How politicians talk about and news media report on Australia’s democracy affects how people think about, feel towards, and engage with democracy in their day-to-day lives. Therefore, understanding discourses around democracy in parliament and news media offers important insights for policy-makers wanting to address issues of distrust in government and dissatisfaction with democracy.

This report presents the findings of a quantitative analysis of discourses around democracy in parliamentary speeches and news media articles in Australia. Using literal and regular-expression (regex) matching strategies, researchers retrieved a total of 117,553 parliamentary speeches from Hansard (from 2006 to 2023) and 1,046,167 news media articles from newsapi.ai (from 2014 to 2023) on 16 issues related to democracy. They used similar matching strategies to identify a total of 24 minority groups within the text corpora. The analyses focused on how discourses around democracy have changed over time, which issues were frequently discussed together, and which minority groups were commonly mentioned in relation to democratic issues.

The findings have significant policy implications. Addressing issues of distrust in government and dissatisfaction with democracy requires effective, targeted, and respectful public engagement and communication strategies. Understanding and reflecting on how office holders talk about democratic issues, and how they relate minority groups to these issues, is a necessary first step towards better strategies.