Richardson: Lights, camera, action!
“Hi, I’m Steven Marshall – my Liberal team and I are preparing an Action Plan to fix our state.”
If you’ve watched much TV this week, you’d presume Labor thinks education is a key election battleground, rather than the tawdry mess of child protection woes it’s allowed to fester in the titular department. Moreover, you might presume the Libs assume no-one knows who Steven Marshall is, and it’s high time they put out some kind of cheesy commercial outlining what a stellar guy he really is and how good his plan is. If he had one. Since he doesn’t actually have a plan, he opens with the somewhat less dynamic gambit that he’s “preparing” a plan. But not just any plan: an Action Plan!
And a five point prospective action plan, to boot. Far better than Jay Weatherill’s seven point plan, which is so cumbersome that even he sometimes forgets the last one or two.
1) Steven Marshall is, he tells us, “backing business to grow our economy”. Well, why not? Except that the only thing keeping a lot of businesses in business of late is Government infrastructure investment, without which there’d be precious little building activity going on.
Which brings us happily to: 2) Building our infrastructure needs. Which, as alluded to above, is pretty much happening apace as we speak.
3) Easing cost of living pressures. Damn those cost of living pressures! How fabulous that we have finally found a politician that wants to ease them. And how much more fabulous will it be when he explains how he intends to do so!
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Point 4) on Steven’s Action-Plan-In-Progress is “Investing in our next generation”, which could mean pretty much anything, really. I suspect it involves some kind of tax on contraception.
And finally, at 5): restoring Government efficiency and accountability. Or, as Isobel Redmond might have less tactfully put it, cutting the public service.
But if the finer detail is a little lacking around this unarguably action-packed hyperbolic feast, it is made up for by the rich visual imagery. We know Steven is Backing Business, because he is wearing a high-vis vest and goggles, and standing in a factory-like setting with another guy in a high-vis vest and goggles who is moving his arms about demonstrably like he knows what he’s talking about because he’s clearly Someone In Business.
We know Steven’s serious about Building our Infrastructure Needs because he has a very serious face on, and he’s standing with a very serious-looking Vickie Chapman and, well, because there’s a train behind them, even though neither of them is looking at it specifically.
Likewise, he’s pretty persuasive about Easing Cost of Living Pressures, as evidenced by the fact he’s sitting around a kitchen table chatting amiably with a young family (the Mum’s even balancing a toddler on her knee!), and the table is littered with papers that may or may not be overdue bills, and matching white mugs that may or may not contain coffee.
He’s investing in our next generation by having a bit of a chat with some early-20s types, and one of them’s wearing a café-style apron, so they’re probably not these layabout early-20s types you get down at Centrelink. They’re probably more the early-20s types you get at your local Young Liberal sub-branch meeting.
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And he’s definitely keen on restoring government efficiency and accountability, because he’s sitting next to Iain Evans and pointing to a glossy document, which is probably a Government agency report, because they both look rather amused by whatever the contents are.
The Liberals’ argument for keeping their policy powder dry has been, in part, to prevent Labor ripping them off, as they did with their last-minute epiphanies on a desalination plant and an inner-city football stadium. So paranoid are the Libs now though, that they accuse the Government of ripping off previous Liberal Oppositions. “A specialist school for autistic kids? That was our policy in 2009! A 1000-student city high school? We thought of that before the last election!”
Yeah, but your current leader wasn’t even in parliament back then, and you’ve long insisted that all policy from the last election was under review, so jog on.
Labor, which one might suggest is starting from a considerable way back in this contest despite the dubious advantage of incumbency, hasn’t blitzed the paid TV advertising route as yet, preferring to pound the pavement with good old-fashioned electioneering. A new school here, a new teaching qualification there, and one might almost forget that Education has become Labor’s Achilles heel. It’s obviously abandoning its patented “Elephant In The Room” approach to child protection, opting instead for the “We Need To Talk About Child Protection” approach, with Weatherill writing to all public school parents this week to point out that “It’s been a tough year for our schooling system” (“schooling system” is, of course, a euphemism for “Government”).
“As a parent and Premier, (he doesn’t add that he’s also a former Education Minister, presumably because it would ruin the alliterative effect) I want you to know that I understand how important this matter is and how committed my government is to ensuring all children are safe”. Which is about as reassuring as a grinning Steven Marshall telling me he’s working on an Action Plan to Ease my Cost Of Living Pressures.
He then cunningly switches into a treatise on the many successes in the state’s education system that, he patiently explains, actually outweigh the incidence of child sexual assault. He tells us if our state were not a state at all but a country, it would outrank the USA, France, Sweden and Denmark in international literacy and numeracy rankings. Perhaps, but it would lag behind NSW, Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania and the ACT. Y’know, if they were all countries too.
All of this suggests the pre-election stalemate hasn’t changed much, but the parties are beginning to address their troublespots. In the Liberals’ case, that no-one knows who their leader is or what they stand for (the latter potentially including themselves), and in Labor’s that the party’s traditional areas of strength have become major liabilities.
Now that parliament is behind us and the messy business of legislating (or “governing”, as it’s sometimes called) is finished, one hopes the case for election is spelled out rather more urgently and persuasively. The Liberals might even find time to finish preparing their Action Plan.
Tom Richardson is InDaily’s political commentator and Channel Nine’s state political reporter.
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