I’m pretty sure, as I’ve mentioned before, that I was the first to dub Queensland’s National Party leader the Borg when I was covering the Queensland state campaign for Crikey in 2006.
Now have a look at Laurence’s new website banner.
He’s stolen our bridge!
Note also the Liberal blue. The Nationals’ Green is entirely absent from his increasingly self-centred branding. And he’s obviously trying to position himself as an urban (and urbane) man. Sharp suit, no tie in a lot of the pics, new haircut, and symbols of Brisbane surrounding him constantly. The moleskins and the rural signifiers have been banished.
In the list of unasked questions - has PETA’s prominent use of naked women in its campaigns ever actually converted anyone to animal rights? Or just drawn attention to them as an organisation?
There’s quite the focus on this in the blogosphere in the US, with a New York Times article on a “Vegans Gone Wild” message - a Vegan strip club in Portland.
Aside from dissing feminism, the shorter response from animal rights activists gone wild appears to be:
“Sexuality is what society will turn its head for more than anything else,” said Ingrid Newkirk, the president of PETA, who added that the recent advertisements were just one of the group’s strategies. “We try to reach everybody in different ways.” She noted that the group has also shown naked men in ads.
Well, that’s ok then.
Continue reading ‘Don’t feed the animals’
Astute readers may have noticed that I’m taking a break from the computer screen while I recover from an eye infection, but I did get a chance to write this story for Crikey yesterday before I went off and bought an eyepatch - which is quite Borgian, when I think about it. Republished from today’s Crikey email:
After any chance of his “United Conservative Party” succeeding in drawing the Liberals to the Nationals’ fold effectively collapsed on the weekend with the leaking of their negotiations with various far right groups, Lawrence Springborg has taken the extraordinary step of shoveling dirt into the Nationals’ grave in a new advertising campaign he launched yesterday.
The self-dubbed Borg told AAP that the omission of the Nationals and Coalition brands was deliberate - “this is a leadership campaign”, he said. The big L Leader expects the “new party” to “to seamlessly morph into” his “better way”.
This is an extraordinarily high stakes gamble for Springborg. Continue reading ‘Pineapple Party: first time as tragedy, second time as The Borg’
McCain’s ads last year when his campaign was tanking were widely derided as well - weird. Some things don’t change. I’m not quite sure how this one gets around the age thing. I was expecting McCain to make an appearance beside Teddy Roosevelt. Or is he trying to say that pointless wars like the Spanish-American War or stunts like the “Battle of San Juan Hill” are a good thing? Maybe that the US should have kept up the counter-insurgency in the Phillipines for a hundred years? I’m confused.
Continue reading ‘Deathstar redux (sort of)’
While the merits of bringing the externalities of our more ancient sins into an economic frame are up for debate, the marketability of voluntarily offsetting certain modern excesses is becoming increasingly clear. Enter GM Holden, importers of Saab. Last year’s ‘Grrrrreen’ campaign which ran in newspapers, magazines and billboards comprised of statements like ‘Every Saab is green, Carbon emissions neutral across the entire Saab range’. And it has now attracted the ire of the ACCC, to the surprise of Holden - if the first comment at this prdisasters.com post is any indication.
Now I’m no lawyer (just a lowly social science postgrad) but from where I sit the ACCC’s claim - not to mention the scope of its issues paper - is quite profound in its implications. Continue reading ‘Firing up the Trrrrrraade Practices Act … could get interesting’
Tom Hodgkinson, writing in Teh Grauniad, doesn’t care for Facebook apparently. He recites the usual blah about how online interaction is somehow dichotomously opposed to (genuine?) real life interaction, a piece of bollocks for which I’ve never had any time:
And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk?
I won’t repeat again all the arguments I made against that sort of tedious theme last time I noticed it raising it head, because Hodgkinson goes on to reveal that the venture capitalists who funded Facebook are (gasp!) libertarians. I can’t quite make out why he says they’re also neocons, as the political positions he articulates don’t seem to have any relationship to those normally associated with neocons. And I’m not particularly comfortable with the way that he misinterprets the ideas on desire of the French philosopher and literary critic René Girard, who apparently lurks as some sort of philosophical inspiration for venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The trivialisation and misinterpretation of Girard’s thesis doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that Hodgkinson has got the rest of the facts he cites in his lengthy rant right.
Continue reading ‘Facebook is teh (right wing) evil, apparently’
Roy Morgan has tested election ads and found that the Coalition’s negative ads polarise voters - making those leaning to Labor more inclined to vote ALP, and appealling only to Coalition supporters. Their ostensible purpose is to frighten swinging voters away from Rudd, so this is an interesting finding. Could it be that they’re really about defending the silver and not winning the election?
Incidentally, are there any positive Coalition ads? At all?
Originally posted at LP in Exile.
Sophie says: “If you are going to take your clothes off for something, it better be a good cause”.
I think most blokes will think Sophie getting naked is enough of a good cause in itself.
The above quote comes from The Sun’s, err, thoughtful article about Sophie Monk’s decision to get her kit off in the interests of promoting animal rights. Being naked and promoting a political cause makes so much sense, doesn’t it? It’d be interesting to see The Sun’s reaction if Ms Monk’s non-meat eating boyfriend dropped his duds (after all he’s a rock star or something) for the same cause. It’d probably go something like this:
I think most blokes will think Benji getting naked is enough to put them off a bloody good steak.
