A Working Paper
Andrew Paul Klein
Abstract
This paper traces the history of political framing language from Edward Bernays’ “engineering of consent” through the Australian variant of “economic rationalism” to the contemporary use of euphemism and abstraction in policy communication. It documents the outcomes of neoliberal policy in six Australian domains — aged care, homelessness, poverty, veterans’ affairs, taxation, and AI infrastructure — and contrasts those outcomes with the language used to describe them. It argues that the language form identified — framing, euphemism, abstraction, the deployment of superlatives — is the rhetorical complement to an architecture of governance that privileges corporate and extractive interests over the welfare of citizens. The paper concludes that the claim is not a lie. It is a framing operation. And the reader is left with an impression that does not survive contact with the data.
1. Introduction: The Question of Language
There is a pattern in the language of political communication that has been documented across decades and contexts. The pattern comprises four features: the selection of facts that support the desired conclusion; the removal of context that would complicate the narrative; the deployment of superlatives that do not survive scrutiny; and the use of abstraction and euphemism to obscure the harm.
This paper examines that pattern. It asks three questions. First, what is the history of this language form? Second, how does it operate in contemporary Australian policy? Third, what does it reveal about the architecture of governance?
The paper proceeds in four sections. Section 2 traces the historical lineage of the form. Section 3 documents the Australian policy record. Section 4 examines the structural relationship between the language and the architecture. Section 5 concludes.
2. The History of the Form
2.1 Edward Bernays and the Engineering of Consent
The deliberate manipulation of public opinion as a systematic technique is generally traced to Edward Bernays (1891–1995), the Austrian-American nephew of Sigmund Freud who is often described as the “father of public relations“.
Bernays pioneered what he called the “engineering of consent” — the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion. His 1928 book Propaganda opened with a statement that reads today as both a confession and a warning:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
Bernays’ view was that it was possible to manipulate people’s unconscious desires, and that engineering the minds of the masses through the shaping of public opinion was a necessary function to control social chaos. He wrote that “we are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of”.
The technique he developed was not lying. It was framing: selecting the facts that supported the desired conclusion, arranging them in a particular order, and omitting the context that would complicate the narrative.
Status: Established.
2.2 The Australian Lineage: Economic Rationalism
The Australian variant of this language form emerged in the 1970s and crystallised in the 1980s. The term “economic rationalism” — a particularly Australian contribution to political rhetoric — was first deployed in the 1970s to commend the “economic rationality” of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the Hawke and Keating governments, the term came to increasing prominence. As one scholarly account notes:
“Government ministers, journalists, commentators and ordinary citizens became accustomed to using a new rhetoric that included references to ‘competition’, ‘level playing fields’, ‘price signals’ and ‘picking winners’. Advocates of ‘markets’ often singled out their capacity to ‘discipline’ or ‘punish’.”
This is the language form we are describing. It is not new. It was institutionalised in Australia in the 1980s, during the period when both major parties converged on the neoliberal policy framework.
Status: Established.
2.3 Orwell’s Newspeak as the Diagnostic Tool
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) provided the diagnostic vocabulary for this language form. Newspeak was the language of the totalitarian state — a language designed not merely to express a worldview but to make certain thoughts unthinkable.
Australian political discourse has been analysed through this lens. John Howard’s use of “dog whistling” — communicating a message with plausible deniability that only some people can hear — has been identified as a contemporary Australian example of the Newspeak technique. More recent analysis of the 2023 Voice Referendum found opponents employing “abstract and euphemistic language like ‘going forward’ and ‘outcome-based’ to create uncertainty, foster scepticism, a form of ‘doublespeak’, when ‘saying one thing while meaning another'”.
The analysis notes that “whilst weasel words allow politicians to escape without making any real commitments, meaningless political language can also exclude people from communication altogether“. People “are excluded from whole areas of discourse, particularly when related to economics, because they are not fluent in meaningless words like ‘diversity’, ‘transparency’, ‘social cohesion’, ‘inclusion’, ‘adding value’ and ‘stakeholding'”.
Status: Established.
2.4 What the Internet Changed
The internet did not create the framing. It industrialised it.
Before the internet, the framing operation was limited by the gatekeepers of the mainstream media. The claim had to pass through editors and producers who had their own interests in maintaining credibility. After the internet, the claim could be deployed directly to the audience, at scale, without verification, and the audience could be segmented so that different groups received different framings of the same policy.
