Agile producers and consumer-saviours: discourses of resilience and responsibility in Australian media coverage of artisanal food and craft

Abstract

COVID-19's supply chain disruptions saw small-scale, artisanal food and craft producers experience surges in demand from consumers seeking locally made goods. This article analyses Australian news coverage promoting this ‘turn to the local’, with a focus on mainstream news outlets from March 2020 to February 2023. We identify two dominant narratives: the ‘producer pivot’ and the ‘consumer-saviour’. Using Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad’s (2018) work on resilience as a regulatory ideal of neoliberalism, we argue that both narratives focus on individual responsibility in ways that make invisible structural and economic impediments to change. The consistent ways in which buying and producing local small-scale goods were presented and understood in the news coverage – across different products, places and stages of the pandemic – highlights the persistent ways in which neoliberal values perform particular kinds of work for capitalism by asserting the necessity of local ‘resilience’ and ‘positivity’ in times of crisis.

Introduction

In the early weeks of COVID-19, a ray of hope presented itself: the COVID-19 crisis was, as Mazzucato (2020) put it in The Guardian, a ‘chance to do capitalism differently’. In Australia and other Global North economies, the ongoing workforce and supply chain disruptions experienced did indeed seem to offer this possibility, and in the artisanal food and craft sectors, especially, a feeling of ‘banding together’ to support local businesses seemed to reveal new forms of value and investment in local economies. News headlines were quick to celebrate the success of local, small-scale businesses despite the restrictions and economic losses of the pandemic: ‘Artisan cheesemakers on a roll thanks to COVID-19’ (ABC News, September 18, 2020); ‘Boutique wine popularity surges after drinkers experiment during lockdown, winemakers say’ (ABC News, February 10, 2021); ‘Local made is in favour’ (The Advertiser, September 5, 2020). Such headlines almost certainly reflected attempts by media outlets at the time to offer at least some positive stories in news cycles otherwise dominated by stories of COVID-related infections, hospitalizations, deaths and economic hardship. Embedded in local communities newly looking for alternative sources for (temporarily) scarce goods experiencing supply chain disruptions, small-scale, artisanal businesses offered particularly rich source material for these positive stories. The ways in which the activities of small-scale producers were framed and celebrated in this news coverage not only reflected an uncritical celebration of the local but also the premium placed on the resilience and positivity that scholars have identified as one of the regulatory ideals of neoliberalism (Gill and Orgad, 2018). At the heart of resilience discourse is the capacity to ‘bounce back’ from difficulties, maintain a positive attitude and re-cast injuries as opportunities (Gill and Orgad, 2018: 479).

Taking such critiques as its analytical starting point, this article analyses Australian media coverage promoting this ‘turn to the local’, with a focus on key mainstream news outlets for the three-year period from March 2020 to February 2023 inclusive. This period was chosen to capture both the immediate impacts of the pandemic and responses extending beyond the initial crisis. We identify two dominant narratives in this media coverage: the ‘producer pivot’, which presents small-scale producers as agile ‘heroes’, ready to nimbly adapt to new areas of shortage and demand, and the ‘consumer-saviour’, whereby buying local products is framed as a social and civic duty. Drawing upon the work of feminist media and cultural theorists Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, we argue that the predominance of neoliberal discourses of individual ‘resilience’ and ‘responsibility’ reflects a ‘distinctive set of neoliberal feeling rules’, where ‘resilience sits alongside other notions such as confidence, creativity and entrepreneurialism, as being among the key qualities and dispositions highlighted as necessary to survive and thrive in neoliberal societies’ (Gill and Orgad, 2018: 478, 490). In this instance, the narratives of the ‘producer pivot’ and the ‘consumer-saviour’ celebrate a narrow version of local success while making invisible any structural and economic impediments to change. The persistence of such narratives raises questions about the discursive role of ‘the local’ in times of crisis, as well as about the limits of increasing production and consumption as solutions to crisis recovery, especially as costs of living and of doing business continue to rise in Australia and similar economies.

Scholars have pointed to the emergence of resilience as a regulatory mechanism of neoliberalism due to its capacity to perform particular kinds of ‘work’ for contemporary capitalism. However, such regulatory discourses are not totally new, with researchers into cultural and creative employment observing that ‘[t]hemes of precarity, resilience and innovation have been part of the cultural imaginary of creative work since the first Industrial Revolution’ (Brook and Webb, 2022: 2). More recently, in a policy context of austerity and rising inequality, recipients of resilience discourse have typically been society's poorest and most vulnerable, who are recast not as the subjects of structural disadvantage but as ‘failing’ or ‘non-resilient’ individuals (Bottrell, 2013). However, as Gill and Orgad (2018) point out, the growing media visibility of resilience discourses has seen a wider number of subjects hailed by its imperatives, and in ways that are presented as freely embraced rather than coerced. They argue that middle-class women, in particular, are increasingly addressed as the ideal subjects of resilience – the ‘idealised bounce-backable … neoliberal subjects’ who, by virtue of their embodiment of gendered expectations of flexibility and positivity, are understood as ‘naturally’ possessing the ‘material and psychological resources to actualise resilience’ (Gill and Orgad, 2018: 479, 490; see also Gill, 2017). But as the Australian news coverage of food and craft shows, resilience also operates as a powerful discourse for interpellating a range of precarious workers (and consumers), particularly those invested in an ‘entrepreneurial self’ (Luckman, 2015), who may be disproportionately but not exclusively women.

