Public Affairs

Up until a few months ago, I ran the Public Affairs area of a state government department - communications, media management, web, speeches etc. Media conferences, Q&A's, doorsteps (a "press conference lite") and the occasional tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy-theorist journalist often make me wish we'd had one of these...


Pentagon's Unmanned Spokesdrone Completes First Press Conference Mission

Years ago I had to do my first live radio interview - the organization I worked for was relocating patients from a hospice at very short notice (for their own safety). The announcer asked:

"the patients in the hospice - are any of them suffering from serious medical conditions?"

I stuttered a bit and said "well, yes" (politeness turned up), rather than "yes, the people here have serious medical conditions: it's a hospice. People come here to die". Some sort of intelligent mechanical device might have been useful at this point, preferably one with weapons and a low stupidity threshold.

But fuckwittage is not the sole preserve of journalists. A year or two after the hospice conversation I accompanied a former boss to a function involving all the Lord Mayors of Australia's capital cities. Melbourne's then Lord Mayor wanted to focus attention on the number of heroin ODs in Australia at that time, and the meeting was dominated by discussion of harm minimization. At the press conference after the meeting, Lord Mayor Peter Costigan of Melbourne stood up before the city media and offered an inadvertant bonnest of all possible mots:

"...if we want to do something about the problem of heroin and drugs in the inner cities, we need to roll up our sleeves and expand our minds."

No apparent irony; no second thoughts. Fantastic.