It’s a small faux pas in the scheme of his broader troubles but stood-aside Federal Speaker Peter Slipper looks to have taken a bait on Twitter.
Upon his election as Speaker, the MP for Fisher took to social media like a bear to honey, diving head-first into the micro-blogging world of Twitter. As of this morning he had 5000+ followers – one of them going under the tag @BobCarrFM who was asking after Slipper’s welfare.
The man dubbed “Slippery Pete” assured the tweeter that he was “well thank you”. A casual glance at the profile of @BobCarrFM would have shown the owner’s claim to being Australian Foreign Minister was only an allegation.
Past tweets from the White House lounge room - where @BobCarrFM said he was watching AFL football with a snoozing Barrack Obama (dribbling in his sleep) and a meat-pie scoffing Ambassador to the US Kim Beazley should have told Slipper as much.
On social media, it's always judicious to check the small print.
Lawmakers often overlook the unintended consequences of their actions. Take the London Olympics for example, where the self-declared “first social media Games” could turn decidedly anti-social.
The Brits have pushed an Act through Parliament to ensure the intellectual property rights of the London Olympics are protected.
Nothing unusual about that – it happened in Australia long before Cathy Freeman went anywhere near a naked flame. It’s just part of the price countries pay to hand over a city for a fortnight to the private company called the International Olympics Committee.
The Guardian newspaper reports that the British legislation goes much further than existing copyright protection. Legal opinion is that someone in the London crowd uploading a photo or footage to Facebook could be prosecuted for breaching criminal law.
The Guardian says using “2012” in connection with terms like “London”, “medals”, “sponsors”, “summer”, “gold”, “silver” or “bronze” is another likely breach. An event called the "Great Exhibition 2012" was threatened with legal action over its use of "2012" but it was later withdrawn.
With ambush marketing in mind, Twitter has agreed to work with the London organisers to ban non-sponsors from buying promoted ads with hashtags like #London2012
Back in the years BS (Before Social), the Australian Government was so sensitive to its own legislation that it referred to the 2000 event as “the Sydney Games” and avoided using The O Word in official communications.
Owners of the Olympic Hotel in Sydney’s Moore Park, located a short stumble across the road from a Games venue, were threatened with prosecution unless they changed its name, despite having long known by the O name.
Common sense prevailed and the dogs were called off.
Much of the same will probably apply in London, even if the draconian law looks, sounds and smells like an ass.
It might say on your ticket that you agree not to “license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet".
But does anyone think the Olympic Police are going to knock on the door after you go home and confiscate your smartphone?
Unless you’re working for a non-Olympic sponsor, the PR consequences would be dire.
More on the games and social media here if you're interested (and that's where we borrowed the image.)
So the final report of the Queensland Floods Commission is out and recommends that three engineers working in the city's dam system be referred to the state’s Crime and Misconduct Commission. The story’s likely to dominate Queensland news for the next week, especially since there’s a State election in eight days time.
Putting the politics to one side and not inferring blame, there’s a lesson here for PR professionals – especially those working in crisis management. It runs along the lines of: No matter how prepared an organisation is for a crisis, a plan is only as good as the people charged with implementing it.
Most large organisations have crisis plans. Few bother to regularly test them. Many have a plan only because it required by their parent company or taxpayers.
The Lighthouse Communications crew has collectively worked on hundreds of those documents. We all agree that it’s one thing to have a plan but it’s another to invest in training the people who have to use it.
Working for one of our clients, I visited the Brisbane flood scene shortly after the waters subsided. The sight of people picking through stinking messes that were once backyards or scraping mud from the floors and inside walls of homes was devastating. It reinforced that the victims of a crisis - and those charged with managing it – are people and a natural disaster can take a heavy toll.
I recall working with another external PR consultant on a plan for a health technology company. Most of the plan was “his” intellectual property. It was actually off-the-shelf and wasn’t anything new. The colour-coded flow charts were very pretty, though, and the document looked great when it was printed and bound.
Crisis plans are not “size fits all”. They’re a prescriptive guide to what you might do when something hits the fan and people need to know how to use them.
It says something about how Australians view their politicians that nobody seems to believe the reasons Assistant Treasurer and Small Business Minister Mark Arbib gave for resigning from Parliament.
“Spending more time with the family” didn’t cut it. There is an assumption that Arbib is bound for a high-paid lobbying job. He might well be.
