Yesterday, following my provocative piece in Guardian Australia about the current and future relevance of the Greens, we were treated to a panoply of good and bad practice when it comes to disagreement. Disagreement is a good thing: without it we’d all be that little bit more boring.
Here’s my latest piece for Guardian Australia: Time is up for the Australian Greens.
Here’s my latest piece for The King’s Tribune… Any Australian election campaign follows a fixed pattern. Daily photo opportunities masquerading as policy announcements are interspersed with debate stoushes and then the debates themselves. Somewhere in the final two or three weeks the campaign launch is held. And also around that time, the expectations game begins.
Setting aside the political wisdom or otherwise of establishing a ‘Women for Gillard’ campaign modelled on a US Presidential campaign strategy, today’s mishandling of the pre-launch story by Labor is yet another example of the party just not getting the basics of effective communication.
How can anyone take a benign interpretation from Kevin Rudd’s interview on 730 last night? If Rudd’s genuine intention was to extinguish the smoking embers of his supporters’ expectations, why insist on grandstanding for half the interview on matters relating to China and the US?
I’ve learned a lot in the past 24 hours. About other people as well as myself. The expected opprobrium in response to my post Entitlement should not disqualify me was swift and came from the usual quarters, but the messages of support from people with similar concerns were unexpected and I thank you for them.
As a privileged, white middle-class woman with a right-of-centre point of view, I’m increasingly bewildered and frustrated by the contention that my entitlement disqualifies me from discussing certain topics.
Guardian Australia’s political editor Lenore Taylor wrote that we’re heading to a post-truth election. This might have come as a surprise to the many political observers who consider truth to be a quaint artefact from a golden age of politics that may not have actually existed.
I’ve been working on a little project since the Christmas holidays, and now it is complete…. I’m now the proud publisher of my first eBook! The eBook contains most of my posts from 2012 on politics, the traditional media and social media – but in chronological order.
Following on from my post yesterday about Julia Gillard’s image, here’s another focussing on Tony Abbott. Both pieces arose from a special feature run by ABC’s Lateline on political image. You can see the feature by clicking here to get to the Lateline website.