Joseph Deeb carried the Roads & Traffic Authority road-safety message into households no department had been reaching, building the communications strategy himself and taking it through schools, places of worship, doctors’ surgeries and onto the airwaves, so that drink-driving, fatigue behind the wheel and the seat belt arrived in front of people through voices they already trusted, which is behaviour change achieved by engaging a community on its own ground instead of instructing it from a distance.
The same approach then carried other programs, since he stood beside the New South Wales Environment Minister at the launch of the Environment Protection Authority’s Solutions to Pollution campaign and took it well past the audience it was built for, across several language communities at once, before developing it from what a household does with its own waste into what a council owes the water it is charged with protecting. He explained the new international calling service of Telecom Australia, now Telstra, to people who had been telephoning relatives abroad for years without anyone telling them what the call cost or how to ask for help in a language they spoke, and he opened the carrier’s own doors to them for a day of direct engagement with its staff and its services.
By the NRMA board election he was doing something else entirely, examining a national member organisation of considerable size as a question of governance, of economic management, and of whether a board serving a membership drawn from every walk of Australian life resembled that membership in any respect, with the press carrying his call on every member to vote and reproducing the full ballot so a reader could take the newspaper into the vote itself.
Underneath all four run the economic implications he identified in culturally and linguistically diverse communities, implications that later hardened into indicators which institutions now price and count, since an institution may hold something a community needs while possessing no means of putting it in front of them, and he had read them as economic before he had any standing to call it that, named an economist by the Australian press decades ago for his work, early in his career. That same reading he now brings to nation states, where what goes unpriced and uncounted is no longer a community an environment authority cannot reach but the leverage a sovereign nation holds in its energy, its minerals and its revenue drawn from outside its own tax base, which is what the Trumponomics Doctrine was written to map out.
The record below is drawn from Australian newspapers of the period, in Arabic and Italian, reporting the work as it was carried out.