Crisis communication serves to guide human behaviour and motivate public compliance with protective policies during times of crisis. Conventional communication models emphasise the significance of timeliness, clarity and references to scientific data. The following study examines how three Australian state governments – Victoria, New South Wales, and Western Australia – strategised human values and political ideologies in their crisis communication during the COVID–19 pandemic. The selection of these jurisdictions is grounded in a most–similar, most–different system design: Taking into account a variety of factors such as the socio–demographic profile of each state, the political–ideological orientation of the ruling party, and the pandemic trajectory, the study accounts for the multiple contextual influences on government rhetoric. This approach provides for a nuanced and robust understanding of crisis communication in Australia. The COVID–19 vaccine mandates for public space access and travel serve as the case study, based on considerations of public visibility of these policies as well as the contentious nature of the vaccine mandates as a direct intrusion on personal bodily autonomy. Because infringements upon bodily autonomy affect the quintessence of individual agency and thus deeply held personal values and identities, we expect that governments need to shift their communicative practices from merely informing to persuading. To examine our proposition, we analyse crisis communication, by coding press conferences and official written announcements deductively using Shalom Schwartz’s human values model and George Lakoff’s political ideologies framework. Additionally, we code the same dataset inductively to capture the specific issues, objectives and social groups that communicatively expressed values refer to. Our approach differs from the predominantly computational methods prevailing in the literature. Instead, we analyse crisis rhetoric for the substantive meaning of statements, manually generating ca. 1,000 coding references using NVivo 15. We demonstrate that basic values may either align with left–wing or right–wing ideology based on the context. Our analysis reveals that the Australian governments moved beyond technocratic communication models in constructing legitimacy for coercive policies. Rather, they resorted to values that aligned with the ideological orientation of political majorities in their respective jurisdictions to generate public consent for coercive health measures. The study has implications for the question of how authorities should communicate contentious policies to the broader public.
