Neither leader seems capable of opening his mouth without saying something over the top
After four days listening to this lot, it’s hard not to feel that if a country gets the politicians it deserves then we must have been must been very bad indeed.
Opinion
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Is there a way we can fast forward to May 3?
Some kind of medical intervention that would allow us to sleep through the next five weeks without having to live through this.
I get that elections are important – I’m paid to write about them so I ought to – but after four days listening to this lot, it’s hard not to feel that if a country gets the politicians it deserves then we must have been must been very bad indeed.
In private, Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese are both thoughtful and amusing company.
But in public neither seems capable of opening his mouth without saying something so over the top as to make it hard to take anything he says seriously at all.
Talking about the coming poll last week as though it’s some sort of contest for the ages probably seemed like a good way of getting our attention.
But rather than succeeding in investing the campaign with the importance it obviously holds for them, the pair sounded like football commentators assigned a Sunday afternoon clash between clubs with no chance of making the finals who are desperately trying to stop the audience changing over to the Elvis movie – you know, the one where he drives a race car – on the other channel.
Which isn’t to say, of course, they don’t have good points to make.
Albo is right to say Dutton is asking us to take a lot on trust when he claims he can cut 41,000 commonwealth public servants without touching what he calls “front-line” services.
But it’s silly to claim “everything in Peter Dutton’s record tells us that he will start by cutting Medicare and he won’t stop there” and “he will cut everything except your taxes”.
Because, as the Prime Minister well knows, contrary to his claims about Medicare bulk-billing rates being in “free fall”, they were in fact much higher under Scott Morrison and Greg Hunt than they have been under him.
He’s not the only one overcooking it, of course.
Dutton has also been turning it up to 11.
As everyone knows by now – in what already seems like an age ago – last Tuesday night Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced that from next July taxpayers will get an extra $5 a week.
As we also know, as a cost-of-living measure, if elected, Dutton will maintain the current income tax rates and instead cut fuel excise for a year.
It’s a far from unreasonable position and is likely to prove popular in the car-dependent parts of Australia in which he is trying to win votes.
In those circumstances the easy – the plausible – thing for him to say on Thursday night was “this tax cut is fine as far as it goes but you can see the fact is it doesn’t go very far, which is why we are …”
Instead he called it a “cruel hoax” because, well, I’m not really sure.
It might be inadequate, but it’s very much real.
Perhaps we were supposed to concentrate on the word “cruel” as opposed to … “kind”, “gentle” or “harmless” hoaxes.
Nah, sorry, that doesn’t work either.
It’s just empty, over-the-top rhetoric.
On the other hand, his claim that the cut was “a shameless election vote-buying exercise” was neither empty nor over the top.
But even so, you have to think it might have been better left out as – literally – seven sentences later the Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition announced if we vote for him he’ll cut petrol tax!
As I said, Dutton and Albanese share a love of rhetorical overkill – overstatement being the besetting vice of the Australian politician – but the danger to the challenger of striking the wrong tone is much greater than to the incumbent.
The advantage for a prime minister painting a lurid picture of what to expect if his opponent comes to power is because he is describing an unknown, the listener cannot be entirely certain there is nothing to what they are hearing.
Whereas an opposition leader who claims we’ll be all ruined if the other bloke gets to keep his job risks looking ridiculous because most of the time the voter is entitled to assume if the current mob stay where they are, at least things won’t be worse.
It’s too late for the next five weeks but at some point it would be good if our leaders could heed a passage in Tony Blair’s memoirs in which he describes choosing attacks on his opponents that seemed “flat, rather mundane almost, and not exactly inspiring” but which were fatal if they came to be believed: “Yes, it’s not like calling your opponent a liar, or a fraud, or a villain or a hypocrite, but the middle-ground floating voter kind of shrugs their shoulders at those claims. They don’t chime. They’re too over the top, too heavy, and they represent an insult, not an argument. Whereas the lesser charge, because it’s more accurate and precisely because it’s more low-key, can stick.”
Originally published as Neither leader seems capable of opening his mouth without saying something over the top
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