his economics. This article focusses on how one strand of Whitlam's internationalism — his Third World sympathies and alignments — informed his government's resource policy, as designed by Minister for Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor. Rather than seeking to redeem Whitlam's economic credentials via this internationalism, however, I argue Whitlam's appeal to Third Worldism sought to infuse an anti‐economics — or, more precisely, a critique of mainstream economic thinking — into Australian resources policy. The legacies of this critique have been enduring. Whitlam and Connor's attempts to establish export controls, foreign investment regulations, and state‐owned enterprise galvanised a fierce backlash from miners and libertarian economists. This backlash has helped shape the neoliberal framing of Australian mining and energy policy over the past 40 years. At the same time, with climate change and energy transitions again illuminating the politics of natural resources, Whitlam's Third World critique remains salient.

Facework display of a political leader: Linguo-rhetoric approach (the case study of Julia Gillard's speech on misogyny)

This article focuses on the cognitive rhetoric features of the politician's facework that incorporate face threatening acts, communicative strategies, and discursive functions in a political speech. The data were taken from the speech on misogyny delivered in 2012 by the 27th Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Throughout the article we disclose the interaction of the politician's face, politeness, and power in the institutional discourse. Julia Gillard does her facework actively engaged into the misogyny argument which provides a persuasive ground to confront the opponent's face through reinforced employment of both positive and negative face threatening acts. The findings suggest that doing facework through rhetorical practices Gillard signals her identity in three faces: a political leader, a female politician and her individual social self-image of a woman and daughter. Gillard's face claims are closely bound with her sense of sociality rights and obligations. This entails her relational and collective self-construal prevail over her individual face. The symbolic power obliges Gillard to protect her collective self-credibility and makes the ground for undermining the self-worth of the opponent in a rather straightforward manner. The politeness Gillard exercises is mainly prescribed by the institutional goal and status which directly impact the use of the linguistic means employed by the politician.

Mind the gap, exploring the expectation gap in political leadership in disasters: An Australian case study

AbstractThis article uses expectation gap theory to explore news coverage of the leadership performance of a national political leader in a major bushfire disaster in Australia. It does so to identify the types of behaviors and leadership that leader enacted and embodied during these events and what fire‐affected communities expected that politician to do in that disaster. Using a case study approach to the Black Summer bushfires that occurred in Australia in late 2019 and early 2020, it highlights the way Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison engaged with affected individuals and communities during and after that disaster. We draw on news media coverage as the disaster unfolded and in the months that followed to analyze his leadership and what others expected of him in those events. We find that in this disaster there was a significant gap between the Australian Prime Minister's leadership and community expectations of that leadership. Our article highlights how the expectation gap played out in news coverage of the fires and why the expectation gap matters.

A Leadership of Refusal: Remaking the Narrative of the Falling Leader

AbstractThe metaphor of the glass cliff is used to describe patterns whereby women are more likely to be selected for challenging leadership positions that have a higher risk of failure. This paper explores how the glass cliff metaphor contributes to a narrative of woman's fall that individualizes a leader's responsibility to avoid risks that may lead to failure. As an alternative, we introduce the leadership of refusal as a feminist resource for remaking the narrative of woman's fall. Refusal is understood as an embodied political and ethical stance that declines to recognize, rather than resists or simply opposes, masculine leadership norms. Through analysis of how three women leaders were represented by the media, former Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, former Australian of the Year, Grace Tame, and climate change activist, Greta Thunberg, we analyse key moments of refusal where these leaders breached the masculine order through their embodied performances. We argue that leadership of refusal enables an understanding of how women leaders exercise power in agentic, non‐sacrificial ways. We therefore urge leadership researchers to position refusal centrally, because first saying no in order to take risks towards achieving transformative action is, we suggest, a defining feature of leadership.

