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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Media dynamics and policy intractability
This book explores the complex, dynamic and interactive relationship between news media and the uneven and politically sensitive bureaucratic field of Australian Indigenous affairs policy. It reveals how news discourses are constructed, formulated and synthesised into the policy realm. Spanning a twenty-year period from 1988 to 2008, it focuses on Indigenous health, bilingual education and the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), when the government sent the army into a number of remote Indigenous communities. We argue that at such key moments, Indigenous policy is played out through the public media, with journalists taking a central role in both constructing and representing Indigenous people and issues as problems to be solved. Media are used strategically in these debates, not only by elites but also by others trying to influence public discussion and policy outcomes.
Indigenous affairs policy is arguably Australia's most 'wicked' or intractable policy field (APSC 2007). According to policy specialists Johns and Sanders (2005: 55; see also Jordan and Bulloch 2010):
Indigenous issues are among the most important, and intractable, facing Australian society. Dealing with Indigenous people is a litmus test of Australian nationhood, by which the larger world will judge us.
Intractable problems should, theoretically, be solvable, but require more time and space than are practical to resolve them. The centrality of the Indigenous policy field to Australian politics, and the sensitive relationship between Indigenous people and the state, means that this field is particularly susceptible to sharp and dramatic policy shifts. It has been described as being beset by bureaucratic 'amnesia' (Pearson 2009). Mickler (1998: 63) points out this is not natural or inevitable. Instead, 'Indigenous affairs' is set as a 'domain-specific' problem related to a problematised Indigenous population (see also Bacchi 2009). It nevertheless has concrete implications. As one of the participants in our study reminded us: 'A policy bureaucracy always wants to be getting it right. I actually think there's a bit of a disease, which is people want to move from one policy to another, there's not enough patience to say well, let's get it right.'
Our focus is on the role played by Australia's news media in this policy intractability. We argue that the complex relationships between the different aspects of media and Indigenous policy are a rarely considered rich and dynamic site of investigation. In this book, we examine how the many facets of media and policy practice interact in a complex interplay of influence that, when carefully teased apart, can help to explain the relationships between media and policy in sensitive social policy domains (Koch-Baumgarten and Voltmer 2010).
We have identified the broad dimensions that characterise this complex set of relationships. The first includes the struggle of Australian governments to acknowledge and respond adequately to the diversity of Australia's Indigenous peoples, places and issues; the nation's history of racism and colonisation; and the broader social, cultural and economic environments within which Indigenous peoples live. The historical legacy of colonialism means that Indigenous Australians have a very public relationship with the state (Meadows 2005; Maddison 2009). Their lives have been more tightly governed and policed by federal and state policy, and communities have been more reliant on government funding and more likely to be engaged with government programmes. The complexity of contemporary Indigenous disadvantage permeates all policy fields and their interrelationships, from health, housing and education to work, welfare and criminal justice (Osborne et al. 2013). Throughout this study, we have tried to remain close to the lived experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who are more affected by government policy than any other group of Australians.
We acknowledge our status as non-Indigenous researchers working with the knowledge and experience of Indigenous people (Smith 2004; Moreton-Robinson 2004). Throughout the research process for this book it became increasingly apparent that Australia's Indigenous affairs bureaucracy, mainstream news media and academia are overwhelmingly raced, 'white spaces'. We have not systematically identified every white or non-Indigenous bureaucrat or journalist who figures here, but will call out the white, raced nature of these fields throughout the book. We see this book as contributing to our broader programme of research, shining a light on the practices of these non-Indigenous spaces, and working with Indigenous researchers to challenge the colonial mindset and the prevailing discourse of deficit in Indigenous affairs (Fforde et al. 2013).
The policies that govern Australian Indigenous peoples are rooted in the bureaucratic process of colonisation and the complex history of Australian federalism (Sullivan 2011). We acknowledge the terms 'Indigenous issues' and 'Indigenous affairs' are socially constructed categories that cannot be extricated from this complex history (Dudgeon et al. 2010). Administered by state, federal and territory governments, Indigenous affairs policy operated across multiple policy portfolios in the twenty years of our study. Ministers responsible for Indigenous affairs are advised and supported by their public servants in the development of policy options; however, in practice, 'policy' and 'politics' are codependent, and there is no clear process whereby policy is decided in the political realm and handed over to bureaucrats to implement (Colebatch 2002).
