AoIR 2024

Representation? Treaty? Polarisation in News and Social Media Debates about Indigenous Rights in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand

Axel Bruns, Tariq Choucair, Sebastian Svegaard, Laura Vodden, and Daniel Whelan-Shamy

• 31 Oct. 2024 – AoIR 2024 conference, Sheffield

Presentation Slides

Abstract

Introduction and Background

Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand continue to struggle with their respective colonial legacies, especially when it comes to the rights, recognition, and representation of Indigenous peoples. In 2023 and 2024, such controversies were once again reignited in both countries, if in very different contexts; this paper presents a comparative analysis of public debates in each case, paying particular attention to the intersections between social media discussions and news media coverage and the extent and structures of political polarisation which such controversies reveal.

In Australia, the centrist Labor government under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, elected in May 2022, honoured its election-night promise to hold a referendum on the constitutional recognition of Australia’s Indigenous peoples (Morse, 2022). On 14 October 2023, Australians voted on a proposal to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament – a federal body representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and providing advice to parliament on matters that affect Indigenous peoples, which had been proposed in the 2017 Uluṟu Statement from the Heart (National Constitution Convention, 2017). However, in spite of substantial majority support for the constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples in the early stages of the referendum campaign, the referendum lost 40% to 60% and failed to carry a majority in even a single of Australia’s six states. This was due to substantial extent to a highly effective and well-organised No campaign, aided by substantial support for No campaigners in Australia’s conservative media.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the 2023 national election, held by sheer coincidence on the same day as the Australian Voice referendum, eventually resulted – after several weeks of negotiations – in a change of government from the Labour Party to a coalition of the conservative National Party with populist minor parties NZ First and ACT (Neilson et al., 2023). Emerging amongst the key policy priorities for this new coalition (and especially for ACT) was the rolling back of existing policies recognising the rights, culture, and language of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Indigenous Māori minority; this manifested initially in part in the removal of bilingual English / te reo Māori nomenclature from government departments and other offices (McConnell, 2023), and subsequently centred especially on the reduction of special provisions for Māori language, culture, and self-governance derived from the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between British colonial representatives and Māori chiefs. The depth of the division between Māori groups and their supporters on the one hand and the conservative government became especially obvious in the variously frosty and angry reception that the coalition party leaders experienced when they attended and spoke at public ceremonies on the eve of Waitangi Day, Aotearoa New Zealand’s annual national day of commemoration, on 5 Feb. 2024 (McKay, 2024).

Data and Methods

To investigate and analyse the public discourse surrounding these divisive debates about the recognition of Indigenous peoples in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, we gathered data on public debate across a range of mainstream social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram (through CrowdTangle, which covers activity in public groups and pages), Twitter/X (via NodeXL’s scraping service, and subject to the severe limitations that now apply to data gathering from this platform), and YouTube (from the YouTube Data API). In each case, we gathered posts that contained one of a number of relevant keywords relating to either debate – for the Voice to Parliament referendum, from 1 Jan. 2023 to the referendum date of 14 Oct. 2023, and for the Waitangi debate, from the election date of 14 Oct. 2023 (data collection is ongoing, and for the purposes of this paper we will determine an appropriate end date). In addition, we also extracted from these posts any links to external sources (with particular attention to content from news outlets), and similarly examined whether YouTube content appearing in our datasets originated from news sources.

For each of these datasets we performed a mixed-methods analysis including Natural Language Processing (NLP), topic modelling, network mapping, and qualitative close reading steps; we have also explored the potential to use Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to systematically assess the expressed stance of individual social media accounts towards the Voice referendum or Waitangi Treaty, and are currently reviewing the quality and reliability of such assessments. This combination of methods enabled us to identify a number of distinct groups of actors in each case, whose news sourcing and sharing practices we also examined.

Preliminary Findings

Within the space available in this extended abstract we can only sketch out some overall findings, and focus here on the Voice referendum case in Australia. Our analysis here clearly points to a highly asymmetrical contest: over the course of the campaign, the No side was able to very effectively mobilise uncertainty, doubt, and even fear towards the Voice to Parliament proposal (indeed, a deliberate strategy to foment doubt and fear especially amongst comparatively uninformed voters was revealed by media reporting; Sakkal, 2023). This is exemplified by the campaign’s simplistic but highly effective slogan ‘if you don’t know, vote no’. Such efforts were further aided and amplified by a coalition of conservative and far-right politicians and media outlets, with the arch-conservative Sky News Australia assuming an especially prominent position in the discourse network.

