Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese (Images: AAP)
Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese (Images: AAP)

Tonight Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese will face off in the first leaders’ debate of the election campaign. But don’t expect many voters to tune in. The debate will be broadcast on pay-TV channel Sky News (and the Courier-Mail’s website), sandwiched between Peta Credlin and Paul Murray’s shows. 

It’s a sign of just how much election debates have lost relevance over the past decade, as an increasingly apathetic voting public tunes out. In the 2000s, most election debates drew north of 2 million viewers, carried across multiple channels. The peak came when 3 million Australians watched Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard slug it out in 2010. Rudd v Abbott still drew 1.5 million in 2013, before the real decline started. In 2016, the last time Sky got the first debate, a paltry 54,000 watched the first people’s forum.

Before the last election, Kerry Stokes claimed a “wonderful coup” landing the first debate on Seven, only to put it on the second channel for viewers on the East Coast (because Home and Away). It was the 19th most watched program in the country that night, with just 415,000 viewers, far behind the millions who watched a reality TV show about grown adults who make things out of Lego. 

The viewer numbers also track with findings from the Australian Election Study, which maps the dwindling importance of debates. In 1993, 71% of respondents watched the leaders’ debate. That number was flipped in 2019, when 70% didn’t watch. Those numbers were a little better than 2016, when 79% of respondents weren’t following the debates.

Compare all this to the United States, where 73 million people watched the cantankerous opening 2020 presidential election debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden (a fall of 10 million from the 2016 record), and you get a pretty good sense of the growing disconnect between the public and politics at large. 

Or, to be maybe a little less pessimistic, it’s at least a sign of how our engagement with politics has changed. In the age of streaming, we’re no longer watching terrestrial TV events. Social media destroyed any ritual around tuning in to nightly bulletins, and atomised our news consumption. It’s also given politicians so many more ways to get their message out to voters instantaneously. 

It’s also worth keeping all this in mind when Albanese and Morrison take to the debate stage in Brisbane tonight. Sky News’ People’s Forum, moderated by chief anchor Kieran Gilbert, promises to feature questions from a selection of 100 undecided voters. But many of the undecided voters that both sides need to win over won’t actually be watching.

What they will see are the soundbites, which now matter a whole lot more than who “won” the hour-long tussle. With so few voters actually watching, the ability to deliver the soundbite easily repackaged as an attack ad or Instagram-friendly zinger suddenly gets a whole lot more important.

And even if nobody watches, the debate matters to the overall narrative of the election. After a gaffe-riddled opening week, another unforced error under the (now more muted) glare of the debate stage would be a worrying sign for Albanese. 

In a relatively nothing-y sort of campaign, a hardening of the “Albo in trouble” narrative would cause a kind of confidence spiral for Labor, hand Morrison more momentum, and give some undecided voters more reason to doubt the opposition.

Likewise, a dominant performance by the Labor leader could brush away lingering doubts about his strength on the campaign trail.

Still, barring something truly out of the ordinary, don’t expect tonight to change any votes. It’s largely the pundits, not the punters, who are watching. But maybe that’s not all too good for the state of democracy.