Queensland's Broad-Scale Land-Clearing Policy Debate, 1998–2006: an Analysis of Evidence-Based Arguments in News Media Conte

Queensland’s broad-scale land-clearing policy debate, 1998–2006: An analysis of evidence-based arguments in news media content

Nathan Laurent and Lee Dufﬁeld [email protected] lee.dufﬁ[email protected]

Abstract This article outlines the methodology and key findings of a media content analysis of news reporting in the Courier-Mail and Queensland Country Life on the issue of broad-scale land-clearing (BSLC) in Queensland during the period 1998–2006. The case study identifies and examines evidence-based arguments made by stakeholders in the public policy debate surrounding BSLC, including elected officials and judges, interest groups, government agencies, scientists, business owners and individuals, such as academics. In both newspapers, it was noted that throughout the period under review, arguments made on environmental grounds in favour of the policy goal of maximum immediate conservation tended to be concerned with establishing an accurate definition of the BSLC problem. However, reporting of arguments made on political and economic grounds reflected stark differences between the two newspapers. The findings of this study support observations that some participants in a contest over new policy may dispute (persistently, and regardless of previous developments) the validity of: (1) definitions of a problem; (2) proposed policy solutions; (3) matters of detail or technical application; and (4) the enactment and implementation of legislation.

Introduction This article reports on a case study of public policy discourse around broad-scale land-clearing (BSLC) in the state of Queensland between 1998 and 2006. Begin- ning with the introduction of the Vegetation Management Act 1999 (Qld) to control clearing on freehold land, and ending with the banning of BSLC of remnant vegetation through the Vegetation Management and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2006 (Qld), the period has previously been identiﬁed as signiﬁcant by scholars of environmental law and regulation (McGrath 2002–03, 2006–07; Kehoe 2009, 2014). Media coverage of the public policy debate surrounding the legislative changes in the period, however, has not previously been analysed in any detail.

70 Queensland Review Volume 25 | Issue 1 | 2018 | pp. 70–88 | c The Author(s) 2018 | Downloaded fromdoi https://www.cambridge.org/core10.1017/qre.2018.8 . Queensland University of Technology, on 21 Jun 2018 at 23:18:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2018.8 Queensland’s land-clearing policy debate, 1998–2006

The following overall research question was pursued: Who made what kinds of arguments about BSLC policy in Queensland newspaper reports in the period between 1998 and 2006? The methodological approach adopted was a content analysis of evidence-based policy arguments, as reported in two newspapers show- ing consistent interest in regional issues and conservationism: metropolitan daily the Courier-Mail (CM) and the rural industry weekly Queensland Country Life (QCL). In reporting on the case study, this article presents a detailed outline of a sys- tematic approach to media content analysis designed to enable ‘mapping’ of ‘the rhetorical landscape of policy formation’ through arguments made by stakeholders in public policy debate (Howland, Becker and Prelli, 2006: 206). It highlights certain characteristics to be found in polemics and the political management of policy issues, such as reporting by media outlets reﬂecting the interests of their particular markets or audiences; changes in the kind of arguments made by stakeholders as policy responses to a problem take shape — for example, in legislation; and an el- ement of arbitrariness in such situations, including the readiness of political actors or interest groups to ignore evidence of a policy’s effectiveness, leading to attempts to reverse policy decisions should an opportunity arise.

The case study: Historical-geographical background With the development of contemporary scientiﬁc and public awareness of environmental impacts of deforestation in the 1980s and 1990s, the issue of BSLC in northern Australia, predominantly for livestock pasture, emerged as an environmental and agri-environmental governance problem for governments and other stakeholders (McAlpine, Fensham and McIntyre 2002: 3–5; Rolfe 2000). Economic inﬂuences on the level of clearing in New South Wales and Queensland in the 1990s included government subsidisation of diesel fuel costs in agriculture and the fact that land-clearing expenses were allowed as business tax deductions (Ryan 1997: 16, 30). During the 1990s, Australia had the sixth highest annual rate of land- clearing in the world, and it has been suggested that if Queensland were a country, it would have ranked ninth globally in terms of amount of land cleared in 2001–03 (Lindenmayer and Burgman 2005: 230–3). Accepted wisdom on the environmental impacts of BSLC is summarised suc- cinctly in a 2002 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) report:

Land-clearing destroys plants, entire habitats and local ecosystems; it removes the food and habitat on which other native species rely. Clearing helps weeds and invasive animals to spread, causes greenhouse gas emissions [from the burning and decay of vegetation and from the disturbance of soil which releases carbon] and can lead to soil degradation, such as erosion and salinity, which in turn can harm water quality. (ABS 2002: 26–7)

