Selling the Australian Government: Politics and Propaganda from Whitlam to Howard

The fact that governments spend millions of taxpayers’ dollars monitoring the Opposition’s every word and pumping out propaganda to backbenchers to ensure its ‘spin’ reverberates across Australia has rarely been questioned by the media. Greg Barns, a former senior government adviser, provides a revealing insight into the way governments sell themselves, both publicly and behind the scenes, and how their expensive propaganda effort affects the political process.