PM misses a cue
GOING to a conference can be a confronting experience.
You’re away from home, on business. You may have packed the wrong clothes for the weather and you may have not the right converter for your laptop. You may have an aversion to the local cuisine and/or you may just be nervous because you’re not bilingual. There are a thousand reasons to be anxious so you need to be alert but not alarmed.
If you’re the only representative from your gang, there is going to be a pressure to perform.
You may have to present, you will have to report back and you will have to make sure that you are able to account for your expenses. Keeping receipts is a no-brainer, but what do you do if you’re not the most interesting, or the most outgoing person in the room?
Do you reach out, do you hang back?
There are good arguments for both strategies; it really depends if you’re buying or selling.
But the one strategy that you should never employ is the “mobile scroll”.
This is the picture: a lone male standing by yourself and scrolling (apparently randomly) through your mobile phone.
The contents of the scroll can be pretty much anything. Emails, text messages, social media. Doesn’t matter. To the casual observer you are saying: “I’m really not interested in the rest of the room”.
The image of “head down and pushing the data” is the perfect statue of somebody giving the rest of the conference “the finger”.
At one point in our modern history, this image conveyed a certain sense of importance.
The mobile scroller was the man who had to be in constant contact with the office. Mr Twenty-four seven. This was the person so important that they could not leave their phone alone for an instant. The decision maker “on deck” and the portal to their personal viewpoint had to be kept open at all times.
These were (are) the same people who refused (or accidentally neglected) to turn their phones off when taxiing down the tarmac.
They thought they would have to be able to take a call while an aircraft was hurtling down the runway. They had special rules and special reasons for their apparent need for interconnection and none of these people observed the social norms of turning the damn things off because “time is money” and “information is power” and without direct connection to the outside world, these guys were potentially going to have a heart attack. But those days are gone. Nowadays, the image of the middle-aged guy on the mobile says; “I am an uncle at wedding and I just don’t want to talk to family and friends because I have nothing interesting to contribute and I don’t like to ask questions.”
So, it was with great distress that the people of Australia saw the picture of Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the G7 this week; mobile in hand, finger scrolling, while world leaders stood metres away.
He cut a seemingly lonely figure with his cell phone and this image of perfect isolation conveyed a suggestion that he is unpopular or unwanted, or even worse, unrecognisable on the world stage.
Of course none of these things may be true. The facts of the moment cannot be conveyed by one single image.
The PM was an invited guest to the heady and congested traffic jam of personalities that is the G7 conference.
You don’t get that kind of an invitation if you’re just some old guy with some kind of connection to the bride or groom.
You only get invited because you are an ally of the most powerful nations on earth. They need something from you (from us) and they want you in the pictures to prove that you are part of the team.
So put your phone down and be present. Who knows? If you raise your eyes and prick up your ears, you might end up being asked to join in a discussion or connect the dots on a great new trade deal.
Attending conferences is part pantomime and part improvised installation.
At the end the leaders line up and stand on dots with their names written clearly in permanent ink.
These images are choreographed publicity for stable democracy.
Scott was probably just doing what they all should have been doing; showing up and getting on point on time.
It’s just a pity for the image of Australia that he was the first one to arrive.