Resigning from the Senate at age 40 defies logic because politics has been his life.
The tone of media at his press conference was incredulous and one question sailed close to the wind, legally speaking.
Arbib’s track record as a so-called faceless backroom operative does pre-dispose people to disbelieve him.
But just don’t think it’s a problem restricted to a single political party or individual.
The Australian National University has been researching attitudes towards pollies since 1969. Its Australian Election Study finds that, on average, only four-in-ten voters admitted to trusting politicians over that time.
Asked if government is run for the benefit of the people, only 17 percent responded positively.
In Australia we like to think we have a unique history of disliking authority. We’re a country that cuts down success and elevates a cop-killing, armed robber in a tin suit to the role of national hero.
Distrust in politicians is really a global trend. As media focus on the daily doings of political leaders has increased, the decline in public trust and respect has accelerated.
Richard Nixon was the first US president to clash head-on with the emergent mass media - and lost battles on Vietnam and Watergate.
More recently, a millionaire Prime Minister cavorting with prostitutes and dithering Eurozone leaders taking the world to the edge of financial collapse have reinforced perceptions that politicians take all of us for granted, almost all of the time.
Social media makes people feel they can speak out and drive agenda for change - as we’ve seen in the Middle East. So why do so many people say they feel less empowered?
As for soon to be ex-Senator Arbib’s career path in the weeks ahead: Watch that space.
To rework Channel 9 Melbourne’s famous 6pm News promo of the 1980s ("Brian Told Me"), it was Barrie who told me about Kevin as leader.
Three words will long be remembered from Julia Gillard’s Adelaide media conference: chaotic, paralysis and sabotaged. They described, in order, her leadership rival’s work patterns, the state of the government he led and, by implication, his role in the 2010 election campaign.
Some media took up the ball. The Sydney Morning Herald’s David Marr said: ‘No Kevin. This isn’t a breakdown in civility. Your colleagues are at last telling us why you were sacked.”
As pro-Gillard Ministers add fuel to the bushfire, and letter writers draw on Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Perry Gretton, Tumbi Umbi: "Kevin Rudd is not the Messiah. He’s just a very naughty boy"), it is true that formerly unnamed sources are finding the courage to be quoted by name.
But the story is not new.
Take Barrie Cassidy’s 2010 book "The Party Thieves, The Real Story of the 2010 Election." The ABC Insiders host and former Hawke press secretary didn’t miss in his account of the coup against Rudd – who had been labelled Captain Chaos by John Lyons as far back as 2008.
Firstly, on chaos and paralysis, Cassidy records Rudd summoning senior public servants for urgent meetings and keeping them waiting for hours, Ministers discovering major decisions in their portfolios only after the PM told the media first, the interfering nature of the PM’s office and a manic emphasis on winning the 24-hour cycle and its impact on governance.
He wrote: “That Kevin Rudd was cut down by Labor factions because of bad opinion polling is the great myth of 2010. The faction leaders took the initiative – that’s all. The support came in an absolute torrent. That’s because Rudd himself drove them (the numbers). His own behaviour had caused deep-seated resentment to take root.”
Cassidy added: “The coup was happening in part because Rudd had hijacked the party, and either ignored or abused key people within it for too long.”
Gary Gray bemoaned the blame lumped on Peter Garrett for the home insulation debacle: “For Rudd and his office to position Garrett as the fall guy was disgraceful, weak, sneaky, unprincipled and just plain wrong.”
Barry Cohen told Cassidy: “If Rudd was a better bloke, he would still be the leader. But he pissed everybody off.”
Take sabotage. Cassidy called the internal campaign against Gillard relentless, vicious and driven by some powerful media support.
Recalling the fallout from Laurie Oakes’ ‘exclusive’ that Julia Gillard had opposed in Cabinet a pension increase and paid maternity leave, Cassidy wrote: “It left few people in the Labor Party in any doubt that the source was either Kevin Rudd or somebody acting on his behalf, with or without his consent. It was now clear Gillard was going to be tested in a way that few leaders had been in the past.
"There was, undeniably, a rat in the ranks, to use a favourite Labor Party term. And that ‘rat’ was determined to bring down the government.
“Rarely before in an election campaign has a leader had such a fight, against an invisible yet real and potentially poisonous insider.”