Of course, The Sun is The Sun, but what justification does PETA have for resorting to such images?
As the non-election advertising campaign goes on and on, I have a couple of quick comments:
* I have a school-aged child and would therefore be in the prime target group for the Federal Government’s drugs brochure. Yet when mine finally arrived, I found little in it of any interest. I leafed through it and put it into the recycling bin. Afterwards, I was struck by what an enormous waste of money this was - first of all, this went to every Australian household, yet fewer than 50% of Australian households include children. If there was really an interest in targeting parents, this was not the way to go about it. Distributing the brochure through (shock!) the public school system might have been more effective. I’m left to conclude that the main aim of this particular campaign was to spread John Howard’s paternalistic face around and make it look like he and his government are extremely concerned and doing something about (horror!) drugs.
* The ubiquitous ads from the Workplace Info line annoy me in general, but one in particular really gets on my nerves. Continue reading ‘Advertising the Howard Federal Government’
Via Another Outspoken Female (who posted the link to this in a comment this morning, but it’s too good to languish there for long) the remixed Workplace Relations ad beneath the fold is a brilliant, pointed piece of satire - or does it still qualify as satire when it’s this close to the truth? Anyway, fantastic stuff. Whoever assembled this has skills. Continue reading ‘Know Where You Stand - the remix’
There’s an interesting piece from Margaret Simons at Creative Economy on the limits of mainstream media blogging. She riffs off the Jack Marx sacking, and I think the lead time for publication at CE is longer than for Crikey where she often writes, as she hasn’t noted Marx’ appearance on the Bulletin’s election blog site (where his first post is pretty tedious quite frankly). The Bulletin’s “Bullring” might be a good case study on those limits, as it’s mostly boring and predictable stuff written mainly by … surprise, surprise… Bulletin staffers, and the stories read like short articles rather than blog posts per se. It’s always a little unfair to judge these things at their inception, but on the other hand, the general track record of such “blogs” is pretty poor. Very few comments may also imply a very low readership, but hey, ain’t that the Bully? There’s another interesting analysis to be written about the News “blogs” which get very heavy comments, but that’s a tale for another day.
Continue reading ‘MSM blogging and other related musings’
Some time ago I wrote, and had published, a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald in response to reports, in connection with the death of Dianne Brimble, that P&O had run an overtly sexist advertising campaign for its cruises designed to attract male passengers of similar character and sexual politics to those regarded as “persons of interest” in relation to Ms. Brimble’s death. The letter urged people to boycott companies which engaged in such crassly sexist advertising campaigns, and that such firms be blacklisted from government purchasing and procurement.
Now, our most Christian of Federal Treasurers is steering a Bill through Parliament which would give the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission the power to sue the ring off me if ever I have the temerity to write similar letters in future.
David Marr reports and comments on the Bill in today’s SMH. The Bill enables the ACCC to sue individuals and organisations who advocate or engage in secondary boycotts of companies for any reason which is not “substantially related” to environmental protection or consumer protection, for damages up to the full value of any loss which the company might incur as a result of the boycott.
Continue reading ‘So sue me’
There’s a very comprehensive rebuttal of the biz “Workplace Reform” ads over at Talk It Out. Not a lot to add, except two quick points. The ads appear to be targetted to people hoping corporate profits will keep rising, and they’ll be getting fat dividend cheques. That’s odd, because as the Crosby/Textor leaked polling shows, the segments of the electorate who’ve moved against the government are, unsurprisingly, those you’d expect to have been most affected or most worried about WorkChoices:
And it tracked groups - including the so-called aspirational voters who helped elect Mr Howard in 1996 - who have shifted to Labor.
Nationally, the defections have been led by what the report calls “new Labor” - voters aged 18 to 24 whose numbers rapidly increased when Kevin Rudd took over from Kim Beazley as labor leader.
Part-time workers, voters aged 35 to 49 and “lower white/upper blue” collar workers - the middle income bracket - also were moving to Labor.
In NSW, voters who had dumped the Government included those aged 35 to 49, part-time workers, and the critical “lower white/upper blue” sector.
Any sort of advertising, political or otherwise, has to effectively target particular segments of the population. Given that the initial impetus from the ads was said to come from disgust among biz leaders at the ACTU ads that showed board members cackling over their pay rises while plotting to cut workers’ wages, I suspect the audience is actually the people who commissioned the ads. It’s feel good stuff. For them. If I were a shareholder in one of the companies indirectly funding this ineffective and self-indulgent propaganda, I’d be asking some questions.
From today’s Crikey email:
Kevin07 is like a refreshing spring breeze. It’s very bronzed and very beachy. There is something new under the sun. Or at least that’s what Labor would like you to think about its new website.
In Monday’s Crikey, I had this to say about Howard’s online strategy:
Howard is actually using social media rather cunningly – to play the mainstream media rather than appeal directly to the “YouTube generation.
Kevin07 is trying to have it both ways. The unkind would say that’s not dissimilar to the offline Kevin.
Continue reading ‘Kevin07′
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