Despite Costello’s supposed leak of a late November election date, it now appears Howard intends to hang on until his publicly-funded ad blitz turns the polls around, or, until it gets too close to Christmas to hold off any longer (8 December is mooted, but a sufficiently desperate government could go even later, into the New Year if necessary).
Sensibly enough, Labor has been pointing to what could have been done with the public money Howard is using for mass mailouts on “John Howard Writes to you on a Subject No Parent Can Afford to Miss”, ad campaigns on the theme “Footy fans back government” and so on. Here’s a piece from Tanya Plibersek
One way to keep this running is to say, every day, what could have been done with the million dollars or so the government is spending. But it could be sliced geographically instead of temporally. If I were running Labor’s campaign, I’d take the government’s total ad spending this term (around $750 million, IIRC) and convert that into around $5 million per electorate. Then find, for each electorate, $5 million of spending effectively foregone (two extra teachers at X High School, a local road project etc). Finally, promise to create a fund for worthwhile local projects like these, to be funded by a cessation of large-scale government propaganda.
The nice thing about this strategy is that would have some chance of locking Labor in to ending the downward spiral of ethics in which the bad behavior of one government justifies even worse behavior by the next.
John Quiggin 
I think that’s rather optimistic, to suggest that would lock Labor into anything.
The only solution I can see is to regulate, to have an independent Parliamentary Officer controlling all media campaigns. A clumsy solution though. Someone (here I believe) suggested that the total cost of the ad should be included in the ‘authorised by’ bit to improve accountability, but that would be far too abusable as well.
government ad’s have swung the electorate towards howard for the last 2 elections , it has been howard’s election winning strategy and i expect it will continue until election day, no matter what the cost
John’s final par highly optimistic with little chance of success.
Our barraker in Chief to call the election the day after the Wallabies win the world cup, if they let him down, then after the cricketers win the series in India.
dylwah
In the USA they have organisations like the following:-
http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_Mission_History
Oyster, may I refer you to the exceptional possum pollytics website, particularly this post: http://possumcomitatus.wordpress.com/2007/09/27/the-narrowing/ regarding advertising (and the fact that it does seem to work, somewhat).
John I do not believe Howard can go beyond December 8 because he gave a clear commitment a few weeks ago the election would be held sometime “before early December”.
Here is how I put it back in 2004, in a letter to the Melbourne Age:
According to Michelle Grattan (23/6/04), as much as $100 million is being spent on the Government’s political advertising. Because such baffling numbers are commonplace in the lofty realms of politics, some perspective may be helpful:
Based on an average income of $50,000 per annum, this advertising costs more than 8000 years of individual tax contributions. Put another way: at least 200 Australian taxpayers spent their entire working lives funding this latest exercise in political propoganda.
If we were to confine ourselves to the subject of healthcare, this same sum could have provided university education for over 400 new doctors or over 1500 nurses.
You can get on your high horse as much as you like. i don’t know what it is like lesewhere but here in WA the State ALP Government continues to bombard us with Advertising, much of which can easily be seen as electioneering. I seriously doubt that Federal ALP will be any different.
More importantly Australians could have had an average tax cut of $5 each. Some of them may even have chosen to put it towards a medical degree.
P.S. What would I do with 0.00002 medical degrees?
you can talk about how the pollies use what was your money, but in fact it’s their money now. that’s why they can spend it as they see fit.
do you really believe pollies rule for your benefit, or is there some genetic deficiency, a national masochism,that causes you to watch the nation’s wealth being pissed away without inspiring you to do anything except give some other thief a ‘go’.
I would just like to again register my own disgust.
Razor, why do you presume that those who object to this rort by the Howard Government necessarily excuse similar rorts by state Labor govenemnts?
I am no less offended by the Beattie (now Bligh) Government’s misleading advertising about forced council amalagamations than the Federal Government’s propaganda blitz.
Nevertheless, the sheer disparity in scale has to be noted.
In any case, the state ‘Labor’ Governments are largely in Howard’s pockets, anyway, and have proven themselves quite happy to play the role of ‘bad cop’, in the most extremely politically crude of fashions close to Federal election campaigns, in order to undermine Federal Labor’s chances for their own cynical self-serving purposes as Latham observed in “The Latham Diaries”. So, why should Federal Labor cop the consequences?
If Howard gets away with this then the principle, that an incumbent government can abuse its position of incumbency in any way it chooses and have almost unlimited acces to taxpayers’ funds in order to promote itself with advertisng, will be enshrined.
