'This very difficult debate about Wik': Stake, voice and the management ofcategory memberships in race politics

The issue of 'race' has assumed an extraordinarily salient position in Aust ralian politics since the election of the conservative Howard government in 1996. Central to debate in the Australian polity; has been the nature of t he relationship between indigenous, or Aboriginal, Australians and the rest of the population, in particular over the issue of the land rights of indi genous people. Land rights, or 'native title', assumed a pre-eminent positi on in national political life in 1996/97 with the handing down by the High Court of the so-called 'Wik judgment'. The discursive management of the ens uing debate by Australia's political leaders is illuminative of key sites o f interest in the analysis of political rhetoric and the construction of 'r acially sensitive' issues. Taking the texts of 'addresses to the nation' on Wik by the leaders of the two major political parties as analytic material s, we examine two features of the talk. First, examine how the speakers man age their stake in the position they advance, with an extension of previous work on reported speech into the area of set-piece political rhetoric. Sec ond,nd, in contrast to approaches which treat social categories as routine, mundane and unproblematic objects, we demonstrate the local construction o f category memberships and their predicates as strategic moves in political talk. Specifically, we demonstrate how the categories of 'Aborigines' and 'farmers', groups central to the dispute, are constructed to normatively bi nd certain entitlements to activity to category membership. Furthermore, in asmuch as such categories do not, in use, reflect readily perceived 'object ive' group entities in the 'real' world, so too 'standard' discursive devic es and rhetorical structures are themselves shown to be contingently shaped and strategically deployed for contrasting local, ideological and rhetoric al ends.