It’s become a media truism: the pandemic response shows that Morrison really learnt from his bushfire stumbles. But just what did he learn? It seems that Morrison learnt to control the news cycle — it’s not whether you do nothing, it’s how you do that nothing that counts.
Moving on from the Hawaii-holidaying “I don’t hold a hose, mate” dismissal of the media, he has learnt that he needs to feed the media chooks a steady flow of announceables. He needs to look all prime ministerial for the television cameras, after the details have been shaped into the government’s preferred narrative in advance through special day-before briefings for the gallery heavyweights.
It’s Morrison’s Potemkin policy village: a facade of action thrown up to keep journalists busy. It’s all colour and movement, with no substance. It’s a little like the notorious village facades set up by Grigory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s 18th century court favourite, to comfort the empress that her country was richer than it was.
We’ve been watching how this works this month with Morrison’s “gas-led recovery” on one Tuesday leading through to Angus Taylor’s “energy roadmap” on the following Tuesday last week. (Weekend averse, Morrison seems to have chosen Tuesday for announcements.)
In each case, an announcement was structured around an event: a speech in Newcastle for Morrison, the National Press Club for Taylor. The key reportables are put out through an earlier briefing that allows it to launch the day’s news cycle through the morning papers and the ABC, with plenty of online reports and radio talk during the day and deliberate “doing-things” footage for the evening news.
The story then trails on through the week as it’s dissected by analysts, critiqued by news media and pounded into a shape fit for trolling the Labor Party and the left by News Corp’s culture warriors.
Sure, the facade may be “a strategy for this” and “a plan for that”, but with the commitment of a million dollars here and the suggestion of a billion dollars there, marinated in grand rhetoric and served hot, the announceable starts to take on the plausible outlines of substance. Plausible enough, at least, to kickstart the required media cycle.
And that’s what matters. The audience for these announcements is not the Australian public — it’s the media itself. It doesn’t even matter if the announcement is popular; controversy is better, both for government and media. As Trump’s first son-in-law Jared Kushner is reported as telling Bob Woodward in his latest book Rage: “controversy elevates message”.
That makes the “gas-led recovery” perfect. According to last week’s Essential Poll, only 15% of people prefer gas-fuelled power to renewables (and another 15%, like the Nationals’ Matt Canavan, stick with coal). But the twin announcements filled up the news cycle with a meta-narrative of governmental busy-ness, while gaslighting environmentalists and winking to climate-change deniers.
Morrison understands that the media is optimised for reporting actions. It struggles to report what doesn’t happen. You can’t jemmy a “nothing happened” into the daily news cycle. (Although News Corp has been trying hard enough in Melbourne and Brisbane.)
Sooner or later, the big announcements fade into the fog of inaction (think: the arts rescue package or the bushfire relief). But, like buses, there will soon be another announceable coming along to fill the gap.
Controlling the news cycle with Potemkin announceables is not that groundbreaking. It’s an approach the PM has adapted from Trump: the US President has perfected the art of announceables by tweet and never-to-be-implemented policy by executive order.
Australia’s media is not blind to the Morrison game. Just about every political thinkpiece concludes that he’s long on talk, short on implementation. Yesterday’s Insiders was marked by a sage nodding that little, if any, of the past two week’s announcements will amount to much.
Still, it’s filled two weeks of news time. It’s divided the opposition, creating its own spin-off news cycle. From the government’s perspective, that’s a win.
Morrison’s achilles heel is his ego, just like Trump.
Labor need to relentlessly paint him as the useless lying manipulator that he is – belt his ego right out of shape and let him spin that any way he likes.
Kushner is right about that much at least, that controversy elevates the message.
Of course we can breath a sigh of relief that no Labor politician has ever been a liar, a manipulator or possessed of an inflated ego. I’m relieved that has never occurred. Phew!
Most pollies have a streak of that but its how the ego is put to our benefit that counts. Gough’s enormous ego gave us modern Australia. Hawke and Keating’s huge egos gave us some remarkable economic and social reform. Rudd some shining moments and some failures. Trying very hard to apply a positive legacy to the latter three conservatives… yeah na…
Did Morrison get his idea of media spin from the Windsors? Why do we get non-stop vapid Royal gossip in the media? Who in Australia, apart perhaps from over-60’s UK expatriates gives a monkeys about this irrelevant bunch of nonentities?
If you are so exasperated about that, just check out the writers who are providing that pap.
Meanwhile we’re stuck in this media spin cycle.
Has it ever been any different? As they say, politicians may change, but governments always stay the same = Power aspires to fullfil itself!
The article is correct….we have a nothing of substance federal government. But the media/journalists no longer ask questions, they just edit pressers.
The huge disappointment of course is the ABC, but then that is the Coalition’s greatest triumph.
The big question is whether Labor genuinely has the decency to rebuild the ABC and lock in fair funding that the LNP cannot ever again attack.
They’ve done the ABC, that’s for sure. Even I now preference other media, the Guardian, Michael West etc. and they’re working on the public service (it’s so hopeless we have to contract out to our cronies), and Australia Post too. Labor is just as conflicted with their owners/funders/donors as the LNP. Labor thinks that by doing nothing in opposition it will win government….what a lazy sense if entitlement! Many of the really smart people in Labor have lost the ‘fire in the belly’ and are now just ‘treading water’….,Penny Wong, Tanya P, Andrew Leigh….it’s such a shame. Who is the Labor leader, what’s his name, and what do they stand for? Low paid jobs and growth of the profits of the rich, ie. thesame as the liberals. So, my answer is a loud NO. The ABC is doomed. What we need is an Italian/NZ renaissance, where the executive government never, ever has a parliamentary majority…lots of ‘no confidence motions’, govts falling and new elections. Maybe then people will value a public broadcaster.
When the media landscape is controlled by Murdoch, who likes his PM’s in his pocket, and the “government” itself has scared off real journalism, Morrison’s penchant for smoke and mirrors is easily managed.
Then when asked in Parliament about such matters, he shuts debate down, if asked a question on the hustings he does not accept the premise of the question.
So we have a “government” able to act as it pleases, untouched.
The only people affected are Australians, and they haven’t counted for years.
For some reason, they keep on electing the same old drop kicks.
Go figure.