Methods

To capture discourses of the local that occurred during the pandemic and its aftermath, news items were collected from the NewsBank database using the search terms ‘locally made’ or ‘locally produced’ and ‘COVID’ or ‘pandemic’. Stories were collected from six news outlets: two national outlets (The Australian newspaper and the ABC News website) and four daily newspapers from the Australian states of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania (The Advertiser, The Age, The Herald Sun and The Mercury). The three states were chosen as small-scale artisanal production forms an important site of each state's economic activity and profile and, together, they reflect the differential impacts of the pandemic: Victoria, one of the country's largest economies, experienced Australia's toughest and most prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns; South Australia, an economy about one-quarter the size of Victoria's, and Tasmania, the nation's smallest state economy, were impacted by fewer COVID-related restrictions. South Australia and Tasmania were ‘locked in’ due to state and national border closures, but for the most part (and certainly compared to Victoria) they remained relatively un-locked-down. Stories were collected over two sample periods, the first covering the first two years of the pandemic (March 2020–February 2022 inclusive) and the second from March 2022 to February 2023 inclusive. The two samples were used to determine the extent to which a refocusing on local production and consumption extended beyond the initial crises of the pandemic and to identify any changes as rising inflation in Australia in 2022–23 contributed to increased costs of living and of doing business.

Because NewsBank archives stories in multiple formats (plain text, print layout, website version), where possible, the web version was collected and used for analysis, given that online is the dominant source of news in Australia (Newman et al., 2022: 131). Once multiple versions of stories were removed, along with articles on themes unrelated to the research questions (e.g., stories about local COVID-19 vaccine production, local energy production and local media productions), the sample yielded 161 results: 80 in 2020–21, 45 in 2021–22 and 36 in 2022–23. Although it was not always possible to assess the size of businesses mentioned, a majority of articles (67%) mentioned producers we judged to be small businesses, using ABS (2001) definitions of small businesses as constituting less than 20 employees. 53 (68%) stories in 2020–21, 32 (71%) stories in 2021–22 and 25 (69%) stories in 2022–23 featuring products likely to have been small-scale or artisanal. We analysed the articles in NVivo, using inductive and open coding, iterative memoing, consultation and reflection by all authors and gradual axial and selective coding to establish over-arching themes (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). Two dominant themes were identified: small-scale producers as agile, resilient and ready to pivot as opportunities arise; and consumers as ‘saviours’ who seek to support local, small-scale businesses as a social and civic duty. Notable in each was a tendency to present producer and consumer action as individualized, unconstrained by financial or other limitations, and without a need for government or structural support.

Producer pivot

Of the news stories in our sample that mentioned products likely to be artisanal or small-scale, most (62%) considered producers’ experiences negotiating the impacts of COVID-19. This ‘producer pivot’ narrative captured neoliberal imperatives by extolling the agility and flexibility of Australian small-scale producers in nimbly adapting to new areas of demand emerging from the disruptions of the pandemic. Here, the pivoting producers were celebrated for their varying combinations of quick-thinking innovation, general capacity to adapt to new circumstances, resilience and altruism. Far from capitalists out to exploit a crisis or enhance their own economic bottom line, local producers were lauded for working to support communities. In so doing, such stories frequently reframed the pandemic less as a source of hardship than as an opportunity for Australian makers to both showcase their products and support their communities, whether that be fashion social enterprises pivoting to the production of reusable masks (Christmas gifts that will help Melburnians, The Age, 11 December 2021) or cellar doors remaining open to support their regions (Hills winery event has the bow-wow factor, The Advertiser, 8 January 2022).

The premium placed on resilience and positivity as ‘solutions’ to the social and economic disruptions of the pandemic can be seen particularly clearly in stories that presented adversity as a driver of creativity and innovation. Such stories celebrated local makers who appeared unfazed and undeterred by any obstacles that came their way. For example, a Herald Sun story about lockdown restrictions preventing Victorians from visiting regional farmers markets and cellar doors was particularly triumphant: ‘it’ll take more than a pandemic to stop our state's industrious and innovative small producers from doing what they do best: creating unique Victorian products from the land and sea’ (Victoria's most innovative and exciting regional producers and products, Herald Sun, 21 September 2020). The article quoted Victorian producers who looked on the ‘bright side’ of the challenges they faced, including one who pointed to the pandemic's ‘silver lining’ of increased consumer support for local businesses.

