Election Campaigns and Television News Coverage: The Case of the 2001 Australian Election

This paper examines the patterns of television news coverage of the political parties, their leaders and the issues they raised during the 2001 Australian federal election campaign. By focusing on some issues, parties and leaders, television has long been argued to constrain voters' evaluations. We find that television news coverage in the 2001 Australian election campaign focused primarily on international issues, especially terrorism and asylum seekers, and on the two major parties—virtually to the exclusion of coverage of the minor parties and their leaders. Within the major party ‘two-horse race’, television gave substantially more coverage to the leaders than to the parties themselves, thereby sustaining what some have called a ‘presidential’-style political contest. John Howard emerged as the winner in the leaders' stakes, garnering more coverage than Labor's Kim Beazley.     

Beyond the Modern Supermarket: Geographical Approaches to the Analysis of Contemporary Australian Retail Restructuring

The recent development of new supermarket forms in Australia (Woolworths Metro and Coles Express) provides important insights into the changing geographical forms of grocery retailing and consumption in Australia. Using a multi‐layered approach designed to integrate three overlapping geographical processes relevant to this issue: urban socio‐economic restructuring, shifting spatial arenas of consumption and the corporate geographies of major retailers, the paper identifies the ways that these developments decentre traditionally dominant supermarket discourses. These new supermarket forms are important because they provide a vehicle for the nation’s two pre‐eminent supermarket chains to extend their retail reach, and effect a blurring of taken‐for‐granted retail categories. Although these developments are new and tentative, they presage wider changes in the emerging geographical structures of Australian grocery retailing, and the linkages between urban spaces and modes of consumption.