Locating 'community' in the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission

Community' is a ubiquitous concept in much disaster policy work as well as governmental discourse generally. This thesis will be taking the view that community is an ideology, that its usefulness as a focus of policy comes from shared and hidden assumptions about what community is and how it operates within Australia as a contemporary liberal settler colony. This thesis will address the question: what are the implicit and explicit understandings and uses of the idea of community contained within the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission Final Report (`the Commission')? To do this a theoretical framework that encompasses territorial sovereignty, governance and affect, will be used to conduct a critical discourse analysis of community as is operates in the Commission. Through its recommendations the Commission attempts to foster communities with the 'correct' attitude to bushfire and the state and who, as a territorial unit, perpetuate a continued occupation of the bush in the face of the threat that disaster poses to the state's territorial sovereignty. As social units, communities internalise the state's messages of self-management and social compliance in the face of systemic inequality and uneven development in rural Australia. Finally the Commission integrates community and stories of Black Saturday into an affective economy that maintains faith in the government after the trauma of disaster and feeds into a selective colonial memory that overwrites the ongoing violence of colonisation with the pathos and suffering of settler communities. The more emphasis that is placed on community as an unquestioned and natural social formation -and as a counterpoint to the power of civil society and the state- the more it obscures the discourses that create it and the further it is pushed into the realm of ideology. The ideology of community within the Commission can be seen to work on all these areas, territorial sovereignty, governance and affect-in concert or in competition all are deployed by the Commission to further the territorial, social and affective dominance of the state