The result is what this paper identifies: a flood of information that makes it harder to find the signal. The saturated information space is not a byproduct of the internet. It is a feature of the strategy. A population that is overwhelmed by competing claims is a population that cannot focus on any single claim long enough to test it.
Status: Inference.
3. The Australian Policy Record: Promise and Outcome
3.1 Aged Care
In 2025–26, 6,436 older Australians died while waiting for the home care the Government had already assessed them as needing — a 34 per cent increase from the 4,812 who died in 2024–25, and nearly double the 3,383 who died the year before that.
This is an average of 17 older Australians dying every day waiting for home care. More than 106,000 people were on the official waiting list as of June 2026.
The system is not merely failing. It is designed to fail in a particular way. As Professor Kathy Eagar told a Senate inquiry, the Department “developed the algorithm in-house and when it’s now making a mistake, it gets to mark its own homework“. The system is, in her words, “designed to be a black box“. She revealed that the “vast majority” of the more than 500 questions assessors ask older people are not taken into account by the algorithm.
The contrast with the government’s language is precise. The policy is framed as “Support at Home”. The outcome is that 17 people a day die waiting for that support.
Status: Established.
3.2 Homelessness
More than 122,000 people are experiencing homelessness across Australia. Almost 289,000 people sought support from the Salvation Army’s homelessness services in the past year. Nearly 169,000 households remain on public housing waitlists nationwide.
The Salvation Army’s 2026 Red Shield Report found:
· 75 per cent of respondents were experiencing housing stress, rising to 86 per cent among private renters
· 60 per cent had been unable to pay their rent or mortgage on time during the previous year
· 37 per cent feared losing their home altogether
· 16 per cent had couch surfed or lived in their car during the previous 12 months
· 64 per cent of households with children could not afford winter clothing or shoes for their children
The claim that homelessness is about sleeping rough is a framing device. Rough sleeping accounts for only 6.2 per cent of homelessness. The most common form is severely overcrowded housing, affecting 39 per cent of people experiencing homelessness. Women and children account for almost three-quarters of people seeking assistance from the Salvation Army’s homelessness services.
Status: Established.
3.3 Poverty and Children in Poverty
The ACOSS and UNSW Sydney Poverty in Australia 2026 report found that 3.7 million people (14.2 per cent of the population) lived below the poverty line in 2022–23, including 757,000 children (15.6 per cent).
The poverty line is $584 per week for a single person and $1,226 per week for a couple with two children. JobSeeker sits at approximately $404 a week — 43.5 per cent of the minimum wage. Three in four people in households reliant on JobSeeker and Youth Allowance are below the poverty line.
The concentration of child poverty is stark:
· 757,000 children are growing up in households below the poverty line after housing costs — roughly one in six children under 15
· More than one in three children in single-parent families live below the poverty line
· Nearly one in ten children experience severe poverty
The government’s language frames the budget as “responsible economic management”. The outcome is that one in six children in a wealthy nation grows up in poverty.
Status: Established.
3.4 Veterans
Two years after the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, the government has implemented 32 recommendations and claims to be on track to implement around two-thirds by the end of 2026. The government accepted or agreed in principle to 104 recommendations.
A Veteran and Family Wellbeing Agency commenced on 1 July 2026. A single legislative framework for veterans’ legislation commenced on the same day.
The reforms are real. They are also slow. The structural causes of veteran distress — the culture of the Australian Defence Force, the claims process, the transition to civilian life — are not addressed by an agency. The government’s language frames the response as “progress”. The mortality rate for veterans remains a documented crisis.
Status: Established for the implementation record. Inference for the structural assessment.
3.5 The ATO Two-Tier System
The tax system operates on two distinct logics.
For large corporations and multinationals: The ATO operates a negotiation and settlement model. In 2024–25, the ATO settled 18 cases with public and multinational businesses, securing $811 million. These settlements averaged 64 per cent of the original claim — meaning the ATO conceded 36 per cent of what it initially asserted was owed.
The ATO’s own explanation: “We only settle disputes when it is appropriate. We are guided by the ATO’s Code of settlement and our obligations under the Legal Services Direction, including the obligation to act as a ‘model litigant’.”
