Joe Hildebrand: Why Labor loves to be lashed

Every chance the government gets, it wants to bring up the opposition. But it’s only playing into their hands. Joe Hildebrand explains.

A couple of years and a couple of prime ministers ago I was sitting at a Labor Party dinner next to one of the party’s most senior and sensible frontbenchers.

I asked him how he thought the government was going.

“They won’t stop attacking us,” he said.

“They’re just obsessed — every single day they get up and have another go at us.”

He paused and broke into a broad grin.

“It’s fantastic!”

The reason he was smiling was simple: Every second of airspace the government used up talking about the opposition was a wasted opportunity to talk to the Australian electorate. Every ounce of time and energy it spent targeting the ALP was time and energy not spent targeting voters.

Of course the opposition provoked the government — from Bill Shorten’s childish schoolboy taunts to Malcolm Turnbull as “Mr Harbourside Mansion” to the bald-faced lie of its Medi-scare campaign — but here’s a newsflash: That’s what oppositions are supposed to do.

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Governments have everything at their disposal: Full ministerial offices, whole departments with armies of bureaucrats and of course executive power.

Oppositions have nothing but a small handful of political staff and their wits. Governments can launch rockets, oppositions can only throw rocks. However rocks don’t just shatter glass houses. They also work on glass jaws.

That’s why good oppositions work day and night to rattle the cages of PMs and premiers or pick off low-hanging ministers like birds on a telegraph wire. They play the man and not the ball for one simple reason: They don’t have the ball.

There is an old saying in politics: Never wrestle with a pig — you both get dirty but only the pig enjoys it. And the opposition, no matter its political colours, is always the pig. To win, it needs to bring the government down to its level.

It can’t be called a federal election campaign if the major parties aren’t slandering each other, right? Picture: AAP Image/Erik Anderson

When the government is the government and the opposition is the opposition, the government by definition holds all the cards. But if you can goad the government into taking off its jacket and rolling up its sleeves — if you can turn the prime minister into the leader of the Liberal party — then suddenly you’ve got a fair fight on your hands.

And that was what that frontbencher was saying with just two words and a smile. And the Labor Party has been smiling ever since.

These are the natural laws of politics. But the funny thing about politics these days is that it’s all a little bit topsy-turvy. The natural laws no longer apply.

While the government started acting more and more like an opposition, the opposition started acting more and more like a government.

As a shaken Turnbull — once an archetypal lofty statesman who was rattled out of his gilded cage — transformed into an attack dog, an emboldened Shorten — a textbook partisan playmaker and political assassin — transformed into a lofty statesman.

In what Sir Humphrey Appleby would call a “courageous” decision, the ALP developed and unveiled a huge big-picture economic policy before the 2016 election when it announced its negative gearing policy. And it has done the same thing again by announcing its downright heroic climate change policy — with its zeppelin-sized pledge to make half of all new cars electric in just over a decade — just before this election.

As a former senior coalition minister said to me in conversation just this week: “Why would you do it? What happened to the small target?”

He was of course referring to another truism of Australian politics that is simply no longer true, that of the small target strategy. The prevailing wisdom — indeed, out-and-out cliché — is that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. All you have to do is keep your head down, keep lobbing grenades over the trench, and a mildly hungover electorate will wake up to find you’re in power. Then you can do whatever you want and the cycle begins again.

But that is no longer the rule. It would be nice to think that the new rule is that an educated and engaged electorate demands clear policies from an opposition before it is prepared to give them the keys to the Lodge but sadly that is not the case. Instead, the new rule is that there are no rules.

And the new rule is now about 20 years old. Kim Beazley tried to be a small target twice. First it was in 1998 when he won the popular vote but lost the election because of strong and carefully targeted Coalition campaigns in marginal seats. And that in itself was in keeping with the other great rule of Australian politics that the “fair go” electorate will always give a government at least two terms to prove its worth.

The second time was in 2001 when Beazley was all set to be a shoo-in until the Tampa came along and John Howard reverse engineered his phaser from “stun” to “kill”. Beazley had sought to be such a small target on border protection policy that when Howard trained his laser pointer on the big guy it turned out he didn’t have a policy at all.

Suddenly Howard, who had been the smallest of targets himself when Keating lost in 1996, was the sniper with a rifle. He went from kindly uncle to killer overnight and went back to kindly uncle just as easily once the election was won.

Indeed, it was this kindly uncle persona that won him the next election after Beazley’s arch-nemesis Mark Latham became leader and unleashed his pent-up wave of not just policies but ideas and single-handedly rewrote the national political narrative.

It is easy to forget that the Latham of this age was a man championing bold new models of community, cultural and economic engagement, a leader who swept aside whole political ideologies and said the most important thing any of us could do was read books to our kids every night. He was as right then as he is wrong now.

