PUBLIC BOOTS THE MESSENGER

30 March, 2012 General news0

Public boots the messenger

March 31, 2012

Opinion

15 years of road upgrades in just 4 years – Team Quirk

<em>Illustration: Rocco Fazzari</em>” /></p>
<p><em>Illustration: Rocco Fazzari</em></p>
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<p><strong>Gillard wants to be seen as the leader who delivers the policy goods but the voters may have already switched off.</strong></p>
<p>If it were not already named after George Orwell, reversing the meaning of words for the purposes of political propaganda might have to be named Gillardian. Consider the talking points that the Prime Minister’s office sent to ministers on Tuesday.</p>
<p>Labor had just been dealt a cold, brutal blow by the people of Queensland on Saturday. It went from 51 seats to seven, so few that it lost its status as a political party for the purposes of Queensland electoral law. Labor’s primary vote in the state fell to a record low of 27 per cent. But federal Labor could, at least, console itself with the fact that its share of the national vote was higher, at 31 per cent in the most recent Newspoll.</p>
<p>Then the latest Newspoll published on Tuesday. Federal Labor’s primary vote fell by 3 percentage points to 28. That is, not materially better than in Queensland. It was a devastating poll. The arguments about the difference between state and federal suddenly looked pretty thin. Labor’s Queensland performance looked like a premonition of its federal fate.</p>
<p>The only faint hint of any positive news for Julia Gillard in the poll was that her approval rate became slightly less disapproving – from a net approval rating of minus 34 to minus 27. That still meant public sentiment was running two-to-one against her, and that she remained a tad more unpopular than Tony Abbott. Dismal, in other words.</p>
<p>The Prime Minister’s office, however, saw it differently. This was the interpretation that Gillard’s staff sent to all her ministers on Tuesday: the Newspoll result “shows people are responding positively to the Prime Minister’s strong leadership on the mining tax, NBN and delivering a strong economy for working people.”</p>
<p>If that is a positive response, what would a negative one look like? This Orwellian construction was so absurd that it had a cheering effect, though possibly not the intended one – some ministers laughed out loud when they read it.</p>
<p>It seemed to be the same vein of thinking that Julia Gillard was occupying when she was asked on Monday whether she, like Queensland’s freshly dispatched premier Anna Bligh, had a problem of trust? Gillard answered that she would be happy to go to the next election and ask the people to trust her.</p>
<p>This sent up a gleeful whoop in the Liberal Party, which quickly produced a video juxtaposing her remark with her broken promise that “there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead”.</p>
<p>And on the face of it, a Labor campaign based on the people’s trust in Gillard does look to be ludicrously quixotic. The basis for her unpopularity is the perception of her very absence of trustworthiness.</p>
<p>A quick review of the evidence. A poll by Essential Media last June found that only 30 per cent of voters agreed that she was trustworthy, a collapse from her score of 49 when she first took the job. Qualitative polling by both parties has found that her biggest image problems with the electorate are that she’s seen as cold and untrustworthy. The Australian Electoral Study, conducted at every election by a team of academics, found that just 9 per cent of voters agreed that the word “trustworthy” described Gillard “extremely well”.</p>
<p>This is the woman demonised at No Carbon Tax rallies and on talkback radio by the epithet Juliar, playing to the public trust? Why on earth? Here’s the thinking among some of Gillard’s senior staff. Trust is an issue that haunts Gillard, but it’s an issue that can’t be skirted: “It’s one of the things you can’t go around, you have to go through,” said one.</p>
<p>The Gillard team well recalls how John Howard did just that at the 2004 election against Mark Latham’s Labor. After years of criticism that Howard was duplicitous and sneaky, over the ”never, ever” GST, children overboard, Iraq and the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, there was widespread incredulity when he called the election with these words: “This election, ladies and gentlemen, will be about trust.”</p>
<p>It worked for him. In fact, it was Howard’s biggest election win. He won the Senate as well as the House of Representatives, giving him untrammelled control of the Parliament for the only time in his 11½-year prime ministership. He asked for trust, and Australia said, How much would you like?</p>
<p>Why did it work? First, Howard did not make it an abstract about trust or trust in truth-telling. This is how he framed it: “Who do you trust to keep the economy strong, and protect family living standards? Who do you trust to keep interest rates low? Who do you trust to lead the fight on Australia’s behalf against international terrorism?”</p>
