LNP Government in Queensland: Dangers of Electing Them

By Denis Hay Description Explore the dangers of electing an LNP government in Queensland…

In Liz We Truss!

There's a bit of a tall poppy syndrome in Australia where we…

Migration, Pathway to Nation Building report released by…

Parliament of Australia Media Release The Joint Standing Committee on Migration today released the Migration, Pathway…

Worst year for new home builds in over…

Experts at Master Builders Australia have warned that low apprenticeship numbers will…

License to Muzzle: Taking Offence at Flag Wavers…

It was done for the Viet Cong in numerous countries during the…

How Politicians Use Social Media to Control the…

By Denis Hay Description Explore how Australian politicians control narratives on social media. Learn…

Lebanon struggles to cope as over a million…

Oxfam Australia Media Release The Lebanese authorities, communities and humanitarian agencies are struggling…

The Pilgrim, Chapter 34

By James Moore “Tell the truth. Sing with passion. Work with laughter. Love…

«
»
Facebook

Democracy via three-word slogans

By Ad astra

Another title might have been Democracy according to Hayne, as it was The Honourable Justice Kenneth Madison Hayne AC, QC, Royal Commissioner in the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, who in his address to The Melbourne Law School on 26 July 2019, contrasted the features of a Royal Commission: independence, neutrality, publicity and provision of a reasoned report, all characteristics of the judicial processes, to the very different features of everyday political discourse.

He lamented that trust in politics has been destroyed, that reasoned debates about issues of policy are now rare, and that three or four word slogans have taken their place. He continued:

“Political and other commentary focuses on what divides us rather than what unites us. Conflict sells stories; harmony does not. And political rhetoric now resorts to the language of war, seeking to portray opposing views as presenting existential threats to society as we now know it. Trust in all sorts of institutions, governmental and private, has been damaged or destroyed. Our future is often framed as some return to an imaginary glorious past when the issues that now beset us had not arisen.

He went on to contrast the independent and transparent nature of royal commissions with the ‘opaque’ and ‘skewed’ decisions of politicians influenced by those ‘powerful enough to lobby governments behind closed doors’.

All of us can identify with Hayne’s sentiments, especially after living through a decade of three-word slogans.

Of course, slogans are as old as politics. Remember the potency of Whitlam’s winning catchphrase ‘It’s time’, and Don Chipp’s promise to ‘Keep the bastards honest’. Judith Ireland offers an informative account of the use of slogans in the Sydney Morning Herald of May 7, explaining how the effective ones capture the mood of the time. It’s worth a read. You may also enjoy The battle of the slogans by Marcus Phipps from the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne.

But do you feel, as I do, that slogans have assaulted us unreasonably during recent elections?

How has it come to this?

If I were to ask you whose name comes to mind when three-word slogans are mentioned, the odds are short that the name would be ‘Tony Abbott’. It was he who used them during the 2013 election to great advantage. Indeed it was his ‘Axe the Tax’, combined with ‘This Toxic Tax’ that broke the back of Julia Gillard’s attempt to introduce carbon pricing in the form of a market-based mechanism, the so-called Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Abbott thereby set back Australia’s emissions reduction efforts for more than a decade, and destroyed Gillard in the process. Abbott’s chief of staff Peta Credlin later admitted: “The climate change policy under Julia Gillard’s Labor government was never a carbon tax, but the Coalition used that label to represent it as ‘carbon tax’ and a fight about the hip pocket rather than the environment. That was brutal retail politics, and it took Abbott six months to cut through and when he did Gillard was gone”.

There were more. Will you ever forget Abbott’s: ‘Stop the taxes’, ‘Repay the debt’, ‘Stop the boats’ and ‘Stop the waste’?

In the wake of the NSW legislature decriminalizing abortion, Abbott was at it again with another of his telling slogans: ‘Death on Demand’. The man is a genius at creating three-worders! Although no match for Abbott, PM Morrison offered one of his own at the recent COAG meeting in Cairns: ‘’A Cleaner Form of Blue’, creatively worded to capture the notion of reducing plastic pollution in the Pacific.

Look back at the slogans used in the 2109 election. Labor’s ‘A fair go for Australia’ was pitted against the LNP’s ‘Building our economy – securing your future’. Both had a warm fuzzy feel, but clearly the LNP’s appealed more. ‘Securing your future’ had more electoral pull than the less personal ‘A fair go for Australia’.

Bill Shorten thought he had a zinger when he taunted: ‘Everything is going up except your wages’, but Josh Frydenberg quickly countered with ‘The Bill that Australia can’t afford’. Most of all though Frydenberg relished ‘Back in the Black’, to which he added ‘Back on Track’ to put the spotlight on the promised surplus he treasures so.

Only a foolish optimist would believe that politics might rid itself of three-word slogans. They work because their wording is appealing, their message is plausible, and above all, they’re easy to remember. They capture warm sentiments if they are positive, and even if they’re negative the jarring note they echo is soothed by the assurance of relief. Who would not embrace the introduction of something desirable or the removal of something undesirable?

Pithy three-worders are part of our way of life. Faulty Towers, rated as the ‘greatest ever British TV sitcom’ gave us some of the best. Who will ever forget Basil Faulty’s ‘Don’t Mention the War’, and Manuel’s ‘I Know Nothing’? Sadly, Manuel’s words are echoed too often in politics today!

So we are stuck with slogans. Those who engineer the most captivating slogans are likely to succeed. In politics, those whose slogans win the support of the voters win the election!

