How is Australianness represented by prime ministers?: Prime ministerial and party rhetoric of race, class, and gender on Australia Day and Anzac Day, 1990–2017

ABSTRACT

Australia Day and Anzac Day, held on January 26 and April 25 annually, are key moments used by prime ministers to share, shape, and reproduce their understanding of what and whom is representative of a unique Australian identity and nationalism. This paper uses qualitative and quantitative methods with content analysis to evaluate and compare prime ministerial and party rhetoric in their Australia Day and Anzac Day speeches between 1990 and 2017 regarding class and economic relations, gender and sexuality, and race and national identity. We ask: How have prime ministers as reflexive actors used their speeches on Australia Day and Anzac Day to represent what it means to be Australian? The study reveals that despite prime ministers sometimes using intentionally inclusive discourses, they simultaneously reproduce a classless, hetero-masculine, and Anglocentric Australianness as a normative representation of national identity in Australian society.

每年1月26日的澳大利亚日以及4月25日的澳新军团日，总理都要打造、复制并与人分享他们对何为澳大利亚独特的身份及民族性以及谁来代表的理解。本文采用定性及定量方法，结合内容分析，评估并比较了1990年至2017年在两个节日里总理及政党关于阶级与经济关系、性别与性、种族与国家认同的发言修辞。笔者要问：总理们做为反思者如何在这两个节日用他们的演讲来表达澳大利亚人的精义？据本文的研究，总理们除了有时故意使用面面俱到的话语，他们会自发地重复一种无阶级的、异质而男权的、盎格鲁中心主义的澳大利亚特质以为澳大利亚社会国家认同的表达。

KEYWORDS:

• Prime ministers
• nationalism
• identity
• gender
• race
• class

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleagues Fadi Baghdadi, Madison Cartwright, Luke Mansillo, and Mathew Toll for their insightful comments and assistance during the editing process. We would also like to thank our reviewers for their extensive feedback and insights which were gratefully incorporated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Nicholas Bromfield is a lecturer with the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. His recent research interests have focused broadly upon issues of nationalism and identity in political science, public policy and international relations.

Alexander Page is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on Indigenous policy analysis, the sociology of race, and social movements.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Bromfield (2018, 97) empirically establishes that prime ministers began to consistently make annual Anzac Day addresses since 1990: ‘Prime ministers since Whitlam have not always made Anzac Day addresses … The shift from the suburban, sporadic and largely passive marking of Anzac to the active, regular, spectacular, and national, remembrance of Australia’s war history has been a process that prime ministers have both embraced and engendered [since 1990].’

2 Junk words included also, per, and cent for the ALP, and much and also for the LPA.

3 Further information on the collation of the top 25 words is contained in the appendix.

4 See Seal (2004) for the distinction between the folk-orientated egalitarian and anti-authoritarian ‘digger tradition’ and state orientated and conservative ‘Anzac tradition’.

5 Further information on the collation of the terms that make up representations of class is contained in the appendix.

6 Surprisingly, and somewhat contra the literature, explicit mentioning of egalitarian or egalitarianism as a core Australian value only appears 19 times across the corpus, all of which appear on Australia Day: Howard (n = 11), Turnbull (n = 4), Rudd and Keating (n = 2).

7 Further information on the collation of the terms that make up representations of gender and sexuality is contained in the appendix.

8 The corpus does not capture the period after the achievement of marriage equality in Australia, so it has been assumed that wives and husbands refer exclusively to heterosexual relationships.

9 Further information on the collation of the terms that make up representations of the Anglosphere and Europe, Asia, and the Middle East is contained in the appendix.

10 It is notable that acknowledgement of Gallipoli as a crucial signifier of Australianness occurs outside of Anzac Day, a feature not replicated in acknowledgement of Australia Day on Anzac Day by prime ministers. This reflects the significance placed upon Anzac in the corpus and the ambivalence regarding Australia Day that is reflected more widely in the ‘Change the Date’ debate.