<p>In short, Howard made it about competence. The electorate did not think Howard honest, but it thought him competent in delivering economic growth and national security, the two prerequisites for a national leader. And, of course, he was – the economy had its longest run of growth on record under Howard and Peter Costello, and there was no successful terrorist attack.</p>
<p>But, more than that, he made it a contrast. In a two-party system, powerfully drawing attention to an attribute of one leader posts an automatic contrast with the other. By emphasising his competence, Howard was pointing up Latham’s inexperience and unsteadiness. It was a contrast that worked brilliantly for Howard.</p>
<p>Can it work for Gillard? Howard pulled “a judo move”, by turning an apparent weakness into a strength, says Gillard’s adviser. When, during the leadership challenge by Kevin Rudd, Gillard declared, again and again, that “I am the person who gets things done”, some of her senior staff started to think that this could be the basis for a Gillard judo move. The guiding concept is for Gillard’s campaign to find public perceptions of her that can be harnessed to an attractive purpose, while simultaneously pointing up an unattractive attribute of Tony Abbott’s. Gillard is seen as a hard worker, ambitious, a good negotiator, and tough. The thinking is to link these attributes to Gillard as the leader who can deliver. “People want some certainty, they want a plan, they want someone to deliver the plan,” says one of her advisers. “We will win on a real plan, we will win on getting things done.”</p>
<p>This is designed to highlight by contrast the perception that Abbott has no positive plan, only negativity, cannot get things done, only block things getting done.</p>
<p>So when, on Monday, Gillard said she would ask for trust, she copied the Howard playbook. She did not make it about abstract trust or about truthtelling. This is how she framed it:</p>
<p>“I am happy now and in the 2013 election to say ‘Who do you trust to manage the economy in the interest of working people? Who do you trust to understand the needs of the future and the building of that future economy? Who do you trust to spread the benefits of the mining boom to make sure that they are shared by all Australians; who do you trust to improve your local schools and local hospitals?'”</p>
<p>And it’s the first of these, the economy, that will, as ever in national politics, be the main battleground. Gillard framed it very deliberately and very carefully and based on years of political psychology.</p>
<p>Peter Lewis of the campaign consultancy Essential Media Communications, the outfit that crafted the ACTU’s successful campaign against WorkChoices, explains that the choice of words is grounded in work by the veteran US Democratic Party pollster Vic Fingerhut: “He showed that when you ask people, ‘Who’s best at running the economy?’, people favour the conservatives. But when you ask, ‘Who’s best at running the economy in the interests of working people?’, the left-of-centre party wins.” It’s all about framing the question. “By merely adding the words ‘for working people’ to the question ‘who is better at managing the economy?’, Democrats pick up 30 percentage points. This is the way that left-of-centre parties can win debates.”</p>
<p>Lewis says that Australians have a firm conviction that social class exists despite our national narrative of egalitarianism. Asked whether they believe social class still exists in Australia, 86 per cent of respondents to an Essential Media poll said yes, and only 8 per cent said no.</p>
<p>This, no doubt, helps explain Wayne Swan’s attacks on billionaires as he seeks to establish a polarisation in the public mind to the advantage of Labor. Guess how many Australians categorise themselves as belonging to the upper class? One per cent, according to Essential Media polling. Thirty-four per cent call themselves working class, and 50 per cent middle class.</p>
<p>“Our reading of this,” says Lewis, “is that this is fertile ground. Class is the new black.”</p>
<p>But if Gillard, Swan and Lewis are right, then why are we seeing poll results like this one? Asked “which party do you think would be best at handling the Australian economy in the interests of you and people like you?” in an Essential Media poll just this week, the Liberal Party still won, by 41 per cent to 29.</p>
<p>The theory is not working for Labor as it is supposed to. Similarly, Lewis points out that “on most issues, Labor is running with stuff that rates 50 per cent plus” on a policy-by-policy measure. He cites the mining tax, the NBN and the prospect of a national disability insurance scheme. “But it’s not translating into electoral support.”</p>
<p>One possible conclusion is that Labor’s popular policies are outweighed by the unpopular. But even the hyper-controversial carbon tax still wins poll support of about 30 to 40 per cent, meaning Labor’s most unpopular policy is nonetheless more popular than Labor itself. Another possible conclusion is that the problem is not the product but the salesman. Or woman.</p>
<p><strong>Peter Hartcher is the political editor.</strong></p>
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