ON SONG? WHY IT’S SO HARD TO CALL THE TUNE FROM OPPOSITION
0On song? Why it’s so hard to call the tune from opposition
April 17. 2022 — 5.00am Save Log in. register or subscribe to save articles for later. Share Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size 2 View all comments Language can be used to welcome voters into policy discussion. Or it can slam the door in the face of electors. bolt it with jargon and camouflage the entrance with boringness. It is no surprise that politicians. whose job it is to jam incredibly complex policy areas into a partisan framework. prefer the Tomb Raider approach. Instead of policies. we mostly get served messages. Particularly in an election. Good messages allow us to believe that we are examining policy. But policies don’t win campaigns. Messages do. A good message is a simple line with a brief but substantial explanation. Gaffes and campaign gimmicks aside. Scott Morrison and his Coalition team have out messaged Anthony Albanese and the Labor team during the first week of this election campaign. Is it the song sheet or the singer? Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has struggled with his message in the first week of the campaign. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The Coalition has repeated the words “jobs”. “plan”. “economy” and “trust” in various combinations across every media channel and in every speech. Of these. half are concrete things. Jobs and plans are demonstrable reasons to accept Morrison’s promises on nebulous concepts such as trust and the economy. The messages reinforce an even more nebulous concept: the Coalition “brand”. The brand is that the Coalition parties are “better economic managers”. This idea has been reinforced by successive Liberal governments for so long that it has become a mental shortcut for voters and even for members of the party. It is harder to make substantial claims from opposition. The longer Labor remains out of power. the more theoretical its promises become. As Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains in his famous work on cognitive biases. these shortcuts – “heuristics” – can lead us to make mistakes because we are thinking quickly. according to baked in assumptions. rather than slowly. using deliberation and logic. If we stopped to deliberate. we might ask what the phrase “better economic manager” means? And should a party that says it believes in free enterprise be seen to be “managing” the economy? Managing economies by means of plans is. the free market economist Friedrich Hayek argued. “the road to serfdom” because governments that plan economies end up micromanaging citizens’ lives. Only philosophers and political scientists worry about these things. and since few people pay attention to their impenetrable ramblings. it works. A political party with an appetite for government would be mad if it didn’t. as Nike would say: Just Do It. Anthony Albanese has struggled to articulate clear messages. To be fair to him and his team. it is harder to make substantial claims from opposition. The longer Labor remains out of power. the more theoretical its promises become. After 10 years of Coalition government. the opposition has to reach back a long way for tangible proof to bolster its messages. So now Albanese is struggling to make concepts such as “a better future” and big programs to deliver “care” tangible enough to be credible. If he could be more simple and specific. he would stand a better chance of accessing the full cache of credibility on health attached to the Labor brand. In many polls. including a March True Issues survey by JWS Research. health is a top priority for voters at this election. The opportunity is quiveringly close. yet Labor is separated from it by a communications chasm. Instead of wrapping his arms around the electorate. Albanese is repeatedly forced to answer questions about the cost and feasibility of his policies. which threaten to drown out his messages of a caring society and a better future. Because his language is too unclear and the messages...
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