Justifying the Unjustifiable: a critical discursive analysis of the political rhetoric of asylum

Abstract

There is a significant body of literature analysing the discursive construction of ‘othering’ that occurs in racialised discourse, including the representation of asylums seekers in media portrayals. ‘Othering’ refers to the positioning of certain groups of people as being ‘different’ from the collective group in power to disempower them. However, the institutional political rhetoric regarding this issue remains open for further exploration. The current study subsequently presents an analysis of the discourse of the Liberal-National Coalition in Australia from the year 2017 regarding asylum seekers. The focus is on statements from the then Prime Minister of Australia and Minister for Immigration. A methodological approach of critical discourse analysis was employed to assess how political statements were oriented to support the justification and legitimisation of Australia’s offshore detention policies and practices. Analysis of the data corpus focused on the pervasive ‘othering’ of asylum seekers. This was accomplished in two main ways: constructing restrictive border policies as indispensable to successful multiculturalism and social cohesion and the denial of government accountability through moral disengagement. Moral disengagement from the plight of asylum seekers was achieved by several discursive strategies including, blame-shifting, the deployment of ‘facts’ to counter humanitarian appeals, and the dehumanisation of asylum seekers as people to be traded between nation states. This study creates space for the questioning of Australia’s institutional decision-making regarding government and national accountability, as well as questions of our social and moral responsibility towards asylums seekers.