The discursive construction of a distinctive Australian identity, whose values and characteristics are to be celebrated, will always be reliant on the placing of limits on that identity. Membership in the national collective cannot be an open proposition if it is to provide a sense of identity security. Jyoti Puri (2004, 2; 15), in her study of nationalism, argues that it is founded upon ideas of sameness and difference; that national identity is relational and the differences ‘between insiders and outsiders are hardly fixed’. This identification of fluidity is vital, as constructions of national identity can and must change over time in response to broader changes in political, social and economic context. Setting and defending the shifting borders between those constructed as insiders and outsiders has been a consistent concern of campaigning political leaders, who have asked voters to consider the ideal size and composition of the Australian community.

These leaders have forged a connection to the electorate through identity stories that draw clear boundaries around the national community, working alongside political discourses that define Australian values and locate the nation in the global landscape as a mechanism to define and defend the national collective. This has played across a range of issues: in early campaign language, attempts to paint Australia as an idealized classless society both mobilized memories, and critiqued notions, of home in service of defining identity for the newly formed nation, offering a direct contrast to the stratified social and labour conditions left behind in Britain. In the campaigns of the twenty- first century, contentious and often highly emotional public debates over Australia's stance on asylum seekers and refugees have similarly offered political leaders the opportunity to evoke a national community both welcoming and under threat. This was perhaps clearest in 2001, an election that sits in popular memory as dominated by concerns about international terrorism and the perceived influx of asylum seekers (constructed in political language as ‘boat people’ or ‘illegal immigrants’). Liberal prime minister John Howard's engagement with these issues sits alongside Gough Whitlam's It's Time campaign speeches as some of the most compelling and frequently analysed uses of political language in Australian political history.