It’s not support for the principles around freedom of political expression. Menzies House only extends that support to Bolt. It’s not about demanding that limits be placed on political action or expression. Menzies House only wants that to happen in respect of the Tent Embassy. And it’s clearly not good banner design.

What the campaigns have in common is (1) their crude and lazy opportunism; and (2) that they are both targeted at Aboriginal Australians. The first supports Bolt’s right to make loaded calls about other people’s racial identity. The second seeks to end the right of Aboriginal people to continue a long-standing political protest. They share a basis in a rudimentary understanding that resentments about Aboriginal people are easily awakened and exploited in some parts of the community.

All political groups make choices about how to allocate their scarce resources, how to communicate in a way that activates their supporters, and where they should best try to channel their energies. Faced with all of the issues of interest to conservatives and libertarians in contemporary Australia, Menzies House have initiated two campaigns in succession that target Aboriginal people.

What words should we use to describe such an organisation, and the people who direct it?

Cynically exploiting racial divisions is something that American conservatives are historically quite comfortable with, and rather good at, too.

Tim Andrews, the founder of Menzies House, and one of those responsible for these campaigns, is apparently based in the US, doing political jobs. He describes himself on his own blog as a “classical liberal” – perhaps, while he is in America, he is learning how to throw red meat to the worst of the conservative base, the better to apply such techniques when he returns to Australia.

You may remember Andrews as the political genius who posted a bunch of pictures of “hot young liberal” women online, and then seemed uncommonly surprised when he drew some fire as a result.

Do remember the name, if only to make sure that you and other people you know always associate it with stunts and campaigns like these, wherever his future career might take him. If he’s what passes for a rising star on the right of Australian politics, we probably have lots more divisive, racially coded campaigning to look forward to in the future.

It would be far too much to ask that senior conservative politicians tell people like Andrews to pull their heads in. Indeed, people like Cory Bernardi proudly associate themselves with Menzies House, its campaigns, and its frequently (though inadvertently) amusing content. A sign, perhaps, that Senator Bernardi himself sees the value in divisive campaigning of this nature.

Meanwhile, we should be sure to understand Menzies House for the kind of organisation it really is. And we should see the people who initiate campaigns like this for what they are, too.

Dale notes that Question Time here is a much rowdier affair than Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons. He thinks that this runs the risk of bringing the Parliament into disrepute. He implies that the Speaker Harry Jenkins is a little bit out of his depth, and that parliamentarians show little respect for his rulings. He questions the Opposition’s Question Time tactics, and claims they’re inconsistent with the Parliament’s function of holding the Government to account.

Mostly, his criticisms come down to issues of tone. There may be something in what he says, but my overriding impression is that he’s seen some differences between our parliament and his own and has turned them into the basis of a normative distinction.

He’s offered very little context in his piece. This is a very unusual set of circumstances in Australian political history. Neither major party has a majority, and each vote (including censure motions) is incredibly tight. We saw our Speaker come close to resigning the other day because two independents were absent and another behaved cluelessly. Naturally, under these circumstances parliamentary tactics have assumed greater importance. We’re in a phase where it’s not inconceivable that deft parliamentary tactics could change the government.

Further, on a range of key issues, this Parliament is characterised by sharp ideological antipathies. Debates about the NBN and carbon-pricing are also debates about the future of the country for decades to come. The Government and the Opposition are diametrically opposed on these issues, and there is visceral feeling on both issues on both sides.

Larger historical factors also play a part in making our parliament more robust. Parliamentary discipline among the major parties is far tighter than in the UK, which leads to more sharply adversarial debates. Depending on your point of view, the ALP’s binding Caucus is the secret of its success or a blight on representative democracy, but gradually the Liberals have adapted by putting a much tighter rein on their MPs, too.

There’s more to say on why Australia is different, but for now I’ll just say that it’s a bit rich seeing hand-wringing from an Englishman about the possibility that Australia’s parliament might bring itself into disrepute. After the mind-blowing expenses scandal involving MPs from all parties in the British Parliament, I don’t think it’s possible that the British parliament could be held in higher esteem by its voters than ours is.

