2024-03-04
Effective communication of Greens ideas and polices is something that even the most experienced among us can keep improving. It requires being true to your own voice while applying well-established principles such as using stories, adapting the message to your audience and being as concise as possible – and it also helps to ensure you get your facts right.
By Rob Delves, a member of the Fremantle-Tangney Greens Regional Group and a co-editor of Green Issue
For over 20 years now, I’ve been trying to find the most effective ways of communicating Greens policies, values and practices, both in conversation (mainly doorknocking) and writing (mainly letters to newspapers – social media baffles me). I’m very aware that I’m still learning how to do this well. In fact, anyone who thinks they have nothing more to learn about making communication better is seriously deluded.
What works? During my 20+ Green years, a recognition of the importance of stories has become stronger in The Greens thinking about effective communication. Amen to that. A related point I’d highlight is finding your own voice, so that what you say and write rings true to you. A third big communications idea we all agree on is making sure we get the facts right, backed up by the best evidence available – probably too obvious really, but it becomes painfully true in the breach, as the consequences of getting it wrong can distract from, maybe even destroy, all the other good aspects of any communication. The fourth obvious one is to adapt/slant the language and style to your audience. The Greens policies on climate change would be crafted differently to a reasonably well-off academic audience than it would when a door is opened by a young parent who is obviously struggling to pay the rent and other bills.
So much for the Big Four. What else?
Be concise is high on my list. The first thing I do after a first draft is ruthlessly try to prune everything that doesn’t add to the impact of the writing. Sometimes I go the other way and ask whether one or two bits would impact better if expanded – but I find that’s only true on occasions. I think the “Be (very) Concise” truth has been hammered into me by decades of trying to keep 25-30 teenage students attentive, focused and interested in what I’m saying – an often painful learning curve.
Make it as lively, entertaining, challenging as possible – a decent dose of humour or cheekiness goes a long way. Finally, I’d throw in the value of embedding the message into the commonsense of our culture, the things that Australians have a gut feeling are fair and decent and right. This sort of brings us back to stories, like Gallipoli for example. The conservatives have twisted that one to their warmongering ends. I like to remind people that the overwhelming message of nearly all those who returned from those horror battlefields was “Never Again.” Perhaps a better example would be to use the story of the Good Samaritan as the starting point for a conversation about fair treatment of asylum seekers.
I’d like to share two recent letters I sent to, and were published in, newspapers that I (desperately) hope illustrate some of the above.
1. CLIMATE CRISIS AND RIGHT TO PROTEST: Letter to The West Australian, 7 December 2023
The Background:
Over the last few years we’ve witnessed increasing attempts to attack and silence everyone who protests against fossil fuel industries, especially those using more edgy, disruptive, confronting forms of protest. The West Australian has been one of the worst media outlets in its relentless one-sided demonising of protest actions. I wrote this letter to challenge the newspaper’s scornful report on what I regarded as a brilliantly dramatic eye-popping anti-Woodside protest by Greenpeace campaigners. I tried to make the letter as cheeky and playful as I thought I could get away with – and still be published.
The Letter:
My heart usually skips with joy at least once during the daily reading of The West. Page 7 of Wednesday’s edition was another heart-warmer: a photo of two huge Woodside signs atop tall buildings accompanied by the bold headline “Height of Stupidity.” Perfect juxtaposition of headline and photo.
For several years now, the world’s climate scientists have been united in warning that there must be no new or expanded fossil fuel projects anywhere. So they would say that “Stupidity” is an understatement. Very true, but the understatement was enough to give me joy – surely no responsible corporation deliberately does stupid things.
But wait, my gleeful heart – read beyond the headline and the stupidity being described wasn’t Woodside’s orgy of planetary destruction! Rather it was slamming the dramatic unfurling of a long “Stop Woodside’ banner from a crane by Greenpeace protesters.
And they were arrested. Presumably the charge is embarrassing a corporation that has captured our government. Here we go again – who are the real criminals here?
The story ends with the supposedly wise words of Deputy Premier Rita Saffioti: “I don’t think normal people would agree with what they did.” Yeah sure – unless you think that every scientist on our overheating planet is a deluded abnormal human.
2. HOUSING CRISIS: Letter to The Fremantle Herald, 24 February 2024
The Background:
Our local independent weekly The Fremantle-Cockburn-Melville Herald has a regular column by Hayden Groves of REIWA embedded in its Herald at Home ̶ aka Real Estate Adverts section. To put it mildly, he’s not a fan of The Greens championing of renters’ rights – in fact he finds it difficult to let a week go by without letting rip with an anti-Greens sentence or two.
This particular week, as well as being astonished that “the main supplier of rental homes – family investors… are actively vilified by The Greens,” he went on to spruik the wonders of Negative Gearing, then offered 10 ways to fix the rental crisis. Rounding out the list was “Keep current tax settings for negative gearing and capital gains tax.” I thought I’d have a go at defending renters – and my beloved party. I held back a little bit, as I thought maybe The Herald doesn’t welcome criticism of an advertiser paid column, especially in these financially troubling times for local papers.
The Letter:
In “10 Ways to Fix Rental Crisis” (The Herald, February 17, page 15) Hayden Groves of REIWA argues that negative gearing is the best thing since sliced bread and that The Greens are misguided to think otherwise. However, I think negative gearing is a very contested space. His 10 Ways to help tenants make some sense, but are so full of words like ‘examine, coordinate, develop incentives’ that I’m not sure they’d come to much.
I’d like to offer an alternative 10 Ways to help tenants:
1. Ban rent bidding.
2. Enact decent minimum health and safety standards for rental properties.
3. Allow tenants to have pets (even encourage them).
4. Tenants should have a legal right to make modifications, such as garden landscaping and putting up pictures.
5. Longer and more secure tenure (e.g. strong restrictions on “no-grounds evictions”).
6. Restrict annual rent rises to cost of living plus10% (as in the ACT).
7. Only allow negative gearing on new homes and one per landlord (currently 80% of negatively geared properties are on existing houses, so do little to increase supply and lots to drive up house prices).
8. End the 50% Capital Gains Discount, as it only encourages speculative housing investment.
9. The approx. $22 billion annual savings from scrapping these two tax dodges should be used by the government to build 550,000 low-cost housing units in the next ten years (estimate from the Centre for Equitable Housing).
10. Remind MPs that housing policy should aim to provide a decent affordable home for everyone – rather than exaggerated wealth-creation opportunities for the already wealthy.
These are fair, sensible, evidence-based and happen in stacks of other countries – which is why The Greens have them.
Header photo: Credit: Powtoon
[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]