THE JACKSON WELLS REPORT

Turnbull out on a limb for Henson

Benjamin Haslem

Federal Shadow Treasurer and leadership contender, Malcolm Turnbull, has gone out on a limb and criticised the police raids on Sydney's Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, where a number of pictures by Australian photographic artist Bill Henson were seized.

This runs counter to the PM Kevin Rudd and Turnbull's own leader, Brendan Nelson, who were quick to endorse the raids on the grounds the pictures contained semi-naked teenagers and were therefore child porn.

Leaving aside my own views on the raids, I don't think Rudd and Nelson had much choice. Condemn the raids and the political damage would be far greater for both than backing the police. Rudd has upset the arts community but they're unlikely to support the other side and Rudd would have been confident that Nelson would fall in line.

Showing leadership is one thing but choosing what many voters would consider weird art to stake your claim would be silly.

So what's Turnbull thinking? Is there a strategy behind his words? Is he, as a colleague suggested here at Jackson Wells, strengthening his credentials as a "true liberal".

Turnbull admits to owning two Henson photographs, which hang in his Sydney home. But they don't involve nudity; so he was free to criticise the pictures removed by police without copping the charge of hypocrisy.

This is high risk stuff by the former merchant banker. In 1993 then Labor PM, Paul Keating, made great play of then Opposition Leader John Hewson having a "Ferrari in the garage".

Turnbull risks painting himself as another rich elitist out of touch with common values.

On the other hand, is he trying to distinguish himself from Rudd (seen by some as Howard-light) and Nelson (who is finding it hard to define himself)?

Jackson Wells' Bob Lawrence on Spin Doctors Thursday

Benjamin Haslem

Jackson Wells' Account Director Bob Lawrence (left) is making one of his regular appearances on ABC Radio Sydney's Spin Doctors segment this Thursday at 9.15am (11.15pm Wednesday GMT). If you're in Sydney tune in on 702AM or you can stream it. The Spin Doctors panel analyses the week’s best and worst spin in the media.

Now it's Labor's turn to cop flak over PM's staff

Benjamin Haslem

What goes around comes around.

When the Howard Government was in power, one of the most anticipated sessions during Senate Estimates hearings was the grilling of bureaucrats from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Senators Robert Ray and John Faulkner turned on quite a show when quizzing hapless public servants about the PM's wine bill amongst other things. The aim was to paint Howard with his snout in the trough.

During my time in the Press Gallery, we'd crowd around TV sets to watch the show.

Well now it's Kevin Rudd's turn to feel the blow torch and it seems from today's performance in Canberra that Liberal Senator Michael Ronaldson has learned a great deal from watching the work of Ray and Faulkner.

From smh.com.au:

The opposition has accused Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of employing a butler to shine his shoes and put out his clothes in the morning while traveling...

"We've got this man who is travelling overseas with a butler or a valet or a footman or manservant, whatever it might be," he (Ronaldson) told a Senate estimates committee.

"If he puts out the ties and polishing shoes in the morning he's probably a valet. If he gets a cup of tea in the morning he's probably a butler, and if he carts the luggage around he's probably a footman.

The irony here is that the present Special Minister of State was responsible for defending the PM during today's hearings.

His name: Senator John Faulkner.

His response: the staff member was an executive assistant whose tasks included helping the prime minister with correspondence, invitations and travel arrangements.

RailCorp fails issues management 101

Benjamin Haslem

This from Sydney's Daily Telegraph:

(A) furious chef, who regularly travels on the Blue Mountains line, hijacked a media conference at Central to unleash his wrath on acting chief executive Rob Mason, who was attempting to quell fears RailCorp was putting people's lives at risk through poor services.

RailCorp's media minders failed to follow a golden rule of issues and crisis management.

Where ever it's possible, you should hold a media conference dealing with a crisis as far away from the crisis as possible.

A case in point (other than the Telegraph story above) was the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989.
Exxon handled its media relations from a site on the coast of Alaska. Here there were any number of angry fisherman, government officials and environmentalists to quote. The site was also incapable of handling the flood of journalists who arrived on the scene.

Anyone who travels on RailCorp's CityRail services in the morning peak knows it's in crisis. So holding a media conference anywhere on its network is fraught with danger.

Hat tip to Trevor Cook for this one.

Can't afford an alcopop, here's a cheap wine cask

Benjamin Haslem

As most Australian-based readers of this blog are aware, the recently-elected Rudd Labor government has increased the tax levied on alcopops or ready-to-drinks (RTDs) by a whopping 70 per cent. You know the ones, vodka mixed with what tastes like lemonade, so teeny boppers can get smashed quickly and cheaply.

The Government claims the measure is designed to combat binge drinking amongst teenagers and young adults. As a form of policy it doesn't get much cruder. And it's worth $3bn annually to the Government's budget bottom line.

A straw poll of one is meaningless but it is interesting to note that my local bottle shop, a chain store owned by the Woolworths supermarket juggernaut, has cleared a not insignificant amount of shelf space of reasonable quality wine bottles and stocked it with very cheap white wine casks.

Some space in the cooler section, alongside the RTDs, has also been filled with the el cheapo casks, which retail at $9.99 for four litres. Call me a wine snob but yuck!

When Rudd introduced the tax his critics immediately pointed out the obvious: the kids and young adults will simply buy a product that's less expensive but delivers the same result, inebriation.

Seems Woolies, like any business responding to anticipated shifts in demand, has obliged.