Within such celebratory discourses, there is little space for negative sentiment. For duck producer Greg Clarke, a decline in restaurant orders was a motivator to diversify into retail offerings. He was hopeful that this pivot would help his business to reclaim lost income, but he did not complain about his losses – ‘I completely understand – it's a pandemic’, he was quoted as saying and he made a point of acknowledging the ‘brilliant support’ from chefs who have purchased from his business despite their own difficulties (Victorian farmers hit hard, again, as COVID-19 restrictions force restaurants to cancel orders, ABC News, 9 July 2020). The focus was on making the best of the situation, quickly moving to new opportunities and not dwelling on the negatives (Gill and Orgad, 2018: 479). In the spirit of embodying the entrepreneurial self and the associated individual responsibility for one's own triumph or failure (Banks, 2007; Banks and Milestone, 2011; Ross, 2007), success here was presented as only limited by the ingenuity and creativity of the business owners. Even businesses whose sales ground to a complete halt were presented as seeing the ‘opportunity’ in their challenging circumstances. For example, although oar maker Darren Croker was unable to sell any oars for six months, this suspension of sales was presented not as a blow to his business, but as an opportunity that ‘gave him time to develop ideas’ that the day-to-day demands of running a business had previously prevented (Oars of international renown made on Manning River, ABC News, 26 August 2021).

This focus on the need for producers to be flexible and insulate their businesses against disruption was evident across the sample. Indeed, rather than speaking about the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, ‘positivity’ was frequently offered as the only acceptable position producers could adopt as they were presented as the beneficiaries of new supply gaps in the marketplace. In a story about locally made Christmas gifts, the producers quoted focused on the upsides of the challenges wrought by the pandemic: for toy maker, Shannon Ley, it was the ‘gratitude’ from his customers that supported his company to continue to employ local people (Gifts that give twice, Herald Sun, 12 December 2020). Buttonworks co-owner Liza Murray-Clarkson thought ‘we were looking at the end of our business’ at the start of the pandemic, but their quick pivot to mail-order puzzles and educational games saved it (Gifts that give twice, Herald Sun, 12 December 2020). Here, the challenges experienced by businesses were briefly acknowledged before the article quickly moved on to positive outcomes and tales of thriving. In so doing, all the very real challenges, along with any personal, familial and economic impacts of the pandemic, were erased and opportunities were presented as only being limited by the imagination of the business owner. Against this backdrop, financial stress was represented as a personal failure to innovate or otherwise seize the opportunities provided by the pandemic, rather than the failure of systems or structures, or even bad luck.

‘Hero narratives’ of producers not just sustaining their own businesses, but also supporting local communities, appeared across the sample. Against this discursive backdrop of opportunity rather than challenge, producer pivots were presented not only as a reflection of individual resilience and positivity, but also as demonstrations of altruism driven not by a desire for profit (or even for economic sustainability) but to assist the community and vulnerable others. In this narrative, producers were presented as ‘heroes’ and ‘philanthropists’ in ways similar to those observed by Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato (2023: 97) in the North American media coverage during COVID-19. They identify how ‘heroic narratives’ focused on those who found ways to sustain their businesses and support their local communities, using the ‘capitalist-friendly language of … philanthropy’. Similar sentiments were evident across the Australian media sample. For example, while the ABC News headline ‘Victorian farmers hit hard, again, as COVID-19 restrictions force restaurants to cancel orders’ suggested that the story's focus would be on the hardships faced by farmers, the farmers interviewed primarily expressed concern for others, specifically, for restaurants and their staff. To illustrate, Meredith Dairy director Julie Cameron's voiced concern was not for her cancelled orders, but for the impacts on the restaurant industry: ‘I’m feeling really sorry for the restaurants because there [sic] going to be hit with a second [shutdown] just when they thought they could get their businesses back on track’, she was quoted as saying (ABC News, 9 July 2020).

In other stories, producer philanthropy was sometimes framed explicitly in terms of charitable works undertaken, such as directing surplus product to hunger relief charities like Foodbank (e.g., Victorian farmers hit hard, again, as COVID-19 restrictions force restaurants to cancel orders, ABC News, 9 July 2020). In other cases, producer pivots were presented as an investment in the self-sufficiency of local communities: for example, Lark Distilling Co.'s pivot to hand sanitizer production was framed as a reflection of the company's ‘deep desire to help the community’ and ‘invest to secure Tasmania's sanitiser needs long-term’, rather than a decision motivated by the company's own economic bottom line (True Tasmanian spirit, The Mercury, 15 June 2020).