How Elites Mobilize the Vernacular: A Case Study of Australian Prime Ministers' Use of ‘Fair Go’ Rhetoric

Abstract Prime ministers often use vernacularisms in their political rhetoric, but we know little about how they deploy these forms of speech and the consequences for politics and policy. This article extends work on the ‘rhetorical PM’ by focusing on how leaders deploy idiomatic expressions in their oratory. The article presents a thematic analysis of four successive Australian prime ministers' use of the country's distinctive ‘fair go’ expression in speeches and media interviews between 1972 and 1996. Australian PMs increasingly invoked the ‘fair go’ expression throughout this period for multiple rhetorical purposes, including to make national identity claims, engage in partisan competition and justify policy reforms with strong neoliberal elements. While prevailing scholarship sees ‘vernacular politics’ as a tool of grassroots actors opposing discourses of globalization and elite-driven reform, this research shows the vernacular is a versatile rhetorical tool mobilized by elites for multiple purposes, including to justify radical policy change.

AUKUS and its Aftermath

In this transcript of his talk presented at an ISFAR seminar in the series ‘After the Elections: Is a Reset possible in French-Australian Relations?’, the author comments on the political situation in France following the French elections in May 2022 and then examines the response to the AUKUS decision in France and the import of the AUKUS decision in terms of Indo-Pacific geopolitical relations. He then comments on the positive response to the visit to France by newly-elected Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and surmises that a return to the relationship that flourished in the 1990s and early 2000s may evolve.

“I hope you aren't becoming woke”: New politicised contours of online ableism in response to disability advocacy by 2022 Australian of the Year Dylan Alcott

AbstractAbleist hate speech regularly appears in online comment‐enabled articles on social media, whenever disability‐related topics enter public discourse. In 2022, Dylan Alcott's appointment as Australian of the Year as a person with disability was widely celebrated. Despite this progress, we identified new forms of politicised ableism in online responses to his disability advocacy in this role. This research considers readership responses to an April 2022 Facebook post by an Australian tabloid publication. The post editorialised Alcott's Twitter response to the then Australian Prime Minister's comments on feeling “blessed” to have children without disability. Enmeshed within the usual ableist imaginary—“why would any parent want to have a child with disability?”—were new justifications for ableism associated with political “wokeness.” We analyse this emerging contour of politicised ableism in contemporary Australia to consider the complex patterns of progress toward social justice for people with disability.

Multimodal rhythm in TikTok videos: Exploring a recontextualization of the Gillard ‘misogyny speech’

This article presents a multimodal rhythmic analysis of a TikTok video, adopting a social semiotic perspective on embodied meaning-making. We highlight the importance of rhythm in coordinating and intertwining semiotic modes to produce meaning. The study develops a method for undertaking an integrated multimodal analysis of rhythm across speech, bodily action, gesture and music, and develops a transcription convention for representing this rhythmic unfolding. The data considered is a TikTok ‘glambot/boss challenge’ video featuring a lip sync to audio sampled from former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s 2012 culturally iconic ‘Misogyny Speech’ condemning misogynist and sexist men, particularly those in positions of power. This speech achieved viral prominence internationally and continues to be a key feminist text in Australian political history. The paper demonstrates how end-accented rhythmic groups create anticipation and lead to the main event in both the speech and glambot sections of the video. Alongside the rhythmic analysis, the article examines the intertextual meanings established with other TikTok videos that iterate the glambot meme and glambot challenge.

The shifting political-administrative interface under Westminster: Australia’s prime ministerial views from Fraser to Morrison

Effective administrative-political relationships are vital for the quality of public administration, both within Westminster-style systems and beyond. However, changes in political practice can put pressure on Westminster administrative conventions. More broadly, recent research interest in the changes in accountability relationships between bureaucrats and political principals and associated challenges to the neutrality of the public service have highlighted the need for further work to explore the changing operation of administrative-political relationships. This article analyses 15 key speeches of eight Australian Prime Ministers to explore whether there has been a significant shift in expectations of the public service, and whether these shifts represent a fracturing of Westminster conventions, or are a result of ongoing trends such as higher expectations of public sector responsiveness and the shift to market mechanisms consistent with New Public Management. The article makes two contributions: it analyses the approaches of Prime Ministers in Australia from different political parties over nearly 50 years and it contributes to understanding shifts in the relationship between governments and the public sector. The analysis also has implications for underlying concerns about how public institutions cope with changes in political leadership, and about how democratic institutions manage under increasingly right-wing governments.

