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The Australian Way of Life: journalism, citizenship and the constitutional convention

This article provides an analysis of the journalistic coverage of the Australian Constitutional Convention, which was held in 1998 to consider whether Australia should become a republic and which model for a republic should be put to the people in a referendum. The article examines the journalistic production of national life, how its representations or visualizations generate a particular sense of place and way of life. It is argued that journalism is an integral communicative form of modernity, bound up in a logic of power which facilitates both the freedoms and controls of populations. Arising out of the indeterminacy of democracy, journalism facilitates both a logic of equivalence and strategies of governance. The article examines the particular kind of citizenship which was manifested through the Constitutional Convention. It is argued that the journalistic coverage did not posit a citizen who actively intervenes in the political life of the society driven by their own sense of a civic right, but rather it offered the citizen a particular capacity to act within a governmentally prescribed role. The acting-out of this capacity, however, was not perfunctory but animated by impulses which stem from sharing in full membership of the society.