Advice from a Tabloid Editor

Thursday, 8th February, 2007  - Richard Farmer 
Environment and Water Minister Malcolm Turnbull - the House of Representatives is a strange forum in which many great lawyers before him have failed to shine.
One thing tabloid newspaper editors are good at doing it is understanding the prejudices of their readers and then playing to them. There was thus a warning note sounded for politicians when the London Sun reacted to British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s endorsement of the Stern report with the headline: "I'm saving the world...YOU lot are paying."
There was another one this morning on ABC radio in Canberra. Not that the national capital is representative of the country as a whole. It certainly is not which is what made the phone in so remarkable. This is a left of centre city which traditionally votes 60% Labor yet the overwhelming reaction of talk back callers asked to give their reaction to global warming was scepticism about the scientific evidence.
Views ranged from outright rejection of what of scientists are saying to a seeming acceptance that global warming created by mankind was no better or worse that warming over the millenia created by nature. So it might be the view of the politicians and commentators that there is only one true view about climate change, and the politicians might be right when they say people are concerned about it, but it does not mean there is yet an acceptance that we all must start paying to fix it.
The people I heard on radio this morning were Mensheviks not Bolsheviks – less of the better future and more of the better now. And they are the group that new Environment and Water Minister Malcolm Turnbull has set out to court during his first week as a minister in the Federal Parliament.
The man might be an experienced public figure well trained in the ways of the media and presenting a case but the House of Representatives is a strange forum in which many great lawyers before him, like Garfield Barwick and Bob Ellicott, have failed to shine. The task of being and looking comfortable became even more difficult when proceedings were opened up for coverage by television. A speaker now must make his impression not only before his peers on the floor of the House but on the public in their sitting rooms at home as well. The first often requires an assertive manner, a raised voice and flights of rhetoric while the second is better suited to reassuring and conversational tones.
Being a man of considerable ambition, Turnbull appears to have his manner directed at his Liberal Party parliamentary colleagues and that is perhaps understandable. Their impression of his leadership potential will be determined primarily by how they judge his performance on their stage and the initial judgment will surely be favourable. For a new Minister he has shown a solid grasp of the facts and figures relevant to his portfolio and there have been no silly slips and stumbles. The man’s confidence in himself has seemed well placed.
On the score of winning future votes for his party rather than himself the verdict is not so clear cut. The message is very much tailored to those cynics identified by the tabloid editor. "Self-inflicted restraint", he told the Parliament yesterday, "will have no effect at all on global warming unless it is matched by a similar reduction around the world." Australia would do what it could but there would be no futile gestures that made some people feel good while putting others out of work for no good reason.
That message, if repeated often enough, will appeal to the Howard battlers but it will be better heard when delivered in a quieter manner. It will be interesting to see how the Turnbull technique adapts to tonight’s debate on Kerry O'Brien’s ABC program.

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