By Peter Chen Mon 19 Aug 2013
Photo: Tony Abbott came under fire for listing 'sex appeal' while spruiking Liberal candidate Fiona Scott's election credentials. (AAP: Dean Lewins)
While some public gaffes on the campaign trail may reveal hidden truths about our politicians, many can simply be attributed to tripping over words, exhaustion, or distraction. The important thing is to be able to distinguish one from the other, writes Peter Chen.
The beginning of the formal election period hasn't been a policy-free zone, but if you looked at the headlines you'd hardly know it.
From Rudd dropping the "f-bomb" (Ford in a Holden plant; apparently akin to washing your feet in a church's font) to #sexappeal hitting Twitter's top-trending terms mid-week, media old and new are having a lot of fun with our hapless leaders' missteps.
This is interesting because the search for novelty stories about campaign stuff-ups are normally more a feature of the mid-election ratings slump than something we see from the get go. If this keeps on we'll be left with those terrible election "best of" compilation stories at the start of week three. God knows what we'll see come September 7 now the pop stars and talent show judges have already been wheeled out to interrogate the leaders.
It's estimated that we make about one verbal error in every 1,000 words spoken. It's therefore a no-brainer that in an election campaign where politicians are talking constantly and everything they say is being recorded, some boo-boo is likely to slip out. Gaffe stories are therefore the stocking fillers of the journalistic world. Easier than low-hanging fruit, because if you sit around long enough one will land on your lap.
But verbal mistakes are more than just fodder for bored journalists being shuttled from one high-visibility vest-wearing event to another, they can have real and important impacts on the way we see leadership figures and engage with the election and its issues.
Some of the immediate impacts of a focus on gaffes are negative. Their tactical use lies in shaping the media agenda. They can allow campaign spin doctors to spoil coverage of opponents' well-planned media events. Through feeding good one-liners to journalists and seeding memes via social media networks, key messages of the day can get lost in a stream of collective raspberries. It's a pretty cheap way of reducing the impact of resource-intensive political theatre to farce. Once an event is reduced to an embarrassing faux pas, it's very hard to re-stage them and get the same coverage.
Who now can remember the purpose of Abbott's speech where he let slip the infinitely photoshoppable line "the suppository of all wisdom"? Significantly, he was launching Michael Sukkar's campaign, a local Victorian candidate. Sukkar's seat of Deakin is currently held by the ALP, but is one the Liberals could pick up with some concerted campaigning, explaining why Abbott was there in the first place.
But organised ridicule has become popular in political PR. Because of a degree of blow-back associated, the now stereotypical black-and-white-sinister-voice-with-red-text negative ads, parties are adding gaff manufacturing to their armoury of dark-arts alongside more traditional muckraking and shit sheeting. Because of the use of humour, the poison's got less bitterness to it, and the audience is less likely to react against its originator. We see this particularly whenever parties bring out ads using animated characters, such as the Liberals' "headless chooks" YouTube video.
While a shift away from the conventional negative ad is likely to have a positive impact on audience jaundice about politics and the political class, excessive reporting of gaffes and the nature of politics as highly "staged" pseudo-events can increase the cynicism of voters who are not strongly committed to a party and those with lower levels of political information. This reflects Valentino, Buhr and Beckmann's 2001 research into the way the framing of election coverage can impact on audience attitudes to the motivations of political actors. This is a global trend that has seen cynicism about political leadership rise as reporting has moved more to discussions of motivation and strategies rather than events and policy differences.
If we see elections as important democratic "focusing events" then the non-partisan and under-informed are exactly the type of people the media's electoral coverage should be appealing to at this point in the campaign. Campaigns activate the weakly-motivated elector into active information-seeking behaviour, just as candidates engage in a more structured presentation of their policies and manifestos for government.
On the flipside, the public can also find a lot of value in using gaffes and unscripted moments as proxies for other, more structured decision-making strategies. Real or manufactured, these moments can allow a sense of authenticity to creep into media coverage of the political race. Gaffes as Freudian slips are widely perceived to represent, not only a release of the unconscious attitudes of the speaker, but moreover, something they are actively attempting to suppress. This explains why gaffes are given disproportionate attention to scripted material: they're interpreted as being a better indicator of what politician's "really think".
This can represent the victory of Louis Heren's maxim that when a politician speaks you need to ask yourself "Why is this lying bastard lying to me?" But we need to take gaffes and malapropisms with a grain of salt. Misstatements can be attributable to a wide range of factors, the most common talking fast and tripping over words. This explains why politicians often talk so annoyingly slowly and deliberatively. In addition, they are exacerbated by exhaustion (explaining why they traditionally come later in a campaign), often commonly occur as simple linguistic activation errors associated with the similarities of sounds in successive words (hence the way the "s" in wisdom was transliterated into "repository" to create "suppository" in Abbott's one in 1,000 error in Deakin), and they can be very transient results of distraction inserting a word like beer instead of fear. The latter might be more a case of seeing a passing billboard than evidence you're an incorrigible lush.
But there is some truth in the repression view of gaffes. Where there are cognitive associations between concepts, verbal misstatements may reflect them in unguarded moments. The important question is to be able to delineate between simple error and significant and telling Freudian slip. In the latter case this would be most observable where these errors are repeated over time, eliminating the "momentary distraction" and "linguistic similarity" explanations.
Tony Abbott may not have a deeply suppressed anal fixation, but his tendency towards repeated gender stereotypes (ironing and women, sex appeal as an important characteristic for women in public life, talking about Indigenous women simply as passive victims) does provide us with a sense that, in this policy area, there's something to the slip of the tongue.
Peter John Chen is a politics lecturer in at the Department of Government at the University of Sydney. View his full profile here.
More politics on The Drum
- Paula Matthewson: An unhealthy addiction to election polls
- Barrie Cassidy: This election is rich in trivia but not much else
- Latika Bourke: Rudd must give voters a reason to back him
Campaign gaffes: plans, slips and mishaps - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
