Politics can be a tough gig for someone with a powerful intellect.
For a start, by its very nature there’s a lot of suffering fools gladly. There’s also the problem of how you make your intelligence non-threatening to people. Kevin Rudd has adopted a technique of pre-emptive self-deprecation that makes sure he’s the first to mock his own wonkishness. Malcolm Turnbull, with a tad more honesty, doesn’t bother. He’s brilliant and prefers you to know that from the get-go.
There’s also the constant need to simplify issues, reduce them to black and white, to avoid nuance and accuracy in favour of the bold statement that is mostly but not wholly true. Because as a rule, nuance is apt to be misinterpreted and should be avoided in politics.
Case in point: on the weekend, Malcolm Turnbull made a wholly unobjectionable observation about the source of Therese Rein’s wealth in the Liberal’s party house organ, The Australian . The Prime Minister, Turnbull noted, attacked “neoliberalism” but the source of his wife’s wealth lay in opportunities created by one of the hallmarks of economic liberalism, privatisation. That made Rudd a hypocrite.
It was an entirely accurate point — but a nuanced one. The mere fact of mentioning the Prime Minister’s spouse was quickly and deliberately misinterpreted as an attack. Glenn Milne — no friend of Turnbull’s — attacked him in News Ltd papers. Stephen Smith stepped forward from the obscurity of the Foreign Affairs portfolio to attack Turnbull for crossing the line from the political to the personal. Craig Emerson joined in.
Turnbull does a lot of nuance. His economic message on the stimulus packages — support for the first package then criticising its impact, opposition to the second package but support for a smaller package of tax cuts and infrastructure investment in the event the Senate blocked it — has more nuance than, well, Nuanced Jack McNuance, winner of this year’s Mr Nuance competition.
As a consequence, Turnbull spends a lot of time arguing with interviewers, trying to explain his position. Way too much time. Repeatedly in interviews, Turnbull is forced to correct his interlocutor. “That’s not what I’m saying.” Or “that’s not what the IMF is saying.” Or “I disagree with you.”
Yesterday he had a sit down interview with Laurie Oakes, and a lot of it was given over to Turnbull chipping Oakes about his questions. They went round and round the mulberry bush on why Turnbull initially supported the first stimulus package but changed his mind, and whether he had been guilty of that much-claimed sin of “talking the economy down” twelve months ago.
Turnbull has to realise that arguing with the commentariat over its questions is one of the least productive features of his leadership. He has to resist it. As a former barrister and possessor of a huge brain, he is convinced that he can argue his way to victory, that he can explain the nuances, the detail of his position.
He is utterly missing the point. As much as it will rankle, he must look and learn from Kevin Rudd.
Politicians have only limited opportunities to communicate with the great mass of voters. And those opportunities are grotesquely unequal in terms of exposure. Cumulatively, dozens of interviews and doorstops with the Press Gallery will barely equal one appearance on, say, Rove .
There are two strategies for this: manufacture more opportunities to communicate, and make sure the ones you do have are effective.
Kevin Rudd’s leadership has been about both. While John “crystal set” Howard avoided that new-fangled FM radio like the plague and ducked chat shows, Rudd, with his long background on Sunrise, embraced them. And he has always understood that the media, and the Press Gallery in particular, are a means to an end, not an end in itself. He uses the media to speak directly to voters, keeping his messages simple, staying disciplined, repeating things ad nauseum . The working press and political cognoscenti might hate it passionately but it works. For Rudd an interview is an opportunity to get his message across to voters. Whether it meets the needs of the interviewer is irrelevant. He is adept at switching his answers to the subject he wants to discuss, while never skipping a beat with that peculiar, but horribly effective folksy nerd routine.
In contrast, Turnbull accepts what interviews are supposed to be — a legitimate opportunity for the press to grill him. He plays fair, and tries to argue his case. When he attempts to shift the focus to the Government, it looks forced and clunky. Turnbull needs to learn from Rudd that interviews are not about answering the commentariat’s questions and explaining himself, but about conveying his key messages to voters. He needs Rudd’s ruthless streak. It helps that Rudd has been in politics a lot longer.
By way of comparison with Turnbull’s effort with Laurie Oakes, Rudd had an hour on Seven last night to talk directly to the punters. With his studied self-deprecation, faux-honesty and carefully-cultivated air of listening, Rudd was in his element. He wouldn’t have minded the end bit when he was one of a line of experts asked to reflect on where things would go from here — there’s more authority as a television-appointed expert than as a political figure, and Rudd was careful not to even mention politics.
And no doubt “shitstorm” was carefully rehearsed. It earned him a round of applause, and that was before Lindsay Fox said he couldn’t have done anything better. The television audience would primarily have been Labor voters, but it would have included plenty of those aspirationals who switched to Labor in 2007 and whom Rudd needs to hang onto as things get bumpy over the next eighteen months.
The contrast with Turnbull, arguing the toss with Oakes about what he did or didn’t say six months ago, was painful.