Politics and democracy involve conflict. Parliamentary politics is about managing that conflict, and if there are heated words, that’s because big things are often at stake. If the clubbiness of PM’s questions conceals that, so much the worse for Westminster. It could be that Australian democracy is more robust because it’s more democratic. For example, we elect an upper house rather than populating it with clerics, aristocrats and superannuated politicians.

The biggest problem with Dale’s analysis, though, is in misreading the function of forums like Question Time in modern parliamentary politics. Contemporary mediated democracies may have enlightenment trappings, but in the Twenty-first century Question Time is essentially a media event. Especially if you’re, say, helping to turn it into a collective viewing experience on the #qt stream, there’s not much point complaining about that.

Dale seems concerned that it’s not a rational process directed at accountability. I don’t really see PM’s questions as promoting that either. Both are rituals, as much about political affect as rational scrutiny. Our ritual is different, and most of that comes down to intensity.

He probably doesn’t like the way we play cricket either.

Since I started following her on Twitter some time in 2009, I have very much enjoyed Jen’s live-tweeting of Woollahra Municipal Council meetings. It’s easy for some to see council meetings as a form of entry-level purgatory for journos starting out. But Jen managed to make Woollahra’s meetings entertaining even for people not in the Council’s domain.

Jen’s style was the thing that caused many to tune into her council tweets. For those not in the know Woollahra takes in some well-heeled parts of Sydney’s Eastern suburbs. Jen’s faintly absurdist take on the councillors, the complaints of bolshy-bourgie residents, planning shit-fights etcetera appealed because of its sense of humour, and occasionally its air of comic resignation. She managed to impart this while still giving an accurate account of events which do, after all, affect people’s lives. And she did it in addition to her necessarily straighter reports in the newspaper, without diminishing the value of either version. Somehow her satirical framing of the meetings showed them to be simultaneously the parish pump affairs that they are and a worthwhile (if exasperating) example of democracy at work.

Talk about journalism and social media often involves lots of buzzwords and bullshit, not least from my some members of profession. Jen’s work at the council showed that actually, the most appealing on-Twitter journalism embodies some basic virtues. Economical writing, a sharp mind, a good basic knowledge of one’s beat, a sense of humour and a desire to share stories are elements of journalistic craft that are still relevant. The possession of these may not sort out the buisiness model but it should ensure people will read what you have to say.

Other new journos assigned to apparentlly unpromising rounds should take note.

Best of luck with the new job, Jen.

There is clear and consistent evidence that the rankings were being deployed inappropriately within some quarters of the sector, in ways that could produce harmful outcomes, and based on a poor understanding of the actual role of the rankings.

One common example was the setting of targets for publication in A and A* journals by institutional research managers.

In light of these two factors – that ERA could work perfectly well without the rankings, and that their existence was focussing ill-informed undesirable behaviour in the management of research – I have made the decision to remove the rankings, based on the ARC’s expert advice.

I personally never experienced any such “undesirable behaviour”. Perhaps I was just lucky. At any rate, having seen the RAE up close in the UK, I figured that doing my job pretty well as normal was the key. As long as an individual researcher is productive relative to their opportunities, I surmised, they should be fine. My managers always seemed fine with that, too. But I don’t doubt that the behaviour Carr points to occurred.

With all that said, I’m actually ambivalent about the end of the rankings. I want to know more detail about what’s replacing it, for a start.

Further, I find today’s post by Joshua Gans pretty compelling. You should go and read the whole thing, but this resonated with me:

But we should be more angry about this. Many academics’ comments on hearing about the demise of the ERA is good riddance. Why? Because they bore the costs of fighting about the measure and then the gaming. But those costs have been borne. I personally bore a ton of them and so did so many others. A complete waste of time.

And for what? Nothing. Just to prove to the Government what we all could have predicted four years ago!

Another squibbed reform from Labor? Gans seems to think so.

One thing’s for sure. There will be a lot of scholars with papers stuck in three year queues at what were once A* journals who might have cause for ambivalence, too.

Playing with politics (PDF download) is a reasonably final draft of a paper that will be appearing in a special issue of Convergence later this year. The special issue is about mobile media and mobile games, so I’ve tried to shape the argument so that it’s explicitly relevant to that theme.

