‘You ignorant bastards!’ Perils of the election campaign trail

Things were going swimmingly at the 43rd birthday party of the Devonport Senior Citizens Club in the marginal north-west Tasmanian electorate of Braddon.

The club choir sat on stage, preparing to launch into joyful song as soon as an accordion player had finished his musical presentation. And then Kevin Rudd and a gang of hangers-on gatecrashed the show.

The accordion player stormed off, bellowing about the indignity of a politician politicising the anniversary of a senior citizens club.

“He just walked in and took over! The height of bad manners! John Howard wouldn’t have done it!” cried the gentleman.

A choir member joined the chorus. “You spoiled the party, you ignorant bastards,” the senior citizen spat.

It was late October 2007. Kevin 07, as Rudd had styled himself, was on a roll.

But this day had become a fiasco and a loss.

As the 2025 election campaign looms, political leaders on the election trail will be reminded endlessly they can’t afford to squander time: federal campaigns rarely stretch much longer than the minimum 33 days allowed.

Famously, Anthony Albanese blew away the very first day of his first campaign in 2022. He clean forgot the national unemployment figure and the official cash rate, grievously jeopardising his tilt at the prime ministership.

It was sweet relief for then-prime minister Scott Morrison, who was smarting from failing to be able to recite at the Press Club the price of bread and milk – an election “gotcha” ever since Paul Keating couldn’t name the price of milk in his 1996 campaign debate with John Howard.

The great debate between John Howard and Paul Keating in 1996. Keating forgot the price of milk.Credit: Mike Bowers

Howard, of course, knew the figure to the cent. (And in 2004, Howard could measure Mark Latham’s leadership turning to dust after Latham tried to monster him with a bully-boy bone-crusher handshake witnessed by the nation’s voters on TV.)

Morrison in 2022 may have thought Albanese was toast after his day one cock-up, but pride came before his own fall.

It came on a kiddies’ soccer field in that politically perilous Tasmanian town of Devonport.

Morrison, trying desperately to deal with accusations that he was an arrogant bully, had tried to make a virtue of the problem by publicly admitting he was “a bit of a bulldozer” and would endeavour to change.

Ex-PM Scott Morrison bulldozes a boy while playing soccer with the Devonport Strikers in the electorate of Braddon in May 2022.Credit: James Brickwood

But in Devonport, he took to the field during training with the local under-8s soccer team.

His stunt made national TV when he couldn’t resist showing off, stumbled and bulldozed a little boy to the ground.

“Typical,” came the cry across unforgiving voter land. Morrison was off the political field within days.

Tasmania is regularly dangerous territory for federal politicians.

Tony Abbott, with his grasp on the prime ministership growing ever weaker, caused consternation about his hold on reality while visiting north-west Tasmania in March 2015.

For reasons best known to himself, he ate a raw, unpeeled onion in the full glare of TV cameras. Tears ran down the nation’s collective face.

Malcolm Turnbull, with Abbott’s prime ministership in his sights, undertook culinary adventure at a bakery in Ulverstone, northern Tasmania, a couple of months later. He sat down to eat a meat pie … with knife and fork, and without tomato sauce! Cruel quips about upper-crust behaviour ensued.

Years before, Rudd had been declared out of touch in the tomato sauce department when he declared “fair shake of the sauce bottle”. Australia chorused that it was “fair suck of the sauce bottle, Kevin”.

A democracy sausage proved problematic for Bill Shorten. As the 2016 election campaign drew to a close, he was filmed tackling a snag in a bread roll from the horizontal axis. Little wonder, some said, that he lost that unlosable election to Turnbull.

During the 1993 campaign, Keating sought to compound the humiliation of his opponent, John Hewson, following Hewson’s cringe-making failure on TV to explain how his GST would apply to a birthday cake.

Keating strode into a cake shop on the NSW South Coast, expecting the baker to excoriate Hewson’s plans for his confections. Instead, the baker tore strips off Keating, who couldn’t escape because of the crush of amused journalists. His language later caused hardened hacks to blanche.

Bob Hawke calls the election in 1984.Credit: David James Bartho/Fairfax Media

When a federal election is in the air, the guessing game among the tragics who care becomes “when will the PM call it?”

Voters, it turns out, don’t like surprises, and they don’t like long campaigns.

In 1984, Bob Hawke called a very early election partly on the excuse that he wanted to bring the House of Representatives and the Senate back into alignment following the double dissolution of the year before.

A more believable reason was that Hawke wanted to cash in on his soaring approval rating, which stood at a mighty 75 per cent.

He settled on a relaxed affair stretching 54 days, imagining it would be enough time to all but destroy Andrew Peacock’s opposition.

Voters grew very sick of it.

Hawke’s government suffered a 2 per cent negative swing and had its majority slashed from 25 to 16.

By 2016, Malcolm Turnbull had forgotten the lesson.

He announced a double-dissolution election campaign sprawling over an astonishing 73 days. Worse, it ran into winter. Voters didn’t warm to making decisions at cold polling booths in July.

Julia Gillard calls the election eight months early in 2013.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

When election night finally came, Shorten – whose party lost, but gained 14 seats – was cheered to the rafters. Turnbull holed up in his Sydney mansion until after midnight, when he emerged to deliver what was widely considered a snarling judgment of everything but himself.

Julia Gillard certainly didn’t get the message about long campaigns. She announced on January 30, 2013, that the federal election would be on September 14! The campaign, in essence, would be an unprecedented eight months.

Gillard didn’t make it to her own election date. By the time it came around, Rudd was the Labor leader, having achieved his revenge for being toppled by Gillard in 2010.

Rudd duly lost the election to Abbott.

And soon, here we go again. Buckle up.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.