One of the key characteristics of constitutional structures which divide responsibilities and funding sources is an enormous capacity to shift costs and political blame for unpopular decisions.

In Australia the Abbott Governments Commission of Audit is allegedly going to address these issues although one suspects the outcome will be a series of ideologically-driven recommendations masquerading as efficiency proposals which will cut back government services while preserving subsidies for business and industry. read more

The blog is taking a break and hopes its readers have a nice one too. In the meantime – some odds and sods to go on with until the New Year.

The joys of Yiddish

One of the blog’s favourite reference books is Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish. The book is part dictionary, part encyclopaedia, part compendium of great Jewish jokes and part cultural anthropology. read more

Regular readers will be familiar with the blog’s posts about the problems of replicability in social psychology research and the warnings by Nobel Laureate,Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow) that the field had to get its act together or experience a train wreck.

For communicators the social psychology research on how people make choices, how they think and what motivates them, has probably been the most profound insight into how to frame communications in many years. For social marketers in particular the work has provided a new foundation for campaigns which hopefully will replace the crude, and largely ineffectual, programs run by so many governments in the past at the urgings of the health thought police. read more

As a good Catholic Tony Abbott probably doesn’t think too much of the Reformation but  reading a recent chapter in a forthcoming book made the blog think about some similarities between the Abbott Government’s first months and the Church’s response to the Protestant revolution.

The chapter is Power, control and religious language: Latin and vernacular contests in the Christian Medieval and Reformation periods. It’s written by Professor Peter Horsfield (a friend from RMIT) and will appear in the forthcoming Religion, media and social change (Routledge) edited by Kenneth Granholm, Marcus Moberg and Sofia Sjo. Peter’s chapter is about “Language (as) a fundamental component of communication and therefore a fundamental component of in the formation of individual and social identities, the shape of social knowledge, the functioning of social relationships and the constructions and contests of social power.” read more

These days if your revolution has failed to get out of the cafes where you have plotted with your comrades; your cause has failed to prosper; or your political party has just lost, the next best thing to blaming the media or the forces of reaction is to blame the PR industry

The blog has experienced a few of these but has, probably unsurprisingly, never blamed the PR industry for the failures. Yet increasingly a number of PR academics and practitioners are becoming the leaders in analysing how PR is used as either an activist or repressive tool. read more

The recent tweets about Indonesia by Liberal pollster, Mark Textor, say quite a lot about the current internal culture of political parties and highlight much of interest about public policy in Ross Garnaut’s new book Dog Days: Australia After the Boom.

For those few who may not have seen it Textor tweeted “Apology demanded from Australia by a bloke who looks like a 1970s Pilipino (sic) porn star and has ethics to match.” Textor also threw in some comments about Fairfax media being involved in ‘appeasement’ consistent with the News Corp and Liberal belief that the problem is not the spying but the fact that the media disclosed it. read more

At a recent function the blog attended one of the speakers said change was made difficult in Australia because of lack of political leadership – the absence of ‘conviction, courage and communication.’ The function was conducted under Chatham House rules so we can’t say who said what but the speakers were focussing on things Australia needed to do in the future. read more

The problem with irony is that if it is sufficiently dead pan, and readers are sufficiently literally-minded, the irony can get lost.

Some 20 years ago the blog wrote an article for IPRA Review (1993 16 (3)) asking whether PR was the first post-modern profession. At the time the blog had been reading a lot of Umberto Eco, not just the novels but also the semiotics work and his collection of essays Faith in Fakes. The latter basically focussed on how in a post-modern world for many people the fake was more real than the real. Eco also talked a lot about how perceptions shaped reality. read more

If there is one really significant thing about the health thought police it is that they are predictable. Whatever the issue – obesity, alcohol abuse, road safety etc etc – the same old answers of taxes, regulation and anything other than personal responsibility are inevitably trotted out. read more