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.
Whether it is a wise strategy or not, I think Albanese is waiting for the campaign, as it gives Morrison less time to run misinformation campaigns, although the LNP Facebook page is running plenty of erroneous anti-Labor pages at the moment.
I just hope Albanese comes out fighting when the election is called.
absolutely agree – the easily-bored news hounds will just have to wait til the official campaigning starts.
Morrison and his spin department will be desperate for something…anything!… as well. Something that can take the spotlight off them if only for a while, and that’s where the small target strategy is doing its job….there is nothing else to focus on except Morrison and his mates. They must be finding it unbearable.
So can you imagine the utter relief they’d feel, if the ALP dropped any substantial policy, before they had to?
First of all, Scomo would do a quick thank you to his mate upstairs…either Murdoch or God, not entirely sure.
Then he’d rub his hands in glee, at how idiotic the ALP have been, gifting him some meat on the bone in his hour of need.
The LNP spin machine would flip into overdrive, figuring out fifty different ways they were going to warp, twist, slice and dice the policy, so it sounded like it was going to singlehandedly destroy the economy.
The ALP policy, replete with derogatory three word slogan, would dominate the news cycle.
That three word slogan would be blasted on repeat on Sunshine, Today, Sky, and all the papers…even the good old ABC would get in on the act, using the three word slogan in a less heated, more earnest context of course – but it wouldn’t matter, because every time that three-worder got used, it would get cemented deeper and deeper into the public consciousness. Mission accomplished, thank you Crosby/Textor.
And while all this is going on, guess who is NOT being discussed? Morrison and his troops.
It would be a double win with a cherry on top.
Nope, Albo and the ALP need to wait til dates are officially set.
In the meantime, the ALP should just keep picking away at the Morrison brand.
I agree!!!
VERY well said, Glenn! I hope they follow your advice.
Part of Morrison’s technique is to take advantage of the fact that he is a moral and intellectual vacuum.
He stands for nothing, has achieved nothing positive on which he can be judged and all the things he has failed to do will be lost in the Mists of time until they come home to roost, by which Time he will be long gone and in a lucrative sinecure.
By being a Tabula rasa he creates the opportunity for enough swinging voters to project their wishes onto him and delude themselves that he will deliver
We see this in his daggy dad schtick and penchant for Being seen in HiVis and going to League . He has never done a days hard work in his life and would last about 3 seconds in a league game, but it allows the voter to think „ he’s enough like me“
It is a dangerous scam that may well work again
Was he ever a League Supporter before he moved to the Shire as a politician? (We already know he has never been a worker in a Hi Vis industry) Do not really care if he was but if he wasn’t it would be nice to know, to further cement the the ‘hollowness’ view I already have if him.
From what Have read he was brought up on rugby union in the eastern suburbs of Sydney and only changed to League when he moved to the Shire.
He used to support the Western Bulldogs too: https://www.hellosport.com.au/2021/09/10/is-scott-morrison-a-turncoat-an-investigation-into-the-pms-footy-teams/
The latest Quarterly Essay tackles this:
Scott Morrison was an extremely obedient drama kid who played rugby union like his rah-rah father. “Rugby [union] will always be my game,” he tweeted in 2012. Yet the two defining themes of Morrison’s youth are a precocious puritanism and the blind faith that he comes from humble suburban beginnings. He recalls his childhood as being “run-of-the-mill” and “nothing out of the ordinary.” “Bronte was a lot different back then than it is today,” Morrison told The Australian before the 2017 budget.
The beachside suburb of Bronte might appear second-rate and far away from everything if you’ve got mates in Double Bay, where Morrison might seem like Darryl Kerrigan compared to Malcolm Turnbull. But Morrison’s upbringing was suspiciously close to that of the inner-city elite. He played the saxophone at Sydney Boys High, a selective public school next to the SCG and a member of the prestigious Athletic Association of the Great Public Schools of New South Wales (AAGPS). The AAGPS was an Antipodean outcrop of the British aristocracy. Morrison made the 1st VIII for rowing and 1st XV for rugby union, two leisure activities of the affluent. On bore-watered GPS ovals, “Scotty-Mo” possibly crossed paths with Barnaby Joyce, a sullen boarder across the harbour at Riverview, and James Packer, a cricket fanatic at Cranbrook. “I learned that you don’t have to be rolling in money to be happy,” Morrison told The Australian, “as long as you’re all together and helping each other.”
