Crikey editorialised about Paul Keating yesterday:
He’s the Bert Newton of Australian politics: the polished performer whose gift for spontaneous, stiffly splenetic wit was honed in tougher vaudevillian times, times when having a personality meant more than booking an in-store appearance from Sophie Monk. “He” is of course Paul Keating, a man who knows how to milk a moment in the public gaze, a man who also knows how to fill that moment with something pointedly amusing and worth the repeating.
Two brackets of achingly sharp political standup from Keating yesterday have hogged the airwaves and set a handful of agendas in the 24 hours since. That Keating need only floss his teeth in public to turn the news cycle on its ear says a lot for the standard of over-massaged, verbally neutered performance we have come to expect from the modern political operator.
The Liberals’ two hour strategy
In discussing Joe Hockey’s latest musings on the need for tens of billions of dollars of spending cuts yesterday, I wondered whether the Libs had conceded the next election, and were trying to position themselves for the one after. I also speculated that it might just be random, and that to imagine that the opposition had a coherent political strategy might be to impose a bit too much form on chaos.
There’s an interesting piece by Alister Drysdale in Business Spectator this morning, which rips into the Liberals:
I don’t know Drysdale’s work, but it’s interesting to see this sort of critique in a publication targeted at a business/finance readership. The alienation between business and their natural political allies is one of the most interesting and least analysed stories of the Rudd incumbency.
It’s also ironic to see John Howard ’stirring from his sick bed’ to denounce Labor in opposition for, well, opposing. (Not that I think the great debate Dennis Shanahan and his mates claim is occurring on Kevin Rudd’s latest red rag to the bulls is pre-occupying public attention).
For all the claims from the Libs and their media mates that Rudd and co are pre-occupied by the media cycle, it’s clear that Labor has successfully laid down a narrative and shaped public opinion. Drysdale’s argument is that the Liberals are narcissistically obsessed with popping up on Sky News and tweeting to political tragics, and have eschewed all the things oppositions should do in favour of playing to the press gallery’s short attention span. He’s right.
No wonder the polls never perceptibly budge.