I am Alex White, a progressive campaign strategist, writer, social marketer and policy activist.
Read any number of journalist or blogger commentaries over the last several years and you will have seen the infiltration of marketing terms like “brand”, “positioning”, public relations, image management and more. Obama is the most recognisable example of this “political brand” phenomenon, but we’ve seen it elsewhere: New Labour under Tony Blair (Gordon Brown [...]
An article I wrote for New Matilda has been published. It examines what lessons Labor could learn from the Obama 2012 campaign to win this year’s Federal election. You can read the article here, and I’ve reproduced it below. This month’s Newspoll boosted Labor’s hopes about the next election. The commentators and Twitterati who got [...]
Here’s an article I’ve written on compulsory voting which was published at New Matilda. For a dissenting view, see Peter Brent from Mumble. In defence of compulsory voting You wouldn’t know from its current premier, but Queensland was the first state in Australia to introduce compulsory voting. They did so in 1915 and nine years [...]
Last year I wrote a (yet uncompleted) series of posts on Labor’s breaking of the immutable rules of marketing. (You can read part 1, part 2 and part 3.) With an election due around September this year, I thought I’d take a quick stock-take on whether Labor is branding itself effectively. Since the election of [...]
At my first meeting with Department officials as Minister for Immigration, I asked who was detained at the immigration detention centre on Nauru and at what stage were their claims for asylum. I was told there were eight Burmese and 81 Sri Lankans there. Virtually all of this group had already been assessed as refugees [...]