Election Campaigns: Promises, Posters, and Strategic Smiling

Election Campaigns: Promises, Posters, and Strategic Smiling

Six Weeks in Which the Entire Country Pretends That Policy Announcements Are the Same as Governing

The Australian federal election campaign is a six-week national performance in which two leaders travel to marginal seats, eat things, promise things, are photographed promising things, are asked about things they promised last time, explain why those things were different, promise more things, and return to Sydney or Melbourne for the leaders’ debate, which is watched by approximately 1.8 million people and described the following morning by everyone involved as a win for their side.

The campaign exists to allow voters to assess the competing visions of the major parties – and, increasingly, to allow minor parties and independents to demonstrate that they have a vision at all, a bar set usefully low in an environment where major party slogans routinely achieve the philosophical depth of a motivational poster in a dentist’s waiting room.

The Slogan: Meaning Everything, Committing to Nothing

Every Australian federal election produces a campaign slogan of remarkable versatility – a phrase carefully engineered to resonate with enough voters to matter while being specific enough to offend as few as possible. The craft involved is genuine; the results are frequently extraordinary.

Consider the 2010 ALP slogan: "Moving Australia Forward." This phrase was interpreted, in a study conducted by researchers at the Centre for Political Semiotics and Mild Confusion, in seventeen distinct ways by focus group participants, including:

• "We will improve infrastructure" (six respondents)
• "We will not go backward, which is reassuring" (four respondents)
• "Something about progress, generally" (three respondents)
• "I think it means the economy?" (two respondents)
• "Is ‘forward’ a place?" (one respondent, who raises a fair point)
• "I didn’t read it, I was looking at the candidate’s hair" (one respondent, who also raises a fair point)

This interpretive flexibility is not a bug. It is the sophisticated output of campaign professionals who understand that a slogan specific enough to mean something is specific enough to lose someone, and that the electorate of a modern democracy is large, diverse, and not primarily organised around the same policy priorities as the people writing the slogan.

The Policy Launch: Theatre With Costings

Partway through the campaign, each major party holds a policy launch – a ticketed event at which the leader delivers a speech to an audience of enthusiastic supporters, announces the centrepiece policies of the campaign, and releases a document purporting to show how everything will be paid for. The document is called "our costings" and is produced either by Treasury, the Parliamentary Budget Office, or – in earlier eras – a process described by the opposition as "making it up" and by the government as "responsible fiscal management."

The opposition then releases its own costings, which show that the government’s costings are wrong, and the government releases a response showing that the opposition’s costings are wrong, and economists release statements noting that everyone’s costings contain assumptions about economic growth that are optimistic, after which the campaign continues with the same energy as before, the costings debate having achieved its primary purpose of filling two news cycles.

"The policy launch is where the campaign becomes about policy," explains Professor Reginald Clipboard III, without quite managing to keep the scepticism out of his voice. "For approximately 36 hours. Then someone says something about a previous comment made in 2014, and we return to character questions."

The Marginal Seat: Where Democracy Is Actually Decided

Australia has approximately 151 federal electorates. Of these, roughly 30 are considered genuinely marginal – seats that could plausibly change hands. These seats receive the full attention of the campaign: the leader visits, the advertising spend spikes, the local candidate is briefed to smile specifically for this demographic, and the residents receive more mail in six weeks than they will receive for the subsequent three years combined.

The remaining 120 safe seats – electorates where the outcome is, absent a political earthquake, predetermined – receive visits from no one of consequence and are mentioned in campaign speeches only as the geographic backdrop to a cost-of-living anecdote. Their voters participate in democracy sausages and the general theatre of election day, but their individual votes will not determine the government. They are, in the mechanical terms of campaign strategy, scenery.

This is a perfectly logical consequence of a system designed to aggregate preferences into parliamentary seats. It is also the reason that government policy tends to reflect the priorities of western Sydney, outer Melbourne, and the seven or eight regional seats that are in play at any given election – a structural bias that is well understood, frequently discussed, and entirely unchanged.

Election Night: The Hours Between Democracy and Governance

Election night is the closest Australian democracy comes to a sporting event – a live broadcast with analysts, graphics, running tallies, and a moment of genuine uncertainty that the campaign’s controlled artificiality has been carefully building toward. Votes are counted. Seats are called. A leader concedes or, memorably, does not. The incoming Prime Minister makes a speech about unity in front of supporters still wearing campaign merchandise.

By the following morning, the campaign – with its promises, slogans, costings, and sausages – is over. Governing begins. These are related activities with a smaller overlap than the campaign period suggests.

For a comparative study in campaign promises and the creative accounting of their fulfilment, The London Prat’s election promise tracker – prat.uk – maintains a meticulous archive of commitments made and forgotten on both sides of the planet.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com