James Campbell: Coalition MPs admit Labor’s attacks on Scott Morrison are working

Labor is running relentlessly negative attacks on the character of the Prime Minister, which government MPs admit in private is working, writes James Campbell.

The most eagerly awaited speech in Canberra last week was not Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s budget effort, handed down on Tuesday, but Anthony Albanese’s reply a couple of nights later.

That’s because most of the contents of the budget were out there by the time Frydenberg rose to speak in the House of Representatives.

To be sure, it was clear from the disappointed looks on the faces of some of the lobbyists at the bar of the Hotel Realm later that night that some of them were going to be having some awkward conversations with their clients, but there were no real surprises for the rest of us.

Frydenberg’s riskiest move was to allow the low- and middle-income tax offset (LMITO) — a rebate paid to those earning less than $126,000 a year — to finish at the end of this financial year, because if Albanese was so minded he could have got up on Thursday night and announced it would continue under Labor.

That would have given every Labor candidate the chance to put material into the nation’s letterboxes showing how much more tax most people would be paying over the next three years if they re-elect the government.

This would have been particularly potent, because from 2024 everyone earning more than $120,000 a year is going to be paying quite a lot less income tax thanks to legislated tax cuts, which Labor has said it will not scrap.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s budget reply speech had a simple theme: Labor cares. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

The government’s bet seems to have been that for Labor, the choice between a tax cut and money to spend is no choice at all. And it turns out their bet was a good one.

On Thursday night, Albo’s speech made no mention of the LMITO. Instead he offered a five-pronged plan to fix aged care, estimated to cost $2.5 billion.

Before getting on to the politics, there’s a few things to be said about the plan itself.

Under Labor, every aged care facility will be required to have a registered, qualified nurse on site, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Every resident will get a minimum of 215 minutes of care per day.

There would be a pay rise for aged care workers, mandatory nutrition standards for aged care homes, and new powers for the Aged Care Safety Commissioner to make residential care providers report what they are spending money on.

On the face of it, this all sounds very reasonable, though it does raise questions — starting with the pay rise.

Most of the content of Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s budget speech was known before Tuesday. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Albanese said if Labor wins it will take a case to Fair Work, but can’t say how much it would like to see workers’ wages rise by.

It could also be argued that increasing mandated non-medical staff ratios would be a better use of money than having more-highly paid nurses sitting around in the small hours of the morning doing nothing.

Of course, the detail of the plan is not the point. The point is to show how warm-hearted the ALP is — or, as Albanese put it on Thursday night: “Child care. Medicare. Aged care. Because Labor cares.”

Toss in the NDIS, along with the promised boost to education, and you almost have Albo’s entire election pitch.

Will it be enough to win? On its own, I suspect not.

But Labor is also running relentlessly negative attacks on the character of the Prime Minister, which government MPs admit in private is working and has them deeply worried.

The government, in return, is now desperately trying to define Albanese as a frightening left-winger, which he may well be beneath the mild-mannered mask he is presenting to the public at the moment.

The problem is, having ignored him for more than two years, the government has been left trying to fatten that political pig on market day.

There’s probably nothing government MPs can do now about how Australians feel about the PM.

What they can do, however, is use incumbency to run a series of local campaigns that stress the merits of each local MP while downplaying their roles as members of the government. And rather than trying to scare us with phantom Labor taxes, it could use every opportunity to point out that Albanese often says silly things, such as blaming climate change for the Solomon Islands’ decision to sign a pact with China.

In his memoirs, former British PM Tony Blair talks about how he underplayed his attacks on his opponents: one was weak, another was better at jokes than judgment, and a third was an opportunist.

“Expressed like that,” Blair wrote, “these attacks seem flat, rather mundane almost and not exactly inspiring — but that’s their appeal … Any one of those charges, if it comes to be believed, is actually fatal. 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 shrugs their shoulders at those claims. They don’t chime … whereas the lesser charge, because it’s more accurate and precisely because it’s more low-key, can stick. And if it does, that’s that.”

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