Framing sexual and gender-based violence: Australia Day, nationalism and conservative prime ministerial policy discourse

ABSTRACT

Grace Tame’s 2021 Australian of the Year (AOTY) award directed public attention towards sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), as did Australia Day award recipients Donna Carson in 2004 and Rosie Battie in 2015. We use mixed-method textual analysis of a corpus of prime minister’s Australia Day speeches between 1990 and 2021 to show how conservative Liberal Party prime ministers have narrated a discourse of idealised national identity to manage activist demands regarding SGBV policy. We quantitatively find that prime ministers promote masculine and heteronormative representations of Australian identity and then develop a qualitative typology of conservative SGBV frames employed by prime ministers that gloss over SGBV as a pressing and chronic policy issue and position idealised Australian femininity to condone and obscure SGBV. This paper builds upon scholarship on public policy and gendered nationalism to explain this pattern of SGBV problem definition and framing by conservative prime ministers.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• Public policy
• Prime minister
• Nationalism
• Australia Day

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The NADC is semi-autonomous. While prime ministers do not have direct decision-making power over the AOTY awards, the NADC is governed by a board appointed by the prime minister, consisting of civil society leaders and a Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet representative. The board selects a national AOTY award recipient from a pool of nominees put forward by the states and territories. The politics of nominee selection is beyond the scope of this paper, but the selection of nominees, and the achievements they are recognised for, nonetheless constitutes an additional politics of agenda setting of which issues do or do not receive attention.

2 SGBV is, of course, not exclusively male-on-female violence. Queer persons, and trans women particularly, face high levels of violence, and especially so when intersectional identities are considered (Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety Limited [ANROWS] 2020). Supported by scholarship that sees culture as a determinant of SGBV (Flood and Pease 2009, Kuskoff and Parsell 2020), and expansive interdisciplinary feminist theorisations of culture and gendered violence (Berns 2001; Piedalue 2017; Yates 2018), our analysis considers how political elite rhetoric influences cultural values that enable and condone SGBV.

3 In this corpus, women won AOTY 7 out of 32 years, in 1998 (Cathy Freeman), 2003 (Fiona Stanley), 2005 (Fiona Wood), 2013 (Ita Buttrose), 2015 (Rosie Batty), 2018 (Michelle Simmons), and 2021 (Grace Tame). It is outside the scope of this research paper to analyse all these instances, but it is worth noting the intersection of identities and the relative lack of women-identified representation in 1998 when Indigenous woman Cathy Freeman won AOTY, compared to 1997 and 1999 (in 1999 white Australian male cricket captain Mark Taylor was celebrated at length by Howard, as was subsequent white male cricket captain Steve Waugh in 2004). Also note the total absence of women-identified representations in 2003 and near-total absence in 2013 (0.03%), despite women winning AOTY.

4 Contemporary accusations that Roberts-Smith was involved in war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan (Doherty 2023) are not unrelated to the values that Abbott commended him for: celebrating his masculine willingness to lethally ‘protect’ the nation. The celebration of militarised masculinity according to simplified tropes like courage or aggression is a political problem that is correlated with excessive war violence, as identified in feminist literature (MacKenzie 2015).

5 It is worth noting that after his conviction, and despite being a registered sex offender, Tame’s abuser was accepted on a scholarship to complete a PhD program at the University of Tasmania and lived in residence with students who were minors. At almost all stages of the criminal investigation, Tame’s assailant was protected and enabled by individuals at many levels, from his colleagues at the secondary school to university stakeholders. Patriarchy in Australian society is remarkably evident when we consider how Australian institutions protect predatory men, a key social norm that enables SGBV.

6 Notably in 2021, in addition to Tame, for the first time across the corpus a woman was awarded in each category of the AOTY awards.

7 This has also been recognised in scholarship on non-heteronormative individuals’ frustration about the binarism present in discourse on survivorship and SGBV (Seymour 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas Bromfield

Dr Nicholas Bromfield is a lecturer with the Centre for Social Impact, University of New South Wales. He takes a research interest in political science, public policy and Australian and comparative politics. Recently, he has focused on crisis management, and nationalism, culture and public policy agendas.

Nicole Wegner

Dr Nicole Wegner is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Auckland. Her research uses feminist approaches to analyse the intersections of gender, conflict, and violence.

Alexander Page

Dr Alexander Page is a Manager at Inside Policy, an Aboriginal-owned and – managed policy consultancy firm based in Sydney and Melbourne, and an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at James Cook University, Townsville. His expertise is in the areas of political sociology, race and racism, and First Nations policy and politics in Australia.