Given the discursive emphasis on ‘opportunities’ to be ‘seized’ upon by local producers, what emerged was the idea that in otherwise commercial spaces community needs should be prioritized over profits. But while such narratives offered a moment in which capitalist imperatives might be re-thought, their progressive potential was undercut by the expectation that producers should individually bare all risks and costs. For example, at South Australia's d’Arenberg Cube, the desire to support local producers and regional communities eclipsed the financial risk of seven-day-a-week trading during a time of limited tourist activity. Chief winemaker Chester Osborn was quoted as saying that, while ‘in purely financial terms it probably doesn’t make much sense’, ‘we want to do our bit to bring people back out to the regional communities’. The article's headline – ‘SA's iconic cube gets cheap and cheerful makeover’ (The Advertiser, 7 July 2020, emphasis added) – was also typical of the relentless positivity within which the hardships associated with this decision were erased. Again, challenges were subsumed into the dominant narrative of sacrificing to support the community, with no attention to the personal or financial resources required for a business to sustain such losses. As a result, the responsibility to ‘look after one another’ fell onto individual businesses and consumers who constituted an ‘amorphous imagined “we”’ (Sobande, 2020: 1035). Here, expectations of small-scale production as a labour of love without financial motives met the desire not to be seen as profiteering from what was, for many, an economic and personal disaster. The COVID-19 narrative amplified a broader imperative, drawn from lifestyle and other media (Luckman and Phillipov, 2020; Phillipov, 2017), for small-scale producers to downplay hardships experienced, which limited the inclusion of critical or structural perspectives.

One area where the limits of producer flexibility and agility were acknowledged, however, was in the stories about locally made hand sanitizer. The pivot, by those involved in alcohol or other production where large volumes of ethanol are to hand, to the production of hand sanitizer to meet unprecedented demand was one of the higher-profile production-related shifts that occurred in almost immediate response to COVID-19. It is notable that several articles reported that many of the distilleries that pivoted became financially worse off, being left with stocks they were unable to shift once international supply chains and less expensive imports were restored (e.g., In the spirit of survival, The Age, 28 June 2020; Australian distillers left with thousands of litres of surplus sanitizer due to flood of cheap imports, ABC News, 23 June 2020). One company, which distilled its stocks of premium aged rum to make sanitizer, was subsequently prevented from capitalizing on its World's Best Rum award because it no longer had product to sell. While the story acknowledged the business and financial risks of the ‘producer pivot’ for small businesses, producers were presented as altruistic heroes who ‘stepped up’ to make a ‘sacrifice … for public health’ (Australian distillers left with thousands of litres of surplus sanitizer due to flood of cheap imports, ABC News, 23 June 2020).

However, even in otherwise balanced stories about the peaks and troughs of demand for local hand sanitizer, a positive spin persisted, as did an underlying suggestion that any resultant financial hardships were of the producer's own making and, hence, their own responsibility to resolve. Both tendencies were reflected in the article ‘Why hand sanitiser boom went bust’ (The Age, 27 December 2021), which included comments from distillery owner Rob Turner, who was storing 1000 litres of unused raw materials for hand sanitizer that he was no longer able to sell. The financial losses were presented both as an outcome of the business's own poor choices – ‘we probably over-committed’, Turner was quoted as saying – but as nonetheless worth the cost as it kept him ‘hopeful during the darkest days of the pandemic’: ‘I remember the sales frenzy when we first released [our hand sanitizer] last April … It quite literally brought me to tears. It meant we could continue to employ our team’. We were thus presented with a vision of the sacrifice as being worth it for emotional, but not financial, reward.

Evident across the news stories addressing producers’ experiences are the consistent neoliberal discourses of positivity, resilience, enterprise and flexibility. Regardless of how producers might feel privately, the message presented in and by the media outlets we examined – which otherwise targeted a range of demographics and adopted varying ideological positions on other issues – consistently foregrounded public declarations of fortitude, optimism and the ‘ironing out of “bad affect”’ (McRobbie, 2016: 40). Value was placed on ‘keeping going’ despite the challenges, looking on the bright side and finding and capitalizing on opportunities. Any sacrifices were presented as serving the greater good (supporting communities, employees, employers and one another) and as part of a ‘moral and ethical framework of care’ (LeBesco and Naccarato, 2023: 87) that was central to their roles as makers and producers. In this way, the language of ‘pivoting’ served to obfuscate a gamut of neoliberal market discourses in which individuals are responsibilized for their own success and well-being and struggles are framed as ‘personal crises or accomplishments decoupled from economic and social circuits of accumulation and dispossession’ (Bottrell, 2013). The relentless focus on resilience, adaptability and psychic agility as regulatory ideals reflected in the new context of the pandemic older and larger ‘calls upon people to be adaptable and positive, bouncing back from adversity and embracing a mind-set in which negative experiences can – and must – be reframed in upbeat terms’ (Gill and Orgad, 2018: 477). This reimagined social contract not between individuals and government, but between individuals and their communities, thus necessitated reciprocal action from the other key stakeholders present in this media analysis: consumers.

