Double-speak and spin fail to deliver a Labor messiah
12-July-2010
Remember Kevin from Queensland who was “here to help”?
Pre-election 2007 the Australian public were given a rock-solid guarantee that Kevin Rudd was a fiscal conservative who would lead a responsible Government with a strong hand on the till.
Thanks to Labor’s spin machine, and large portions of the anti-Howard media, he was portrayed as some sort of messiah.
Back then, there was no overt sign that what he’d actually deliver was record levels of Government debt, daft and poorly administered programs like the home insulation fiasco, utter rip-offs like the BER that wasted billions of taxpayers money, an influx of illegal arrivals due to weakening of Australia’s border protection laws, and no real action to fix the health system which he vowed he would tackle in his first year.
It turned out that pre-election Kevin, the beloved “Kevin 07”, was merely a caricature created by Labor’s spin machine to cultivate an image of responsible government. The Gill-Rudd team simply didn’t have the policies or the management skills to live up to that caricature.
Indeed, they fell well short of the mark.
In fact they delivered almost the opposite of what the Australian public had been expecting. Or as our new PM (who was Acting PM for almost 20% of Rudd’s reign) put it, they “lost their way”. Hmmm…can’t have had a very good policy compass to have managed that in just 2 short years?
If Kevin’s meteoric fall taught Labor’s spin machine anything, it should be that raising expectations to messiah levels and delivering instead a Monty-pythonesque “naughty boy” is hardly the formula for long-term electoral success.
But the elevation of Julia Gillard has seen the whirring of Labor’s spin machine notched up to almost deafening levels. Julia is supposedly here to fix the mess created by Kevin, who we were told, was here to help.
Witness her “fix” Labor problems on a daily basis, with media headlines that proclaim her success.
She’s “saved” Sydney’s western suburbs from over-crowding without a single policy to address population….unless you count adding the word “Sustainable” to a Minister’s title (BTW isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron when it applies to a Labor Minister?)
She’s “compromised” with the miners – which actually means making bad economic policy marginally less-worse and dodgying the figures so it creates only a $1.5 billion black hole in Labor’s budget. No word yet on how that will be addressed (and don’t expect one until after the election).
And now she is “solving” the illegal boat entry problem her Labor Government created by….wait for it… introducing her own “Pacific Solution” in the form of offshore processing - after years of decrying and demeaning the Howard Government’s policy which did just that.
Labor’s spin machine is clearly in overdrive with it’s new female messiah offering the chance to “fix” the problems created by its former white-bread messiah.
It’s all about creating that “reliable, solid” vibe that was done so effectively with Kevin 07.
And just like in 07, there are so few in the mainstream media looking behind the spin and questioning the substance of what Julia Gillard is saying.
In fact, one of the major metropolitan dailies recently described Gillard’s “I don’t want a big Australia, but don’t ask what I’m going to do about it” statement as “when she announced she was putting the brakes on the nation’s population growth”. Hello, did I miss that “announcement”? Exactly how is she putting the brakes on it?? Has anyone bothered to ask?
Julia Gillard will enjoy a honeymoon period. Labor’s spin machine knows this. As with the Kevin 07 campaign, we’re being presented with a caricature, a confected image, essentially a false bill of goods.
Just as Kevin didn’t help our nation, Julia will not fundamentally fix the problems the Gill-Rudd Government created. She is a creature of the Labor party and has been an integral part of every poor decision that led to Rudd’s downfall.
You only have to look at the substance of her recent “fixes” to see it’s all smoke and mirrors. Despite the carefully crafted image of a “second coming”, Labor is only offering more of the same behind a different mask and voice box.