The words spoken by campaigning leaders throughout Australia's electoral history provide an invaluable, and often overlooked, window into contemporary national political, social and cultural life. Across elections, parties and politicians, the constructions of Australian identity analysed in this book provided identity security for voters. Campaigning leaders offered their constituents a chance to feel at home within, and in control of, the national space. Operating in cycles of anxiety and reassurance, these leaders reacted to the issues of the time while also evoking those of an imagined shared past. Speechwriter Graham Freudenberg (2005, 272) has argued that the issues that dominate Australia's contemporary political life are always about ‘our history’, and that ‘the party political struggle increasingly involves a contest about who and by whom that history shall be interpreted’. This, then, is the key to understanding

This political ‘struggle’ is not just about the stories told about the past, and the flashpoints Freudenberg mentions could be updated to reflect those of any era. Rather, it reflects a much more immediate concern about who Australians are today. The enduring desire of campaigning political leaders to develop a meaningful discourse of Australian identity demonstrates the way in which constructions of the nation's collective past can offer a sense of belonging and ownership in its present and future. The battle for ownership of this discourse has played out in federal election campaigns since Federation.