“Nazis Aren’t Welcome Here”: Selling Democracy in the Age of Far-Right Extremism

Kurt Sengul and Jordan McSwiney
Additional contact information
Kurt Sengul: Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature, Macquarie University, Australia
Jordan McSwiney: Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra, Australia

Media and Communication, 2024, vol. 12

Abstract: This article critically examines the communicative and policy-framing response of Australia’s Victorian government to the state’s growing crisis of far-right extremism. Through a critical discourse analysis of the Victorian Andrews and Allan Labor governments’ political communication from 2021 to 2023, we explain how the government discursively responded to the rise of far-right extremism. We found the Andrews and Allan governments employed a range of communicative, discursive, and legitimisation strategies to both legitimise the government’s policy to ban Nazi symbols and gestures and to (re)establish Victoria’s reputation as an inclusive and multicultural liberal democracy. The findings of this article broaden our empirical understanding of the central role of political and crisis communication in responding to extremism and may provide a template for other governments to respond to the global crisis of far-right extremism.

Keywords: Australia; crisis communication; democracy; extremism; far right; policy framing; public sphere (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/7853 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:meanco:v12:y:2024:a:7853

DOI: 10.17645/mac.7853

Access Statistics for this article

Media and Communication is currently edited by Raquel Silva

More articles in Media and Communication from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().