Title: Re: Where mud sticks: election spin, slogans & shy
Post by Thy.Equitist on Jul 18th, 2010 at 5:50pm
Meantime, I love this poignant cartoon: -  http://images.smh.com.au/2010/07/17/1699220/svOPED_JULY18-420x0.jpg...which accompanied this article: - http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/a-fight-to-the-finish-20100717-10f2a.htmlQuote:
A fight to the finish
July 18, 2010
Sometimes there is a flicker of meaning behind the emptiest election slogan.
ELECTION campaign slogans are a bit like tacky abstract art: if you stare long and hard enough, sometimes you see flickers of meaning, intentional or not.
If Julia Gillard's ''moving forward'' and Tony Abbott's ''real action'' catchphrases were pieces of art, they'd probably be hanging on the wall of a fast-food outlet. They're that bad.
''Moving forward'' sounds a bit like ''going forward'', a piece of management jargon which regularly ends up on lists of ''10 annoying phases to avoid using''. And ''real action''? What other type of action is there?
Both phrases are no doubt the result of hours of focus group research that has been carefully boiled down by strategists, refined by pollsters and distilled by PR people. The hope is that we are all so brainwashed by the elixir that at the end of the campaign we wander to the polls like a pack of zombies and tick the correct box.
It would be easy to dismiss it all as meaningless. Yet, when you think about it - stare too hard - both phrases reveal much about the defensive and offensive strategies of each team, and the strengths and weaknesses of each leader.
Take Gillard's ''moving forward''. First, implicit is an instruction to forget about the old prime minister (what was his name again?) and embrace the new. Get over it and move on, the phrase seems to say. The juggernaut rolls on.
The process of air-brushing recent history is a necessary one for the Labor Party collectively and for Gillard personally, who is struggling to manage perceptions she knifed a popularly elected prime minister to further her own political ambitions.
The hope for Gillard is that if she keeps telling us to move on while refusing to talk about private conversations that took place on ''that night'', the issue will simply go away. Problem is, many members of the public feel she owes them a decent explanation.
Second, by using the phrase Gillard is placing herself in the centre of the political spectrum. By claiming to be ''moving forward'', she is implicitly telling us she is moving neither to the left nor the right. It's a subtle pitch to the so-called ''Howard battlers'' living in marginal electorates from a prime minister with left-faction origins who has been reshaping herself as a middle-ground leader with fundamentally conservative values.
Third, the phrase implies action and movement, rather than equivocation. This, in turn, is a response to perceptions that Rudd was a ''do nothing'', ''blah-blah'' leader unable to translate his rhetoric into action, let alone string together a clear sentence.
Gillard, as the opposition keeps reminding us, was in fact intimately involved with many of Labor's policy failings when Rudd was leader. The dilemma is that she cannot claim credit for the Rudd government's successes without accepting some of the responsibility for its failings. She is now telling us that she is getting on with the job of being a decisive and competent leader.
Fourth, going forward implies economic progress. It is an aspirational phrase reminiscent of Mark Latham's ''ladder of opportunity''. Presenting as a safe pair of hands to manage the economy is widely regarded as an essential ingredient in any successful modern election campaign.
Yet economics still represents a major weakness for Gillard, with published opinion polls suggesting Labor is once again trailing the Coalition in this area. Gillard attempted to address this problem is a speech last week titled ''Moving Forward to a Strong and Fairer Economy'', with promises to offset all new election spending with savings so as to not erode the surplus. The speech was pedestrian and, anyway, the message was derailed by questions about whether she reneged on a leadership deal with Rudd.
Fifth, ''moving forward'' is designed to highlight the idea that the Coalition's values are rooted in the past, while Labor is looking to the future. Labor will be doing much to portray Tony Abbott and his colleagues as retrogressive dinosaurs, climate-change deniers and wedded to policies of the Howard government such as WorkChoices. Labor, in contrast, wants to portray itself as modern, tech-savvy, progressive, fresh and energetic.
But what of Tony Abbott's ''real action'' phrase?
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