In response to Australia’s ratiﬁcation of the United Nations (UN) Convention on Biological Diversity in 1993, Australian governments developed a national strategy for biodiversity conservation, which was adopted in 1996. When all Australian states signed Natural Heritage Trust partnership agreements in 1997, they were able to obtain access to federal funding in return for meeting national standards on native vegetation protection. However, while ‘protection of biodiversity was

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Queensland University of Technology, on 21 Jun 2018 at 23:18:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2018.8 Nathan Laurent and Lee Dufﬁeld

Figure 1 (Colour online) Trend in woody vegetation clearing rate by replacement land cover, Queensland, 1988– 2014. Source: Creative Commons licensed copyright, reproduced from Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation, Queensland (2015: 33).

the motivation behind the enactment of tree clearing laws’ throughout Australia during the 1990s, Bell (2011: 203–4) observes that the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) also became ‘an important by-product’ of the laws. Australia’s ratiﬁcation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) in 1992 led to agreement among all Australian governments on a Na- tional Greenhouse Response Strategy in 1992. In 1994, the compilation of information for Australia’s ﬁrst National Greenhouse Gas Inventory to meet its UNFCC obligations ‘highlighted the lack of data available on land cover’, which led to federal funding for ‘a State–Commonwealth program to assess agricultural land cover change across the continent between 1990 and 1995’ (State of the Environment Advisory Council 1996: 6.39-6.40). In Queensland, this funding established the Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS) program to acquire and analyse satellite imagery. Although policy and legislative attempts to regulate BSLC on freehold land in Queensland largely failed in the 1990s, the rate of all woody vegetation clearing (and remnant vegetation clearing in particular) was markedly reduced between 2004 and 2010, under the Vegetation Management Act 1999 (Qld) (amended in 2004 and 2009). This is supported by annual statistics on the average annual rate of land-clearing by replacement land use, derived from the SLATS program and publicly available since 1999 (Department of Science, Technology and Innovation 2015: 1–37). Figure 1 shows the average annual rate of land-clearing by replacement land use (including settlement, infrastructure, mining, forest, cropping and pasture) up to 2014. Evidence of the effectiveness of the VMA was clear in the reduction of the annual average rate of clearing by 50 per cent (admittedly after nearly a year of panic

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clearing), following the proclamation of the Act in September 2000 (Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Queensland 2003: 5). As depicted in Figure 1, clearing averaged around 500,000 hectares a year until the 2003 moratorium, before commencing a sharp four-year decline. While the present study ran up to the end of 2006, when BSLC of remnant vegetation was banned, clearing was to fall under successive policies of the Beattie and Bligh governments to a historic low of 78,000 hectares in 2009–10 (Taylor 2015: 11). Since 1997, public policy interventions to curb the environmental impacts of BSLC have raised economic, social and political concerns, including property rights implications for freehold landholders, agricultural employment impacts and poten- tial implications for food security and international trade (for example, Australian beef exports). Although these public policy interventions have had direct impacts on one socio-economic sector in particular — namely pastoralists — the issue of BSLC in Queensland has been characterised by political conﬂict and competition for media attention among various state-based, national and even international stakeholders based in Australia, including scientists, environmentalists, primary in- dustries organisations and politicians. Nevertheless, Norton (2013: 59) describes the implementation of the Beattie government’s 2004 state election promise to phase out broad-scale clearing of remnant native vegetation by December 2006 as ‘perhaps the most important environmental policy achievement of state Labor governments’.

News media and the policy process The study was based on some assumptions about the importance of news media in the policy process in Western democracies. From media and policy studies literature, descriptive and normative models of the relationship between media and the policy process were identiﬁed, including lists of important functions of the media in the policy process (Christians et al. 2009;Fico1984; Fisher 1991; Lambeth 1978). It was generally accepted that

the news rarely focuses on an issue over a sustained period of time, and thus generates only spotlights of attention that hardly leave any traces in the memory of the audience [while] . . . the policy agenda develops over long time spans, often involving several legislative terms. (Voltmer and Koch-Baumgarten 2010:2)

