I once worked with a couple of guys in an advertising agency who spent all their time at the pub. Their theory was that if they weren’t seen, they couldn’t be fired.
I think Tony Abbott has adopted the same theory.
He has realised that while ‘stop the boats’ worked as an effective campaign slogan, it’s just not actually possible. So he’s doing the next best thing - stopping people hearing about the boats.
It’s almost brilliantly perverse in a Yes Minister kind of way.
The fact that at no point before this announcement was there any suggestion that information to the Australian public was in any way contributing to the arrival of boats is entirely irrelevant. As is the fact that people smugglers use satellite phones on board to let their business associates in Indonesian know as soon as the boat is picked up by Australian authorities.
It is about media management - it is not a defence policy. A weekly update means any boat arrival news is always a couple of days old. Immediacy is the TV news stock in trade. Anything that feels outdated, even by a few days, is unlikely to make the news bulletin. And that suits Abbott just fine.
And now this pattern of reduced information continues with the leaked document this week stating that all media appearances by frontbenchers must be approved by Abbott’s office.
He wants to be “a government that’s about the substance of getting things done, not about the theatre of putting things on the front page”
The problem is that there’s no point getting things done if the public don’t hear about it. One of Kevin Rudd’s biggest mistakes was reducing the amount of political advertising (which he described as a cancer of democracy). You actually need the public to know what you’re doing with their tax dollars. And if you’re going to wait till an election campaign to tell them (as Rudd tried to do with his handling of the GFC) you’ve left it way too late.
For Abbott, getting himself off the front pages may not be a bad strategy for now. Gutless but sound. Barry O’Farrell has pretty much adopted it in NSW. You can count his TV appearances on half a hand.
Yesterday’s polling from Essential Media showed Abbott was preferred PM over Shorten or Albo at 37% to 31% and 32% respectfully. Given his party has just swept into office in, if not the landslide they expected, still a very, very comfortable margin, his own polling is pretty terrible. Disappearing for a while may help.
And controlling party messaging is also a good tactic. One of the many problems that dogged the Labor government was an inability to present clear and consistent messages. The ‘Round the World’ talking points often resembled a thesis.
But controlling a message is one thing, controlling ambitious MPs is another thing entirely. Micromanaging your MPs doesn’t work. Just ask Kevin.
And recent events show it has a tendency to backfire on the Coalition as well.
Had Jaymes Diaz been allowed to front the media after his well publicised stuff up – and done it with a bit of mea culpa and a lot of charm as he demonstrated on the Hamster Decides - he could now well be the member for Greenway. The decision to prevent him from going on TV cost the Coalition that seat.
A political party is not an autocracy and, as united as the Coalition may now be, cracks will inevitably appear, particularly in a party that is rightly described by Abbott himself as a broad church. Politicians will never stop talking to the press, and if they can’t do it upfront, they’ll do it behind closed doors. With anonymity comes permission to go a little harder than you might otherwise do and for Abbott, who already faces internal backlash against his PPL as well as his climate change policies, that will spell trouble.
By the way, the ad agency guys eventually got fired.
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