Carbon tax: Was it the PR disaster of 2012?

In January this year, cyberchatter.com announced its list of ‘Public Relations Disasters of 2012’. Included on this list were Craig Thompson for his ongoing finances scandal, 2Day FM for its prank call and Alan Jones for…well quite a lot of things.

But beating all these contenders to first place was the carbon tax. An initiative so misunderstood that it has lost control of its own name, with even members of the Gillard ministry recently referring to it as the ‘carbon tax’ rather than the more forgiving ‘carbon pricing’.

First off, carbon pricing was always going to be unpopular in 2012. This was inevitable for four key reasons:

– It costs money. Or to be more precise, it brings forward a cost that has not until now been accounted for, and allocates it. This is never going to be popular.

– A dangerous (and mistaken) belief among the general population that since the UN talks at Copenhagen, Australia has been acting alone when it comes to climate change. (This is patently not true: in January, the OECD published a report showing that 29 countries have a higher effective carbon price than Australia.)

– A dangerous (and mistaken) belief among the general population that there remains scientific uncertainty about the genesis of climate change. (This is also not true: not a single academy of science in the world questions anthropogenic climate change.)

– The prime minister’s pre-election promise that there would not be a carbon tax under her government

Of course, having an unpopular initiative doesn’t necessarily mean your communications have not been good. In fact, good communications can prevent an unpopular policy being even more unpopular.

But why are we even talking about public relations? Shouldn’t the best policy speak for itself? That might be a nice thought, but it’s not realistic.

There were four key communication pitfalls that we saw in the promotion of carbon pricing:

– The name: For some people, this is the full extent of information they will ever have about the policy. Currently, they think ‘carbon tax’. It needed to spell out what it is doing more clearly – which is reallocating cost, not creating new cost. Calling it the ‘Polluter Pays Initiative’, or similar, would have made the purpose and target audience of the initiative more obvious.

– Owning the doubt: 51% of Australians were either ‘confused’ or ‘disengaged’ about carbon pricing. But they didn’t need to be convinced that climate change is happening. A lot of effort was wasted trying to do this. Instead, they needed to be convinced that if there was any doubt about science, we should err on the side of action, not inaction. Climate change needed to be sold like insurance: whether or not you are sure about the outcome, it’s still worthwhile investing in the product.

– Household assistance: Targeting, or ‘hypothecating’, a large proportion of the revenue to household assistance was a good idea. Less good was the speed with which the government backed away from saying this out loud. When the benefits of the scheme were raised (ie. the revenue for assistance), it needed to be driven home that these came from carbon pricing.

– Big-noting China: It’s not in a government’s genes to talk up what other countries are doing. But that is what this situation called for. If people had a stronger sense that China was investing billions in renewable energy, and stealing a march on Australia, they would be more likely to support a transition to a cleaner economy.

This is not to say that great efforts weren’t made by extremely capable people in these areas. In fact they were. But arguably too much focus was placed on the designing and implementing the policy of carbon pricing, and not enough on communicating it.

As the world is discovering, action on climate change is a fiendishly difficult thing to sell at the best of times. Given the inherent challenges, I’m far from convinced that the carbon tax was the ‘PR disaster of 2012’. But there is no doubt that Australians were less supportive of action on climate change in 2012 than they have been for some time.

Whoever finds themselves in power on September 14th, the lesson from last year is that if you want a policy to stick (no matter what it is), you need to put as much effort into selling it as creating it.

Andrew Ure is the Managing Director of OgilvyEarth, a public relations firm specialising in environment and community issues. He is a former employee of DCCEE