Mediating a Budget: Economic Coverage, Financialisation and (Re)forming the Australian 'People'

Economic news and comment has consequences for civic life through its contribution to the formation of the Australian 'people'. This increasingly important media genre is one element of financialimtion-the making of finance into the leading sector in national and international economies and cultures. Economic coverage plays its part in this development by equipping the Australian 'people' with finance literacy. While there are many aspects to this, we consider it here by analysing media coverage of a recent Federal Budget. This coverage can be seen as a recent instalment of a relentless persuasion to a finance rationality that has shaped people's agency in historically and culturally particular ways, forming them as investors and as consumers in late twentieth and early twenty-first century Australia and for regimes of governance where finance imperatives dominate. This finance rationality has particular limitations such as the ignoring of disprivileged social conditions and labours. These are considered alongside the current push by the Australian government for education in finance literacy to become a priority and, relatedly, the declining fortunes of the discipline of economics.