Australian PM unable to “sell” his policies

Australian PM Kevin Rudd’s polls are desperately down. Aussie newspaper ABC tries to understand why and wonders if Rudd lack of popular support is not due to a failure in his communication strategy. To spin or not to spin?

One of the most interesting aspects of the political year so far has been the attempts by journalists and commentators to explain the Rudd Government’s increasing unpopularity.

A variety of theories have been advanced. In the beginning, close watchers put Tony Abbott’s bounce in the opinion polls down to his ability to win back the Coalition’s conservative base.

But as Kevin Rudd and federal Labor’s standing in the opinion polls has slid inexorably southwards in 2010, a new theme emerged: Rudd’s failings as a political communicator, and the government’s inability to “sell” its policies.

You’ll hear the criticism repeated so often that it has effectively become part of the received wisdom of the Canberra press gallery and the broader Australian media. As Michelle Grattan wrote in early June, “the PM doesn’t seem able to sell anything any more.”

The criticism is levelled at both the government and the Prime Minister himself. In part, it’s a criticism of his personal speaking style, which can be waffly and bureaucratic, and relies heavily on often-repeated catch-phrases like “you know what?” and “this is difficult stuff”.

A more nuanced variation of the criticism is that it’s not that the Rudd Government can’t sell its policies very well, but that it doesn’t try hard enough in the first place. Many believe the Rudd Government squandered its early political capital on key battlegrounds like emissions trading. The argument often mounted by Crikey‘s Bernard Keane, for instance, is that Labor’s torturous progression through the consultation phases of the ETS was primarily a political tactic to expose the deep rifts in the Coalition on the issue of climate change. On this analysis, the decision by Kevin Rudd to leave the particulars of the negotiation to Penny Wong meant that issue stalled, while climate skepticism gathered momentum in the community. Instead of campaigning hard through the second half of 2009, the government assumed it could stitch up a deal with the Opposition to pass a relatively weak Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bill.

It doesn’t help that, despite his bureaucratic background, Rudd seems to be a poor day-to-day political manager. As David Marr reminds us in his recent Quarterly Essay, Rudd’s chaotic decision-making processes and the relentless 24-hour pace of his government have led to burnout and high turnover amongst his personal staff. Fatigue causes errors – and there have been plenty of errors and miscalculations this term, from big picture political decisions such as the ETS backflip, to more mundane media gaffes such as visiting Cate Blanchett in hospital instead of attending the funeral of a much-loved former Labor minister.

Then there is the focus – or lack thereof. As Madonna King pointed out this week, Rudd’s hyper-active desire to cross items off his to-do list has led to a government congenitally unable to maintain a consistent focus on anything. According to King, “his inability to consolidate on each of these achievements before moving on to the next challenge is his greatest failing.”

King wanted to check on the details of the $30 a week increase in the base rate of the pension, one of the Rudd Government’s genuine achievements. She had to ring the media offices of three different federal offices: “three offices to confirm something most people would believe the Government should be proud of!”

There does seem to be some truth in the observation that this government has difficulty focusing on any one issue for very long. After the ascension of Abbott as Opposition Leader, the government decided to switch its attentions from emissions trading to health reform. Rudd threw himself into a whirlwind series of negotiations with state premiers and the medical lobby, eventually brokering a Commonwealth-state health agreement that will lead to significant (if incremental) health reforms. Billions of new dollars will be found for public hospitals. Rudd trounced Abbott in the televised health debate.

But instead of “bedding down” this important achievement, his government sailed straight into the stormy seas of the mining super profits tax. I am on the record as supporting this tax, but the government’s handling of it has left much to be desired. While certainly expecting to take some hits on the issue, Rudd and his senior ministers seem to have been blind-sided by the sheer fury of the mining industry’s attack on the scheme. The issue has dominated political discussions in the media ever since it was announced. Health reform seems like a distant memory.

I think the criticism of the Rudd Government’s political communication skills has merit. But the real cause of their problems may be subtly different.

