Publications

COVID-19's supply chain disruptions saw small-scale, artisanal food and craft producers experience surges in demand from consumers seeking locally made goods. This article analyses Australian news coverage promoting this ‘turn to the local’, with a focus on mainstream news outlets from March 2020 to February 2023. We identify two dominant narratives: the ‘producer pivot’ and the ‘consumer-saviour’. Using Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad’s (2018) work on resilience as a regulatory ideal of neoliberalism, we argue that both narratives focus on individual responsibility in ways that make invisible structural and economic impediments to change. The consistent ways in which buying and producing local small-scale goods were presented and understood in the news coverage – across different products, places and stages of the pandemic – highlights the persistent ways in which neoliberal values perform particular kinds of work for capitalism by asserting the necessity of local ‘resilience’ and ‘positivity’ in times of crisis.

Ideas of “craft” and “craftsmanship” have long been mobilized in middle-class Global North markets to promote the romanticized authenticity of artisanal goods, but what happens when these ideas are applied to industrially-made products? This article analyzes the artisanal imaginaries of the Australian Made Campaign to explore how the campaign taps into the growing cultural desirability of the handmade and the artisanal, and heightened concerns about the future sustainability of mass production. Focusing on the discursive and aesthetic approach of the campaign’s Facebook posts, we show how the campaign contributes to a wider mainstreaming of neo-craft as a dominant mode for promoting production in a national context where onshore manufacturing has long been in decline. We argue that the campaign’s media repertoires work to “domesticate” large-scale manufacturing via emotive appeals to traditional artisanal tropes (“love,” “family,” “care”) to tap into the zeitgeist appeal of locally-specific and knowable scales of production.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Australian consumers to pay greater attention to how local supply chains intersect with global networks, but this emphasis on local provisioning was part of a larger pattern of growth in small-scale and local production. Presenting findings from a representative national survey, this article identifies who is willing to pay more for locally made goods and how motivations for buying locally differ by age, income and gender. We find that the desire to ‘buy local’ is not dominated by any one demographic and is influenced by a range of complex commitments. Far from being just a niche middle class activity, we argue that with no singular overarching reason, demographic identification or ideological disposition driving the motivation to buy local, we can better understand how calls for the re-introduction of tariffs and buying locally are finding fertile ground among diverse parts of the electorate across the Global North.