Working families are suffering from the financial crisis in perhaps the most painful way of all. Direct hit to household budgets? Nope. Employment uncertainty? Not yet. No, working families have taken a direct hit where it really hurts — in the Government’s rhetoric.
Being guilty of verballing the Prime Minister on Friday — he really did say “forty five years ago” when referring to Barack Obama and Martin Luther King, and not 25 — we decided to check senior ministers’ language in press releases, interviews and Question Time. “Working families” was of course the Government’s buzzword — or more correctly, its entry for most annoyingly overused phrase since “metrosexual” — for much of the year. But now dire economic times have forced it to give way to “decisive” as the preferred term in the Government’s lexicon.
In short, the Government used to be indecisive, but now it’s damn sure. “Decisive” was used more than 80 times by senior ministers in the week following the Government’s announcement of its deposit guarantee and its plasmas’n’pokies stimulus package. “Tough decisions” has also emerged in the last week as the Government’s parlous fiscal position was made clear in the MYEFO figures.
The Government’s reliance on incessant repetition is revealing of some of its internal workings. Take “tough decisions”. That phrase first emerged in the aftermath of the Gippsland by-election at the end of June, the first time the Government had experienced any sort of political headwind of any kind. The Prime Minister immediately tied it to the Government’s “tough decisions”, although quite what tough decisions the Government had made at that point wasn’t clear.
“The Government has taken tough decisions,” Rudd declared. “The Government remains determined to take tough decisions … It’s our resolve, as the Government, to take these tough decisions … our resolve to take tough decisions in the national interest…”
The Government had “made the really tough decisions” echoed the Treasurer the same morning.
“When it comes to the tough decisions … we’ve taken some tough decisions…” Swan kept it up for several days.
“We have to take the tough decisions,” he told Greg Cary later in the week.
“Preparing the nation for future challenges means that we need to take tough decisions,” joined in Julia Gillard. But thereafter, the phrase locked away until the Budget situation summoned it forth last week.
“Working families” was popular earlier in the year and around the Budget, when there was even a “Working Families” package. But even the punters in the real world started to grow tired of it.
“You keep shoving this working families down our throats as though it’s some mantra from heaven,” one caller told Rudd during an interview with Neil Mitchell on 27 June.
Thereafter, the phrase dropped out of the official lexicon for a couple of weeks. Rudd, as if chastened, almost literally stopped using it, although the Parliamentary recess helped by taking away the main platform for its use, Question Time. But it returned with a vengeance during the first week of September when the Government was pressuring the Opposition and minor parties to pass its budget bills and celebrating the Reserve Bank’s first interest rate cut. In one week, the Prime Minister uttered the phrase a mind-numbing 65 times in Question Time.
Rudd is the biggest user of these keywords by far. Swan and Gillard are the next biggest, and tend to show the same pattern of usage, giving away that they’re sticking to the same script. Interestingly, Lindsay Tanner doesn’t play. He has let rip with the occasional “decisive” in Question Time lately, and has not been entirely innocent of evoking working families, but otherwise seems to almost religiously avoid using them. No wonder he comes across better than Swan.
This is the “Big Lie” technique in action. That’s not to suggest the Government are a bunch of goose-stepping Nazis, but rather that it doesn’t care that smartypants like us know they are relying on incessant repetition of keywords to shape public perceptions. The Government is talking over and through the media to voters, who typically see far less media than you and me.
The target of the Government’s keyword tactic is the voter who probably doesn’t read a newspaper, and who mainly gets his or her news from the evening commercial TV news, from breakfast TV or radio bulletins during the day. They might hear one or two soundbites a day, they might see the briefest of grabs from Question Time on the news, they might hear Kevin Rudd shooting the breeze with “Mel and Kochie” (that’s their official designation in transcripts) in the background while they get the kids ready for school. The Government is hellbent on ensuring they get the message it wants, regardless of how much it bores the rest of us.
Bernard, you should have written your last paragraph first, and saved us all the tedium of reading your long and pointless preamble. Rudd is not remotely interested in whether you or any other political tragic is bored. He has a message to get out to the punters, who don’t sit all day reading press releases, newspapers or online news. I’d be surprised if they heard one in fifty of Rudd’s repeated messages. But if one can judge from the polls they’re hearing enough to be satisfied with Rudd and his Government. So save yourself the trouble of counting or recording the multiple reiterations of a small number of messages. Rudd may know more about communicating with the public than the staff at Crikey.
And by the way, please tell whoever wrote today’s introduction (editorial), that I didn’t subscribe to Crikey to read the tabloid language he used in his second last paragraph to describe Rudd as “a loose lipped braggart”. Even The Oz ,which you delight in berating, would not use such unseemly language. If this sort of demeaning talk continues, don’t be surprised if you loose subscribers. I’m attaching my comment to your piece as I couldn’t see how to comment directly; it would be helpful if subscribers could, so that we can say what we think about some of the editorials we’re reading of late.
Spot on Bernard!
Most everyone I know is getting increasingly irritated at being spoken down to by Rudd/Gillard/Swan in particular but actually by most of the front bench. Some horourable exceptions, (on occasion) but most seem determined (compelled??) to hide behind plastic sound-bites.
I can understand and (almost) forgive this fanatical compulsion to stay “on-message” during an election campaign but that was over a year ago and I now expect my government to give me the benefit of doubt and to communicate with me (via the media) as an intelligent adult.
Instead we are fed Orwellian phrases of little/no substance and an ongoing display of arrogant avoidance of legitimate questioning which even the former PM couldn’t match.
If you want to keep my vote Mr Rudd I suggest you have your government earn it by treating me with some respect!
R. Yeah, it’s a great saying ain’t it? Also, your second comment, para two, was spot on.
B. Crooks: If you had read the whole post, including comments, you would realize I acknowledged that very point! Olé.
Ad Astra sorry, but last line of para three reads….”Why should we be funding a committee or ten to discuss something irrelevant in the first place?
SHOULD READ: Why should we be funding a committee, or ten, to discuss it in the first place?
Ad Astra: I thought his comments were very much to the point. I don’t like being talked down to. And it’s certainly not a case of wanting the Libs back. It is merely good manners not to talk down to people..
I’m getting more than a little less amused with this prissy little pri*k, with his patronizing the proletariat, spending outrageous amounts of our money in subsidizing foreign car manufacturers, forming committees to see if the original 20, 000 committees, and their 100,000 sub-committees are working or not. As far as I’m concerned he can take them all and shove them up where the sun don’t shine.
And I voted for him! God alone knows what his opponents have to say.
BTW: Why can’t you email Crikey if you want to get in touch with them?