Bartlett's Blog

Michael Gawenda’s article in this weekend’s Age & SMH is a dispiriting but accurate account by an internationally experienced journalist of just how hollow Australian political campaigning and the media ‘coverage’ of it has become. He writes of “the emptiness of this campaign, empty in the sense not of its importance, but of spontaneity and debate and political speeches and humour and anything approaching a real conversation – and a real confrontation – between those who want power and those who will decide who wins it.”

It is a sign of the desperate emptiness of this campaign that Howard’s morning walk offers the main – perhaps the only – chance of a fleeting moment of unscripted reality, even if that reality is a chance to interview someone dressed as a sheep who is protesting against the live-sheep export trade and who, most mornings when Howard is staying at Kirribilli House, waits for him to appear and then to be duly ignored.

In an irony heavy with symbolism, the day this article was published, even the sheep was arrested by some over-zealous Federal Police outside a John Howard campaign event!

I’ve noted a few times on this blog in recent weeks about the various community forums I’ve attended on a range of issues, and the non-attendance of Coalition candidates at the vast majority of them – a pattern which is consistent with what I’ve heard from other Democrat candidates and indeed also read on other blogs. (and if this example from GetUp’s site is anything to go by, it even extends to not responding to requests  for  information on policy positions.)
Despite the mainstream media’s almost exclusive focus on following and exhaustively (over)analyzing and score-carding the photo-ops and scripted sound-bites of the two major party leaders, plenty of real campaigning does occur where political aspirants engage with real people about their real concerns.

But Gawenda’s piece makes the strong and very unsettling case that Australia’s democracy is even shallower and emptier than the USA’s, despite the domination of money and the stone age electoral system and electoral laws in that country. When it comes to genuine engagement between the public and the candidates at election time – Australia is well behind. Maybe the average Australian accepts this and is comfortable with this or at least resigned to it? I don’t know. Our media certainly seem to be, despite their regular grizzling about it, as Gawenda points out.

The travelling media, most of them young reporters, have been turned prematurely cynical by the cynicism of the Howard team’s media management in this campaign, which apparently is almost identical to the management of Rudd’s travelling media circus.Each night, a text message is sent by one of the young female assistants that tells you when Howard will be taking his morning walk and when to be ready to board the bus. That’s it. The only hint of what might be happening the next day is whether or not the order is to have bags packed ready to check out of the hotel.

This is remarkable and maddening. Nowhere else, at least not in any country that has pretensions of being a democracy, is there this level of media management of election campaigns; not even in the United States, for all the talk of it being the place where political spin was perfected and where every word uttered by politicians is said to have been focus-group tested.

Indeed, compared with this campaign in Australia, American political campaigns are decidedly old-fashioned and messy. Candidates for the Senate and candidates for their party’s presidential nomination actually hold public rallies. They take part in debates in front of large and small audiences. They are heckled. They are asked curly questions.

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by the time the Republican and Democratic party presidential candidates have been chosen, some time after the main primaries in January and February, the candidates will have talked to tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Americans, at rallies and public meetings and sometimes in tiny town halls that can fit 50 people in the most remote parts of New Hampshire or Iowa.

They will have been tested in a dozen debates with their rivals for the nomination. They will have stood on the back of flat-back trucks, megaphone in hand, and talked to anyone willing to listen. And later, when the campaign proper gets under way, there will be more of this sort of campaigning and there will be at least three debates.

Yes, squillions will have been spent on advertising by the time this presidential campaign is over and the spin will be furious and ruthless, but there will still be old-fashioned campaigning in front of large and not so large crowds and there will be great and not so great speeches about America’s place in the world and about American renewal. The vision thing will matter.

The media travelling with the candidates will not consist primarily of young reporters who, good as they may be, don’t have the experience and standing to consistently subject a prime minister or president to the sort of questioning that may force them to go beyond the constantly repeated , focus-group tested, sound bites that kill language and empty it of all meaning.

That the main political journalists in Australia have given up travelling with Howard in what will be his last political campaign is a concession of defeat, whatever they may say about how useless it now is to get out on the campaign trail.

I have heard many journalists in Australians complain about this, but what I genuinely don’t understand is why they put up with it and continue to report it. If a couple of major media outlets simply refused to be spoonfed staged photo opportunities every day, stopped pretending it was something of genuine substance, and went out and covered other candidates or stories about some thing real, then the two leaders would quickly fall into line, or be starved of the vital night-time TV news coverage and the morning paper photos. As Gawenda notes, many of the main political journalists have given up going on the campaign trail. Given that it is so empty and meaningless, and everybody knows it is and often says it is, why is it being reported at all, let alone given precedence over everything else happening in the campaign?

ELSEWHERE: Thomas Arup muses on the same issue at Election Tracker.