ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 examines how the Australian Government has incorporated education and literacy within whole-of-government strategies during 2007. This period marked the transition from the Howard Coalition Government to the Rudd Labor Government in November of that year. Prior to the election Rudd had assumed leadership of the Australian Labor Party in December of 2006 and as leader saw to the eventual defeat of Howard’s long term prime ministership in the November 2007 election.
Informed by my reading of the corpus, in this chapter I draw out three distinct strands that connect literacy and education to particular discursive and non-discursive practices of government. My discussion is structured around the themes of Securing Human Capital, Securing National Identity, and Governing Human Security. Each of these themes brings into view how literacy and education might be constructed as an economic virtue, a cultural virtue, a civilising virtue. When taken together they form part of an apparatus implicated in the production of human subjects necessary for the good governing of civil society: An apparatus that I argue constructs literacy and education as security.
