The Government should be forced to specifically justify this, not to just sweep it under the carpet and allow it to go through in the appropriations because by convention the Opposition doesn’t oppose the appropriations. I think we do need to take a very, very seriously critical look at this question of the debt ceiling. [...]
In this world of desperate quantification (numerical support providing objectivity in all things), there appears to be a fierce urge to measure something as unmeasurable as politics. Presently there are two ways of doing this: polls and elections. Thus, if a party is polling poorly, they are likely to lose an election. They have therefore [...]
Author of Looking for the Light on the Hill: Modern Labor’s Challenges, Troy Bramston wrote an interesting article in The Australian today. Here’s an excerpt: Labor’s wiser heads believe the Greens’ support has peaked and Brown’s departure will accelerate their decline. Labor research provides an insight into who votes Green and why, and suggests the bigger [...]
Antonio Gramsci died on the 27th of April in 1937 at the age of 46. Today marks the 75th anniversary of his death. He was imprisoned by the Fascists in Italy for eight years. At his “trial”, Gramsci’s prosecutor allegedly stated, “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning”. This post is a brief [...]
Tad Tietze (@dr_tad), a Sydney psychiatrist and blogger at Left-Flank, didn’t think much of my blog post about positioning. Tad is one of those lefties who joined the Greens political party for a few years, then left because they weren’t pure enough. He now has a little cottage industry of blogging at the Drum (for [...]
I see the attitude amongst many on the progressive side of politics who dismiss marketing as “gimmicks” or that it is just about “selling toothpaste”. Their argument goes that politics is more important, significant and above all, qualitatively different to the advertising and sale of consumer goods. This attitude demonstrates that the person who holds [...]
Recently Julia Gillard has started to ask “who do you trust?” ”I’m happy now and in the 2013 election to say ‘who do you trust to manage the economy in the interests of working people?’,” Ms Gillard said… This echoes the same question that John Howard asked following the “children overboard” affair and the failure [...]
What can brand management and situational crisis communication theory do to help us understand and respond to the endemic crisis facing the Labor Party. Labor in Crisis? Firstly, is the ALP facing an organisational crisis? Certainly, most Canberra Press Gallery commentators think so. The literature helpfully defines an organisational crisis as: An organizational crisis is [...]
With the meltdown over the Federal Labor leadership now a national farce, it almost seems redundant to talk about how Labor regularly and systematically violates the laws of marketing. There is no doubt, regardless of which side of the Rudd-Gillard fence you find yourself on, that this leadership debacle has grievously wounded Labor for a [...]
In 2010, I welcomed Gillard’s ascendancy to the Labor leadership but expressed my concern over the circumstances of how she rose to be Prime Minister. Back then, I wrote: The fact that the parliamentary leadership of the Labor Party is determined by the vote of only Members of Parliament is now shown to be open [...]
Labor is currently passing historic reforms to health laws in Australia that will means-test benefits for people with private health insurance. This is a great improvement as it does away with the Howard-era regressive system of poor people subsidising wealth people’s private health insurance, and introduces a progressive system that excludes high-income earners from receiving [...]
Some interesting new research by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler from Dartmouth examines attempts to change people’s strongly-held pre-existing beliefs. This kind of research is very important, especially for progressive organisations and causes, and it ties into what my previous blog post about evidence-based campaigning. The research looks at (mis)perceptions of three issues: the war in Iraq, [...]
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