Inside Spin: The dark underbelly of the PR industry.
An extract from Bob Burton’s investigation of Australia’s billion dollar a year public relations business
Milne was stunned. In a speech in the Senate on changes to provisions governing federal electoral funding disclosure she said that PRIA’s decision:
“…makes a complete mockery of any kind of code of conduct for the public relations industry and confirms what people in the general community think of them. The result is that a group of unknown, unnamed, shadowy figures can emerge from somewhere and call themselves anything, such as Tasmanians for a Better Future and, interestingly, that is a similar slogan to the one that the government ran with and got away with.”
Download submission by Tony Harrison submitted to the Public Relations Institute of Australia: CC_PRIA_Submission.pdf
IN March 2006, Tony Harrison, the CEO of the Hobart-based Corporate Communications, authorised a major television and newspaper advertising campaign on behalf of Tasmanians for a Better Future, a previously unknown group, in the last weeks of the 2006 Tasmanian election campaign. This shadowy group — which was not incorporated, was not a political party, a business or a charity — blitzed television programs and newspapers with a saturation advertising campaign designed to ensure the Tasmanian Greens did not win the balance of power. They succeeded.
While the bulk of the clients of Corporate Communications are befittingly corporate, it also undertakes work for the Tasmanian Department of Economic Development and the Department of Tourism, Parks, Heritage and the Arts. In a later submission to Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) for its annual Golden Target Awards, Harrison revealed that he ‘gained access to government research’ which showed that the most likely outcome was that the Greens would win the balance of power. While the funders of the campaign, Harrison wrote, had wanted to: “…mount a campaign critical of, and attacking the Greens, the consultancy’s research revealed a clear public view that the party was viewed as a legitimate segment of the Tasmanian political landscape and little would be gained by an all-out assault on its policies or personalities.”
Instead Harrison opted to run a campaign promoting a vote for whichever political party had the best chance of forming a majority government. Concluding his pitch, Harrison boasted that the effect of the campaign was ‘to assist the incumbent Labor Government’.
In the ranks of the PR industry and the PRIA itself, Harrison is one of the heavy hitters. He was the National President of PRIA in 2000 and is a member of the College of Fellows, the inner sanctum of members which assists the board by ‘clarifying policy on such matters as ethics’. In 2003, Harrison was awarded the ‘prestigious’ national President’s award by the Public Relations Institute of Australia for his contribution to the profession at a national level.
Repeatedly before the election, journalists asked Harrison who was funding the group and the advertisements. Repeatedly he refused to disclose the names of specific contributors. The funders, he told Mercury journalist Sue Neales, were a ‘group of concerned Tasmanian business and community people’: ‘No one in Tasmania has a problem with these ads and I have complied with the Electoral Act’, he told the Australian Financial Review journalist Julie Macken. He was right that Tasmanian electoral legislation did not require disclosure of who was funding the group, but his optimism that no one in Tasmania objected was misplaced.
The week before the March election, Australian Greens Senator from Tasmania, Christine Milne, lodged a detailed complaint with the PRIA National Secretary, Jim Mahoney. PRIA’s ‘code of conduct’, she later told the Senate, ‘requires members to reveal who has funded any PR campaign. Tony Harrison, on behalf of Corporate Communications, utterly refused to do so’. Two months after lodging her complaint, Jim Mahoney sent a one sentence response to Milne, stating that PRIA’s National Board accepted a recommendation from the College of Fellows that Harrison ‘did not have a case to answer’.
Milne pressed PRIA for a statement of reasons. Once more Mahoney declined, though he added that PRIA was not a ‘partisan political organisation’, and that he was ‘disappointed that its investigation may have been used as part of the election campaign’. It was a bizarre response, as PRIA’s consideration of the complaint began only after the election was over and the complaint was concerned with a secretive partisan political advertising campaign initiated by a PR company and PRIA member.
Milne was stunned. In a speech in the Senate on changes to provisions governing federal electoral funding disclosure she said that PRIA’s decision:
“…makes a complete mockery of any kind of code of conduct for the public relations industry and confirms what people in the general community think of them. The result is that a group of unknown, unnamed, shadowy figures can emerge from somewhere and call themselves anything, such as Tasmanians for a Better Future and, interestingly, that is a similar slogan to the one that the government ran with and got away with.”
In her opinion, the consequences extended far beyond Tasmania: “If you do not rein this in now, it will mean that there will be a blank cheque for public relations agencies going into the federal election, with the full blessing of the Public Relations Institute of Australia which will be saying: ‘Forget about our code of conduct. It doesn’t operate. It doesn’t matter. We’re completely self-regulated. We’ll just do as we like and you just go right ahead’.”
Unknown to Milne was that the panel appointed by PRIA determined that the obligation to disclose sources of funding was trumped by another provision in the code of ethics requiring members to ‘safeguard the confidences of clients’.
A few months later, the judges for PRIA’s annual Golden Target Awards were so impressed by Harrison’s campaign that they gave it a commendation in the public affairs category. However, the case did prompt PRIA to issue a guidance note in mid-2007 interpreting the code of ethics provision stating members must ‘be prepared to identify the source of funding’ for a campaign. In its wisdom, PRIA determined details of funding only need to be disclosed where it is a legal requirement to do so, such as under electoral laws. Where disclosure is not a legal requirement, such as in Tasmania, PRIA advises that all a practitioner needs to do is to provide journalists with contact details of the client.
Sheila O’Sullivan, the head of PRIA’s College of Fellows, which handles ethics complaints, accepts PRIA’s standards are weaker than those developed in the United States. ‘One might describe the Australian situation as being much less transparent than the American one’, she said.
But just because we currently don’t have US-style standards of transparency, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.
This is a slightly adapted extract from Bob Burton’s book, Inside Spin: The dark underbelly of the PR industry, published by Allen & Unwin, $24.95, ISBN 9781741752175. Inside Spin is available from booksellers or www.allenandunwin.com. It is available as an ebook
Next Monday: The Manning beef
