Article

The Tampa, Wedge Politics, and a Lesson for Political Journalism

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Abstract

For a little over a week at the end of August and beginning of September 2001, the plight of the MV Tampa and 433 refugees aboard dominated front pages, news bulletins, and talkback radio. The Howard Government's determination to ensure that no illegal immigrant set foot on Australian soil triggered a sharp upward swing in the polls. This was no accident. The Government's move against the Tampa was a carefully researched and premeditated election gambit intended to peel blue-collar voters away from Labor. The mainstream media largely missed this story even though the Opposition pointed to Howard's use of wedge politics. Had journalists understood this point they may have framed the story differently. The Tampa incident's lesson is that those covering politics need a good understanding of wedge politics and the full arsenal of political marketing methods that now shapes Australian political combat

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... Similarly, Wilson and Turnbull (2001, p. 386) view wedge politics as a "calculated political tactic aimed at using divisive social issues to gain political support, weaken opponents and strengthen control over the political agenda." Importantly, as will be explained below, wedge issues are facilitated by the media (Ward, 2002). Jackman (1998, p. 167), exploring issues of race in Australian politics in the late 1990s, identified that conservative parties can be net beneficiaries of the ideological tensions posed by race issues, including migration, and also identified that racial attitudes cut across other components of the electorate's ideology, causing internal party strains. ...
... The political function of wedge issues is twofold: to divide the electorate, and to weaken the position of an opposing candidate (Safire, 1992;Ward, 2002;Wiant, 2002, p. 278;Wilson & Turnbull, 2001). Common strategies to achieve these objectives focus on the message and the audience. ...
... Many researchers have studied the pejorative language used within, and by, Australia's media to report on asylum seekers. Common negatively framed expressions have included: "floods," "waves," "tides," "queue-jumpers," "illegals," and "economic migrants" (Klocker & Dunn, 2003;Manning, 2003;Rowe & O'Brien, 2014;Smit, 2011;Ward, 2002). This kind of commentary has been afforded by the fact that many Australians have "limited accurate knowledge about asylum seeking issues, with their knowledge highly dependent upon media reporting of the issues" (McKay, Thomas, & Kneebone, 2012, p. 128). ...
... Similarly, Wilson and Turnbull (2001, p. 386) view wedge politics as a "calculated political tactic aimed at using divisive social issues to gain political support, weaken opponents and strengthen control over the political agenda." Importantly, as will be explained below, wedge issues are facilitated by the media (Ward, 2002). Jackman (1998, p. 167), exploring issues of race in Australian politics in the late 1990s, identified that conservative parties can be net beneficiaries of the ideological tensions posed by race issues, including migration, and also identified that racial attitudes cut across other components of the electorate's ideology, causing internal party strains. ...
... The political function of wedge issues is twofold: to divide the electorate, and to weaken the position of an opposing candidate (Safire, 1992;Ward, 2002;Wiant, 2002, p. 278;Wilson & Turnbull, 2001). Common strategies to achieve these objectives focus on the message and the audience. ...
... Many researchers have studied the pejorative language used within, and by, Australia's media to report on asylum seekers. Common negatively framed expressions have included: "floods," "waves," "tides," "queue-jumpers," "illegals," and "economic migrants" (Klocker & Dunn, 2003;Manning, 2003;Rowe & O'Brien, 2014;Smit, 2011;Ward, 2002). This kind of commentary has been afforded by the fact that many Australians have "limited accurate knowledge about asylum seeking issues, with their knowledge highly dependent upon media reporting of the issues" (McKay, Thomas, & Kneebone, 2012, p. 128). ...
Article
This article examines Australian voters’ responses to asylum seeker boat arrivals during the most recent 2013 federal election campaign. We explore this issue using a mixed-methods approach, by conducting media monitoring analytics, content analysis of Liberal Party press releases, and statistical analysis of Voting Engagement Application data. We identify the salience of the issue to the public and the media and examine the prominence of this issue in Liberal Party political messaging about asylum seekers. We then analyze voters’ attitudes to asylum seeker boat arrivals using Vox Pop Labs’ Vote Compass data (n = 438,050). The survey is of unprecedented size in Australia and contains information collected during the election campaign about citizens’ attitudes to policy issues, enabling fine-grained analyses of voter attitudes at the electorate and subgroup level. We find voters’ attitudes toward asylum seekers, particularly in marginal electorates, impacted on vote intention. This effect is stronger among subgroup voters who care the most about that issue. These results suggest that the increase in the salience of the asylum seeker issue favored the winning Liberal Party.
