How Labor’s campaign strategy was accidentally born at an intimate dinner for party insiders
A small gathering of the Labor Party faithful came together for a dinner. The tone that night was grim, but the party has come a long way since then, writes Joe Hildebrand.
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In December last year a small gathering of the Labor Party faithful came together for a dinner in Sydney’s Inner West.
The event was supposed to be a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the electorate of Grayndler — Anthony Albanese’s power base for a generation.
But there wasn’t much to celebrate. After winning government for the first time in a decade in May 2022 and riding stratospherically high in the polls thereafter, the ALP had hit rock bottom.
It had been dealt a massive moral, political and psychological blow by the landslide defeat of the Voice campaign a year before and been sinking in the polls ever since.
Many senior party figures, who were always apprehensive about the Voice referendum, now felt the Albanese government was in free fall.
On an otherwise sunny morning earlier that same month one such figure had sent me a short unsolicited text message: “He is taking us off a cliff.”
With less than six months before Albanese would be forced to call an election, the mood at the dinner was bleak to say the least. Had Labor, as it is so often wont to do, self-combusted again?
The guest of honour was of course the Prime Minister himself, and the man charged with introducing him was his protégé and presumptive heir to the seat of Grayndler, Inner West Mayor Darcy Byrne.
An earthy, genial and knockabout bloke, Byrne did his best to rally the troops with a rousing speech but it felt like Napoleon marching through Russia. Then Albanese stood to speak.
“I know a lot of you are worried,” he said. “But remember: There is always a plan.”
Few in the room believed him then.
They sure as hell believe him now.
The reversal of Anthony Albanese’s fortunes since those dark days is one of the greatest political comebacks in Australian history.
As the nation morosely broke for Christmas last year, with cost of living pressures piling on in the wake of soaring inflation and 13 interest rate rises, the sense of despair in the Labor Party could not be overstated.
Many had gone from being quietly resigned to minority government to confronting the very real prospect that they could be the first first-term government to lose office in almost a century.
The one shining exception to this pathos was Albanese himself. With an almost evangelical zeal, he never had any doubt that he would ultimately prevail.
Indeed, he privately told confidantes that he would even strengthen the government’s position at this election.
Again, this seemed like wishful thinking at the time. Today it might just become reality.
Critical to this is that it was never just wishful thinking. Behind the scenes, even throughout last year, the government was amassing an arsenal of announcements it planned to roll out from January.
Fresh in Labor’s collective consciousness was the bitter lesson from the last time it had been in the exact same invidious position.
Kevin Rudd too had enjoyed sky-high popularity after his landslide election in 2007 but by the end of 2009 the aura was beginning to fade.
Most expected him to come out from the summer holidays in 2010 and launch a double-dissolution election. Instead he launched a children’s book.
History shows the consequence of that inaction and Albanese, Rudd’s most loyal lieutenant, was determined to ensure history did not repeat itself.
And so the PM came out of the blocks in the first week of January with a $7 billion package to fix Queensland’s Bruce Highway — a constant source of woe in the northern state.
Nary a dollar’s worth of bitumen would fall in a marginal seat — which Albo played as a virtue. Instead it was the firing of the starter’s gun in a months-long election campaign that it appears only the Opposition failed to realise was now underway.
The following month came the long-anticipated interest rate cut by the RBA, which was nonetheless showered by sighs of relief from the Labor camp.
And then at the end of February Labor unleashed its biggest election artillery with the $8.5 billion Medicare package that came to define the campaign even before it had officially started.
At first this looked like an answer to a question nobody had asked. Low bulk-billing rates are a perennial weed in Australian politics but they had not been front of mind for most voters, who were more concerned with keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table.
And that was precisely the point. Labor needed to shift the battleground from its greatest point of weakness — the cost of living — to the Coalition’s: Whether it would back in Medicare, always forever, until the end of time.
The gamble had been that Dutton would equivocate on the spending and thus they could accuse him of secretly plotting to kill off Medicare, just as Bill Shorten had so falsely and effectively boxed in Malcolm Turnbull in 2016.
Sensing the trap, Dutton immediately matched the promise, but Labor simply continued its line of attack regardless, and whatever its spurious merits it worked. The Liberals had now blown $8.5 billion for nothing and the campaign still hadn’t officially begun.
Likewise Labor immediately offered another $150 to all Australians in power bill relief for the price hikes that had occurred under its watch. Once more the Coalition felt cornered into matching the subsidy, lest it be accused of being responsible for higher electricity bills.
And here we come to the Rule of Three that has always governed everything in life, from bad luck to jokes about Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen. The set-up, the confirmation and then the twist.
Saddled with a Budget they did not really want to hand down, thanks to the Cyclone-that-wasn’t Alfred, Labor unveiled a minor long-range tax cut it had been planning to announce during the campaign.
Infamously cast as a $5-a-week reprieve that was both too little and too late, it was nonetheless a tax cut. And it was on this hill that the Coalition decided to stand and fight.
Albo had his rope-a-dope. By sending out big weather balloons for the Coalition to pop, he could now accuse Dutton of hiking taxes, just as he was accusing him of cutting health funding.
Thus throughout the campaign Albo was like the Chicken Hawk in the old Looney Tunes cartoons, always outsmarting and outmanoeuvring the more earnest and patriotic Foghorn Leghorn until the anvil came down on his head.
But there were still fires to put out and new ones to start.
Australians have always been uncannily fearful of nuclear reactors and Peter Dutton’s proposal to build seven of them was the very definition of what Sir Humphrey Appleby would call “courageous”.
It also triggered idiotic reactions from sections of the Left in the Labor Party — including Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan and ACT frontbencher Andrew Leigh — who started flooding their social media with memes of three-eyed fish and the like.
This was of course an absurdity in a world where nuclear power had operated safely for decades and a ridiculously irrational position for a party that constantly implored people to “trust the science” on climate change.
The PM knew he needed to shut it down or risk blowing Labor’s credibility.
Here another key factor came into play. While there was a schism between Peter Dutton’s office and the Coalition Campaign HQ, the Labor Party machine led by National Secretary Paul Erickson is a wholly owned subsidiary of Albo Inc.
Thus the parliamentary party and party executive operate as a seamless single unit with Albanese calling the shots free from any internal friction or pushback. If he wills it, it is done — and done quickly.
Thus the three-eyed fauna instantly disappeared — as did other juvenile campaign material, such as personal attacks on Peter Dutton.
But Labor still needed a nuclear scare campaign, and so instead of focusing on the science it focused on the cost.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen was able to use data from the CSIRO that had been “analysed” by the Smart Energy Council — a pro-renewables group — which concluded that the Coalition’s nuclear plan would cost between $116 and $600 billion.
In fact the Coalition’s own costing of $330 billion sat squarely within this range but Bowen and Labor seized on the upper limit and hammered it home ad nauseam, warning Dutton would have to make vast cuts to achieve it. Research showed this line of attack resonated incredibly strongly with voters.
Meanwhile the PM had been rebuilding his Praetorian Guard for the campaign trail. Chief among these was Fiona Sugden, a veteran communications guru from Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership who was poached from Twiggy Forrest’s PR machine midterm.
Fiercely protective, Sugden was at the PM’s right hand throughout the campaign to hose down any crises — including smilingly disarming alt-right protesters who tried to confront Albanese in the hotel he was staying at.
Again, unity and loyalty gave Team Albo a discipline and strength that meant it withstood the campaign pressure cooker as Team Dutton started to crumble.
It was all part of the plan.
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Originally published as How Labor’s campaign strategy was accidentally born at an intimate dinner for party insiders
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