Anthony Albanese campaigns in prose — and the media want poetry

Australia’s political media are getting all scratchy. They’re bored. In the segue to a post-COVID Australia, they’re hunting for drama. Specifically, they’re bored with Scott Morrison, sensing that behind his deliberately cultivated suburban daggy-dad persona there’s not much there.

The result? A surge in calls for Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese to fill what Sean Kelly describes in his impressionist portrait of Morrison, The Game, as “an odd hollowness at the centre of Morrison’s prime ministership”. And they’re frustrated that other than a suburban daggy-dad redux pledge to “kick with the wind in the fourth quarter”, Albanese is reluctant to go along.

In the Nine papers last week the always perceptive Niki Savva wanted to know when the fourth quarter was going to begin. In The Conversation, one of Australia’s sharpest political scientists, Judith Brett, wanted a bit of mongrel with “some cut-through lines, to up his public profile, to simplify the political contest, and to land some blows on Morrison”.

So when Australia’s best political analysts are chanting “Come on, Albo, come on!” in unison, what’s going on? Here are a few clues.

It’s (a question of) time

It’s a known-known: political parties and political media work on different timelines. Australia’s political parties want your vote just once — next May. Media want your attention all the time — most of all: right now!

Last time around, Labor played to media demand and dominated the three-year news cycle with largely popular policy announcements. Problem is, seems to have worked too well, with the election becoming a referendum on a Shorten government.

No one knows anything

Here’s the known-unknown that political media has to imagine away every day: no one really knows what tactics or strategy shift (or not) the relatively small number of votes in the handful of electorates that turn out to matter. (It’s to conceal this dirty secret that The Australian has to work so hard to turn Newspolls’ statistical shifts into page one news that tie the month-to-month result to Canberra’s by-play.)

In the United States there’s a theory that tries to answer that question for the Democrats (and, by extension, Australian Labor): “popularism”, or crafting an agenda out of a grab-bag of popular things (as distinct from controversial things like *cough* race). Maybe. Wasn’t that the Bill Shorten plan?

In Australia, you campaign in prose

In a reversal of the US mantra, in Australia the all-too-rare successful oppositions have almost always campaigned in prose. It was events that gave them the opportunity to govern in poetry.

Labor’s past two wins — Hawke in 1983 and Rudd in 2007 — changed society. Yet in 1983 Hawke walked away from the controversial tax plans Labor had taken to the 1980 election and his big policy innovation — the Accord — was only released during the campaign. Rudd campaigned as a “fiscal conservative” committed to Howard’s promised tax cuts.

No one campaigns in the same river twice

It’s an unknown unknown: like generals, politicians are always ready for the last campaign. Morrison, for example, is trying to shift to his 2019 terrain of “who do you trust?” It took John Howard 20 years to shake the irony out of the “Honest John” tag. Can Morrison shake the Turnbull-gifted “Scott has always had a reputation for telling lies” by next May?

The electorate changes as people die, turn 18, move house. The country changes. Will the election be in post-COVID times? And what will that mean? Sure politics lags culture (as does political journalism). But over three years, all shift, particularly when turbocharged by big events like the global-warming-induced summer of bushfires and the pandemic.

Another unknown: 2022 will be a post-media election — regional mastheads all but vanished, commercial media hidden behind ever harder paywalls, News Corp an overt political player, Twitter with expanded reach, Facebook in a state of moderation confusion. 

If political leaders hi-vis it up for 20th century media, did it really happen?

Maybe history brings hope for Labor

Here’s a known-known, at least to politicians sleepless in their beds a-night: all political lives end in failure. And an unknown-known: over the past century, 10 Australians have become confirmed PMs for the first time mid-term. Like Morrison, all but one (poor old Billy McMahon) won their subsequent election.

None of them won the one after.