... Part of cultural violence is the continued attempt to not recognise the asylum seekers as potential refugees (which most of the unauthorised arrivals were during this period), positioning them instead as 'illegals' with criminal connotations and attempting to de-humanise them by, for example not allowing pictures of them or their stories to be told) (Macken-Horarik 2003;Marr and Wilkinson 2003;Ward 2002). By denying journalists and photographers access to detained asylum seekers the human aspect was lost in the news. ...
... Since the Howard government won the federal election in 2001 and in 2004, his government's hard attitude towards asylum seekers arriving on boats, or in detention, was not an issue a large portion of Australian society viewed as morally indefensible or of enough importance to seriously oppose. Ward (2002) argues that journalists are victims of manipulation by PR specialists and spin doctors, and if they had understood the Howard government used 'wedge politics' 32 during the 30 It should be noted here that Indonesia was not a signatory to the Refugee Convention. 31 Klaus Neumann explored how Australia's historical commitment to asylum seekers, and one of his points is that the "Howard Government's hardline approach" was not "unprecedented" (2004: 113) and I think that insight is important since it debunks the idea that Australia has an unblemished record towards asylum seekers, when in fact cultural violence has previously caused hard line approaches towards asylum seekers and the aim should be to debunk the cultural violence, of both past and present, that has made such structural violence possible. ...
... 31 Klaus Neumann explored how Australia's historical commitment to asylum seekers, and one of his points is that the "Howard Government's hardline approach" was not "unprecedented" (2004: 113) and I think that insight is important since it debunks the idea that Australia has an unblemished record towards asylum seekers, when in fact cultural violence has previously caused hard line approaches towards asylum seekers and the aim should be to debunk the cultural violence, of both past and present, that has made such structural violence possible. 32 Wedge politics is when politician create divisions and resentment among one group towards another, smaller group, for political gains (Ward 2002) Tampa incident in 2001, they might have been able to challenge the cultural violence. ...
Article
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A media monitoring project, using peace journalism to evaluate Australian newspaper coverage of the 2004 HREOC report regarding children in detention centres.
... Some days of high-profile activity ensued, with Australia breaching generally accepted maritime practice by refusing permission for the ship to proceed to the nearest land, Australian territory at Christmas Island. The Prime Minister announced that no matter what, none of the Tampa refugees would set foot on Australian soil, thus stimulating a shift in support, particularly from bluecollar voters, away from Labour (Ward, 2002). During the election campaign itself, there were well-publicized images of children who were untruthfully claimed to have been thrown overboard from a small refugee boat in an attempt to force Australia to give them asylum. ...
... Defence Minister Peter Reith issued instructions to his department's media relations staff that required all statements to be cleared by his office or by his junior minister, Bruce Scott, preventing journalists from approaching asylum seekers, and requiring reporters to obtain information from the Immigration Minister's press secretary in Canberra (Ward, 2002). The chairman of the Press Council, Professor Ken McKinnon, said that the council deplored these restrictions: 'As the Prime Minister, John Howard, has often said, a free press is crucial to the proper functioning of democracy. ...
... The successful management of the refugee issue in Australia has been fully supported by the resources of the Australian Government. Ward (2002) identified the considerable capacity of the Federal Government to support their message and potentially to manage the news output concerning the issue, illustrated by the fact that there are no fewer than 105 Department of Defence public affairs staff, with an annual budget of around A$11.6m (Garran, 2001). Steketee (2001 pointed out that all ministers have media advisors to manage their interaction with the news media: in all, the Howard Government employs nearly three dozen media minders. ...
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Countries have been built on the hopes, dreams and courage of refugees. In recent years, the global refugee problem has become more intense, and reactions from governments around the world have been generally negative. This paper explores and describes the way in which a hitherto unpopular Australian Government managed and communicated an apparent ‘refugee crisis’ to win an election campaign, using information known at the time to be untruthful. It compares the messages used to win the election with the truth that subsequently emerged, and relates this to political marketing, especially the theories of Machiavelli. It concludes by describing the situation post-election and discusses some potential implications for public affairs. Copyright
... The Federal Liberal Party had identified 'illegal immigration' as an election issue well in advance of calling the election and had been talking up, in negative ways, the 'boat-people' in detention centres who were mostly Middle Eastern or Muslim. As Ward (2002) argues, the media generally played along with the government's strategy, especially the Australian newspaper, and various key talk-back radio announcers who called for 'simplistic and often callous solutions' (22). Ward, along with others, explains this form of strategy in terms of 'wedge politics'; a form of politics learnt from the U.S. Republican Party and further developed by Lynton Crosby, Howard's chief election strategist at the time. ...
