School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemPolicy news in the digital age: an examination of Australian election reporting( 2018)This thesis examines news coverage of policy issues in Australian federal election campaigns from 2001 to 2013. Focusing on three policy domains (health, education and taxation), it evaluates news coverage primarily through a quantitative content analysis of four key elements: media attention to policy issues, the amount of policy information provided, the sources quoted, and the frames and narratives adopted in these reports. In doing so, this study examines 1270 newspaper articles, 128 television news stories and 86 online news reports. Additionally, it analyses how media coverage intersects with political communication through a quantitative content analysis and qualitative language analysis of 10 campaign launch speeches. This study provides an original contribution by bridging a major gap in the Australian scholarship. It investigates news coverage of policy issues and campaign launch speeches over a period of immense technological, political and economic change in Australian political communication. Australia’s traditional print and broadcast media organisations are facing significant threats to their businesses models in the twenty-first century. A clear tension exists for Australia’s news organisations as they attempt to balance their commercial challenges with their democratic obligations to inform the public sphere. To examine this empirical problem, this thesis addressed the following question: What, if anything, has happened to traditional news media reporting of policy issues during Australian federal elections in the twenty-first century (2001-2013)? This study finds an overall decline in the quality of policy reporting provided by the press during election campaigns in the twenty-first century. The evidence suggests that policy reporting provided in later election cycles was limited in its capacity to facilitate a contest of diverse ideas and inform voters about policy matters. News coverage in later campaigns contained less policy information, adopted more game and strategic frames, and quoted fewer sources than earlier election cycles. However, this decline in the quality of policy reporting cannot be blamed entirely on Australian journalists. This study concludes that a combination of factors including financial pressures experienced by media outlets and changes in political campaigning adversely impacted on policy reporting in the 2000s.
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ItemSettler regimes of ignorance: teaching indigenous-settler relationships in schools in Australia and Kanaky/New Caledonia( 2018)Schools are institutions for knowledge dissemination but at the same time also sites of power. They inculcate students into specific ideological and emotional norms and social relations. Far from being politically neutral institutions, schools disseminate government-sanctioned ways of understanding and engaging in Indigenous-settler relationships. Schooling, as a form of power, has particular salience in settler colonial societies such as Australia and Kanaky/New Caledonia. In these societies, schools have, historically, been a crucial tool for the assimilation and oppression of Indigenous people. The latter have contested, refused, but have also used to their advantage these colonial education institutions to challenge colonial hegemony. In response to continued Indigenous resistance and struggles, schools have attempted more recently to reform historical knowledge and redefine Indigenous-settler relationships. This thesis focuses on the ways that the historical and political relationships between Indigenous people and settlers are taught in public schools in two settler colonial societies: Australia and Kanaky/New Caledonia. Based on an analysis of history curricula, textbooks and interviews with history teachers carried out in these two societies, this thesis addresses the following questions: What political understandings of Indigenous-settler relationships are disseminated in schools? To what extent can or does the teacher – as the ultimate institutional actor, the inheritor of a historiography, and a political and emotional agent – shape the relationships between Indigenous people and settlers in schools? Can the school system decolonise itself? Pushing the existing boundaries of research on settler colonialism and decolonisation, and taking the original approach of engaging with settler colonialism across European colonialisms by bringing together British/Australian and French forms of settler colonialism in the analysis, the thesis examines processes of producing both knowledge and ignorance. It argues that settler colonial power rests on settler regimes of ignorance that sustain the political status quo. This thesis interrogates the ways that teachers deal with these settler regimes of ignorance and their capacity (or lack thereof) to challenge them. The thesis concludes that the production of knowledge may not necessarily be a solution to settler colonial ignorance but, rather, that the attitudes towards that ignorance are both where the problem is and where the solution lies. Findings from my research reveal that history curricula, staffing trends, textbooks, and some teaching practices sustain settler regimes of ignorance. The school system in both these societies continues to disseminate historical knowledge that fails to comprehend and wilfully ignores the mechanisms and contemporaneity of settler colonialism. This ignorance constitutes a most effective tool of settler colonial power within the school system. However, some history teachers, on an individual level, attempt to destabilise and rethink institutional practices to shift power relationships between Indigenous people and settlers within this public institution. In doing so, teachers’ practices bring an unexpected finding, that is the potential of ignorance – rather than increased knowledge production – to facilitate such a political shift.