PR Wins and Sins 2022
It’s been a whirlwind of a year as we emerged from COVID haze and saw a suite of PR wins and sins around the nation and the world. The year began with 1.5m distancing and closed with a 2.5k gathering of naked bodies in Bondi Beach – both an effort for health. Nicole Reaney, CEO, InsideOut PR breaks it down for us.
The Sins
When the Dom Perrottet announced the coined Let it Rip approach to managing Covid-19, it swung from wrapping us up in cotton wool (or masks) with extreme restrictions, guidelines, rules and daily press conferences to leaving the public to navigate the new variants and what ‘living with Covid’ meant. While isolation is something we were all familiar with, the new variants were not. Government lacked the necessary communication and support to provide Australians with guidance on what to expect and the impacts of Delta to them and in their various community, home, work and education environments. Scott Morrison announced RATs would need to be purchased, and then quickly backflipped realising the impact it would have on lower income earners and the elderly.
The messy regulations of vaccination saw an embarrassing handling of tennis champion, Novak Djokovic. Publicly voicing his no vax stance he arrived on Australian shores at a time where COVID cases were escalating and vaccination was mandated on the belief of a medical exemption. He was detained in a notorious immigration detention hotel and his visa cancelled. The court later overturned the decision to cancel his visa, but in a heated volley of conflicting powers then-Immigration Minister Alex Hawke used special discretionary powers to cancel it again, arguing it was in the public interest to do so. Djokovic was finally deported and world headlines exploded on Australia’s treatment of the international athlete, of course all this just ahead of the Tourism Australia’s campaign, Come and Say G’day.
