Australian local government is fascinating to watch. Touted as truly representative of community sentiment, it’s actually the least accountable form of government. You’ll know this is an irrefutable fact if you’ve ever lodged a complaint. Don’t get me started on its ability to be petty when it comes to controlling what people want to do with their own property.
This story about Ashfield mayor Lyall Kennedy being pulled into line for his opposition to a court’s approval of 24 trading for a local fast food outlet probably poses more questions than it answers.
What was the conduct that was inappropriate? The report probably attracts only qualified legal privilege so we may never know but one comment in the story by the good mayor stands out.
''It is not essential for people have access to hamburgers at three in the morning,'' he said.
Not essential, but is Mayor Kennedy qualified to comment about the carb-loading needs of shift workers? What about people heading off on holiday at an ungodly hour who need to feed their kids? How about junk food addicts?
Would his attitude be different towards early morning kebabs or hot dogs?
Crowd Sourcing on the Internet is so hot right now. In simple terms, it means outsourcing a job to a group of people, raising financial backing or tracking an event or cause.
Upheavals in Libya and Egypt are great examples of how to use crowd sourcing to map a crisis. Think of it as social media for activists, where plotting actions on a map mobilises protesters or shows the extent of an issue to raise public support.
We’re going to see a lot more of Crisis Mapping in world hot spots as access to wireless broadband explodes. Wireless broadband is cheaper than cable Internet in much of Africa.
The ubiquitous TV aerial that’s a part of every shack in even the poorest shanty towns in South Africa is fast being replaced by less visible smartphones as a prime communications channel.
It’s probably not far off the mark to say that we’ll soon have billions of digital media users on social media but lack access to fresh running water or a toilet.
One issue that needs to be explored is how reliable as a source of information Crisis Sourcing will be. Crisis Mapping is as easy as signing-up for online software and galvanizing people with the same interest.
Hackers accessing back-end software is a daily event and who’s to say the servers these databases run won’t become the target of operatives spreading disinformation.
In military parlance, this is “black ops”. Where winning hearts and minds used to rely on leaflet drops or foreign language radio broadcasts, the digital world is the new theatre of warfare.
You can read an academic’s view on Crisis Sourcing here.
If it’s all too hard, you can always watch how the world is tracking the zombie apocalypse here.
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.
What’s inducing that queasy feeling? The revelation that Network TEN is making a reality TV show called “The Shire” or the sneering comments from latte-sipping journalists who couldn’t find their way out of Sydney’s inner-west with a seeing-eye dog and a GPS?
“Reality TV” is an oxymoron. There’s nothing “real” about it. What goes to air is selectively-edited lowlights, cut in a way to bring out the worst in us.
A declaration of interest: I lived in the Sutherland Shire for 20 years. I’ve swum at Cronulla Beach. I’ve shopped at Miranda Fair and I’ve sat on the hill at Shark Park. I didn’t go to the Australia Day riots - but I know someone who helped start them. On the advice of police and following death threats, he was last heard of living in Melbourne with a shaved head and under an assumed name.
I don’t have an emotional connection to The Shire and recognise that some people who were born there will die there without ever feeling a need to cross the Georges River.
The Shire is an up-market version of Sydney’s Northern Beaches – like Manly-Warringah it’s an insular peninsular but without the bush ticks.
The Shire’s coastal end shares the same characteristics of most urbanised beach suburbs with a high transient population. The inland parts are middle class suburbia dotted with older houses and more recently built McMansions.
Four-in-ten people who live in The Shire also work there. Eighty percent of the locals are Australian-born. There are fewer Chinese as a proportion of population than anywhere else in Sydney and it’s generally an ageing and conservative area.
So what’s in it for reality TV?
Big audiences. It’s OK to hate The Shire. It’s not elitist and it’s not like deriding lower socio-economic areas like Sydney’s south-west. Having a football team that’s never won a premiership is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s Lara Bingle, the stereotypical blonde Shire girl. Ricky Pointing also calls the area home - but let’s gloss over that.
Filming someone making a fool of themselves in Cronulla Mall after the pub shuts is like filming interviews with Mid-Western Americans and leaving in only the idiotic statements. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
When the local mayor - fittingly, a former fashion catwalk veteran- starts threatening legal action and says she’ll barricade roads into the area, you know the producers are going to have plenty of material to work with.
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.
There’s an old saying in political circles: Never have an enquiry unless you know the outcome. It’s rubbish of course, even if that’s the outcome most pollies would want.
So it wasn’t a surprise to see Defence Minister Stephen Smith up to his neck in mixed messages and furore last night following the release of the so-called Skype Sex Scandal report.
Smith’s refusing to apologise for criticising the way the head of the Australian Defence Force Academy treated the alleged victim.
On the face of media reports at the time, the academy chief’s actions looked insensitive. Smith acted as many in his position would have, but probably didn’t have the full facts.
He isn’t the first and won’t be the last Minister to go head-to-head with Defence and come off second best. Did he know how the enquiry would go? Of course not.
You can bet your house that Smith was praying for the PM to drop the Bob Carr option and parachute him into the Foreign Affairs job, not only because he wanted the gig but so he could be overseas when the findings became public.
Speaking of enquiries, the one certainty about the Finkelstein Report into regulating Australia’s media industry is that most of its recommendations - in their current form and converted to legislation - will never see the light of day.
As worthy as His Worship’s intentions might have been, the report handed to the Government by former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein last week had more holes than a parsimonious pensioner’s string shopping bag.
You have to question how “independent” a $2m a year media regulator with beefed-up powers of direction would be. The complaint systems we now have are feeble and choking in red tape but isn’t the solution simpler than a bigger stick?
Political payback theories aside, the original terms of reference seemed to be about making media organisations and their employees more accountable. The catalyst was the phone hacking scandal 20,000km away and any connection to Australia was tenuous, at best.
While making media organisations more accountable is a great idea, no sensible Government that supports a free press but already has lots on its plate wants to be picking a fight with people who buy newsprint by the container shipload.
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.
Are you sick of the Prime Ministerial soap opera? Take a holiday overseas or become a hermit. The Press Gallery loves a good leadership stoush - so prepare to hear much, much more.
The most likely scenario is that one of the warring parties will bring on a spill in a week and the loser - most likely Rudd, but a lot can happen in a few days - will zip off to the backbenches to plot some more.
If Gillard goes down, you can bet the media will look for turning points in her leadership. They’ve already being edited into neat TV packages that can be rolled out at a moment’s notice. So what will become these so-called watershed moments?
Putting aside the PM’s pre-election promise about “no carbon tax under a government that I lead” and the stumble over sending asylum seekers to East Timor, these are the contemporary events that stand out:
That speech to the ALP National Convention, wiping Rudd’s term as PM from the history books: It looked churlish, not Prime Ministerial, and fed into the image of disunity.
The Australia Day melee at The Lobby Restaurant in Canberra: That image of the PM being dragged into a waiting Comcar made her look helpless. That her office had a hand in stirring up an incident that led to pictures going worldwide posed serious questions about who was in charge.
The Four Corners interview: If you’re going to do an interview, have a game plan. Why not forcefully make it clear that leadership rumblings were underway before the Rudd coup but the decision to stand was taken at the last minute?
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.)
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