This cannot be allowed to happen.
And when Laboer is elected it must be held to its own commitment to end these abuses, and it must conduct full open parlimentary enquiries into the abuses we have witnessed for the last four years at least.
daggett, hasn’t the penny dropped? labor doesn’t have to do anything. the government is your master, not your servant. learn what democracy is, and what it isn’t. we’re in the second category, and until you understand this, things won’t get better.
al loomis, I hadn’t pegged you as an anarcho-capitalist, but anyway welcome aboard!
BBB
The distinction between government advertising for informational purposes and government advertising for political purposes is very difficult to identify in a lot of cases. Given that this is the dilemma faced in issues of moral hazard, implementing some of the measures the insurance industry uses could be useful to achieve an optimal outcome: Political parties pay an ‘excess’ or some fixed amount towards each ad campaign/make copayments on advertising expenses (pay x% of total ad costs).
If the moral hazard is great enough, it may be a ‘second-best’ response simply to ban government advertising all together. Given the lack of ‘hard’ information in government advertising lately, and the free availability of important information (on the internet or myriad government hotlines), a complete ban might be the simplest and best response.
[…] John Quiggin has a suggestion for the Labor party in their campaign: If I were running Labor’s campaign, I’d take the government’s […]
Everyone please sign the GetUp petition at:
The email I received recently from GetUP bears repeating:
Dear friends,
When the Government saturated us with their Climate Clever advertising campaign, GetUp members rallied to raise an unbelievable quarter of a million dollars to successfully air our climate spoof ad during the AFL Grand Final.
But Government spending of our taxes to advertise their party policies has gone on long enough! Before any more public money is spent, sign the petition now to tell Mr Howard and Mr Rudd that we demand an end to government advertising designed to spruik not inform:
Some adverstising is legitimate but this Government has spent more than any other on its own advertising – estimated at almost $2 billion. Our Government is now one of the biggest advertisers in Australia, and one of the highest spending governments in the world. It is all with our money, but without our consultation or consent.
The last federal Labor government did the same, as do current state Labor governments – there is nothing effective in Australian law to prevent this unbridled abuse of public trust and purse. Now rumours abound that John Howard even intends to break with time-honoured convention and continue taxpayer-funded propaganda during the election period itself. Sign the petition now – and we’ll put your name to the $2 billion invoice we’ll send to the government for our monies spent:
Imgaine what $2 billion of our taxes could do – close the Indigenous health gap, fill the shortfall in public schools funding, double the Government’s spending on climate change. But that money has been largely wasted on political self-interest, and that is simply insulting to Australian taxpayers.
John, it is natural for people like you and I to get real mad about these government ads. But what is a surprise is to read Murdoch’s National Political Correspondent, Steve lewis, in today’s Herald Sun. He is absolutely withering about these ads.
I would be interested to read Steve Lewis’s article.
Steve Lewis may well be sincere, but the Murdoch’s press occasionally will posture as a critic even to the left of Howard in order to re-establish some degree of credibility so that it can better sell its propaganda at later point.
Hence I read a Murdoch editorial which actually labelled Howard a liar over the Scrafton revelations back in 2004. This was even (mistakenly in my view) quoted on the (now-discontinued) web site http://www.johnhowardlies.com) but days later the Murdoch press was peddling it’s pro-Howard and anti-Latham message and succeeded, most unfortunately for the rest of us, in getting Howard back in.
It may also be hedging its bets, hoping that a Rudd Labor Government will give it most of what it wants.
I recall reading, in a bizarre editorial in Murdoch’s Australian on the occasion of the victory of Tony Blair’s Labour Party in 1998, that Blair’s victory was confirmation of the British public’s support for Thatcher’s economic ‘reforms’. The logic was that because Blair had watered down his opposition to Thatcher’s policies, that the British public, who had voted for Blair must have therefore supported Thatcher’s policies.
So, by Murdoch’s logic, to have indicated their opposition to Thatcher’s ‘reforms’ the British public would need to have voted against Labour and for the Conservatives.
Anyway, Murdoch has since got most of what he wants from Blair, just as he hopes to get most of what he wants from a Rudd Labor Government, not that this doesn’t mean that the choice is still very important.
Steve Lewis’s article “Howard is splashing your cash” can be found at
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22533377-5000117,00.html
Video that Howard doesn’t want Australians to see.
Please, can you include a link to the YouTube video at AlertActive.blogspot.com and send a link to everyone you know.
You can also embed the YouTube video into your site with this code –