So as we digest Kevin Rudd’s plea for an end to ‘vicious personal attacks,’ on the grounds they are ‘un-Australian,’ maybe the ABC will introduce Barrie Cassidy’s Insiders next Sunday with an update of Channel 9’s promo for the late Brian Naylor.
It’s a blip in the scheme of things but a clear case of Do As I Say, Not Do As I Do. I’m talking about Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ticking off of a journalist at her Adelaide media conference this morning.
Press Gallery journalists rightfully praised Gillard for giving one of her strongest performances ever in front of a media throng. That was until the final moments when The Australian’s Michael Owen asked about her role in the downfall of Kevin Rudd.
"So you just fell into the leadership?" he said at one stage – and kept going. Her response showed what not to do in front of an otherwise benign media pack.
"I’ll answer your question but, ah, just ... I’m not listening to this rudeness, I’ll answer your question and then I’ll give a question to your colleague, thank you very much... “I’m not going have you just speak to me like this. End of sentence. I’ll answer your question and I will take a question from your colleague.
"Your question is internally inconsistent. Let me answer it...well, I’ll answer it thanks very much... If you stop talking then I’ll give you an answer, but I can’t give you an answer if you keep talking.”
The appearance of Angry Julia not-so-deft sidestepping an issue might have been a play aimed at presenting her as a PM with renewed authority, but went dangerously close to portraying her as out of control.
That the reporter has since apologised doesn't quarantine footage fo the incident making the nightly news.
It wasn't quite on the scale of K Rudd’s Unhappy Little Vegemite YouTube video, mind you, but it's still not a good look.
At Lighthouse, we use media training to enable clients to handle questions exactly like this. So here's some free advice.
The most graceful response is to pause, stay silent until the questioner has run out of steam, acknowledge the question and answer or re-direct it, on your own terms.
Remember, it’s a reporter’s job to ask hard questions and probe. Ripping strips off them just distracts from the messages you were trying to convey.
Not all gift giving is good PR. I’ve never sent a present to a head-hunter – it seems too “try hard.” Americans do most things differently and it seems they’re not shy about sending recruiters a post-meeting gratuity.
This blog outlines 33 of the weirdest gifts sent by job candidates. The list includes a GI Joe doll, breast-shaped cupcakes, a stapled teabag and a bag of mixed nuts.
Not all the presents went down well.
Of of them pale compared to the South Australian Government-funded marketing firm that sent industry influencers dead goldfish to spruik the state’s business relocation claims.
The political parlance is “coming up the middle” and it refers to a dark horse candidate taking advantage of the inability of front-runners to muster a majority of votes.
Like jockeys riding Melbourne Cup prospects, Bill Shorten and Stephen Smith both want to sit off the leaders and only make their run when the finish line comes into sight.
Are Greg Combet and Simon Crean credible alternatives? Or Wayne Swan, who for now is Gillard’s deputy. That’s getting way ahead of the game.
Right now it’s all about Gillard and Rudd. That’s Julia, who can’t cross the road without causing a 10-car pile-up and Kevin, the comeback kid whose evaluation of his self worth is much more substantial than his Parliamentary support base.
There’s supposed to be a hard-core of 40 Caucus members who will vote ABR (Anybody But Rudd) while Ruddster’s own bloc of votes is widely accepted as sitting around 30. That leaves 30 backing Gillard - plus most, if not all, of the ABRs.
With a comfortable majority of seats, Gillard could bring on a spill, send a vanquished Rudd to the backbenches and get on with the job of being a Prime Minister. A comfortable majority, of course, is one thing she lacks.
Pushing that button could provoke Rudd to resign from Parliament, bringing on a by-election that Labor would be hard-pressed to win. Talk about a rock and a hard place – and there’s that looming Queensland State election that’s shaping as a Labor bloodbath.
Resolving the leadership issue before then – even bloodlessly - isn’t going to reverse ingrained perceptions of divisiveness. A messy change could make it worse.
Gillard’s leadership never got out of the starting gates and is dying a death of a million cuts. Rudd’s Prime Ministership was riddled with mistakes but his popularity with men and women in the street is strong – mostly because he’s not Julia.
One under-reported factor is the role of the Press Gallery. Media love colour and movement and leadership changes are on every correspondent’s bucket list.
Some Gallery reporters have obviously been targeted by political operatives with leaks that talk up the prospect of change. One prominent Canberra scribe has even been berated on Twitter for his use of limited off-the-record sources.
