‘Hurtling down the track’: The significance of Australian population debates in an era of anxiety

Abstract

This article focuses on some of the fantasies underpinning contemporary politics and the way that these ‘perform’, in effect, to occlude more complex understandings. To develop my argument, I deploy a critical discourse analysis to consider the narratives used by politicians during the 2010 Australian Federal election campaign to galvanise popular support by raising the ‘threat’ posed by large-scale population growth. I argue that narratives framing ‘population growth as unsustainable’ have a resonance with sections of the electorate because they connect to a sense of unease about the present and the future. The vexed debates surrounding population size are indicative of anxieties that lie beneath the surface of political discourse.