Get set for a No vote because of the perception PM has dropped the ball

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has had a tough few weeks largely thanks to the lethal Joyce-Voice combo, writes David Penberthy. And it will cost him.

Politics moves fast and having coasted though his first year as Prime Minister, things started to get real for Albo this week. To be an effective Prime Minister you have to look like you are 100 per cent focused on the things that matter most to people.

Anthony Albanese has suffered a decline in the polls because he has started to look unfocused. You could fairly attribute that decline to two key reasons. In the midst of a cost of living squeeze, he has found himself cast in the role of St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, tethered to two things which are regarded with hostility by a majority of Australians – the lethal Joyce-Voice combo.

Former Footballer Adam Goodes, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, Minister Linda Burney, Noel Pearson, are seen at the launch of the Qantas 'Yes' Campaign in Sydney. Picture: NCA Newswire / Gaye Gerard

Let’s deal first with the formerly outgoing/now suddenly gone Qantas chief Alan Joyce, who finally got the bum’s rush by the somnambulant board this week after scandal number 23 (or was it 24?) befell the national carrier.

As the PM in the midst of the aforementioned cost of living crunch, I can’t think of a worst bloke for Anthony Albanese to be knocking around with than Mr Moneybags from Mascot. Here’s a guy who pocketed a cool $125 million over the past 15 years, the sum total of which was his meticulous conversion of a beloved national icon into a standing national joke.

Perception matters more than details in politics. Pictures are also worth a thousand words. The perception right now is that the Albanese Government has been far too close to Qantas. Any company that is prepared knowingly to sell a product that does not exist deserves a special category of condemnation.

For the Albanese Government, the killer has been the Qatar Airways issue. Whatever its reasoning, the Government’s decision to block Qatar’s bid for increased flights made it look like it was Qantas’ lapdog. It doesn’t matter how the decision was made, who spoke to whom when, or whatever the multiple and nuanced reasons were for blocking these extra routes. It simply looked like a protection racket.

That perception was bolstered by the haplessly evasive performance of Transport Minister Catherine King, and the cuteness of the PM in sheepishly refusing to mention Joyce by name in Question Time this week.

Former Footballer Adam Goodes, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Qantas CEO Alan Joyce at the launch of the Qantas 'Yes' Campaign in Sydney. Picture: NCA Newswire / Gaye Gerard

Then there’s the small matter of the Voice, from which you can draw a direct link back to Qantas which under Joyce’s leadership became the most high-profile Australian corporation to engage in what voters regard as patronising electoral sticky-beaking with its trio of painted planes pushing a yes vote.

That picture of Anthony Albanese with a beaming smile sitting next to Alan Joyce at the Voice announcement has done him significant damage. Rightly or wrongly it suggests that they are the best of friends. And the nature of that event is a red rag to a bull to many Australians who think the corporate sector has no role in telling them how to vote.

Especially at a time when so many of these preachy corporates are the ones hitting us hardest in the cost of living stakes.

I was reminded this week of the comment by Michael Gove, the Tory minister in England who played a lead role campaigning in favour of Brexit back in 2016. Gove offered a bleak and anti-intellectual assessment of why he thought Brexit would and should prevail, declaring that people are “sick of experts” – that is, sick of being told how to suck eggs by know-it-alls as to how they should think.

I am a Voice supporter. But I don’t believe that Qantas, Coles, Woolworths or some mining company which has historically pillaged Aboriginal land have any role in telling me, you or anyone how to think.

It seems miserably appropriate against a backdrop of two-plus centuries of dispossession for Aboriginal people that one of the biggest killers of the Yes vote is the well-meaning and idiotic posturing of white people themselves. The process has been hijacked by the preachy PC bourgeoisie within corporate Australia, which has succeeded largely in pushing people further into the No camp with the impertinence of their tactics.

The Yes campaign looks like a rerun of the republic referendum. Clearly Peter Dutton has played a devastating tactical role by denying the idea bipartisanship. Dutton aside, the two yawning weaknesses of the Voice – as per the republican campaign – are that the supporters of the Uluru Statement are divided as to how it should be implemented, and the campaign to support the Voice proposal lacks the popular touch.

The republicans thought they were on a winner back in 1999 with advertisements featuring Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, as if their coming together would galvanise the punters into voting Yes. It was a complete misreading of the public, as I suspect many punters upon seeing both men would remember the first as an economic incompetent and the second a forgettable leader who spent eight years avoiding meaningful reforms and the rest of his career giving us lectures about human rights.

In the same way that randy heterosexuals use Tinder and the gay folks use Grinder to meet up with like-minded individuals, someone should invent an app called “Voter” so that middle-class lefties can track down members of the working class in the outer suburbs and the regions to talk to them about issues of the day. In the same way the Australian Left was stunned and amazed when the republic failed, and gobsmacked when Bill Shorten wasn’t elected prime minister, they are on schedule to be flabbergasted again after October 14 when the Voice fails, as they simply don’t know anybody who would be ghastly enough to vote against it. It’s one of the mollifying and misleading effects of Twitter, in that you can all hang out together in safe, passionate agreement, before your jaws hit the ground when the reverse of your own private consensus manifests itself.

The problem for Albo isn’t the no voters who are traditional Liberal conservatives anyway, but those voting no because they’re sick of hearing about it from a prime minister who in their view should have other things on his plate.

Originally published as Get set for a No vote because of the perception PM has dropped the ball