Cries from Babylon: the problem of compassion in Australian refugee policy

Abstract

In considering the problem of asylum generally, and the experience of ‘boatpeople’ specifically, through the tools of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and New Criticism Cries from Babylon is a study of asylum-seeker discourse within the Australian body politic. More particularly, it is a retrospective on shifting policy rhetoric during the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments. Through its historical-cultural and linguistic analysis, the paper positions the rhetoric of these Prime Ministers in the context of an historical narrative concerning the asylum seeker. A principal finding is that, despite indubitably strong personal convictions (inspired, in significant measure, by the life and work of World War II martyr Deitrich Boenhoeffer), in trying to appease the right of Labor’s own broader electorate, Rudd occasionally echoed — though never adopted wholesale — the hard-line rhetoric of his predecessor John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia 1996 ‐ 2007. In making its arguments, Cries from Babylon also considers the resurgence of such rhetoric by Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.

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 — 3 citations exist upstream.

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