The final speaker in this panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference is David Nolan, whose focus is specifically on constructions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the 2025 Australian federal election, in the wake of the Trump administration’s cancelling of DEI programmes in the US. Such interventions were seen as having the potential for a ‘Trump effect’ during the Australian election, too – with attempts by conservative politicians and others to create an ‘anti-woke’ groundswell.
Attacks on DEI programmes tend to misrepresent what such programmes aim to achieve: procedural and distributive justice in organisations and institutions. DEI is not without genuine critique, and can constitute institutional window-dressing and lip-service without true commitment, but such backlash is also arguably a product of both the successes and failures of DEI initiatives.
Far-right advocacy groups have long opposed what they see as ‘woke’ policies, including DEI, and are claiming that we have passed ‘peak woke’ and a broad backlash against such policies has now begun; they position their own agenda as a defence of mainstream, ordinary citizens, but in doing so also align themselves with white supremacist and fascist groups.
This project examined public texts from the July 2024 to June 2025, collecting news content containing specific keywords that represent such discourses. This frequently represented an ‘us vs. them’ dynamic pitting ‘ordinary Australians’ against the ‘woke elite’; they attacked the supposed wastefulness of DEI initiatives (and in doing so mirrored the Trump administration’s rhetoric in the US); focussed especially on racialise narratives opposing Welcomes to Country, positioning Australian national identity as Anglocentric and white, and defending the celebration of Australia Day; pushed discourses of western civilisational collapse as a result of ‘wokeness’; and engaged in gendered and anti-trans narratives.
In the lead-up to the Australian federal election, such ‘anti-woke’, Trump-inspired rhetoric became more prominent, but also provoked a considerable backlash (with Peter Dutton labelled as the ‘Temu Trump’); the importation of such Trumpist rhetoric proved to be an election-losing strategy and revealed that Australian national attitudes had progressed considerably further beyond the positions embraced by conservative politicians. Dutton himself had to backpedal substantially and claim his support for some aspects of these supposedly ‘woke’ policies, such as the Welcome to Country at major events.
We may take heart from this failure, but it should not distract us from the fact that far-right movements are increasingly media-savvy and will continue to push their ‘anti-woke’, racist, sexist, and white supremacist agendas; the 2025 election may constitute a pause on such populist agendas rather than their outright defeat.
