David Penberthy: Children’s books come with a higher degree of intellectual rigour than this pile of tosh

Labor diehards’ “gotcha” excuses can’t explain Albo’s hopeless performance. And then there’s that “hole in the bucket” ad, writes David Penberthy.

Regardless of who wins the election, it has been clear for the past six weeks who the losers have been. You. The Australian people are almost owed a formal apology from our political parties for the nonsense they have bowled up in a campaign that has more closely resembled abuse than an exchange of ideas.

There’s a hole in the budget, dear Labor, dear Labor.

Libs tell Fibs. Save our homes. Save our homes. It won’t easy under Albanese.

Not to forget the mischievously edited “that’s not my job, that’s not my job, that’s not my job”, where three answers by the PM to questions completely unrelated to his policies were chopped up to make him look like a bludger.

Children’s books come with a higher degree of intellectual rigour than this pile of tosh.

This election has been the only one I can remember that did not see a groundswell of voter sentiment framed around a set of policy ideas. In 1983, it was the unstoppable Hawke juggernaut, and while he almost frittered it away in 1984, he had his eye back in 1987, when the conservatives collapsed amid internal division exemplified by the Joh for PM campaign.

Australian PM Scott Morrison and Jenny Morrison vote at Lilli Pilli Public school in the seat of Cook. Picture: Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

The 1993 campaign was about the public baulking at the ideological excesses of John Hewson’s Fightback package, only to tire of Keating’s policy ambition and bombastic style three years later to embrace John Howard’s “relaxed and comfortable” vision. In 1998, we marked Howard up for courage in the wake of gun laws and his crazy-brave decision to campaign while carrying the lead of a GST in his saddle bags.

In 2001, it was national security, in 2004, interest rates and economic management versus the increasingly deranged stylings of Mark Latham; by 2007, Howard was completely out of puff and the nation rallied behind Rudd, unaware at that stage of what an oddball he was.

The past six weeks have been little more than a sledging exercise, where – aside from Scott Morrison’s utterly hysterical body slam on an eight-year-old soccer player – nothing has brought a smile to our face.

The campaign has been devoid of any sense of inspiration. This is because it was not so much a popularity contest as an unpopularity contest. People voted on the basis of who they disliked the least, rather than who they liked the most.

The Liberals ran a wholly unambitious campaign promising more of the same, resting on their laurels in the hope they could simply cruise back in due to the superiority of their economic management. Labor, burnt by the Bill Shorten experience three years ago with policies on everything from shares to negative gearing, decided that this time they would present us with a policy vision that didn’t contain any major policies. Hence an almost exclusively negative campaign framed entirely around their conviction that everyone either hated the Prime Minister, or at least thought he was ineffectual.

To those who bemoan the quality of the coverage and the behaviour of the press travelling with Albanese and the PM, I would put the counter argument that much of the perceived rattiness is what happens when the political parties create such a vacuum. And in these days of social media, where left-wing and right-wing ideologues devote hours on Twitter to defending their heroes and denigrating their opponents, the reality is that both men were put through their paces in a valid way.

Morrison faced plenty of questions about his handling of the pandemic and natural disasters, the toughest line coming from Tracy Grimshaw last week.

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese and Labour candidate for Higgins Dr Michelle Ananda-Rajah/ Picture: Wendell Teodoro/AFP

And the idea that Albo was subjected to “gotcha” questions is merely a foil from his supporters for the fact that he was sloppy on his feet. As Sid Maher wrote in The Australian, asking a leader who has just announced a six-point NDIS policy to explain that policy isn’t a gotcha question, it’s a Dorothy Dixer, and his ill-preparedness to answer it was a valid story every day of the week.

It feels to me looking at both the Labor and Liberal leadership that what both parties need now is real generational change. Neither man has captured anyone’s imagination. Indeed away from NSW, in more couth and cultured states such as Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, watching the pair of them go hammer and tong has often sounded like two blokes drunkenly hanging s––t on each other over the bar at a leagues club in some outer Sydney suburb.

The debates were dreadful, especially that interruption-laden garbage Channel 9 served up, followed only by the insipidness of their follow-up on Channel 7, where they both realised they’d come across terribly and tried to pretend to be nice to each other. This campaign was encapsulated by the look on the faces of those poor punters invited by Channel 7 to perform “the pub test”, the undecided voters dotted at front bars around the country to vote on the debate. Most of them looked like wanted to die or have the ground swallow them up at the end of it all.

And understandably so, as between Libs telling fibs, and holes in the bucket, dear Labor, dear Labor, we have all been treated like fools, with the end result being the continuing erosion in the primary vote for two parties that historically were much more credible and much more dominant.