Thesis abstract:

«p»Midway through 2016 in the runup to the federal election of that year, the then Australian Commonwealth Immigration Minister made an ostensibly contradictory claim during a television interview regarding refugees settling in Australia, stating “They won't be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English. These people would be taking Australian jobs, there's no question about that” (Bourke 2016). The incongruity of the first and second sentences of that statement is jarringly apparent: the assertion is that this minority outgroup would be fundamentally unqualified to procure employment in Australia, owing to their inability to operate in a professional capacity as a result of their profound lack of education or skills in English or even in their native tongue; yet at the same time they represent a tangible economic threat to ingroup workers due to their likelihood of in actual fact successfully obtaining those jobs at the expense of eligible Australians’ opportunities in the workforce. This study will investigate the hypothesis that the claim is a succinct example of a paradoxical framing evident throughout the political media discourse and public opinion regarding minority outgroups, one that is frequently deployed (consciously or otherwise) as an act of ‘symbolic power’ (Bourdieu 1991) in the ultimate service of maintenance of social hierarchies and preservation of selective material advantage through economic inequality. It is further hypothesised that it achieves this by rhetorically fastening these groups in a stigmatic ‘double bind’ (Bateson et al. 1956), iteratively setting them in competing ‘equivalence frames’ (Scheufele and Iyengar 2017) as a chimerical corruption of folk-taxonomic social categorisation (Douglas 1966; Sperber 1996), whereby their depictions are alternately grounded in low-competence/low-warmth ‘contemptuous’ prejudice (e.g. ‘illiterate’) and high-competence/low-warmth ‘envious’ prejudice (e.g. ‘job-stealing’) (Fiske et al. 2002). I examine whether this polarity in political rhetoric and media reporting may induce an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance in receptive subsections of ingroup audiences - specifically the 'isolates/fatalists' in Douglas's (1999) Grid-Group theory - with regards to the status of the relevant outgroup category, analogous in form to a Pavlovian ‘experimental neurosis’ where the paradoxical messaging “...imposes on the…(audience) the vital necessity of correct discrimination and then, within this frame makes discrimination impossible” (Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson 1967:216). This discomfort is functionally projected onto 'Wayward Puritans' (Erikson, 1966) which legitimates discriminatory attitudes and, crucially, rewards the reduction or elimination of the bewildering threat, for example by the voting in of a political party that has promised to reduce refugee intake into the country. It ultimately guarantees entrenchment of existing social hierarchies and the material inequalities of the status quo. By employing corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker 2006; Marchi 2018) through the construction and comparative interrogation of bespoke corpora of Australian, British and American news and social media, triangulated (Olsen 2004) with data from attitudinal surveys of the general public, I explore the possibility of the existence of the phenomenon outlined above in the case of the immigrant minority outgroup (‘industrious delinquents/idlers’).«/p»