Are the recent Melbourne protests Australia’s own version of the US Capitol riots? For some commentators, the answer seems to be an unequivocal “yes”. The Australian columnist Katrina Grace Kelly described the demonstrations that took place between 20 and 25 September as Antipodean variants of the bloody, social media-driven brouhaha that unfolded in the United States on 6 January.
In the Herald Sun, cartoonist Mark Knight depicted a Melbourne protester as that city’s “QAnon Shaman”, the best-known participant in the Capitol uprising, a hard hat resting on his raccoon headdress, flexing on the Westgate Bridge.
Similar allegations have been advanced on Twitter. For example, one pundit tweeted: “What is the difference between the Jan 6 Capitol Insurrection and the Melbourne protests? More planning — that’s about it.” Another Twitter user wrote:
WTAF is going on in Melbourne?! Scenes like the US Capitol riots.
— Marcus Megalokonomos (@MarcusMegalo) September 21, 2021
Framing the recent demonstrations in Melbourne in terms of an Australian version of the Capitol riots is understandable, not least because of the apparent similarities between these events. But can such a framing enrich our understanding of the events that played out in Melbourne, and how these events — which, like the COVID-19 pandemic itself, have been described as “unprecedented” — came into being? Does this kind of framing in fact obscure the complexities and peculiarities of the protests and thus prevent us from working to minimise the likelihood of such discord happening again?
The importance of framing
Framing plays a crucial role in shaping public sphere discussions of news and current affairs. As Robert Entman puts it:
To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.
The frame that a journalist, a politician or social media user adopts to describe a particular news story can help shape the way that story is understood by the wider public. By including certain details and excluding others, we can portray certain occurrences in radically different ways, and construct radically different portraits of “what actually happened”.
Sometimes, framing is undertaken for ideological purposes. This was not lost on those Twitter users who described the violence on the streets of Melbourne as the #MurdochRiots. This is a reference to the trend within Murdoch media outlets of promoting anti-lockdown, anti-Daniel Andrews, and anti-vaccine rhetoric. And, of course, adopters of the #MurdochRiots hashtag are operating from a clearly ideological position.
Framing can be undertaken for the purposes of attracting clicks and, therefore, dollars. In a saturated mediascape, sensationalism and conflict can be the perfect tools with which to command eyeballs. As the old journalistic maxim goes: “If it bleeds, it leads”. Framing can also be a means through which media outlets and users can make sense of the world around them. This has been especially evident since January 2020, during which time the novel coronavirus and the myriad upheavals it has set in train have been framed as everything from a capitalism-exacerbated crisis to an opportunity to create a fairer, more just world.
The demonstrations in Melbourne that began in earnest on 20 September, and which followed on from a series of anti-lockdown protests across Australia, along with a number of smaller, non-violent demonstrations on 17 September, are very much by-products of a COVID-ravaged world. The ways in which these events are framed, whether it’s in a newspaper or on a social media feed, are significant for understanding these events and minimising the likelihood of them reoccurring.
Did Washington come to Melbourne?
So why would the US Capitol riots might seem like an appropriate frame through which to understand and discuss the Melbourne Protests? There are superficial similarities between these demonstrations. The Washington and Melbourne protests were both held at iconic sites, though the locations in Washington are recognisable globally than those in Melbourne (which include the Westgate, the Shrine of Remembrance, St. Kilda Beach and — inexplicably — Northcote Plaza).
The Washington and Melbourne protests were both characterised by public violence. The Capitol uprising resulted in five deaths and numerous injuries. A number of police, protesters, and journalists were harmed in Melbourne, though, mercifully, none have died.
The demonstrations have been marked by the presence of far-right actors and conspiracists. In the United States, these included, notably, QAnon supporters and the Proud Boys; and the riots themselves were at the instigation of former President Donald Trump and in response to baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election had been rigged. Participants in the Melbourne protests included individuals who presented as opposed to vaccines, and a number of men wore shirts with Proud Boy logos. The protests were attended by Lizzy Rose, the so-called “Karen from Bunnings” and a high-profile COVID-19 denialist. A quick social media trawl reveals that footage of the protests has been recorded and/or shared by a number of anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown, and COVID-sceptical activists.
The Washington and Melbourne protests were fuelled and facilitated in no small way by a networked online mediascape — a mediascape in which disinformation is produced and distributed globally at a rate that was unimaginable in the pre-Web 2.0 era. In all the protests, the private messaging app Telegram was used to coordinate events (or at least try to, in the case of Melbourne; the Australian protests were conspicuous by their disorganisation).
