SPECIAL EDITION blog post: The NSW State Election.

 I'm not going to lie. I'm a little bit late with this blog post and it would have probably been far more effective to write about the NSW State Election and the 'law and order campaigns' involved before everyone had voted last Saturday. Nonetheless, the issues surrounding elections concerning the crime, media and politics relationship can still be discussed as they will be relevant for many elections to come.

 It's accepted that most of the public are avid consumers of crime news and has been found that roughly 76% of people form their opinions about crime from what they see and read in news media (Marsh and Melville 2009: 1). So if millions of people are watching and forming opinions about crime from what they see in the media, it would make sense that politicians (especially around election time) would also use the media to present their solutions to our country's crime problems. This is what 'law and order politics' basically is.

 Much of the debate around crime and the assurances made by politicians to solve crime problems play on our ideas of what is needed to deter people from committing crime, dubbed 'law and order commonsense'. Some of the main themes of law and order commonsense include: 'soaring crime rates, "it is worse than ever": law and order nostalgia [and that] the criminal justice system is "soft on crime" and does not protect citizens'. (Hogg and Brown 1998: 21). This was one of the ways the political candidates running in the State Election tried to win votes, so to speak.

Let us take a look at what both parties had to offer - in relation to crime policy - in the weeks leading up to the election. The Liberals we offering a plethora of improvements to crime policy including: more police powers, a three-strike system for problem venues (goodbye Friday nights at the Railway Hotel) and a graffiti hotline and crackdown, to only name a few. The ALP on the other hand, did not provide as many answers to crime problems, but in what they had shared very similar premises with those offered by the Libs. So we can see that law and order campaigns are a very popular angle to take.

 Finally, I found this significant to note here: tonight as I watched the evening news I saw that Barry O'Farrell is claimed to have said that he intends to follow through with ALL of the policies put forward in the Liberals' electoral campaign despite having found a 4.5 billion black hole in the state's budget. This raises another question:

How much should we take at face value?



References:

Marsh, I. and Melvelle, G. (2009). Crime, Justice and the Media 1st ed. London: Routledge. p. 1

Hogg, R. and Brown, D. (1998). Rethinking Law and Order. New South Wales: Pluto Press. p. 21