Newmania: Hostile Territory

The Courier Mail, Brisbane’s only newspaper and for so many years the defender of the conservative political cause in Queensland must be feeling a change in mood. This morning, the Courier Mail ran with one of the many recent media offerings designed by PR hacks and image-makers. The objective is to soften King Campbell’s image as an axe-wielding job-murderer.

Twelve months ago, even six months ago, the Comments page on a story about King Campbell's insomnia would have been full of confident, boastful, and poorly punctuated statements, crowing about how King Campbell would clean up the mess created Anna Bligh (complete with accusatory spelling like “Blie” and “Blier” that even predated Alan Jones “Juliar” attack).

King Campbell was the Can-Do Man. The LNP was going to win the election because the time had come for change. It was King Campbell’s CanDo-ness that secured the LNP a record-breaking majority.

Now, just seven months into a three year term, even the Courier Mail readers have turned on King Campbell, with a barrage of eye-scorching negativity and poor spelling. The reason, of course, is the horror-movie brutality of his cuts to the Public Service, and his uncaring, tactless attitude. Of the first 65 comments, only 12% were supportive of King Campbell. The other 88% included former public servants who had been sacked, and current public servants who have been living under the Sword of Damocles for the past six months. Their pain shows.

 

With the exception of a handful of LNP supporters, the mood of the Comments pages ranged from disillusioned to furious to defeated. Obviously comments on a news website have little credibility as a measure of the public mood. In this case though, regular readers will have seen a complete change in alignment, from anti-ALP to anti-LNP, although there's no trace of pro-ALP sentiment either. I can’t believe the readership has changed that much, so it’s the allegiance of the readers that has moved.

In a delicious twist, it was just this weekend when the Courier Mail’s own state political correspondent Steve Wardill suggested that King Campbell needed to back away from the carnage and show his humanity. It’s a good point, Steve, and most first-year communications undergraduates would offer the same advice.

But, as the cuts crusade draws to a close, Newman needs to show another side beyond his other persona, spruiking three-worded election rhetoric such as "back on track" and "four-pillar economy".

Showing compassion for the wider community is a big part of being a premier. It's what sets the job apart from the rates-and-rubbish politics of local government and the big-picture federal arena.

Mr Wardill is wrong. Playing the compassionate leader and crying woe-is-me in this atmosphere is so incongruous in light of his actions as Premier that it’s not credible. The public has become more cynical, but also more knowledgeable about the world of politics. Spin is spin.
We have political wonks – a relatively new word to describe the growing number of people who immerse themselves in the world of politics and politicians as others might follow Morris dancing or cockroach racing. It’s intense and potentially antisocial in many circles, and just a little...weird? (Did you know that “wonk” is the word “know”, but backwards?)

We also have social media, where groups informally coalesce like bubbles in a lava lamp, tweeted opinions spread exponentially, emotions are a dime a dozen, and political wonks congregate and hatch plans for "Wonk Drinks" (yes, it's a thing), boycotts, petitions, protests, campaigns to Destroy the Joint, and events like SlutWalk.

My advice to King Campbell would be to forget about the photo ops with babies and cute furry animals, and stop talking to the media about anything that isn’t policy-related. His personal popularity right now is such that few would if he never sleeps again. He should continue to be this cold, emotionally detached sub-human wrecking ball with a mandate…but do it quietly, and do it until the job is done. Then, rebuild, and let his actions speak as eloquently as they have since Election Day in March.

The problem now for King Campbell is that he doesn't have that kind of time. The hatred is strong. King Campbell has much more to do, and if he continues to act with such little regard for people, he will lose.

Is it possible that just seven months since his election, he's set himself and the LNP on a road back into Opposition? Is this a one-term government?

Honestly, I doubt it, if for no other reason than because the election left the ALP shattered and as such, there is no opposition. Literally. The sporting commentator's favourite cliche, the "rebuilding phase", was custom-made for the ALP in Newmania in 2012.

King Campbell would have learned in the army that it’s wise to make yourself a smaller target, as small as possible, invisible...especially when people are shooting at you. Right now, he’s making himself a bigger mark, and millions of Newmanians are shooting in his direction.