Fig. 1: The network of Facebook groups and pages sharing on each other’s content demonstrates the considerably more coherent structure of the No campaign, and the centrality of Sky News Australia as a source of No-aligned content, while the Yes campaign is considerably less organised and has no comparably central campaign or media sources.

The Yes campaign, by contrast, was considerably less coordinated: it enrolled a loose network of Indigenous activists, progressive politicians, union leaders, media and sports celebrities, and progressive activists, but this network lacked a core driver and failed to engage centrist or progressive media as supporters and amplifiers; this is due in part to the considerable market power of conservative media in Australia (led by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which also operates Sky News Australia), but also to the editorial choices of public broadcaster ABC and even the progressive Guardian Australia to favour even-handed fact-checking over active campaigning. Such choices represent a principled journalistic stance that is perfectly defensible, of course, but this mismatch between activist and disinterested journalistic reporting did also mean that public debate in news and social media was able to be dominated by the clearly partisan editorialising of Sky News Australia and other conservative and far-right outlets in support of the No campaign.

Further Analysis and Interpretation

Given the different status quo in Aotearoa New Zealand (where an existing treaty between Indigenous people and colonial society is being undermined), we expect our second case study to exhibit very different patterns of debate, and intend to analyse and highlight these divergences in the full paper. Overall, we will interpret our observations through the lens of polarisation, distinguishing between the various forms of polarisation (issue-based, ideological, affective, interpretive, interactional, …) that have been identified in the relevant literature (cf. Kubin & von Sikorski, 2021; Lelkes, 2016; Marino & Ianelli, 2023; Yarchi et al., 2021), and assessing in particular whether the patterns of polarised discourse and engagement that are evident in our two cases exhibit any of the symptoms of destructive polarisation that Esau et al. (2023) have identified.

Should such symptoms of destructive polarisation be present in our data – and our preliminary analysis of the Voice referendum debate certainly suggests that it exhibits some such symptoms – we will also reflect on how such trends could have been avoided and might yet be reversed. While the Voice to Parliament referendum is lost, the struggle to maintain and safeguard Māori rights continues, and in Australia, too, greater recognition and representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in policy-making remains on the political agenda despite this major setback.

References

Esau, K., Choucair, T., Vilkins, S., Svegaard, S., Bruns, A., O’Connor Farfan, K. & Lubicz, C. (2023, 30 May). Destructive Political Polarization in the Context of Digital Communication – A Critical Literature Review and Conceptual Framework. International Communication Association, Toronto. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/238775/

Kubin, E., & von Sikorski, C. (2021). The Role of (Social) Media in Political Polarization: A Systematic Review. Annals of the International Communication Association, 45(3), 188–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2021.1976070

Lelkes, Y. (2016). Mass Polarization: Manifestations and Measurements. Public Opinion Quarterly, 80(S1), 392–410. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw005

Marino, G., & Iannelli, L. (2023). Seven Years of Studying the Associations between Political Polarization and Problematic Information: a literature review. Frontiers in Sociology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1174161

McConnell, G. (2023, 24 Nov.). Incoming Government to Change Branding to English and Repeal Treaty Clauses. Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/133346834/incoming-government-to-change-branding-to-english-and-repeal-treaty-clauses

McKay, B. (2024, 5 Feb.). Heckles and Boos for NZ Government to ‘Protect Treaty of Waitangi’. Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/heckles-and-boos-for-nz-government-to-protect-treaty-of-waitangi-20240205-p5f2iw.html

Morse, D. (2022, 23 May). Anthony Albanese Promised Action on the Uluru Statement from the Heart. So What Is the Proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament? ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-24/federal-election-anthony-albanese-indigenous-uluru-statement/101092816

National Constitution Convention. (2017). Uluru Statement from the Heart. https://ulurustatemdev.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/UluruStatementfromtheHeartPLAINTEXT.pdf

Neilson, M., Pearse, A., & Cheng, D. (2023, 24 Nov.). Coalition Agreement: National, Act, NZ First and the Deal That Delivers New Government. NZ Herald. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/coalition-agreement-national-act-nz-first-and-the-deal-that-delivers-new-government/4MEDZQBQ7BDK3J3DLG5K5K3HHY/

Sakkal, P. (2023, 12 Sep.). No Campaign’s ‘Fear, Doubt’ Strategy Revealed. Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/no-campaign-s-fear-doubt-strategy-revealed-20230910-p5e3fu.html

Yarchi, M., Baden, C., & Kligler-Vilenchik, N. (2021). Political Polarization on the Digital Sphere: A Cross-platform, Over-time Analysis of Interactional, Positional, and Affective Polarization on Social Media. Political Communication, 38(1–2), 98–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1785067