Politicians turn image into votes
Back in the day it was State houses, and cartoon Cossacks, now it’s Vogue photoshoots and slots on reality TV that boost political clout. Jack van Beynen reports.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in a Harman Grubisa trench coat for a Vogue magazine shoot. National’s Bill English riding his quad bike, with tie streaming out the back. Then prime minister John Key mincing down the catwalk in the 2011 Rugby World Cup volunteers’ outfit.
Photo opportunities have come a long way since Michael Joseph Savage carried a table through a crowd into New Zealand’s first state house in 1937.
Our politicians are defined by images. They use pictures to form a persona that the public will vote for. In our image-saturated world, pictures of politicians are more important than ever but the kinds of pictures we see of our leaders has changed.
Michelle Boag has been press secretary for two prime ministers and a leader of the opposition. She says images of politicians are even more important now than when she was setting up photo opportunities for Robert Muldoon, Jim Bolger and Jim McLay.
‘‘With the fragmentation of the media and social media, photo opportunities have become even more important. I think the focus three or four decades ago was much more about substance with an illustration attached.’’
Perhaps because they’ve become more important, photo opportunities tend to be more structured than in Boag’s day. She remembers Muldoon being photographed speaking to a crowd of thousands at Wiri wool store in 1975. It was a great photo, but it wasn’t set up to be one.
‘‘It reflected the reality of your average bloke and your average woman getting interested in politics. Muldoon had this immensely popular appeal so they literally came out to hear him.’’
The tradition of political photo opportunities goes back far beyond Muldoon, however. Massey University professor of communication design Claire Robinson traces it back to that famous video of Savage carrying furniture into the first state house.
It was shot in 1937 and aired as part of a campaign video for Labour during the 1938 election.
‘‘That was the very first film that had been used by a political party in promoting the political party and promoting the image of the leader as being benevolent and kind. That was his brand at the time, and so it reinforced it.’’
The next party leader to seize the opportunities offered by new media was Norman Kirk in 1969. Television was introduced to New Zealand in the early 1960s, but in the early years, politicians didn’t do much with it. Then came Kirk.
‘‘Norman Kirk became the leader of the Labour party in 1969 and that year was probably a turning point as well,’’ Robinson says. ‘‘He had Bob Harvey as his advertising guy and they set about trying to make Kirk, who was at that stage quite overweight, into something a little more svelte, for the purposes of campaigning.’’
Harvey and Kirk produced what he calls New Zealand’s ‘‘first really good political ad’’.
‘‘Kirk was being portrayed as energetic, of the moment and very trendy, appealing to young people.’’
Kirk was frequently depicted as a ‘‘man of the people’’, which was a radical departure from more statesmanlike depictions of politicians.
Dr Bryce Edwards, of Otago University, says the idea of politicians being ‘‘one of us’’ is a popular one in the modern world. ‘‘I think what has changed, especially in the last 10 years, is that the public wants a different sort of leadership,’’ he says,
‘We used to want our politicians to be leaders above us, who were experts and very high achievers. They were kind of like superpeople. Whereas now we really want politicians to be one of us.
‘‘The warmth factor is more important now than the respect factor. You see politicians conveying their personalities more and more.’’
Edwards points to John Key as a recent example. Despite in many ways being a member of society’s elite – a Parnell-living millionaire, a top global finance trader – Key went to great pains to be seen as a regular bloke.
Ardern is cut from similar cloth, though the Vogue photo isn’t the best example; Edwards points to recent photos of her behind the barbecue at Waitangi as images designed to show her as one of the people. ‘‘I thought they were gold, political gold, in the sense that they personalised Ardern, the prime minister, and showed her being down to earth and willing to serve the people,’’ he says. ‘‘They were the contemporary version of Michael J Savage helping move the furniture into the new state house.’’
While Edwards has observed a trend towards more personable politicians, Robinson says that whether a prime minister elects to go for a personable or a statesmanlike public image does depend on the individual’s personality. ‘‘Kirk, definitely, man of the people, that was the basic message about him, so there are lots of images of him with people,’’ she says.
‘‘Muldoon was portrayed as more of a statesman. Bolger was kind of in between. He loved being a statesman, so he used to portray himself a lot in international forums, but he was also portrayed as Jim Bolger, a man with a connection to the earth from being a farmer.
‘‘Helen Clark was for a long time portrayed as a woman who understood the people, but later on in her leadership she was more of a statesperson.
‘‘So it kind of wavers between – if they’re trying to get people to like them, they’re very much about being a person of the people, and as they go on in their reign, in their leadership, they become more separated from them and then they take on this persona of the statesperson.
‘‘Jacinda Ardern is very much in her, ‘I’m a leader who understands the people’ moment, and I expect that will continue for quite a long time. There’s value in her being seen to be popular, because it reinforces that notion that people like her and that she’s someone who’s in touch with the ordinary people.’’
Whether the Waitangi pictures will become the defining images of Ardern’s time in government remain to be seen. But there’s no doubt images will remain key to how that Government is perceived.