Matthew Abraham: Are spin doctors a dying breed under the new Premier Steven Marshall?

THE Weatherill Governnment was drowning in spin doctors - are those days over under new Steven Marshall, Matthew Abraham asks?

Jay Weatherill holds a press conference during the election campaign. Picture: Dylan Coker

IT’S hard to believe such a naff thing could still happen in our hipster city.

South Australia’s slightly used new Treasurer, Rob Lucas, has been in the job for one whole month and hasn’t employed a media adviser. Not one. What a fuddy-duddy.

It gets worse. He’s handling media calls himself, on his own phone, with the same old-school prefix that dates back to analogue mobiles the size of house bricks.

When Advertiser Political Reporter Lauren Novak dropped this titbit into a recent article, I got pretty excited.

Was this the beginning of a brave new experiment – a government without spin doctors?

Over the 16 years of Rann-Weatherill government, the employment of staff dedicated to the whims of ministers mushroomed. By the end, they were drowning in a swamp of their own making.

Consider this: in the year before the election, then-Premier Jay Weatherill had almost 44 full-time ministerial staff. Just for him.

That’s a ludicrous number, particularly as a Premier also has more than 1500 public servants on tap in the Premier’s Department.

Digging up these figures last year, The Australian’s Economics Correspondent, Adam Creighton, observed that South Australia was “morphing into an oversized rogue council with vice-regal trappings”. A fair call.

Creighton observed that this payload of personal staff, including 17 media advisers earning between $115,000 and $157,000 a year, almost matched that of the Prime Minister’s office and was nearly half as much again as the office of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

Weatherill’s personal army began at the top with the chief of staff on $202,179 and then cascaded down through a director of media, chief media adviser, 13 ordinary media advisers, media-monitoring service manager, principal monitor of the media monitors (seriously), five ministerial advisers and even an assistant to the ministerial advisers.

Talk about employing your own cheer squad. What did they all do?

At the bottom of the full-time heap were eight media monitor staff, pulling $70,000 each. Monitoring government media interviews is a form of hell on earth. They deserved every cent.

When I called Treasurer Lucas to check that he hadn’t hired a spin doctor in the last couple of days he said: “No, why, do you want a job?”.

He said his priority had been hiring a COS and ministerial adviser with a special focus on treasury and major projects and he had also just employed a young person from the Fair Work Commission with legal expertise in industrial relations.

“I’m actually trying to get people in the office who can add value to the office,” he said. “It’s a novel thought, I know. Essentially, when you had a look at some of the staff (of the previous government), they were spear carriers for the right faction, the left faction or whatever”.

The Marshall Government has promised to reduce ministerial staff numbers and Lucas says he has already begun giving newbie ministers the bad news. Good luck with that.

Former Premier Tom Playford, a cunning media manipulator, never had a press secretary, but he pioneered 10-minute radio spots on 5AD, presenting nearly 100 in two years, on mundane topics from egg exports to sewage treatment. Nobody told him what to say or how to say it.

The job of most political media advisers is to shield inexperienced or incompetent ministers from being exposed for the dills they are, to make smart ministers look even smarter, to bury bad news and pump up positive news, to rebadge bad news as good news, or a combination of all of the above.

In short, to make it appear that a government has all the answers even if it hasn’t got a clue.

During its last desperate days in office, the Weatherill Government was in a constant, exhausting frenzy of self-promotion. It was a relief when it all stopped.

During the week Pope Francis, who presides over a formidable media outfit, released a major apostolic exhortation titled Rejoice and Be Glad – a call to happiness in an unhappy world.

“When somebody has an answer for every question, it is a sign they are not on the right road,” he writes.

If a government did try operating for a year with no spin, it might not be more honest but it would leave us room to think for ourselves.