A range of key issues are dominating voters’ thoughts going into tomorrow’s election, but the messaging of the major parties is not among them, according to a leading linguistics expert.
While Labor’s campaign has been ‘Building Australia’s Future’ and the Coalition’s has been trying to ‘Get Australia Back on Track’, both slogans have been met with little enthusiasm by Australia’s 18 million voters ahead of the May 3 election.
Indeed the slogans of Clive Palmer’s nationalist party Trumpet of Patriots have garnered more headlines (accused of being deliberately divisive), and taken up more advertising space, despite their being little prospect of the party winning a seat.
So, is it apathy towards political sloganeering generally or just the particular path Labor and the Liberals have taken?
“It’s probably a mix of both,” said Dr Howard Manns, a senior lecturer of linguistics at Monash University.
“I’ve seen it suggested somewhere that the time of the slogan has already gone away. That we are not really using slogans anymore, [so] we are not really expecting that to be useful anymore.
“On the one hand…maybe the time of the political slogan is beginning to fade away, maybe there is a certain apathy about the voting public towards slogans, but also, there’s still some really useful slogans out there that do seem to move people.
“I wrote about this with the ‘If you don’t know, vote no’ because despite what you think about what it’s pointing to, it’s a really good slogan.”
Is one slogan better than the other?
Whether a political slogan can achieve popular use and success turns on the language itself, the experts say. From the choice of words and their sound to the meaning it conveys.
Regarding Election 2025’s slogans, Dr Manns said: “I think there’s a really interesting dance around trying to keep things as vague as possible… so that each of the candidates can appeal to a broad body.
“There’s one cynical view of these slogans which is ‘they could try harder.’ But then there’s another view of the slogans which is essentially… keep it vague on the national level because you need to be able to connect with as many voters as you can and the experience of as many voters as you can.
“Putting aside the messaging and what they actually point to, the slogan ‘Make America Great Again” clearly is a useful slogan. It’s been used multiple times in history. It’s been plagiarised and reused. Reagan used it and then before Reagan, Barry Goldwater used it.”
Dr Manns said the major parties then use “micro-target messaging” or secondary political slogans to build upon their main slogan, like Labor with “Protect Medicare”.
He added: “But then [parties] localise, and you have very specific messages. Because the message that is going to win you a seat in a place like Toorak is not the same message that’s going to win you a seat in Ballarat.”
While this overall strategy by each major party may be functional, one is not necessarily more memorable than the other.
“If you think about this year’s slogans, ‘Building Australia’s Future’ [people are] all for that. Let’s get ‘Australia Back on Track’, I think collectively we probably all agree there’s something and we like it to get back on track. To be honest, if I were to assess both of this year’s slogans, I’m drawn to both of them.”
Back to the future?
The competing slogans suggest opposite directions in what may be the parties attempt to distinguish themselves from each other, but can be understood as part of a long-standing political tradition.
“There’s always this narrative in any one campaign of moving forward versus moving back,” Dr Manns said. “It kind of came to a head, if you think about it, with Malcom Turnbull’s slogan some years ago when he did that: ‘Continuity and Change’. Which was actually a slogan right from Veep.
“So those kind of vibes are always there and you can always expect that one party will take one perspective and the other another perspective.
“In general, what you find is that the incumbent wants to come up with a slogan or a narrative where there continuing to take Australia’s future forward. There continuing to finish the job.”
An example is Abraham Lincoln’s catch cry ‘Don’t change horses midstream’ which gained popularity in the 1864 US presidential election, and was used 123 years later by Labor leader Bob Hawke in the 1987 Australian election.
Dr Manns said: “Whereas, for the other side, whoever is trying to unseat the incumbent oftentimes it’s about some kind of metaphor for either just a broad aspirational new Australia, or broad aspirational new way.
“Or, you know, things have gone off track and now we’re going to put them back on track.”
Another key difference between the slogans is their sound.
The words ‘Back on Track’ rhyme — making them arguably more catchy than the staid ‘Building Australia’s Future’.
