Tags
Australia, Australian Labor Party, authoritarianism, Conservatism, George Lakoff, language, left-wing, Liberal Party of Australia, media, policy, politics, reframing, right-wing
Reality: it’s all about how you frame it.
- Mining Super Tax
- Media Regulation
- Carbon Tax
- Terrorism
And of course:
- Offshore Processing
- Closing the Gap
- Stronger Futures
- Ethnic Cleansing
- Climate Change
- Asylum Seekers
- Pacific Solution
- Malaysia Solution
- WorkChoices
- War on Terror
- War on Drugs
Using language in this way is the usual doublethink. In Australia it’s especially well implemented by the Murdoch media complex as well as by the (related) Liberal Party, both of whom have well documented, public links to the Republican Party in the US and their shady right-wing think tanks.
A good book on this subject is “Don’t Think of an Elephant” by George Lakoff.
The classic Conservative (or at least paleoconservative) is all about “small government“; indeed in Australia, conservatives talk about any sort of human rights protections, regulations on the police & state and regulation of monopolistic behaviour as being somehow “big government”. How ironic then, that they support Orwellian measures like the “anti-terror” laws, use of war to distract the population, and of course, use of the media and language to rewrite reality.
Related articles
- Speaking Out Is at the Heart of Being a Citizen (readersupportednews.org)
- How the State of the Union Worked (charlog.me)
- Disarming Republican Anarchists (smd12364.newsvine.com)
- Fifteen Benefits of the War on Drugs (c4ss.org)
- The only way is up? The northern Australian food bowl fantasy (theconversation.edu.au)