The criticism of the government’s ability to sell complex policies first surfaced in the euphoric early days of the first term, when the government struggled to explain how its “Fuel Watch” and “Grocery Watch” policies would work. Faced with opposition from the big retailers and administrative difficulties in making the schemes work, the government quietly shelved them. It was the start of a pattern of backflips and broken promises that would eventually come back to haunt the government.

Although it seems like a long time ago now, the Rudd Government came to office on a significant mood for change in the electorate. The Australian Election Study and the many polls published in 2007 tell us that climate change and WorkChoices were significant and real vote-changers for many citizens.

But the Rudd Government’s first year in office, in which it enjoyed stratospheric opinion poll ratings, was largely marked by policy enquiries and a steady-as-you go approach. Political capital was hoarded rather than spent.

But while the policy plodded forward slowly and steadily, the rhetoric soared. In both opposition and government, Rudd has talked about many issues in florid language. Climate change was, notoriously, the “greatest moral challenge” of our time; but even back in 2006, when prosecuting his attacks on Alexander Downer over the AWB scandal, Rudd was calling that “the biggest corruption scandal in Australia’s history”. Similarly overblown rhetoric has been deployed in the announcements of many government policies in the first term of this Labor government. Wayne Swan called the Henry Tax Review the greatest reform “in living memory”. Chris Evans gave a speech on refugee policy in which he promised that refugees would only be detained “for the shortest practicable time” and that children wouldn’t be detained at all. None of these claims have proved supportable. As Leigh Sales put it to Lindsay Tanner recently on Lateline, the government has a “hyperbole problem”.

Remember the 2020 Summit? It was hailed by the Prime Minister as a meeting of the nation’s “best and brightest brains” and greeted with an unprecedented outpouring of public goodwill. Nearly 8,000 Australians took the time to write policy submissions. Media coverage was overwhelmingly positive, even fawning. But participants attending soon realised that the government was not particularly serious about their policy ideas. Many complained that much of what was said and agreed was not even recorded properly in the Summit’s minutes.

As the Rudd Government has matured, criticisms like this have started to bite. They form a kind of background radiation that has helped to inform the broader public disillusionment with a government that has repeatedly over-promised and under-delivered.

When he announced the 2020 Summit, Rudd declared that “for too long Australian policymaking has been focused on short-term outcomes dictated by the electoral cycle.” Just two years later, he was mumbling through an announcement that his government was delaying an emissions trading scheme until after the next election.

Perhaps one of Kevin Rudd’s biggest problems is not that voters don’t listen to him. Perhaps it’s that they do.

Was Twitter that important in Iran?

At the height of mass post-election protests that took place a year ago this month in Iran, known as the “Green Revolution,” Western media outlets were filled with a flurry of reports of protesters using Twitter, e-mail, blogs, and text messages to coordinate rallies, share information, and locate compatriots.

Journalists were agape at the sudden influx of information coming out of the country, unusual in light of the Iranian authorities’ media blackout. “The immediacy of the reports was gripping,” reported the Washington Times. “Well-developed Twitter lists showed a constant stream of situation updates and links to photos and videos, all of which painted a portrait of the developing turmoil. Digital photos and videos proliferated and were picked up and reported in countless external sources safe from the regime’s Net crackdown.” Journalists even gave the unrest in Tehran a second moniker: the “Twitter Revolution.”

But was there really a “Twitter Revolution?” Radio Free Europe’s Golnaz Esfandiari recently described the idea in Foreign Policy as “an irresistible meme during the post-election protests, a story that wrote itself.” Esfandiari explained that opposition activists primarily utilized text messages, email, and blog posts to organize protests, while “good old-fashioned word of mouth” was most influential medium for coordinating opposition. Social media tools like Facebook and Twitter were not ideal for rapid communication among protestors, and utilized more by observers in other countries. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach — or didn’t bother reaching? — people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets posted with tag #iranelection,” quipped Esfandiari. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

The concept of a “Twitter Revolution,” as challenged by Esfandiari and others, is rooted in the idea that Twitter was the lifeblood of the Green revolution. Taking this definition, Esfandiari and other critics are right: Twitter was no secret weapon that magically made the Islamic Republic disappear. “Twitter cannot stop a bullet,” mused Charles Krauthammer on the Green Revolution’s anniversary. “There was a lot of romantic outpouring here thinking that Facebook is going to stop the Revolutionary Guards. It doesn’t. Thuggery, a determined regime that is oppressive, that will shoot, almost always wins.” Social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, now our bread and butter, were more influential in mobilizing Diaspora Iranians and international observers in solidarity rather than coordinating street protests inside Iran.