Consumer-saviours

While most of the news coverage of small-scale local production reflected the perspectives of producers, their stories of resilience and agility were typically underpinned by the presentation of consumer support for local businesses as normalized and widespread. Stories centred on consumers tended to be set within market-based discourses in which growth in locally produced goods was presented as primarily consumer-driven: as variously something that consumers were doing, something they wanted to be doing or something they should be doing. In each case, it was presumed to be the responsibility of consumers to ‘do the right thing’ and perform moral citizenship through their consumption choices (Johnston, 2008). Although there were some cases where barriers to consumer action, such as the higher cost of buying local, were acknowledged, these were frequently minimized and diminished.

The most common way that consumers appeared in the news coverage is in stories that attributed growing sales of local products to increased consumer support for small businesses during the pandemic. Stories ranged from those of boutique wineries experiencing a ‘dramatic increase’ in demand from younger consumers (Boutique wine popularity surges after drinkers experiment during lockdown, winemakers say, ABC News, 10 February 2021) to artisan cheesemakers reporting record sales due to ‘Australians … directing their pay cheques to support local producers’ (Artisan cheesemakers on a roll thanks to COVID-19, ABC News, 18 September 2020). But more than contributing to the success of individual businesses, the news coverage presented consumer support for locally produced goods as reflective of a widespread shift in buying habits. Unlike the ‘heroic consumers’ that LeBesco and Naccarato identify in the North American COVID-19 coverage, whereby consumers were urged to make ‘claims to heroism … [in their] food-related [and other consumption] decisions’ (LeBesco and Naccarato, 2023: 95), Australian news presented a more normative view that consumers would and should ‘step up’ to support local businesses during the crisis of the pandemic. Comments such as ‘people really want to buy local’ (Victoria's most innovative and exciting regional producers and products, Herald Sun, 21 September 2020) and ‘customers [are] seeking out local produce’ (From cattle feed to top chefs Pinaroo farmers turn weather-damaged lentils into gluten-free flour, ABC News, 13 March 2021) were common and implied universal support for local businesses: it was ‘people’ and ‘customers’ who were presented as buying local, rather than business growth reflecting the buying power of specific market sectors or demographics (e.g., wealthier middle-class consumers with greater capacity to pay the price premiums associated with locally made goods).

Stories focused on how consumer action can protect and support local businesses, taking for granted that consumers would want to ‘band … together … to help locally made products survive’ (Coronavirus: Team Australia rallies behind local, The Australian, 19 April 2020) and ‘support local businesses during the coronavirus pandemic’ (Bumper summer guide, The Mercury, 18 December 2020) if only they had the opportunity. Consumers were thus presented as saviours whose purchasing decisions were made not with their own needs in mind, but rather motivated by their desire to support local businesses doing it tough. Given that this windfall demand for local goods directly arose in the face of a global crisis, the adoption and normalization of such discursive framing was a safe means to avoid any sense of this being an instance of promoting disaster capitalism, thus ensuring that local makers and their customers – very probably the same mostly middle-class market as the outlets’ readerships and advertisers’ target markets – emerged from this moment in a positive light.

Significantly, the consumer-saviour was presented as supporting local producers and communities while demonstrating a similar psychic agility and positivity as the ‘agile producers’. Any barriers to being a ‘good’ local consumer were largely downplayed. For example, the higher cost of locally made goods, or the impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns or supply chain disruptions on consumer spending power went largely unacknowledged in most stories. Instead, the relentless positivity of ‘banding together’ and ‘supporting local businesses’ simultaneously obligated consumers and presented individual consumer responsibility as both widespread and morally ‘right’. In an especially clear example of the consumer-as-saviour, an opinion piece by the Chief Executive of Business SA described buying local as:

supporting businesses, jobs and communities. When small businesses grow, it boosts local communities in so many ways. Whether it is in the CBD or a regional high street, businesses help create the identity of your community. Unique and vibrant businesses are where we socialize and create soul and character for our favourite places. (Let's go kachingle all the way, The Advertiser, 16 November 2021)

Buying local was thus presented as not only benefiting the consumer (who got to live in a place with ‘identity’, ‘character’ and ‘soul’) but as also having broader altruistic benefits (through ‘boost[ing] the community in so many ways’). Such comments suggested not only that it is the responsibility of individuals to support their communities, but that consumer activity is the best way to do so. In this way, responsibility to the community was largely framed as a responsibility to the market, with people's investments in their local communities primarily expressed through exercising their purchasing power.

The small number of stories that did acknowledge that perhaps not all consumers are buying local tended to ignore both the limits of individual responsibility and the barriers consumers face when buying local. Instead, they typically took as their starting point the assumption that consumers wanted to buy local, but simply needed some extra encouragement or advice on how to do so. For example, an Advertiser story about family camping encouraged campers to ‘note what's available near your campsite and support local farmers and regional artisans once you arrive’. This, the story noted, would contribute to readers ‘improving their camp cooking experience … [as well as] helping out the local economy and small businesses at the same time’ (Cordon Bleu by campfire, The Advertiser, 14 October 2020). These stories that addressed a presumed knowledge gap simultaneously naturalized buying local as a rational consumer behaviour and ignored any structural barriers to such action.

