Protecting ‘Our Way of Life’: Constructions of National Identity in Government Anti-Terrorism Advertising

In the last five years, governments in Australia, the United States and United Kingdom have enacted various measures to deal with the perceived threat of terrorism since September 11, 2001. The Australian federal government has run two high-profile anti-terrorism advertising campaigns, designed to provide reassuring information about what to do in an emergency, and to justify tough security measures: Let’s Look Out for Australia and Help Protect Australia from Terrorism. This paper will draw on government anti-terrorism advertising from the United States and United Kingdom to undertake a comparative analysis of the use of the threat of ‘terrorism ’ to encourage a sense of national unity. It will argue that the terrorist has been positioned as the central ‘Other ’ in Australian society. Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, it will study how the threat of terrorism was used to justify racialised constructions of national identity, encouraging Australians to join together in ‘looking out ’ for terrorists in their midst. It will argue that the anti-terrorism advertisements in the sample provided privileged constructions of ‘Australianness ’ and were consistently vague in their definition of who, or what, Australians should be ‘looking out for’. This paper will argue that the Australian anti-terrorism advertisements implicitly point to ‘Arabs ’ and ‘Muslims ’ as a ‘terrorist Other ’ by drawing on deeply held cultural myths and assumptions. Constructing the nation as both valuable and under threat, the advertisements position Australian-Muslims and Arabic-Australians outside the boundaries of national identity