Extract from ABC News
Analysis
The Morrison Government has never been shy about spending a bit of taxpayer dosh on advertising campaigns promoting what it is doing and how good it is.
And, of course, the government is led by a prime minister who is sometimes, unkindly, referred to as "Scotty from Marketing".
So it's a little odd that the week is ending with a hot debate about the quality of the government's advertising campaign for the national vaccination rollout.
And it is more than just depressing that the campaign is being asked to at least partly reverse the damage done to the vaccination message by the government.
The Prime Minister told us this week that $40 million was allocated to the advertising campaign this financial year and that, apparently, "the programme rolls with ... the sequencing of who's getting vaccinated right now".
The problem is that no-one seems to have seen the campaign — or at least if they have, it has not cut through.
Public health experts and advertising strategists alike have been on the airwaves pleading with the government to rethink a strategy that isn't working.
The number of people getting vaccinated has been increasing in the last couple of weeks, which is good. It reflects that at least some parts of the distribution of the vaccine — which started as such a debacle — is starting to function, particularly the bits run by the states.
But multiple and fundamental problems with the program are now becoming entrenched, even as the logistical ones are partly being fixed.
The double-edged sword of political messaging about COVID
One of them is the government's conflicting messages about whether there is any pressing need to get vaccinated.
The other is that, unfortunately, the message that has gotten through to too many people is that the vaccine Australia is most (literally) invested in — the AstraZeneca vaccine — is seen as a somehow dangerous dog.
These two problems were neatly encapsulated by Health Minister Greg Hunt on ABC News Breakfast on Thursday morning.
"Right now, we want to encourage everybody over 50 to be vaccinated as early as possible," Hunt said. "But we've been very clear that, as supply increases later on in the year, there will be enough mRNA vaccines for every Australian."
In other words, if you have concerns about AstraZeneca, you can wait.
In Australia, only one person — a 48-year-old woman — has died from the AstraZeneca vaccine, and she had other serious medical issues. That is, clotting is rare and can make you very sick but in countries with good healthcare, it doesn't kill healthy people.
Both public polling and focus groups are revealing vaccine complacency, as well as hesitancy and entrenched concerns about AstraZeneca.
Much of the problem can be traced back to the double-edged sword of the government's political message about COVID-19 which (quite rightly) celebrates Australia's success in keeping it at bay.
Australians, Scott Morrison said on Monday, understand the government taking "a cautious approach when it comes to maintaining our border arrangements".
But this has been allied with the message the government delivered when the early stages of the vaccine rollout were in trouble: that there was nothing to worry about because Australia wasn't facing the same sort of crisis as other countries where the pandemic raged.
This might have been true, but it has fed both complacency that there was no hurry to get vaccinated, and the view that we could continue to safely live in our gilded cage.
The politics of keeping the borders closed
The government certainly went on the front foot in the early days of the pandemic. But if the public has vaccine hesitancy, the government has developed strategy hesitancy. The politics of keeping the borders closed keep luring like a siren.
It does little to reassure anyone that it is either cranking up the strategies for gradually opening up the economy, or more importantly, that it has actually been doing any substantive work up until now — despite the Prime Minister insisting there have been people beavering away on grand policies for months.
Quizzed this week about the various proposals for more purpose-specific quarantine facilities in Queensland, the PM implied these were just top of head ideas that have been dreamed up in the states in the last couple of weeks; that the Victorian proposal is good but the federal government has only just got to see it.
Well, since we have all heard about both of these proposals for weeks or months, you'd have thought the feds might have heard about them.
Or, controversially, that it might even have been out shopping for such proposals — which will inevitably be needed if we are going to try to move more people in and out of Australia, and/or because of the virulence of some new strains of the virus.
Equally, the many universities that months ago prepared and presented detailed proposals for plans to bring international students back into the country are going out of their minds in frustration that these have all foundered on desks in Canberra.
Saving the domestic economy, presiding over the destruction of key export markets
In the wake of the Budget, the government has been out selling its credentials for saving the economy.
Scott Morrison sold the Budget's Liberal credentials to a gathering of the Liberal faithful in Sydney last week. He put forward JobKeeper and HomeBuilder as the two programs that better illustrated Liberal philosophy.
That would be, firstly, a wage subsidy program which was certainly effective but which also spectacularly splashed money around in a way that too often ended up in company profits and executive bonuses.
The second was a home building incentive that has fed into an asset bubble. And now it is relying on another tax break for business — the extension of the instant asset write-off to prop up things until the election.
But if the government has saved the domestic economy, it now has to explain why it sits complacently by and presides over the destruction of some of our most successful export markets — for starters, international education (which is rapidly losing its competitive, even globally dominant, position), and international tourism.
It does this even as it forks out $600 million for a power station that no-one in the private sector would build and which the market operator says is not needed.
At that same post-budget function in Sydney last week, Scott Morrison riffed on the Talking Heads song, 'Once in a Lifetime'.
"[David Byrne] brings it all together and says, 'Well, how did I get here?'
"And the song goes on to say that 'in the days go by'," the Prime Minister told his audience.
"But that's not what has happened here with Australia. We haven't arrived at this point right now because we just let the days go by, no. We took action. We were active, we leant forward."
Perhaps he should have gone and quoted more of the song:
And you may ask yourself, 'Where does that highway go to?'
And you may ask yourself, 'Am I right? Am I wrong?'
And you may say to yourself, 'My God! What have I done?'
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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