The Dead Roo

Johnny has gone and made another policy announcement on YouTube. You can see the vid here, or just read the transcript here.

My response to the first video was to describe it as “Lies Plain and Simple“. This second video is very different, in a very scary way.

It’s effective. I’ll explain why, over the fold.

Listen to the first line:

Recently there have been suggestions that Federal Government intervention in traditional areas of state responsibility is a power grab by Canberra.

It’s brilliant. It’s amazing. You’re thinking “he can’t say that, he’s not allowed to raise those suggestions straight off the bat”, but he’s gone and done it. He’s brought the big nasty doubt out into the open and attacked it head on.

It does three things.

It makes the rest of the video more compelling watching (in terms of watching John Howard anyway).

It conveys just the right amount of subtle sarcasm, “ooooo, a bit nasty power grab, ooo, aren’t we evil”, is what he’s really saying to the viewer.

Third and most importantly, it high-jacks the viewers gut response to seeing Howard on a screen.

Think about that very carefully. What would be your real gut reaction to this announcement? It would probably be something like, “One measly frigging hospital, big deal?! How on earth does that make up for the money you’ve slashed from public health over the past ten years you b-st-rd?!”

But now it isn’t. Now you’re not having that gut reaction critique of Howard’s message. Now when you go to throw something at the screen, it’s not because of the piecemeal nature of this announcement, or because of the hypocrisy of Howard announcing a dribble of health funding to one place when he’s slashed federal funding to health throughout his time in government. No, instead you’re throwing something at the screen because of his attack upon the basis of federalism.

Well you would be, if you gave a damn about federalism, and the polling shows, you probably don’t.

This video is amazing. In facing it head on, Howard is able to define what the criticism of this announcement will be about, and thus neuter it.

Update: On a lighter note, it seems the “video responses” box hasn’t been turned off this time (did someone screw up?), so naturally I took the oppurtunity to post this:

Further Update: More blog reactions to the video at Larvatus Prodeo, Catallaxy and Surfdom. .

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