From the literature of environmental communication studies, it is noted that research in the social constructionist tradition has been characterised by an emphasis on ‘claims-making’ in public arenas as the constitutive component in the creation of environmental issues as ‘social problems’ (Hansen 2015: 28). From the literature of policy process theory, it is accepted that ‘the differentia- tion between agenda-setting, policy formulation, decision making, implementation, and evaluation (eventually leading to termination) has become the convenient and conventional way to describe the chronology of a policy process’ (Jann and Wegrich 2007: 43, italics in original). Further, it is noted that ‘the typical view of media is that they matter in the early stages of the policy process — that media can help to set an agenda, which is then adopted and dealt with by politicians, policy-makers, and other actors’ (Soroka et al. 2012: 204). However, it is also noted that ‘the accumulated literature [on policy agenda-setting] suggests an important (and often

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independent) role for media in determining which issues are important, and when — for the public, and for policy-makers as well’ (Soroka et al. 2012: 204–6). Like previous policy studies based on media content analysis (Earle 1986; Howland, Becker and Prelli 2006; Rose and Baumgartner 2013), this study proceeded from the presumption that public policy discourse would be well represented in mass media news reports.

Research design It was considered that the question of which sources made what kinds of evidence- based arguments about BSLC policy in Queensland newspaper reports in the period under review called for a descriptive (Neuendorf 2002: 53) and quantitative approach, rather than a more qualitative method such as discourse analysis (DA). The advice that DA ought ‘not to be used as a method of analysis detached from its theoretical and methodological foundations’, including ‘philosophical (ontological and epistemological) premises regarding the role of language in the social construction of the world’ (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002: 3–4) reduced the appeal of DA as an approach. Instead, the research design employed for the study was derived primarily from two policy-oriented news content analysis systems: one developed by How- land, Becker and Prelli (2006) and another by Shanahan and colleagues (2008). Both systems combine quantitative and qualitative research design elements, and the elements borrowed from each complement one another. The Howland, Becker and Prelli (2006: 206) model, based initially on Lasswell’s (1971) policy sciences conceptual framework, was designed to assist ‘the description of trends in social and decision processes surrounding a policy’. Following the Howland, Becker and Prelli (2006: 211–13) model, the main unit of observation and analysis for the study was the policy argument, which was defined as comprising both a claim and data (i.e. a statement supported by evidence or information from an accountable source). Four research questions (RQs) about policy arguments made in the press regarding BSLC policy in Queensland during the period 1998– 2006 were addressed by the content analysis: r RQ1: What proportion of arguments was supportive of, or opposed to, the policy goal of maximum immediate reduction of native vegetation clearing? r RQ2: In what proportion were the arguments: international or domestic; and economic, natural (environmental), political,orsocial in nature? r RQ3: What was the relevance of the arguments to one or more of five criteria of effective policy making (namely: the establishment of an accurate definition of the problem; the proposition of a policy solution appropriate to the defined problem; the acquisition of necessary support for the policy; the technical feasibility of the proposed policy; and the establishment of accountability for carrying out the solution)? r RQ4: What stakeholder groups were the main sources of the arguments?

The first question assumed that an evidence-based claim about a policy goal could be categorised as either for or against it. In order to sharpen the point of division between opinions either way, a decision was made to define the policy goal as maximum immediate conservation. The five elements of the third question related

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broadly to the policy process (Howland, Becker and Prelli 2006: 291). A practical interpretation of these policy issue criteria is that they indicate what policy stakeholders — the sources of policy arguments — perceived the current location of the debate to be in relation to theoretical stages of the policy process at any point in time.

Newspapers analysed Reporting of the BSLC issue was analysed from the two newspapers, the Courier- Mail (CM), a Brisbane daily, and Queensland Country Life (QCL), a rural sector weekly. CM is a News Corp (formerly News Limited) publication. During the period June 2002 to June 2007, its weekday circulation varied between 211,200 and 221,000 copies and the Saturday circulation between 316,600 and 346,400 copies (Herman 2007: 14–15). In March 2006, CM transitioned from broadsheet to tabloid format. By the ﬁrst quarter of 2012, Monday to Friday circulation was around 187,800 and Saturday circulation around 255,500 (Dyer 2012). Prior to 2007, QCL was owned by Rural Press Limited. In May 2007, Rural Press merged with Fairfax Media. Based on three QCL readership surveys, a 2011– 12 Fairfax media kit for the publication notes that the newspaper at that time had an audited paid circulation of 33,725 copies per week; that it was distributed every Thursday throughout Queensland, the Northern Territory and northern NSW; and that it was read every week by 90 per cent of Queensland’s broad-acre farmers and 93 per cent of beef producers managing at least 400 head of cattle (Fairfax Media 2011: 4). Further, the media kit states that the average age of property owners or managers reading QCL is 51 years, with 42 per cent having some tertiary, college or university education, and that the average size of readers’ properties is 3507 hectares.

