. . . as Dutton’s Mews Muse (probably)

Sir Roger has it on authority from multiple sources that the “Dead Cat on the Table” ploy, most recently fed to and trotted out by Peter Dutton, is the signature work of one Lynton Crosby. Goebbels was also a master propagandist.

What?

Sir Roger is in no way suggesting that Crosby is comparable to or correlated with the Nazi regime. On the contrary, just as Barnaby did with the boats and the beef, Sir Roger just mentioned two things side by side. How dare you suggest that Barnie was throwing a long-dead and rancid cat on the table, or that Lynton Crosby is just as putrid! How very dare you!

ICYMI, what is a “dead cat”?

According to The Spectator :

“ When,  Crosby says,  you are in a hole or faced with the tricky task of diverting attention away from some unwanted piece of news you should throw a dead cat onto the table. Hey presto! No-one is talking about the bad news; everyone is talking about the dead cat on the table.

Lynton Crosby – sorry, SIR Lynton Crosby (knighted for confusing the British electorate into voting for the wrong set of poncing fools last year) – it is said SIR Lynton Crosby has, as his favourite method of tricking the voting public into voting for the wrong team, the above-mentioned Dead Cat Ploy.

The function of this skullduggery is to cause everyone — including especially the media — to talk about the one thing the party has going for it. The media of course lap it up and blow it up and smear it over everything they own because there are now too few journalists, they are overworked and overwhelmed and they are desperate for an easy story  (“what are they saying on twitter?”). And so it becomes the Big Story of the Day, or the week, it reinforces the one issue that does well in the party’s focus groups and turns the media gaze away from issues where the other side polls better.

It is also used to divert attention (and conversation) away from damaging embarrassments.

And what would they not want people talking about?

Well, almost everything. The budget, last year’s budget, the one before that. Malcolm Mansion’s incompetent mismanagement of the NBN, health, education, pensions, unemployment, the economy, growth, unemployment. The “Innovative Society” needed to be hidden after the NBN raid because that just reinforces that if Malcolm is so incompetent that he can’t make the cheap and nasty version cost heaps less than the expensive shiny one then he’s got no chance of pulling off an innovation of any kind.

Then there’s:

• superannuation
• tax cuts (except for the rich)
• tax increases
• the climate
• the environment
• fracking
• burning rivers
• subsidies to polluters
• orphan industries
• new coal mines
• the Great Barrier Reef and coral bleaching

. . . to name just a few.

The list of topics they’d rather we didn’t have a close look at includes just about everything – oh, except the Tony Abbott obsession with keeping the brown-skinned people away from our pristine White Australia.

Lynty-baby certainly has his work cut out.

Anyway, Sir Roger hopes that Sir Crosby will be as effective in this election as he was in the recent Canadian election, where his client collapsed in a landslide.

The problem is that the Dead Cat ploy is not a surprise anymore.

The media are onto it like a shark smelling blood at a dog show and are beginning to cover the campaigner and not the issues. More and more people are talking about the sliminess of the liberal party’s campaign strategy and campaign strategist and despising them for trying to play them for fools, or more importantly, trusting them even less than before if that is possible.

The propagandist is in the spotlight when he’s supposed to be invisible, and the ‘valiant hero of the East’, or at least the Eastern Suburbs, is the one who’s supposed to be bathed in the limelight.