The construction of a ‘narrative’ in Australian federal budget speeches, 1996–2013

Abstract

Given the significance of annual budgetary decisions in both fiscal terms and policy reach, the annual federal budget speech has a distinctive place in Australia's parliamentary cycle. The speeches afford a government a significant opportunity to articulate its economic policy agenda and to contrast its agenda with that of its predecessors or the Opposition. This article reviews the budget speeches of two Treasurers, Peter Costello (Liberal, 1996–2007) and Wayne Swan (Labor, 2008–13), and compares them with respect to how they used the budget speech to position their parties and their governments. Costello's speeches are singular, consistent and highly partisan. Swan eschewed the ‘ad hominem’ argument favoured by Costello, but failed to project an alternative, consistent narrative of his government's agenda and achievements.

年预算无论是财政上还是政策上都至关重要，因此年度联邦预算讲话在澳大利亚的国会程序中有着特殊的位置。这个讲话为政府提供了阐述其经济政策并比较其前任或反对党经济政策的机会。本文研究了两任财长即彼得考斯特罗（自由党，1996-2007）和怀恩斯万（工党，2008-13）的讲话，比较了两人如何利用预算讲话阐明其政党和政府的立场。考氏的讲话不同凡响、一以贯之，具有鲜明的党派倾向。斯万不像考氏那样个人风格，但他没能就其政府的议题和成就拿出一个别样、连贯的讲述。

Keywords:

• Australian political discourse
• budgets; linguistics
• rhetoric

Funding

Initial research in this project was conducted with a small grant from the Department of Linguistics and the Faculty of Human Sciences at Macquarie University.

Notes

1 Relevant works include Dann (2008), Dowding et al. (2012), Dyrenfurth (2010), Fenton–Smith (2008), Grube (2010, 2011), Kabanoff et al. (2001), Kane and Patapan (2010), Uhr and Walter (2014), Walter and Uhr (2013) and Walter (2014).

2 Though not included in this study, Hockey's first speech (2014) as Treasurer in Australia's new Coalition government did not include a recognisable economic forecast. Until there are more data on his period as Treasurer, it is difficult to conclude whether this is a one-off variation for this register or a new approach to the act of giving a budget speech.

3 The ‘frequency’ is measured as the number of instances of a lexical item compared with the total number of words in the corpus of speeches of each of the two Treasurers.