Corporate Engagement

Trevor Cook on public relations, social media and politics

Obama caught adrift in the media, lobbyist circus

October 10, 2009 – 6:28 am, by Trevor Cook

Awarding Obama the Nobel peace prize seems emblematic of the triumph of celebrity over substance. I’m an Obama fan, but the reality is that his achievements lie ahead of him not behind him, and you can’t help thinking that the Nobel judges were more than a little ‘previous’ in awarding the prize to a guy who hasn’t yet been in office for a whole year. A bit like winning a ‘best picture’ academy award for a film proposal. Of course, part of the decision is just a matter of ‘thank god that dangerous idiot Bush has finally gone’. But still.

Interestingly, just before the Nobel award, Robert Reich (a Clinton secretary for labor) had a general spray about the Obama administration’s apparent paralysis on domestic policy:

My friends in the Administration and on the Hill repeatedly tell me “don’t make the perfect the enemy of the better,” or words to that effect. Politics is the art of the possible, blah blah blah. True. But in each of these areas — healthcare, financial regulation, environment, and jobs — the “better” is really not that much better. Forget perfect; anything that offered real reform would suffice for now. But in every case, what should be the centerpieces of reform are being left out.

Why? Congress is overwhelmed with corporate and Wall Street lobbyists (far too many of whom are former Democratic office holders). The White House is trying best it can to push and prod in the right direction but there’s too much going on, too many arenas where private interests are framing the debate and stifling major reform, and too many friends of friends and relations of relations who are making tons of money working for the other side. The public doesn’t know what’s going on because the national media would rather report on the sexual escapades of famous people or social trends or high finance (a recent Pew study of economic reporting shows the vast majority of stories about the Great Recession have focused on Wall Street rather than Main Street). And progressives — that is, progressive organizations in our nation’s capital — have been remarkably and consistently outgunned, outmaneuvered, or just plain ineffectual. This is largely due to the fact that they’re sitting in Washington rather than organizing and mobilizing the rest of the country.

There’s more to government than good intentions and hope, and if Obama can’t do better on foreign policy than Reich suggests he is doing domestically than the Nobel Prize will look a bit hollow in 12 and 24 months time.

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Even the GFC can’t reverse the Left’s decline

September 29, 2009 – 11:26 am, by Trevor Cook

In a recent issue of the new york review of books (Sept 24), Tony Judt described social democracy as the “ideology that dare not speak its name”, such has been the decline of the political ideology that once dominated Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and ‘new deal’ America. (Obviously, Judt doesn’t read Kevin Rudd’s essays.)

This decline can be traced back to the oil shocks of the 1970s that helped undermine confidence in the Keynesian, welfare state approach that had been the mainstream orthodoxy at least since the second world war. The decline of the Left got a further big kick along with the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s emergence as a major (state) capitalist power. Instead of social democracy, we got the third way and new Labour.

When the GFC hit, the neo-liberal consensus seemed shaky. There was a return to Keynesian approaches by governments around the world, particularly in the english-speaking west where neo-liberalism had been most vigorously on the march. The sales of Marx’s works were on the rise, and academic political economists wrote stacks of ‘we told you so’ articles.

But the outcome of the German election which saw the end of the grand coalition and the exit of the social democrats from government might be another sign that any hoped-for social democratic revival will be short-lived:

German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II.Voters also punished left-leaning candidates in the summer’s European Parliament elections and trounced French Socialists in 2007. Where the left holds power, as in Spain and Britain, it is under attack. Where it is out, as in France, Italy and now Germany, it is divided and listless.

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Was “Balibo” sanitised?

September 22, 2009 – 6:43 am, by Trevor Cook

A few weeks ago, John Pilger made some interesting claims that the script of Balibo had been toned down to expunge Australian Government (and media?) complicity. Pilger’s quotes from director Robert Connolly don’t exactly refute the claims but the Australian media doesn’t seem interested in it either, perhaps preferring the official version once again that it was all Indonesia’s fault:

Claiming to be a “true story”, it is a travesty of omissions. In eight of sixteen drafts of his screenplay, David Williamson, the distinguished Australian playwright, graphically depicted the chain of true events that began with the original radio intercepts by Australian intelligence and went all the way to prime minister Gough Whitlam, who believed East Timor should be “integrated” into Indonesia. This is reduced in the film to a fleeting image of Whitlam and Suharto in a newspaper wrapped around fish and chips. Williamson’s original script described the effect of the cover up on the families of the murdered journalists and their anger and frustration at being denied information and despair at Canberra’s scandalous decision to have the journalists’ ashes buried in Jakarta with ambassador Woolcott, the arch apologist, reading the oration. What the government feared if the ashes came home was public outrage directed at the West’s client in Jakarta. All this was cut.