But this paper is an outcome of ideas I’ve been kicking around for a long while, some of which I presented in a seminar at the University of Sydney last April, and at another one at UC last August.

Those ideas include the concept of post-broadcast democracy, which I’ve found productive in a number of papers now, and the idea of Twitter faking as a kind of performative satire. Material gleaned from interviews with Twitter fakers is at the heart of the paper.

Most important of all for me, perhaps, is the idea that the minority of politically engaged citizens in Western democracies constitute a kind of political fandom, with similarities to other kinds of fan cultures. I don’t quite get around to thinking about whether democracy or a fourth estate is sustainable on the basis of this audience in this paper, but I will soon.

Anyway, as always, bouquets and brickbats welcome.

UPDATE Um I actually put up a PDF that’s not in landscape this time.

Anyway, I have commented recently on Lindsay Tanner’s book, which I found interesting (if flawed) because it overlaps with a particular thread in my research in recent months.

In a bout of self-promotion on Twitter last I mentioned a paper whose concerns overlap with Tanner’s book that’s under peer review for an international journal at the moment. Rather than email everybody who expressed an interest, I thought I’d throw it up on the blog for people to download at their leisure. Here it is!

From Sunrise to sunset: The rise and fall of a celebrity Prime Minister in Australia’s post-broadcast democracy. (PDF)

The very, very short version of the argument is that Rudd’s rise and precipitous fall can be understood in terms of his engagement with celebrity media, and the reaction to that engagement on the part of political journalists. There’s more to it, though, at 8000+ words.

A much shorter version of this argument has just been published at Celebrity Studies for those who are able to access it.

Feedback welcome, as always.

I hope to be back writing a bit more on here in the breather we get from teaching over Winter, when I have lots of research and writing planned.

Call for chapters and expressions of interest

Underbelly: A Critical Companion

Edited by Melissa Gregg, Sue Turnbull & Jason Wilson

This book collection offers a critical companion to the Australian television series Underbelly. Drawing on a range of perspectives ­ from academics, journalists and critics to the show¹s production team and the wider public ­ it provides a comprehensive account of Underbelly’s development, screening and reception. In doing so, it explores the social, political and economic conditions that mark a successful program in the landscape of Australian television.

A feature of this collection will be to showcase new partnerships developing across media and cultural institutions in Australian screen industries. A cross-section of work in contemporary media, journalism and cultural studies will discuss key concerns for these fields, and leading critics will illustrate the possibilities for contemporary screen studies analysis.

Writers, producers, actors and directors on each of the seasons to date are invited to contribute to the collection and/or participate in interviews. “Below the line” production staff and workers in affiliated areas (eg. publicity for the series and its distributors) are particularly welcome. Potential contributors for these formats should contact the editors before submitting an abstract.

Several of the chapters for the book are already commissioned, so the purpose of this call is to fill gaps in scope. We seek chapters responding to themes in each of the three seasons of Underbelly, such as:

- underworld and criminal networks
- white collar crime, including institutional corruption
- the drug trade
- commodity distribution and logistics
- drug consumption (including comparative class demographics)
- police culture and/or the politics of bureaucracy
- tabloid media and the law
- inter-state rivalry and cultural prejudice
- the night time economy, including the privatization of security
- sex work
- migration and ethnicity (especially in relation to alternative and/or leisure economies)
- cultural tourism and city branding
- the politics of city space and suburbia
- class and aspiration
- ordinariness
- masculinity and homosociality

Industry concerns for the book include:

- screenwriting and adaptation
- franchising in a global television market
- state and corporate funding strategies
- copyright and distribution (including the piracy threat)
- ratings and advertising
- casting and the Australian acting pool
- the pedigree of successful production teams
- prospects for Australian television careers

Potential chapter contributors are advised to read the following article for
further indication of the material of interest to this collection:

Melissa Gregg and Jason Wilson (2010) “Underbelly, true crime and the cultural economy of infamy” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24 (3): 411-427

Abstracts for written chapters should be 250 words and should be sent to:
Melissa Gregg: melissa.gregg at sydney.edu.au
Sue Turnbull: S.Turnbull at latrobe.edu.au
Jason Wilson: jason.wilson at canberra.edu.au

Abstracts are due December 31.

