8
DO BRILLIANT CUT-THROUGH ADS
You are tired now, dog tired. The benefit of the café run is long gone, displaced by the post-rage exhaustion of reacting emotionally, back in the privacy of the cave, against those jogging journalists you passed. Lying on the couch, fondling your phone like a comforter, you catch up on the AFL latest. Your team is having its usual patchy season of highs and lows despite being cashed up, having a huge membership and possessing more than a dollop of glamour: so unfair. You are on Twitter, of course, where politicians and journalists cluster around #auspol – though you’ve avoided #auspol since election night because of the slavering coverage your dumb-but-cunning opponent got for winning an election you had in your pocket. At least, the polling said you had it in your pocket. The polling! You slide from #afl to #auspol stealthily, as though not wanting to catch yourself doing it. Tweets of news stories trumpeting your opponent’s win have eased somewhat compared to last time you accidentally looked. It’s moved on from mainly ‘what’ to ‘why’. You skip over (the many, many) tweets blaming you personally. A story written by one of the journalists you jogged by, describing your ad campaign as weak and misdirected, is getting lots of likes. It wasn’t that bad, was it? Here’s a tweet asking whether anyone can remember a single ad from your campaign. Now that’s unjust. There was that, um … that ad that, you know …? Something about ‘the big end of town’ anyway. You can’t be expected to remember all the ads. You were out on the trail trying to win! Hell, you knew you shouldn’t have switched from #afl to #auspol. You toss the phone up the other end of the couch and try to forget about the election again. It’s too painful. You had better policies, better people and better polling than the other side. Why didn’t voters see that and make you prime minister?
Advertising isn’t everything – but it’s nearly everything. Without an effective advertising campaign, not just good in itself, but better than the other side’s, it is very difficult to win an election. Campaign advertising is linked inextricably with the issue of campaign finance. Advertising is expensive. Your ads have to be absolutely world-beating to prevail if you are massively outspent by your election opponent. The ad spend was a key factor in Labor losing both the 2016 and 2019 elections. In the 2019 election, the quality of Labor’s advertising campaign made a big contribution to the loss too.
Campaign ads are, of course, extensively tested, but a good rule of thumb is: Is the ad memorable? If not, no matter how slick, don’t waste your money on it. Election winners have ads that cut through the noise, get talked about and stick in people’s minds.
Can you remember a Labor ad from the 2019 election? No. Conversely, the Morrison campaign’s ‘the Bill you can’t afford’, and the ‘Shifty Bill’ of Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party (UAP) campaign, both designed to destroy Bill Shorten as an alternative prime minister, probably ring a bell.
Labor’s ads failed the basic test: they were too dull to remember. Nor did they compellingly communicate Labor’s core campaign message because there was no core message but rather a flurry of policy releases diffusing any focus. This was harnessed by the Liberal–National opposition into an economic management scare campaign which pushed enough swinging voters into the Morrison Government’s arms for it to win.
It is not as though Labor does not know how to do brilliant ads. The Whitlam ‘It’s Time’ campaign is easily the best election advertising campaign in Australian political history, on a par with world’s best campaigns like Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ (1979) and US president Ronald Reagan’s ‘It’s Morning in America’ (1984).1 But there hasn’t been memorable Labor election advertising for some time.
Ads have to be directed at the right target. Labor’s ads not only didn’t cut through, they were designed to beat the previous Liberal leader, plutocratic Point Piperdwelling Malcolm Turnbull, not the leader who actually led the government to the election: Pentecostal church-going, rugby-league loving Sutherland Shire resident Scott Morrison who, as Labor’s election review noted, ‘presented himself as a suburban dad’.2 Ads pegged on exploiting a leader associated with ‘the big end of town’ will not land on a target posing as a ‘daggy dad’. There were eight months between Morrison’s ascension in August 2018 and the election being called in April 2019 – eight months during which Shorten and his team could and should have refocussed and reworked their advertising strategy as part of rethinking campaign strategy overall in response to Morrison’s ascension.
Further, if there is an unusually large wall of money coming at you in the form of advertising, leaning on your modest poll lead hoping that wall of money won’t knock you over is not a winning strategy. The ad spend was a decisive factor in the results of the 2016 and 2019 elections.