The “true story” is largely fictitious. Finely dramatised, acted and located, the film is reminiscent of the genre of Vietnam movies, such as The Deer Hunter, which artistically airbrushed the truth of that atrocious war from popular history. Not surprisingly, it has been lauded in the Australian media, which took minimal interest in East Timor’s suffering during the long years of Indonesian occupation. So enamoured of General Suharto was the country’s only national daily, The Australian, owned by Rupert Murdoch, that its editor-in-chief, Paul Kelly, led Australia’s principal newspaper editors to Jakarta to shake the tyrant’s hand. There is a photograph of one of them bowing.

I asked Balibo’s director, Robert Connolly, why he had cut the original Williamson script and omitted all government complicity. He replied that the film had “generated huge discussion in the media and the Australian government” and in that way “Australia would be best held accountable”. Milan Kundera’s truism comes to mind: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Well, as long as it’s a good movie, right?

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Social democracy deracinated

September 21, 2009 – 6:57 pm, by Trevor Cook

A new light on the hill | The Australian

In Saturday’s Australian Tim Soutphommasane had a long piece on where Rudd and Labor stand in ideological terms. Part way through reading it I started to notice that there was a lot missing from his account of the ALP’s current relationship with its traditional ideology. What was missing was any references to workers, and account of unions and the ALP’s relationship with unions, there was no critque of capitalism, no sense of the employment relationship as a source of inequality or exploitation. In fact, anything that might distinguish Labor from its opponents seemed to have been airbrushed out.

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NEWSFLASH: Bernard Salt discovers new acronym

September 9, 2009 – 6:46 am, by Trevor Cook

Bernard Salt is no doubt a wonderful demographer, but he is also great at getting publicity.

Salt knows the value of a bright new social trend, be it tree changing, sea changing or now Nettels.

Yes, folks, Salt has interrogated the data (generously provided by taxpayers) and discovered (drumroll please) that many people are time poor.

Of course, as startling as this insight into our society might be, its not going to get more than a cursory media treatment without something to ’sex it up a bit’.

And that something is an acronym which is also a word. Very cute, very media-friendly.

He probably spent hours or days on it, perhaps he worked with a creative consultant, perhaps it came to him in a shower moment.

All this is great for Salt and great for his business.

And it’s another example of the marvelous value-add of PR.

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Is Gerard Henderson a leftie?

September 9, 2009 – 6:31 am, by Trevor Cook

A new study seems to suggest so.

The authors, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, got some solid media coverage with their finding that the ABC is slanted rightwards. In fact, the study claims that ABC TV is more favourable to the coalition then talk radio stations 2UE and 2GB. Do you believe it?

Others have already pointed out how dumb the methodology is in this study. Basically, the authors locate public intellectuals on a left-right scale based on whether they get more positive or neutral mentions from Labor or Coalition federal politicians. Media outlets are then ranked as slanted depending on whether they mention right and left wing intellectuals. It sounds dubious and it is.

Gerard Henderson’s rating is only one of many anomalies. Gerard got many more favourable mentions by Coalition than ALP MPs. Consequently, when he is cited by a media outlet it is counted as a plus for the ALP when the slant ranking is being worked out.

Sounds silly and it is. You don’t have to know too much about parliamentary, or political, debate to know why the ALP might mention Gerard so positively so often.

The reason is that being able to quote someone generally felt to be supportive of your opponents is a much more powerful debating point than quoting people who might be described as the usual suspects.

Postscript: Phil Gomes points out to me that he made this point last week in the comment stream on Larvatus Prodeo.

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In Sydney, adultery is bad but property is really serious

September 4, 2009 – 8:06 am, by Trevor Cook

This week a couple of big media stories gave us another epiphany on the Sydney psyche.

Della Bosca’s escapades with a comedy script writer got a kind of faux serious treatment, ’shock, adultery right here in Sydney, what next?’.

And then last night, the really serious Sydney stuff, a property dispute that resulted (apparently) in a cold-blodded murder.

In Cremorne, too, on the lower north shore where ladies lunch and ‘financial advisers’ live in harbour front houses and it’s ALL about the property.

After a troubling week like that, it’s time for the music man

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Public service reform gets the Rudd treatment

September 4, 2009 – 6:34 am, by Trevor Cook

From The Australian:

(Rudd) has asked Terry Moran, secretary of his Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to put together an advisory panel which will develop a discussion paper seeking ideas for reform by the end of this month.