Procedure In July 2014, digitally archived CM articles containing the search terms (‘native vegetation’, ‘vegetation management’, ‘land cover’, and ‘tree-clearing’ or ‘land- clearing’) were accessed via the Factiva database in a search with a range of dates from 1 January 1998 to 31 December 2006. The search produced a collection of 1,045 CM articles, which were reviewed for relevance. Duplicated content, reports from other states that did not deal substantially with BSLC policy in Queensland and letters to the editor were eliminated (in the latter case, for not consistently or thoroughly representing a stakeholder position or not containing adequately sourced or veriﬁable data). A total of 408 CM articles were selected based on relevance, including feature articles and opinion columns. Also in July 2014, digitally archived QCL articles containing the same search terms were accessed via the QCL website (news archive section). The search produced 1,158 results, the earliest of which was dated 6 October 1999. Articles published prior to September 1999 and content for eight months found to be missing from the QCL online archive, were sourced from microform, and scans of articles and editorials saved. This collection of articles was reviewed for relevance, and the same categories of items removed from the CM sample were eliminated. For the period 1 January 1998 to 31 De- cember 2006, a total of 386 QCL articles (from both microform and the digital archive) were selected based on relevance.

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The decision to include opinion pieces in the content sample was based on the observation that key actors in the BSLC debate were occasionally invited to con- tribute such content during the period under review, and that those pieces included evidence-based arguments. For example, columns from the federal Environment Minister, the Queensland premier, Queensland senators, presidents of AgForce, the coordinator of the Queensland Conservation Council and academics were clearly informative contributions to the debate. In the case of the QCL’s archived content, occasional ‘analysis’ pieces on BSLC by a senior journalist were included. Editori- als were excluded from the content sample, as frequently quoting from rather than initiating claims or introducing data. The samples of 386 relevant QCL articles and 408 relevant CM articles were then assessed for the presence of claims and evidence. After examination of the 386 relevant QCL articles, 76 were coded for claims supported by evidence and for the sources associated with those claims. Similarly, upon examination of the 408 relevant CM articles, 118 were coded for claims supported by evidence and the sources associated with the claims. Basic coding was done using QSR NVivo 10 qualitative analysis software. More detailed coding by means of annotation of PDF copies of articles was done using Adobe Acrobat Pro. All coding was recorded in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The main coding challenges were deciding whether each claim was supported by evidence and deciding the rhetorical substance category into which to place each argument – economic, natural (environmental), political or social. Regarding the former, a useful guide from the literature of persuasive communication was McCroskey’s (1969: 170) deﬁnition of evidence as ‘factual statements originating from a source other than the speaker, objects not created by the speaker, and opinions of persons other than the speaker that are offered in support of the speaker’s claims’. Following Howland, Becker and Prelli (2006: 211–13), once the statements to be coded were selected, the rhetorical direction of arguments (either for or against) was coded with the letter ‘F’ or ‘A’. In the next step, the rhetorical substance of arguments was coded, so that the second code letter assigned to each argument was ‘E’ for economic,‘N’fornatural (environmental), ‘P’ for political or ‘S’ for social and the third code letter assigned to each argument was either ‘T’ for transboundary (for those that were international in scope) or ‘L’ for local (for domestic-focused arguments). The following sixteen code combinations for direction and substance were therefore available. The eight for codes were: FEL, FET, FPL, FPT, FSL, FST, FNL and FNT. The eight against codes were: AEL, AET, APL, APT, ASL, AST, ANL and ANT. While some arguments were coded more than once for direction and substance, the same code was not used more than once per article. As an example of an argument coded as against economic, following the release of an Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) report on compensation for landholders, AgForce claimed that ‘farmers collectively stood to lose millions’ (Ryan 2000). An example of a for natural (environmental) argument was provided by a spokesperson for the Queensland Conservation Council in response to the release of satellite data and an ABARE farm survey on land- clearing, to the effect that failure to introduce strict BSLC controls would make ‘a mockery of Australia’s efforts to meet its international obligations on greenhouse gas emissions’ (Ryan 1999a). A statement coded as for political was made after