Malcolm Turnbull would have almost certainly lost the 2016 election had he not donated $1.75 million to finance more Liberal advertising in the campaign’s final weeks. Turnbull was the biggest single donor to his own party, making the huge gift just before election day.3 It was the first time an individual bought an election in Australia: a sad moment for antipodean democracy and one which, disgracefully, occurred with little comment from journalists or action by other political parties. The fact that under existing rules official campaign finance returns for 2016–2017 were not made public by the Australian Electoral Commission until 18 months after the donation helps obscure anti-democratic goings on like this from becoming the site of legitimate public affront.
The lack of outrage and consequential inaction set the scene for an even greater assault on democratic norms at the 2019 election when Clive Palmer, through his UAP front, spent $83 million to stop Labor winning.4 Indifferent to the fact his party failed to win a single seat, Palmer claimed credit for the Morrison Government’s re-election: ‘Our Shifty Shorten ads across Australia … have been very successful in shifting the Labor vote.’5 Palmer said his decision to ‘polarise the electorate’ with an ad blitz in the final weeks of the campaign was critical to stopping Labor from winning office.6
The ANU Australian Election Study gives credence to Palmer’s claim. The proportion of voters giving their first preference to a minor party is growing. At the 2019 election it reached 25 per cent: one in four voters at the last election voted for a minor party ahead of either the main progressive party, Labor, or the main conservative parties, the Liberal Party and the National Party.7
Voter instability is also rising: fewer people today loyally support one party all their life compared to the past. At the 2019 election 58 per cent of voters either voted for a different party than previously, or voted for the first time.8 In line with the central plank of this book, the Australian Election Study notes that ‘elections are often won or lost on small margins’. In the 2019 election it found ‘a greater number of voters that switched from Labor to the Coalition based on economic issues, than from the Coalition to Labor based on environmental issues’.9
The preferences of minor party voters flowing to the Liberal and National parties in key seats, especially the combined 6.5 per cent of voters in Queensland whose first preferences went to Palmer’s UAP and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, and which then mostly flowed to the Liberal–National coalition as second preference votes, underpinned Morrison’s surprise win.10 ‘The Coalition gained a 4.3% swing in Queensland, compared to a national swing of 1.2%,’ the Australian Election Study found. ‘This delivered two extra seats to the Coalition, both at Labor’s expense.’11 The Morrison Government only won the election by two seats. As is often the case in Australian politics, the election result came down to Queensland.
Labor’s election review described Palmer’s actions as ‘an unprecedented act of collusion between supposed political rivals’.12 Has Bill Shorten the right to feel like the election was stolen from him by the cheque book and callous self-interest of mining oligarch Clive Palmer? Yes, especially in light of Palmer’s ownership of a massive coal lease in Queensland’s Galilee Basin, adjacent to Adani’s Carmichael mine and potentially dwarfing it by comparison – a mine that an environmentally minded Shorten government would have likely stymied.
If you think a federal Labor government would not lean against, and even outright block bad state government environment decisions – including bad Labor state government environment decisions – read the history of the Hawke and Keating governments. They repeatedly nudged and, when necessary and constitutionally possible, outright forced states to do the right thing, from blocking the Franklin Dam in Tasmania onwards. A Shorten government would likely have done as the Hawke and Keating governments did.
On the other hand, consider everything that was thrown at Shorten and Labor in the run-up to and during the 2019 election. Palmer’s $83 million worth of attack ads, Morrison’s gaslighting on policy, its $100 million worth of ‘Sports Rorts’ money funnelled under the prime minister’s office’s supervision into marginal seats targeted by the government, Murdoch’s News Corp media outlets providing saturation support for the Morrison Government and skewing reporting against Labor.13 All that and the Morrison Government only won by two seats. Two seats.
So if Shorten Labor had been just a little better across the range of areas outlined in this book – just at even a few – despite that collective assault, it could have won. Advertising was one of the obvious and easier things to do far better. Sitting in the bushfire-scarred remains of south-eastern Australia as I write, that seems like an incredibly important and necessary thing to have done. It wasn’t.
More fundamentally, Labor needed to grasp the historic significance of what happened in 2016 when for the first time an individual, Malcolm Turnbull, bought his own election win. That signal event crystallised fundamental campaign finance reform as a democratic imperative in Australia. Labor should have galvanised its ranks, in league with parliament’s better minor party and independent MPs, to force pre-emptive action before the 2019 election. The Turnbull Government should have been embarrassed into some sort of improvement in campaign finance laws, as a prelude to Labor improving them to a proper level of integrity in government itself. This did not happen. Palmer’s $83 million assault on Shorten’s character, helping the Morrison Government pick up in Queensland via Palmer UAP preferences the two seats it needed to retain government, was the result.14 Palmer’s $83 million worth of advertising bought a decisive amount of persuasion. This cannot be allowed to continue.
