Dear Duncan (Kerr)By ROB WALLSGood morning, Duncan... Thanks for the invitation to attend the 2004 Denison Campaign Forum. I would like to contribute, so please put me down as attending. Sure the results were disappointing, but fairly predictable (and I don't mean from the wisdom of hindsight). I apologise for the length of this email...but you did ask for feedback on the campaign. Having worked with quite a few politicians on their election campaigns as a photographer (Neville Wran, Laurie Brereton, John Kerin et alia), as well as covering elections as far back as 1963 (Menzies), I think I've absorbed pretty much of a gut-level feel for what a politician's image is about. With this election, I think the problem was one of marketing: what the experts would call "a lack of product differentiation". With both candidates scattering cash as though it were some sort of personal largesse, rather than distributing to the people what was theirs in the first place, all the voters could do was subside into cynicism about the political process. Faced with a choice of dishonest politicians, they opted for the one they knew to be a barefaced liar, over one they knew would, because of the political process, inevitably turn into one. Most politicians pay lip-service to the intelligence of the electorate, but the punters aren't taken in by baby-kissing, phoney photo opportunities with great big bits of cardboard being signed in felt marker and candidates squatting on the floor patronisingly reading books to pre-schoolers. Both parties and most politicians do it...so where's the product differentiation? From this side of the ballot box, surplus budgets being treated as an electoral war-chest appears to be about the most cynical exercise of power one could imagine. Deprive the people of their right to good education, health care and other services for three years on the spurious justification of prudent fiscal management, then scatter the cash to the four points of the compass to buy votes during the campaign. I think I've only ever seen one thing more cynical in an election campaign and that was a politician at Kundiawa in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, who made his campaign speech from a platform built from several tonnes of slabs of beer. There was a lesson here too: the voters took his beer and still voted for the candidate of their choice. I wrote to you some years ago, expressing my hunger (and probably that of others) for a politician who would lead by offering a vision couched in rhetoric that would lift people's spirits; words that would elevate their aspirations and make them feel worthy. There is a quote from a 19th Century unionist whose name escapes me, but the quote has always stuck in my head: "The tragedy of the working man is the poverty of his desires". I believe the politician or political party that addresses itself directly to changing this will differentiate itself from the purely venal ruck that dedicates to the putting money in your pocket with one hand while taking it with the other. Alleviating poverty is a given; elevating the aspirations of the nation should also be a priority. I think Paul Keating understood this and came close to striking the right chord in his Redfern speech. I think Bob Carr and Kim Beazley in their personal passions for American history understand what it takes to stir the souls of men and women with words. Menzies knew this too. You could say it is not in the Australian nature to respond to inspirational idealism couched in fine rhetoric, but times and people change. We are no longer the dour, taciturn, horny-handed battlers that populate the myth of what it is to be Australian. Though they have their place, the Australia that writers such as Flanagan and Kenneally write of is mere folk memory. This is the imaginary landscape that John Howard inhabits. My children are Anglo/Irish/Chinese/Italians for Christ's sake! We are a different race with different ideals and different ways of expressing ourselves. Those who govern us need to understand that this country is not Australia Pty Ltd, but an entity made up of people with aspirations that extend beyond the bottom line of the national corporate balance sheet; inhabitants whose basic desire is to be seen as more than just another cog in the Australia-machine. My guess is that the first politician with the guts to sack the spin-doctors and pollsters, to learn to speak unvarnished, unhedged, unequivocating truth from the heart will win the hearts and minds of the electorate. If you want to justify it to the merchants of spin, that would be product differentiation. But then again I'm probably naive...I still believe that people can rise above the poverty of their desires.
Warm regards,
RAPID RESPONSE EMAIL: What do you think? Thursday, October 21, 2004 |