No joy for the 'boys' on the campaign bus

The Boys on the Bus is a political campaign classic in which Tim Crouse covers the journalists covering the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential race. It was one of the first books to expose the inner workings of the symbiotic relationship between journalists and political campaigners. The Australian equivalent was Mungo McCallum’s Mungo on the Zoo Plane (1978). The zoo plane in US parlance was the third campaign jet that carried foreign correspondents and the TV technicians and their equipment.

It is an open secret that both the major political parties run election campaigns just like the Reagan administration ran the invasion of Granada in 1983. Put simply, journalists accompanying the leaders are given minimal information about where they will be going and what will be announced. The story that journalists are sent a text message saying “the bus leaves at 0800 and pack for overnight” is not an urban myth. Journalists are given little time to scrutinise policy announcements, and no time to research the issue of the day. After all, rigourous scrutiny of policy is the last thing we want in an election campaign.

The purpose of such secrecy is to ensure that the key campaign event of the day is transmitted in its purest form to viewers of the nightly television news. Chasers and activists take attention away from the main message. Indeed anything, or anyone, not “on message” is to be eschewed. Anybody unpopular is warehoused for the duration of the campaign. What was Morris Iemma doing for the past six weeks; and what of Kevin Andrews and Phillip Ruddock? Both Tony Abbott’s lateness and bad language, and Jackie Kelly’s promotion of Islamophobia as a Chaser-style prank saw them become campaign pariahs.

Indeed, given the discipline that governs modern campaigns, it is incomprehensible that Kelly’s gang could go off on such a damaging frolic of their own, without at least some head office knowledge. Either someone in campaign management was complicit, or the Liberals had given up Lindsay as lost, and the guardhouse had been abandoned.

It’s the unscripted moments that cause heartburn for campaign managers, which is why Howard, battling from behind had to do the tough gigs with Tony Jones, Neil Mitchell, and Kerry O’Brien. Take for example this exchange between Kerry O’Brien and John Howard on November 20.

JOHN HOWARD: You learn by experience. You have to go through things to actually understand it ...

KERRY O'BRIEN: Or you can learn by a study of the past.

JOHN HOWARD: You can't learn by reading a book or uttering a mantra or uttering a focus group tested line.

KERRY O'BRIEN: We can't learn from history without being a part of it?

You can't learn by reading a book. A wonderful line, which, with today’s technology can be up on YouTube as an attack ad overnight. In hundreds of thousands of lounge rooms, voters who see education as the pathway to social mobility purse their lips and say “Hmmmm”.

This “campaign bus as a detention centre” model of political campaigning is why Laurie Oakes, Michael Brissenden and Paul Bongornio stay studio bound in Canberra, and rarely go on the road. They will attend the big set piece events such as the campaign launch, but that’s the limit.

On occasions the major players complained. Howard got testy at one point that the heavy hitters were not in the pack. If they weren’t, he’s only got himself to blame.

In this campaign the key objective for Labor was to get pictures - for tonight’s TV news and tomorrow’s front page - of Kevin in either a hospital or a school. Smiling. For John Howard, the objective was to get a picture of Howard hugging blokes. Hugging women and children is a no no, but hugging blokes, particularly aspirational blokes from ordinary working families, shows that Howard is not mean and tricky, and that he’s not anti-worker - in fact he likes them so much he runs around the country hugging them.

And then, almost in a class of their own, are the visits to schools where the candidate gives high fives, signs autographs, and generally attempts to generate some hysteria among 14-year-old girls. What unmasks this as a campaign stunt is the fact that school kids can’t vote, but footage of them treating pollies like pop stars always makes the nightly TV news before the first ad break.

You can measure how successful the backdrops were by the number of times they are subsequently used by the TV networks as stock footage. Probably the most widely used stock footage of the 2007 campaign was that of Rudd and Peter Garrett in the glass bottomed boat at Green Island, and the subsequent sand kicking stroll along the beach. All staged for the cameras. The fact they were accompanied by a sun bleached blonde reef guide just added value to the footage. Labor subsequently won the seat of Leichardt from whence all that footage came.

On the road, preference is usually given at the “stand ups” to answering questions from local media outlets, so that at an announcement on water policy at some dried up waterhole in regional Australia, the reporter from the local Galargombone Clarion who knows bugger all about the macro-policy settings on the issue, will get the call, instead of a Gallery reporter who at least know what the initials IPCC stand for.

Very few media organisations are willing to expose the tactics; the 7.30 Report ran a desultory piece by Heather Ewart on a slow news day out of Melbourne.

Yes as we saw with APEC, the greatest threat to the daily campaign message comes, not from the unscripted, accidental encounters on the morning walk or in the shopping mall, from old ladies stomped by the media scrum, or silly old buggers, but from the equally disciplined, scripted, well planned and executed Chaser. It might appear anarchic, but it’s not. It is said that the war on terror never ends; let’s hope the same applies to the War on Everything because this is one battle Oakes and O’Brien, Brissenden and Bongornio are not willing fight in public.

Finally, by way of a footnote. The media organisations have to band together to take the election debates out of the hands of the parties, and out of that suburban drinking hole and gambling den that calls itself the National Press Club.