Don't Call Me Stupid

Conservative commentator Rowan Dean has scaled the heights and reached peak absurdity. In an opinion published by News Limited yesterday, Mr Dean proposes that recent opinion polls do nothing more than prove that the majority of Australians are largely morons for preferring Bill Shorten as Prime Minister over Tony Abbott. 

In surprising contrast to recent media coverage, interviews with Prime Minister Abbott by everyone from Karl Stefanovic and "Chris" Koch to Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt have been critical of the government, but Dean's commentary lacks even a single note of negativity about the government. All of his criticism is aimed at "us", telling us - the x% of the population that prefers Bill Shorten to Tony Abbott - that we're wrong.

Wrong, and terminally stupid.

Of course, Rowan Dean - advertising and marketing legend, conservative writer/commentator and talking head for hire - and the Liberal Party are right in every way. The rest of us should remove our flawed, inferior DNA from the Team Australia gene pool.

It's a calculated opinion, deliberately placed in News Corp's daily tabloids. His words are for the readers of Murdoch's dailies who may have been carried away in the unexpected wave of end of year anti-Abbott hysteria. Regardless of how bad you might think Abbott is, Shorten will always be worse, wafts from the spaces between the lines.

Bill Shorten, when he wasn’t busy knifing one leader to replace him with another, then knifing that one and replacing her with the first one (clearly a man of strong convictions and sound decision-making skills), sat at the big table and happily splurged our cash. And we want to put him in charge of cleaning up our finances? Darwin Award for Category A Stupidity – tick!

While criticism of the Abbott Government is entirely absent from Mr Dean's rant, so too is praise. Nowhere, not even once does Dean have anything complimentary to say about the Abbott Government. There's not a word of approval, no hint of respect for the first fifteen months of the Abbottocracy.

Condescension is in plentiful supply though. Mr Dean takes aim at conservative-leaning swinging voters who are fleeing the barnacle-ridden Good Ship Abbott in search of calmer, saner waters, and proceeds to mock them for not agreeing with him.

But Mr Dean has sailed off into the Sea of Snark, taking with him a vague argument loaded with assumption. He's hoping to convince a segment of voters that sways on the breezes of practicality to stick with Tony Abbott because Bill Shorten was a member of the Rudd-Gillard governments. 

Really? That's an argument you could make about anyone leading the federal Labor Party. Equally, you could refer to Tony Abbott as the 'former Opposition Leader', as @ABCNewsIntern did on Twitter last night.

The Coalition won the 2013 election with simple slogans that reminded us to be afraid of something, underpinned by a sustained attack characterised by a single concept: We're better than they are. After more than a year in government, many undecided voters have decided that's no longer true.

Don't try to lecture these people on vague principles; they aren't interested. The question they want answered is "what's in it for me?" and Mr Dean has not acknowledged the question, much less answered it.

By the way, it’s neither necessary nor wise to treat your audience as though they’re dumb:

Let me run that past you again – slowly this time, really slowly, because it’s obvious there are some pretty slow people out there: a … majority … (in other words, enough voters to win an election) … think … (i.e. have apparently used what passes for their brains and come to this conclusion) … that Bill Shorten … (a bloke who is so empty-headed he once said: “I don’t know what Julia Gillard said, but I agree with every word of it”) … would be a better prime minister … (in other words, be making every single decision every single day for three years that will determine the prosperity and financial success of every one of us and all our children) … than Tony Abbott (a bloke who, regardless of whether you like him or not, has as his sole focus a single-minded determination to fix the economic mess that this country is in).

Those who respond to ideological argument have already chosen sides. Suggesting, with all the subtlety of a McDonalds birthday party, that those with a solid ideological preference will shift when reminded that "we're better than them" is at least as dumb as Mr Dean believes Australians to be, and those who are open to change are moving left.

We were just dumb enough to allow Tony Abbott to be Prime Minister once. Don’t expect us to be that stupid twice.