The political ideologies brought to government by parties and influential groups also influenced policy direction and the interaction of actors in the policy process. Later in this chapter, and throughout the book, we outline the broad political positions and shifts that have characterised and influenced health and bilingual education policies since 1988.
Australia is a vast continent with many offshore islands. Before the arrival of white colonisers, there were more than 500 clan groups or nations in Australia. According to the 2011 national census, around 3% (670,000) of Australia's 22.3 million population identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. 34.8% of Indigenous people (233,100) lived in major cities; a further 43.8% (295,800) lived in regional Australia; and the remaining 21.4% (51,300) lived in remote Australia or very remote Australia (91,600). In 2011, 11% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people spoke an Indigenous language at home.
As the population figures indicate, remote areas of Australia, including the Northern Territory, are not where most Indigenous people reside. However, governments and media have increasingly focused their attention on disparities in key indicators such as health, education, criminal justice, employment and housing in remote areas (COAG 2011). While this remote focus is not natural or inevitable, it shapes wider understandings that impact on the lived experience of Indigenous people throughout Australia.
Policy is made where governments sit – in state capitals and in the national capital, Canberra. This is also where the nation's news media are headquartered, and where most senior journalists are clustered – in close proximity to their powerful and elite metropolitan sources and their imagined non-Indigenous audiences. Paradoxically, most politicians, senior bureaucrats and journalists only visit remote and regional Indigenous communities and settlements when there is a major policy announcement to be made, or a key event to be attended. Policy and news about much of Indigenous Australia is made and reported at a distance. This results in what McCallum (2013) terms 'intimate and distant conversations', shaped by the logics of the media, policy and Indigenous fields, as well as by geography.
Finally, marginalised people such as Indigenous Australians do not usually have the same access to the halls of power as the well-resourced and connected lobby groups they sometimes encounter, such as mining companies and the pastoral industry. Therefore, the media are often their only avenue to be heard and to weigh in on policy matters that affect them (Voltmer and Koch-Baumgarten 2010). This book provides evidence of Indigenous people (especially those living in 'remote' contexts) being excluded from policy and media discussion, or finding that they are framed in negative ways that make it difficult for them to assert their perspective. However, there is also strong evidence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people using the media to advance their positions in public and policy debate. The firmly held policy positions they advance and defend through media, based in land and culture, can be understood to contribute to the intractability of Indigenous affairs.
Dealing with complexity
There are further layers of complexity that relate to studying the relationship between news and policy. First, it is necessary to examine different levels of discourse and how they circulate, from the broad networks of ideas about Indigenous affairs that define particular policy eras, to the ways in which specific policies are represented in texts and manifested through mediated events. At another level, despite the truism that media wields a powerful influence in policy, it is not a simple task to tease out the elements and directions of influence. Nearly a century of media studies research concludes that demonstrating direct causes and effects of news media content on audiences, or on political or policy responses, is a fraught exercise (e.g. Lazarsfeld et al. 1944; McQuail 1979; McCombs 2004; Scheufele 1999). Attempts to demonstrate the influence of a single news story on public opinion, or the impact of news reporting on a government policy decision, have so far proven elusive (Voltmer and Koch-Baumgarten 2010).
It is important to note from the outset that we are not trying to explain the unidirectional influence of media on policy, but rather the complex interplay between media and policymaking that results in particular policy outcomes. It is therefore important to draw on research that takes a more explanatory approach to understanding these complex relationships. We therefore look beyond studies that attempt to identify the role of news media in setting public agendas (McCombs and Shaw 1972; McCombs 2004), to the small body of research that has examined its role in the framing of policy disputes over time. Another important intervention is to view policymaking as a discursive practice (Schön and Rein 1994; Bacchi 2009). The most notable study is a long-term project by eminent political sociologist William Gamson (1992; Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Gamson and Stuart 1992) that traced media discourse, policy change and local understandings of policy issues such as nuclear energy and health-care reform. Gamson and Modgliani (1989) investigated the role of media discourse in providing news audiences with contested, and shifting, frames about nuclear energy over 40 years, arguing that each policy outcome has been the result of discursive battles played out privately, institutionally and through the public media. In Gamson's view, texts are discursive artefacts that play an important role in the policy discourse, both in terms of control by political and policy elites and the monitoring and reading of media texts by all policy actors. More recently, Maeseele and Schuurman (2010: 90) concluded: 'What news media do is offer a platform or public arena for different ideological positions to confront each other through a framing contest.'