A study by Norwegian academics in 2013 found rhyming had the ability to influence a voter’s perception of a slogan, otherwise known as the ‘rhyme-as-reason effect.’
The political left is getting better at language but I’d say the politically right has a 50-year head start here.
The same research also indicated people found slogans which rhymed were easier to remember and seemed more trustworthy.
Dr Manns said the strategising behind slogans went way back.
“The political right has invested, and conservatives have invested, a significant amount of money into language,” he said. “And they have absolutely worked a revolution in linguistic thought in the last 50 years or so.
“To be clear, that’s not me saying it, George Lakoff has written about this in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant, which is essentially what they’ve done really well and they’ve had some really good political language experts.
“Frank Luntz, who is probably becoming a little bit more moderate as he gets older, was an absolute wizard in the 1990s and the early naughties with slogans and words and sloganeering. He’s the reason why, essentially, we talk about climate change instead of global warming. That was Frank Luntz and he was the one who helped to design a lot of these slogans for the GOP and conservatives.”
But the political left has also taken a page from the right’s book regarding having a distinct sound to its slogans.
“I think the political left are getting better with language and alliteration,” said Dr Manns. “I mean we shouldn’t forget that not in the last election but two elections ago, Bill Shorten was running on “100 positive policies”.
Another example was the 2015 report ‘Words that Work: Making the Best Case for People Seeking Asylum’ from the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) and communications expert Anat Shenker-Osorio that sought to change discussions about people seeking asylum.
Dr Manns said: “It was a really successful campaign that sought to humanise asylum seekers, and it was a very successful campaign in Australia. I think the political left is getting better at language but I’d say the politically right has a 50-year head start here. “
Steering clear of the word ‘woke’
During a campaign launch in Western Sydney earlier this week, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton reiterated one of his more controversial election plans.
“A Coalition Government is committed to ensuring classrooms are places of education – not indoctrination,” he said.
While other media outlets have called this Dutton’s plan to remove the alleged “woke agenda” from education, it appeared the opposition leader had an aversion to using the term itself.
“I haven’t seen Dutton use woke,” said Dr Manns. “I’ve seen him use everything but that. And I think one of the reasons that he is not using that word, is to avoid being linked to some of the things in the US right now.
“Because it’s a political hot potato in the US. But in a meaningful way, I’m glad he’s not using it.
“Because sometimes we linguists think about the word ‘woke’ or ‘socialism’ or even ‘facism’ as linguistic spam. And what I mean by linguistic spam is, it’s a word that’s been used and over used so much. It’s very emotional for a good reason for people. But we just don’t share a definition anymore for that word.
“So, I’m not really sure that it’s a meaningful word. I think that it’s kind of being hollowed out from its meaning.
“In a community how can you actually describe a concept or discuss a concept if we don’t agree on what the concept means, and I think we are kind of there with woke too… I don’t think it’s a great word to use in this day and age because I’m not really sure that people share a definition of it. It’s a very politicised word.
“Why don’t we just say what we mean, you know, be more honest.”
Election by social media
In NSW, there are a million voters aged between 18 and 29, comprising nearly a fifth of the voting population in the state. Now more than ever, young people’s votes matter.
Both Labor and the Coalition have made significant efforts to use social media in their election campaigns in hopes of appealing to young Australians.
Dr Manns said: “This definitely seems like a more social media-oriented election, definitely for the ALP and the Greens.
“You can very consciously and clearly see that the Greens and Labor are trying to target young people and target that TikTok trend.
“The really interesting thing that’s changed in recent years, too, is that people want to make these slogans hashtags. And every now and then it’s very successful like ‘Yes we can’ [Obama]. I don’t know how big it was necessarily on Twitter, but ‘Yes we can’ had that vibe of a movement and hashtag.”
Though one political side may use social media more doesn’t mean their slogans or campaigning will gain greater visibility with audiences.
Such was the case in the 2024 American Presidential Election with a recent study from Media Matters finding nine out of the 10 of the largest online shows (across all platforms) were right-leaning.
So, what the two parties’ slogans are worth will only be clear on election night.
Main image by Irene Diakanastasis.
