Labor needs to sell its story on super before the newspapers do

As a student of history, Treasurer Jim Chalmers knows politics is played as a long game — but that same discipline teaches him short horizons can be as treacherous as anything that lies beyond the next news cycle.

When he was feeling more than a little under siege, the target of public and private slings and arrows from opponents — inside his government, across the political divide and in the know-it-all political commentariat — one thing he couldn’t claim to be was surprised. He had chronicled the malaise of modern politics in blunt terms in his 2013 book Glory Daze, his reflections on the years he spent working with former deputy prime minister and treasurer Wayne Swan.

Here’s his frank assessment of why having the kind of “sophisticated conversation” he’s been seeking is all but impossible:

[As well as right-wing commentators], the once-mainstream news outlets must also take some of the blame for the ways that the incentives in our politics have become misaligned in a way that rewards the hyper-partisans. Newspapers respond to commercial pressures by increasingly pitching to a narrower and narrower base of commercial readers, pushing their commentary out of the mainstream and into the realms of preaching to the converted.

If you look back on the way the putative serious national media — The Australian and The Australian Financial Review — covered the very modest (some might say timid) tax reform around high-end superannuation concessions, it’s not surprising Chalmers singled these newspapers out for special mention in his 2013 book.

He wrote that balanced and considered reporting had been replaced “with campaigning headlines and gotcha pieces and nasty captions”.

No doubt these and other observations he made in 2013 went through Chalmers’ mind as he was bounced around the sideshow alley of breakfast TV and its Whac-A-Mole approach to that serious conversation some people thought we were having.

“[A] preference for cheaper commentary and shallow reporting … [mostly] reflects a new set of incentives in the political system that diminish its capacity to properly apportion credit,” Chalmers wrote.

This is fine as far as it goes, but while it delivers a clear-sighted assessment of modern politics, today’s treasurer then walks into a more contentious part of the political woods: he chides senior commentators for placing story-telling on an equal par with reform achievements and macroeconomic outcomes.

Part of Chalmers’ point was to defend his former boss and friend Swan, who was criticised for not being as good a communicator as Paul Keating or Peter Costello. Chalmers says Australians should be able to pay on results: “Not on opinions, but on cold, hard realities of our economic performance, good and bad. On substance. And they need to look for those results and be able to read about them in the nation’s media.”

The problem with this — and perhaps why there was so much anxiety in government ranks last week — is that the narrative is important. It always has been.

There are fewer places where this is better discussed than in a 2020 book, The Art of Political Storytelling, by Philip Seargeant, a senior applied linguistics lecturer at Britain’s Open University. His thesis is that in political storytelling you need a monster, a seemingly unbeatable foe terrorising the population, and a hero who races in to save the day. As Robert Shrimsley of the Financial Times asks in his review of the book, is this Star Wars or everyday politics?

Founding editor of Private Eye Christopher Booker identified seven basic plots, all used by politicians through the ages: “overcoming the monster”; “rags to riches”; “the quest”; “voyage and return”; “comedy”; “tragedy” and “rebirth”. As they say in the once-smoke-filled rooms of politics, it ain’t rocket surgery.

In fact, in 1964 the American essayist Richard Hofstadter wrote a cover story for Harper’s Magazine examining what he called the paranoid style in US politics which he labelled an arena of angry minds. He was talking about the “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” which has a “greater affinity for bad causes than good”.

To prove his point there was nothing new in the political solar system, Hofstadter went back to the Joe McCarthy hearings of the early 1950s, the Populist Party manifesto of 1895, and anti-papal conspiracies of the 1850s.

Of course, as Chalmers suggests, the hollowing out of legacy media opens the way for a hyper-partisan reaction to any reform no matter how modest. As effective politicians everywhere have shown, you need a narrative, a story where the monster is identified and vanquished by good guys. Keating would always say good policy was good politics but the corollary of that is that good politics is good storytelling. Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese might be pleased with — maybe even emboldened by — this week’s opinion polls showing a majority of Australians backing super reforms by two to one, with majorities across all demographic and political cohorts.

They will need to look seriously and carefully at how the last couple of weeks went; they were not fully prepared, there was no line of sight to the third and fourth move, let alone anything beyond. They got through it because it was a sensible reform that was always going to get strong public backing (anyone who didn’t anticipate Monday’s Newspoll should hand in their politics badge).

Where the government lost credit with voters was on trust — most people thought this was a broken promise and there’s some repair needed on that front.

What comes next will need a narrative, a story. Booker listed the most common plots and the government has the appropriate one sitting there: overcoming the monster.

If Chalmers can develop his plot lines from the first chapter to the last he will achieve the results he wants everyone to acknowledge. Wishing the kind of frenzied, irrational response from those “newspapers responding to commercial pressures” away is going to be much harder.

An even greater problem for any Labor government is that these legacy newspapers are led and owned by editors and chief executives with ideological opposition to any policies targeting inequality or inequity. That’s the unsentimental handicap Labor faces.

Jim Chalmers had a dream about civilised discourse. Do you share it? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.