How can we, the ordinary voter, contribute?

First, we might put our creativity into gear and develop some telling slogans ourselves. There’s a fascinating article in The Guardian by Nick Evershed: Three-word slogan generator: create your own political catchphrase with an in-built ‘slogan generator’. You will enjoy playing with it. You might come up with more telling slogans than do the so-called ‘experts’! And then you could feed them to your preferred political party, both positive ones that advance the cause, and negative ones that counter opponents’ slogans. Frydenberg’s ‘Back in the Black’ might have been countered by ‘The Surplus that Never Was’ or ‘Frydenberg’s Fictitious Surplus’ or simply ‘The Frydenberg Fiction’.

Next, in our discourse with others we can expose slogans for what they are – clever but cheap forms of advertising or promotion, no more worthy than the well-worn commercial advertising slogans that irritate us every day.

Democracy via three-word slogans has replaced reasoned debate, transparent discussion and honest disclosure. The democratic process has been blighted by avoidance of direct answers, aggressive partisan rhetoric, lies, obfuscation and deception, aided and abetted by old-fashioned slogans that persuade, cajole, deceive, soothe, calm, pacify, and reassure even when no reassurance is warranted.

Commissioner Hayne is right. Trust in so many of our institutions had been eroded, even destroyed. Pillars of our society: financial and commercial institutions, educational bodies, religious orders, charitable foundations, and bodies set up to help those in need, such as the NDIS, head the list.

A flawed sense of purpose, lack of direction, indifference, absence of empathy, inefficiency, incompetence, overbearing administration, and carelessness, together with an aura of despair, afflict them. And if this appalling catalogue of misdemeanours is not enough to flush our democracy down the drain, the contemporary deluge of three-word slogans will help it on its way. Oh dear!

This article was originally published on The Political Sword

For Facebook users, The Political Sword has a Facebook page:
Putting politicians and commentators to the verbal sword

Like what we do at The AIMN?

You’ll like it even more knowing that your donation will help us to keep up the good fight.

Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!

Donate Button

 

10 comments

Login here Register here
  1. Aortic

    Here’s one “F*ck off Liberals.”

  2. wam

    I cannot but shudder at the natural long term deadly slogan.
    labor and the greens
    and the even longer anti-labor slogan the has lost elections
    labor and the unions.
    Albo has to break the nexus that scummo can manage the economy.
    he could expose the rabbott joey trumball’s scummo and scummo’s joshua.
    he could even have a laugh at howard’s effort for fraser.

  3. David Bruce

    Disorders of neurobehavioural development affect 10–15% of all births, and prevalence rates of autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder seem to be increasing worldwide. Subclinical decrements in brain function are even more common than these neurobehavioural developmental disorders. All these disabilities can have severe consequences—they diminish quality of life, reduce academic achievement, and disturb behaviour, with profound consequences for the welfare and productivity of entire societies.

    Seems relevant in Australia now? Suicide rates, voting trends, rule by Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt? oh another slogan…

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418502/

  4. New England Cocky

    The principal beneficiaries of this political ineptitude are the foreign owned multinational corporations that conduct business in Australia, and Asia out of Australia, and exploit the too many taxation advantages that have accrued for corporations and undeserving wealthy individuals.

    PS I am offended by unnecessary pics of Scummo “decorating” sensible AIMN articles. However, putting Scummo Howard and Pell on a page together is just too much for a skeptical little delicate political flower like myself.

  5. Nigel Drake

    Breaking my promise to myself again –

    “How can we, the ordinary voter, contribute?”

    “We” who enter into studied and thoughtful discussions are absolutely NOT ordinary voters.

    Ordinary voters seem to be devoid of those qualities; often deliberately so.

    It is to them that the infamous three word slogans, as well as the slightly longer variety, are directed: Those who want to avoid searching and thinking for themselves; who are content to inhabit the mindless world of peer approval and tribal affiliation.

    I resolved to avoid discussing anything political with “ordinary voters” in the lead up to the last election, and have had my resolve firmed in the consequential return to absolute political apathy and voluntary ignorance of the general population.

    Fortunately, I meet occasionally with a few folk of more intellectual rectitude with whom I can debate and learn from; none of whom are academically inclined but are of open attitudes and inquisitive inclination.
    They are far from being your “average voter” though.

  6. Aortic

    Chris Kenny in the OZ. ” from low expectations Scott Morrison’s Prime Ministership has become a masterclass.” And people actually buy this rag? If you mean masterclass in three word advertising slogans and ignoring the most pressing problems such as climate change, NBNs mess and the Great Barrier Reef problems sure. Still I suppose we will all know where to go for a piss soon, so that will no doubt count in his favour.

  7. Wayne Turner

    Sadly they work because the average voter is a gullible ignorant moron.

  8. Aortic

    Too right Wayne. More interested in Queerland and Tasmaniacs about their franking credits and tax dramas than in the public wellbeing. Will it ever be so? As long as we have the sloganeering of the likes of Abbott and Morrison et al and people to swallow such garbage without thinking beyond their self interest I fear it will.

  9. Kaye Lee

    If you have a go, you’ll get a go.

    If you’re going to step up, you’ve got to show up.

    We’ll meet our targets in a canter.

    I will burn for you every day

    Sigh…..another three long years of an ad man.

  10. Karl Young

    Labor can.t run the economy.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The maximum upload file size: 2 MB. You can upload: image, audio, video, document, spreadsheet, interactive, text, archive, code, other. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop file here

Return to home page