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When the going gets tough, try to
tough it out like rabbits

Harold Mitchell
May 7, 2009

The best time to build for the future is during a period of crisis.


IT WORKS for everyone who is game enough to try it. Just ask the rabbits. The last check of rabbits put their numbers at around 150 million.

Nothing we have ever done has been able to wipe them out.

My friend Louise, who knows about these things but, poor thing, lives in the city, said to me the other day, "Rabbits, I thought we wiped them out in the '50s with that myxo stuff." Well, we thought we did, Louise. Scientists invented myxomatosis to eradicate them from the landscape. A crisis for the rabbits!

They were all supposed to die, but they didn't. They worked out how to overcome the threat - the bigger and better rabbits survived to breed on, and on, and on.

During the next 50 years we tried to get rid of them with new scientific discoveries. After myxo in the '50s there was the calicivirus in the '90s, not to mention a century of shooting, baiting, ferreting, trapping and, of course, the rabbit-proof fence. All useless.

The latest I heard this week was that in the suburbs of Canberra at the foot of Mount Ainslie they have created a crisis for the rabbits (and the residents) by gassing them in their burrows with phosphine gas. They obviously haven't heard of ferrets that would do the same thing, but much cheaper.

Killing off families of rabbits - I wonder where Senator Fielding stands on this one.

Each time there has been a crisis for the rabbits they have survived and continued breeding. But why am I telling you about the rabbits? It's because we are told the world is in the biggest financial crisis in 80 years, and the rabbits can teach us something. The rabbits that were the strongest and the smartest survived to be bigger rabbits - even when they over-burrowed.

This column is about marketing and the media, so it is the brands and services that build and grow now when media rates are lower and their competitors down and out that lay the base for the better times that are coming, as Charlie told us last week.

Look at what companies such as Woolworths are doing and you will see how it works.

And elsewhere, the AFL is planning moves into foreign lands, such as western Sydney: classical anti-cyclical strategy that will be a winner.

The Big Four banks are on the march doing the same thing, turning this crisis into an opportunity. So is Kerry Stokes and Seven Network … the list goes on.

I built our business in the mid '70s out of the world oil crisis, galloping inflation and troubles everywhere. Gough Whitlam had just been sacked, the country was in crisis and confidence was rock bottom - I must have been mad.

But in fact what was happening was advertising agencies were cutting staff and our competitors weren't looking for any new companies like us. We sneaked up on them.

Politically, John Howard has shown us how to turn a crisis into a victory on a number of occasions.

Twice leader of the Liberals and twice rebuffed, he fought back and became prime minister. And then he was confronted with the massacre of Port Arthur. It was that crisis that brought him the admiration of the Australian people that hadn't wanted to know him for the 20 years before.

George Bush was getting nowhere as US president in 2001 as September 11 arrived: a crisis to be embraced and it was the making of his presidency.

So think of your own circumstances, because this is one of the best times to build for the future.

Harold Mitchell is the executive chairman of the Mitchell Communication Group.