By ABC's Barrie Cassidy

Photo: Tony Abbott says he will not commit to talking unless he has "something to say". (AAP: Alan Porritt)

Prime Minister Tony Abbott's predecessors were clearly overexposed, but he should consider the cautionary tale of Ted Baillieu before he stops feeding the chooks altogether, writes Barrie Cassidy.

Tony Abbott's immediate media strategy is to put the country to sleep, or at least lower the volume so that everybody can enjoy a little quiet reflection after a tumultuous few years.

That approach is eminently defensible and politically smart.

It assumes, surely correctly, that the public's appetite for politics as usual has been more than satisfied after a bruising year.

And more to the point, it will represent a stark contrast to the appalling priorities of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments over the past six years.

Kevin Rudd entrenched smart-alec politics right from the start. He and his minders set about trying to manage the 24-hour news cycle.

So much useless information was collected and disseminated. Interviews were arranged for the sake of it. Junior staff would arrive at work at 4.30am to prepare media breakdowns for the more senior staff who would be on deck by 6am.

Eventually trite political lines would be force fed to chosen senior ministers, and they in turn acted as spruikers, snake oil salesmen, for a government obsessed with spin.

Once a government judges that it must win a news battle every day of every week - that every day is a separate political contest - then it is in permanent election campaign mode. The real business of government, the policy formulation, the building of bridges with interest groups across the community, become secondary.

The policies, the rhetoric, the appointments, the day-to-day engagements, are shaped according to some perceived impact with focus groups.

In June 2010, former NSW treasurer, Michael Costa, wrote in The Australian:

The new machine men think politics is as simple as borrowing techniques and strategies from the product marketing textbook. Politicians are now brands that can be subjected to brand management techniques. In their mind, the same techniques used to sell soap powder can be equally successful in selling brand Rudd. It's a kind of voodoo politics. Instead of using information derived from these techniques to adapt the message around a well thought out policy, they use these techniques to develop a policy.

That's when you get policies like Fuel Watch and Grocery Watch, and special taxation zones.

Even now, former key Rudd staffers when interviewed only ever talk about strategies, manipulating public opinion, and the rhetoric that supposedly drives votes. They never address policy, the bedrock to good and sustainable government.

Tony Abbott talks about the adults being back in charge. An extension of that thought would be to insist ministers behave as they once did prior to Rudd and Julia Gillard; that is, limiting their public comments to their portfolio responsibilities. Cutting across the work of others is fraught with danger. Contributing to the daily spin churn cheapens their own stature.

Ministers should be instantly recognisable according to their responsibilities. The Rudd and Gillard ministers were not. They morphed into a pool of cheap skate politicians.

Gillard's media advisers should have learnt from the mistakes of the Rudd period, but they did not.

Why do politicians feel it is their obligation to feed the insatiable 24-hour media beast?

Labor ministers often argued that if they did not fill the vacuum, then the opposition would. In retrospect, how did that go?

Abbott said on the day he announced his ministry that he would not commit to talking "unless I've got something to say". He said:

I think there's been far too much empty talk from people who should know better at senior levels of government over the last few years. If there's something to say after a Cabinet meeting, there will be the appropriate announcement. If there's not, there won't be.

Short term, bringing an end to the constant media onslaught is a no brainer. Labor will fill the void while the leadership issue is unresolved, and in any case, the footy finals are well underway.

In the longer term, however, the media has to be alert to the danger that Abbott and his ministers wind back media engagements primarily to avoid scrutiny and accountability.

If that is both the motive and the effect, then that will become obvious soon enough.

Ultimately, it is in the Government's interests to pull back, but not pull back too far. The balance that needs to be struck was best identified in March, this year, by Denis Muller, a senior fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne.

In an article for The Conversation, Denis recalled the experiences of former Victorian Premier John Brumby:

It seemed that every night on television he would show up somewhere in a hard hat and high-viz jacket wielding a shovel or gazing through safety glasses at some symbol of Victorian progress. It almost got to the point of self parody.

Ted Baillieu (his successor) set his face against this. He was convinced this kind of political cabaret – what Paul Keating called "the switch to vaudeville" – was short changing the voting public.

The voters would reward you, he believed, if you governed well and delivered on your promises. They didn't want media stunts.

But Baillieu, as it turned out, pulled back too far. He virtually stopped "feeding the chooks" altogether.

As Muller observed, he did not make himself available frequently enough and failed to build a rapport with journalists. Eventually Baillieu's uneasiness and his lack of accessibility built distrust. His own team complained that he was failing to get out the government's story.

That will be Abbott's challenge. To operate under very different rules from those that drive smart-alec politics, but not disengage to the point where resentment builds and the message is lost.

Barrie Cassidy is the presenter of Insiders and Offsiders on ABC1. View his full profile here.

Abbott wise to pull back... but not too far - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)