Doctoral Thesis by Nicholas Bromfield
Australian Prime Ministers in the 1970s and early 1980s did not incorporate Anzac into their disc... more Australian Prime Ministers in the 1970s and early 1980s did not incorporate Anzac into their discourse of national identity. However, since 1990 Australian Prime Ministers and their governments have increasingly engaged with Anzac in a manner that has supplanted the traditional role of the Returned and Services League as custodians and drivers of Anzac. This has involved them consistently giving Anzac Day addresses during the last twenty-five years, both at home and at significant sites of Australian war remembrance overseas. But this has not always been the case. Prime Ministerial engagement with Anzac in the past was primarily as a participant, not as a custodian, and was more sporadic, more suburban, and less spectacular.
The thesis explains this shift by tracing the increasing use of Anzac discourse by Australian Prime Ministers from 1972-2007. It will be argued that these Australian Prime Ministers have increasingly shown ‘Anzac entrepreneurship’ – successfully identifying the public’s desire to engage with Anzac and facilitating Anzac’s resurgence by employing the power resources of the state in order to amplify Anzac. Critical discourse analysis is adopted to analyse the integration of Anzac discourse into Prime Ministerial language. Such an approach points to the socially embedded nature of language, whilst simultaneously analysing the linguistic construction of this language.
The thesis identifies that Prime Ministers have engaged with Anzac in order to both constitutively renovate Anzac as a central Australian identity and for instrumental policy ends. These twin developments have pertained especially to the processes of domestic economic reform in a globalising world and the deployment of Australian troops during the War on Terror. Such a study is important, as recent scholarly interest in Australian politicians’ role in the resurgence of Anzac from political scientists and historians has not seen systematic investigation of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day addresses that analyses the evolution of these addresses over time or closely examines their language on a sustained basis.
Journal Articles by Nicholas Bromfield
Australian Journal of Public Administration, 2025
COVID-19 has intensified interest in crisis policy learning, yet the micro-level interactions amo... more COVID-19 has intensified interest in crisis policy learning, yet the micro-level interactions among political, bureaucratic, and expert actors remain underexplored. We conceptualise an ideal-type framework for the micro-flow of crisis learning, an ordinarily epistemic and context-specific process of individual-level interactions, where lessons co-constitute with the spaces of actors, processes, and institutions, travel across them, and iteratively build as they flow over time. We additionally introduce a matrix to trace the ideal micro-flow of crisis learning and identify challenges to this ideal. We demonstrate the framework's analytical utility by applying it to Australia's COVID-19 acute phase (2020-2021), mobilising qualitative evidence from semi-structured interviews with 34 Australian politicians, senior public servants, and policy experts, including former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Health Minister Greg Hunt, and Chief Medical Officers Brendan Murphy and Paul Kelly. We find that Australia's initial COVID-19 microlearning was open and effective, facilitated by adaptive institutions like National Cabinet and informed by This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Social Policy & Administration, 2025
Crisis management is a field that evaluates and solves crisis and disaster responses. Whilst the ... more Crisis management is a field that evaluates and solves crisis and disaster responses. Whilst the effectiveness of the ideal-type parameters of crisis management and administration has been well examined, crisis responses create administrative burdens, particularly for marginalised groups, that must be navigated. This paper brings together the administrative burden and crisis response literature, presenting a systematic review of research into Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) during COVID-19 to answer: What burdens emerged during the COVID-19 response for people with a disability? Why did these burdens arise? Were they potentially avoidable? And who was harmed by these burdens? We find that NDIS workers and participants experienced considerable administrative burdens during the implementation of the Australian pandemic response and co-produced the limited successes found in NDIS COVID-19 measures. Consequently, we argue that a crisis equity agenda should anticipate multiplied burdens for marginalised populations, plan to mitigate them and prioritise and assist the most disadvantaged in navigating stressed policy systems during a crisis response. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Australian Journal of Political Science, 2024
Grace Tame's 2021 Australian of the Year (AOTY) award directed public attention towards sexual an... more Grace Tame's 2021 Australian of the Year (AOTY) award directed public attention towards sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), as did Australia Day award recipients Donna Carson in 2004 and Rosie Battie in 2015. We use mixed-method textual analysis of a corpus of prime minister's Australia Day speeches between 1990 and 2021 to show how conservative Liberal Party prime ministers have narrated a discourse of idealised national identity to manage activist demands regarding SGBV policy. We quantitatively find that prime ministers promote masculine and heteronormative representations of Australian identity and then develop a qualitative typology of conservative SGBV frames employed by prime ministers that gloss over SGBV as a pressing and chronic policy issue and position idealised Australian femininity to condone and obscure SGBV. This paper builds upon scholarship on public policy and gendered nationalism to explain this pattern of SGBV problem definition and framing by conservative prime ministers.
International Review of Administrative Sciences, 2021
Australia and New Zealand are routinely presented as sharing more in common than the federal and ... more Australia and New Zealand are routinely presented as sharing more in common than the federal and unitary systems separating them. As two modernising Antipodean settler societies, their governing trajectories have embraced waves of public administration/ management reform. Shared pathways seem matched by their relative, although precarious and fragile, early successes in the crisis challenges of COVID-19. This article contextualises and examines one crucial point of separation: two very different crisis governance routes to such outcomes. Australia's federal variant of multi-level governance, more used to addressing diverse regional challenges than shared national threats, has been characterised by an evolving balancing act of multi-jurisdictional agendas and bureaucratic-political conflicts. By contrast, New Zealand's unitary system of governance, well-versed in the centralisation of power, has produced lower levels of intergovernmental conflict. Our analysis of these differing pathways also makes a contribution to our conceptual understanding of successful crisis governance.
How is Australianness represented by prime ministers?: Prime ministerial and party rhetoric of race, class, and gender on Australia Day and Anzac Day, 1990–2017
Australian Journal of Political Science, 2020
Australia Day and Anzac Day, held on January 26 and April 25 annually, are key moments used by pr... 
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Doctoral Thesis by Nicholas Bromfield
The thesis explains this shift by tracing the increasing use of Anzac discourse by Australian Prime Ministers from 1972-2007. It will be argued that these Australian Prime Ministers have increasingly shown ‘Anzac entrepreneurship’ – successfully identifying the public’s desire to engage with Anzac and facilitating Anzac’s resurgence by employing the power resources of the state in order to amplify Anzac. Critical discourse analysis is adopted to analyse the integration of Anzac discourse into Prime Ministerial language. Such an approach points to the socially embedded nature of language, whilst simultaneously analysing the linguistic construction of this language.
The thesis identifies that Prime Ministers have engaged with Anzac in order to both constitutively renovate Anzac as a central Australian identity and for instrumental policy ends. These twin developments have pertained especially to the processes of domestic economic reform in a globalising world and the deployment of Australian troops during the War on Terror. Such a study is important, as recent scholarly interest in Australian politicians’ role in the resurgence of Anzac from political scientists and historians has not seen systematic investigation of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day addresses that analyses the evolution of these addresses over time or closely examines their language on a sustained basis.
Journal Articles by Nicholas Bromfield