Unfortunately the syntax here is confusing but I guess that it means that the advisory panel will be established by the end of the month rather than the ‘ideas’.

Sounds well-meaning and worthwhile doesn’t it?

Don’t be fooled.

For a start, Rudd’s fondness for elongated processes are part of the problem (remember the 20/20 summit and the new PM crouched on the floor looking for ideas).

Rudd is also reported as saying yesterday that he wants bold ideas and courage:

“Public servants should not shy away from big ideas or be afraid to be bold,” Mr Rudd, a former public servant and diplomat, said.

“As I have said before, we cannot afford a culture where the public service only tells the government what it wants to hear.”

Unfortunately, the last few decades of reform (a word that has been leached of meaning) have pushed the public service in precisely the opposite direction.

All the emphasis on ’serving the Minister’, ‘providing mature advice’ and ‘working as a team’ (all phrases that I regularly heard when my shortcomings were being discussed and I was being ‘counselled’) has simply underscored the old LBJ maxim ‘go along to get ahead’ which is at the very heart of the ethos of the senior ranks of the Canberra bureaucracy.

And this kind of culture only re-inforces the paradoxical effects of tenure. When people build their careers around a specific set of largely non-transferable skills promotion through the ranks means they have ever more to lose and they consequently become more timid as they climb the ladder. Tenure undermines boldness and courage. The very opposite of its much touted justification.

Most senior public servants have virtually no real career experience outside the public service, and often their experience within the public service is also sharply constrained to a few Departments (with preference given to people with central agency experience e.g. treasury and prime minister and cabinet). Unsurprisingly, the range of viewpoints on basic questions (not policy details) is very narrow at the top. Which I guess is what prompts Rudd’s call for fresh thinking.

Bold ideas and courage come from a breadth of experience and confidence, and that takes careers that span senior roles in a number of fields. The senior public service is practically devoid of people with real experience in business, media, academia, the NGO sector, and so on. So without this internal diversity and cross-fertilisation, where will the ideas come from? Outside consultants? Summits? And like their parliamentary masters, senior public servants are still overwhelmingly white males. A bit more noticeable in the age of Obama.

So Rudd’s panels, discussion papers and what all won’t make a bit of difference unless he finds a way of breaking open the cloistered world inhabited by his loyal but unimaginative and fearful advisers. Stale minds and dull cultures don’t just suddenly become bold and creative.

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‘Making communism work’; aka award modernisation

September 3, 2009 – 8:34 am, by Trevor Cook

Multi-employer awards are an Australian phenomenon and so is the herculean task of modernising them.

As time goes by, and given the legalistic approach we take to these things, our award system starts to take on some of the characteristics of an archeological dig with layers of regulation piled on top of each other. Faced with this growing pile, governments routinely hit upon the idea of a thorough-going overhaul. Root and branch stuff.

Award modernisation (or simplification) is a highly desirable and worthwhile exercise. That’s why the Hawke Government had a go at it and why the Rudd Government is also having a go. But it’s not easy, as today’s angst ridden stories demonstrate.

As awards grow in number, and matters covered, the worse it is for business from an administrative perspective. The fewer awards the better. But fewer awards mean that more employers, and employees, are squeezed into a strait jacket of conditions and wage rates that might not be commercially viable in many circumstances. Simpler awards can mean less flexible awards, and that’s not good for business either.

But there’s no obvious or easy way out of the problem that awards pose for a modern, flexible, competitive economy. If there was, awards would not have to be modernised every decade or two. John Howard hoped that awards would just wither away and be replaced by a set of minimum conditions underpinning individual and enterprise bargaining. That solution was rejected as too ‘extreme’ by the Australian electorate. So we are back with trying to make ‘capitalist wage setting with Australian characteristics’ work as well as possible.

Awards may be a great way of protecting workers, but they do not fit easily into today’s world and its demands for some magical pudding of simple and flexible regulation. And award modernisation will be with us for as long as there are awards. In another 20 years, another ALP government will launch upon the task of making awards work.

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Whitlam’s Grandkids – media coverage

August 30, 2009 – 5:24 pm, by Trevor Cook

In recent days I have secured some good media coverage for my research comparing the first speeches of the 2007 and 1983 ALP MP intakes; which I luridly titled “Whitlam’s Grandchildren: What the Class of 2007 tells us about the ALP”.

Annabel Crabb wrote it up in the SMH Thursday (In Gough we Trust) which prompted the Australian to ask me to do an op-ed for Friday’s paper (Whitlam’s Grandkids“)

Gerard Henderson also gave it a mention on Insiders this morning (Sunday).

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