Dog-whistle politics and déjà vu

The term “dog-whistle politics” originated in Australia during the Federal Election campaign in 1996, to describe John Howard’s winning ways and subsequent Howard Government policies. It was introduced into British Conservative Party politics in 2005 by Lynton Crosby, Federal Director of the Australian Liberal Party during the elections of 1996, 1998 and 2001, and is now understood world wide.

Dog-whistling is different from labelling, stereotyping, branding and dehumanising; it is deliberately covert and designed to activate concealed prejudices. The key to dog-whistling is to use coded language to convey an implicit, almost subliminal, message to a select target audience, while maintaining “plausible deniability” against accusations of prejudice or fear-mongering. The Double-Tongued Dictionary (2007) defines dog-whistle politics as “a concealed, coded, or unstated idea, usually divisive or politically dangerous, nevertheless understood by the intended voters”.

For 11 years dog-whistle politics became the standard technique of government leaders, Howard, Downer, Reith, Ruddock, Andrews and others, as they deployed “wedge politics” - the politics of labelling, stereotyping, demeaning, demonising, dividing and isolating “them” from “us”. It characterised their policy statements about “illegal” immigrants, the “war on terror”, Islamist “extremists”, welfare “dole bludgers”, Aboriginal “child abusers” and “no-hopers” and many other “target” groups.

Following the success of Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party, the Howard government employed dog-whistling to appeal to voters with racist attitudes while evading criticism from those opposed to prejudice. Their ideological allies in the media spread these coded messages even more explicitly, dismissing complaints (when they bothered) as freedom-stifling “political correctness”.

Their critics were “the chattering classes”, “the chardonnay set”, the “latte-sipping elite”, the “guilt industry”, “do-gooders” or “bleeding hearts”. Ignore the message, attack the messenger; “play the man, not the ball”! All “sensible” Australians knew that people who were likely to “throw their children overboard” were “not fit” to enter Australia, as were those (worse still) who didn’t know who the “great cricketer” was out of Walter Lindrum, Don Bradman and Hubert Opperman.

Australian politicians became so adept at “dog-whistling” that in 2007 Josh Fear, an Australia Institute researcher, presented a lengthy paper titled Under the Radar: Dog-Whistle Politics in Australia. As Institute Director Clive Hamilton said at the time, “Dog whistling allows politicians to subliminally send multiple and ambiguous messages to voters, whilst denying they are doing so. It is becoming a refined art in Australia.”

Dr Hamilton added that words and phrases commonly used in “dog whistling” included “Australian values”, “the thought police”, “the black armband view of history”, “practical reconciliation”, “border protection” and “be alert, but not alarmed”. He didn’t need to point out that all these were John Howard’s favourite phrases.

As Josh Fear wrote, the “common features of dog-whistle politics” were “deniability; a select target audience; and coded, implicit or subliminal communication.” He argued that:

Over recent years, dog whistlers have been especially well-placed to exploit community concerns arising from overseas conflict and the threat of terrorism. They have also sought to create and inflame paranoia about minority groups and outsiders, and to taint the politics of immigration and Aboriginal affairs with parochialism and suspicion.

But in his view, “dog whistling is a problem because it undermines democracy”, by destroying the “clarity and directness” which were especially important in political communication. Mr Fear also said conservative politicians were more likely to use “dog whistle” tactics, while those to the left of centre seeking to distort the truth were more likely to resort to “spin”.

Déjà vu is the feeling that something has been previously experienced, often that uncomfortable episodes from the past are reoccurring. Unfortunately, they are. Moreover, they are accompanied by tried and trusted labelling and political dog-whistling, in three areas of current national concern: Australia’s part in the occupation of Afghanistan and the so-called “war on terror”; the treatment of an increase in refugees arriving in Australian waters by boat; and Australia’s participation in international action on global warming. All these issues have a direct impact on human rights and peace with justice.

For a start, the Rudd Government is justifying Australia’s continued involvement in Afghanistan in increasingly mendacious terms, in the face of a Newspoll published in March 2009 in The Australian, which found 65 per cent of Australians were against Australia increasing its troop numbers beyond the 1,100 already serving there. A growing number opposed involvement altogether. Pointing to the “hundred or so Australians who've been killed in terrorist attacks around the world”, Rudd claimed: “Those responsible for those terrorist attacks have primarily been trained in Afghanistan and neither America nor Australia have an interest in Afghanistan in the future becoming once again a safe haven for the training of terrorists.” In April 2009 Rudd made even larger claims: “We cannot ignore this cold hard strategic fact - less security in Afghanistan means less security for Australians.” He went on: “Handing Afghanistan back to terrorist control will increase the threat to all Australians.”