Punctuated equilibrium and the dynamics of political participation: the case of letter writing

ABSTRACT While extensive research has shown that policy outputs are punctuated, there is a paucity of research about the punctuation of public opinion and political participation. We know policymakers rely on political participation to understand public opinion, so we need to understand the patterns and flows of this participation, to help understanding democratic responsiveness, and how policy outputs behave. I advance punctuated equilibrium theory by applying it to individuals’ decision to participate, and the policy issue they choose to engage with. I argue that bounded rationality and disproportionate information processing, driven by media and interest group coverage of trigger events, will result in a punctuated equilibrium pattern in both the decision to participate and the issues focused on. Using new datasets on the volume and topic of letters to the Australian Prime Minister and American President, I find consistent evidence of punctuations, using weekly, fortnightly, and annual data, across Australia and America, notwithstanding institutional, cultural, and behavioural differences. These results extend punctuated equilibrium further up the policy process chain than has previously been done, supporting its claim as a “full theory of government information processing.” Doing this helps us to understand the difficulty in translating environmental and public demands into policy.

Life as Prime Minister: A Genre Study of Speeches Made by Australian Prime Ministers Following Leadership Spills

ABSTRACT Between 2010 and 2018, four Australian prime ministers were removed from office outside of a federal election, by leadership spills initiated by their party colleagues. Each of the prime ministers—Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull—delivered a televised speech shortly after the leadership spill. The speeches provided an early opportunity, long before the preparation of any book-length political memoir, for each departing prime minister to narrate their political life and affirm their political legacy and identity. The speeches can be conceptualised as a rhetorical genre of life narrative in an Australian context. Applying Carolyn R. Miller’s theory of genre as social action (“Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70: 151–167. 10.1080/00335638409383686.) confirms the speeches as a rhetorical genre, not because of their similarities in form and content but because they respond to the same recurring rhetorical situation—the leadership spill—and have shared social functions in their assertion of the rhetor’s (speaker’s) achievements, integrity and authenticity. All address the past, present and future; project a defining aspect of character; refer to significant others; and place life as prime minister in other contexts. In doing so, the speeches resemble but differ from some other forms of life narrative.

Monarchy and the peculiarities of the English

This article describes how the monarchy has enjoyed historical continuity in a society that has not been invaded since 1066 and had no revolutionary experience unlike other European nations. The other peculiarity includes the confusion about ‘the British Isles’, ‘Great Britain’ and ‘England’. Britain is best understood as a fragmented archipelago of societies. Queen Elizabeth II managed to survive the peculiarities and two major crises: the dismissal of the Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and the death of Lady Diana.

Scott Morrison’s Political Discourse During Crisis: A Narrative-Semiotic Analysis

This study explores communication strategies and techniques in the political discourse of the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, during crisis. Twelve public speeches and statements made during media conferences, from April 2019 to May 2020, are analysed as sample data. These consist of three contexts, starting from the election campaign, followed by the bushfires that ravaged the nation and the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic. The study identifies the prominent themes and most frequently occurring features in the data set. The election campaign communications and COVID-19 crisis communications are observed to have similar use of discourse features and emphasis of themes. Comparatively, the bushfire crisis communications showed low levels of technique usage and a low significance of themes. The speeches are grouped into four political discourse clusters for further analysis using actantial modelling. The models provide a visual representation of various actants to draw comparative insights. The study highlights that communication needs to be viewed as a discursive activity that can have variations to the contexts, and the need to attribute sufficient significance for public issues using discourse features is critical.