So what will those blue collar workers (the ones who abandoned the Howard Government for being out of touch and who love a premixed can of Bundie Rum and Cola after work) do for a drink?

The whinging well-off and their sense of entitlement

Benjamin Haslem

Further to my piece on Saturday about the Rudd Government's battle to sell its family payments changes, Sydney Morning Herald columnist Ross Gittins has an excellent piece this morning on the whinging well-off who have this bizarre sense of entitlement to government benefits.

The average earnings of adult full-time employees are now $60,000. So someone on $150,000 is pulling in 2½ times average. And you're asking the rest of us to feel sorry for you? You reckon the bottom 97 per cent of taxpayers should be paying you special benefits?

The carry-on we've seen from people pulling down a paltry $150,000 a year borders on the obscene when put beside the troubles of the people who really do have cause for complaint, single pensioners living it up on $270 a week. That's a bit over $14,000 a year - less than a 10th of what the well-off whingers are getting.

Wasn't welfare once for the poor?

Wayne Swan has been trying to make the point that households on $150,000-plus are doing alright thanks Jack but still the post-Baby Boomer generation (mainly Gen-X, to which I belong) stick out their greedy paws.

And not only am I a Gen Xer but my household income fits snuggly into the bracket Gittins writes about and I have a Sydney mortgage. Woe poor me!

The Liberal Party once held the notion of self-reliance as an article of faith. After 11 years in Government it's produced a bunch of well-off parents fighting for the teat. Labor is trying to ween them off.

Bob Brown's $1m bribe claim sus

Benjamin Haslem

This from this morning's Sydney Morning Herald:

THE Greens senator Bob Brown has said he was offered a $1 million bribe by a large media company eight years ago. He has used the incident as an illustration of why he believes the Federal Government's attempts to regulate lobbyists' activities do not go far enough.

Senator Brown would not say who had made the offer because he had received legal advice that disclosing the person's identity would lead to a defamation case that he would probably lose because it was one person's word against another's.

That's a strange response from a man who is acutely aware of the power of Parliament and the protections it affords Senators and MPs.

Why didn't Brown use Parliamentary privilege to name the person who offered the bribe? He could have told the Senate the person's name with 100% immunity from litigation.

Brown never ceases to call for full Parliamentary inquiries to get to the bottom of things or even as a foil to his political opponents. He knows how to work the system, so why not here?

Trevor Cook has made a similar observation.

Rudd, Swan failing to sell family payments changes

Benjamin Haslem

This is the first par on the lead story in this morning's Sydney Morning Herald:

MORE than 110,000 Sydney households concentrated in the city's north, north-west and key inner suburbs will be caught by the Federal Government's new $150,000 benchmark for identifying the undeserving rich.

It's wrong.

But the Herald is not alone on this. All week many media outlets have been running the line that all families earning more than $150,000 a year are going to lose family payments following changes outlined in Tuesday's Budget. They're not because they were never receiving them in the first place.

The problem for Wayne Swan is that the Family Payments system the Rudd Government inherited is ridiculously complicated.

What Swan announced on Tuesday night was that the family payment, Family Tax Benefit B, would for the first time, be means tested. As would the $5000 baby bonus.

Stick with me here. This is complicated.

There are two family tax benefits.

Family Tax Benefit A has always been means tested and you can bet your house most of those 110,000 families referred to in the SMH have always been excluded by that means test. That's because that payment is for two-income families and cuts out once a household income passes about $100,000. Obviously, too, most of those 110,000 households will not be in line for the baby bonus as they're not all pregnant! So they won't lose there either.

Family Tax Benefit B was established by the Howard Government to reward stay-at-home mums. The payment is available to families where the second income earner (usually mum) earns less than about $20,000 a year. The size of the principal earner's income was irrelevant. In other words a mum could stay at home or earn up to about $20,000 a year, be married to Bill Gates and receive welfare in the form of a Family Tax Benefit B payment.

Meanwhile, a family with two income earners each on about average salaries bringing home a combined $110,000 a year received NO family payment because they failed the Family Tax Benefit A means test. It was this unfairness that Rudd and Swan tackled on Tuesday night.

So all those households referred to by the Herald, with an income of over $150,000 and where the lower income earner brings home more than about $20,000 a year, are losing no family payments. That's because they weren't receiving any to start with.

And many will be better off (leaving aside the fact they're getting an income tax cut) because the child care rebate will be lifted from 30 per cent of out of pocket childcare fee expenses to 50 per cent and paid quarterly instead of annually. And the amount they can claim per child also rises. It's also not means tested, though the child care payment is (but let's not confuse you further!)

The Herald briefly explains this at the tail of this morning's story but you can bet most people think ALL families with an income of over $150,000 are losing family payments when they are not. And in fact many are better off.

As a former journalist who covered welfare in the Federal Press Gallery, I know how complicated this is. And the added difficulty for the reporter would be dealing with news desks and editors who just don't get it.

The lesson here is that trying to explain changes to a complicated system and then get it through numerous gatekeepers is difficult.

And once the media gets an idea in its collective head, it's very hard to shake.

I have no idea how the government tried to sell this but they should have thoroughly briefed the reporters before Tuesday's Budget lock up.

Press Gallery veteran, Sue Dunlevy, who covered welfare with me, was spot on last Thursday with the Daily Telegraph's splash on this. Sue reported that 40,000 familes nationally would be worse off. Compare this with the SMH's 110,000 figure for Sydney alone.