David Penberthy: Albanese and Morrison aren’t the utter scumbags social media makes them seem like

Social media makes it look like Albanese and Morrison are the two biggest frauds in Australia – but that’s not the blokes I know, writes David Penberthy.

The unpleasant and uninspiring nature of this marathon election drudge can be best evidenced by two numbers that appeared in last Monday’s Newspoll.

For the only time I can recall in an election, the primary vote of both parties has actually gone down since the campaign started two weeks ago, showing that the more the Australian people have seen of the two combatants in this campaign, the less impressed they have become.

It puzzles me watching this campaign as I know both Anthony Albanese and Scott Morrison well from my time in Sydney.

I used to get on the turps a bit with Albo at some of those salubrious watering holes in Marrickville when I was working in the NSW Press Gallery, and I got to know ScoMo when he was state Liberal Party director in NSW. We would catch up for the odd counter meal on Fridays at the Woolloomooloo Hotel near, just a short stroll through The Domain from NSW parliament.

When my wife and I had our first child ScoMo sent us a goodie basket of baby toys, even though my wife was one of his political opponents for many years, and Albo sent us a teddy bear.

Anthony Albanese and Scott Morrison shake hands before the first leaders' debate of the 2022 federal election campaign. Picture: Toby Zerna

I tell these personal stories not as some bizarre form of name-dropping involving toys for newborns but because in my mind it goes to the simplicity and likability of these two men.

I regard them as down to earth, unaffected, unpretentious blokes, good people who have not let power go to their heads.

They are devoid of arrogance and sincere in their desire to help people. Yet if you were watching this campaign and knew nothing about them, you would think this is a contest between two of the biggest liars, frauds and scumbags Australia has ever seen.

I have been trying to work out how the vibe of everything in public life got so foul in this country. My theory for what it is worth is that hatred appears to have gone mainstream thanks largely to social media.

The chief contribution of a medium such as Twitter to political discourse has been to destroy manners, eliminate any concept of decency, and dehumanise opponents with whom you would have once agreed to disagree.

I think the election result might show there was a tactical flaw at the centre of Labor’s campaign, which is light on for policy difference and envisaged more as a plebiscite on Morrison’s character. It is almost as if Labor has spent too much time reading Twitter and has got the impression there is so much hatred out there for the PM that simply not being Scott Morrison is enough to get you over the line.

There is certainly a mountain of hatred for Morrison on Twitter but I am convinced this hatred it is not replicated in real life.

Working in talkback radio is an illustrative rejoinder to the world of social media where we get texts by the minute from listeners in the suburbs for whom politics is generally a second-tier interest.

Of the worst criticisms we receive about Morrison, I would say the most vicious critics on radio regard him as a hapless dork, a wally, a goofball, not the hate figure you see described on Twitter through bile-filled nicknames such as Scummo or hashtags such as #scottytherapeprotector, a particularly charming one that was doing the rounds for a while last year.

This election campaign is the most low-rent operation I have seen in politics in my lifetime. If it came with a mercy rule they should have rung the bell and stopped the fight on Thursday in the wake of the leaders forum on Sky News.

The debate itself was civil enough and the questions were fair and both leaders gave a fair account of themselves. I would argue Albo won because many of the topics were on his preferred territory and he avoided any of the gaffes that troubled him in the first week of the campaign, despite struggling a bit on the boat people stuff.

It was the debate that came after the debate that I found completely putrid, and again, out of step with what I regard as mainstream sentiment towards our leaders. The reaction to Morrison’s comments about him and Jenny being blessed to have had healthy children struck me as a Twitter-led pile-on which deliberately misrepresented an attempt at empathy on the PM’s part.

Perhaps I am being soft but the worst I would say about his remark was that it was a bit awkward and inadvertently insensitive to those parents whose kids have been born with disabilities.

I know there are parents in that exact position who disagree with my laid-back assessment and found it offensive. They have every right to be upset and I would admit that my own life experience as a parent has given me none of their insights on that question.

But what struck me was how many other people who don’t have any direct experience of disability – including ScoMo’s opponents in Bill Shorten and Kristina Keneally – so ruthlessly prosecuted these remarks, as if they were proof positive of undeniable truth that Morrison is nothing but a shit bloke.

It was a deliberately uncharitable assessment of what many people would regard as an innocent remark that was meant to convey compassion, but which simply came out wrong.

And tellingly, for all the foaming at the mouth unfolding on Twitter, we were getting texts from parents of kids with disabilities on radio on Thursday saying they knew the point the PM was trying to make, and weren’t upset by what he said.

The end point of all this constant abuse is we have a campaign that has become almost unwatchable, and according to Newspoll, two political parties who for a third of Australians are now regarded as unelectable.

In terms of tone, manners and civility, this is the campaign equivalent of what was known during the Cold War as mutually assured destruction.

Originally published as David Penberthy: Albanese and Morrison aren’t the utter scumbags social media makes them seem like