Hussein Rudd (l) Kevin Obama (r),aka.tomato,tomarta.Imre Salusinszky
The Australian
July 03, 2009
KEVIN Rudd may have failed to emulate Bob Hawke's "love affair with the Australian people", but his honeymoon with much of the media shows no sign of losing its ardour after 18 months in office.
Rudd's triumph has been to water down a ruthless political will with a warm-and-cuddly persona that has been sold to the public on media platforms that were regarded as beneath his predecessor, John Howard.
Members of Team Howard, including the former prime minister, have been shaking their heads at Rudd's extraordinary exertions of spin and the tolerance of the Canberra press gallery towards the exercise.
Those more sympathetic to Rudd, such as former Labor pollster Rod Cameron, believe the Prime Minister's smooth ride has come courtesy of discipline and good management, plus the disarray among the Coalition.
Cameron sees Rudd's strategy of working the talk shows as a logical extension of Howardism. "Howard broke the mould by ignoring highbrow media and going to commercial talkback, and Rudd has just taken it a step further and gone to somewhat trashier radio and television," Cameron said.
The recent Rudd spin cycle involved the studied alternation between bloodthirsty displays in parliament over the OzCar affair and soft media appearances, such as last Sunday's effort on Rove, which included a photo-shoot with Sacha Baron Cohen's alter ego, Austrian fashionista Bruno.
See Kevin 07 endure the hard hitting and relentless questioning of none other than Rove,caution xxx it's not for the feint hearted.
Senior Liberal frontbencher Tony Abbott said yesterday it was not hard to tell who was the funnier - Rudd or Bruno - but added that it was harder to say who was the more "phoney".
While Rudd was attacking News Limited newspapers yesterday about their coverage of the OzCar affair and wastage in the government's $14.7 billion Building the Education Revolution program, he was following through on his on-air promise to TV host Rove McManus to send a Twitter with the line "It's Twitter time", which prompted McManus to reply: "You rule! (and not just because you are our elected leader)."
None of this seems to have aroused the suspicion, or even the scepticism, of much of the Canberra press gallery.
"He has had a very good run," Howard said yesterday of Rudd's treatment at the hands of the gallery over the past 18 months.
"Most working journalists will cut a centre-left government more slack than a centre-right government - that's the culture of the cohort. I certainly didn't have much of a honeymoon. There is a different culture, and I always knew that to be the case."
In stark contrast to Howard, whose medium of choice was talkback radio, Rudd has made a specialty of forums such as FM radio and Rove. His latest appearance on the Ten Network talk show was no doubt inspired by Barack Obama's Tonight Show appearance with Jay Leno in March.
"The reason I didn't do that kind of media is that I didn't think I would be very good at it," Howard told The Australian.
"But I also thought the prime minister oughtn't to do too much of that stuff. I took the view that my responsibility was to go on serious programs. Although I did do talkback radio, I didn't avoid the serious interviews.
"I had frequent press conferences and I would often go until they were getting agitated and wanted to file."
While there is certainly nothing wrong with a prime minister discussing his use of a hair-dryer with Rove McManus - or engaging him in exchanges via Twitter - that was not the universal judgment on Howard's talkback appearances with Neil Mitchell in Melbourne and Alan Jones in Sydney. In an essay in Stifling Dissent, a 2007 collection edited by Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison, Helen Ester argued that the Howard strategy of daily talkback appearances had "diminished other democratic institutions, including the parliament itself".
Based on interviews with a dozen senior Canberra journalists, Ester said: "Their perspectives show that the last decade has seen an increased focus on strategies to block and control access to information flows from the gaze and analysis of the critical expertise of journalists in the parliamentary round."
Howard said: "I used talkback radio, and of course some of the Canberra gallery resented that, because it removed them as gatekeepers. When you do news conferences, you are in the hands of editors and journalists about what is used. If you do talkback radio, at some point your argument cannot be filtered."
One claim frequently advanced against Howard's media strategy was that he avoided "hostile" interviewers such as Kerry O'Brien on the ABC's 7.30 Report.
"That's absolute nonsense," Howard said. "In the last few years I was PM, I can't think of more than a handful of occasions where he'd ask me and I'd say no.
"I don't think anybody would say Kerry O'Brien was a friendly journalist, but it was a serious political program."
Similar criticisms have not been directed at Rudd, despite his blanket ban on appearing with Jones.
"The evidence is he won't go on the program," Howard noted. "I also regularly went on (John) Laws, including in the early years when Laws still carried a torch for (Paul) Keating."
Jones thinks Rudd is running scared. He told The Australian yesterday: "Rudd won't appear on tough forums because he doesn't like criticism and he has no comprehension of detail.
"He's simply not across the detail. It's fine if everything's written down in front of him and he can go unchallenged, which of course happens in the parliament. But on talkback radio, you're not unchallenged.
