Two days before Australians went to the polls in the 2007 federal election, long serving Liberal Party prime minister John Howard took to the stage at the National Press Club in Canberra. He had been on the campaign trail for almost six weeks by the time he faced this room full of journalists in the nation's capital in late November. The Press Club address is one of the staples of modern Australian federal elections, bookending the earlier policy launch speech in which prime ministerial candidates open their party's campaign with an outline of policies, priorities and promises. This was Howard's final major address, at the tail end of a campaign infused with the feeling that a change was in the air. His opponent, Australian Labor Party (ALP) leader Kevin Rudd, had spoken in the same place only the day before, making a case for ‘new leadership’ after Labor's 11 and a half years in the political wilderness. It was Howard's last chance to explain why Australians should return his government for a fifth term.

Australia, the prime minister boasted, was a ‘stronger, prouder and more prosperous nation’ than it had been when he was elected in March 1996. He listed his government's achievements in prosperity and productivity; defence and border security; foreign policy; social security; employment; taxes; and welfare. In all of these, Howard repeatedly emphasized that Australia was ‘a nation transformed’. He then laid claim to a fundamental transformation in Australian culture:

Howard's words are incredibly revealing, significant as much for what they say about the nature of Australian identity as for the transformation they describe.

One of the most powerful ways that campaigning political leaders forge a connection with voters is by talking about Australian identity in positive terms. This is a discursive strategy that pervades political speech beyond election campaigns. It seeks to use explicit discussions of the Australian people and the things they care about as a foundation to allow leaders to align themselves, their parties and their promises with what is imagined as the Australian way of life. This strategy can be incredibly effective, helping citizens feel as though they are part of a community that is valuable and worth protecting, a community within which their dreams for the future and personal ideals will be respected. It seeks to construct for voters a positive story of their own individual identity, and then connect this to an image of Australian identity that aligns their sense of self, if not wholly then in the ways that are seen to matter, with the values and priorities of those around them.

Political leaders who provide positive articulations of individual and collective Australian identity do so with a keen partisan eye, ensuring that they develop for themselves a political persona aligned with these articulations. If a party leader can claim what they present as the positive story of Australian values for their side of politics, using the Labor or Liberal tradition as a standing for national history more broadly, then they can cast themselves both as personifying these values and as their staunchest defender. While this discursive strategy runs throughout Australian political history, some leaders have worked explicitly in their campaign speeches, interviews, debates and press conferences to bring Australian values to life. Through mythologized descriptions of the national character, historical re imagining and storytelling, and personal anecdotes, they have used this discourse to pledge to govern in the spirit of the carefully constructed Australian way of life that these shared values make possible. The challenge for leaders is to ensure that their mobilization of these discourses seems sincere. Aligning yourself with Australian values or the national character can backfire unless it is seen to accord with a deeply held personal belief about, and shared lived experience of, the priorities and concerns of the electorate.

Concerns about the safety of the national way of life have consistently arisen in Australian election campaigns. These concerns have ranged from daily personal worries about family, finances and the future to larger scale threats to the nation's security. While the former are positioned in political and media discourse as domestic concerns, the latter tend to be perceived as foreign. As national citizens, we worry about military aggression or invasion; ideologies like socialism perceived as alien to the Australian identity; radical Islamic fundamentalism; and international terrorism. Political leaders have tapped into voters’ fears of these real and perceived threats to develop a complex discourse of security. Addressing domestic and foreign threats has allowed them to demonstrate that they understand the anxieties of those constructed as ordinary Australians and can offer reassurance. Vote for me, they argue, because I understand why you're scared and I can help you solve the problem. This chapter explores the language of leaders who have mobilized voters’ concerns about the security of the Australian way of life in the partisan battleground of campaign politics. Effectively presenting themselves, and their parties, as the custodians of national security offered a mechanism of connection with voters, and a means through which to position their political opponents as aligned with whichever threats were of key concern at the time. An exploration of these discourses of Australian security reveals the way that elections operate as a fundamentally partisan battle and illuminates how leaders have played into this battle, presenting themselves and their party as the natural choice to maintain identity security.

