The trouble with the bubble – for both Albanese and Dutton

Not long before the 2019 election, in a Qantas lounge at Heathrow, I was surprised to overhear a man talking about the coming poll. He was close to the department secretary, he said, impervious to who might hear him; and the secretary was perceived as being too close to Scott Morrison. And so, it seemed, this public servant would soon lose his job.

This came back to me last week, amid speculation over whether Treasury chief Steven Kennedy would keep his job if Peter Dutton wins. It was a reminder of just how febrile the weeks before an election are. Everyone is talking; people become indiscreet; everyone around politics starts worrying about their job; the looming deadline makes people do strange things.

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In the end, of course, Morrison – and presumably that public servant – held on. Which is a reminder that the feeling inside the bubble is often no indication of what is going on outside.

But who, this time, is trapped inside the bubble? Is it Anthony Albanese, who seems almost eerily unperturbed by negative polls and the grim forecast for Labor increasingly made by commentators? Or is it the doomsayers, overly attached to drama, ignoring the still fairly close polls and the fact that first-term governments tend not to lose?

Not since 1931, anyway. To which Dutton responds, in interviews, that this is the worst government since 1931. This is a striking claim to make – particularly given just how much voters hated the Morrison government at its end. Have voters really forgotten already, or is Dutton caught in his own bubble, having convinced himself of his own hyperbole?

A possible reason new governments usually win is that they get to run not only against an opposition, but against the ghost of the previous government. Voters remember why they made their recent choice and repeat it. Given that, you would expect Albanese to raise his predecessor often. Oddly, he doesn’t.

Is that about to change? Last week, Foreign Minister Penny Wong referred to Dutton “beating the drums of war”. To make her point, Wong arguably over-egged something Dutton had said when he was Morrison’s defence minister, about joining the US if it chose to defend Taiwan in war with China. But this was not the only combative comment Dutton made in office, and there is truth in Wong’s broader case. There was a belligerence to the Morrison government, its conduct in world affairs and its rhetoric, and Dutton was a part of that.

This is potentially an important political issue. Dutton projects a sense of toughness. And the politics of global crisis are easier for an opposition, for the simple reason that its words have little diplomatic consequence. After Donald Trump’s atrocious treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky, Albanese restated his support for Ukraine, but he resisted commenting on Trump. It is a tricky situation, but Labor looks, at best, as though it is trying not to be noticed. This plays into Dutton’s preferred contrast of weakness and strength (even when he avoids commenting, too).

Wong, then, was making an important intervention in the discussion. She was complicating the binary: effectively asking whether Dutton’s so-called strength really protects us from risk – or if it is, in fact, a risk itself.

Beneath the political question lie crucial questions for the Australian people about our country and its future. How much do we want to be a part of the world and how much do we want to wall ourselves off? Is the latter even possible? How much are we our own country, and how much are we simply following currents overseas?

The point that Albanese does often make about the previous government is that it left inflation high. You can understand this politically – voters have a one-track mind right now – but really this was a temporary problem, not unique to Australia. The problem with the last government was broader and more lasting. Across a range of areas – health, education, wages, productivity – the country either stood still or went backwards.

Another way to put this is to say that the things that perhaps make this place great – what separates it from other countries – were allowed to degrade. And this, too, is potentially an argument about Australia’s place in the world. Typically, Paul Keating put this best, in 2016, while criticising the “reverential, sacramental quality” the US alliance had taken on. We needed to recognise, instead, that Australia is “a better society than the United States”. Keating listed healthcare, increasing incomes, no guns in schools, school participation and superannuation.

The chaos Trump is currently causing in his own country would seem to offer a way to renew this argument. And there was a sense, with last week’s bulk-billing announcement, that Albanese grasped this, at least a little. “We don’t want our health system to be more American,” he said. “We don’t need to copy the ideologies of any other nation. We only want our health system to be more Australian.”

Mostly, though, this case remains implied – as it was in Sunday’s announcements from the major parties. Albanese promised to build more urgent care clinics. Dutton promised to buy more fighter jets. Both, you might say, are promising us we can stay in our own comfortable, distant bubble: Albanese by promising to keep Australia different, and Dutton by promising to keep Australia safe.

In the shadow of this past week, Dutton’s emphasis looks smarter. But this points to another aspect of that febrile pre-election atmosphere: the tendency to give too much weight to whatever has just happened. Is Trump the most important person in this election, with Xi Jinping a close second? Or will the everyday dramas of Australian suburbia reassert themselves? The truth is that those caught inside the political bubble can only really guess what is going on outside it. They’ll find out on election night – along with the answer to the question of who is going to lose their job.

Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison. He is a regular columnist and a former adviser to prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.