ScoMo and Albo don’t know Victoria, and that’s a problem
The next ‘gotcha’ questions to rugby-loving Sydneysiders Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese should be aimed at exposing their lack of knowledge about Victoria.
Opinion
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Sitting in a radio studio in Sydney for the first time back in 2002 I was so terrified of not knowing where in the city callers were calling from. I had a street directory on my lap.
Peter from Petersham or Gloria from Guildford had no idea, as I rattled off streets in their area as if I had lived there myself.
It was terrifying trying to get to grips with a foreign city after growing up in Adelaide and spending most of my working life in Melbourne.
Talkback on 3AW was easy as I had spent much of my working life out on the road as a newspaper reporter in Melbourne and had been to just about every location the callers were from.
Sydney on the other hand was a complete mystery outside of the tourist destinations like Bondi or Manly and even the Blue Mountains. The sport of rugby league – many Melburnians make the mistake of calling league simply rugby which is an entirely different game – was even more of a challenge.
My winter code DNA is Aussie rules having grown up in SANFL-mad South Australia.
Drop the name Ted Whitten or Ron Barassi and of course I knew who you were talking about.
Not in Sydney, however, and I once made the classic rookie mistake of thinking I was interviewing superstar Andrew Johns but was really talking with Brad Fittler who later asked my permission to use the gaffe in his autobiography.
My on-air embarrassment was sweat inducing nausea.
For the past 14 years I have largely been presenting a national radio show and it has become much easier to sound like you know what you are talking about in the various states but it’s still very easy to make mistakes, and when you do there is no hiding.
Take it from me, it’s much better to own up to your error, apologise and move on because the Australian public – my audience or the voters – are very quick to spot someone trying to fake it.
Aussies have a remarkable radar for, putting it politely, bulldust artists and they hate them.
It’s why, for prospective Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the incumbent Scott Morrison, the next five weeks will be like tiptoeing through a minefield.
Already both men have fallen this year to gotcha questions they should have known the answers to.
The PM was first, back at the Press Club function in Canberra, when he didn’t know the cost of a litre or petrol, a loaf of bread or a rapid antigen test (RAT).
It was Albanese’s turn this week not being able to tell us what the Reserve Bank had the cash rate set at – for the record currently 0.1 per cent – and Australia’s unemployment rate, wrongly suggesting it was 5.4 per cent not the actual 4 per cent it stands at.
I’d suggest not knowing the cost of a litre of petrol was more a hanging offence than the cash rate but for a Labor leader campaigning on jobs his inability to get the jobless rate right was a very bad look.
Now you can’t expect anyone to answer every cocky Canberra press pack gotcha question every time, but anyone wanting to lead the country should know the basics.
What this national campaign will also highlight is the fact that two men from Sydney are applying for the job and neither, despite what they will try to tell you, have an especially strong connection to or love of Melbourne or Victoria.
They are from Sydney.
Both love rugby league – Morrison the Cronulla Sharks and Albanese the South Sydney Rabbitohs – although the Labor leader has been a long time Sydney Swans fan as well.
For voters these things matter and it’s one reason each of the major parties have Victorians as deputies; Richard Marles for Labor and Josh Frydenberg for the other side.
Sydney, as I know only too well, is a very different city to Melbourne.
It is a cut throat place to do business as many Victorians who have tried to break into that culture will tell you; think Eddie McGuire and his time running the Nine TV network.
Politics in NSW is done differently and the respect each side here in Victoria have for each other – pre-Daniel Andrews of course – doesn’t exist in NSW.
In Sydney, Morrison comes from an area known as The Shire while Albanese is from Marrickville.
There really is no Melbourne equivalent of The Shire while Marrickville is a combination of North Fitzroy and Brunswick.
Morrison is a marketing man who chose Lara Bingle to be the face of Australian tourism while Albanese was a big player in student politics who did an economics degree and has spent the rest of his life inside the Labor Party.
It would be fair to say they are both typical Sydneysiders more comfortable networking the political media bubble that exists between Sydney and Canberra than in Melbourne.
To govern for all Australia, and to really mean it, isn’t easy.
Victoria’s last nominally local PM was Julia Gillard, but she was really a South Australian.
Bob Hawke held a seat in Victoria but as soon as he could, decamped to Sydney and lived the rest of his life there.
Kevin Rudd was a Queenslander while Malcolm Turnbull had a mansion on Sydney Harbour and Tony Abbott was a lifesaver from Sydney’s northern beaches.
You need to go all the way back to Sir Robert Menzies and Harold Holt to find a genuinely Melbourne PM. Malcolm Fraser was Victorian but a wealthy western districts grazier more than a Melbourne figure.
Peter Costello would have fitted the bill, but he was never brave enough to take on John Howard so again Melbourne missed out.
The next gotcha questions to Morrison or Albanese ought not to be about bread or petrol, but rather ‘where is Whittlesea and who was Ted Whitten?’.
Then we can pick who really wants to govern for all of Australia, including Melbourne.
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