The kinds of networked disinformation described above have been reported uncritically — and, at times, celebratorily — by the Murdoch press in North America and Australia. The relationship between this media empire and anti-lockdown, anti-lockdown protests warrants further scrutiny.
What does Washington have to do with Melbourne?
Despite these similarities, there are some crucial differences, which point to the problems with applying the Capitol riots frame to what has occurred in Melbourne.
To begin with, the Capitol protests were predicated on allegations of electoral fraud and the denial of justice to Donald Trump — indeed, Trump himself was perhaps to chief promoter of these allegations. While those who took part in the riots exhibited a degree of diversity in terms of their political affiliations, they were all united by their endorsement of the former President. There may well have been Capitol protesters who were aggrieved by real injustices (like unemployment or poverty, but they were not protesting these injustices, but rather unproven accusations of an injustice committed against Trump.
By contrast, the Melbourne protests arose directly from decisions made by the Victorian state government to remove tea rooms for tradespeople on construction sites (due to these facilities being COVID-19 spreading grounds) and the requirement that all construction workers needed to receive the first injection of a COVID-19 vaccine by 5 October. Thus, these protests began as demonstrations against hastily mandated workplace regulations — regulations that could unfairly affect workers (I’ve heard more than one person remark about the difficulties of getting a vaccine shot in a short period of time). In a lengthy and compelling account of the demonstrations, Ben Hillier writes:
One protester, in the industry for twenty years, said that he has never seen a divide like this between the union leaders and a section of the workforce. He won’t be getting vaccinated because he just doesn’t trust it, but he was wearing a mask because he doesn’t deny the seriousness of the pandemic and “because I have respect for people”.
The reasons for this protester’s vaccine distrust are unknown. The concerns he expresses about the virus are hardly redolent of the far right or any conspiracy movement — particularly those movements based around denying COVID-19 and opposing face masks.
Right-leaning activists certainly participated in the Melbourne protests, but this in itself does not make the protests inherently right-wing, much less an initiative of the far right. As Elise Thomas points out: “The nature of these kinds of ‘anti’ protests is that the participants are united by what they’re against, but often have wildly differing opinions on what they’re for.” Some of the Melbourne protesters might have opposed mandatory vaccination on moral grounds, or due to vaccine hesitancy; others might have opposed vaccines on the grounds that they belong to a nefarious government plot to render citizens docile and subservient. Thomas argues convincingly that labelling the Melbourne protests as overwhelmingly “far right” can have parlous consequences:
Labelling all these people as being far right, white supremacists or neo-Nazis, as the building industry union has suggested, is not just inaccurate. It’s actively harmful, because it hands anti-lockdown protesters a propaganda tool which they can use to their advantage. The logic goes: “They say we’re white supremacists, but we’re not. If they’re lying to you about this, what else are they lying about?”
In other words, actual far-right groups can take these unfounded accusations and use them to sow distrust and dissent against those in positions of power. Such distrust and dissent can, in turn, create fertile grounds for those groups to recruit new members.
One can only speculate as to whether public comments made by former federal opposition leader Bill Shorten and current Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton might be used by conspiracists and the far right to build their numbers. Shorten described the Melbourne protestors as “man baby Nazis”; Sutton accused the protesters of living “in a fantasy world”: “If they have taken mandated vaccination as a hook, so be it. Let’s not pretend these are otherwise rational individuals. They’re absolutely wacky.” It’s not difficult to imagine how such remarks might be framed as evidence by, say, anti-vaccine groups that governmental “elites” are uncaring of — indeed, actively hostile toward — their constituents.
Finally, the Capitol protests were actively inflamed by Donald Trump — a man whose popularity stemmed, at least in part, from his uncanny ability to perform the role of a non-elite, a voice of the people, uncensored and unafraid. Immediately before the 6 January riots, Trump told his supporters, “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” By contrast, Prime Minister Scott Morrison denounced the Melbourne protests in no uncertain terms.
Time to reframe
It’s time for those who produce and those who consume the media to find new frames through which to represent and attempt to understand the can of social unrest we’ve seen in Melbourne. These new frames would attempt to understand how government policies and pronouncements (no matter how well-intentioned) can put ostracise and alienate certain groups (such as tradespeople), and make their particular grievances vulnerable to co-option by nefarious actors. To put it bluntly, if we want to stem the rise of the far right, it’s advisable not to push people into their arms.
Framing the Melbourne protests as our very own Capitol riots is inappropriate. Such framing misrepresents the participants and the issues at stake in the Melbourne events, and thus stands in the way of knowing how to reduce the likelihood of repeat performances.
Jay Daniel Thompson is a Lecturer in Professional Communication in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.