"Kevin Rudd last week was talking about fakes and frauds. I think many Australians understand to whom those epithets appropriately apply. As for the business of appearing on Rove, no one can be critical of the program but you have to question whether that's the forum in which the Prime Minister is going to be asked to answer important matters of state. It's because he knows he won't be asked, or if he is it will be in a humorous and frivolous way, that he again finds this comfortable, avoiding the detail and the criticism."
Sydney public relations consultant John Wells said Rudd's exploitation of the talk show format showed a different temperament from Howard's, but also a generational shift.
"Rudd is much younger, has grown up in a different technological age, and the people around him are much more savvy at new media and the importance of having younger people vote Labor," Wells said.
"Rudd's performance on Rove was very good. He turned up after a week of absolute mudslinging in the parliament with Turnbull.
"They would have had that programmed in advance of that previous week, and having had the outcome they did and all the shenanigans over 'Utegate', it would have reinforced their thinking that 'We've got to get out of here and soften that harsh, argy-bargy parliamentary persona into a softer positioning'."
Howard's former chief of staff Arthur Sinodinos has been impressed, in a perverse sort of way, with Rudd's forays into that region of the media where presenters go by nicknames and the most profound issues are of the "what gets your goolies" variety.
"Rudd is very good on the spin and has a good machine for doing that," said Sinodinos, who now works in the finance sector and is being touted for a federal parliamentary career.
"He also feels part of his success was picking up that younger constituency, so doing Rove or FM radio or social media stuff is all part of continuing to cultivate that constituency. Rudd is being all things to all people.
"I think there are a lot of them (in the press gallery) who fundamentally are more sympatico with Rudd in terms of his social outlook and policies, but it's not clear they are giving him an easy run. A lot of them are quite sceptical."
Labor PR consultant Bruce Hawker sees a rhetorical gulf between Rudd and Howard driving their media strategies.
"Howard was like your family solicitor - no nonsense, almost taciturn," Hawker told The Australian. "He really wouldn't have been comfortable opening up on a program like Rove. Rudd is still finding his feet."
Wells believes Rudd has received a softer ride than Howard from the media - although he adds this could easily shift with longevity. One point he does make is that if a fake email had surfaced in 1997, suggesting Howard had sought special favours for a mate, the reaction would have been "hysterical" and would have survived the unmasking of the lie.
"If you relate it to children overboard, that was hysterical," Wells said.
But it is likely there are deeper cultural reasons why a lie against Rudd evaporated in nanoseconds, whereas a lie against Howard was guaranteed to linger in the political ether indefinitely.
Journalists, after all, have limited scope to shape the historical narrative, compared with the vast ballast of the intelligentsia in universities, non-government organisations and the arts.
A quick survey by The Australian has revealed nobody in any of these institutions is planning a book called Stifling Dissent or His Master's Voice just because Rudd has doubled the number of spin doctors employed by the government, or branded the work of Australia's most celebrated photographer "disgusting".
"The 1970s saw an almost irreversible penetration of some of those institutions by the Left, and you just have to find other means of turning it around," Howard said. "It creates an automatic scepticism and tension once you have a centre-right government, or a centre-left government that doesn't behave the way it is expected to behave, like Tony Blair."
Australian Prime Minister & Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd, was successful in winning the Australian 2007 Federal Election.
Kevin Rudd and his party's success was due in no small part,to the overwhelming support of the Australian media and their hangers on in the Film,Arts,TV and "beautiful people" industries.
The 2007 Labor Party campaign was assisted by spin doctors and stratigists from American Democrats and approximately 100 foot soldiers from the Chinese Communist Party.
The same bumper sticker slogans and trendy one liners were employed by Labor,Rudd and their media groupies to convince (successfully) the Australian voters, that were later modified and used for the Hussein Obama Campaign in 2008,that there was something wrong with having the most prosperous and fastest growing western economy in the world,that there was something wrong with having pratically no unemployment, that there was something wrong with having NO illegal entrants via the Middle Eastern refugee boat people express, that there was something sinister or indeed "clever" about an Australian PM who dared say to the world and Muslim people smugglers "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come.",that there was something immoral for an Australian Government requiring that immigrants speak English and swear alligience to Australia and that the Australian culture be the paramount culture in Australia,that there was something wrong with the Howard Government having re paid the previous Hawke /Keating Labor Governments $96 billion DEBT and that it was even worse for the Howard Australian Government to have a $28 Billion IN THE BANK.
Some 2 years after Rudd's election the media spin doctors are telling Australians that an extra 100,000 Australians are now unemployed,Australians have lost 35% of their personal wealth since Rudd and his party of ex Union Officials,school teachers,affirmative action appointee's,"carers and sharers" took control of the nations purse strings, Australians are now in $300 billion DEBT and there is NO money in the bank,is, like their immigration policy,is a sign that the Rudd Governments economic policies are working.
