Campaign gaffes – so many to choose from!

Posted on September 16, 2014 Updated on September 16, 2014

I was looking at some recent campaign gaffes in elections around the world and it reminded me of a recent article on Australian examples by Peter Chen from Sydney University.

I first met Peter Chen briefly in 2008 at a post-2007-federal-election workshop at ANU where he entertained a room of political science academics and practitioners with YouTube clips from the 2007 election campaign. Last year he wrote an interesting piece for The Drum about campaign gaffes http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-19/chen-campaign-gaffes/4895246

Peter Chen has also written a very good and thorough analysis of Australian Politics in a Digital Age, an ANU e-press thesis which is free to download here: http://press.anu.edu.au//wp-content/uploads/2013/02/whole2.pdf

If you don’t have time to read the 2012 thesis you might prefer this shorter article from 2012 “Social Media, Youth Participation and Australian Elections” http://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/research/caber/files/1b.pdf … in a nutshell: ” Social media used for political purposes is likely though, in the first instance, to attract those with pre-existing strong political interests. However, the generalisation of social media use, and its focus on sociality and community building, has the potential to change the way trusted political information is distributed and engagement occurs.”

Dr Chen’s thesis reveals he “is a lecturer in media and politics at the University of Sydney. He holds a PhD from The Australian National University. His research focuses on the relationship between media and political processes, with a particular interest in new forms of communication. He also teaches and researches in the areas of public policy, Australian politics and social movements. Peter is the author of numerous articles and chapters on the role of digital media in Australian political life, and the author of Electronic Engagement: A Guide for Public Managers (ANU E Press, 2007) and the co-author of Electronic Democracy? The Impact of New Communications Technologies on Australian Democracy (Democratic Audit of Australia, 2006). He is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics and the International Journal of Electronic Governance.

I can’t seem to find him on Twitter though, which is a bit disappointing.

And here is Dr Chen chewing the fat with Jonathon Holmes from media Watch about politics and new media http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s3742753.htm

In the Drum article Dr Chen refers primarily to Mr Abbott’s “suppository of all wisdom” gaffe and concludes “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.”

It’s interesting that Dr Chen’s Drum article doesn’t mention Mr Abbott’s most famous gaffe of recent years with Channel 7 news reporter Mark Reilly, which became so famous it always features in every memorable collection of Mr Abbott’s past gaffes such as this one

Perhaps the nodding incident happened after the Drum article? I’m not sure. Either way, it’s hard to live down.

No doubt I’ll come back to this article with some more links about hilarious campaign gaffes here and overseas, although they’re pretty easy to find via google and youtube if you want to try.