Page 133 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

122 D. McKNIGHT AND M. HOBBS

Labor to government. Yet the price of Greens support was a fixed price on
carbon, or ‘carbon tax’. This second attempt to price carbon would also
meet fierce resistance from the fossil fuel lobby in the form of a third
persuasive PR campaign when it was introduced in 2011, and is discussed
in Case Study 3.

CASE STUDY #2: THE CHARM OFFENSIVE, 2010–2011

The mining lobby’s public relations campaign against the Rudd govern-
ment demonstrated the communicative power of a well-funded and exe-
cuted public relations campaign. At the time, advertising and PR executives
praised the campaign for its targeted messaging, which ‘successfully sold’
the anti-tax message by appealing to ‘empathy’, ‘ideas of fairness’ and
‘solidarity’ with an industry that had ‘saved the nation’ from the global
financial crisis (McKnight and Hobbs 2013). While this campaign was led
by the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) and funded by the big
multinational mining conglomerates, its strategic success was largely the
result of the creative talents of Neil Lawrence and his advertising agency,
Lawrence Creative—which is somewhat ironic given that Lawrence had
been the ‘creative architect’ behind Kevin Rudd’s successful ‘Kevin 07’
election campaign. Lawrence’s work with the MCA continued after Rudd’s
political demise, with his firm producing a series of advocacy advertise-
ments that clearly sought to bolster the industry’s public image as part of a
proactive inoculation strategy.
It is possible that many Australian public relations executives have not
heard of inoculation public relations, and if they have it might seem too
‘academic’ for Australian practitioners that often come from careers in
journalism, marketing or politics rather than having studied public rela-
tions at university (Harrison 2011). While the term ‘inoculation PR’ is
not in common use, the strategy it signifies is widely used in Australia,
but is colloquially referred to as a ‘charm offensive’. As the name sug-
gests, a charm offensive seeks to build relational capital with a range of
publics, which then become allies or at least ambivalent or neutral about
the organization’s operations. Much like the inoculation strategy in the
US, the charm offensive consists of community sponsorship programs,
political donations and advocacy campaigns, which seek to publicise the
socioeconomic benefits of a specific corporation or industry. As Richard
Denniss (cited in Cleary 2015, p. 30) notes, in Australia the mining