One of the issues obsessing Democrats as they brace for a mid-term savaging is their apparent inability to communicate effectively with voters. The disconnection between the Democrats and working-class voters, and especially white, and male, working-class voters, has long been an issue of concern to Democrats, except when a political natural such as Bill Clinton showed how it could be done. But after the Tea Party’s effective harnessing of voter anger, and the Republicans rolling out of Gingrich-era stunts, the Democrats, and even the great orator President Obama himself, look as inarticulate as ever in communicating even with what should be key middle-class constituencies.
It’s a debate with any number of parallels in Australia. Except, progressives in the United States at least have the excuse that, for all the efforts of the Obama Administration to forestall another depression, the US economy remains mired in a low-growth/high-unemployment state from which there seems no escape. Millions of unemployed Americans might be hoping that, as usual, the Republicans fail to live up to their small government rhetoric if they seize Congress.
Labor has no such excuses. The Australian economy is the wonder of the world, and for all that credit rests with previous governments’ reform efforts, a booming Chinese economy and luck with our financial system, the Rudd government’s stimulus packages were, with the RBA’s aggressive easing of monetary policy, crucial in keeping unemployment down while maintaining, by world standards, a very low debt level. Yet Labor struggled to sell this success story to voters — and not just after Julia Gillard’s installation as Prime Minister made hyping the successes of the Rudd government a double-edged sword. Labor had a communications problem under Kevin Rudd that was partly the fault of its Prime Minister, but the communication problem continues today.
It is not that the Rudd government didn’t have a communications strategy. It had one, all right, a comprehensive one. Its characteristics were tight message control, a constant stream of announcements to give the impression of activity and constant repetition of self-identifying phrases (“working families”, most famously) and key talking points to obtain voter agreement.
It was also a strictly enforced strategy. Rare were the ministers who didn’t fall into line and follow it. Lindsay Tanner was the clearest exception, in his reluctance to use the government’s list of official clichés and his question-time notes written in longhand (Tanner particularly disliked the obsession with the word “tradies”, which became one of the government’s most overused words in the second half of 2009).
But the communication strategy, like the broader political strategy of the Rudd government, was more about the process than about outcomes. Towards the end of the Rudd prime ministership, his government resembled a cult continuing to undertake the rituals that had long sustained them, oblivious to the fact that they were having no effect of any kind on the real world. They kept performing a rain dance as the sun beat down ever harder.
The Rudd government’s problems were not limited to communication. Indeed, there’s a strong argument — to be advanced on a later occasion — that communication wasn’t even its primary problem, but rather the decisions it communicated. But it is the problem that has continued over into the Gillard Government, and which is likely to guarantee that, even in the event this turns out to an effective government (as, economically, the Rudd government was), it will never be able to convince voters of that fact.
One of the most striking features of the Rudd and Gillard Governments has been that not merely have they been poor at offering a convincing narrative either in a whole-of-government sense or in relation to specific policies, but that this failure has extended to allowing their opponents to offer a damaging narrative and actually facilitating that process by engaging with their opponents on the latter’s terms.
This is a political death wish, especially when your opponent is a former journalist skilled at framing stories voters want to hear, such as Tony Abbott.
This is a problem Labor has in common with the Democrats, of allowing their opponents to frame the debate. The two most common cases are in relation to fiscal policy and the alleged trade-off between the economy and the environment. Conservatives in Australia and the US have persistently argued that progressives are incapable of managing budgets when in government, and that any government debt or economic stimulus is a form of national sin. Moreover, they have been effective at personalising the debt issue, reducing fiscal policy to a personal credit comparison that isn’t even internally consistent, given the mortgages many voters have, but that nonetheless strikes a chord with voters. There is plenty of hypocrisy in this stance — a little in Australia, where the profligacy of the last term of the Howard government saw the budget plunge into structural deficit despite the resources boom, and a whole lot in the US, where the Republicans blew the surpluses of the Clinton years and compiled vast deficits even before the GFC.
Labor has, apparently, been happy to play along with their opponents, neglecting the idea of explaining the importance of deficit spending when the economy needed it in favour of emphasising how it was a temporary but shameful aberration. It’s no coincidence that, according to Essential Research’s polling, the first real dent in the Rudd government’s support came after the 2009 Budget, where Rudd and Wayne Swan managed to draw plenty of attention to the size of the deficit by their refusal to say what it was — to the extent of not saying the figure in the Budget speech, and, childishly, refusing to append “billions” to the number. In effect, Rudd and Swan were saying, the government expected voters to be happy with the size of the deficit when they wouldn’t even say what it was, let alone defend it.
This gave the Coalition’s focus on the iniquity of debt a huge boost by legitimising their claim that the deficit was an evil, when it was sound economic policy. It was a re-run of what the coalition did to Labor from government in 1996, when it demonised the debt it inherited from Labor as “Beazley’s $10 billion black hole” when the $10 billion was a fictitious figure and mostly a product of the slow, jobless recovery from a savage recession in the early 1990s.
