‘Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.’ These words, written by one of Madison Avenue’s finest, the legendary Bill Bernbach of DDB fame, go to the heart of a sound communications strategy. A message must be delivered without any distractions, without contradictions and without confusion. Tearing out the weeds from the Coalition’s comms strategy – if such a garden exists – require getting to the heart of what they wish to say.

Tony Abbott could do worse over the summer break than browse through a collection of the writings of Bill Bernbach. This bookish adman was certainly one of the great communicators of the last century, responsible for almost single-handedly turning the hustling and spruiking skills he’d picked up on the streets of the Bronx into a multi-billion dollar industry. Yet his solutions to communcations problems – he called the art of persuasion an art, and not a science – are as relevant to selling policies as they are to flogging popcorn and polaroid cameras.

A bastardisation of Bernbach’s ‘weeds’ idea is Tony Abbott’s recent ‘barnacles’ schtick – the idea that in a tempest you must rid yourself of those unwanted politicies that cling to your underside in order for the good ship of government to sail smoothly forth. That’s all well and good, but Mr Abbott’s problems are not political – they are entirely to do with poor communications.

‘You can say the right thing about a product (or policy, presumably) and nobody will listen,’ said Bernbach. ‘You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don’t feel it, nothing will happen.’

Equally: ‘Just be sure [you are] saying something with substance, something that will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you’re saying it like it’s never been said before.’ And perhaps most important of all: ‘The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.’

Putting Bernbach’s theories into practice, Tony Abbott needs to not only communicate the truth, he needs to do it in a way that hits people hard in the gut. The truth of the matter is our nation’s finances are in a shambles. The truth is also that if they are not fixed now it will be far harder and more painful to fix them later.

Yet also: ‘The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying, and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you, and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting, and you won’t be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.’

Tony Abbott is, by nature and by reputation, an aggressive ‘no holds barred’ fighter. He needs to persuade the country that he is in the fight of his life – for our economic future. Anything that clouds or deviates from that message, be it the PPL, the medical research future fund or anything else, are the weeds.

Pre-silly season

Clearly, the silly season has arrived early. Normally, this unique part of the fourth estate’s calendar occurs when our politicians head to the beaches and the media have to scour around for any and all ludicrous stories to pad out their pages. But this year, the silliest, dopiest and most preposterous stories came from the politicians themselves in their final week of parliament.

Naturally, the oxymoronic Palmer United Party were the richest vein of silliness for the nation’s newshounds to mine. Jacqui Lambie, who in a few short months has managed the extraordinary feat of becoming a self-parody of her own self-parody, seemed keen to ruin not only the nation’s finances but also the nation’s funeral (for cricketer Phillip Hughes). Then the towering intellect who goes by the (presumably intentionally-ironic) nickname ‘the Brick’ sought to reduce the critical issue of university reform into a cheap gag about text messages.

Speaking of Christopher Pyne, his (correct) pronunciation of the word ‘Wang’ was deemed by the ABC’s Leigh Sales worthy of in-depth analysis.

But the prize for silliest story of the pre-silly season must surely go to Queenland’s Greens Senator Larissa Waters, with her bizarre linkage of gender-specific children’s Christmas toys and, er, domestic violence.

Heaven help us, next thing you know these ridiculous characters will be trying to tell us that our beautiful, turbulent, unpredicatable, scorching, burning, flooding Aussie summer weather is all a product of human-induced climate change!