One of the most powerful ways that campaigning political leaders forge a connection with voters is by talking about Australian identity in positive terms. This is a discursive strategy that pervades political speech beyond election campaigns. It seeks to use explicit discussions of the Australian people and the things they care about as a foundation to allow leaders to align themselves, their parties and their promises with what is imagined as the Australian way of life. This strategy can be incredibly effective, helping citizens feel as though they are part of a community that is valuable and worth protecting, a community within which their dreams for the future and personal ideals will be respected. It seeks to construct for voters a positive story of their own individual identity, and then connect this to an image of Australian identity that aligns their sense of self, if not wholly then in the ways that are seen to matter, with the values and priorities of those around them.

Political leaders who provide positive articulations of individual and collective Australian identity do so with a keen partisan eye, ensuring that they develop for themselves a political persona aligned with these articulations. If a party leader can claim what they present as the positive story of Australian values for their side of politics, using the Labor or Liberal tradition as a standing for national history more broadly, then they can cast themselves both as personifying these values and as their staunchest defender. While this discursive strategy runs throughout Australian political history, some leaders have worked explicitly in their campaign speeches, interviews, debates and press conferences to bring Australian values to life. Through mythologized descriptions of the national character, historical re imagining and storytelling, and personal anecdotes, they have used this discourse to pledge to govern in the spirit of the carefully constructed Australian way of life that these shared values make possible. The challenge for leaders is to ensure that their mobilization of these discourses seems sincere. Aligning yourself with Australian values or the national character can backfire unless it is seen to accord with a deeply held personal belief about, and shared lived experience of, the priorities and concerns of the electorate.