Yes!!!! the Rudd Marxist Funded International Socialist Labor Governments policies ARE working, Australia is descending BACK into the economic and social dark ages that the Conservative Liberal Howard Government dragged Australia out of.
The Rudd Governments media cheer squads are reluctant to spruik the following on their tonight shows and ABC Kevin 07 infomercials,aka Hard hitting current affairs and investigative journalism.
Our pork pie PM revels in butchering the truth
Piers Akerman
News.com.au
Monday, June 29, 2009
THE Federal Police are investigating a fake email _ why not also investigate Kevin Rudd’s fake 2007 election policies?
There were the big promises and there were the little promises and all of them were dodgy. Remember that pledge to bring Iran’s rulers before the International Criminal Court at the Hague? That was a biggie. Out of left field but phoney.
Two years later and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now brazenly facing down an uprising with barely a word from Rudd or Foreign Minister Stephen Smith.
Then there was the promise to save the Murray-Darling River system and the Great Barrier Reef. This was patently false. Nothing the Rudd Government can possibly do will increase rainfall to or alter the Reef’s fate.
Migrating whales off the NSW Coast are a reminder of the fake promise to send the Royal Australian Navy to protect whales from the Japanese whaling fleet.
Then there is the $21 million wasted on the false FuelWatch promise. The last bowser I passed showed unleaded was still close to $1.30 a litre and the last
news item I read indicated that the fuel companies were still intent on squeezing profits no matter what the Government was telling them.
Which brings us to GroceryWatch. Despite spending more than $13 million on a promise that was dead on arrival, the Rudd Government maintained this promise was still viable until it was put down last Friday when media attention was diverted by Michael Jackson’s prescription drug death.
GroceryWatch was an extension of the phoney war Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan waged against the former Howard government over inflation while the global economy was melting down.
Treasury’s modelling and Treasury’s experts failed to spot the trend as did Swan and Rudd. They were too focussed on the phantom Inflation Genie to notice what was happening in the real world.
Fortunately they had the Howard-Costello surplus to use as a cushion but that has not prevented them wasting the legacy of future generations on a reckless spending spree.
Remember Rudd’s promise to be a fiscal conservative? False.
Just look at the cost blow-out for his national broadband network _ from $4 billion to $7 billion to $43 billion _ to cover fewer households than the cheaper model promised by the former government.
Then there were the promises to give a boost to the alternative energy industry _ and the slashing of the solar energy rebate scheme before it was due to end, the phasing out of the LPG conversion scheme, the promise of flood relief to the NSW North Coast, the dental scheme that delivers less than the old plan and the cuts to rebates for those needing life-changing cataract surgery.
Still to come are the job losses which will flow from the flawed industrial relations changes and any sign of the government stemming the flow of unlawful arrivals on the north west coast.
Whatever happened to the promised openness and transparency that the Rudd Government promised to deliver? For that matter, whatever happened to Rudd’s oath: The buck stops with me?
If the AFP want to get to the Mr Bigs of fakes and phonies, it should go straight to the top and get a warrant to search the Lodge.
Liberal Party, (Conservative) opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull has recently shot himself in the foot, he fell hook line and sinker for an opportunity he and his dumb arsed advisers thought was too good to miss, the"Rudd / Grant email" was it seems, something Turnbull was prepared to caste aside all his legal brilliance and caution for,in exchange for the opportunity to deal Rudd a death blow, getting Rudd out of the way before the next federal election,as we all now know the email was a fake, yaddah yadda yadda blah blah blah.
If only Australia's media was as vigilant in telling Australian's before the 2007 election of Rudd's BIG LIE concerning the circumstances of the death of his Father and Rudd's slandering of the Docteors and Nurses who attended him in hospital for six weeks before he died,after he filled himself with booze all day,and then attempted to drive his car home,thankfully only wrapping his own car around a telegraph pole and no one else.
Personally I have great sympathy for Rudd's childhood circumstances and admiration for his Fathers attempts to provide for his family,they are similar to my own,what disgusts me is Rudd's manipulation of the facts of same for the benifit of some Labor / Communist Party "Dream Time Mythology"
Rudd's deliberate missrepresentation of the facts concerning his Fathers death,are, like his orchestration of the destruction of evidence concerning the gang rape of an Aboriginal child,what is now known as the "Heiner Affair",are but two of many insights that exposed his smirking creepy dishonest character, hey no wonder Australia's Hollywood Wannabees love him so much.
What of Treasurer Wayne Swan,Rudd's hapless bumbling treasurer ? Turnbull is surely not going to allow Swan off the hook just because he got it wrong on the Rudd / Grant email , even if the Labor media apolgists are prepared to do so, for Swan the email Turnbull was hoping was going to slit Rudd's throat,was indeed a TEMPORARY God send.
I am sure Rudd is more than glad he is not Wayne Swan.... btw. Wayne when does Federal Parliament resume again ?
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