Federal election 2016: Opinion - Malcolm Turnbull’s unforgivable tactical slip

DENNIS ATKINS: No one in Malcolm Turnbull’s travelling team has worked on a national election campaign before - and it’s showing.

AFTER four days the great Australian Federal Police/National Broadband Network kerfuffle has died down.

This has been the worst campaign distraction for the Coalition, both because it sucked oxygen from its efforts to get its own message out and it was aimed at a key positive for the Prime Minister - his trustworthiness and credibility.

The big lesson the Coalition needs to take from this is that it has to heed two of Malcolm Turnbull’s two favourite words and be more agile and nimble in responding to expected events.

The story of the raids on Stephen Conroy’s Melbourne office broke at about 4pm on Thursday but the Coalition’s campaign spokesman Mathias Cormann was completely unaware of what was going on when he fulfilled a scheduled appearance on the ABC’s 7.30 program that evening.

He should have known.

From then on, the Coalition was playing catch up - understandable on one level but when analysed episodically, it became progressively worse as Friday became Saturday.

Labor was being very agile and nimble - dropping out new information on deadline, catching the evening TV bulletins and then the morning radio.

It felt like the Prime Minister’s office was running behind the AFP, waiting for the police to confirm or sign off on details.

This was an unforgivable tactical slip.

It’s been pointed out no one in Turnbull’s travelling team and the home base bunker has worked on a national election campaign.

The one exception is Arthur Sinodinos who is not travelling all the time and has a background in policy rather than politics.

Coalition strategists hope their team will learn from this and are thanking their luck that it happened in week two and not week seven.

Originally published as Federal election 2016: Opinion - Malcolm Turnbull’s unforgivable tactical slip