Newmania: The Slippery Slope

The Courier Mail is, like its News Limited sister publications, a little right of centre. It plays to the classic reactionary talk-back style of tabloid newspaper, which is obvious from both the content and tone of the online reader comments. News Limited publications carry the southern commentary of such well known shockers as Andrew Bolt, Piers Ackerman, Janet Albrechtsen and Miranda Devine – the radio equivalent of Alan Jones and Ray Hadley. They appeal to a certain audience and in a self-sustaining cycle of misinformation, shouted from tinny kitchen radios and preached from between the inky pages of the morning editions, then fed back to the media in the most vicious of circles.

News Limited, and particularly the Courier Mail, which was allowed to exist for far too long without competition here in the land of Joh, land on the side of the Coalition, and now, the LNP. It’s what their readers expect.

So confident was the Courier Mail in the ultimate success of the new Campbell Newman LNP Government that it proudly ran a chart of Newman’s first 100 Days In Office. The graphic was of concentric green circles, with green ticks to mark success as measured against the tasks listed in the LNP’s own 100 Day Action Plan…

…Until it became Impossible to hide their problematic truth, that King Newman will not be able to tick off all of the items in his 100 day Action Plan within his hundred day schedule. Suddenly, around the first week of this month, the chart stopped appearing in the Courier Mail. Rather than admit, or even worse, publicise the LNP’s failure to meet their own KPIs, they heaved the graphic altogether.

They seem to have replaced it with Newman’s Razor, a blood spattered image chronicling the latest cost cutting measures. As images go, there’s a huge emotional variance between a bright green target festooned with ticks, and the new image, with the red splatters and photos of Newman and his team wearing Mafia style hats. The paper could have chosen a positive visual to portray the progress of cost-cutting, but they chose instead one that suggests old fashioned values, violence, goodies-versus baddies – just the kind of imagery to appeal to the Courier Mail’s dedicated readers.



Most telling, this image does not contain any key performance indicators – no dates or amounts, no charts or timelines. Let’s not let facts contaminate the beauty of the blood splatters.

It’s not just the imagery, either. The Courier Mail’s reader Poll hasn’t gone according to plan. They’ve been asking readers whether they support the LNP’s changes to the existing Civil Partnership legislation. As at 11:00am today, 55% of readers disagreed with the changes. These are Courier Mail readers – conservative and supportive of the LNP.


Furthermore, in a quick tally of the first 100 comments on the Courier Mail Reader Online section regarding King Campbell’s televised speech last night asking Newmanians to support state-wide belt-tightening, 62% of respondents were sceptical of government’s motives, their willingness to tighten their own parliamentary belts, or their chances of success. Of the 38% who sided with the government, many took the opportunity to blame the previous Labor Government, and snark the public servants whose jobs were under threat.

It’s easy to understand the frustration, when on the one hand, Costello’s Audit squawked a warning about the deficit of $100b, a fact which Sue Lappeman explains in the Gold Coast Bulletin.

There is no argument the previous Labor Government screwed up royally and the state's finances are in bad shape.

But there is no $100 billion debt. I repeat. There is no $100 billion debt.

That is a figure Mr Costello came up with as a possible outcome by 2018 if the spending of the past few years continued spending that included vast investments in major infrastructure including the Gold Coast's new hospital and the massive cost of catastrophic natural disasters and the global financial crisis.

To help manage the non-existent $100 billion debt, King Campbell has terrified every public servant by stating that we can’t afford to pay about 20,000 of them … while at the same time, engineering his team so that every LNP MP gets an $8000 bonus for being a committee member. Okay it’s around half a million dollars for the LNP members versus over $1.5 billion dollars in public service salaries, but as so many readers of the Courier Mail had commented, it’s the principle.

Meanwhile, King Campbell is still planning to spend an unspecificed amount of money to knock down existing buildings in the Brisbane CBD, have private companies build new buildings on the prime riverside land, and then lease the office space back from the private corporations to house the government departments. It was originally a Labor Government initiative, but I wonder why it’s still on the table now, when we’ve been told to brace ourselves for rough times ahead.

