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Asylum Seeker Policy Analysis

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Asylum Seeker policy has become key political battleground in recent times. This stems from the end of Australia’s ‘White Australia’ policy in the 1970s; a policy which saw restrictions placed on non-European migration for over 70 years (Crock & Berg, 2011). Following the conclusion of the Vietnam war, a myriad of boats arrived in Australia, carrying asylum seekers from south east Asia. This lead to a stark increase in public concern over the arrivals and consequently, the term ‘boat people’ was born and spread through the media and public/political discourses alike (Grewcock, 2009).

In the following years, this increase in public and Government concern, culminated with the introduction of more restrictive measures towards asylum seekers, …show more content…

This lead Asylum seekers to be portrayed as threats in both a criminal sense towards society, our economic stability and international relations (Every & Augoustinos, 2008). The most important aspect of this discourse however, was that it (we argue that) it succeeded at its intended purpose and managed to convey the message in a way to which the legitimate concerns surrounding both the legality and the inhumanity of the treatment towards these people were effectively undermined and brushed relegated to a state of irrelevance. The Government managed to justify their actions as being in response to illegal actions by asylum seekers who importantly, were managed to be portrayed and perceived as a threatening ‘other’ (Every & Augoustinos, …show more content…

it accomplished something, it manifested itself through public talk and political discussion and it accomplished an action (the enacting of policy, which justified and legalised the rejection and subsequent incarceration of these asylum seekers). This concept of discourse being functional takes a perspective arising from the relatively new field within psychology known as discursive psychology (Edwards & Potter, 1992). Discursive psychology takes a social constructionist view upon the world, whereby reality, events and objects are constructed in language as we talk about them. That they are not objective material entities that exist we constitute them through language and talk. Discourse is constituted with discursive resources and practices including the use of metaphors, arguments and terms to describe actions and events and rhetorical common-places e.g. clinching arguments premised on common-sense notions on idioms, e.g. everyone knows that there are two sexes. Finally, discourse constructs identities for speakers, people can be positioned on a particular issue by particular ways of talking . A salient and pervasive example of this is with respect to asylum seekers, the very words of which people use to refer to them and describe them can generally indicate a persons position on the matter. For example: present a person a video of a news story regarding an asylum seeker boat that has been

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