(Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

No matter how cynical and jaded you get, you never really get used to News Corp’s way of running news like a campaign, with no reference to actual events. For a week, across The Australian and the tabloids that pay its way, just, we had nothing but the horror of Jim Chalmers’ very modest increase on tax on super holdings above $3 million. 

The opening barrage was the old “politics of envy” stuff. But even the donkeys at News Corp HQ knew this wasn’t enough. So then we had speculation about how many people would be paying the higher rate in 30 years, when bracket creep had done its job — and no one, apparently, would have altered the threshold. 

That was sillier, but it was no sillier than plan C, which was to find people who had $3 million in super, but were renting and would face “real hardship” because they had decided to pay the vast rents of luxury property they must have been able to afford to buy at an earlier stage. Someone should get a Walkley for finding two of the nine people who made that life decision.

Then the two polls — Newspoll and Essential — came out, with essentially the same message: that around 60% of people supported this modest and sensible move. Quelle surprise! Labor had got both the target and the messaging right this time, having learnt from its total stuff-up over franking credits in 2019.

Targeting a truly separate group, with a clear dividing line, and the miniscule number of people affected. Must be said, it’s nice to see basic competence exercised in a modest progressive move. Been a while.   

Soon as the polls came out, News Corp swung its guns and troops around, marching down the other side of the hill. The Coalition followed, all heading towards the latest rate rise. It’s no substitute for “super grab horror!” and not only because people understand that the Reserve Bank is an independent entity. 

It’s also because the Coalition isn’t actually suggesting, and can’t suggest, political intervention in the interest-rate-setting process. So it has no follow-up. It’s just Sussan Ley, putting us in the picture (the jingle written by the great Les Gock of Hush; can someone explain why no one’s done a documentary about an Asian-Australian band having huge hits in the early 1970s?).

Well, look, when you want a party spokesperson for the figures, clearly the best candidate is a woman who changed her name to match that of a basic betty clothing line, because numerology. But Labor isn’t going to get off that easily forever. They will need to start plugging the other side of the equation (no, S-S-S-Sussan, not the 5th-dimension astral plane). It is going to need to talk about spending, and also not spending.

Jim Chalmers noted, as m’colleague Atkins noted, that there isn’t the space anymore to do the sort of explanatory policy politics that Paul Keating engaged in, and that — as irritated gen Z-ers and ageing millennials note (yes, you’re ageing now! Welcome to the thunderdome!) — is something Xers and boomers produce as a sort of panacea-mantra. 

But News Corp is now an organisation devoted to the destruction of a genuine public sphere in Australia. Nine “papers” are now objectively right-wing and steered towards defending the Coalition’s soft, weak, sickly flanks. Middle-market gotcha journalism rules everywhere: 20-year-old cadets, acne in a suit, asking the minister for water supply to define a metope, etc, the application of tabloid techniques to what was once policy coverage. 

Albanese Labor needs to find a way around that, but I disagree with m’colleague as to the need for “a monster” (or “the enemy” as Carl Schmitt had it, more honestly, and nastily, a century ago). Labor’s been in power for close to a year. People want it to assume responsibility. 

The filleting of the Coalition governments can continue in inquiries, slowly, day by day, to give the (accurate) impression that they were closer to a criminal gang than a series of governments. Seeing all this through the judicial eye gives the sharper sense that they did something not merely bad, but wrong. 

Labor can then make itself the natural party of government, as the Coalition is dismantled piece by piece. You can see the state they’re in by the sick burn Monique Ryan gave Peter Dutton, over the question of whether she wanted to be prime minister, as Sally Von Won’t had suggested in her wokeplace lawsuit. “I’ll be prime minister before you are,” Ryan replied, to big laughter, some of it from the opposition benches.

Ryan’s quick wit sealed the gag. But the situation has to be one in which the joke expresses a pre-appreciated truth, otherwise it fails. Dutton had made himself into “the monster” during the last Morrison government; cosmic psycho-in-council. Ryan’s gag made him look like a bloke at the bowlo who’s been sat in the sun too long, poor old fella. If that can be done, then were the government to “make monsters”, it would leave a vacuum where legitimised power should be.

There’s no alternative now, but for the Albanese government to fill out every available space, as the government and party that will lead us into the next stage of what we are going to become. That means that initiatives such as the super changes have to be accompanied by some sort of “plan”, even if it’s a few words — just some statement of what’s it all for, what the joined-up bits are, and what the real difficulties we’re going to face will be. 

Labor might be tempted into a permanent soft insurgency-in-power, given the pain that’s going to come from the RBA’s next 28 interest rate rises, and the effect this is going to have, especially on large numbers of the young, as Alison Pennington has explained here. 

The young are really, really angry at the moment, as far as I can tell. They see a future permanently deferred, and their own future as permanently sequestered in the sort of jobs they would otherwise be moving on from. Labor might be tempted to the “hello, fellow debt-ridden renting kids” pose, but it won’t work. 

Labor will be tempted to it because the Greens and left-wing groups should be able to benefit from it — especially if the Greens pivot quickly from the least-worst deal they can get on coal and gas, and become a fire-breathing sectional party for Generation F’d. The only way Labor can really respond will be to say that it’s a whole-of-country party, dealing with the difficult business of government, and have some sort of overall plan that includes some sort of mitigation of the worst.

It’ll have to take the hit from the left if the Greens gear up to deliver it. That in turn will move the whole political spectrum left, and render the Coalition even more irrelevant.

I couldn’t be happier about it all, waiting for the next desperate News Corp try, which will surely come. After all, this goes with that, eh, Sussan?

Will Labor be able to make a difference? Let us know your thoughts 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.