A crisis in search of a narrative: Australia, COVID-19 and the subjectification of teachers and students in the national interest

Force majeure circumstances, such as those witnessed in the COVID-19 pandemic, have been used to justify new technologies of governance as policy-makers around the world began to realise the magnitude of the problem and its political implications. In Australia, the coronavirus crisis focussed attention on the vital role education plays in society and was used as an opportunity by policy-makers to reinforce an agenda that, over the past two decades, has tied education policy-making to the economy and ‘national interest’. Indeed, Australia’s growing federal involvement, with respect to schooling policy was continued in the pandemic as the Australian Prime Minister (PM) created a national cabinet to deal with the crisis, consisting of the PM and state and territory leaders. However, despite the ongoing ambition of a national policy agenda pursued by federal policy-makers, fault lines appeared. Informed by Foucauldian notions of discourse, governmentality and biopolitics, this paper explores how Australia’s federal Coalition government endeavoured to manage the population at the outset of the pandemic and subjectified teachers as responsible in the service of the economy. While COVID-19 was a crisis in search of a narrative, federal policy-makers experienced pushback as state and territory leaders assumed control and teachers refused subject positions.

Much Ado about Little: The Whitlam Government and Australia’s Engagement with Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT Australian Prime Minister Edward Gough Whitlam has gone down in history as the man who ended two decades of Australian neglect of Asia. Having come to power with the ambitious goal of making a quantum leap in Australia’s regional engagement, Whitlam is widely credited with bringing his country closer to Asia. However, such a representation of Whitlam’s Asian diplomacy does not quite stand up to a careful examination of the historical record. Whitlam’s new course in foreign affairs not only failed to inject new momentum into Canberra’s policy of regional engagement, but it also perplexed – or even frustrated – more than one regional actor. It is no coincidence that he spent nearly half of his prime ministership seeking to dispel the perception that Australia was becoming isolationist. Focussing on Whitlam’s policy towards Southeast Asia, an area of crucial strategic importance for Australia, this analysis provides a corrective, based on recently declassified Australian, British and American government files, of Australia’s regional engagement in the early 1970s.

Australia-France relations after AUKUS: Macron, Morrison and trust in International Relations

ABSTRACT The centrepiece of the AUKUS defence pact agreed between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States in September 2021 was a commitment to help Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines. This made redundant an earlier $90 billion deal Australia had entered into with France to deliver conventionally powered submarines. Australia’s decision to renege on the French deal, as well as the revelation that three of France’s key partners had negotiated AUKUS in secret, triggered a furious French diplomatic response. In this commentary, we explore the ramifications of this episode for future Australia-France relations. We begin by documenting the immediate diplomatic fallout of the AUKUS announcement and tracing how the dispute became personalised between Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and French President Emmanuel Macron. We then move to consider how the episode reveals the divergent approaches Australia and France are taking in response to China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific. Finally, we highlight three reasons why this episode represents a theoretically valuable case study for scholars interested in the roles of trust and leadership in global politics, given it features the breakdown of interpersonal trust between leaders of friendly states.

Constructing COVID-19: A corpus-informed analysis of prime ministerial crisis response communication by gender

This paper compares Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers’ crisis response communication about COVID-19. We examine how gender performativity and contextual factors contribute to each leader’s discursive ‘style’ at the lexical level, and explore micro-diachronic changes as the pandemic unfolded. Informed by corpus linguistics approaches, we analysed written texts published on each leader’s website between January and December 2020, using Scattertext to visualise lexical differences between each leader’s corpus, and mapping frequencies against coronavirus case numbers in each country. Guided by these results, closer qualitative analysis reveals that whereas Jacinda Ardern quickly established and maintained a consistent and highly personalised style in guiding New Zealanders through the pandemic, Scott Morrison’s messaging was both less personal and more reactive to the epidemic curve. However, despite some traces of stereotypically gendered language, neither leader made gender salient in their COVID-19 crisis response communication.