Accepted chapters, of 5000 words maximum, will be due at the beginning of
April, 2011.

Please feel free to pass this information on to others.

Is the ABC illegitimately competing with commercial media outlets by offering online opinion with its online offerings?

This is a separate question from, say, the manifestly spurious claims of bias that crop up about sites like The Drum. The idea that’s been put about recently is that the ABC is making life hard for commercial media businesses by dragging eyeballs away from their websites and email bulletins.

Go read and comment over there, if you like.

In my view, it is the incapacity of traditional parties to provide distinctive forms of identification around possible alternatives that has created the terrain for the flourishing of right-wing populism. Indeed, right-wing populist parties are often the only ones that attempt to mobilise passions and create collective forms of identifications. Against all those who believe that politics can be reduced to individual motivations, and that it is driven by the pursuit of self-interest, they are well aware that politics always consists in the creation of an ‘us’ versus a ‘them’ and that it implies the creation of collective identities. Hence the powerful appeal of their discourse, because it provides collective forms of identification around ‘the people’.

If we add to that the fact that, under the banner of ‘modernisation’, social-democratic parties have in most countries identified themselves almost exclusively with the middle classes, and that they have stopped representing the interests of the popular sectors – whose demands are considered ‘archaic’ or ‘retrograde’ – we should not be surprised by the growing alienation of an increasing number of groups who fdeel excluded from the effective exercise of citizenship by the ‘enlightened’ elites. In a context where the dominant discourse proclaims that there is no alternative to the current neoliberal form of globalisation, and that we have to accept its laws and submit to its diktats, it is small wonder that more and more workers are keen to listen to those who claim that alternatives do exist, and that they will give back to the people the power to decide. When democratic politics has lost its capacity to shape the discussion about how we should organise our common life, and when it is limited to securing the necessary conditions for the smooth working of the market, the conditions are ripe for talented demagogues to articulate popular frustrations.

Mouffe, Chantal, 2005. The ‘End of Politics’ and the challenge of right-wing populism. In F. Panizza, ed. Populism and the mirror of democracy. London ; New York, NY :: Verso, pp. 50-71.

Back here with more soon, I hope.

First – I had a piece in Crikey today using Leximancer to crunch election coverage. The piece runs exactly parallel with some research I’m currently doing on election coverage in regional areas. It’s here (though paywalled, unfortunately.)

Second – I got asked to write a piece about Kevin Rudd for the UK journal celebrity studies. This needed to be 1500 words including references – it’s a “forum” piece rather than a longer, formal paper – a bit of a hybrid between academic and op-ed work. I won’t tell you the hilarious story involving me writing an 8000 word version of this that now needs another home. I’ll tell you the punchline, though: I’m an idiot.

Anyway, it’s a nice length to chuck on the blog. Below the fold, I reproduce a final “author copy”, just in case you’re interested. It brings together some strands from political communication studies, journalism and celebrity studies to add something (I hope) to the growing pile of words written about the man.

Enjoy, feedback welcome, etc.

Sunrise to sunset: Kevin Rudd as celebrity in Australia’s post-broadcast democracy.