While stories occasionally acknowledged the higher price of locally made goods, the barriers this posed to buying local were minimized. In some instances, locally made goods were presented as better value for money than cheaper imports, and hence worth the extra expense. For example, a Herald Sun story about locally made Christmas gifts quoted producers who highlighted the benefits of buying local. Toymaker Shannon Ley was quoted as saying:

[Australian-made] is more expensive but you get a lot more because you’re buying it from people who have gone to the effort of setting up a factory … You get a higher degree of manufacturing and service. With a locally made product … much of people's dollar goes into the pockets of people in their community. (Gifts that give twice, Herald Sun, 12 December 2020)

Similarly, the co-owner of Buttonworks, a company selling Australian souvenirs and gifts, emphasized how ‘buying locally supports an entire network … it's our suppliers, our distributors, its anyone who is employed in our business’ (Gifts that give twice, Herald Sun, 12 December 2020). The article headline described locally made gifts as ‘Gifts that give twice’ (presumably to the receiver of the gift and the local business from which the purchase is made). However, the article text focused on wider benefits to communities as justifying the extra expense, as reflected in comments such as ‘buying local supports an entire network’ and money ‘goes into the pockets of people in their community’ – the implication being that consumers were purchasing goodwill in addition to goods.

While some stories presented the extra expense of locally made goods as justifiable given the wider benefits, others downplayed the significance of the increased cost, suggesting that buying local products was only a matter of paying slightly more than for larger-scale or imported equivalents. For example, a story in The Australian about Victorian honey described the greater quality and health benefits of the locally produced product, which more than made up for the ‘small difference’ in price: ‘While big brand honey from the supermarket might be a couple of bucks cheaper … the health benefits in local honey make the small difference in price more than worth it’ (How Surf Coast beekeeper discovered his new passion, The Australian, 8 October 2021, emphasis added). An ABC News story about imported pork products prominently quoted Australian Pork Limited CEO Margo Andrae as saying that if consumers ‘realised they just needed to pay a little bit more to buy Australian then they would certainly do that’ (Despite consumers’ commitment to shopping local, most bacon sold in stores comes from overseas, ABC News, 18 September 2021, emphasis added). Phrases such as ‘small difference in price’, ‘couple of bucks cheaper’ and ‘pay a little bit more’ downplayed the price differentials to present small-scale and locally made products as less cost prohibitive than consumers might expect. In doing so, they suggested that the consumer ‘choice’ to buy local was reasonable, achievable and something that everyone should be doing. None of the stories included discussion of who was (or was not) able to afford the additional cost, nor how paying more might conflict with other ethical values, such as thrift, which, as scholars have noted, can also be understood as a way of demonstrating care for others (Johnston, Szabo and Rodney, 2011; Miller, 1998).

The tensions inherent in a focus on consumer ‘choices’ without adequate consideration of barriers or limitations to those choices were especially clear in another story about Australian pork. The story quoted celebrity chef Luke Mangan, who called the amount of pork Australia imports ‘obscene’. While he acknowledged the additional cost of locally produced pork as a potential reason for the large proportion of imports, he nonetheless saw consumer choice as the means to overcome any barriers to buying Australian pork. As he put it: ‘Australians should have the choice of knowing whether they were eating local or foreign’ (Pig farms hammered, The Advertiser, 5 January 2021, emphasis added). The article clearly highlighted the limits to a focus on individual consumer responsibility: that is, positing consumer ‘choice’ as the primary mechanism for supporting local industries offered little room for solutions beyond simply giving consumers more information and hoping they will make the ‘right’ decisions. This focus on individual producer and consumer action as the only possible solutions to disruption and crisis served to minimize barriers to both buying and making local products and responsibilized individuals to overcome any challenges faced.

‘An easy way’: Positivity, resilience and the ‘simplicity’ of action

The media focus on only two key stakeholder groups – producers and consumers – is all the more notable because governments were generally absent from discussions of how artisanal or small-scale businesses could be best supported. In contrast to the substantial amount of government support provided to businesses and individuals during Australia's COVID-19 lockdowns – and which were subject to a large amount of media coverage at the time – only 14 (16%) of the articles in our 2020–22 sample that mentioned products likely to be artisanal or small-scale suggested some level of governmental responsibility for ensuring the viability of their production. Most articles advocating government support focused on larger-scale manufacturing (e.g., ACTU wants billions of dollars spent to create jobs, The Australian, 20 July 2020), but even these stories tended to responsibilize consumers alongside governments. Headlines such as ‘Manufacturers are adapting to coronavirus, but want consumers and governments to help’ (ABC News, 5 July 2021) made this dual responsibility explicit, but in many cases, the ‘proper’ way for governments to support Australian businesses was presented to be as a consumer: for example, by mobilizing procurement to buy more locally made goods and/or ensuring Australian-made products are included in government projects (e.g., Australian manufacturing has been in terminal decline but coronavirus might revive it, ABC News, 22 July 2020). Such stories tended to reflect a view that individuals and markets were best left to their own devices, albeit with the occasional nudge in particular directions.