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the release of the first Queensland State of the Environment report in 1999, when a Greens Party spokesperson predicted ‘trouble’ if the government failed to introduce BSLC controls in response to the report (Ryan 1999b). An argument made by a Landcare project officer that was coded against social asserted that, based on the experience of her Landcare group, the state government would risk losing the goodwill of farmers if BSLC legislation was ‘heavy-handed’ (McKenna et al. 1999). The fact that a claim could be coded twice enabled the complexity of some arguments to be represented in the coding. For example, in response to the federal Environment Minister’s announcement in 2005 that Australia’s GHGE had been cut by 4 per cent in five years, the National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) president pointed out that farmers had footed ‘a significant portion of the bill for delivering this outcome’, going on to argue for an ‘Intergovernmental Agreement on land resource security’ through the Council of Australian Governments (Fairfax Staff Writer 2005). So the same data supported both a for environmental claim by the federal minister and an against political claim from the NFF president. The main international dimensions to the BSLC public policy debate in Queens- land were Australia’s notional Kyoto Treaty commitments and the comparison of Queensland’s rate of clearing with other nations. Other international issues raised included biodiversity (a global ecological value) and agricultural exports. Following the Howland, Becker and Prelli (2006: 213–18) model, each coded policy argument was then further coded according to ‘which of five criteria of effective policy making [were] put at issue’, with more than one policy issue criteria code allowed to be assigned to a single argument. The policy issue criteria (PIC) outlined in Research Question 3 were coded as PIC1, PIC2, PIC3, PIC4 and PIC5, with more than one PIC category able to be coded for each argument. Rather than following the Howland, Becker and Prelli (2006) approach for coding sources of policy arguments, it was decided to adopt a detailed categorisation of sources from Shanahan and colleagues (2008: 122–6). This system incorporates the following categories: interest group; elected official or judge; government agency; science; and individual or business. According to the scheme, each source is also identified as representing either a state or national interest. Further, where environmental issues are addressed by scientific sources in articles, the Shanahan and colleagues (2008) coding method distinguishes between conservation science and technology-based science. As the authors explain: conservation science is characterized by natural management, habitat and ecosys- tem protection, and biodiversity; technical fix centered science is characterized by management of the environment through technological innovation and the productive capacity of natural resources (Shanahan et al. 2008: 121–31). Following Shanahan and colleagues (2008: 134), source types associated with arguments were coded once for each article in the case study. The codes used for sources were: IGQ (Interest Group Queensland), IGN (Interest Group National), OJQ (Elected Official or Judge Queensland), OJN (Elected Official or Judge National), GAQ (Government Agency Queensland), GAN (Government Agency National), SCQ (Science Conservation Queensland), SCN (Science Conservation National), STQ (Science Technical Queensland), STN (Science Technical National), IBQ (In- dividual or Business Queensland), and IBN (Individual or Business National). An- other category, IGI (Interest Group International), was also included to encompass

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contributions from international interest groups to the debate in Queensland, even if the spokespeople were based in Australia. Unless clearly identiﬁed as members of a national panel or committee, ‘conservation’ and ‘technical’ scientists based in Queensland were categorised, respectively, as SCQ or STQ; and ‘conservation’ and ‘technical’ scientists based in other states were categorised, respectively, as SCN or STN. One option considered for the study was to break the count for source type coding into fractions, so that total for each article would equal one. This option was only taken in the case of one article, in which the identity of a source was not revealed, but it could be inferred that the source type was from one of two categories. A half-count for each source type was coded in that case. For media content analysis research, a measure of intercoder reliability is important to provide basic validation of a coding scheme — in other words, ‘that the coding scheme is not limited to use by only one individual’ (Neuendorf 2002: 142, emphasis in original). However, as this study employed a coding scheme derived directly from two schemes previously developed and tested by other researchers (Howland, Becker and Prelli, 2006; Shanahan et al. 2008), it was considered a reasonable expectation that the coding scheme would not be limited to use by only one individual.

Results In terms of RQ1 (proportion of arguments for or against maximum immediate reduction of clearing), there was a substantial difference between the arguments made in QCL and those made in CM during the period surveyed. Within the QCL coverage, the total number of coded arguments in the 1998–2006 period was 88, with 61 (69.3 per cent) against, and 27 (30.7 per cent) for the policy goal of maximum immediate reduction of native vegetation clearing. Within the CM coverage, the total number of coded arguments was 139, with 114 (82 per cent) for, and 25 (18 per cent) against maximum immediate conservation. In relation to RQ2 (proportion of arguments, international/ domestic/ economic/ environmental/ political/ social) in the QCL coverage, political arguments against maximum immediate conservation were predominant (29.5 per cent of 88 coded arguments), followed by economic arguments against (27.3 per cent). In terms of natural (environmental) arguments, the appearance of a balanced debate was presented, albeit with more arguments for (19.3 per cent) than against (11.4 per cent). Comparatively few economic and political arguments were presented for further regulation (both 5.7 per cent). Arguments coded across all categories were overwhelmingly local (domestic), with only one transboundary (international) argument (for natural) coded. Figure 2 depicts total coding results for arguments for and against made in QCL by category and by year. In the CM coverage, arguments were predominantly for maximum immediate conservation on political grounds (43.2 per cent of 139 coded arguments), followed by for natural (environmental) arguments (28.8 per cent) and for economic (10.1 per cent). The case against received less attention, with political (7.2 per cent), natural (environmental) (5.7 per cent) and economic (4.3 per cent) lines of argument put forward. Again, arguments coded across all categories were overwhelmingly

