Paul Keating famously told us that “when you change the government, you change the country”. At the time it was a sensible, even prescient warning, but as a generalisation it’s at best a half truth. Most changes in government bring less change than people imagine; continuity is the rule, not the exception. But real change does sometimes happen, and politics is a major driving force.
Both lessons are on display in the controversy over government-funded political advertising. The Age this week has been running hard against the Brumby government on the issue, with an op-ed piece by an outraged Tom Ormonde on Monday, followed by a front-page Paul Austin story yesterday.
This is, to put it mildly, not new. Four years ago, then-Opposition leader Robert Doyle was making exactly the same complaints. As I put it at the time, some of the ads were “simply a catalogue of government achievements, almost indistinguishable from the sort of thing that would run during an election campaign — except that then, the ALP would have to pay for it.”
But governments keep doing it: state and federal, Labor and coalition. And voters rarely make them pay any price for it.
However, although abuse of government advertising is of long standing, things have changed. There used to be a degree of restraint, even coyness, which is now missing. Twenty years ago, the sort of blatantly political advertising that is now common would have been all but unthinkable: the Cain Labor government and its Hamer Liberal predecessor sometimes bent the rules in their favor, but nothing like what we are seeing today.
At least in Victoria, it was the Kennett government, with a huge parliamentary majority and a disdain for established conventions, that started the change. I recall sitting in on meetings in that government to discuss the advertising strategy to promote electricity privatisation; there was no pretence that it was anything other than partisan advocacy, but the taxpayers were picking up the tab.
A few years later, the Howard government went one better by advertising a policy that hadn’t even been legislated for – the “unchain my heart” GST campaign before the 1998 election.
Kennett’s arrogance was eventually punished by the voters, although it took two elections. The GST campaign was also a failure; the majority voted to turf out the Howard government, but our capricious electoral system kept it alive. Yet nothing seems to have deterred their successors, and John Brumby will presumably take his high standing in the polls as an endorsement of his strategy.
Ormonde says: “the political hardheads obviously calculate that the free plugs are worth far more than any trouble they bring”, but I’m not sure that’s true. Just as much commercial advertising is clearly useless, boosting the egos of management rather than selling product (a result of the split between corporate ownership and control), I suspect that governments often promote themselves because they can, rather than because of any results it brings.
My recollection is that the ‘Unchain My Heart’ GST campaign, partisan though it was, didn’t begin until the legislation was passed in 2000.
A cursory Google seems to confirm this:
For example http://www.abc.net.au/am/stories/s132891.htm
I think political advertising to inform the public of policy is a good thing. Governments need to explain to the punters the affect significant legislation will have on them. Best way to do this is through the mass media. The public fears what it does not understand (and rightly so when it comes to politicians). Look at the the CPRS. If Rudd had got on the front foot in communicating this to an unsure public, he might have been able to get his legislation passed. Instead, he allowed the Liberals to occupy the information vacuum.
I guess the difficulty Scott is framing legislation that allows genuine disemination of policy rather than another opportunity to grandstand and advertise. A recent example is Gillard’s School Stimulus signs. Was that informative or advertising?
Informing the public has always had an element of advertising. It’s all marketing at the end of the day. I don’t begrudge Labor’s school stimulus signs, same as I don’t begrudge the old “fridge magnet” for the security hot line from the Liberals. However informing the public is a two edged sword. If people understand the policy, and hate it (like Workchoices Mk 1), it’s hard to sell it. As my marketing friends say, you can’t polish a turd.
Interesting I think that social change often precedes the change of government. For instance, if you look at a graph of government spending in Australia there is an uptick after 1970 (the second stage of the welfare state). This preceded the Whitlam Government, but was confirmed by it.
In this instance, all sides of politics both condemn and aggravate the practice. I remember Howard condemning Keating’s “Animals” unit only to outdo him when in office. No change of government has brought this on, but each new administration has pushed the boundaries of decency further.
I disagree, however, with Charles Richardson’s argument that the advertising is ineffective. Careful analysis of voting results shows our political system favours the incumbent, and I think this kind of self-promotion, carefully calibrated to hit the right buttons in the marginal seats, is one of the reasons that governments hang on – even when they lose the popular vote as in 1998. The problem with WorkChoices is that the union movement did a pre-emptive strike, launching attack ads before the policy was even unveiled!