Red Rag

Today’s Melville City Herald is a fantastic read — and I haven’t even looked at the articles yet. It’s packed full of ads for various candidates running in Alfred Cove. Janet Woollard has taken several full-colour ads: half of page 3, and the whole of pages 5 and 7.

There’s also a large number of anti-Kierath ads from injured workers’ support groups, and a hilarious “Put Katherine [Jackson] Second Last” against Kierath’s stooge independent.

But the ads that grabbed my attention were a series of subdued ads authorised by Liberal Party director Paul Everingham. Here’s an example:

This kind of thing is fairly standard. I’ve used a number of headline clippings in artwork I’ve done for Labor ads and leaflets during the campaign. For instance, there was a great headline in The Australian that we used in Collie-Wellington, about Colin Barnett delaying a power station. There’s nothing wrong with drawing news reports and commentary to people’s attention.

But this Liberal ad is different.

The picture on the left is from the top of a news page in today’s West Australian. The picture on the right is from the Kierath ad. The typefaces are identical, and so are the dashed and solid lines running across the top of the page.

Anyone who looks at this ad would think it was highlighting an article that had appeared in the West Australian — but it’s not.

Hidden in the fine print, beneath the authorisation (who reads them?), is the following statement:

The headline shown is not an extract from a published article.

It’s a total fabrication!

Still, after Paul Everingham’s experiment with green how-to-votes, what were we to expect? Lying to voters through misleading advertising is his stock-in-trade.