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Figure 2 Coding for claims ‘for’ and ‘against’ by category and by year, QCL, 1998–2006.

Figure 3 Coding for claims ‘for’ and ‘against’ by category and by year, CM, 1998–2006.

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Figure 4 Coding for claims ‘for’ and ‘against’ by policy issue criteria categories (PIC1–PIC5), QCL, 1998–2006.

domestic. Figure 3 depicts total coding results for arguments for and against made in CM by category and by year. For RQ3 (relevance of arguments to policy-making criteria — definition of problem/proposition of a policy solution/acquisition of support for policy/technical feasibility/accountability for carrying out the solution), the clearest finding from the results for QCL was that arguments in the two largest categories (against political and against economic) were concerned predominantly with the technical feasibility of the policy of the day. Figure 4 depicts coding of arguments for and against made in QCL by policy issue criteria (PIC) category. In this figure, policy issue criteria categories from PIC1 through to PIC5 are labelled, respectively, ‘Problem’, ‘Policy’, ‘Support’, ‘Feasibility’ and ‘Accountability’, reflecting the central concerns of arguments in these categories. The clearest finding from the results for CM was the fact that most of the arguments made in the largest category (for political) were concerned with establishment of accountability for carrying out the solution to the problem. The category for political was the only CM category where a trend in the results for coding of arguments clearly reflected conventional policy process stages, as outlined by Jann and Wegrich (2007). Figure 5 depicts coding of arguments for and against made in CM by policy issue criteria (PIC) category. Again, categories from PIC1 through to PIC5 are labelled, respectively, ‘Problem’, ‘Policy’, ‘Support’, ‘Feasibility’ and ‘Accountability’, reflecting the central concern of the arguments. For RQ4 (What stakeholder groups were main sources of arguments?) the most significant finding in terms of sources of arguments in the QCL coverage was

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Figure 5 Coding for claims ‘for’ and ‘against’ by policy issue criteria categories (PIC1-PIC5), CM, 1998–2006.

that 25 per cent of the 88 coded arguments were arguments against maximum immediate conservation from state-based interest groups, and that most of these were against economic. State politicians made the most against political arguments. The majority of these arguments against were concerned with technical feasibility of the policy goal. Figure 6 depicts coding for claims made in QCL for and against for each source type group. In the CM coverage, the most signiﬁcant ﬁndings in terms of sources of arguments were that 23 per cent of 139 coded arguments were arguments for, from state politicians; 18 per cent were for, from state-based interest groups; and 15.8 per cent were for, from national interest groups. State and federal politicians and state and national interest groups made most of the arguments in the category for political. Figure 7 depicts coding for claims made in CM for and against for each source type group.

Discussion of results In relation to the policy goal of maximum immediate reduction of native vegetation clearing, there was a substantial difference between the arguments made in QCL (69.3 per cent against and 30.7 per cent for), and those made in CM (82 per cent for, and 18 per cent against). This is a signiﬁcant result amenable to interpretation. Perhaps the most obvious explanation lies in the fact that QCL is a ‘specialist agricultural media outlet’ (Fairfax Media 2011: 4) and CM is a

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Figure 6 Coding for claims ‘for’ and ‘against’ by category and source type, QCL, 1998–2006.

Figure 7 Coding for claims ‘for’ and ‘against’ by category and source type, CM, 1998–2006.