The focus on governments’ responsibilities as consumers of local products was also sometimes the substance of stories about small-scale businesses – such as distillers calling on state governments to buy their surplus hand sanitizer (Australian distillers left with thousands of litres of surplus sanitizer due to flood of cheap imports, ABC News, 23 June 2020) – but for the most part, the viability of small businesses was presented as the responsibility of producers and consumers, rather than governments. For example, at the launch of a new online marketplace for products from Australian small and medium businesses, then-federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg described buying Australian-made products as a ‘practical and simple way to keep Australians in jobs and Australian businesses in business’ (Rich lister Gerry Ryan bankrolls Australian-made online platform to drive local manufacturing, The Australian, 15 July 2020). In his focus on the ‘simplicity’ of consumer activity, there was a clear implication that no additional assistance from government, or any other kind of structural support, was necessary. Similarly, while a Mercury story about Tasmanian small businesses acknowledged the importance of a ‘policy focus on local acquisition’, it also foregrounded ‘community awareness, and promotion of the economic benefits of buying locally made or supplied goods and services’ as ‘simple actions’ that ‘all [can] contribute to’ (Your dollar spent locally builds Tasmania's economy so much more, The Mercury, 23 May 2020). Again, the focus on the ‘simplicity’ of consumer action as something available to ‘all’ worked to normalize individual responsibility as both reasonable and easily achievable.

The emphasis on individual consumer behaviour and on producer resilience and innovation as the primary means of shoring up local communities and economies is even more striking given not only the tremendous amount of Australian government funds, both at the state and federal levels, invested in its COVID-19 response, ¹ but also its enhanced interest in sovereign manufacturing in the face of persistent supply chain disruptions and geopolitical instability. However, much of this support and renewed policy emphasis on Australia (once again) being a country with a strong manufacturing industry did not kick in until after the initial shock of the lockdowns and supply chain interruptions of the pandemic. So, while it took governmental action to close borders, both national and state, and to put in place an emergency social safety net of welfare payments to those who lost employment, news stories addressing local impacts and production industries tended to crystallize around individual responsibilities and responses, as the stories in our sample have shown. This is neither benign nor accidental; rather, the taken-for-grantedness of these discourses clearly highlights the normative power of neoliberal, entrepreneurial ideas as a default even in times of profound global and personal crisis. As such, they reflected the kinds of discourses underpinning government policy across much of the Global North, and these persisted well beyond the initial crisis moments of ‘impact’, ‘inventory’ and ‘rescue’ and well into the periods of ‘remedy’ and ‘recovery’ (Cohen, 2002: 16–17). Therefore, as other researchers have argued in different research contexts, far from being a unique response to COVID-19, the hegemonic discourses of resilience and individual responsibility present in this data set are part of a much larger and ‘longer history of both corporate and governmental efforts to generate greater consumer responsibility, as part of attempts to deflect from their own responsibilities’ (The Care Collective, 2020: 80).

The neoliberal ‘business as usual’ economic approach – albeit with a mobilization of ‘localness’ as a virtuous consumer obligation – remained evident in media reports into 2022–23. This was a period of rising inflation in Australia, which significantly increased the costs of living and of doing business, with rising interest rates causing mortgage and economic stress for many Australians, including small businesses. There was significant reporting on these topics in all the media outlets included in this research, which opened up possibilities for alternative or critical voices. But in stories focused specifically on local production, there remained a predominant emphasis on consumer behaviour and producer action as the only necessary remedies for situations of risk and inequality.

Celebratory stories of producer success, resilience and creativity persisted in this vein, with stories of new, innovative products (including non-alcoholic beverages and craft beers using native Australian ingredients) going ‘gangbusters’ in local markets (e.g., Global drinkers lapping up Victorian-made no-alcohol beverages, Herald Sun, 3 April 2022; Flavour country, Herald Sun, 26 August 2022), and those of ‘passionate’ producers supporting, rather than competing with, one another to bolster the growth of local industries (e.g., Meet the makers: The faces and stories behind SA's gin distilleries, The Advertiser, 15 June 2022). Stories about upsides to the pandemic for small local producers and makers also continued to appear: for example, those in regional communities benefitting because the ‘pandemic has convinced Australians they really should be buying locally produced and owned products’ (Hooray it's a regional revival, The Australian, 5 March 2022), and those who, aided by the high vacancy rate of CBD shops, were leading a retail ‘renaissance’ in Melbourne (Scent of renewal in Melbourne, The Age, 20 August 2022).

