It started out somewhat awkwardly with speedos, but, as opposition leader, Tony Abbott was a consummate media performer. In the lead up to the 2013 Federal election, he would stand on the factory floor in the signature orange vest and deliver the Liberal party’s narrative to the people of Australia without faltering.



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At the heart of his story was the Coalition’s renaming of the Clean Energy Act introduced by the Greens and the Gillard Government in 2011 as the “carbon tax” – giving us the now-famous “axe the tax” slogan. The story was well crafted, the messaging was tight, it had villains in Julia “Juliar” Gillard and the Greens, a hero in Abbott, and it was delivered with precision.

Today we see something different, a far less coherent and persuasive Abbott. Having destroyed the government from opposition, Abbott now provokes one crisis after another. It’s a sure bet that the response to these self-generated crises will be poorly considered, careless, and delivered with aggression and anxiety. The contrast between then and now couldn’t be more marked.

Why this shift occurred has been the subject of much analysis, with some excited by the prospect of blaming Peta Credlin. The crucial detail missing is that the Liberal party’s 2013 election victory was the work of external strategists heavily invested in the control of public discourse – and that those strategists are no longer in charge.

The architects of Liberal party communications on topics like global warming and refugees are the pollsters Crosby and Textor. Since Howard, they have deployed long-term strategies, spanning election campaign cycles, to shape how we think and feel about society.

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At the heart of the carbon tax strategy was a plan to seize control of the national debate on global warming. It is likely this plan was pitched to the Liberal leadership immediately following the election loss in 2010, with the deployment of the strategy highly visible in Abbott’s media shortly after.

Prior to this, at the time Abbott took over the leadership of the Liberal party, the national discourse on global warming was already tipping in favour of the denial industry. Climate science was being used as a device by conservative political parties and big polluters around the globe to drag the debate about global warming away from the topic of big polluters

The Liberals’ carbon tax strategy was a more advanced iteration of this global tactic. They exploited the tendency of the clean energy or “climate” movement to frame communications in terms of “carbon”, “emissions” and “moral challenges” – words that don’t tell a story and mean very little to most people outside the movement.

The idea of Bjørn Lomborg’s “Big Polluter Consensus Centre”, suggested to the University of Western Australia by the federal government, is the most recent iteration of that strategy. Lomborg, like the Liberals these days, doesn’t engage in “global warming isn’t happening” style denial.

The angle is a more subtle one: “let’s not be faddish, the world is full of problems, we must consider the costs of dealing with them”. Lomborg’s approach has much in common with the strategies of big polluters, and of the Coalition.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The angle is a more subtle one: “let’s not be faddish, the world is full of problems, we must consider the costs of dealing with them”.’ Pictured: Bjørn Lomborg. Photograph: EPA

First of all, disguise the problem and the villain. Do this by making sure the “climate” narrative isn’t about big polluters making money poisoning air, water, and soil. Then ignore the solution: the fact clean energy is already empowering the world’s poor through locally controlled solar and wind electricity – no coal required.



Crucial to this plan is getting the “climate” movement tangled in talking about the science of “climate” change, policy details of “climate” action, and now Lomborg’s cost-benefit analysis angle. It’s one very round climate circle.

The result is the story about the big polluters, and the solution story about clean energy, get buried in bureaucratic climate talk. The public are left with the story about the costs.

This is something I’ve learned after many years of running focus groups on topics like big polluters, clean energy and global warming: the word “carbon” is something most people can make neither head nor tail of. It confuses the hell out of them.

When you combine “carbon” with a bunch of other terms like “emissions”, “parts per million” and “sequestration”, it means even less to the average soft voter in your focus group.

“Tax” on the other hand, is something that is easily understood. The fact that these same focus groups will tell you that clean energy is an easy sell tells us just how canny the Liberal strategy was.

Every time the words “carbon tax” came out of Abbott’s mouth, he was delivering on this strategy to steer debate away from the inconvenient truth about Australia’s huge coal industry – and the plans of both the Liberals and Labor to expand it and export even more pollution, driving global warming.

What was most striking about this strategy was how the Liberals managed to execute it without any effective opposition. Most of the parliament, the media and society bought into the language of “carbon” and “carbon tax”, letting the Liberals frame the debate.

The Labor party are technocratic in their communications and missed the point about “carbon”, language and contesting the narrative. Where the “tax” part of the narrative was concerned, it was as if the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the clean energy target (RET) did not exist. There was no fight on the terrain of narrative. Labor capitulated and embraced the framing of the Clean Energy legislation as a “tax”.

One explanation for why so many other people were wrong-footed by the Liberal plan is that progressive Australia has only recently adopted more contemporary techniques in narrative and language analysis.

The Liberals are at least a decade ahead of the rest of the country in the use of these techniques of persuasion. From Tampa and “queue-jumping” onwards, the Liberals have based their marginal seats strategy around systematic approaches to controlling language and the public narrative.

People might dismiss what they’re hearing as nothing more than three-word slogans, but the apparatus is more sophisticated than that.

The success of the carbon tax strategy appears to have emboldened Abbott and his pals, and goes some way to explaining the cockiness of this government upon arrival in office. But, crucially, it was political consultants – not Liberal party staffers – who designed the narrative strategies that won Abbott the election.

There is a big difference between the way that strategists and staffers operate. One of the consequences of this is that there’s often a disconnect between what a party says during a campaign and what they say in office. Campaigns also tend to be more coherent.

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One explanation for this disconnect is that the money comes from different places and is used to hire different staff who use different techniques. Election campaigns are about the big story, framed by pollsters hired by the party. Parliamentary political staffers are taxpayer-funded and focused on the media cycle. The cultures are different and often not in sync.

One of the secrets to Howard’s success was that there was no such disconnect. The Liberal party coffers stretched between elections and so did the plan. The line from the prime minister to the pollsters was always open. With the Rudd and Gillard governments there was no line. And it appears that, for Abbott, the line has likewise been closed.

To be sure, Abbott and Credlin did a great tactical job delivering the election strategy, but with the British election in full swing, it appears the pollsters are no longer running the show. And after his big win on climate change, Abbott looks lost without them.