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Abstract
How important is it for journalism, media, public relations and communication studies students more generally to acquire literacy in political economy? How possible is it for this to happen while maintaining now established specialized communication, journalism, media, public relations degrees or at least professional strands within communication degrees? A recent media campaign in Australia over a proposed mining tax throws into relief communication professionals' need for literacy in the orientations and positions of political economy. A recently implemented course gives some indicators of what can be achieved in this area. The article is thus about the spread and purchase of a culturally informed political economy rather than knotty questions within it. The article, first, sets out in brief key aspects of the media campaign in question and one journalist's reflection on the challenges it posed. It discusses what might be involved in equipping students with how to meet those challenges, placing this in the wider context of a course that introduces communication students to a non-reductionist, interdisciplinary political economy.
Notes
1. After Ken Henry, Secretary of the Department of Treasury and Chair of the Panel conducting the Review.
2. ‘[A] capitalist country turning communist’ – Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest, chairman of Fortescue Metals Group in Hudson (Citation2010).
3. ‘[M]y number one sovereign risk on a global basis’ – Tom Albanese, chairman of Rio Tinto in Chambers & Tasker (Citation2010).
4. Counting just the 11 television commercials commissioned by the Minerals Council of Australia, these were played ‘1011 times across free-to-air TV [in the first month] – an average of 33 times a day’ (Lee Citation2010). On the coverage, see Gilding et al. (Citation2012).
5. Following Rudd's deposal, Prime Minister Gillard negotiated a compromise with Australia's three largest mining companies. The resulting Minerals Resource Rent Tax, applying to coal and iron ore projects, is set at 22.5% (effective), with new investments given an immediate write-off. The MRRT commenced on 1 July 2012; contrary to the May budget forecast of $3 billion revenue, it raised only $126 million in its first six months.
6. A phrase prominent in the Opposition Leader, Tony Abott's, 2010 Budget Reply speech, for example: ‘“The only way to stop this great big new tax on the people who saved us from the recession is to change the government”’ (Franklin & Karvelas Citation2010). ‘Axe the Tax’ rallies were headline news and ‘axe the tax’ Abbott's preferred way of outlining his party's policy stance on the issue.
7. A statement by 22 economists appeared in national broadsheets and was widely reported (Argy et al. Citation2010).
8. The Australian Financial Review (est. 1951) is Australia's foremost newspaper for economic, finance and market news and analysis, as well as serious political journalism and international coverage.
9. The third in a group of four making up a Politics Economies Communication major available to students undertaking professional study in Advertising, Journalism, Media, Professional Communication, and Public Relations. Economies Communicated is a purposefully idiosyncratic title; neither ‘Economics and Communication’, nor ‘Economics Communicated’, nor ‘The Economy and Communication’, nor even ‘Communicating the Economy’, all of which assume disciplinary perspectives, separations, or reifications which the course is careful to avoid.
10. See Flew (Citation2009) for a useful overview of strands of this work from a cognate cultural studies perspective.
11. See Thrift (2008, pp. 128–132) for a useful account of the varied provenance and purpose of performativity. See also Bryan et al. (2012, pp. 305–308) for a critical appraisal of performativity and its limits.
12. Although his focus is more specifically on the teaching of cultural studies, Turner has recently cast a wider eye over ‘schools of media studies, communications and Cultural Studies’ (Citation2011, p. 687) about which he rues ‘how wholeheartedly … applications of convergence culture have articulated humanities’ knowledges to what are in significant part business degrees’ (p. 688).
13. Another index of this is the marketization of electoral politics; see Thrift (Citation2008, pp. 247–252) and Dahlgren (Citation2009, pp. 50–52). On finance escaping political control, see Froud et al. (Citation2011).
14. A sense of foreignness captured in Enzensberger's ‘Blind Man's Buff Economics’ (Citation1990), and which still resonates with current readers, despite the ‘democratization’ of finance (Erturk et al Citation2007).
15. This claim makes more sense if I mention that this knowledge is also presented in a partner course, Politics Communicated.
16. Figures of ‘the economy’ (Mitchell Citation2008) and ‘homo oeconomicus’ (White Citation1982; Fridman Citation2010).
17. The aim is to give students a more heterodox sense of economic life, comprising multifarious economic practices, relations and actors (Miller & Rose Citation2008), to enable them to step outside dominant economic frameworks.
18. With one able journalism student reporting in course feedback, ‘Who would ever have guessed I could be interested in anything economic?’
