Magic moments for Labor as commentators fall at their feet, while Dean debacle turns voters off Liberals
July 18, 2008
Stephen Mayne was The Age's media critic during the 2002 Victorian election and this column appeared on Saturday, November 23, 2002
Momentum is the magical ingredient for a successful election campaign, and the ghost of Robert Dean combined with a series of negative polling stories gave Labor plenty of it this week.
After three days largely devoted to burying the unfortunate Dr Dean, The Age led Monday's paper with the Saulwick AgePoll showing a 61-39 lead to Labor.
This was picked up by all media and gave Labor great confidence going into Monday's slick campaign launch, generally recognised as bigger and better than the previous day's Liberal effort.
Labor even successfully infiltrated the Sunday night TV coverage of Robert Doyle's launch, with short-lived ads featuring Jeff Kennett bucketing Doyle two months ago on 3AK.
The Liberals were struggling to regain momentum on Tuesday and Wednesday, before Thursday's Newspoll in The Australian predicted a 60-40 Labor landslide, which again echoed through the media.
The sheer volume and nature of the Dean media coverage ensured the message really got home to voters.
The Age gave it the biggest treatment, leading the paper on Friday, Saturday and Sunday with a variety of unpleasant angles for the Liberals.
The Herald Sun took a more sympathetic line, especially last Saturday's front-page splash which somehow linked 15 failed IVF attempts with Dr Dean's enrolment address.
Herald Sun editor Peter Blunden has a 7-0 record in favour of the Liberals during his 10-year career as a News Ltd editor in Adelaide and Melbourne responsible for writing the election-eve editorial.
By way of contrast, The Age's Michael Gawenda is 2-1 in favour of the Liberals over five years. Given the media coverage so far, anything but support - albeit qualified - for a second Labor term in next Friday's editorials would be a surprise.
With the exception of one mildly critical comment piece in The Age from Ewin Hannan, the media have completely swallowed Labor's "sound financial management" argument.
Industrial relations is the other vulnerable point for the government. But apart from predictable voices such as the Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt, Stan Zemanek on 3AW, Jeff Kennett on 3AK and former Liberal senator Michael Baume in The Australian Financial Review, the media have not collectively latched on to it as an issue.
The Liberals have resorted to full-page newspaper ads predicting industrial chaos. But who can name the Liberal industrial relations spokesman?
Labor has been fortunate that negative stories have not gained momentum. For instance, The Age's Thursday splash about a secret advertising slush fund made it on to all the TV news bulletins, but had petered out within 24 hours.
Jon Faine and Neil Mitchell exposed the public service whistleblower Michael Laker as a Liberal Party member, and Labor pushed the line he was a disgruntled public servant suspended from duty for allegedly misusing resources. Interestingly, Faine confirmed to this column yesterday he was a member of the ALP for three years in the mid-1980s.
The Liberals will need something much bigger than a Labor slush fund to save their bacon; the Labor momentum continued with yesterday's Morgan poll showing a 62-38 lead.
* Stephen Mayne, the publisher of crikey.com.au, was a press secretary for Jeff Kennett in the 1990s.
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