Rudd brandishes finance reports in the war on error
Annabel Crabb
smh
October 11, 2008

Oh, what a lovely crisis for a PM to hobnob and strut
Bank's not that reserved

We're at war. You can tell because Kevin Rudd has suddenly become a wartime prime minister.
It's not as literal as donning a flak jacket and issuing war bonds, but you may have noticed some similarities between "Global Security Crisis PM" John Howard, circa 2001, and "Global Financial Crisis PM" Kevin Rudd this week.

When Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard called a snap press conference in Canberra on Thursday, there was a frisson of excitement: What could this mean? Were they about to announce something big?

Given the global trend for government bail-outs, were the PM and his deputy going to join the mob and buy back the Commonwealth Bank or renationalise Qantas?

It turned out that all the Prime Minister wanted to do was conduct a textbook Crisis Press Conference. John Howard did a lot of these in the early days of the War On Terror.

There are some firm guidelines for such press conferences. The first is that there should be plenty of flags around. The second is that you should always start the press conference by mentioning a recent conversation with a world leader.

"The impact of the global financial crisis continues to be felt around the world," Rudd began on Thursday.

"I spoke again this morning to the British Prime Minister, Australian time, about the measures which the British Government has just announced in its financial support package." (Luckily for Gordon Brown, Rudd completely approves of the British rescue package.)

So confident is our PM in his new role that he threw in a second world leader, more or less immediately.

"Following a conversation I had with Premier Wen Jiabao a couple of nights ago, on the question of China's growth strategy, it would appear to me to be confirming that China intends long term to accelerate its growth strategy into the future."

But the main point of the Prime Minister's Thursday press conference was to wave around some international reports. This is a key tactic for the wartime PM: find an international report that suggests you're doing the right thing, and brandish it vigorously.

Mr Rudd chose the International Monetary Fund report, which this week predicted widespread recession across the globe. But not for us. "For Australia, the IMF World Economic Outlook document provides a much stronger prognosis," Rudd rejoiced.

"Positive growth with a two in front of it for '09, and furthermore you see that reflected in the different projections on unemployment. For those major advanced economies, something ahead of 6 per cent, and the numbers projected for Australia [are] ahead of 4 per cent for 2009."

There's something reassuringly authoritative about a tick from the IMF. It's a global organisation of 64 years' standing, and its Washington offices are staffed, one assumes, by squadrons of quietly efficient pointy-heads whose job it is to know who is and isn't about to whoosh down the economic toilet.

But the IMF doesn't have a network of purpose-built Australian spies to feed its impressions of the Australian economy. Its World Economic Outlook report is written using information obtained from member state economies themselves; from the Commonwealth Treasury, in our case.

So in effect, when Kevin Rudd quotes from the IMF, he is quoting himself; at the very least, he is quoting Wayne Swan.

Laundering one's own words through the medium of an authoritative-sounding organisation is not new. Hell, it's probably not even wrong; it's just worth keeping in mind.

The PM also declared himself buoyed by the findings of the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report, issued this week. Close followers of celebrity global finance will be achingly familiar with the World Economic Forum; it's the Swiss outfit that every year convenes an Alpine gabfest in the snowy village of Davos, providing invaluable opportunities for world leaders to confer, debate and be photographed with Bono.

The WEF's Global Competitiveness Report comprises a dizzying array of indices against which every country is judged; it's compiled partly using survey responses from its members (thanks, Bono) and partly using information from - you guessed it - the IMF.

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