The swing was on. For at least two years.
This election was not fought on policy, as it should have been. It wasn’t even fought as a leadership content, as unlikeable and uninspiring as both Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott seemed to be. This was about the knives in the backs — the electorally unforgivable instability that voters were always going to punish.
As Bernard Keane writes today:
“Labor managed the economy well, but it could never manage itself. In particular, it couldn’t manage Kevin Rudd, first when he was prime minister, when it took an unprecedented removal of a first-term PM to deal with his managerial style, and then when he was on the backbench, plotting his return. As one state Labor figure put it, Labor never worked out that if you removed a sociopath from the prime ministership, what did they think he was going to do in return?”
And so Abbott becomes Australia’s 28th prime minister. Because he never really buggered it up like many thought he would. And the other mob buggered it up at almost every step.
Unlike 2010, the message from voters was clear: Abbott deserves his chance, with a sizeable lower house majority to implement his agenda, and Labor got what was coming to it — but saved enough furniture to stand firm in opposition and be competitive in three years.
As for the Senate, Australia, just what were you thinking there?
What so far has been missing from the post election analysis is the behaviour of the media over the past few years.
Some politicians respond to questions of perceived failure by pointing out that the media’s focus on getting a ‘story’ rather than reporting event meant that they concentrated on the farcical or burlesque, thereby making it difficult for politicians to actually communicate effectively and also made them ultra cautious in what they said and did.
This isn’t news of course. various media commentators have mentioned it over the years, academics have occasionally weighed in and the comments from the public have often been scathing.
But media itself continues to ignore its own contribution to the way the public understands or reacts to the activities of politicians.
So at this time of soul searching and pillorying of pollies who have failed because of their various perceived shortcomings, it might be well to also consider your own and those of the industry you are part of.
Usually it is considered unfair and impolite to shoot the messenger, but in the case of the local media, shooting barely qualifies as adequate.
You let the self-obsessed idiots lock themselves in the cock-pit (and everyone else out), to learn to fly the plane, what do you expect?
We only get to see our politics and politicians as the media edits, frames and presents them.
They control how we voting punters get to see them.
They see themselves as some sort of catalyst/enzyme in the process, not involved in the actual reaction – and thus not responsible – this ignores the reality.