I sometimes think you have some rather fixed trendy ideas BK but, as a former politician, I commend this article as showing an acute nuanced understanding of what is required. Remember the dogged way Phil Lynch could answer any question with whatever he wanted to say? In almost every respect the perfect deputy leader, but even leaders have to be willing to irritate those in the audience who notice that they are not answering the question. Commenter “rig” I suspect is one of those whose IQ is not within the one or two standard deviations of Malcolm Turnbull’s obviously high IQ required to know how smart he is. And his suggestion that the problem is about the Liberal Party not having a message makes no sense when you see how many points can be made simply poking wholes in the government’s policies. Does it matter if only 10 per cent of people could quickly come up with a convincing answer to “what are the main differences between the Oppostion and the Government in their descriptions of reality and prescriptions for Australia’s future?”. Most people could mention a couple of bills about to be debated but that’s just shorthand.
Your assessment is sad but true. Obama had some of the same issues – too smart for his own good, too honest with the media, etc. – at the beginning of his primary campaign. He learned quickly how to stay on message, manipulate the media and suppress his intellect and obvious discomfort and disagreement with some of the simplified policy positions he was “forced to swallow”. Turnbull should learn quickly as well and I think we will start to see him sharpen his attack and do a better job of “using” the media in the coming weeks. Of course, having Costello agitating from the sidelines should give him further incentive to abandon his need for intellectual thoroughness. On the Therese Rein controversy, as soon as I read Turnbull’s piece in The Australian I thought damn, the rebuttal could have stood on its own without mentioning Mrs. Rudd. But after reading and listening to the various reactions to the piece as the weekend played out, I wonder if Turnbull (or more probably his advisors?) deliberately included the points about Mrs. Rudd to draw attention. Lets be honest, would Turnbull’s editorial have had as many readers if there wasn’t the relatively tame “controversy”. Of course, many won’t read the editorial and just base their views on the Glenn Milne’s of the world. But others will find the editorial only because of the hoopla. And if you look at the reader comments in The Australian, they tracked about 3-1 in support of Turnbull with many commenting that it is about time Rudd was called on his hypocrisy and his mid-course repositioning and for Turnbull to keep up the pressure. I dont’ think The Australian (of all outlets) would have censored comments and only published the favourable ones. I think a number of people were pleasantly surprised that Mr. Turnbull may finally be getting some focus and finding his voice. Now if he can just get a handle on Kerry O’Brien. Laurie Oakes is a lost cause as evidenced by his poofy pieces on Rudd in recent months.
Malcolm’s problem with communicating to the electrorate and staying on message is that there is no message.
The Liberal party is so divided over key issues such as work choices, climate change and whether the party should be dry, or schizophrenic like the Howard days, where they talked dry, but acted wet, that Malcom can’t put out a message because he will upset someone. No one in the Liberal Party really wants Malcom, because he represents a radicle change, a thing that conservatives utterly abhor. And one must never forget that Dollar Sweetie is there as the spoiler to keep them all off balance and muddy the message even more.
But one thing puzzles me. People keep telling us how clever Malcom is. What’s the evidence for this? What has he really achieved. He has accumulated a lot of wealth, but you don’t need a big intellect for that as many of our CEO’s adequately demonstrate. Malcom’s approach to his current job suggests an intellect not much different to that of his predecessor, who’s vision was limited to bashing unions, bashing the public service and bashing any minority group that the shock jocks could win him votes with. Malcom has worked out that his predecessor’s approach was past it’s used by date, but he hasn’t come up with anything useful to replace it yet.
Written and authorised by Lachlan Harris?
Half joking.
Here’s another perspective altogether – Turnbull’s audience target was Oakbarrel’s generally Liberal small business voting public, not the ALP folks or swinging vote on Sunrise Sunday concurrent (eg Riley Diary). Similarly with Turnbull cross referening in the Oakes Sunday 9 interview his piece in The Australian:
I have a greenie friend from a Liberal Party leaning family -religously buys The Australian in Sydney, not the Sydney Morning Herald even with it’s now censored Eco pages (censored since you know what killed about 210 people plus).
So Turnbull was scaffolding his pitch to the Liberal Party over the leadership and crowding out the Costello high profile earlier in the week. It was all in house Coalitiion leadership business. You guys! You all missed the main play. You get paid for this, as well as AM last Saturday misconceiving the wet lettuce attack on Rudd “personally” for being a hypocrite or “corrupt copper” (derr he’s a politician) was really an attack on Costello, to say , chest beating I can do ALP hating like Pete too. And I’ve got balls, always have had. This was why he took on LO, as ‘unproductive’ as it might seem.
Credit where it’s due – Laurie Oakes led the interview with the squeezy “elephants” of Liberal Party leadership. So BK might do as well to take the veteran at his word. It was about Costello. It was about ownership of the Liberals. Selling nuance to the general public had little to do with it. It was branch land he was worried about.
Turnbull is a lawyer, an advocate is he not? And Rudd is a public servant. Neither one strikes me as an economist but I guess I could say the same about Krugman. Both “representatives of the public need” must learn some basic economics fast – preferably not that Keynesian crap the Treasury pushes down our throats but begin sifting through the works of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig Von Mises – even Frederic Hayek . They could probably do no better than to start with Paul Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson” – that should do it. Then they need to practice explaining it to all the poor devils trying to understand what is going on and why it is going wrong and why throwing good money after bad has never worked throughout history..
At that point they might explain it to the leaders of the rest of the Western World along with all the central bankers. If they need assistance they should call up Vladimir Putin – he seems to have a handle on it. Closer to home, John Key sounds like he has already started reading “the Austrians”!
As for the PM’s wife – I believe she is a fair target as is the Opposition leader’s. Both are as capable of handling themselves as their respective husbands. Probably better actually!