Last weekend, some readers will no doubt have tuned into Channel Seven’s landmark Minding Your Money: An Audience with the Prime Minister program which was televised on Sunday evening. Hosted by David Koch, the program featured Prime Minister Kevin Rudd fielding questions from a studio audience on Australia’s standing in the global financial crisis. For those that missed the program, it can be viewed on the Yahoo7 site here.
From all reports, the Prime Minister went down a treat with the studio audience, who reportedly were drafted in from the Sunrise email newsletter subscriber base. Watching the program, I certainly felt that Rudd did a damned good job of making clear his position on the issues raised by audience members, as well as conveying a sense of warmth and pathos. One could never have imagined John Howard fronting up like this, to a television studio audience in an impromptu fashion. With respect to the government’s relationship with the media, the former Howard Government was probably quite happy to keep doing things the way they had been done for the last few decades, with a couple of honourable exceptions.
Of course, “stunts” like this one will also attract cynicism from some quarters, and to be fair, that’s probably a good thing. I am quite sure that some viewers, when confronted with their Prime Minister lecturing them in an ad hoc fashion on national television, moved swiftly to issue an abusive remark and change the channel. Without necessarily being critical, there is the scent of something Orwellian in Rudd’s decision to participate in the program. The relationship between government and the media is arguably entering a new phase, whereby politicians with the requisite gall and self-confidence (some would say, arrogance?) can push themselves into previously unchartered openings in the infotainment landscape. When the Prime Minister offers himself up as a television host, as he effectively did last Sunday night, should we be concerned or appreciative that the government is launching itself into the infotainment sphere? Or both?
For my money, I think the endeavour offers some promise. At half an hour, including commercials and David Koch interludes, it was a bit saccharine for my tastes, but I think with some changes in the format, it could really fly. I would actually like to see senior members from the Federal Government or Opposition face up to scrutiny from a studio audience for an hour, once a week. We all know that parliament itself has declined in value as a house of debate in recent years, and the scrutiny of politicians in press conferences is at arms length from the majority of the population, twisted and mangled as it is into tidy packages for the nightly network news programs. Why not usher in a new, more direct breed of political debate into our living rooms?
Politics in itself can’t effectively compete with entertainment when it comes to holding people’s interest in the short-term, but maybe political infotainment can. In an age where hedonism is king and political apathy is of considerable concern for our democracy, why shouldn’t political parties be seizing every avenue they can for engaging people in debate about the big issues of the day?