For small businesses and individuals: The ATO operates an automated enforcement and debt recovery model. The ATO has aggressively reinstated 160,000 small business debts — many under $5,000, some under $100 — that were written off years ago as uneconomical to recover. Interest at 10.78 per cent kicks in after six months.
The structural asymmetry is precise. The multinational with a $100 million dispute has resources, legal representation, and the ability to negotiate. The small business with a $5,000 debt has automated letters, revived debts, and interest charges. The law is the same. The application is not.
Status: Established.
3.6 AI and Data Centres
On 15 July 2026, the Prime Minister announced a national AI framework and the establishment of an Office of AI within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The framework includes “clear rules for large data centres” — a legal obligation to underwrite their own power supply, pay their full share of connection costs, and be as water efficient as possible.
The language is the language of control. “AI must remain under human direction, oversight and control”. “Australian Standards“. “Australia’s interests“.
The structural reality is different. The government is fast-tracking data centre approvals before the legislation is written. The standards are “expected to be legislated early next year” — 2027. In the interim, dozens of approved but unbuilt data centres will escape the proposed restrictions because the rules are not expected to be retrospective. ABC analysis found that the combined capacity of 27 approved but unbuilt data centres is at least 3.38 gigawatts — more than double the existing 1.5 GW of operational capacity.
The claim that data centres will offer “employment and economic growth” is not supported by the evidence. Data centres are capital-intensive, not labour-intensive. The construction phase employs workers temporarily; the operational phase employs few. The wealth generated flows to the shareholders of the companies that build and operate them — companies that are overwhelmingly foreign.
The government’s framing is “AI in Australia’s interests“. The outcome is that the infrastructure is being approved before the rules are written, and the citizen is consulted after the decision has been made.
Status: Established.
3.7 Australia Post
Australia Post has entered exclusive logistics partnerships with Vinted, Depop, and WhatNot. Licensees discovered the deals on social media, with no consultation. Parliamentary records confirm that the impact of these partnerships on licensee revenue was raised in operations meetings, with “no substantive answer” provided. The pricing disparity — packaging sold to platform users below LPO wholesale cost — remains unresolved.
Status: Established.
4. The Structural Read: The Mirror and the Market
The pattern documented in this paper is not a failure of governance. It is the operational logic of the market-state.
The government’s priorities are visible in its budget. It funds the infrastructure the market requires — data centres, defence procurement, tax breaks for property investors. It defers the regulation that would constrain the market. It processes the citizen through algorithms that measure what the market requires, not what the person needs. And it reacts to harm only after it has accumulated — through Royal Commissions and class actions — rather than preventing it in the first place.
The language form documented in this paper — the selection of facts, the removal of context, the deployment of superlatives, the abstraction and euphemism — is the rhetorical complement to this architecture. It is not a failure of communication. It is a success of communication — with the people who already agree, and with the people who are too overwhelmed to check.
The claim is not a lie. It is a framing operation. The facts are selected. The context is removed. The superlatives are deployed. And the reader is left with an impression that does not survive contact with the data.
This is not unique to Australia. It is not unique to any one party. It is the language of the market-state, and it has been spoken by both major parties since the neoliberal turn of the 1980s. The difference now is the scale and the speed — the internet has industrialised the framing operation, and the result is a population that is drowning in information but starved of understanding.
The paper’s conclusion is not that the language is meaningless. It is that the language has a function that is independent of its truth content. It functions to obscure the outcomes that the architecture produces. It functions to protect the market from scrutiny. And it functions to manage the citizen who experiences the consequences.
The theory of the free-market neoliberal ideologue tries to shape the world and the outcomes within the narrow narrative of its construct. None of it was ever based on the realities of lived experience. As such, it can be viewed as a mirror that reflects the substance it lacks. The only trickle-down effects are suffering and death for the majority of the population — those who, due to the circumstances of birth, connection, and networks, find themselves on the outer in a myth-made world where the invisible hand of the market is indifferent and cold.
The evidence for this claim is documented in the parliamentary record. A submission to the Australian Parliament concluded that “the trickle-down economic theory continues to be alleged in support of current government policy but no longer works; there is only a trickle-up effect“. The submission noted that “in order for trickle-down economics to work, there must be liveable wages paid for work, there must be a taxation system that is proportionately applied… All of those mechanisms have been weakened with the intended outcome that there is no effective or sufficient trickle-down effect”.
Status: Inference.