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generalist metropolitan media outlet. Both newspapers have different purposes for their respectively different markets. Signiﬁcantly, in a speech given at the 2006 Property Rights Australia (PRA) annual general meeting (AGM) and conference, a journalist who was responsible for much of the QCL reporting on BSLC reﬂected on QCL’s role in the debate, noting that:

The Greens and even members of the State Labor government used QCL’s reports to accuse it of bias and label the paper a branch of the National Party. Unfor- tunately, we became viewed by some as a player in a political battle instead of as an independent media [sic]. It seemed to me that government perception of our alleged political position became more important than the facts we presented. (Queensland Country Life 2006) Only evidence-based claims were analysed in the study. So if the differences, in terms of rhetorical direction, between the reporting of arguments in CM and QCL articles on BSLC in the period reviewed were due to bias, then the inclusion of evidence-based claims in reports is apparently no guarantee against bias The overwhelming preponderance of for political arguments in the CM coverage, followed by for natural (environmental) and for economic arguments, was not unexpected, considering CM’s overwhelmingly metropolitan readership. The fact that against political and against economic arguments opposed to the policy dominated the QCL coverage was also not unexpected, considering QCL’s rural industry readership. CM had an urban constituency able to embrace nature conservation arguments, without the pecuniary, business, or lifestyle commitments that QCL readers faced to limit such support. However, the extent of the difference between these results for rhetorical direction coding is remarkable. In terms of natural (environmental) arguments, the fact that the appearance of a balanced debate was presented in QCL, but not in CM, was possibly either an indicator of ‘false balance’ in QCL (i.e. ‘the journalistic practice of giving equal weight to both sides of a story, regardless of an established truth on one side’) (Sullivan 2012), or an indicator that CM journalists obtained less routine access to, or had less interest in, sources making environmental arguments in opposition to a ban on BSLC. However, coding results for sources were mixed in the environmental categories for natural and against natural. In this respect, the environmental debate in QCL did not particularly indicate polarised opinion among scientists. In turn, this would suggest that it was by no means a ‘textbook’ case of false balance favouring ‘maverick’ scientists (Boykoff 2011; Boykoff and Boykoff 2004; Dearing 1995). It was perhaps a show of somewhat more than nominal commitment to a pluralistic approach, admitting diverse views — at least in relation to environmental aspects of BSLC policy. It is also worth noting that although News Corp publications have acquired a signal reputation for privileging so-called ‘climate change scepticism’ in their coverage (McKnight 2010), and although a key motivation for regulating tree- clearing in Queensland was reducing GHGE, the research presented here did not ﬁnd that climate scepticism affected the treatment of the BSLC in Queensland by the CM. Coding for the ﬁve policy issue criteria (PIC) developed by Howland, Becker and Prelli (2006) added another level of detail to the data produced. Data for each

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argument were progressively refined through coding: from a simple measure of rhetorical direction — that is, either for or against — to an indicator of rhetorical substance — that is, whether economic, natural (environmental), political or social — to an indicator of which of five ‘criteria of effective policy making’ were involved in the arguments (Howland, Becker and Prelli, 2006: 213). The only clear reflection of conventional policy process stages to emerge from the PIC coding was in the fact that arguments about problem definition disappeared from the BSLC debate after certain points in time in both the for political category for CM, and the against political category for QCL. While these results were clear in the period analysed, it was nevertheless possible that key stakeholders making political arguments could return to problem definition concerns at a later date. Among for political arguments in CM, a rapid progression away from PIC1 (problem definition) arguments to concerns associated with later stages in the policy process took place in the lead-up to the enactment of the VMA in 2000. In other words, sources making political arguments in favour of maximum immediate tree conservation in CM determined that the debate had progressed from the problem definition stage once the VMA was passed. Indeed, within the for political category for CM, the largest single PIC category coded was PIC5 (establishment of accountability for carrying out the solution to the problem), with a large spike in these arguments appearing in 2000. The same trend of movement away from PIC1 (problem definition) arguments, particularly towards PIC4 (technical feasibility arguments), was reflected in the against political category in QCL, although the turning point came two years later (in the lead-up to the enactment of the Natural Resources and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2003) than the equivalent turning point in CM. Clearly, hostile critique of BSLC regulation was accommodated in QCL in the period under review. The fact that the majority of both against economic and against political arguments coded were concerned with technical feasibility, while a tiny fraction of arguments in those categories were concerned with an accurate definition of the problem, would be consistent with a view that the readership of QCL, being dominated by pastoralists, might have had little time for analytical discussions of the definition of the BSLC problem. The results for the for natural (environmental) arguments in both CM and QCL showed quite a different trend, whereby establishment of an accurate definition of the problem was the primary concern, and establishment of accountability for carrying out the solution to the problem was the lowest priority. In CM,PIC1(problem definition) arguments were made in the for natural (environmental) category throughout the period up until January 2005. On the other hand, results show that PIC4 (technical feasibility) arguments were the main concern in the against natural (environmental) category in CM, particularly between 2001 and 2005. In this study, the overall results for coding of arguments by source type were unremarkable. For instance, it was not surprising that OJQ (Officials or Judges, Queensland) sources dominated the debate in CM, followed in decreasing order of influence by IGQ (Interest Groups, Queensland) sources, IGN (Interest Groups, National) sources, and OJN (Officials or Judges, National) sources. Neither was it surprising that IGQ sources dominated the debate in QCL, followed in decreasing order of influence by OJQ sources, OJN sources and IGN sources. These findings reflect the identity of CM and QCL as, respectively, an outlet set up for general