There was a vox pop recording on the TV news during the Howard years that tells us a lot about what wins elections. Around about the time of MV Tampa, an old woman, when asked why she voted for Howard, said “I need to feel safe.”
Not be safe (that would be inestimably better in my books); she had a need for the feeling of safety from an avuncular PM who would identify the problem (urban congestion, unemployment, law and order, whatever) identify the cause (mostly foreigners or refugees in Australia) some action to take (send them to Nauru), put his arm on hers and say “there there, everything will be OK.” Not to do anything, mind, that would address actual safety in the community, just to stand by and give her the feelings she needed.
This is what the ALP needs to connect with. Anthony Albanese misreading ‘gotcha’ quotes about Morrison and the Coalition for the evening news won’t quite cut it; Morrison is too seasoned a campaigner and too much of a bullsh*t artist.
I forget (thankfully) which loathsome creature claimed, prior to May 2019, that Sydney’s commuter congestion was due to refugees.
Fiona Scott, Liberal. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/asylum-seekers-not-flooding-into-lindsay-but-that-doesnt-stop-scott-20130904-2t5lu.html
Thanks.
Deservedly forgotten.
Good point, Mercurial. But with the high vaccination rates now achieved, it would be asking a lot for voters to remember that the lockdowns were imposed because Morrison said getting vaccines was not a race, and his failure to equip Australia’s firefighters with all the gear they need. Maybe high on Albo’s list of promises should be getting the fire fighting gear, including planes, that Shorten presciently promised last time. And funding a govt agency for manufacturing MRNA vaccines.
That which is absent; neither prose or poetry. It is ‘leadership’ electorate yearns for.
The longer Morrison and the MSM dirge dominates. The less electorate reacts, focusses or demands change. The political mire Australians trapped in, without leadership; the more certain a negative outcome. We have a bare couple of months to save our nation.
But why did the old woman feel unsafe? Lies from people like Hanson saying Australia was being flooded with Asians and Howard that refugees on boats were a threat? I don’t think the numbers that arrived on boats to date would fill a decent footy ground. Labor has got to let this mob destroy themselves and when they get their chance, do better.
The “tsunami of boat people” of the 6yrs of Labor – complete with daily foghorn by leghorn Hadley on 2GB – totalled, at most fewer than 70,000.
The legal immigration, though reduced from the rate 260K+pa due to floodgates being opened by Howard at the behest of business – not counting 457 scams, 676 overstayers and family reunion – during the same period was 1.4M.
Figures is fun – so revealing.
Unfortunately too many people are innumerate – particularly journos.
See the link above. It was Howard’s nasty trick to imply, without actually saying it as that naive candidate did, that the (widely unpopular) very high levels of immigration was all the fault of asylum seekers.
Tim,
You forgot the refugees that flew in by plane.
Thousands of them under Howard.
Last week in Rome and Glasgow Morrison destroyed himself beautifully, Labor didn’t even have to play a part, Macron did it for us.
Morrison is finished.
Daggy Dad Morrison (Smirkmo) largely owes his fairly narrow victory last election to the blundering Bob Brown foray into Central Queensland to show those hill billies the need to get out of coal and to the federal popularity of the Coalition in WA.
He also had the wind behind him with the Murdoch media boosting messages like “Shorten wants to ruin the long weekend”, and the BCA’s lie that a “46% cut in Greenhouse emissions will ruin the economy”.
You don’t get such luck twice. There will be no caravan cavalcade to Queensland this time round and the Coalition’s ratings in WA have plummeted. The BCA is now rather sensibly calling for substantial cuts in emissions by 2030. The Murdoch media now supports reductions in emissions.
As for Albo, he is keeping his head low. The cost of business as usual is now clearly high and very high for Australia. The cost of full transformation at the needed speed might be high too but it will be temporary. It will be nothing like the injustice of leaving our children and grandchildren to carry fall in the standard of living that will be the result of keeping the owners of fossil companies happier for longer. The monstrosity of the Coalition’s go slow campaign should be obvious to all those who are not in denial. Those who hang on the coattails of fossil fuel interests will live in infamy.
I don’t read the Murdoch media, but is their line now “Thank goodness, Morrison will act on climate change!”?
The media reveals its prosaic emptiness by calling for Albanese to ‘land some blows’. Morrison does nothing else but give himself uppercuts because of his ineptitude and visionless mediocracy. But much of the media does not report that. For example, News Corpse has turned Morrison’s French subs unmitigated diplomatic train wreck into France’s fault because France is ‘unAustralian’. That is so puerile it is sickening.