5. Conclusion: The Mirror and the Citizen
The language form documented in this paper is not new. It was pioneered by Edward Bernays in the 1920s. It was institutionalised in Australia in the 1980s. It has been industrialised by the internet. And it operates today in the gap between what the government says and what the data shows.
The paper has documented six domains where the gap is measurable: aged care, where 17 people a day die waiting for support that has been approved; homelessness, where 122,000 people have no home; poverty, where 757,000 children grow up below the poverty line; veterans’ affairs, where the reforms are slow and the mortality rate remains a crisis; taxation, where multinationals negotiate and small businesses are processed; and AI infrastructure, where the rules are written after the approvals.
In each domain, the language frames the response as adequate. In each domain, the data says otherwise. The language is not a lie. It is a framing operation. And the framing operation is the rhetorical complement to an architecture that privileges the market over the citizen.
The theory of the free-market neoliberal ideologue is a mirror that reflects the substance it lacks. It reflects the assumptions of the market. It does not reflect the lived experience of the citizen. And the citizen, who is not in the mirror, is left in the gap.
The record is kept. The language is named. And the data speaks for itself.
Claim -Status- Summary
# -Claim- Status
1 -Bernays pioneered “engineering of consent” -Established
2 -Bernays described an “invisible government” -Established
3 -Economic rationalism was institutionalised in Australia in the 1980s -Established
4 -The language form includes “competition,” “level playing fields,” “price signals” –
Established
5 -Howard used dog whistling- Established
6 -Voice Referendum opponents used doublespeak -Established
7 -6,436 died waiting for home care in 2025-26 -Established
8 -17 people a day died waiting for home care- Established
9 -Eagar: Department “marks its own homework” -Established
10- 122,000 experiencing homelessness -Established
11- 75% of respondents experiencing housing stress -Established
12- 3.7 million in poverty; 757,000 children- Established
13 -JobSeeker at $404/week vs poverty line $584/week -Established
14 -ATO settles multinationals at 64% of claim- Established
15 ATO reinstated 160,000 small business debts Established
16- 27 approved data centres escape proposed rules- Established
17- 3.38 GW of approved but unbuilt capacity -Established
18- Australia Post licensees discovered deals on social media -Established
19- Trickle-down theory has not worked; trickle-up effect -Established
20 -The language form is the rhetorical complement to the market-state -Inference
21 -The theory is a mirror reflecting the substance it lacks -Inference
Method notes- Claims are classified throughout as Established, Inference, or Speculation. The paper examines the historical lineage of political framing language, its institutionalisation in Australia during the neoliberal turn of the 1980s, and its contemporary application in policy areas including aged care, homelessness, poverty, taxation, and AI infrastructure. It argues that the language form — the selection of facts, the removal of context, the deployment of superlatives — is not a failure of communication but a rhetorical complement to the architecture of the market-state.
References
1. Bernays, E. L. (1928). Propaganda. New York: Horace Liveright.
2. Stokes, G. (2016). The rise and fall of economic rationalism. In Studies in Australian Political Rhetoric. ANU Press.
3. Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg.
4. Australian Parliament House. (2026). Trickle-down economics: Submission to the House of Representatives.
5. The Salvation Army. (2026, August 4). Record Homelessness Should Shock Australia into Action.
6. ACOSS & UNSW Sydney. (2026). Poverty in Australia 2026: Who is affected.
7. ABC News. (2026, October 8). An average of 17 older Australians died every day waiting for home care last year.
8. ABC News. (2026, August 22). While government reviews aged care algorithm, waitlists are growing and people are dying.
9. The Australian Greens. (2026, September 24). Experts shoot down Labor’s aged care assessment fix.
10. ABC News. (2026, September 11). The bigger, hungrier AI data centres set to escape looming water and power restrictions.
11. Computer Weekly. (2026, July 15). Australia launches Office of AI to drive world-first national framework.
12. LinkedIn. (2025, November 12). ATO’s selective enforcement: Why multinationals get a break while small businesses face debt revival.
13. Australian Parliament House. (2026). Australia Post and licensee consultation.
14. The Guardian. (2026, August 25). Australia may face a rush of datacentre construction as AI firms look to avoid upcoming rules.
15. The Saturday Paper. (2023, October 21). The shrunken backyard: Howard and the Voice.
Prepared for the record. The language is named. The data speaks. And the citizen is in the gap.
