'Does this guy ever shut up?' The discourse of the 2013 Australian election

In this paper, I analyse the campaign communications of three of the four major parties who contested the 2013 Australian federal elections: the Australian Labor Party (Labor), and the conservative Coalition consisting of the Liberal Party of Australia (the Liberals) and the National Party of Australia (The Nationals). I pay special attention to the message and image strategies of the leaders of Labor and the Coalition, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott. I discuss campaign slogans in four overlapping debates, which, at least for Labor, were critical to the election result: (1) the carbon tax, (2) asylum seekers, (3) party reform, and (4) economic management. I arrive at three major conclusions. First, the 2013 elections narrowed the bipartisan language and thinking in which the differences between the rivals, except perhaps on carbon pricing, were fewer than they wanted the voters to believe. Second, the language of electioneering moved from long-term policies in the plural to short-term politics in the singular. And, third, the increasingly irrational discourse of the election period has not dissolved, but rather hardened following the election of the new Abbott government. Today it is affecting many areas of political life, including those that were not contested subjects in 2013, such as international, regional and interethnic relations