Coronavirus: It’s time for corona campaign 2.0 in Victoria

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews must examine his government’s messaging. Picture: Getty

The Andrews government messaging is tired.

The close to five month strategy of relentlessly lecturing the community needs to be buffed and polished.

Daniel Andrews’s style worked at the beginning and in the middle but as the community grows deeply weary and confused about the mixed messages, Labor should start looking for outside inspiration.

School on, school off, school on, school off.

Masks off, masks on.

Go out and have a feed, don’t go out and have a feed; don’t play golf, play golf. The ADF is coming, the ADF is not coming.

Many of the challenges facing the government are unavoidable and are not of its making.

It didn’t cause the pandemic but there is growing community uncertainty about the way Andrews is handling it, particularly as the hotel quarantine debacle has been forced into a formal inquiry.

There is a clear contradiction between having a government that may well have contributed largely to the latest outbreak but at the same time dictating the next terms of engagement to Victorians.

Andrews should be thinking about engaging leaders outside of government to freshen the message, from business, sport and philanthropy. This would add credibility to the valuable narrative that is been sold.

One of the great challenges is the splintering of the community in the digital age.

A lot of people, particularly in the outer suburbs, are not tuned in to so-called legacy media in the way they might have been decades ago.

This is especially the case with free to air TV, where government campaigns traditionally would be focused.

Andrews is heavy on social media but this only hits a certain cohort and quite often targets the people that are already barracking for the politician in question.

The daily press conference with Andrews, his Health Minister Jenny Mikakos and chief health officer Brett Sutton lasts for up to an hour and is probably the prime outlet for informing the community.

It’s a valuable and necessary way to communicate but the selling of the message needs to be modernised and broadened.

The large caseload and rising death toll suggests a couple of things as Victoria prepares to mark the second week anniversary of Lockdown 2.0.

Andrews and Sutton both hinted on Tuesday that there were positive signs in the numbers, notwithstanding the 374 new cases reported.

Sutton said that while the new case numbers were too high, it was markedly better than the 3000 that might have occurred had the government not restricted people’s movements.

Yet so much of what is happening boils down to community goodwill.

Unless there are signs that the government is making inroads, then there will be a real risk that the community turns off.

Which is a potentially diabolical outcome.