But then of course Latham himself was swept aside after a single incident, a bizarrely aggressive handshake with Howard that he has since admitted was deliberate. For all his ideas, for all his ego, he could not contain the id of the thug within.

And then emerged Kevin Rudd, Jack the Giant-killer, to finally defeat the great John Howard with another slew of bold policies but this time safely communicated through a lovably verbose nerd who looked like he couldn’t handshake his way out of a paper bag.

And then of course his party stabbed him to death for it.

After Kevin Rudd lost the support of the Caucus Room, the Labor leadership fell to Gillard.

And so what does all this tell us about the upcoming election? Certainly nothing that could ever fit into a coherent sentence but that is precisely the point. Indeed, if I had to say something definitive it would be that Labor is an absolute certainty to win the election but there is a slight chance it may not.

And that is because nothing in politics is coherent anymore. Not only do the two parties present alternate narratives but they are communicated simultaneously in alternate dimensions.

News.com.au has obtained analysis by media research group Meltwater that compared the responses to both Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten after the Budget Reply and also cross referenced the responses between conventional news media and social media.

The conventional news sentiment towards Morrison after the Budget Reply was 7.9 per cent positive, 28.9 per cent negative and 63.3 per cent neutral. The results for Bill Shorten were remarkably similar: 3.1 per cent positive, 25.3 per cent negative and 71.6 per cent neutral.

But the social media figures looked like they had come from a different planet. Here 27.5 per cent of sentiment was positive for the PM compared to 42 per cent negative and just 30.2 per cent neutral.

Shorten’s results were almost the opposite. He had almost double the number of positive mentions with 53.8 per cent and half the number of negative on 22.1 per cent, with 24.1 per cent neutral.

Again, this tells us a number of things, which are also hardly cohesive.

At face value it appears to confirm that Twitter leans heavily towards the left, as conservatives have long complained. Granted, left-wing Twitter users would no doubt argue that it merely proves the mainstream media is biased towards the right however this is hard to sustain given its similar response to both Morrison and Shorten and the vast difference on social media.

Moreover, if we look at the response to Shorten alone the difference in positive sentiment is just over 3 per cent in the mainstream media versus almost 54 per cent on social media. That means Shorten is almost 18 times more popular on social media than in the news — a factor that is almost impossible to explain by natural forces. Far more likely is that Labor and the left generally have a much better ground game on social media and are far superior at promoting their people and policies.

However it is also self-evident that the people who are most active in political debates on Twitter and Facebook are highly politically engaged and far less likely to be the swinging, undecided or apathetic voters each party needs to get over the line.

And not just different media but different markets are seeing different things: Just as social media was all-in for Shorten after the Budget Reply, the bookies were all-in for Morrison after the Budget. A betting agency source told me there was a big plunge on the Coalition as soon as it was handed down.

And that’s not because it was the best Budget anyone had ever seen but because it was the most boring. Indeed, the second most boring was last year’s and the sole purpose of this year’s Budget was to basically repeat last year’s but with the added caveat that no one gets upset by it.

This is why even after it has been handed down we now see the government running around happily plugging up whatever holes people don’t like as though they’re tarring the deck of the Titanic.

Many on the conservative side condemn this as a retreat but it is at least a tactical retreat. If the opposition wants to attack the government it is now going to have to do just that: Attack. It will have to come out of the trenches and charge into no man’s land.

Just a couple of weeks ago we had the Turkish dictator Erdogan invoke the vilest insults against ourselves and the Anzacs, trashing decades of solemn understanding and respect between our two nations.

But it also brought to mind one of the most telling legends of the Gallipoli campaign, a tragically foolish battle in which brave and noble souls on both sides were forced to kill men with whom they had no quarrel.

There is both truth and myth in the tale but basically it goes that the Turkish forces had run out of ammunition and were in retreat. But instead of allowing this, the great Ataturk ordered the troops to suddenly turn around and point their guns as though they had lured the Allies into a trap. The spooked invaders thus themselves retreated and we all know what history now records. One of the most critical battles in the Great War and it all turned on a matter of perception — a perception that was false and yet became self-fulfilling.

And perception is everything in a world where people only see what they want to see and the government and opposition are constantly swapping roles. It’s like a real life re-enactment of Trading Places. Or maybe Wife Swap Australia. Or maybe just a 1970s swingers party.

There is little doubt that the Morrison government is on the back foot, fresh out of bullets and headed for a rout but by handing down its first and last Budget, it is trying to show that it still holds the high ground and the Treasury benches are still its turf.

The only problem for the PM is that whatever his faults, Shorten is not a man who gets spooked. He’s already knocked off two prime ministers and he will hardly hesitate to knock off a third.

At least this time it will be one from the other side.

Continue the conversation @Joe_Hildebrand