Against the backdrop of rising inflation and its wider associated media coverage, stories specifically focused on local production and consumption largely downplayed the impacts of rising prices on consumers’ ability to absorb the additional cost of locally made goods. A small number of articles suggested that ongoing supply chain disruptions had contributed to the increased cost of local products (e.g., Price pointers, The Age, 17 May 2022; Rising grocery prices are pushing up inflation, ABC News, 29 October 2022), but the stories continued to assume consumer support for local products and producers. In the few cases where buying local was acknowledged as less affordable, stories suggested ways that consumers could buy local in the face of rising prices: for example, by buying smaller (and hence less expensive) items (e.g., Pride of Australia, Herald Sun, 30 April 2022) or by drawing on local retailers’ knowledge about the best value products (e.g., Price pointers, The Age, 17 May 2022). But there remained a tendency to minimize the extent of price increases and the barriers these posed for many consumers. For example, in a story in The Age about challenges for small business, one small-scale producer was quoted as saying that they maintained ‘some pricing room’ to pass on rising costs because ‘Australian shoppers supported locally made goods’ (Inflation, IR changes add to challenges faced by small business, The Age, 5 November 2022). An ABC News story suggested that milk produced by smaller dairies may cost ‘a little more than supermarket stock’, but ‘buying local milk is an easy way for people to support their local dairy farmers’ (Full-cream Jamberoo Valley milk bottled for boutique appetites, ABC News, 29 June 2022), replicating the earlier tendency to present buying local as both ‘easy’ and only ‘a little more’ expensive.

In fact, most stories from 2022–23 continued to focus on – and celebrate – consumer demand for locally produced goods in ways largely unchanged from those in the earlier sample period. This was notable given the reduced imperative for positive news during this later period, when the pandemic focus on unity, solidarity and joint effort declined and news cycles returned to ‘normal’ (Nolan et al., 2021: 33, 43). For example, a 2023 Mercury story about Australian cheese quoted Australian Made Chief Executive Ben Lazzaro as saying: ‘A renewed focus on buying Australian and supporting local has consumers and businesses exercising their preference for Aussie products more than ever’ (Someone will get creamed, The Mercury, 18 January 2023). Even at a time when media reporting was otherwise highly attentive to the rising costs of living (at least in the wider news coverage), stories on local production still largely ignored the greater cost of local goods or the barriers consumers faced to buying local. In stories such as the one in The Mercury discussed above, consumers tended to be discussed as a homogenous group who ‘all’ wanted to be buying local with little acknowledgement of which consumers might (or might not) be able to do so. Despite rising costs, then, the news stories continued to suggest that the responsibility for adapting to challenges lies with individual producers and consumers, without any further need for policy intervention or structural change. The few stories that considered government involvement tended to focus on support to increase export markets for locally made products (Global drinkers lapping up Victorian-made no-alcohol beverages, Herald Sun, 3 April 2022), rather than on making such products more accessible to local consumers or more viable and sustainable for local producers.

The consistent ways in which buying and producing local small-scale goods were presented and understood in this news coverage, across different products, places and stages of the pandemic, is evidence yet again of the hegemonic power of neoliberal values of individual and market responsibility as the ‘commonsense’ ways in which themes of positivity and unity are presented. This coverage revealed not just the persistence of resilience discourses in the ways in which making and buying local was understood in this coverage but also how these discourses performed particular kinds of work for capitalism in a time of crisis. As we have seen, news stories across both the ‘producer pivot’ and the ‘consumer-saviour’ narratives were overwhelmingly dominated by themes of positivity and resilience. In the case of small-scale production, a persistent narrative of individual responsibility presented producers as both agile and relentlessly positive, always ready to pivot into new areas of demand and to look on the bright side of challenges as they arise. In the case of the consumer-saviour, the focus was on presenting consumers as banding together to help small business survive without any (apparent) limitations to their own spending power. These discourses did not just highlight an individualizing strategy of making people responsible for their own success and welfare under the guise of unity and solidarity; they also made evident neoliberalism's ‘feeling rules’ involving the ‘remarkably patterned way in which resilience is mobilised as a set of dispositions, qualities and feelings designed to enable individuals to survive in neoliberal times’ (Gill and Orgad, 2018: 490). The seemingly ‘voluntary’ ways in which roles were both offered and taken up – alongside the media outlets’ common sense acceptance of the apparent ‘naturalness’ of neoliberalism's ideological positions – served to close off more meaningful debate around the accessibility and sustainability of contemporary supply chains and to silence capacity for larger critiques of structural inequality and support. While the manipulation of the affective reasons for buying local has been a feature of promoting small local businesses well before COVID-19, its durability remains to be seen as the economic and environmental pressures of (uncritical) consumption continue to mount. But at this moment when COVID-19 offered a chance to do capitalism differently, the media coverage of local small-scale production highlighted neoliberalism's power to reassert itself, even at a time when the need for collective responsibility and action provided an opportunity to imagine things otherwise.