Australia – get ready for a rough 6 weeks
When the federal election is finally called, Australians need to strap themselves in for the most personal political campaign in recent history.
Analysis
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Half a century ago, student activists rallied around the catchcry that “the personal is political” – a rejection of the nuclear family and so-called traditional values.
Today the wheel has come full circle and we are entering an election campaign in which the political is personal. The contest over which side of politics should govern the country has been deliberately framed by both contenders as an argument over the personal character of each of the two leaders.
The Coalition and the conservative voices supporting it are painting Anthony Albanese as a fake who is paying lip service to sensible centrist and consensus politics – no new taxes, waving through Budget payouts, unity on national security – only in order to win power and then unfurl his secret socialist agenda.
This has even been tied to his recent weight-loss and somehow infamous choice of new spectacles.
Meanwhile Labor is painting Scott Morrison as a bully and liar of almost pantomime-esque proportions. A man who is simply not fit to govern the country.
And frankly, it hardly needs to bother. A veritable curtain call of disgruntled figures from the PM’s own side is doing that job for their own various reasons and there is little doubt the electorate increasingly agrees with them.
They may well all be right. But there is a cost to all of this and for anyone who believes in civil liberal democracy it is a very high price to pay.
Because when an argument about who is better placed to protect the country, grow the economy and look after ordinary people instead turns into an argument over who is a better person it doesn’t take long for things to turn ugly.
A Labor-aligned pollster mate of mine once said to me – and not happily – that in the age of social media political debate had changed from being about whether or not you did good or bad things to whether or not you were a good or bad person.
In other words the contest of ideas had been replaced by a contest of character, hence the rise of the modern phenomenon of “virtue signalling”. Victory is measured not by the benefits one might secure for those less fortunate but by how morally and ideologically pure one can prove themselves — or indeed just proclaim themselves.
You only have to read the self-praising Twitter bios of those with a teardrop in their handle to see how prevalent this is among the activist left.
This sort of narcissistic social media silliness is at least largely impotent but when a national election campaign becomes a contest of character a bigger problem takes hold, because the contest can only be won by character assassination.
This means that personal attacks are no longer an unfortunate by-product of the democratic process but its central purpose. It is not the dismantling of a politician’s arguments that is vital but the dismantling of their decency.
The most obvious recent example of this was the scrawling of a swastika on the face of Josh Frydenberg on his campaign poster in Kooyong.
This would be a disgraceful act against any candidate but for Frydenberg, the first Jewish member of Parliament to take his oath on the Torah, it is a particularly personal abomination.
And even more abominable is that he faced legal action from a political opponent trying to void his citizenship because his parents were forced to flee the Holocaust. If escaping genocide isn’t off limits for 21st century political tactics then what was World War II even fought for?
Even worse is that this was not an isolated or one-sided act. Labor’s member for McNamara – the former Melbourne Ports electorate held by the proudly Jewish and pro-Israel MP Michael Danby – also had his poster defaced by a swastika earlier this year.
Josh Burns, the current MP whose image was defiled, admirably said he was not seeking sympathy but was sickened that this was something that could happen in Australia today.
Meanwhile in Wentworth, a must-win Sydney seat with a huge Jewish community, Dave Sharma – a former Ambassador to Israel – is being targeted by a so-called “independent” campaign supported by activists who call Israel a murderous apartheid state. When some people liken Israelites to white supremacists it is little wonder that others start branding Jews as Nazis.
And this nasty wormhole has opened up before the election has even been called. There is a febrile energy in the air.
Obviously the tenor of political discourse has become more vicious in the social media age but in Australia the limits of that viciousness have not been fully tested in an election campaign.
In 2007 the Rudd-slide was a foregone conclusion and in 2010 the Gillard campaign was a disappointing deflation. In 2013 every leftist with more than one brain cell was resigned to an Abbott victory and in 2016 the fashionable left was divided between Shorten vs Turnbull.
It was only in 2019, when Morrison snatched victory against every assumption, that the activist class really exploded with rage. Reality had defied their expectations and so they ruthlessly attacked him for everything from family holidays to bowel movements.
Meanwhile the Coalition is on a hiding to nothing and so has nothing to lose. Like any cornered wounded animal it will resort to anything to survive. Little wonder it is reaching back decades to try to find any scraps of dirt it can on Albanese.
And so we are looking down the barrel of what may be the most personal political campaign in recent Australian history – and it hasn’t even started yet.
Watch Joe’s new show The Blame Game — 8.30pm Fridays on Sky News or stream on demand at flashnews.com.au.
Originally published as Australia – get ready for a rough 6 weeks
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