[csaa-forum] Brett Nicholls: The communist empty signifier: the Australian League of Rights and the Voice to Parliament referendum

[Rosemary Overell]

Kia ora koutou,

As part of our MFCO Seminar Series 2025, our very own Dr Brett Nicholls will be presenting next week on Tuesday 29th April. Please join us at 3pm in Burns 4 or via Zoom link (register here<https://forms.gle/LuMtYkY5Fj9NzgKm9>). Seminar details follow:

The communist empty signifier: the Australian League of Rights and the Voice to Parliament referendum

In 2023, voters across Australia resoundingly rejected the Constitutional institution of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Among several claims made by vote no campaigners against this institution, a text published in the 1980s by the notorious extreme right organization, The Australian League of Rights, surfaced. The central claim of this text, titled Red Over Black, is that Aboriginal claims for justice and land rights are a communist conspiracy. In the lead-up to the referendum, the campaign to vote no echoed this claim. Drawing upon the Laclauian Discourse Analysis, the seminar considers how this signifier, ‘communist,’ continues to resonate in political campaigns in Australia. My claim is that the foundations for this continued resonance emerge in enduring reactionary organizations such as the Australian League of Rights, which was founded in the 1940s. The seminar thus outlines how the League imagines the communist conspiracy and explains how this conspiracy remains embedded in political discourse today.


Rosemary Overell<https://www.otago.ac.nz/mfco/staff/rosemaryoverell.html>
Pūkenga Matua | Senior Lecturer
Pāpāho, Whitiāhua, Pārokoroko | Media, Film & Communication Programme
Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | The University of Otago
Otepoti | Dunedin
Aotearoa New Zealand
9054

Latest publications:
Overell, R. (2024). ‘Don’t Worry Darling: The anxious question of what women want after #MeToo’. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-024-00461-5
Millar, I., Nicholls, B., Overell, R., & Tutt, D. (2023). Power and politics in Adam Curtis' Can't get you out of my head: An emotional history of the modern world. In C. Owens & S. Meehan O'Callaghan (Eds.), Psychoanalysis and the small screen: The year the cinemas closed<https://www.routledge.com/Psychoanalysis-and-the-Small-Screen-The-Year-the-Cinemas-Closed/Owens-OCallaghan/p/book/9781032223223>. (pp. 163-189). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Overell, R. (2022). Methodological Masturbation<https://lackorg.com/2022/08/26/methodological-masturbation/>. LACK: punctual musings. 26th August.

Google Scholar<https://scholar.google.co.nz/citations?user=ZW7oyEAAAAAJ&hl=en>
LinkedIn<http://www.linkedin.com/in/rosemary-overell-047786222>

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