The City of Port Phillip provides a never-ending series of case studies of how not to undertake communications and/or community consultation.

Regular readers will remember how the Council created a new benchmark in issues management – failing to convince residents that action had to be taken on soil contamination in a local park. In all the blog’s decades in the issues management field it had never experienced a situation in which the usual proponents and opponents positions were completely reversed. read more

One of the most profound insights into everything from politics to the stock market is J.K.Galbraith’s observation that the conventional wisdom is always wrong.

The ongoing relevance, and power, of the aphorism was on display  over the weekend with the South Australian election and the Batman by-election. For a week we were told by the media that  the SA election would result in a hung Parliament and the Greens would win in Batman thanks to strong votes in the southern part of the electorate. read more

While the public relations industry has a much better record on gender diversity, and penetrating glass ceilings, than many other industries the situation is still complicated.

It was often thought that female PR practitioners didn’t confront the glass ceilings that women in other industries did and that pay parity was common. Back in 2014 the blog reported on US and UK research which indicated that women were a majority of PR practitioners but they were not predominant in C-suite roles – except in many consultancies – and that salary levels were still not equitable. The blog suspects that the C-suite role and salary situations are still the same in large private sector companies and organisations although not the case in politics (well at least among ALP staffers) or the public sector. read more

The Age recently carried an op ed by a Visiting Professor at UTS, Mitchell Landrigan, suggesting we need to be careful about granting honorary doctorates and claiming that recipients “may – forever more – call themselves Doctor.”

Up to a point Lord Copper and Professor Landrigan. In fact the custom is that a recipient should not refer to themselves as Dr, any more than an Adjunct Professor should refer to themselves as Professor, unless within the university or on university business, for example, speaking as an expert associated with the university. The awards can obviously be listed in CVs but not beyond that. The reaction to a former Canberra Department Head, Jane Halton, apparently using the Professor title is an example of how this rule has been interpreted. read more

President Trump has said that if had been at the school, whether he had a gun or not, he would have rushed in to tackle the gunman.

Just like he rushed into the US Army to fight in the Vietnam War!

While the mindless bleatings of many businessmen and women about the benefits their faith-based mantras will bring to humanity are as persistent as their mindless bleatings about how some change or other to business regulation will be disastrous for the world there are some signs of existential angst amongst the business boys and girls. read more

The most common error in developing communication strategies is to confuse tactics with strategy – an error that PR students learn to avoid while highly-paid political advisers have ensured the error is endemic in contemporary politics.

Indeed, you can easily see the problem on any given day in Australian politics. While political campaigning is supposedly becoming more professional – and has become so in areas such as data mining and target market identification – the day to day hurly burly of politics is so awful in communication terms that it is hardly surprising that people look at Parliament and politicians with contempt and that the annual Edelman Trust Barometer rates Australia at 21st place (out of 28 and just 4% ahead of Russia) for trust in institutions. As veteran journalist Mungo McCallum, says: “Australian government has in recent years, become debased – opportunist, secretive, poll-driven, fixated on short term political gain and unwilling to engage in serious issues when (as is always) they interfere with its internal wranglings. It has been depressing and demoralising, and the public has responded by branding our parliamentarians a bunch of untrustworthy go-getters, obsessed with their own well-being rather than the public good.” (John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations 8 February 2018) read more

Watching a recent London National Theatre Australian performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time the blog was struck by the shock and stillness of Christopher, the main character, when he is told Sherlock Holmes is not real.

Now for those who haven’t seen the play, or read Mark Haddon’s book, you need to know that Christopher appears to readers and theatre audiences to suffer from Asperger’s even though Haddon is adamant that the book is not about Asperger’s, high functioning autism or savant syndrome but about ‘difference’. But when the blog saw the play’s Holmes scene it reminded it of a similar view of Sherlock Holmes in a recently posthumously-published book, Chronicles of a Liquid Society. That book was written by one of the blog’s favourite writers, Umberto Eco, who profoundly influenced the blog’s approach to PR. read more

What do one of Australia’s leading social researchers, the former British Chief Rabbi, a US philanthropic organisation, Adam Smith and David Hume have in common?

All are concerned about how societies live together and the glue that creates communities which Hugh Mackay, the researcher, says “nurture, sustain and protect us”. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, in a TED talk, quotes Thomas Paine’s words about times which “try men’s souls” and says “they’re trying ours now.” Adam Smith devotes the first chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments to ‘sympathy’ or what we call empathy. Daniel Lubetzky, founder of the KIND Foundation has launched a program, Empatico, which is developing an online learning tool that “will connect students across the globe….(and give them the chance) to explore their similarities and differences, expand their horizons and strengthen their empathy muscles.” David Hume wrote that “whatever other passions we may be actuated by …the soul or animating principle of all of them is sympathy.” read more

Trump’s hero Andrew Jackson

Reading Ron Chernov’s terrific biography of General Ulysses Grant the blog learnt a lot about the Southern terrorism which ensured that the South won the peace even though it lost the Civil War. The blog also found out how some southerners, such as General James Longstreet, fought hard to make Reconstruction work. read more