Changing the story: Narration and framing in regulation and governance

A tape deck (Image credit: Joybot (Flickr))

In the once separate fields of politics and governance, the narrative is everything. Perhaps more. Mark Kenny from the Australian Studies Institute looks how the government controls the storyline across Newstart, refugees and the Uluru Statement from the Heart and concludes it is the ‘back story’ that lends the government legitimacy.

Armed with the right story, taxes can be cut for the wealthy, soldiers deployed in far flung lands, schools and hospitals shut or expanded, and carbon taxes levied or axed.

For governments the narrative line is at once key and crow bar.

Key, because it can unlock the chains of public resistance to a particular policy or initiative, and can even help to build majority support among voters.

And crow bar, because it can be also used to bash the opposition, to render opponents, stupid, stubborn, self-interested, and even unpatriotic.

Examples abound.

Momentum towards an increase in the Newstart allowance (the dole) has come from across the political spectrum with the Business Council of Australia joining welfare groups, market economists, and political parties of left and right (Labor, Greens, and some Nationals) in urging the increase.

On the face of it, that breadth portends real power. It is quite uncommon to see the business lobby actively engaging in the political fray and doing so on the other side from the government.

Even during the Turnbull Government’s ill-fated fight to convince the parliament to cut company taxes, the biggest direct beneficiaries of the proposal – large companies – were muted in their public positioning, perhaps worried about appearing too self-interested, but also no doubt, keeping their powder dry in order to maintain some kind of relationship with the other side of politics.

This drove then Treasurer Scott Morrison to distraction – as it has when firms have soft-pedalled their support for industrial relations reforms from which they might also directly benefit.

The company tax cuts campaign – and indeed the government’s Colonel Custer-like last stand to defend the banks against a royal commission – are examples of the narrative line failing to support government policy.

The argument that big companies - who most voters believe already avoid paying their fair share of tax - should actually be given a big financial break and that this cash would somehow wind up in ordinary peoples’ wallets, was unconvincing – or perhaps better described as uncompetitive given the pre-existing and dominant narrative of company greed and the Liberal Party’s historical support for capital over labour.

Back to the dole.

For a government unwilling to spend the estimated $3.2 billion for a $75 per week increase, and one so solidly on-the-record rejecting the push, the response needed to be good.

And in a sense, it was: “the best form of welfare is a job”.

Of course it is, except for two ‘teensy-weensy’ details: a job is not actually a “form a welfare” at all. It’s a job.

So this quite literally, does not address the proposal for a dole increase at all. Not one bit.

Second, the dole isn’t provided to people who have a job, it’s for those who don’t have a job and thus don’t have an income.

That’s the point. These facts may seem almost too obvious yet, they need stating because the government has been allowed to sidestep this legitimate issue.

This is repudiation by redirection.

The Coalition’s argument works because it is essentially a political one, so different rules apply.

It might be clever, trite and transparently evasive, but like-it-or-not, the Coalition’s “jobs-are-us” counter-narrative kind of works.

Indeed to the extent that it invites a response, it cunningly positions critics as being somehow uninterested in getting the unemployed into paid work.

Its message rests on this proposition – unlike our opponents, we don’t talk about the dole, we focus on getting people off it.

Or put another way: you’re for the dole, we’re for jobs.

It’s a brazen claim to a higher moral plane without spending a cent, and without acknowledging the parsimony of the dole nor the harsh realities of life on the bottom rung – even where those realities contradict the government narrative – to wit, because the dole is now so low as to be another structural barrier to labour-force re-entry.

So why does it work? Partly because it shuts down the debate and partly because it dovetails in to the Coalition’s established jobs-slash-economy story in which it (rather than private capital) claims to have created 1.4 million jobs.

It has many manifestations – such as “Labor wants to tax the country to prosperity to distribute the pie (which never works) and we promise to expand the economy, to grow the pie.

Another equally egregious example: The Uluru Statement from the Heart called for a Constitutionally-enshrined “Voice” mechanism for Indigenous peoples.

Despite widespread public support, the Government’s retort that it would amount to a “third chamber of parliament” quickly became Coalition lore.

This argument-truncating ‘third chamber’ fallacy bore no relationship to the Uluru request but it enabled the Coalition to relegate a valid broadly sensible idea behind a “superior” government imperative of national institutional preservation.

Core territory for conservatives.

The most glaring case of the co-dependence between story and regulation though, is in the area of border protection.

Here we see a the turbulent delta of values going to history, the national story, the concept of Australia itself, compassion, identify, security, otherness.

The strong borders idea is a rendering of these formative notions to fit a narrative arc.

A re-ordering and re-weighting of these building blocks of Australia has led us to the point where – notwithstanding Labor’s recent positions supporting the Medevac legislation, and the Tamil family – has seen both sides support tough policies including a blanket prohibition on refugees arriving by boat ever achieving residency, and boat turn-backs on the high seas.

We know the elements of this newer narrative well:

• Labor in government opened the door, and 1200 people perished at sea.

• Resettlements can not be permitted to occur in NZ despite that country’s offer because that would restart the people-smuggler trade.

• Labor is only pretending to be tough and would weaken the rules in office

• And of course, granting any exceptions would be tantamount to retreat, starting the boats once more.

In one sense, narrative is just another way of describing the much loathed category of political-speak known as “spin”.

And there’s no doubt that spin is an important element of this kind of communication.

But narrative is considerably more than merely situational spin – the crafting of words to explain a problem and get the government out of a tight spot.

Narrative is longitudinal and perhaps better described as a thread which weaves its way through all policy areas to stitch them into a single canvass.

It’s the plot-line that lends individual regulations, laws, and expenditure decisions, a consistency-of-purpose – a back-story, an over-arching reason.

It doesn’t always work and frequently it is at least a partial fiction, but without it, many rules and restrictions we all agree on would make less sense – and for the authorities, would be even less defensible.

This is the third in a series on Narration as Regulation, produced by ANU’s School of Regulation and Global Governance. You can also read about: how to counter poisonous stories, using the example of sorcery related violence in PNG, by Miranda Forsyth; climate change as a hyperthreat by Liz Boulton; and why racialised youth perceptions of police matter by Kanika Samuels-Wortley.