Carol Bacchi (2009) asks, 'What's the policy represented to be?', reminding us that all policy has a discursive basis. This approach takes into account the practices of all actors in the policymaking process, and contrasts with purely textual approaches that value the text above all else, or political economy approaches that are concerned with media industry and ownership issues.
The Media and Indigenous Policy project
The research that underpins the book was conducted for the Media and Indigenous Policy project. The study was born of a desire to better understand the media's role in Indigenous policy development and outcomes, and to critically analyse the factors that characterise Indigenous affairs policymaking in an increasingly media-saturated environment. The chapters that follow explore the nature of at times subtle forms of media power, as well as their impacts on the policymaking process and, ultimately, on the lived experience of Indigenous people. Our central guiding question was: How do the news media impact on the development of Indigenous affairs policy in Australia?
A key aim of our project was to create a new and distinct ecology of knowledge for exploring the news media's role in specific Indigenous policy fields. We recognised at the outset that no single research method had the capacity to fully explore this topic. We therefore developed a project-specific set of research methodologies to explore these key policy moments and policy actor perspectives. We drew on our backgrounds as qualitative media studies researchers and our professional backgrounds in journalism and public affairs to design a multi-method project to address our research questions. The different theoretical lenses and research methods used produced a range of findings.
We were seeking an approach that would offer insights grounded in empirical evidence informed by media history and theory. A number of decisions, explained in more detail throughout this chapter, shaped our research design. First, in order to understand the changing contexts of media and policy, we needed to examine specific policies in their broader historical, political and discursive environments (Bessant et al. 2006). We chose a twenty-year period beginning with the highly symbolic 1988 bicentenary of white occupation and ending with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's 2008 apology for the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their parents. The study period also corresponds with the rise of neo-liberal thinking throughout the English-speaking world (Altman 2010; Peters 2011; Flew 2014). Second, we adopted a policy-specific approach, examining how policies that had a major impact on the everyday lives of Indigenous people developed within specific discursive environments and at particular moments. We focused on two policy domains – Indigenous health and bilingual education – and one major policy announcement – the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response.
Policy domains and moments
A key social indicator programme, Indigenous health is arguably the most intractable of all Indigenous policy issues. Part III of this book examines in close detail the suite of policies that govern the delivery of Indigenous primary health care in Australia, with particular reference to the highly politicised funding and delivery of Indigenous community-controlled health services. We consider the relationship between media and Indigenous health policy across a number of dimensions, and trace the policy history of Indigenous primary health-care delivery from self-determination to paternalism and intervention. We report on a detailed news frame analysis of Indigenous health reporting in three Australian newspapers, focusing on key policy moments and examining the enduring, contested and dominant frames that were used to tell the Indigenous health story. Interviews with health policy bureaucrats provide a third facet, which explains the significance of news media to the development of Indigenous health policy.
First implemented in the 1970s, bilingual education policy in the Northern Territory has undergone a number of shifts in direction, characterised by periodic attempts to abolish these programmes for Indigenous children who start school with language and learning skills in their mother tongues, but rarely in English. We explore the policy through the understandings of Indigenous and other bilingual policy experts and advocates who engaged with the media in their fight to protect bilingual education over the two decades of our study. We also reveal the media–policy relationship in bilingual education through the perspectives of journalists who reported on the policy, and through the words of public servants who oversaw the development, maintenance and dismantling of the policy from 1988 to 2008.
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Excerpted from "The Dynamics of News and Indigenous Policy in Australia"
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