Refugees, Radio Journalism, and Communications for Social Change

Federal Government policies aimed at preventing boatpeople from reaching Australian shores have cost taxpayers an estimated $300 million per year since 2001. Staff and students at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have embarked on a new project to ask whether a more deliberative form of public engagement might have yielded a different, more composed response to the increase in numbers of boatpeople arrivals that occurred after 1999. This QUT project explores the potential for journalists to facilitate community deliberation about viable and realistic responses to the challenges created by asylum seeker and refugee arrivals. This paper presents the findings of a pilot radio project aimed at promoting deliberation and redressing some of the imbalances in current media coverage on these issues