Campaign discourses that ask Australians to be concerned about domestic or foreign threats to identity security are complex. Political leaders use them to develop appeals to voters on a number of levels. First, leaders must construct the threat itself as real and vivid, with the most effective connecting contemporary concerns to long- held political, economic or cultural fears in the Australian imagination. Second, they present themselves and the party they represent as guardians of Australian security in the face of these threats, usually with reference to party history or tradition. And third, they must position their opponents either as a threat themselves, or as aligned with the enemy foremost in the public mind.

The presentation of a positive vision for Australian development and prosperity has been a central and enduring element of effective campaign communication. Party leaders vie for the prime ministership by asking voters to buy into a hopeful narrative of possibility; one that is always reliant on an explicit construction of, and implicit connection to, the shared cultural ideas of values, community, belonging and security explored in the previous chapters. Enduring political narratives of the Australian future combine these elements in their appeal to voters: This is what your nation might look like, and who you might become, if you vote for us instead of them. These appeals to possibility and hope are mechanisms of connection, through which a constituency can be constructed and maintained. In federal election campaigns this is the task of the party leader: to paint a picture for the nation's future that will personify the values central both to their party and to the Australian identity, and reflect both the electorate's frustrations with the present and dreams of the future.

Change of government elections offer the clearest window into the moments where a leader's vision connects with the electorate's priorities. Australians are notoriously loyal, and have voted an opposition in (or a government out) only six times in the elections held between the end of World War II and 2013: 1949, 1972, 1983, 1996, 2007 and 2013. These elections become part of political folklore, positioned as reflecting cultural and demographic shifts to herald a new era in Australian politics. In 1949, for example, Robert Menzies brought Labor's wartime government and post- war reconstruction to an end and gave voice to the ‘forgotten people’ he had been addressing in his radio broadcasts since the early 1940s (see Brett 1992). In 1983, a popular new leader restored Labor to power for the first time since the Whitlam government's 1975 dismissal (Haupt and Grattan 1983). In 1996, John Howard's vision of a ‘relaxed and comfortable’ nation brought Labor's record 13 years in government to an end (Williams 1997); and in 2013, a carefully controlled Tony Abbott came to power after a tumultuous period of Labor leadership changes and political uncertainty (MacCallum 2013).

The discursive construction of a distinctive Australian identity, whose values and characteristics are to be celebrated, will always be reliant on the placing of limits on that identity. Membership in the national collective cannot be an open proposition if it is to provide a sense of identity security. Jyoti Puri (2004, 2; 15), in her study of nationalism, argues that it is founded upon ideas of sameness and difference; that national identity is relational and the differences ‘between insiders and outsiders are hardly fixed’. This identification of fluidity is vital, as constructions of national identity can and must change over time in response to broader changes in political, social and economic context. Setting and defending the shifting borders between those constructed as insiders and outsiders has been a consistent concern of campaigning political leaders, who have asked voters to consider the ideal size and composition of the Australian community.

These leaders have forged a connection to the electorate through identity stories that draw clear boundaries around the national community, working alongside political discourses that define Australian values and locate the nation in the global landscape as a mechanism to define and defend the national collective. This has played across a range of issues: in early campaign language, attempts to paint Australia as an idealized classless society both mobilized memories, and critiqued notions, of home in service of defining identity for the newly formed nation, offering a direct contrast to the stratified social and labour conditions left behind in Britain. In the campaigns of the twenty- first century, contentious and often highly emotional public debates over Australia's stance on asylum seekers and refugees have similarly offered political leaders the opportunity to evoke a national community both welcoming and under threat. This was perhaps clearest in 2001, an election that sits in popular memory as dominated by concerns about international terrorism and the perceived influx of asylum seekers (constructed in political language as ‘boat people’ or ‘illegal immigrants’). Liberal prime minister John Howard's engagement with these issues sits alongside Gough Whitlam's It's Time campaign speeches as some of the most compelling and frequently analysed uses of political language in Australian political history.

