PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd a should be a bit careful telling the Australian people that if the polls are replicated on election day Tony Abbott would be PM.
There are several reasons for caution. First, many voters might say “so what”; secondly, some voters might begin a subconscious association between Abbott and the prime ministership; thirdly, it displays an arrogant assumption – how could anyone contemplate Abbott as Prime Minister; and fourthly it displays yet another misunderstanding of how the media works.
On the first point, one might ask would it make a huge difference? The troops would stay in Iraq and Afghanistan; there would still be no action on climate change; refugees would continue to be mistreated; immigration would remain unsustainably high; the government would continue using taxpayers’ money to propagandise in its own favour; we would remain a constitutional monarchy for the indefinite future; the executive branch of government would continue to dominate the House of Representatives; individual rights would still play second fiddle to the powers of the police and intelligence agencies; government would remain centralised and secretive; armies of spin doctors and media massagers would remain in place; government programs would still be skewed to favour government-held marginal seats; the war on terror and the war on drugs would rage on ineffectually as always; thoughtful, detailed inquiries into major policy questions will still be sat on and mostly ignored; and the US and Israel would continue to be supported no matter what violent folly they engaged in.
Sure, a mining tax might not be levied, but then again an unworkable internet filter and a potential broadband white elephant might not go ahead. Two bob each way.
On the second and third points, Australians tend not elect people who are not prime ministerial – people of seriousness, credibility, substance and caution and without quirks, or even a hint of extremism or fanaticism.
Since the 1950s, Bert Evatt, Arthur Calwell, Billy Snedden, Andrew Peacock, John Hewson and Mark Latham were rejected on one or more of those grounds.
When John Howard was first defeated in 1987 he was not prime ministerial – he was Little Johnny struggling against a quirky and slightly fanatical Joh Bjelke-Petersen who was supposed to be on his own side.
Bill Hayden and Kim Beazley were prime ministerial, but their opponents were equally so. Howard had matured in prime ministerial material by then. Malcolm Turnbull was also prime ministerial, but was thrown out by his party, as were the decidedly less prime ministerial Brendan Nelson and Simon Crean.
Since World War II, Australia has had two non-prime ministerial Prime Ministers, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron, — John Gorton and Billy McMahon. The party disposed of one and the people the other.
So where does Tony Abbott fit. The fitness fanaticism, the policy on the run, the odd statements about which of his statements are to be taken seriously and so on, suggest he is on the non-prime ministerial side.
When you look at the history of elections since World War II you see voters, however narrowly, reject leaders who do not have gravitas, seriousness and caution. They can be coupled with a reform agenda, but one that is well-thought-through and not too far from main-stream thinking.
Abbott is not there, at least yet. This is why Abbott is one of Labor’s best assets.
But the more Rudd tells us: “Look you idiots, don’t you realise that you could have Tony Abbott, for Heaven’s sake, as Prime Minister” and the more Abbott rightly treats it with disdain, the more the prime ministerial balance shifts.
On the fourth point, it seems the key players in the Government have misunderstood media behaviour – not only with the Abbott tactic but also with the Emissions Trading Scheme and the mining tax.
Media behaviour is at least partly responsible for the dip in Kevin Rudd’s popularity. I do not at all mean the usual accusations of media bias that have been thrown at media organisations or individual journalists for the best part of a century.
Rather I mean a culture and modus operandi that politicians often do not understand. Yes, they understand the usual bag of media tricks – “stay on message”, use slow news days for good stories and hot news days to hide bad government news and so on.
But often they miss the more fundamental point. Imparting information so voters are well-informed is only one function of media. The media must also operate to stay in existence. To do that it must be bought, viewed or listened to. And it can only do that if it appeals to a broad public.
More than a century of mass media tells us that the public wants not just information but news. News includes information of consequence and impact, but it also includes stories of conflict, personality, celebrity, human interest, human emotion, and novelty.
Conflict and personality are especially important in political coverage. They make what to many would be dull fare interesting.
This is what Rudd and his team failed to comprehend when they warned of an Abbott prime ministership. It has been lapped up by the media. But at this distance from the election it carries the danger of elevating Abbott to one part of a roughly equal contest, making him more prime ministerial.
The Rudd team similarly mis-predicited the reaction to the abandonment of the ETS. They thought it was a rational policy matter, whereas the media saw it as a story of human emotion, of betrayal.
Perhaps the Government’s biggest misreading of how the media works came with the mining tax.
It is an almost perfect illustration of the media’s incapacity to impart complex information to a broad audience. I doubt of one in a thousand voters understands the new tax. Yet, media organisations have polled voters on whether they favour it or whether they think it is good for the country.
Before much information could be spread, the story became one of conflict and personality inevitably fuelled by mining money, not about a policy of national impact and consequence.
For all of its spin capacity and vast media-massaging resources, the Rudd team has proven singularly inept at predicting media and therefore public response to some of its policies and tactics.
All first-term governments since World War II were re-elected, but three of them came very close to grief at the first hurdle: Menzies 1951, Whitlam 1974, and Howard 1998.
I’ll stand by what I wrote in February before the ETS scratching and the mining tax surfaced: “The media’s negative coverage of glitches in government programs will always out-weigh its coverage of government competence. The latter is expected; the former is news. . . . Most people assume that a second Rudd term is inevitable. I think is quite likely, but Abbott should not be ruled out. The advantages that an Opposition has with apathetic, gullible and ignorant masses, a media rightly down on any glitches with government programs, easy populist one-liners, plus the present electoral-boundary advantage suggest an Abbott victory is not out of the question.”
CRISPIN HULL
This article was first published in The Canberra Times on 19 June 2010.