IT WILL DEMAND AN IRON WILL. BUT IT’S NOT TOO LATE FOR ALBANESE TO CHANGE TRACK
0It will demand an iron will. but it’s not too late for Albanese to change track
April 18. 2022 — 5.00am Save Log in. register or subscribe to save articles for later. Share Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size 240 View all comments One of the hardest lessons to learn in politics is that it is never too late to make a change. If you are the leader. or in the leader’s office. it can seem horribly hard to pull the cumbersome weight of campaign machinery from one rail onto the other – but it can always be done. By Wednesday. Anthony Albanese’s need to shift the focus of this campaign away from his mistakes was clear. Amazingly. Scott Morrison delivered two chances. It emerged that the Rheem factory he had gone to for a jobs announcement the previous day was cutting workers. Then. in a press conference. Morrison essentially abandoned his earlier pledge to deliver an integrity commission. Illustration: Jim PavlidisCredit:The Age That day. or certainly by the next. Anthony Albanese could have travelled to the Rheem factory – fighting on jobs. sending a message he would not be cowed by early missteps. Or he could have flown to. say. Badgerys Creek. and made the promise he made two days later: to legislate the commission by the end of 2022. Either would have made Morrison the issue and stolen back momentum. Neither happened. This makes it sound easy. But which would you have chosen? Might you have chosen instead to focus on news the government had (again) paid more money to flood victims in a Coalition seat than the Labor seats around it? What about the large payout to a former Liberal staffer over allegations of bullying and harassment? Or the potentially explosive fact there was a sexual harassment claim. against a different Liberal MP. that had been secret until now? Or the billions made in grants under sweeping ministerial powers? Or Scott Morrison’s assertion he would have more to say about stopping trans women from playing women’s sports (he later changed his mind)? The past week reminded me of Peter Hartcher’s 2019 observation that Bill Shorten’s policy offerings were an IKEA flat pack: you needed to assemble them yourself. while Morrison simply hammered economics. This campaign is different. built less around policy visions and more around destroying your opponent. But Labor is making the same mistake. Morrison has so many flaws that Labor seems unable to choose. Now look again at that list. It contains only concrete facts – things the government has recently done or said it will do. And. to give the media its due. we know about them because they have been reported. We also learned one important (and depressing) fact about Labor. that it had abandoned plans to review JobSeeker. But consider now what received the bulk of coverage last week: the idea of Albanese under pressure. There was Albanese’s failure to remember figures. and his choice of words on offshore detention. soon clarified. He made two mistakes. on policy around temporary protection visas and in falsely stating who had done costings for a health policy. Each of these was a stupid and avoidable mistake. Together. they looked terrible. and Albanese deserved sharp criticism for his lack of campaign preparedness. But how can you determine the import of each for an actual Albanese government? This depends entirely on speculation. Did his failure on jobless figures tell us something about the sort of prime minister he’d be? Did his lack of clarity on immigration indicate a lack of commitment on boats or was this an absurd over reading of a bland statement? You will have your own answers. The undeniable fact is that these speculative and unknowable aspects of the campaign have so far received far more attention and weight than empirically provable facts supporting what we already know. Morrison. in his attacks right now. has two advantages. The first is that he has one clear attack. The second is that this attack plays to the media’s preference. The perverse difficulty for Labor is that the various...
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