Comparing the ‘Freedom’ Movement Rhetoric in Aotearoa and Australia during COVID-19

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 was informed by, the overall infodemic of mis- and disinformation surrounding COVID-19; the infodemic was fuelled by distrust of mainstream media, governments, and other information sources, and the alternative and conspiracist sources that this enabled.

The same was true also in Australia, where a strong anti-establishment narrative also emerged; this produced a ‘persecuted hero’ narrative adopted by protest leaders in their ‘heroic’ fight against governmental ‘evils’. Australia saw this in exclusionary discourses directed against lockdowns, not least in the ‘Dictator Dan’ rhetoric in Victoria, which (mis)appropriated language and arguments from more legitimate freedom movements by Indigenous people, racially, ethnically, and religiously marginalised people, and other groups.

The present study compares the dominant discourses in such protests in Australia and Aotearoa, and also against freedom movements in other contexts. It builds on Facebook posts and tweets associated with these protests, and from these larger datasets conducts an in-depth critical discourse and metaphor analysis on a sample drawn from these datasets.

Key themes emerging from the Australian data are an appropriation of social justice terminology; a rejection of mainstream expertise; and a resistance to a ‘new world order’ – and these also overlap with each other in considerable ways. This often takes place in ‘anti-public publics’, draws on war metaphors, and positions activists as persecuted heroes; central to it all is a strong sense of distrust of mainstream authorities and a positioning of these established authorities as standing against ‘the people’.

In Aotearoa, such themes were somewhat different: here, there was a strong theme positioning protesters as ‘defenders of freedom’; a disavowal of government authority; and a sense of citizen disenfranchisement – and again there are considerable overlaps. These themes signal a perceived loss of power by ‘the people’, and of social marginalisation, as well as a wilful ignorance of political processes. This culminates in the sense of such protests as a battle for autonomy.

This means that there are some synergies but also differences between the Australian and Aotearoa protests. A theme of distrust and loss of agency pervades both, social justice rhetoric is misappropriated, and key political figures are targetted – yet the federal structure of Australian government also introduces differences, and the very different histories and status of Indigenous peoples in the two countries also introduces important differences. Both represent a fight for what the protesters see as ‘autonomy’ from perceived government overreach, however.