Boats, votes and political discourse : anti-asylum seeker sentiment in the 2013 Federal Election

Abstract

A tough approach to asylum seekers has been a feature of Australia federal election campaigns over the last decade and a half, with commentators claiming this is a key issue in marginal electorates. However, the extent to which anti-asylum seeker talk is successful in garnering votes remains unclear. The overarching aim of this project was to explore both the use and impact of anti-asylum seeker sentiment in the 2013 Federal Election campaign by analysing political discourse, public opinion, and the voting behaviour of western Sydney constituents. Within a broad critical approach to discourse, this research examined the use of political power, through language, to not only shift accepted notions of anti-asylum seeker sentiment in the public sphere, but to also generate electoral outcomes. The emergence of anti-refugee and asylum seeker sentiment in Australian political discourse was first chronicled, from Federation to 2013; close attention was paid to how this discourse has evolved throughout Australia's history, in response to various international and national events, and how this discourse functioned in the context of election campaigns. Having set the context for the 2013 Federal Election, a political discourse analysis of election campaign materials used in the 2013 campaign, by both the Liberal and Labor parties, was conducted. Thirty-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with voters from four western Sydney electorates in New South Wales: Lindsay, Greenway, Parramatta, and Chifley. The intertextualities between these two data sets were examined, exploring the dialectical nature of political discourse. A questionnaire with 400 voters from the same electorates in western Sydney was also conducted. Thematic analysis of the interview data and statistical analysis of the questionnaire data helped reveal the role the asylum seeker issue played in the voting decision of western Sydney constituents in the 2013 election. This project made three key contributions to our understanding of asylum seeker politics in Australia. Firstly, it was revealed that while the last 17 years, in Australia, represents a time of increasingly negative attitudes and punitive exclusionary legislation, much of the refrain about the unprecedented challenges of refugees and asylum seekers entered the public and political vernacular decades earlier. Concerns about fairness, criminality, assimilation, and security were first voiced in the 1930s and 40s regarding Jewish refugees and have re-emerged whenever Australia has been faced with the 'problem' of humanitarian entrants or 'irregular arrivals'. Similarly, anxieties over Australia's sovereignty and control have long dictated the government's response to 'boat people' and refugees, to the point where the Australian government had a hand in watering down international refugee agreements, seeking to prioritise the rights of nations over refugees. Throughout Australia's history these discourses have merely been reshaped and adapted to better suit the political agenda of leading politicians at the time. The second contribution of this project pertains to the use of anti-asylum seeker talk in the 2013 federal election. The prominence of asylum seeker issues in the 2013 campaign demonstrated the enduring importance of agenda-setting and issue ownership: The Liberal party sought to emphasise not only the asylum seeker issue in their campaign but also their reputation of having handled this issue well in the past. Political leaders then used various strategies to construct asylum seekers as a threat to national security and identity and to position asylum seeker issues as a proxy for other political issues (i.e. economic management). The framing of asylum seeker issues at a national political level was found to have significant local impacts; the language used by voters to discuss asylum issues mirrored that used by politicians. Interview data reveal that intolerance towards asylum seekers is conflated with peoples' economic struggles. People are unable to separate the challenges they have endured regarding accessing public housing or affordable childcare, for example, from the arrival of asylum seekers. Political leaders have both generated and capitalised on these feelings of deprivation at the hand of the 'asylum seeker'. Finally, this study provided insight into the impact of anti-asylum seeker talk on the voting behaviour of Australians. While the quantitative results of this research (and others; for e.g. Carson, Dufresne, & Martin, 2016; McAllister, 2003a) support the assumption that 'stopping the boats' is a 'vote winner', the qualitative findings complicate this assertion. The survey data suggests that the salience of asylum seeker issues in the 2013 election, combined with largely negative public attitudes, favoured the winning Liberal party. However, findings generated from interview data reveal that Labor partisans rarely defect to the Liberal party on the asylum seeker issue alone; rather, Labor supporters are largely disillusioned with their party as a whole. This disillusionment is predominantly an outcome of Rudd and Gillard's tumultuous six-years of leadership (2007-2013), combined with the Coalition's relentless efforts to ensure the Labor party's disorder was at the forefront of voter's minds on polling day. Further, many of these voters were largely indifferent to the plight of asylum seekers, they simply did not care enough about this issue in order to it influence their voting decision. The current characterisation of the asylum seeker issue as a 'vote winner' fails to identify the complicated nuances in the voting behaviour and attitudes of western Sydney constituents. This research highlights the need for political scientists to enhance their engagement with qualitative methods to generate a more nuanced understanding of voting behaviour.

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English