Who has the floor? Media discourse, Australia’s First Nations peoples and the Northern Territory Intervention

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Social Sciences and Communications, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

In June 2007, John Howard, then Prime Minister of Australia, declared a ‘national emergency’ in the remote Indigenous communities of the Northern Territory. The announcement followed a report from an official inquiry into child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities in the Territory. The federal government subsequently launched a number of controversial measures across prescribed communities to combat what it called a ‘crisis’. This policy approach, the Northern Territory Emergency Response, soon became known as the Intervention. Exploring mainstream news media coverage of the Intervention through a mixed methodology, this thesis integrates textual analysis of newspaper and television stories about the policy with industry interviews. Media representation of Indigenous affairs and peoples in Australia has been widely researched in past decades; yet previous studies have tended to concentrate on textual analysis despite calls for further exploration of media practitioners’ accounts on the topic. This project contributes to bridging that gap. Sampling coverage across a three-year timeframe and drawing on established frameworks for discourse analysis, this thesis asks: what discourses are present in news media coverage about the Intervention and how have the discursive practices of different social actors, including journalists and non-media individuals and institutions, impacted on these discourses? Investigating the constraints of media practice and the idea(l)s of professional journalism the thesis reflects on the complex relationship between Indigenous communities and journalists, who are generally non-Indigenous, and how Indigenous perspectives might be better represented.