THE TEMASEK REVIEW

Perfect spin is so elusive

• Andrew Bolt
• From: Herald Sun
• March 05, 2010 12:00AM

 POOR Peta Duke. If she hadn’t somehow typed the ABC’s address on the email she’d actually meant for her boss, she’d be a hero.

“You’ve done it again, girl!” Planning Minister Justin Madden would probably have chortled.

“Your plan will do the trick.” With emphasis on the word “trick” – as in one more deceit by those pea-and-thimble shysters you now elect in these spin-spin days.

You know the kind of thing – stacking committees to produce the “right result”, fudging surveys to prompt the longed-for answer, and launching sham inquiries to give your crusading politicians exactly the dodgy conclusion they always wanted.

But, alas. Duke, eyes no doubt whirling from another frantic day of spinning in the Brumby Government’s media unit, last week accidentally emailed her plans for the Government’s latest “trick” to the ABC, and now must pay the price for being caught doing precisely what she’s paid to do.

Denounced by the suddenly moral Premier, John Brumby, and the suddenly outraged Madden, she was “demoted” to doing, er, what she always does.

Paid to spin, and now “punished” as spin, by a minister whose other new title – “Minister for Respect” – is pure spin, too, to trick Indians into thinking this Government is cracking down on racist thugs.

It’s a circus, folks.

You’ve no doubt heard about Duke’s precise “crime” – drawing up a document titled “Minister for Planning Justin Madden’s Media Plan” to help her man rig the blocking of a proposed redevelopment of the heritage-listed Windsor Hotel.

The problem, she wrote, was that the “Windsor Advisory Committee report is expected to recommend that development go ahead”.

The solution: “Strategy at this stage is to release it for public comment, as this affects the entire community, and then use those responses as reason to halt it, as we have listened to community views.”

Well, listened to only the “community views” they were sure they could incite.

The Government has since tut-tutted that Duke’s email was something it neither wanted or endorsed, being “not professional” and filled with “speculative language”. Heavens, they would never do anything so cynical.

But they do, and many of you – I’m afraid to say – keep falling for it.

Want some examples?

Right from the very start of this Labor Government, we got exactly the kind of rigged public consultation Duke proposed a decade later.

Remember the Government’s plans then to give us five “safe” injecting rooms for the addicts it falsely claimed would otherwise die by the hundreds?

It appointed a committee of experts under Prof David Penington who – surprise! – already agreed with the Government’s mad scheme, and who commissioned a survey that claimed that two-thirds of residents in the five lucky druggie-packed municipalities agreed, too.

Except, of course, the Government never released the survey questions that prompted this highly unlikely support, and it soon dropped the whole idea when it became only too obvious that the public was in fact furiously against it.

Later came the Government’s even more reckless spinning over our water supplies. Maniacally opposed to building the dam that fast-growing Melbourne clearly needed, it appointed just the kind of committee that would say it was damn right, too.

This 2003 committee on Melbourne’s water resources was stacked with “experts” sure to share the Government’s green ideology – dam-buster Tim Fischer of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Mary Crooks of the Victorian Women’s Trust (yes! really!) and a spokesman for the Victorian Council of Social Service.

And the Government got the echo it wanted – a committee that called dams “unacceptable”, suggested “exploring the drought response strategies adopted by indigenous people”, and pooh-poohed even a desalination plant (which Labor then opposed), saying we’d be right until 2050 if we just used a lot less water.

Wrong, insane and wrong. Three strikes, but is the Government out for fiddling such a trick?

But here I am criticising the apprentice for the sins of the master.

If you want a real lesson in salt-the-mine spin, look no further than your Prime Minister.

YOU’D think Kevin Rudd actually set the bar with the trick he pulled with the bill of human rights that is Labor policy – a bill that lets Leftist judges bring in the laws that Leftist politicians can’t get through parliament.

He stacked a committee, led by Jesuit Frank Brennan, and had it do “public consultations” of the kind that were sure to be dominated by the very activists who’d back Labor.

And, indeed, Brennan’s committee found that 87.4 per cent of the 35,014 submissions it got agreed – goodness, yes – we did need the human rights act the Rudd Government wanted.

Which would make you think every sane person backed this idea, right?

Ahem: consult now the survey Brennan unguardedly commissioned, that found that whatever Rudd, his committee and their consulted experts thought, two-thirds of Australians were sure their rights were already protected just fine, thanks. Not that this mere detail stopped the committee from telling Rudd his plan was just peachy.

Yet Rudd trumped even that effort, and anything John Brumby could dream up, with his 2020 Ideas Summit.

Remember that farce of two years ago? Rudd invited 1000 of our “best and brightest” – actually almost all tame Leftists, including 118 members of the GetUp group alone – to give the Government a plan for our future.

This was meant to show you that all Australians, or at least the smart ones, agreed with Rudd. Indeed, delegate Sam Mostyn even boasted: “We do represent the whole community.”

And – like magic – these 1000 “best and brightest” almost unanimously agreed that so many of Labor’s policies were fabulous, whether it was fighting “global warming”, giving us that bill of rights, creating one-stop childcare centres, reviewing the tax system or assembling fresh armies of bureaucrats.

Not one person at Rudd’s summit was a declared climate sceptic. Most tellingly, only one even objected to the summit’s call for a republic, even though the latest Galaxy poll shows fewer than half of the rest of us want such a thing.

BRILLIANT spinning. Fabulous, and better than anything Peta Duke could suggest to our Minister for Respect – yet I’d still have expected voters to have learned by now to see through such flagrant fakery.

But, no. There you lot go again, falling for the latest trick of these watch-my-hand slyboots – of appearing sorry for having stuffed up what they’d once pretended to fix.

There was Rudd last week, in strife and suddenly admitting his Government deserved a “whacking” because “we haven’t been up to the mark so far”.

And there, almost within hours, were Brumby and South Australian Premier Mike Rann playing the very same trick to turn scorn into sympathy by putting the con in contrition.

“We’ve been not delivering as well as I would have hoped,” sighed Brumby.

“We haven’t communicated our message well enough,” cried Rann.

What a great trick, but to have three leaders play it at once forces me to ask young Duke a hard question.

Peta, you didn’t muck up your emails again, did you – sending to Rudd and Rann advice meant only for Brumby.

Source: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/perfect-spin-is-so-elusive/story-e6frfhqf-1225837126876

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