Frontline: Interrogating power and disrupting the discourse about Onslow and the gas hubs

Abstract

When government statements talk about a secret deal with a multinational consortium that will see more than A$250 million spent on a town with a population of around 1000 people, questions need to be asked. Basic maths equates the spend to around A$250,000 a person and yet many people in the town are unhappy about the whole deal. Tracking Onslow was a collaboration between a university and a local government that used journalism as a methodology to document and interrogate the interaction between Chevron, the state and local governments and the Onslow community over a three-year period. This article focuses on the production of the lead feature of the final edition. It presents the published article and a reflexive exegesis that uses Foucault’s ideas about power and knowledge to frame and evaluate the journalistic endeavour.

Keywords

• Australia
• collaborations
• community media
• exegesis
• investigative journalism. journalism as
• research