Or – Shock! Horror! – is King Campbell considering selling assets? Isn’t that what killed the Bligh Government?

I wonder if there are plans afoot to cancel the Queensland Government’s hundreds of subscriptions for the Courier Mail? That’d just about pay for the 60 seconds that King Campbell of Newmania had his head on television last night.

Queensland versus The World

It's Rugby League State of Origin week. For League fans, the State of Origin Games weeks are the biggest weeks of the season. These matches are tough, cliche-filled mini-dramas where everyone with even a passing interest in the game takes sides, dons a colour, drinks beer and yells a bit, at least here, north of the Tweed.

It's Queensland versus New South Wales, "Mate versus Mate, State versus State", Maroons versus Blues, Cane Toads versus Cockroaches. 

In Queensland, businesses are draped in maroon and white bunting, balloons and banners, office workers wear their prized maroon footy jersey to work over their shirt and tie or blouse, and the war cry is "QUEENSLANDER!!" So ubiquitous is the Queensland obsession with State of Origin that people who aren't swept up in maroon fever are mocked, insulted, shunned.  Of the 900 or so people that I follow on Twitter, the number to confess their disinterest in the sporting event is in single digits. Brave Susan Hetherington did; she knows the territory all too well.    

Many Queenslanders would be amazed to learn that the same level of obsessive state fanaticism just doesn't exist south of the border.  Sure, footy fans wear blue to the match, and get together to watch the game, yell at the tellie and share a few beers, but you won't find many offices and shops festooned in blue. In New South Wales, a State of Origin match does not equate to state pride on the line. The morale of the entire state doesn't hinge on the final score.

Queenslanders take a great deal of pleasure in taunting their New South Wales friends and colleagues when the maroons win State of Origin (which they seem to do most of the time). Take a hint from a transplanted southerner: save your breath, the don't care that much.

Queensland parochialism is a force of nature.  There's a maroon-hued unity within this state that I've never seen anywhere else, in any colour. When a Queensland sportsman wins anything of note, it's a headline.

There's a line, though, and while I respect the Queensland state pride, that line is crossed far too often, particularly by media. Look at individual sports like tennis, golf, surfing and swimming. Some of these sports have national teams, so when competing at international level, those athletes are representing Australia. They are wearing the Green and Gold. The cry from the stands is not "QUEENSLANDER!", it's "Oi Oi Oi!"  Too often, the Queensland media report these victories by describing the victorious athlete as a Queensander.

"But they are Queenslanders!", I hear you argue. 

Yes, they are, but when representing Australia, can we introduce them as such, as leave the state affiliation to the second sentence?

I recall during the Beijing Olympics four years ago, pumped up Queensland journalists breathlessly reported Queensland's Olympic medal tally. It wasn't a sidebar, or a feature on the success of Queensland athletes in the Australian team. It was just the way some maroon-hearted reporters presented the medal tally. 

Here's a note, up front of the London Olympics. Queensland doesn't compete in the Olympics because Queensland is not a country.

Of course it's appropriate to count up the number of Olympic medals won by Queenslanders if that's the point you're trying to make, as was the case in the Quuensland Parliament after the Games, but surely we can agree that if you're an Olympian representing Australia, your medal is an Aussie victory, first and foremost?

I fully expect to be challenged on this, by Queenslanders, by media, by you: why shouldn't we be proud of our state? 

We should be proud, and we are. Still, Queensland state pride often seems over the top, particularly in comparison to...well...everywhere else. The fact that nowhere else does state pride like Queensland does is something else we can be proud of. 

But what's behind it? Is it a response to having been mocked for so many years for not being as big or successful or trendy as New South Wales and Victoria? Is it an attempt to reclaim some pride after the Fitzgerald Enquiry painted the Sunshine State as more shonky than shiny? Is this intense maroon frenzy just a group reaction to our own inferiority complex?

I think it is. This is Queensland, constantly having to prove ourselves. It's part of who we are. For those cooler weeks in footy season, Queensland becomes QUEENSLANDER! This is our personality, our image, our colour scheme, our obsession. And for those three games per year, that's okay.

I wonder what Queensland is for the other 49 weeks of the year?