A fortnight ago, after the characters at The Opposition Organ went into full on attack mode, confecting a picture of governmental chaos and evil spin from Kevin Rudd and his minions, we could witness the construction of one of those “media narratives” we’re constantly told by… the media… are so important. Last year we saw the then Government Gazette go into brain explosion mode, trying desperately to shore up the foundations of the then media narrative - that Howard was a political genius blah blah with a veritable plague of rabbits concealed in his Akubra. That was a bridge too far. Because it showed the narrative dissipating before our eyes as the effort being put into walling it off from reality was too painfully evident. Something similar is happening this year, with the cracks very indiscreetly showing, as the beleaguered “political class” of punditocrats effectively bemoan their lack of influence by letting a few too many cats out of the bag while trying to sew up the rips in the fabric of their dreams.
So we had Andrew “Insider” Bolt, who recently “celebrated” ten years of his column by “toot[ing] [sic] [his] own triumphs [sic]” (the link is to Grodscorp’s fisking not to Bolta’s auto-Birthday party), claiming - how embarrassment! - that it was journalists who swung the Gippsland by-election (the link goes to the post at LP not to Bolt’s blog). On Saturday, we had Christopher Pearson joining his News Limited colleague Glenn Milne in touting the saviour like potential of Peter Costello - the “man of the future”, we’re told! Although he apparently has “no malice” for Brendan Nelson, what’s one of the factors that Pearson cites as demonstrating that Nelson is doomed?
Partly it’s a case of not having won over the press gallery.
Yep, that’s the reason why Nelson bombs in the polls. Must be all those journos who live in Gippsland being over-sampled. I actually suspect Costello’s smart enough not to believe this nonsense, though I also imagine he takes the flattery in the spirit with which it’s given. Anyway, the narrative about chaos and spin in Rudd’s office is alive and well, if the silly reaction to the new Working Dog tv series, Hollow Men, from the Insiders - particularly “sketch writer” Annabel Crabb - yesterday morning is any indicator. The segment is worth watching, though, for the comedy gold of Gerard Henderson pontificating about the impact of comedy.
And this mob of clowns complain about spin?
So, to circle round back to where this post started, in the post I wrote about the extraordinary OO weekend of piling on Kevin Rudd two weeks ago, I asked a question:
Is it really so surprising that any government might want to shape its media coverage? Really? Is that so shocking? Did the Howard government never do spin?
Credit where it’s due - Laurie Oakes, as I noted at the time, wasn’t taken in by all this nonsense. And credit also goes to Lenore Taylor, who wrote a very sensible column last weekend:
THE Opposition would have us believe Kevin Rudd is all spin and no substance. I think his problem is exactly the reverse.
Far from being devoid of content, I reckon the Rudd Government is running a real risk of having too much substance, too much policy fibre for the electorate to digest in just one electoral term.
I suspect she’s wrong that the public won’t be able to get their heads around more than one big issue, and perhaps the biggest problem the Rudd government has - magnified out of all proportion by the media’s “why didn’t you fix that yesterday?” mindset (and see this interview between Kerry O’Brien and Kevin Rudd last week on the 7 30 Report for yet another example of that) - is the expectation that so much that went wrong or was left unaddressed in the Howard era will be fixed instantly.
But this passage, and the comparison with the communications problems of Blair’s New Labour that follows it, does make a lot of sense to me:
If by spin the critics mean bowling up a news story with an accompanying prime ministerial picture opportunity every day to feed the hungry maw of the 24-hour news cycle, then they certainly practise too much of it. Of course governments do things and have to be seen to be doing things. But Rudd does a different thing every day. He has about as much continuity of message as a bot fly.
On Thursday he was talking about business regulation and the Murray Darling Basin at a COAG meeting with the premiers. On Wednesday he was talking about organ donation. On Tuesday he was talking about the car industry with the global president of Toyota; and before that he was talking about how great it was to be at a community cabinet in Mackay.
Important things, all of them.
But that kind of message-a-day spin doctoring is more suited to election campaigns or the permanent campaign mode of late-term opposition.
What this Government needs is more so-called spin of a substantive kind. More consistent explanation about the big stuff. The really important things. The things we put them there to do. The things that, in many cases, they are doing behind the scenes.
Take emissions trading. Cabinet and the nine-person cabinet subcommittee on climate change have been meeting late into the night discussing this fundamental economic change. They’ve not made final decisions yet. They’re not ready to make announcements. Fair enough.
But surely the Government could be responding to Opposition politicking on the issue by reminding us in a straight-talking, no-nonsense kind of way exactly why we need an emissions-trading regime.
That’s very similar, let me point out, to a lot of what we’ve been saying at LP for some time.
Laura Tingle argued in Friday’s Fin Review that one of the “diabolical” political problems - as well as the diabolical policy problem Ross Garnaut has sketched - about emissions trading is that the case has to be made simultaneously for the substance as well as the detail, because although there’s a lot of support in the community for addressing climate change - and it was one of the big two factors, along with WorkChoices, that won Rudd the election - the actual nature of an emissions trading scheme isn’t well understood.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that we’ve got Treasury modelling, a government Green Paper, the final Garnaut Review report, and a White Paper yet to come, and that the final shape of the ETS won’t become clear until much later this year. It shouldn’t be forgotten either that we’re going to hear far too much from industry shills complaining that they’re among the “losers”, let alone the crud that the Nelson opposition will probably serve up.