It’s a harsh assessment because “off the record” is the lifeblood of political reporting in Australia. If newsrooms followed the US practice of not publishing a story without independent corroboration, we’d be living in a political news vacuum (which some would consider a good thing.)
In an era of instant gratification and attention spans on par with a gnat, the US system of primary presidential elections is an anomaly that defies explanation for someone not brought up on it.
Like Disney movies, the late Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery and Whitney Houston tributes, you can’t miss the primaries. They run from January to June and dominate Australian news coverage. Estimates for how much they cost go as high as $US5 billion.
That's far less than the $US3.2 trillion the Iraq war is supposed to have cost but not exactly small change.
The idea about bringing party delegates together to pick their candidate for the “real” election has only been around since the 1820s.The primaries rely on an insanely complex formula and has no real foundation in the US Constitution.
As the US Government’s own website rhetorically says: “How many times do we have to vote for president, anyway? Why can't we just go to the polls once in November and be done with it?”
I won’t bore you with all the answers but they’re mostly motherhood statements about giving people a chance to question candidates and feed into the democratic process.
They could do the same online and then cast a vote at the poll.
If the primaries are so good for democracy, how come only 48 percent of eligible Americans cast a vote? Of other countries where voting isn’t compulsory, Malta (94 percent), Chile (93 percent) and Austria (92 percent) rank much higher.
Australian has primaries. They’re called candidate pre-selections. You may not get to vote for the PM when you cast a vote, but the option is there to join a party and play a role in who becomes leader.
The US primaries are public blood-letting that provide media content, cost a bomb and reduce policy debate to the politics of the personal.
Americans should be kinder to their kids, ditch the primaries and let the baby-kissing start when the polls get really serious.
Roll-up, roll-up, roll-up - The great Australian Labor Party circus has hit town and you are sure to be entertained by a wonderful team of entertainers - including a few clowns, a number of knife-throwers, invisible men and tightrope walkers, led by not one but two ring masters who can't tame the lions behind them.
Yes for at least the sixth week in a row (though I must admit I have stopped counting), the "phantom" challenge by the former PM, one K.Rudd, to topple the current PM continues to dominate newspapers and the airwaves.
We have seen media reports about who is backing whom.
We have heard party colleagues claim that it was not possible for Rudd to return as a leader having previously led and failed (despite those same colleagues being around when Kim Beazley was returned as the ALP leader in 2005 after having held the throne four years earlier).
We have listened to carefully crafted words from Rudd and Gillard and their supporters to dismiss the challenge as simply being a media speculation ....and wondered if Mark Latham would introduce his Conga Line of Suckholes descriptor to the current situation.
And then we read that the riot act had been read to the party – Stop Talking - it's only giving oxygen to the story!
With that, I was not holding out much hope for any explosive revelations coming from Four Corners story on the only battle taking place in federal politics - Rudd vs Gillard (Tony who?).
But being a political junkie, I removed myself from the family room - having just lost a debate with one of the kids over whether Kev vs Julz's would be more entertaining than the new Channel 7 US import Revenge - and flicked on the box in the bedroom to hear the old familiar Four Corners theme and Kerry introducing "The Comeback Kid?".
I was interested but not surprised when a line-up - including a former Rudd staffer (who got some good PR for his new book), a right wing union bod, two former ministers (now lobbyists) and another political staffer-turned-lobbyist - gave their views on Rudd and what happened.
In reality it was a bit ho-hum and in my view would not really give much fuel to the leadership fire. Any newsroom would be scratching hard to get much out of the story to give the "challenge" more life.
But then came the PM!
And to much celebration within newsrooms around the country came a very poor response to the question of whether her office had prepared her speech accepting the role two weeks prior to Kevin being shafted. If this was the case and she knew about this, there would be a huge question mark over the credibility, already tainted by her "no carbon tax" pledge and commitments to independent Andrew Wilkie regarding pokies.
The PM had repeatedly stated that she was not behind a planned campaign to dispose of her old boss and that she only made the decision to challenge for the leadership the day before.
After several unsuccessful attempts to get a straight answer to the questions, we heard "I have just given the best answer I can." If that was the best answer that could be given by her, one has to ask the question: Why on earth did Gillard grant the interview in the first place?
As I have long believed and advocated with clients - you don't always have to say yes to a media request. If Julia had taken such a position, we may have been saved at least a day of leadership talk in media and Julia may well have saved some face before the public.
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