Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
also highlights the dependence of this naturalisation on the exoticisation of others.
The White Australian, in other words, can only be imagined as native to Australia
by continuously invoking the foreignness of others (Asians, Africans, Indians, etc.).
This perpetual invocation of the foreignness of coloured others and the
nativeness of the white self, is recaptured in the continuous replay of scenes of
suspicious foreigners entering Australia. This scene of the border is played again
and again on the hit television program,
Border Security: Australia's Frontline
.
Border
Security
, which follows the work of Australian Customs and Border Protection, the
Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service and the Department of Immigration
and Citizenship as they go about their daily work of enforcing Australian customs,
immigration and finance laws and quarantine practices. The program is supported
by the government departments and agencies involved, who have the right to veto
what gets aired, which introduces a political bias in the post-production process
(Burton, 2007). As Deveny (2007) argues, the program is thus a mixture between
television documentary, security advertisement, government propaganda and
public information campaign.
10
Consequently, the program has been the butt of
several critiques by journalists aiming to expose its public relations overtones.
Such bias does little to curb the Australian public's fascination with the program
which has regularly appeared in the top ten watched television programs since
2005. According to audience research funded by Australia's Customs and Border
Protection Services itself, 78 per cent of Australians thought the program was
'realistic'. The aim of the research was to assess to what extent Customs involve-
ment in
Border Security
produced positive outcomes for the government agency.
DMB Consultants, who conducted the research, found that 96 per cent of the 1.2
million viewers thought Customs did an important job and 83 per cent said it 'keeps
Australia safe', claiming the program was informative, amusing, realistic and
relevant. Yet when asked about the role of Customs, viewers were confused. The
program was most popular among people from lower-income brackets who had
not travelled in the previous year (constituting 93 per cent of the viewers) and who
were more likely to believe that Customs and Border Protection were responsible
for 'preventing illegal immigration' (Meade, 2011). From one angle we might say
the entertainment of watching is dependent in part on confusing border protection
from pests, diseases and weapons with border protection from foreigners, who are
seen as bearers of these ills. It may employ different suspicious coloured characters
(a Chinese couple visiting their student son, a Muslim Malaysian couple returning
to Australia, a black African couple visiting Australia or an elderly woman from
Hong Kong visiting her daughter) but the message is the same. At best, the program
portrays foreigners as ignorant. At its worst, it portrays coloured foreigners as
arrogant and scheming carriers of exotic diseases and pests.
Conclusion
Nature is an image of human making in which humans can reflect on themselves
and their society. Consequently, attempts to manage nature are always already
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