Rudd recovers his TV mojo, but appearance ain't reality

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This was published 12 years ago

Rudd recovers his TV mojo, but appearance ain't reality

By Shaun Carney

IN LATE 2009, The Age moved to a new building that straddles the rail lines leading to Southern Cross Station. It's everything a modern media office should be, with lots of windows that keep reminding those inside that there's a world with real people just outside, and good coffee at a ground-floor cafe that is open to the public. Again, shockingly, journalists sometimes find themselves rubbing shoulders with … members of the public!

Next to my desk is a ''media wall'' with eight large-screen televisions tuned to different stations. It can be distracting and mesmerising as the news channels play and then replay their bulletins, and discuss and dissect each piece of political minutiae in their panel shows - hour after hour after hour. Very little happens in national politics now that isn't pored over and subjected to a back and forth. Journalists take part, as do politicians. Some politicians are regarded as better ''talent'' - that is, visually attractive or personable or articulate or provocative - than others.

As the media beast gets hungrier, it needs more and more fresh talent in terms of material and personalities. One of the trailblazers in this expansion of political news was Kevin Rudd. When Rudd was Labor's foreign affairs spokesman in 2003, he started doing a regular segment on the Seven network's Sunrise program with the Liberals' Joe Hockey.

Rudd and Hockey both prospered politically partly thanks to the segment, which ran all the way until early 2007, a few months after Rudd became Labor leader. Around the same time in 2007, as the Coalition government found itself beset by public antagonism over WorkChoices, John Howard gave the workplace relations ministry to Hockey in order to capitalise on his friendlier public image developed on Sunrise.

The Sunrise gig was a gift for Rudd, who could have been typecast as a narrow, limited foreign affairs geek if he had not been the given the opportunity to show his sense of humour, his breadth of knowledge and what passes for, in our highly combative political system, his reasonableness.

Rudd has years of experience at deploying the appealing parts of his personality in front of a camera. At a certain point in his prime ministership, around the start of last year, Rudd misplaced his ability to perform on TV. He started off 2010 with a cranky performance before a studio audience of young Australians on the ABC's Q&A - an especially bizarre effort in light of his extensive experience with the free-and-easy Sunrise - and seemed determined to pump out streams of unmitigated waffle in subsequent television interviews.

Having lost his televisual mojo, he lost the confidence of the voting public and a big majority of his caucus colleagues. The politician who only a few years earlier had appeared to fully comprehend the sensibilities and requirements of the modern, personality-based media looked spectacularly out of place.

But nine months after losing the Labor leadership, Rudd has relocated his TV mojo. On last Monday's Q&A, Rudd was relaxed and absolutely loving the attention. Like a good dinner party guest, he took everything in his stride, kept his temper, disclosed a few bits of government info entre nous with a smile, and looked as if he had the world on a string.

TV Kevin is back. It's worth noting at this point that TV Kevin is not the same as Kevin in the same way that TV Joe is not Joe. There is a way to present on TV, but it's not the full picture of the subject, either as a person or as a politician. That's not to say that we shouldn't see the television version of a politician - we should - but it's not necessarily a complete guide to how that politician will discharge their duties.

Rudd is a demonstration of that. For his first three years as leader, from the end of 2006 to late 2009, he could barely put a foot wrong in terms of public support. Because he had an image that was part daggy nerd, part policy wonk, part smartest kid in the class, he seemed believable.

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Sure, he over-promised and some things had gone wrong, but he still looked in command. The truth was, his prime ministership was in many respects a house of cards. Behind the media facade, Rudd had set out an agenda that was so extensive and so wide-ranging that only the most efficient and focused administrator could have hoped to implement it effectively.

And Rudd was not a good administrator. He micro-managed, he lost focus, he did not manage staff well, he offended many of his most senior colleagues in the cabinet with a high-handed manner, he did not look after himself by getting enough rest. He also was obsessed with maintaining a big and constant media presence. Having hitched his star to the news-and-entertainment mix of Sunrise and having benefited mightily as a result, he became addicted to having his image and his statements and his activities available for the round-the-clock media cycle.

The actual business of government became very hard to define. Was it the creation and implementation of policy, or was it merely the announcement of a policy? How did it play in the media? That became the crucial metric from Rudd's viewpoint as prime minister, most acutely and damagingly borne out by his daily visits to hospitals around the country last April to publicise his health funding deal. The television pictures were all that mattered, but they contained empty, predictable images; they conveyed nothing except, implicitly, the then-prime minister's obsession with managing his public appearances through the media.

The line between appearance and reality started to blur. There was a real prime minister and a real government, and there was a media version. Eventually, through the autumn and early winter of 2010, the public worked out which was real and which was illusory, and judged Rudd accordingly.

This is worth recalling when reviewing Rudd's performance on Q&A this week. More than a few Labor supporters and swinging voters described him, on talkback and on media websites, as ''prime ministerial'' - articulate, commanding and self-assured. What they meant was that for an hour on Monday night he looked like he used to look in the media when he was prime minister. Until, a year ago, he stopped looking like that and public confidence in his leadership evaporated.

There's considerably more reportage, analysis, discussion and commentary around politics in today's media. Of course, this column is part of that. More politicians can be found in the media, in serious interviews and in the hybrid public meeting-interview format of Q&A. Some, like Rudd, mostly know how to do it well. Some don't.

And yet, with all that extra exposure, it would be hard to find many Australians who think that political debate or political leadership is getting better. Most say it's much, much worse.

Shaun Carney is associate editor.

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