Tony Abbott: mistaking the crowd for the audience

On the day before Tuesday’s health debate I was giving media training to a client. Tony Abbott should have been there.

“Remember who your audience is,” the client was told. “There’s a huge difference between talking to A Current Affair and talking to the 7.30 Report.”

Abbott thought his audience was the political insiders being wined and dined at the National Press Club. His knee-raised, arms-splayed, loud-laughing, bad-joking, interjecting persona might have raised a cheer from the Liberal faithful in the room but that’s not who his real audience was. If you are talking to Tracey Grimshaw or Kerry O’Brien then you had better understand that while they are conducting the interview you are really giving answers to the hundreds of thousands of viewers out there.

Abbott forgot that and came across to the wider public as aggressive, undisciplined and (whisper it quiet) almost Lathamesque.

Our client was also told never to trash an opposition brand. He could say his product is better, faster, more efficient than other brands but he should never resort to saying another brand was no good and he should never ever ever attack another brand on a personal level.

Abbott had a duty to attack the government’s health plan, and because he has decided not to release the Coalition health plan until closer to the election it was difficult to attack in a constructive way by comparing it unfavourably to his own product. Yet he broke the golden rule when he went after Kevin Rudd on a personal level. Perhaps he was looking for the nightly news grab, but once again he misunderstood his audience.

Making jokes about Rudd being a boring speaker might be all well and good in Parliament – or at the National Press Club during a normal presentation – but personal attacks just don’t fly with anyone except the rapid supporters.

When Mark Latham spoke before the 2004 election of the Howard government being a “conga line of suckholes” Labor stalwarts cheered because he was “giving it” to the Coalition. Undecided voters – the ones he had to impress – wondered whether he had the gravitas to be Prime Minister. A couple of months later they decided, and Latham was no longer.

The Australian public want their leaders to be respectful. They have got to be able to envisage them at important occasions, see them at the White House or a world leader’s forum.  They want them to fight, but by the rules of good behaviour.

The same is true of leading brands. We want them to be respectable, we want to be able to display them on important occasions and we want them to spruik their wares in an engaging, innovative and positive manner.

The guy I was training now understands that. Tony Abbott still needs to.