Kevin Rudd was a ‘fanatical’ media networker from very early on in his political career (Latham, 2005: 249) – given his lack of support within his own Party, in a sense he had no choice. His rise from backbencher, to shadow minister, to Australian Labor Party (ALP) leader and Prime Minister coincided with his most important sustained engagement with celebrity media – five years from 2001 to 2006 as the ALP’s representative on ‘The Big Guns of Politics’ segment on Australian television network Seven’s Sunrise program. Seven’s breakfast show successfully challenged the ratings dominance of the Nine Network by adopting an informal, irreverent tone, and because its hosts (Melissa Doyle and David Koch) present as ‘ordinary’, ‘everyday’ people ‘like us’, by contrast with the luminaries of Nine’s well-established star system. (Harrington, 2010) The regular segment where Rudd squared off against affable Liberal Party parliamentarian Joe Hockey sat well alongside the show’s other preoccupations – celebrity topics and ‘kitchen table’ concerns. It was relaxed, light in its tone, and deliberately avoided the arid partisanship of political debate in elite media. Through their appearances on the program, the two politicians became ‘intimate strangers’ who appeared in and around the morning routines of ‘average Australians, people who were not normally engaged by the high-brow political analysis of the Canberra press gallery’ (Jackman 2008, p. 32) The celebrity appeal they developed helped Sunrise: they were eventually moved to the highest-rating part of the highest-rating day in the show’s weekly schedule (Marr 2010: 50). Rudd and Hockey came to notice the program’s ‘eclectic appeal’: far way from their electorates they would be ‘greeted fondly as mates, rather than politicians’. (Jackman 2008, p. 32) Rudd – the Mandarin-speaking, millionaire, cosmopolitan ex-diplomat – came to be ‘perceived as ‘‘ordinary’’, rather than just ‘‘another boring politician’.’ (Harrington, 2009: 178)

His engagement with Sunrise and other like programs meant that Kevin Rudd’s political rise and fall drew celebrity and celebrity media closer to the central terrain of political struggle and debate in Australia’s ‘post-broadcast democracy’ (Prior, 2006). Rudd engaged strategically with the Australian celebrity industry in making a direct appeal to the Australian people, creating a persona seen as ordinary, trustworthy and familiar to the point of intimacy. His successful election campaign in 2007 foregrounded this persona. But over the course of his first and only term as Prime Minister both his opponents and the ‘elite’ political media (who Rudd had attempted to manage and sideline) combined to cast doubt on its authenticity, to reveal the ‘real Kevin’ behind ‘Kevin ‘07’, and thus to change the public meaning of Rudd’s celebrity. Combined with his political errors, these efforts succeeded in producing a crisis of public faith in Rudd’s leadership. Having been the most popular Prime Minister in the history of Australian opinion polling, in June 2010, Rudd was removed by his own party as unelectable.

Three trends in Australia’s media environment help us to understand Rudd’s dalliance with celebrity culture, and its consequences. First, Australia’s mediated democracy is subject to the post-broadcast dynamic of audience and media fragmentation. The multiplication of information channels and platforms mean that encounters with political information are strongly dependent on the degree to which audience members are inclined to seek them out.) Sally Young finds that Australia has a minority (even niche) ‘elite’, news-seeking audience, and a much larger ‘general’ audience who have switched off serious current affairs content but ‘may not necessarily replace this’ with other forms of political content (2008). Second, Australia’s celebrity industry has expanded into more outlets and channels, and commands far more public attention than politics. Third, Australia’s political communications system parallels other Western examples in exhibiting a dynamic of competition and co-evolution between political advocates and professional journalists in elite media outlets covering national politics. This creates what James Stanyer has called a ‘disdaining dynamic’ between political and press corps as each compete ‘for control of the way messages are presented to the audience’ (2007, p. 7).

All three offer powerful incentives to go beyond official, elite news media outlets and to court a broader constituency. Rudd used celebrity media outlets to reach audiences apart from the ageing, dwindling one attached to elite news outlets , and to issue messages in a way that bypassed their scrutiny. Additionally, Rudd’s intrinsic problem of lacking extensive support or patronage in his own party (Oakes, 2010) was motivation for directly cultivating a broad public following in friendly media outlets.

Rudd’s ‘Kevin 07’-branded election campaign was able to assume that the Nation was comfortably on a first-name basis with the Labor leader. The persona he had burnished on Sunrise augmented his appeal as a change candidate challenging a Government, and a Prime Minister, who had been in power for more than a decade. The echoes of James Bond in the slogan risked ironic self-deprecation – an unusual trait in campaigning politicians. But this simply underlined the message that Rudd was something new in political life, and a familiar face – a mate – who could be trusted with running the country. Throughout the campaign, Rudd continued to engage with celebrity and general media – like FM Radio and comedy talk show Rove – often at the expense of serious outlets. This triggered a late-campaign spat with the host of ‘insider baseball’ talking heads show Insiders, Barrie Cassidy, who accused the Opposition Leader (who had refused to be interviewed on the show during the campaign) of avoiding scrutiny, and forsaking genuine politics for ‘vaudeville’. Rudd’s reply fingered Insiders‘ elitism, and its limited appeal:

Guess what? There’s a whole bunch of people out there who you may be surprised to know don’t watch Insiders but do listen to FM radio. And my job as the alternative prime minister is to communicate with the entire country.’ (Hawthorne, 2007)

Both men had a point. But their conflict reveals the tensions at the heart of celebritising post-broadcast democracies. The dynamics of this shift intensify internal and mutual competitive pressures on politician and journalist alike. In Cassidy’s attack, we can see the beginnings of the journalistic backlash and debunking coverage that would characterise the latter part of Rudd’s tenure as Prime Minister.

Political journalists’ first response to the novel intensity of the new government’s media management was familiar: ‘metacoverage’ highlighting the presence and activity of Rudd’s PR apparatus. But they also attacked the persona at the heart of Rudd’s success, and persistently questioned the authenticity of Rudd’s public face. Journalists began competing with stories purporting to reveal the darker nature of the ‘real Kevin Rudd’, threatening to expose an inauthenticity at his core. In this way, political journalism in Australia approximated the tactics of celebrity media in its “scourging” mode, where it engineers the degradation and descent of existing celebrities. (Rojek, 2001: 80) These attacks hit the mark because they came on top of a series of policy reversals – most notably a scrapped emissions trading scheme – which opened the question of what Rudd stood for. A central theme that emerged was Rudd’s rage: stories pointed to Rudd’s outbursts of temper, directed at colleagues and luckless government employees.

The scourge culminated in an essay, Power Trip, by senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist David Marr, published just before Rudd’s demise, which insisted that Rudd was fundamentally ‘driven by anger’. The ‘real Kevin Rudd’, then, was as far away from ‘Kevin 07’ as could be imagined – Rudd had lied about who he was. This conclusion was still ringing on the 22nd of June 2010 when the ALP responded to intractably bad polling by replacing Kevin Rudd with Julia Gillard, who called an election weeks thereafter. Kevin Rudd was gone; Kevin 07 had departed long before, as the meanings of Rudd’s celebrity irrevocably changed.

Administrative failures, political errors and the alienation of his colleagues all played a part in Kevin Rudd’s political demise, but the gradual tarnishing of his political celebrity was also connected closely with his decline in public affections. The questions that arise from his fate go to the very possibility of campaigning and governing in post-broadcast democracies. How can politicians build broad popular support without alienating the seriousness of elite media, who still retain considerable influence? What version of authenticity ought we expect when media fragmentation necessitates a variety of media performances from politicians, and an ever more complex constitution of political celebrity? Can a politician become a celebrity in contemporary media cultures and still pursue difficult, sometimes unpopular reforms? The world will watch the US Presidential elections of 2012 in the hope of receiving clearer answers to these questions.

Harrington, S., 2010. Waking Up With Friends: Breakfast news, Sunrise and the ‘televisual sphere’. Journalism Studies, 11(2), 175.

Harrington, S.M., 2009. Public knowledge beyond journalism : infotainment, satire and Australian television. Thesis. Available at: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/26675/ [Accessed October 14, 2010].

Hawthorne, M., 2007. Kevin Rudd gatecrashes kids party in Adelaide. Adelaide Now. Available at: http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/rudd-gatecrashes-kids-party/story-e6frea83-1111114899983 [Accessed October 20, 2010].

Jackman, C., 2008. Inside Kevin07 : the people, the plan, the prize., Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing.

Marr, D., 2010. Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd, Melbourne: Black Inc.

Oakes, L., 2010. On the record : politics, politicians and power, Sydney: Hachette Australia.  

Prior, M., Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  

Rojek, C., 2001. Celebrity, London: Reaktion Books.  

Stanyer, J., 2007. Modern Political Communications: Mediated Politics In Uncertain Times, Cambridge: Polity.

Young, S., 2008. The bad news. Inside Story. Available at: http://inside.org.au/the-bad-news/ [Accessed October 19, 2010].