Government

And we’ll finish the day at I-POLHYS 2024 with my keynote, which builds on the work of my Australian Laureate Fellowship team to review the types of polarisation that have been identified in the literature and develop the concept of destructive polarisation as a particularly concerning stage of polarisation dynamics. Our research proposes five distinct symptoms of destructive polarisation – and in the keynote I reflect on the recent Australian referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament to explore to what extent these five symptoms of destructive polarisation were present in the news and digital media debates in the lead-up …

The final speaker in this session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Alessia Donà, whose focus is on the two parties of the populist radical right in Italy, Lega and Fratelli d’Italia. The populist radical right combines the thin ideology of populism with the thick ideology of nativism and nationalism: where populism often simply distinguishes between in- and out-groups, the radical right builds on xenophobia and positions foreigners as threats to the national identity and nation state, and positions authoritarianism as a solution to the problems of society.

This represents a politics of fear, presenting real or imagined threats that can build …

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Victoria Fielding, whose interest is in reporting roles in climate disasters in Australia. Her focus is on the catastrophic bushfires in 2019/20, and the Lismore floods in 2022, and the way the media did or did not link these to climate change. These natural disasters were extreme, and part of a greater trend towards growing threats from climate change, and as such became part of a highly politicised debate around climate change in Australia.

While there can no longer be any question about the reality of catastrophic climate change, consensus about …

The next session that I’m in at at ANZCA 2023 is on media and climate change, and starts with my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the mainstream media framing of UNESCO’s ‘in danger’ rating for the Great Barrier Reef on the Australian northeast coast.

Mainstream media continue to play a key agenda-setting role on social media platforms, but the way this works differs across social media platforms. Carly collected data from several social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) around the UNESCO ‘in danger’ recommendation in 2021. The recommendation was eventually ignored by the …

And the final paper in this ANZCA 2023 session is by Petra Theunissen, whose focus is on the ‘Sovereign Citizen’ movement in Aotearoa and Australia. This is a non-prosocial activist movement, which believes in the illegitimacy of government institutions and sees itself as subject to laws only as they interpret and consent to them. This morphed from a far-right, white supremacist posse comitatus into a broader movement that now overlaps (but is not the same as) other movements including anti-vaxxers, conspiracists, and other groups.

The key beliefs of this movement are that governments are corrupt and extract taxes illegally, in …

The next speakers in this ANZCA 2023 session are Claire Fitzpatrick and Ashleigh Haw, who extend our focus to a comparative analysis of the ‘freedom’ movements in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. In Aotearoa, the protest was organised by a diverse group of participants without clear leadership, and the atmosphere around the protest declined precipitously as prosocial and family-oriented protests were overwhelmed by some much darker messages calling for the overthrow of the democratically elected government.

This led to increasing radicalisation and violence; the protest became a battleground of warring narratives and bodies. This also formed a part of, and …

The last day at ANZCA 2023 starts for me with a session on ‘freedom’ movements, and we begin with Ciaran Ryan and a paper on the 2022 ‘Convoy to Canberra’. This was a gathering of some 10,000 Australians in Canberra in early February 2022 to protest COVID-19 measures, and was inspired to some extent by the Canadian ‘Freedom Convoy’ to Ottawa, which blocked the city centre. Both convoys were largely organised and promoted through social media.

These events exemplify the use of such media for the organisation of populist protest movements, supported and inflamed by fringe news outlets and enhanced …

The next session at ANZCA 2023 is on journalism and war, and starts with Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen, whose interest is in how to visualise twentyfirst-century state and corporate power. Neglected from a visual perspective is that which is not seen – the invisible systems, structures, and processes of corporate-military power, and the indirect, systemic, or socially abstract invisible warfare in which we are immersed daily, and ineluctably participate on various levels.

Today, this happens at the nexus of global corporatisation, digital information and communication technologies, and modern, AI-driven warfare, and is aided by the global digitisation, corporatisation, datafication, and financialisation of …

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Julie Browning, whose focus is on the role of campaigning media during the October 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. A referendum represents an unusual campaign in that it is polarised by design (the choice is a simple Yes or No), and can cut across party lines (as it did in this case, at least to some extent).

This can be both an advantage and disadvantage, as it can also lead to disorganised campaigning by multiple groups that otherwise have little in common with each other and do not …