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Government Communication in Australia. Young, Sally. "Government communication in Australia." Government Communication: Cases and challenges. Ed. Karen Sanders and MarÍa JosÉCanel. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 99–114. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 29 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472544629.ch-006>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 29 September 2021, 21:53 UTC. Copyright © Karen Sanders, María José Canel and Contributors 2013. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 6 Government communication in Australia Sally Young ustralia is one of the few countries to have continuously been a democracy Asince the early 1900s and is also one of a comparatively small number of countries (approximately 30 worldwide) to have compulsory voting. Over 94 per cent of registered voters usually turnout at federal elections in Australia (AEC, 2010). And elections are held regularly, on average, every two and a half years at the federal level (where there are no fixed terms and, by convention, the prime minister determines the election date). This means, unusually by international standards, that the vast majority of Australians of voting age make regular assessments of their governments based on the information they receive. Because politics is highly mediated, much of this information comes from media representations. Australians are big media consumers and news is a very popular genre. In 2007, over 80 per cent interviewed for the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes said that catching up with the news was a regular part of their day (Phillips, Tranter, Mitchell, Clark & Reed, 2008). However, not all of this news consumption was about seeking out political news and, as in other mature liberal democracies, media use patterns are changing. Newspaper circulation has declined significantly and television news and current affairs programmes have generally (and, in many cases, quite dramatically) been losing viewers (Young, 2009). At the other end of the spectrum, internet usage is very high in Australia by international standards (Tiffen & Gittins, 2009, pp. 171, 177) and this is impacting upon the way in which Australians access news. Other factors are also altering the media landscape including digitalization, changing leisure patterns, the use of personal video recorders with the ability to timeshift broadcasts and the use 100 GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATION: CASES AND CHALLENGES of portable devices such as ‘smart’ phones and tablet readers (for those able to afford them). In terms of the media-politics environment, Australia has a dedicated portion of Parliament House set aside for the media (the Press Gallery) (see Lloyd, 1988). As a result of this close contact between politicians and journalists, especially in Australia’s national capital, Canberra, critics accuse the Gallery of being prone to ‘capture’ by the politicians they work with (and vice versa). The Gallery has also been criticized for being ‘out of touch’ with citizens and for operating like a ‘club’ where reporters share similar backgrounds and mindsets and engage in a type of ‘group thinking’ (see Simons, 1999). Some Gallery journalists vehemently deny this and point to differences in journalistic styles and opinions as well as the competition that occurs for scoops and exclusives. Other journalists accept there is often homogeneity in topics and output (e.g. Kelly, 2001). Yet others note that, outside of the Gallery, a raft of other commentators, opinion columnists, bloggers and broadcasters also play an important role in communicating politics and government. Australia has a federal system with three tiers of government (federal, state and local) which makes efficient government communication between the levels of government both important and challenging amidst the propensity for dispute, duplication and buck-passing of responsibility which can characterize a federal system. A unique physical landscape and vast geographical distances also pose communication challenges for Australian governments. While most of Australia’s population is concentrated in coastal areas with the majority living in state and territory capital cities, some areas still face unique conditions. To take just one example, the state of Western Australia covers a land mass area of over 2.5 million kilometres making it larger than Alaska and Texas combined and 11 times bigger than the United Kingdom. Australia’s demography is also an important factor in government communication. Australia is culturally diverse. English is Australia’s official language but more than 4 million residents speak a second language and there are more than 200 languages spoken in Australia (Young, 2007a, p. xxv). Although Australia is, by international comparisons, a wealthy country, the resources necessary to participate in political life – including education, time and money – are spread unevenly – as they are in other comparable countries. However, of particular concern in Australia is the level of disadvantage experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (SCRGSP, 2007). Political and media environment Compared to journalists in many other countries around the world, Australian journalists work within a relatively free media environment. There is no explicit GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATION IN AUSTRALIA 101 constitutional protection for freedom of the press but there have rarely been any attempts at overt government censorship of the media in Australia, save for times of war. Significant High Court judgements in the 1990s pointed to an implied right of free political speech in the Australian Constitution (Stone, 2001; Williams, 2002). There is also, by world standards, a high degree of political rights in Australia in relation to electoral processes, political pluralism and civil liberties and a high degree of institutional checks and balances constraining the executive. In the Transparency International (2010) ranking of corruption, Australia was ranked number eight in 2010 as ‘very clean’ of ‘corrupt practices in both the public and private sectors’. In Australia, the most negative effects on the public sphere come not from government oppression nor censorship but rather the ways in which media and governments interact in a system of concentrated media ownership. Australia’s media system combines public and private broadcasting. Its public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), is smaller in relation to national broadcasting than the BBC and some European public broadcasters, but larger than others (such as the United States). The ABC has a very large radio audience, a share of the television audience that has increased in recent years and an important internet presence. It has a reputation for displaying a high degree of journalistic scepticism and critical inquiry. Not surprisingly then, the ABC has been criticized by both progressive and conservative governments but it was particularly criticized by the conservative Howard government (1996–2007) over its reporting of the Iraq War in 2003. The government complained ABC reporting was ‘anti-American’ amid vocal claims by some conservative critics that the ABC exhibited general ‘left-wing’ tendencies (see Young, 2011, pp. 250–1). That era of criticism led to even more detailed editorial policies cementing the ABC as having the most prescribed, monitored and evaluated political coverage of any media organization in Australia. In the commercial sector, Australia has one of the most concentrated media ownership structures of any liberal democracy in the world deriving, at least in part, from its relatively small national market but also from favourable public policy decisions made by various governments that advantaged the largest media players and consolidated their dominance (Chadwick, 1989). A handful of major companies dominate across commercial television, radio, magazines and pay television. Two companies control more than 90 per cent of metropolitan newspaper circulation and one of those – Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited – has 68 per cent of the daily newspaper market and over three quarters of the Sunday newspaper market (Gardiner-Garden & Chowns, 2006; Tiffen, 2010, p. 85). This has an important impact on journalists’ working conditions in Australia but also on the relationships between governments, politicians and other political actors with powerful media owners and their organizations. 102 GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATION: CASES AND CHALLENGES News Limited (part of the global News Corp company) plays a particularly important role in political debate in Australia and its Australian-born owner Rupert Murdoch is a controversial figure wherever he operates. Murdoch’s news outlets have tended to display ‘an intellectual orthodoxy and an ideological uniformity’ (McKnight, 2005, p. 54; see also Greenslade, 2003). When the conservative Liberal-National government determined that Australia would participate as a member of the ‘coalition of the willing’ in Iraq, the Murdoch press was conspicuously supportive. Political scientist Robert Manne (2005, p. 96) argued that between 2002 and 2004, the opponent Labor Party’s policy on Iraq was reported with ‘contempt’ and ‘persistent, harsh and frequently shrill criticism’ in Murdoch’s Australian newspapers. While the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ justification for Iraq and the mismanagement of the post- invasion seriously damaged Labor and Tony Blair in the United
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