19. My thanks to JCE's editor and anonymous reviewer for their encouragement to develop this direction, and for the reviewer's generous suggestions for dealing with both the pedagogic and mining taxation issues.
20. Identifying the objectives, knowledges and practices of loose alliances of actors involved in financialization, in projects for the reform of financialization, and in less-developed and more recent projects for definancialization (e.g., Sassen Citation2008; Hind Citation2009).
21. For example, identifying governing rationalities of ecological modernization, free-market environmentalism, and low-growth ecological sustainability (Sairinen n.d., c.Citation2000; Carvalho Citation2005).
22. Covering, for example, the altruism vs signal debate concerning market behavior and digital literacy (Quiggan & Potts Citation2008) and a Schumpeterian informed Creative Industries rationality involved in remaking Brisbane as a creative city in a Smart State (Cunningham et al. Citation2008; Gregg Citation2011).
23. That is, allocative or economic efficiency, where questions of value are at stake, rather than technical or productive efficiency, determined by quantity.
24. One of six forms of mineral rent taxation, what is specific to the Brown Tax (named after a 1948 proposal by US economist Carey Brown who specialized in depreciation allowances) is the way it handles, from the outset of projects, mining companies’ deductions for expenses against revenue. A negative cash flow attracts a payment in the year in which it is incurred rather than being carried forward with interest (Garnaut Citation2010, pp. 6–7). The modified version used in the RSPT threw into question a pure Brown Tax's virtue of neutrality for investment (‘leaving investment incentives unchanged’ (Ergas Citation2010)) by introducing room for doubt about the full compensation of future negative cash flows.
25. This is not to suggest the mining lobby did not prosecute their case on both fronts; but central to their claims to be companies paying their ‘fair share’ and doing (more than) their bit for all Australians was their ability to convincingly speak for the Australian economy, in possession of knowledge of its practical mechanisms.
26. Central here is the issue of equity and fairness in regimes of ownership. Bryan (Citation2011) pinpoints this in his history lesson about the West Australian tax fight ‘between royalties, [the Crown's requirement for mining companies to develop] local processing and national corporate taxation revenue’, describing ‘the terms on which iron ore companies have, for almost 50 years, accessed publicly-owned wealth’, ‘a story … of mining industry profits underwritten by governments’ (emphasis added). Such histories are complicated and time-consuming to set out and grasp, requiring attention to particular agreements, disputes and negotiated arrangements and to the empirically various consequences they yield. As Bryan notes, such perspectives have been ‘lost in the analysis’ (analysis of, in the case he deals with, conflict between the West Australian and Federal governments over the successor tax to the RSPT, the MRRT). It is this losing to view of specific historical arrangements concerning the sources of wealth that assists the side-lining of issues of public interest, social equity and fairness as legitimate paths of investigation. The universalizing categories of neoclassicism imported exactly this kind of ‘losing to view’ into the RSPT debate. On this aspect of neoclassical conceptualization, see Fine's (Citation1982) account of an historical loss of the ability to distinguish between royalties and rent (as consequential factor inputs for sources of revenue) in his description of the economic significance of the particular 19th-century arrangements of land ownership for the state of development of the British mining industry. He traces this conceptual loss through the supplanting of earlier marginalist partial equilibrium theory by the general equilibrium model that marks the dominance of neoclassical economics.
27. That is, they would continue to exploit Australia's non-renewable resources, and pay more than the 14 per cent tax paid in 2008–2009, a rate which had ‘more than halved from an average of around 34 per cent over the first half of this decade’ in a period when ‘[r]esource profits were over $80 billion higher’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2010, p. 10).
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Notes on contributors
Cathy Greenfield
Cathy Greenfield is Associate Professor of Communication at RMIT University with a research focus on the role of media in the government of populations. She has been a long term General Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Communication, Politics & Culture (previously Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture). In that capacity she was responsible for special issues on Finance and Communication (2001) and Economy, Communication and Neo-Liberal Politics (2003). Her most recent published work is a range of articles with Peter Williams on media rhetoric and neo-liberalism (Australian Journal of Political Science), the role of media in financialization (Media, Culture & Society; Australian Journal of Communication), the relations between communication and sustainability (Communication, Politics & Culture), and a chapter on ethical investment. The continuing focus of her scholarship is on media, market and technological populisms, the formation and maintenance of populist rationalities, and the challenges and opportunities these present for democracy.