Robodebt and media strategy myopia
In the wake of the Robodebt media debacle, The Drill’s Gerry McCusker unpacks what does – and what doesn’t – constitute ethical and professional PR practice.
A claimed successful media crisis strategy for the flawed Robodebt scheme, culminated with its architects grilled at a Royal Commission and helped curtail the political career of the scheme’s sentinel, Alan Tudge. Before that, the impact of Robodebt was linked to multiple suicides. With the scandal and recent hearings bringing the political obsession with media crisis management into public focus, the short-sightedness of thinking press relations is the be-all and end-all, has swung firmly into view.
In giving evidence to a Royal Commission, senior media adviser Rachelle Miller accidentally compounded the image problems of PRs all over Australia with candid revelations about the cynical, tit-for-tat nature of what’s erroneously presumed to pass for peak PR practice in Australia.
For if you ask any Joe or Joelene in the street what PR – or what ‘a PR’ – is, they’ll suggest it’s media relations or spin doctoring: Which is false! True public relations is – as peak body PRIA writes – ‘the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.’
