Samantha Maiden’s Party Animals, out today, is a brisk and highly readable account of the lead up to Labor’s legendary achievement of losing 2019’s unloseable election.
It’s a great look behind the curtain at the dark arts of an election campaign.
Here are some of Maiden’s biggest revelations:
Days between policy and announcement
One of the recurring themes of the election’s post mortem is that Labor had so many big policy announcements, all clustered together, that it was never able to adequately explain them.
The book gives one example of how this was able to happen.
Labor’s $4 billion plan to provide free childcare to families earning under $69,000 per year was taken to shadow cabinet a mere four days before it was announced.
As such there was no time to put together any kind of serious marketing explaining the policy to those most affected.
The policy had been added at the last minute because of fears Labor wasn’t sufficiently easing cost of living by failing to match all of the Liberals’ tax cuts.
The dirt units
Maiden looks at the teams digging up dirt on opposition players, detailing the techniques Shorten’s dirt unit used to break at least two scoops any news hound would be proud of.
Firstly, we head back to 2015, when they noticed then-speaker Bronwyn Bishop, enemy of publicly-funded sloth, had taken a taxpayer-funded helicopter trip to a fundraiser.
In 2017, the team cracked then-health minister Sussan Ley’s efficient combining of her official business with a spot of house hunting.
Both scandals resulted in Walkley-winning news stories, and all without the public realising it came from Labor.
Lest we think this is solely the domain of the ALP, Maiden gets a confession from a Liberal party hack:
‘Remember, right at the beginning of the campaign, that donation scandal was sparking off?’ [Liberal party staffer John] Macgowan said.
‘That night, we had video on TV of Huang Xiangmo’s wedding with Shorten sitting there.’
Where did they obtain the damning vision? From all the other Liberals who attended.
‘There was a whole table of Liberals there,’ he laughs.
Brian Burston changes history
In case you’ve forgotten him, Burston was for a brief time the George Harrison of Australia’s shitty Beatles, One Nation’s 2016-18 Senate team.
In June 2018, Burston cashed in the “massive falling out” token that everyone receives when they commence work with Pauline Hanson, leaving a cloud of acrimony and, later, a trail of blood.
Burston defected to Clive Palmer’s moribund United Australia Party, in return for the promise he would receive legal protection from his furious former employer. This kept the UAP alive and saved the mining billionaire the trouble of proving he had 500 grassroots members.
Thus, Burston allowed Palmer’s election-shifting ad spend of $60 million (Palmer, typically, claims he spent more than that).
‘Deep Throat’ and the scandal that wasn’t
The Shorten team noticed something in the early stages of the election campaign, something most people didn’t.
Apropos of nothing, Prime Minister Scott Morrison made references to a very particular period in Shorten’s youth.
To Shorten’s team it seemed like Morrison was priming the ground for something; the relitigation of a longstanding (but now dropped) allegation of rape against the former opposition leader.
It only happened a few times and would take the hyper-sensitive ear of political staffers desperate to avoid scandal or bad press to pick up, but they took it very seriously.
There were fears the tabloids would interview his accuser and the issue would detonate during the campaign. Those fears about how to handle the issue consumed the Shorten campaign … Staff talked about the constant threat of exposure of the rape allegations …
Apparently the information that the story was going be reignited was passed on by a known Liberal insider, grandly styled as “Deep Throat” in his ALP file.
Whether the information was genuine or a double bluff intended to plant baseless stress in the opposition leader’s head during the campaign is unclear.
Regardless, Labor says it derailed the campaign.
Labor’s treasury spokesman Chris Bowen would later claim that ‘some idiot’ had told Shorten that News Corp was about to run the rape claim 10 minutes before the disastrous press conference on 17 April, when he clashed with Ten Network reporter Jonathan Lea over the cost of his climate-change polices.”
I’m assuming a yellow cover – to match her jaundiced, anti-Labor/pro-Limited News Party subjective views?
Sounds about right, klewso!!
Is there anything else the collective MSM and their fellow travellers can throw at Bill Shorten about the last election campaign??? On and on, and bloody on……..mostly BS.
Tell you what…Bill would have made a far better PM than the current incumbent…lying, cheating, hypocrite that Smoko is, and always has been.
Thanks for nothing L/NP voters…because that is exactly what we have…a NOTHING man!!!!
No one has ever explained to me why they disliked Bill Shorten, so I can only assume that it is because Rupert brainwashed them. I also think that the Labor party are barked up the wrong tree when deciding that coal mining was the reason they lost the Queensland vote, I think it was Clive palmer’s negative advertising against Shorten.
Palmer’s negativity against Shorten was a good match for Shorten’s own negativity; he always came across as a projector of defensiveness, insecurity and anxiety, as expressed in his rather whining tone. Of course, he had good reason to exhibit some of those traits, in addition to his natural proclivity, while the MSM continued to interrogate all his policies as they gave Smoco a free pass.
Maybe my 93 year-old mother with dementia can help, BJ. She was a country girl with a keen sense of justice who became a rusted-on Labor voter when she experienced working class life in a factory. Now that she’s lost her reasoning capacity, image matters more to her than logic. So she pitied (not disliked) Bill Shorten because he didn’t have leadership material (meaning charisma, I think) and ‘quite liked’ Smirko. So if we assume too many Australian voters have the brains of a demented 93 year-old, then unfortunately the charming (sociopaths are usually superficially charming), smooth-talking BS-artist will win the image contest over the genuine candidate relying on a platform of more intellectually-challenging policy proposals.
I think you (Peter Schulz) are right on the money. I have said repeatedly in many forums that it was always about personality and never about policy. The Australian electorate as a whole really are that brain dead.
Can’t say they disliked him but the rank & file preferred Albo but were given Billary .
Can say John Roskam (head honcho of the horrible IPA) liked Billary so much he gave him a glowing endorsement in the lead up to the “unloseable one”.
I think you are on the money. The media monopoly Murdoch has in Qld since buying the APN regionals in 2016 (now called NRM) to add to his metropolitan and regional city mastheads and The in-Australian! is huge and, in my view, consistently underestimated. And remember, Palmer spent what must have been a big percentage of the $85-odd million buying full page and double page, anti-Labor ads in News’s products. What a disgusting windfall for those rags and their websites, already hellbent on editorialising against Labor in every way possible on a more than daily basis. And of course there’s the deals done with the regional WIN broadcaster – in 2018 – (and now 10Play) to beam Sky After Dark in all its biased in-glory into free-to-air homes.
* un-Australian and un-glory *