Anna Caldwell: ‘Populism’ battle between Premier and Luke Foley
EVERYWHERE around the world, leaders are putting on the mantle of populism. But does it fit NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, Anna Caldwell asks.
Opinion
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SOMETIMES a story about a politician captures his essence so well it becomes folklore.
Take the time when, during the Sydney Olympics, it went around that then-premier Bob Carr had been caught reading Tolstoy’s War And Peace in the stands at the beach volleyball finals.
There are different versions of the story depending on who you talk to — another has it the book was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment — but the gossip, which entered into local political legend, was repeated because it seemed so believable.
Carr never shied away from his intellectualism and bookish image. In fact, he traded on it, and to his credit never tried to be the everyman or family guy, even as he did the hard yards of talking to the public and taking calls on talkback in a job he has said sometimes felt like being “mayor of NSW”.
Paul Keating, with his Zegna suits, Mahler, and antique clocks was much in the same mould. Ditto everyone from JFK, whose image was one of carefully cultivated new aristocracy, to John Howard, who may have been derided by his haters as a mere “suburban solicitor” but who never traded in populist-image salesmanship.
Today, though, it seems anything that smacks of the elite is the kiss of death. Outsiders are in, and insiders are to be distrusted.
It is impossible to separate this from the lessons of the 2016 US election campaign, which was the ultimate repudiation of the political elite.
Donald Trump, of course, campaigned as the ultimate outsider: Despite his jets and property empire, he was never taken seriously by the east coast establishment and found more connection with the farmers and factory workers of the American midwest.
Everywhere, it seems, shoring up one’s everyman credentials is crucial.
Gladys Berejiklian’s quiet, nose-to-the-grindstone persona saw her elevated through the ranks of the NSW Liberal Party, first winning preselection for the safe north shore seat of Willoughby in 2003 before becoming an Opposition, and then government, frontbencher.
Barry O’Farrell gave her the transport portfolio after the 2011 state election, and she would later become treasurer and then, when Mike Baird stepped down, Premier. Not exactly an insurgent, populist coup by an outsider promising to make NSW great again.
It’s no accident Premier Berejiklian, in an interview on the front page of this paper last week, told me she was “almost an outsider that’s now an insider”.
It’s a way to get voters to look at her and see not a party apparatchik who played her cards right but a woman who has fought against the odds to be in with a shot to be Australia’s first female Liberal leader elected at the ballot box.
The Premier is trying to say to voters, “Hey, I know what it’s like to do it tough” — when clearly she isn’t doing it tough anymore.
For Luke Foley, it’s an easier sell. He lives in the suburbs, where a train rattles past his back yard, with three kids.
He had a tough life with his dad, an alcoholic, walking out on the family when Foley was just eight. He’s spoken of his upbringing before and Labor knows it speaks to voters.
Foley is deliberately and clearly weaving a narrative that as a father of three kids he knows what it’s like to juggle family and cost of living pressures.
He regularly posts social media photos at the Flemington markets where he does big Saturday morning shops for the family.
Echoing LunchMoney Lewis’s hit song Bills, Foley recently captioned a post of himself with fishmongers at the markets, writing: “I’ve got five mouths to feed so you have to get in there nice and early!” The message: I’m not one of those parliamentarians you hear about living a high life of government cars and four-figure internet bills.
But the Premier will have a harder time, which perhaps explains her strategy to crystallise her preferred biography of hardworking daughter of hardworking immigrants who raised their daughter to believe in the Australian dream.
It’s a compelling story, but any politician trying to play the everyman is taking a risk.
Whenever a politician embarks on this sort of reintroduction campaign, voters will come to it with cynicism and need to be convinced otherwise. The dire spin-doctoring that gave Australia the “real Julia” is one instance where it fell flat.
When the Premier talks of her empathy for struggling families because she remembers having “parents working shifts different times of the day. They only saw each other for an hour a day and on weekends … I watched my parents juggle everything”, the near-instantaneous rejoinder from voters will be: “What are you going to do about it?”
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There is no doubt the government will roll out a series of cost-of-living measures in answer but, nonetheless, this is where Foley has the advantage.
Opposition leaders are almost by definition outsiders as they are forever kibitzing from the sidelines but never forced to take any real responsibility — until they win, of course.
More than that, though, his day-to-day life — even curated through the lens of social media — feels more in touch with the everyman narrative than that of the Premier, who lives on the north shore and whose public transport is a bus across the Harbour Bridge.
The lessons of great leaders past tell us voters don’t need a leader to be just like them though. We happen to be at a point in history where leaders are trying that out. The same is evident federally when you look to Scott Morrison’s “ScoMo” and Bill Shorten’s champion of the worker narrative.
Just how this plays out in NSW remains to be seen. Labor strategists and senior ministers — even faced with a recent bad run for the government — still believe winning majority government will be a stretch. They see a hung parliament as a more likely result.
They want Foley to do more to make himself known and internal polling shows he needs to do just that. On the one hand, invisible Foley gives Labor an opportunity. They still have time — although it is running out — to construct exactly who Luke Foley is and what he stands for.
The Premier is already well at work projecting her own image.