Expertise, public opinion and Indigenous policy agendas: Shifting media assemblages and their implications

This presentation draws on a case study of an intervention in Indigenous policy debate, and what it suggests about potential shifts in process of mediated agenda setting. In the policy process, the expertise of opinion pollsters has been a significant influence in public debates, and polling has provided an important tool through which policy actors have worked to build policy agendas. The presentation focuses on a case study of such a process in action, as mobilised by 19 the ‘Recognise’ campaign for constitutional recognition of Australia’s first peoples, and a subsequent controversy that occurred following an intervention by the activist digital media organisation IndigenousX. A significant criticism of both Indigenous policy making and mediated policy discussion has been its reliance on a narrow range of policy actors and voices, and the predominance of well-resourced actors that are able to mobilise institutional and economic capital to both shape and delimit Indigenous policy agendas. The production of polls, and the successful promotion of findings as the basis for news stories, has been a significant resource within Indigenous policy processes. Where the Recognise campaign’s use of polling was quite typical in this respect, its contestation by IndigenousX, through the production and publication of a second poll that disputed the findings of the first, points to a significant digital disruption of the mechanisms, relationships and ‘media ecology’ through which Indigenous news representation is produced. This paper provides an analysis of this controversy in order to trace these shifting relationships and, by doing so, reflect on what it suggests about the changing ways in which mediated policy agendas are produced and contested, and discusses a current digital action research project that seeks to further amplify a greater diversity of Indigenous voices.