If it was a fleet of the new Gonski Stealth Jet Fighters, then security and border protection would be the benefit.
If it was the Gonski High Speed Rail Link, running up the east coast, between Melbourne and Brisbane, then we would benefit from the convenience.
A Gonski Dam on the Ord River, would open up vast areas for cultivation and the subsequent benefit of increased food production.
Most Australians would see the value in paying 14.5 Billion Dollars for one of these Gonskis. That’s because we all understand what an fighter jet, rail network or a dam can deliver.
History has etched that in our minds.
Now the Gonski school funding reforms are different. It’s a complex issue to understand, let alone sell to the average punter.
There have been a number of newspaper articles written recently trying to articulate what a Gonski is. Here is the most recent one from SBS.
‘Selling’ has never been the strong point of the current government. They follow the polls when making policy decisions but don’t listen to the consumer when it comes to articulating their benefits.
They need a good advertising agency.
When the late, and very divicive, Maggy Thatcher came to power in 1979 she used the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi to sell her agenda. They came up with the ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster.’ This very quickly and simply articulated the Tory message.
I think Julia could take a leaf out of Maggie’s book and hire a good ad agency to help sell the Gonski.
The death of the written word.
Sunday, May 19th, 2013I no longer buy a hard copy of newspapers but prefer to read them online. They’re portable, easy to read and have high quality resolution for the graphics and photos.
In many ways they’re far superior to the printed versions.
However many of the online news and editorial articles are increasingly containing video. In fact one of our local Melbourne newspapers, The Age, is becoming more of a TV station than a newspaper.
Audio books are also on the increase and now Google has announced that their primary mode of search will be voice activated not written.
The result of this visualisation of content is that many people will prefer to have their news and information read to them rather than reading it for themselves.
When I was a kid I loved having books read to me but I only got to really appreciate the joy of literature when I started to read them for myself.
It was my voice, in my head, interpreting the words and filling in the gaps.
My voice was painting the pictures and creating ’The World’ of a particular story or author.
Advertising used to be a combined craft of the visual and the verbal, with quality pictures complementing excellent writing. Now most ads consist of an average picture, headline and a short, boring, piece of copy.
Long copy ads, that involved the reader in a journey of discovery about a product or service, have vanished. They’ve been replaced by a fast grab of visual and verbal cliches.
The beauty of the written word is that it involves you in a two way communication. You read the words, interpret them and are subsequently rewarded by that creative act of interpretation.
I loved reading the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkein. Through his craft he was able to described a world that was beyond our creation. Yet because of our imagination we were able to see that world, in our mind’s eye and visualise it for ourselves.
Seeing Peter Jackson’s interpretation of the Hobbit was exciting but no more so than creating my own vision of The Shire, Gollum and Middle Earth.
If we lose the written word we will lose the ability to create visions of our own.
And what a loss that would be.
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