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coverage of news for a wide audience, and a far more specialised outlet oriented towards the interests of pastoralists and rural communities. The domination of debate by official sources also reflects the fact that ‘one of the best documented findings in news research is that journalists rely heavily on governmental sources’ (Miller and Riechert 2003: 51; see also Bennett 1990; Jones and Wolfe 2010). The reliance of journalists on interest group sources was also to be expected (Cooper, Nownes and Johnson 2007: 50). The results of the analysis indicate that, at least for the largest category of arguments (against economic)intheQCL coverage of the BSLC debate, IGQ sources were the most important for journalists. Again, this departure from the pattern of source coding for the largest argument category (for political)inCM may be explained by the rural industry economic base of QCL. Whereas the QCL journalist who reflected on the BSLC debate at the 2006 PRA AGM claimed that the paper had been labelled a branch of the National Party by its detractors (Queensland Country Life 2006), the results of this study suggest that, collectively, the rural industry groups, the Queensland Farmers Federation, AgForce, the Queensland Canegrowers Organisation and the PRA were more influ- ential in QCL’s reporting of against economic arguments than the National Party. The political interests of those organisations would, of course, overlap consider- ably with those of the Queensland National Party (which merged into the Liberal National Party in 2008) (Fairfax Staff Writer 1998; McCosker 1998). In terms of opposition to the government’s policy, findings from the QCL content provide a clear picture of when and where the main players directed their rhetorical efforts in relation to the policy process. For instance, state politicians made the most against political arguments; and most arguments in QCL in both the against economic and against political categories were made after 2002 and were preoccupied with the technical feasibility of BSLC regulation.

Conclusion The data produced in this study highlight which sources made evidence-based claims about BSLC policy for the consideration of readers of two Queensland newspapers in the period 1998–2006. As for the effect of those policy arguments, links can be demonstrated between evidence-based claims made in the media and the progressive development of government policy over time. Since BSLC in Queensland is a live issue at the time of writing, it is likely that audience research based on current media coverage of the issue will be feasible for some time to come, and this study might be of some assistance in the design of such research. The Howland, Becker and Prelli (2006) coding system employed in this study, augmented by the source coding categories developed by Shanahan and colleagues (2008), proved to be rigorous, if labour-intensive and time-consuming. The focus of the content analysis on the rhetorical direction, rhetorical substance, policy issue criteria and sources of arguments resulted in a rather detailed evidence base, from which the most significant findings have been outlined. The strategic definition of argument employed, whereby only arguments supported by data were coded, also generated (as a by-product) a good collection of evidence as presented by stakeholders in support of claims attributed to them in the public policy debate over BSLC.

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This study also supports observations that some participants in a contest over new policy may dispute the validity of: (1) definitions of a problem; (2) proposed policy solutions; (3) matters of detail or technical application; or (4) the enactment and implementation of legislation. Such intransigence appears to reflect, as an aspect of political ‘reality’, an expectation on the part of some stakeholders that the policy process (or cycle) may always be recommenced at some stage. As Gruszczynski and Michaels (2012: 359) find, ‘elites who have been unsuccessful in achieving their policy aims continue to advocate for their preferred outcomes by altering their framing strategies’. Amendments to the VMA following the historic low level of clearing in 2009–10 reflect a persistence of contestation, differences of opinion and shifts in the balance of political forces over time. The success or failure of attempts to wind the policy clock back may depend on many factors, including changes in public awareness and public opinion about an issue over time and/or collective (or public, or social) memory (Park 2006: 229– 32; Zelizer 2014: 42–6). For instance, the fact that a large repository of collective memory dating back to 1999 (in the form of hundreds of news articles on various rural issues — including BSLC in Queensland — that previously were available via the QCL online news archive) was recently removed from online public access may have implications for future retrogressive clock-winding attempts in public policy.

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