But the basic message about the nature and the necessity of an ETS is the most important communications task Rudd faces. It’s clear as Brian has written that he’s staking a lot of chips on this issue. It’s also clear as I’ve suggested that communications effort needs to go beyond the government itself, and that’s one task we at LP have set for ourselves - explaining as well as defending the need for an ETS.
In order to follow the standard for Ozplogistan, nice post Kim.
It’s been a weird few weeks for sure for the Rudd Government. It seems to me like they are letting the smaller hollow issues overcrowd their message. It is clear that from Friday onwards the ALP spin machine has been in full gear on the issue of climate change, but methinks that they should have been clearing the table for the debate before this time. On the other hand, would there have been all that much to gain by kicking off this debate before Garnaut released the draft?
As you have said above, this fight is going to be big and is going to go on for a few months. Rudd has let Nelson get in first to rabbit on about how this is all a rush job etc - but Nelseon was always going to say that no matter how much analysis actually went into Garnaut and the umpteen other reports on emissions trading etc.
From what I understand, the government has been gearing up for this fight for a long time and they expect it to go over many rounds. I’m also pretty sure that Rudd and Penny Wong have had it spelt out to them in very clear language how important it is to have the right ETS and not the sort of half-cocked nonsense that some in the energy and mining sectors would like to see put in place.
Nothing much at all, mick, in one sense, but maybe a few high profile speeches about the need for an ETS? I suspect they were trying to avoid getting into a discussion about the detail too early, but I think maybe some more big picture ground needed to be laid.
I don’t agree with Lenore Taylor, as I said, that it’s a mistake for Rudd to talk about other stuff. It just needs tying in to the big picture themes.
I think they had a very scrappy period post-budget, but I think they’ve been back on the front foot the last week or so.
Btw, Rudd was on Insiders yesterday. That’s closed off one line of whinging from the punditariat!
But I wonder if they haven’t decided to cultivate a few allies or potential allies (ie Cassidy, Megalogenis) and split the pack a bit. I wouldn’t be surprised if Rudd’s got someone smarter than that press secretary dude giving him a bit of media strategy advice now.
Okay - I’ll be conscripted…I may desert later but I’ll chip in for now.
Kim may seduce me even if others never will.
The smart play on petrol prices inho is to use the bully-pulpit. Start delivering regular sermons on psychopathic corporate behavior ( With numerous examples such as Exxon and etc)
And just how much cartels like OPEC resemble the old Comintern.
You know the drill. ( Kevin Carson is good for background)
Prices will rise but its up to us as consumers to keep up the demand for level playing fields and truly free and fair markets. Or else.
Climate change denialists and panic-mongers will be told to put up or shut up.
Then severely punished should they persist. Yes?
Say yes Kim please say yes.
Further to the “spin v well-referenced reality” debate, you might like to compare Possum’s analysis of shifting poll demographics in The Coalitions’ Demographic Train Wreck http://possumcomitatus.wordpress.com/
with George Megalogenis’s effort in today’s OO Voters begin to shift on PM
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23979407-601,00.html
Not a bad July08 version of the 2007 example Kim quoted (above). Ah, but George had the advantage of Focus group polling; so he could claim:
If this isn’t the superlative degree of “fending off gardening leave” tongue-in-cheek, George, I’m giving you up!
There is another doozy of a comparison between Sunday night’s TV news footage of the ACTU + Greens & other green groups demo yesterday, and Samantha Maiden’s in the OO’s Rudd faces climate revolt, the “authorities” quoted in this effort’s being - wait for it - Michael Costa & Australian Workers Union national secretary Paul Howes!! http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23979406-601,00.html
“Spin City”, you have been eclipsed!
PS: By the way, today’s OO attack on internet-based politics is Glen Milne’s Lessons from ALP’s secret web weapon on GetUp: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23978364-7583,00.html
Oh to be a media/ OzPol student in search of a thesis topic!
And Milne didn’t mention LP? I’m disappointed.
While I’m sure Get Up and various blogs contributed to Howard’s defeat, the biggest reasons for Labor’s victory was that Labor was a credible alternarive for the first time in years and there was a stench coming from the Howard Government after all the wrong they did over their years in power - not just Workchoices (though that helped greatly) but a lot of other things, about which the Australian people said, No more!
We await the Liberal version of GetUp!
If they mention us by name, people might discover that there’s an alternative to reading what Milne et al say about politics, and stop reading him and start reading us, Paul! So they never do.
BTW: Tell me I’m not hallucinating when I recall that Kev Rudd actually went to the electorate promising to have a CTS in place by 2010. So y’r Oz voters went to the polls - opinion as well as ballot boxes - and actually voted for a CTS in place by 2010!
So when Brendan Weathervane (& sundry NewsLtd scribblers & TV commentators) come out in spoiler mode crying “Too soon! Too Soon!” and “voter backlash”, are they, once again, trying to force Rudd to break his election promises (or hoping he will)?
Or do the above believe that voters are so dumb they don’t know what they’re doing when they cast a vote? That all those polled people showing concern about the environment - ratify Kyoto, introduce STS by 2010 etc - didn’t have a clue that Rudd would actually do it if elected, and wouldn’t have voted for him if they thought he would?
I do note with interest the underwhelming number of journos etc who ask Brendan whether he’s again hounding Rudd to break his election promises.
I was pretty impressed with Rudd’s performance on the 7:30 Report you linked to. He was a bit stilted, and sounded slightly nervous, but he also sounded as though he has the political courage to actually do the right thing on global warming and the Murray in particular. It left me feeling slightly less hopeless than I have in months.