“We must agree on our vision”

Abstract

From 1999–2008, New Zealand’s Labour-led coalition Government fashioned a specific discourse of globalisation and the nation. Within a representation of globalisation as a realm of hostile competition, New Zealanders were increasingly addressed as contributors to an urgently necessary and meaningfully shared national response. While there was nothing particularly unusual about this discourse, the history and structure of New Zealand society meant that its political and ethical implications could be seen particularly clearly in this setting. This article analyses three key features of the government’s discourse — its future-focussed orientation, its heavy use of imperative terms and its careful use of the first person plural — and shows how they led logically to a reductive address and positioning of individuals and sub-state groups. Drawing on elements of CDA and critical political theory, it explores how the discursive construction of a shared (national) purpose served an anti-political function by marginalising divergent perspectives, including the historically-based claims of the indigenous Maori.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.