But while Twitter failed as an organizational tool, the Green movement remains the first major world event broadcast worldwide almost entirely via social media. Given the extent of the Iranian regime of repression, the amount of information publicized real-time through social networks allowed the international community an unprecedented peek into the turmoil afflicting Iran. For the Greens, the international reaction to the post-election violence gave the movement critical international visibility. While crowd sourcing is now a familiar concept to even the marginally tech-savvy, Twitter’s use on a massive scale was rarely contemplated nor executed prior to the Iranian election. The Green revolution was a Twitter revolution; while social media fell short organizationally, it brought the violence in the streets of Tehran to the forefront of the geopolitical conversation.

The unprecedented use of Twitter also situated the micro-blogging service at the center of a global social transformation. The Green Revolution was far from social media’s political coming-out party; Barack Obama’s media-centric 2008 presidential campaign was an early testing ground for new media as a means for political communication and organization, and the practices pioneered there quickly spread to other political movements around the globe. But it was the critical role of Twitter as a lightning rod for international attention that established it as a tool for political communication rather than outright organization. Iran’s post-election unrest was the micro-blogging service’s baptism by fire as a means to observe, report, and record, real-time, the unfolding of a crisis.

Since the Iranian election protests, Twitter has provided eyes and ears in the direst situations. The earthquakes in Haiti and Chile earlier this year provided striking examples. With Haiti’s communications infrastructure virtually obliterated and cell phones an inconsistent lifeline, Twitter and other social media provided a glimpse of conditions on the ground. Mashable’s Ben Parr reported that thousands of Facebook and Twitter updates appeared every minute, while Twitter was used to disseminate “moving and gut-wrenching TwitPics of the disaster. “Following the 8.8 magnitude quake in Chile, Victor Herrero of USA Today wrote that in Conception, the epicenter of the quake “social-networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook and some Google applications have been at the forefront of transmitting highly localized information … about finding families and friends, food and water, ways to get transportation.” As in Iran, Hatians and Chileans used social media to create a mosaic of the human drama on the ground. And the medium’s potential as an organizational tool continues to evolve, as we’ve seen in the case of South Korea’s recent elections, narrowly overlapping with the anniversary of last year’s political unrest in Iran.

The Green Revolution in Iran was muzzled, sadly, its political organs now defunct and its development totally stifled although the movement continues to put pressure on the Iranian regime a year after its initial protests. The Twitter Revolution, however, is far from over.

Tory’s spin doctor makes more than… the PM

A spin doctor has been hired by a Conservative council on a deal that works out at £182,000 a year – or £40,000 more than the Prime Minister!

Suffolk County Council is employing Jill Rawlins as a head of communications on up to £700 a day, claiming one of her roles will be saving money.

But the appointment will be seen as a snub to David Cameron’s demands to rein in public spending through ‘painful’ cuts.

Miss Rawlins, a former head of communications at the Countryside Agency, is due to begin work on Monday on a six-month contract.

Earning his money: David Cameron (right) with United States Defence Secretary Robert Gates yesterday

Her role will involve developing ‘a pro-active approach to communications, particularly in media management, including campaigns, media public relations, marketing, events, publications, branding and web’.

Tory Central Suffolk and North Ipswich MP Dan Poulter called the expenditure ‘a public sector disease’. He added: ‘A lot of councils and hospitals are employing spin doctors and their pay is completely disproportionate to those who work in front-line services.’

TaxPayers’ Alliance chief executive Matthew Elliott said the appointment would leave Suffolk’s taxpayers with ‘an astronomical bill, all so the local authority can tell residents how great they are’. He added: ‘An age of austerity is coming and the county council should make do with the communications staff they already have.