John Pilger, in his City of Sydney Peace Prize lecture early in November 2009, drew attention to Rudd’s new Afghanistan rhetoric, saying:

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause”.

Rudd had been standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he said this. Pilger’s comments were scathing: “There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” But (so far, at least) the Coalition in Opposition fulsomely reiterates the same rhetoric, and Rudd echoes their lines. During a visit to the war zone early in November, Rudd emphasised Australia's commitment to remain in Afghanistan for “the long haul”. It all sounds depressingly familiar and specious.

The policy debate (or lack thereof) on the “handling” of refugees, fleeing mainly from strife-torn Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, is also depressingly familiar. So much so that in a media release at the end of October 2009, the Edmund Rice Centre (ERC) called for a definitive end to the sort of debate that treats asylum seekers as political footballs, tossed around with the sole aim of gaining a team advantage in the game of politics. ERC Director, Phil Glendenning, stated:

This stand-off in Indonesia [over Sri Lankans refusing to leave an Australian Customs vessel for Indonesian refugee camps] demeans Australia in the eyes of the world, and diminishes us as a people. It is ugly politics that under a discourse of “deterrence” uses vulnerable people to send a message to others who simply are not listening.

Glendenning commented that “The whole issue throws up a crisis of moral leadership in Australia”, and put his finger on the reason for feeling this:

The current political debate is wrong because it demonises the vulnerable, it employs the ugly tactics of petty partisan race-politics. This is dog-whistle stuff which summons up the darkest fears that reside within Australians' hearts historically.

John Pilger, in his Peace Prize lecture, made similar criticisms. He compared Kevin Rudd’s praise, in an essay titled Faith in Politics (October 2006), for both the parable of the Good Samaritan and the UN Convention on Refugees, with his words in October 2009: “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia … a tough line on asylum seekers.” Pilger commented:

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear - they are legal.

He went on to say: “Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.” Glendenning and Pilger are strongly supported by Malcolm Fraser, former Liberal Prime Minister, who appealed in November 2009 for a return to the bi-partisanship which in the 1970s led Australia to fulfil its moral and legal obligations and accept large numbers of Vietnamese refugees. Fraser commented:

I think it's unfortunate, I believe both political parties have demeaned Australia by trying to say, you know: “We're the toughest, we're the toughest. We'll keep boat people away.”

The third major area of dog-whistling is the current lamentable “debate” about climate change. Some of the rubbish being peddled in the media is only exceeded by that peddled by the politicians.

According to opponents, supporters of an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) are engaged in “fear tactics”, painting a “doomsday scenario” which will “bleed the taxpayers dry”; the response is that the “tentacles of the climate change sceptics” and “deniers” have strangled “sensible” debate, because, as Rudd put it, “They are a minority. They are powerful. And invariably they are driven by vested interests.”

The rhetoric is revealing.

The ETS is really little more than a “moralising new tax” (Senator Barnaby Joyce), or a vast conspiracy by “the extreme left” (who, since “the collapse of communism” had “embraced environmentalism as their new religion”) grabbing “the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, to sort of de-industrialise the western world” (Senator Nick Minchin). According to Abbott, the ETS is “a great big tax to produce a massive political slush fund to provide enormous handouts to favoured groups that will be administered by a vast bureaucracy.”

Rudd’s response is to attack vague Coalition alternatives for “direct action” as “a magic pudding and bucket of red tape”, with “bureaucratic red tape strangling the entire economy through the least-effective, most-expensive system which doesn't compensate families, all funded by a magic pudding, …”

Invocation of Norman Lindsay’s famous illustrated children’s book (1918) to deride some cost-free, never-failing magic solution to our problems has a history in Australian politics (look up Paul Keating), and denigration of bureaucrats and red tape is quite fair. But dog-whistling mainly works “the dark side”, to quote Dick Cheney. A classic piece of recent dog-whistling was Tony Abbott’s description of the global climate change talks in Copenhagen as “some latter-day environmental Munich agreement kind of thing”. “Munich” is code for “appeasement”, craven cowardice, failure to stand up to “dictators” like Hitler, an analogy much abused in the lead-up to the attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime.

When pressed on ABC TV's Lateline about the comparison, Abbott employed the standard evasion: “It was a throwaway line in which you would be wrong to invest too much significance.” Abbott’s technique is consistent. As new Coalition leader, he excused his previous description of climate change as “absolute crap” as “a bit of hyperbole” rather than his “considered position”. Given that Abbott’s new Coalition front bench holds a renowned collection of dog-whistlers old and new, the quality of political debate in Australia will inevitably go even further down, taking concern for human rights and peace with justice down with it.