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During the last decade or so, schooling policy has had to increasingly grapple with processes that have a global reach. One significant aspect of globalisation has been the global flows of asylum seekers and refugees. Although Australia has a long history of accepting asylum seekers and refugees, in recent times, concerns about national security have fuelled community disquiet about refugees and asylum seekers. As such the ‘refugee problem’ is a crucial site for research by those interested in the relationships between a vibrant and socially just society and educational policy and practice. This paper draws on Rose's genealogy of ‘community’ (that is community now a site for governmentality); and Bauman's meditation on ‘elusive community’ (how can we have both freedom and security?) as a means to think through an appropriate ethico‐politics for educators grappling with the refugee problem in Australia.
... This is, by all means, a mechanism of exclusion often used to argue monoculturalism (superior, civilized, assimilation, etc.) without mentioning race. Examples of this have been already discussed by Ward (2002, p. 28) who noted the existence of a " dog whistle journalism " which, using a reasonable language, delivers a calculated message to the target audience. The audiences to which Ward refers in his article on the Tampa affair in Australia in 2001 were the undecided voters in that country. ...
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This article explores the nature of immigration and refugee narratives and how they are structured by a constellation of media interests in the specific context of Scottish news agenda. It also looks at the coverage of asylum issues by The Scottish Sun, The Scottish Daily Mail and The Scottish Daily Express between September 2003 and September 2004 as examples of media interventions. This comparative analysis identifies these interventions as distinctive and orchestrated racist efforts that use elements such as culture and national security to legitimize it narratives. It studies the amount of coverage and looks at specific examples in terms of narratives and textual analysis.
... And, of course, it is precisely because the Redfern blacks, and blacks in general, are not 'part of the mainstream' in socio-economic terms or political power that violence becomes logical. 21 The Tampa was a Norwegian freighter which rescued several hundred drowning refugees in August 2001 off north-western Australia and which provided Howard a carefully staged episode denying them a landing in Australia, thereby attracting world derision and 77% Australian public support, turning the 2001 election Howard's way and allowing him to pose as a man of steel against his continent's 'enemies' (Ward 2002; Charlton 2002; Marr & Wilkinson 2003). ...
Article
Australia's federal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) and more general national policy towards indigenous peoples have become major subjects of political discussion, dispute, and one-upmanship in Australia's long-running 2004 national election campaign.
... However, since 1996 Australia has had a national government led by John Howard which, uniquely among 'first world' countries, has actively cultivated community racism and xenophobia as a party and electoral strategy (Markus 2001; Rundle 2001). The world had a glimpse of this with Howard's personal handling of the Norwegian ship Tampa and its rescued asylum seekers in August 2001 (Beeson 2002; Charlton 2002; Ward 2002). 10 In August 1998 Howard endorsed an NT plan for statehood which had been designed aggressively to shut out Aboriginal peoples, rights recognition, and interests so completely that it failed at referendum two months later, although Howard then rescued the NT premier and made him head of his own national Liberal party. ...
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The subject of this paper is the process of resistance and political activism involving indigenous peoples in national hinterlands previously invisible to national governments. Sami, Inuit, and other peoples of Northern Eurasia and North America, as well as Australia's Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders, have been shaping new political institutions and political cultures in large regions through their defence of homelands and culture, their search for more power in their lives, and more power in the protection, management, and development of land and sea territories. This has been a negotiation, sometimes implicit and visible in hindsight, sometimes explicit. Over recent decades it has brought many changes and will bring many more in coming years. Some governments have been reluctant to recognise this process or understand its dynamics, benefits, or requirements, so progress has had a stop-go character, resulting in much unnecessary and damaging delay and conflict. The best way forward is for national governments to recognise indigenous political communities and their rights, by accommodating, joining with, or reconciling with those communities through designing with them political, legal, and administrative arrangements for the protection of territory and its sustainable resources and livelihoods; and assuring to indigenous peoples their associated imperatives of culture, language, and self-government. The underlying assumptions are that indigenous peoples are important and must survive, and that at least 'first world' national governments are responsible enough, ultimately, to act on as well as talk about sustainable development.
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