It was a worse effort in relation to the CPRS, where Labor had actually managed to establish a convincing narrative around the need for action — so convincing John Howard was unable to fight it and had to agree to an ETS himself before the 2007 election. Labor then reinforced the narrative by engaging Ross Garnaut to undertake a Stern-style economic analysis of the options available to it, thereby establishing the “problem” phase of the narrative in a convincing, high-profile way. From such a strong position, Labor allowed the debate to then devolve into a dispute over jobs versus the environment — a favoured conservative narrative in which voters will always, finally, decide that the former are more important than the latter. By refusing to cast the CPRS as a critical economic reform, and implicitly accepting the hysterically overstated claims of polluters about employment impacts by repeatedly caving in to them, Labor again allowed its opponents to frame the argument as a debate over whether we should protect the jobs of Australians or do something about the environment.
The same failure is currently being replayed by Tony Burke over the Murray-Darling Basin, where the focus is on “balancing” supposedly competing economic, social and environmental concerns, rather than framing the issue as one about enabling the entire basin — communities, farmers and the river — to function sustainably, and ending the hidden but massive costs of the current over-allocation of water.
But it’s on banking reform where Labor’s willingness to let its opponents frame the debate has gone to an absurd degree. Swan now seems to have embraced the role of guardian of our banking oligopoly, putting stability and the need for strong banking profits ahead of both a compelling policy case for reform, and strong support from voters for reform. Labor has now adopted the traditional conservative position of looking after the banking oligarchs — despite the conservatives themselves acknowledging the case for reform and moving against the cartel.
It’s a position that may yet prove very costly for Labor if voters decide that they really are sick of being gouged by the cartel and are prepared to back politicians who are serious about taking them on. It’s a position that Labor has an historic claim to — I’m not just talking about Ben Chifley but about Paul Keating’s stoushes with the likes of Nobby Clark. But it is now in the process of ceding that claim to the Coalition. They haven’t just let their opponents frame the debate, they’ve embraced their opponents’ narrative even when the latter have rejected it.
Tomorrow: the “reform” narrative and where Labor lost its way
Come off it Bernard. The skill or otherwise of the major party leaders pales into insignificance when the message is filtered through the current conservative dominated press. With Fairfax obsessed with the current state governement and the ABC neutered as the socialist mouthpiece, pro conservative messages are unchallenged and progressive messages are ignored or distorted.
News stories in the Oz, Tele and Macquarie Radio shape the directioon of the lazier networks.
Noone could accuse the current Labor strategists as being geniuses, but the Tories only look good due to the boosterism of the press.
If the Gillard Government dropped that 1980s managerial weasel-word “reform” from its communication strategy, indeed from its political strategy altogether, then pollies might be forced to actually explain why policy change is necessary, and to provide a coherent historical narrative in terms that might inspire voterland.
Voters are sick of being told that our managers are managing fine and the system just needs a little tweaking through “reform”. The majority of voters, on a number of fronts, are begging for real root and branch change, not weasely bloody “reform”.
I heard Julia Gillard promising to “reform the river” the other day. Really.
In many cases the government is nowhere to be seen. When the government proposed the CPRS, they did not bother to explain the income transfers to households, that would more than offset the income impact of electricity prices for the majority of households. And rather than using this to counter the scare campaign about a “great big tax on everything”, the response of the government was to put their hands over their ears and hope that it would go away.
After Kloppers made his speech supporting some sort of carbon price, there was resistance to the idea from groups such as ACCI who said that “Australia should not go ahead of the world” even though Australia ius far behind the rest of the world. But apart from some comments at estimates hearings, we hardly heard the government rebutting this claim. It was instead left to academics and NGOs to point out that Australia is behind the rest of the world on a carbon price. But it is much easier for politicians to get airtime than academics and NGOs – and instead of using airtime to explain stuff or shape a narrative, we get meaningless phrases like “working families” and “moving forward”.
Good article Bernard. The Berkeley linguist George Lakoff has been telling the Democrats for the last 10 years about the necessity for them to better frame their message by articulating progressive values (see his book ‘Dont think of an Elephant’). However, the Democrats don’t listen and get lost in policy wonkery that just confuses/loses the electorate. Labor need to read Lakoff quick, otherwise they will not get another chance.
Jeff
As a Labor Party member for 35 years I have gone to party meetings and forums and heard the latest update on what the State and Federal Government are doing ,and I never cease to be amazed at the amount of initiatives being undertaken by these governments that never get press coverage, particularly the multiplicity of good and positive things the governments are doing. The media, print, radio and TV these days are dominated by Murdoch press inspired tabloidism and sensationalism. Stories are expressed in simple terms for even the dumbest reader listener or viewer to understand. Even the old Fairfax press seems to be infected, though they do allow some of their more intellectual commentators some space on the weekends in News Review in the Sydney Morning Herald. Thank heavens for the online media like Crikey and New Matilda.
Labor does have a problem with communication though. There seems to be an emphasis on local communication and party branches and unions are encouraged to use local papers. But who reads them? And with the decline in activity in party branches, there is a decline even in this local communication.
Up the other end of the political process, Ministers and politicians issue press releases and you can go to their website to read them. But who does that? So we rely on journos to pick up the press releases that they think may interest the public and where journos are looking over their shoulder ( what would Rupert think?) the choice and range can be very limited. Labor has their own radio stations and they sold them. They have their own papers but they are for party members only. Their inability to communicate is linked to the general malaise inside the party.