The European inhabitants of terra Australis have grappled with an enduring sense of geographic and cultural isolation since the earliest of days of their settlement. In its earliest manifestation, this was driven by a perception of themselves as white- British pioneers inhabiting a far- distant outpost of Empire surrounded by unfamiliar (and potentially aggressive) nations. These anxieties about culture and belonging, geography and isolation have endured. They resonate deeply, playing out in art and culture; in media and public debate; and in the language of foreign policy and economic development in the private and public sectors. Throughout Australian history, political leaders have worked in this context to provide answers to the question ‘where do we belong?’ and employed various mechanisms to invite Australians to locate themselves securely in the world.

This chapter engages with the campaign language of three leaders who provided complex, multilayered answers to the fundamental question ‘what is Australia's place in the world?’ at key periods in the nation's history: the decade following Federation; the time of upheaval between World War II and the end of the Cold War; and the strategic repositioning that followed the economic restructuring of the mid- to late- 1980s. George Houstoun Reid, Robert Menzies and Paul Keating all provided voters with a vision of Australian belonging that was both a comfort and a challenge, familiar and unsettling. The shifting and dynamic nature of Australian belonging comes into focus here, as these leaders grappled with uncertainty in ways that were often surprising: calling on Australians to think in new ways about their place in the world. All three, despite their vastly different levels of success at the ballot box and length of time in office, had a deep and enduring impact on the discourse of national belonging in Australian politics. The legacy of their language both echoed in the campaign battles to come and also fundamentally influenced the shape of Australian identity stories.

Rather than proposing radical shifts, these leaders claimed to be the guardians of Australia's traditional place in the world, using this as the basis to extend voters’ understandings of where they belonged.

The words spoken by campaigning leaders throughout Australia's electoral history provide an invaluable, and often overlooked, window into contemporary national political, social and cultural life. Across elections, parties and politicians, the constructions of Australian identity analysed in this book provided identity security for voters. Campaigning leaders offered their constituents a chance to feel at home within, and in control of, the national space. Operating in cycles of anxiety and reassurance, these leaders reacted to the issues of the time while also evoking those of an imagined shared past. Speechwriter Graham Freudenberg (2005, 272) has argued that the issues that dominate Australia's contemporary political life are always about ‘our history’, and that ‘the party political struggle increasingly involves a contest about who and by whom that history shall be interpreted’. This, then, is the key to understanding

This political ‘struggle’ is not just about the stories told about the past, and the flashpoints Freudenberg mentions could be updated to reflect those of any era. Rather, it reflects a much more immediate concern about who Australians are today. The enduring desire of campaigning political leaders to develop a meaningful discourse of Australian identity demonstrates the way in which constructions of the nation's collective past can offer a sense of belonging and ownership in its present and future. The battle for ownership of this discourse has played out in federal election campaigns since Federation.

Australian Identity, Leadership and Political Language

Australian identity stories have been a key feature of campaign language since Federation, a defining discursive theme of election appeals through which political leaders have sought to articulate shared experience and collective values. Political iterations of these identity stories are not definitive reflections of the nation's true essence. Rather, they give citizens options from which to create both individual and collective notions of belonging. These political narratives do not provide the sole inspiration for identity formation. They are part of, and compete with, other elements of the ‘media culture’ that, Douglas Kellner (1995, 1) has argued, helps ‘produce the fabric of everyday life’ and provides ‘the materials out of which people forge their very identities’. They must also engage and align with, reconceptualize or challenge a wide range of lived experiences and the myriad other social and cultural cues for what it means to be, and to feel, Australian. Why might an Australian who has never personally visited the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru or the Sydney Opera House recognize images of them as home? Why might someone living in the suburbs of Melbourne feel a stronger connection to the experiences of those in Perth than in Auckland? While the boundaries of the political nation- state provide some insight, they are not the whole answer. There is a much more powerful process of definition and identity formation underway, in which the need to belong, and to be both part and proud of a distinctive community, operates as a fundamental element of the human experience.

This process of identity formation is a fundamental aspect of why election campaigns capture public attention and call on citizens to engage and respond, and it plays out in the narratives that political leaders tell about themselves, voters and the nation. Stephen Coleman (2015, 168– 69), in his argument for conceptualizing elections as ‘storytelling contests’, highlights that: