Reputation

At work, there is an acute awareness of conduct that raises reputation risk. This is the sort of thing you never want to be involved in, run if anyone wants you to help with it and vigorously advise against anything that could damage the brand reputation or goodwill a company has built. That shit is valuable; it takes a long time to develop and getting it involves engendering trust in your market, clients or consumers. Reputation really is everything.

Which is why I look at the joke that is Federal Politics and wonder what crackpots are giving the government advice on how to protect the reputation of Australia.

Australia, a wonderfully rich and beautiful country with a huge queue at the door, heaps of cash, decent jobs and - lets face it - an all round awesome lifestyle. We have a pretty decent publicly funded healthcare system (suck it America), big grassy backyards with swimming pools (hear that UK?), brilliant summers (umm yep that's for you UK), cities where you don't need to commute 2 hours each way and can be employed as an executive and still see your kids play soccer (are you listening Japan?) All in all, we have it pretty damn good. And I'm confident the rest of the world generally knows that too.

If Australia was a company, it would be employing an entire corporate affairs team to work overtime to make sure that glowing reputation stays firmly put. It would feverishly iron out 'misunderstandings', align itself to initiatives that enhanced its reputation and develop a strategy that required a general understanding of all involved that there would be a need to toe-the-line. The executives of Australia would be unlikely to engage in conduct that could negatively impact the goodwill Australia has in the eyes of the world - the last thing you want to do is slide down the customer satisfaction scale and lose points to London.

So. What the fuck is Labor doing.

This whole leadership....disgrace....spill....overthrow......whatever you want to call it.....is the corporate reputation equivalent of a leaked internal memo from a big cheese company saying its using child labor in Myanmar. In other words, reprehensible, embarrassing and behaviour that those involved should know better.

There is really no excuse. As an Australian, I have sat back and watched this pathetic bitchy infighting and have thought of only one thing - what an embarrassment for Australia. I couldn't give two shits what is going on between Julia, Kevin and the rest of the party. As the governing party, I am shocked that this game of leadership tennis has gone on this long. The reputation of Australia is, in my view, irreparably tarnished during a period of political history that should be celebrated as a time where Australian's entrusted leadership to its first female prime minister. Instead, my recollection of this period will be one of utter embarrassment for our country, both in the eyes of its community but to our allies and those in other countries. Australia has fought for a long time to be seen as a strong and trusted ally and I can't help but feel this crap (this is what it is - crap) has damaged this image.

No company would come close to sanctioning conduct that is even close to what has played out with Labor for fear of reputation damage. Here, we have a government that isn't even sanctioning - its facilitating the conduct - without regard for how this image is going to carry with Australia. I'm sure the Labor die hards will say all of this is for the greater good of Australia. My only answer is how could it be.

#thewholebookaustralia