Australian News Narrative on Unauthorised Boat Arrivals During Federal Election Campaigns in 1977, 2001 and 2013

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.In recent years an extensive body of media research has accumulated on the representation of immigrant, refugee and asylum seeker (IRAS) debates in western liberal democracies. This research touches on the work of two structuralists, Propp and Levi-Strauss, to suggest that a grand narrative became instrumental in Australian press coverage of IRAS boat arrivals during the federal election campaigns of 1977, 2001 and 2013. It argues that the news narrative of the ‘boat’ is fundamentally a sequence of cycles between binary elements recurring over time. This thesis examines , to describe the identical functions of the main characters in the ‘boat’ news narratives. Such narratives define politicians as the main actors and reproduce their voices as they talk about turning back the boats to reduce problems at sea, the country’s right to choose, the vulnerability of an open nation, and concerns that criminals and non-genuine refugees are getting on the boats. In a thematic analysis, ‘Foreign Relations Threats’ recurred as the top core theme. This reflects how the Australian Governments at the time of the three elections considered the ‘boat’ issue an international and regional problem that relied on offshore solutions