you do know what a corflute is?
I think it is actually a trade name which has come into more common use. A corflute is a poster made of plastic but constructed in the same way as corrugated cardboard. They are, at least here, commonly used to advertise the election candidates and their parties.
A measles like rash of them has suddenly appeared. Someone I know quite well is standing for election and his smiling face looked down on me as I passed yesterday. He is standing in the neighbouring electorate and "will almost certainly not" (his own words) win. He's there because that party needs to be seen to field candidates if they are to have any hope of retaining their seat in the "upper" house.
Corflutes are not cheap. They are designed to last more than one election of course.
And therein lies one of the problems. The candidates age - but the posters don't.
Do they actually have an impact on voters? There is some evidence to suggest that they have no impact at all - or, if they do have an impact, they have a negative impact.
There is one political party which has almost no money behind it. At the moment it too has one representative in the upper house. She has done an outstandingly good job, especially when you consider she was catapulted into the position in the most unexpected way. At the time she agreed to be second on the ticket nobody even thought the first candidate had much hope. The death of the first candidate, the machinations of the preference system, and the publicity got her over the line.
So, she's standing/sitting again. The team behind her has added people to run in lower house seats. And they aren't putting up any corflutes. Even if they could afford it they have decided that it isn't worth the money. They are realistic enough to know that they might only get used once. Four years in parliament can change a person's appearance.
I remember looking at a corflute for a former politician. The last time he stood for election (and won) he was still using corflutes that were over a decade old. They showed his hair as dark when it was now gray. He looked a lot older in real life. In a way that might be seen as dishonest.
But there is another problem with all that advertising material, not just the corflutes but the material being stuffed into our letter boxes and inserted into the paper or handed out as "how to vote" cards on election day. It's environmentally unsound.
I wonder what would happen if we stopped all that?
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4 comments:
Remember the old days when you turned up at a hall where the candidates spoke? And answered questions from the floor? And got heckled?
Frequently a candidate would go around, on the back of a truck, speaking, answering, and being heckled.
I guess that these methods would be a bit difficult in some of the larger Australian electorates.
But then, you could meet the candidate, as distinct from seeing him/her on tv.
In a small country, like NZ, you probably knew the candidates, and their sisters and their cousins and their aunts anyway. Nowadays, the candidate may have been chosen and helicoptered in by the political party and have no grass-roots connections with the electorate.
LMcC
I remember the MP in one country electorate coming to our home and saying to the Senior Cat, "I know I have your vote. I'd rather talk about how..." and they went on to discuss how to help a brilliant lad from a dirt poor family get to university. And yes, the Senior Cat did support the MP and they did get the boy to university. (The boy ended up as a lecturer in maths.)
I notice a candidate from a competing political party has decided to campaign not with the colour of their own party, but the colour of the party being represented by the subject of your post - the one that doesn't use corflutes.
I don'r suppose that surprises you Jodie?
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