Adapt or die
This election campaign that is set to be a battle of attrition against a wounded opponent. Strategies can unravel rapidly in a hostile environment.
To win this election, Labor needs to adjust its campaign to meet the challenges of a disaffected electorate and a hostile fourth estate. It has been clear that a new era of political campaigning has descended on federal politics in Australia, it looks to favour the strategy of our marketing inclined Prime Minister.
We wake up on Monday morning, and on way to work, not moments into the weeks campaign coverage, and we start to realise that the unrelenting screech of spinning politician and talking head will continue unabated throughout another week.
A campaign can be a long time, especially for this beleaguered Australian population. Sometimes a shift in strategy is necessary when an operating in a hostile environment, where the battleground is laden with obstacles and an incumbent that looks to work in bad faith to snatch an election. The ALPs small target strategy may have had its merits in the lead-up to the campaign, but their lack of details has also left the enemy free to invent them. As they fall inside the wake of bipartisanship over most issues, they shirk the opportunity to stand tall and challenge the government on its true weakness.
It’s not like there’s a dearth of material for them to work with. On the economy, there’s a missing $60 billion. The military, a messy and diplomatically costly submarine deal. With health, the failure to secure vaccines. Emergency response, the brazen absenteeism in the face of a taste of existential crisis. Pork barrelling, climate ignorance, sports rorts, cashless welfare, integrity commission, aged care… And there’s more.
Each minister from their associated portfolio is tarnished by these fatal “gaffes”, spanning across hectares of burnt hinterland, unliveable housing in flood zones, and years’ worth of badly kept books. The mounting poverty is real at the petrol pumps and checkouts, and the lip service and trails of bulldust cloud the eyes of the press gallery and drops the heads of the public. The government is led by a Prime Minister that seeks to rearrange the core tenets of the conservative ideology that has continued since Menzies.
Some of them didn’t make it to the election, some of them were supposed to be off the cabinet, some of them have been using our money to mount legal cases or out of court settlements. Some are running around panicking like blue-arsed flies, as independent candidates descend on them, many of them are seeing the cleaving of their political parties, the end times under two distinct ideological divides. With nothing else, in spite of the overflowing levees of mismanagement and wilful decay, the PM stands beside these people every day, oscillating around them on camera in fluro vest and full smirk, as the ultras talk the brief and the mods are pressured to recount their brave positions on ICAC.
Morrison creeps through this 6 week campaign so far with a cabinet in disarray, a transphobic one-trick-pony in Warringah, and Anne Ruston, moving from ensuring the Indue card, to a brazen promotion as the next potential Minister for health. Her promotion demonstrates an open intention to hammer the bolster into the cracks of Medicare, and fragment it once and for all.
The ALP has a host of good parliamentarians, not yet bogged down in the scandal of government, and not operationally comparable to the likes of Alex Hawke and Michaela Cash and the other policy-bereft neocons that encourage an Ayn Rand inspired libertarian nightmare that awkwardly drapes around this reasonably moderate and somewhat confounded country.
Labor comes equipped with a capable senior leadership core, some of whom would considered for the leadership role in their own right. That same depth does not currently exist in the LNP. Beleaguered by scandal and the mounting complications of delivering a poor government, Morrison has lost Porter and Tudge, it cannot deploy McKenzie and Hunt like it once did, Frydenberg and Wilson are on the ropes, and the next “captains pick” Deves, must go to the quiet of the garage to field questions.
Penny Wong could be taking press conferences to demonstrate her acuity on foreign affairs and defence. Tanya Plibersek could be leading an all-out campaign focusing on the governments abysmal handling of pretty much everything to do with women’s equality. Why isn’t Ed Husic, one of the few ALP shadow ministers that is relatable to the working class, talking about the intersection between innovation and uplifting the lower-classes through smart jobs programs? Chris Bowen, Terri Butler, Richard Marles are people that can articulate clear alternatives pertaining to their portfolios, these senior figures should be standing behind Albo at the pressers, talking what they are passionate about.
Morrison knows that you can change your rugby codes, lose a series of plum jobs, and still pivot into prime minister -- because he adapts his campaign. He also has the full support of the titans of industry who open up dozens of gas and coal projects, the press who fulfil the political agenda of international media leviathans, and the bureaucracy, stacked for over a decade with politically aligned appointees who degrade the foundations of our independent regulatory apparatus.
If the ALP wins this election, it would have done so without the support of the media or the elite, it will have done so solely on the backs of Australians, from all classes, and it must recognise that mandate. It must respect the Australian voters that hand it to them. Australians urgently want climate action, we overwhelmingly support a national integrity commission, we cry at the cost of living and we are concerned about health and aged care. Will Labor heed that call, or will it fall to the trappings of major party influence and seek to capture the counterintuitive small interests of the billionaire class?
Australian political campaigns have been mastered by those in marketing and advertising, creating a constantly changing and evolving approach to selling the product. A US style libertarian philosophy has infiltrated the Australian political sphere, this is a known-known to the PM who has divined this environment and means-tested his small-minded strategy in a post-Trump world. He has experience in its vacuousness, but this is a foreign experience for the ALP, but it is nothing to admire, nor celebrate, or something to consider emulating.
Labor must find an antidote to this disingenuous and harmful politics, not play the same game. It must highlight this critical negligence with the quality people it has and demonstrate the glaring necessity for an alternative to this abominable government. And it does that by getting its people out in front of the cameras, behind Anthony Albanese and targeting the glaring inconsistency and disunity of this government.
The Australian people are sick of this narcissistic PM blocking out the sun. As a handful of individuals rip apart the essence of a major political party, the ALP can demonstrate what a functioning and unified group of parliamentarians can deliver. They just need the conviction to do so.
Your writing is just the right mixture - it captures the rage that we feel about the last nine years and then brings it back to solid analysis. I hope someone in the Labor camp is reading this.
Totally agree Joel. If he doesn't, Labor still may win but only with the support of Independents and a reduced legitimacy.