KEY POINTS:
It has been the habit of some political and media commentators to suggest Press Gallery journalists spend their working days at Parliament idly waiting to be spoon-fed the latest Government "spin", which they swallow unquestioningly and then regurgitate for their respective readers, listeners or viewers.
As evidence of
this complicity between politician and journalist, those propounding this theory point to the legions of public relations flacks hired by ministers as proof of some all-pervasive Beehive "spin-machine", the tentacles of which reach deep into the minds of even the most sceptical reporters and have them robotically restating the Government's version of events hook, line and sinker.
The sages who perpetrate this theory could always pick up the phone and ask political reporters why they are interpreting things in a particular fashion.
But that would destroy the myth they have worked so hard to create. As always, the truth is somewhat different.
There is no argument that the Government's public relations apparatus grows ever larger. There are now close to 40 press secretaries working for ministers in the Beehive.
However, a fair chunk of them would have a struggle locating the offices of news media organisations in the parliamentary complex, let alone indulge in some spin-doctoring once they got there.
The similar explosion in the number of communications staff employed by Government departments - now standing at well over 400 - has been interpreted as more evidence of Labour priming its taxpayer-funded spin-machine for election year.
Those staff inevitably have a political function, mainly in damage limitation when something goes wrong.
Furthermore, as events at the Ministry for the Environment revealed last year, the line between developing policy for the Government and promoting it is now very blurred.
Even so, the prime responsibility for co-ordinating and communicating Labour's messages to voters falls to relatively few insiders who work in the Beehive offices of the more senior ministers.
As Labour's election strategy becomes clearer, the question is whether the communication is effective or, more seriously, whether it will make any difference at all.
Labour's strategy is to portray Helen Clark as a strong, experienced leader, stress Labour's track record of doing what it says it will do, underline what the party claims is Labour's reputation as a safe pair of hands, while all the time rolling out big, fresh policy initiatives.
Labour believes Clark's leadership attributes and the party's track record in Government speak for themselves. The challenge is to get voters to switch on and absorb Labour's new policies.
Tactically, Labour is doing some things right. Despite the Prime Minister's longstanding reluctance to release any information before an announcement, Labour is realising that the strategic leak to some media in advance can significantly increase the overall news coverage.
Clark's caution reflected her old adage of under-promising and over-delivering. She has worried that leaking material unnecessarily heightens public expectations with the result that the actual announcement falls flat.
Meanwhile, Labour has pulled out the stops to wrest back control of the political agenda from National with a flurry of announcements ranging from Michael Cullen flagging a phased programme of personal tax cuts to the Prime Minister unveiling radical steps to crack down on tagging.
But not everything has gone like clockwork. There was a major glitch in the handling of the Prime Minister's big announcement two weeks ago that teenagers will be required to remain in school or skills training until they are 18.
The new policy was widely misinterpreted as meaning the school leaving age was being raised to 18.
In fact, the policy will be flexible so that students are linked to a school for administrative purposes, but will have latitude to explore training and work options away from it.
Surprisingly, there was no back-up material explaining this kind of detail to go with Clark's announcement. That material was not issued until this week, by which time Labour had lost the argument with a lot of people.
Being so unprepared is unusual for Labour. It may have seriously harmed what is a groundbreaking initiative.
It probably will not happen again. However, there is another problem with Labour's selling of its policies - its failure to slot policy announcements into a bigger picture.
The announcements in the Prime Minister's statement to Parliament on Tuesday were a case in point. One foreshadowed a huge increase in funding for voluntary organisations working at the coal-face of family and societal problems. But most voters would have missed how this dovetails with other moves focusing on at-risk youth, such as the tagging crackdown and the roll out of the "B4 School checks" screening programme identifying 5-year-olds with behavioural problems.
Clark was critical of John Key's choice of youth crime for his recent state-of-the-nation speech. But Key bundled his solutions together, thereby reinforcing the message that National is serious about getting young offenders back on the straight and narrow.
Clark is no less serious. But the scattergun nature of Labour's policy announcements makes it look like the party is doing things in a piecemeal fashion.
Across the whole of the Government, there is a danger that because Cabinet ministers know what Labour has done and know what it plans to do, they ignore the need to paint the bigger picture for voters.
Somehow Labour's dry announcements about funding have to be translated into something people find meaningful in their daily lives.
To borrow the phraseology of American psychologist Drew Weston, Labour is not making an "emotional connection" with voters.
The party could well go into the election campaign with a truck-load of rational, innovative and highly workable policies, few of which voters can connect with in the way they connected with Key's promise of boot camps for young offenders.
That promise struck a chord, partly because Key kept the concept sufficiently vague so that people could read whatever they wanted into it.
Labour's response is to pooh-pooh such populism, arguing that voters want substance and Key personally and National collectively have done nothing so far to suggest they have it.
But Labour must find a way of connecting with voters and capturing their imagination. This is going to be difficult, given Clark's technocratic style.
Labour is also having to combat the notion pushed by National that, having had nine years in power, it has had sufficient time to fix the country's problems.
Labour may well go into the campaign feeling it has an excellent product to sell.
But it will come to nothing if voters feel no empathy with its new policies. No amount of spin-doctoring or additional communications staff can change that.