Campaign finance reform must also address the problem of not just individuals, but also sectoral interests buying election campaign wins. The mining sector’s active use of money to sway political outcomes in Australia goes back a decade to Rudd Government treasurer Wayne Swan’s attempt in 2010 to create a Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT). The initiative was recommended by the Henry Tax Review to redress the paltry net revenue to the nation, compared to other mineral-rich countries, from resource exports.15
The Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) quickly created the ‘Keep Mining Strong’ campaign in response, consisting of a website, eight different radio ads, 11 different television ads and 20 different print ads directed against the tax, spending $1–2 million a week running them at the campaign’s height. The government’s advertising campaign in response was slow, as regulations concerning such advertising were scrupulously observed, dull (as government-paid information ads mostly are), and dwarfed by the scale of mining industry spending, which by now also included ads from BHP Billiton and the Australian Minerals and Exploration Council. ‘By the height of the MCA campaign in early June, its television advertisements were screening, on average, 33 times per day on free-to-air networks – more than twice as often as the government commercials,’ according to the Australia and New Zealand School of Government case study on RSPT and the campaign to destroy it.16 ‘Reports suggested that the mining industry had at least $90 million more in reserve to oppose the tax.’
The International Monetary Fund supported the RSPT as did most reputable Australian economists who deplored the disinformation pushed by the mining industry in its campaign against it.17 Aided by the Liberal and National parties, a second front in the campaign was opened up, attacking the government’s information advertising campaign. The pressure pushed down Labor’s electoral support – it’s primary vote fell in the six months to June 2010 from 46 to 35 per cent – and contributed to Kevin Rudd’s fall from the prime ministership late that same month, replaced by Julia Gillard.18 Gillard declared the tax open for negotiation, successfully got the mining industry campaign against it suspended in a show of ‘mutual respect’, and in consultation with a few of the big mining companies the RSPT was watered down into the modest Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT).19 The attempt to gain a decent amount of revenue as a share of mining profits for Australians, who actually own the resources, was foiled.
So the attempts of mining interests to skew Australian politics and policy has a history. Mining moguls like Clive Palmer, through his $83 million campaign spend to stop Labor winning the 2019 election, and iron ore-mining billionaire Gina Rinehart with her financial underwriting of the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs think tank, follow in the wake of the MCA’s anti-RSPT tax campaign which undermined the Rudd Government in 2010.
The fact that the miners are so cashed up does not mean the situation cannot be changed. Political hard heads will curl their lips and dismiss as unreal the possibility of substantial campaign finance reform. If you don’t try, true, it can’t and won’t happen. But politics is only like an ‘on, off’ switch in dictatorships. Politics in democracies is about the long campaign: crystallising an idea, organising a coalition of support to advance it, and persuading enough people to get behind it to eventually make it happen. Quicker is better, obviously, but achieving fundamental change rarely happens that way. Apparently impossible situations can, and have repeatedly, shifted through effective political campaigning over time.
A favourite example is the South Australian gerrymander favouring the conservative Liberal and Country League (LCL) where from the mid-1930s to the late 1960s votes in country seats carried many times the weight of city-dwellers’ votes. Historian Angela Woollacott recounts in her biography of SA Labor’s remarkable Don Dunstan how, denied office because of the gerrymander at the 1968 election, he created and led a protest campaign after it for fair electoral boundaries.20 The sustained public outcry it stirred embarrassed LCL premier Steele Hall into some electoral reform. This unlocked the gerrymander just enough for Dunstan to win the next election and move South Australia to the gold standard of ‘one vote, one value’ fairness. Dunstan’s achievement is a case study of how seemingly impossible political change can be made possible.
So, do brilliant cut-through ads. Aim your ads at the correct – that is today’s, not yesterday’s – target. Don’t waste money on dull, forgettable ads. You have complete control over your own advertising campaign. Make it work hard for you. And take action now to start the likely long process of campaign finance reform to stop elections getting bought as Turnbull did in 2016, for just $1.75 million, and Palmer did in 2019 spending $83 million through his paper-thin pretence of a party, the UAP, to help Scott Morrison pick up the two seats he needed to retain government. Otherwise someone else, or maybe Palmer again, will pervert democracy with their filthy lucre at the 2022 election and beyond. This is Australia. We have salary caps in the AFL and NRL to make competition fair, otherwise the richest team would always win. For the same reason it’s only right we have campaign finance reform to stop the richest team always winning elections too.