No easy ride waiting for Federal election winner

Is there just the slightest sense that this might actually be a good election not to win?

Labor leader Anthony Albanese and Prime Minster Scott Morrison. Picture: Jason Edwards

Is there just the slightest sense that this might actually be a good election not to win?

That whomever emerges as the occupant of The Lodge and gets to sit on the Speakers right-hand side in parliament – and indeed gets to select that Speaker – might not actually be entering on the “three best years of their life”?

That, bluntly, it’s all going to end in tears for the “winner” on May 21? Like, I don’t know? Malcolm Turnbull who won in 2016? Tony Abbott who won in 2013? Julia Gillard who won … Kevin Rudd ….

And they all had it easy.

Now, of course they didn’t; for assorted reasons from the personal to the broader political environment, to indeed all the expanding and accelerating turmoil across the globe.

Winning politically and then governing has become essentially difficult to impossible in the 21st century after the last few years of the Howard-Costello government.

That’s if you don’t think of success purely in terms of the big white cars and all the other perks. Which leader has departed in recent decades with the love and affection and thanks of even their own side?

No, what I’m seeking to emphasise by saying they “had it easy”, is that was the case relative to what faces our next PM and our next government.

“Things” are going to irresistibly get very complicated and difficult and do so across a very broad front, way and above the already difficult reality of the last two decades and indeed the last two years.

We are right on the cusp of entering a period where it is going to be extraordinarily difficult to govern – after two years when it’s been in a very real sense extremely easy to do so.

What could have been “easier” than shutting borders, locking people in their homes, issuing health orders, and just printing hundreds of billions of dollars to paper over all the cracks?

You really didn’t have to argue the case; you really didn’t have to deal with dissent; you just said “shut up; it’s the health advice” and did it, greased at both state and federal level by all that “free money”.

Now of course the bills are being presented; now of course we are sort-of back to “politics as normal”. And you have to run the country in the normal way.

Plus there are going to be all sorts of new “events” rushing at you that you will have to try to deal with and at least fend off.

There’s Ukraine. Even if we don’t drift or plunge into World War Three – as too many unhinged and supposedly also hinged voices too loosely shriek – it can only get messier and worse and impactful on everyone.

Does Europe really cut off all Russian oil and gas, as it surely must so as not to fund in real time Russia’s military spending? If it does, what are the consequences for global enemy markets and the world economy? And will it turn Russia, well, nastier?

There’s China; both the “nasty” China and the Chinese economy that is at best slowing dramatically and maybe imploding.

We may not have liked the authoritarian China of the past two decades; but hey its spectacular ever-expanding economic growth kept the global economy ticking over and showered hundreds of billions of dollars on us in particular.

It’s still doing the latter; but for how much longer, if its economy implodes or even just continues to stagger?

And I continue to be amazed by the assumption that we can declare China our biggest and most dangerous enemy and take it as read that it will underwrite our prosperity and indeed our entire economy.

Then there’s the ‘normal’ stuff that will start to bite this coming week: our Reserve Bank raising interest rates for the first time since 2010, the US Fed raising US interest rates and impacting global financial markets.

We are stuffed if they do and stuffed if they don’t — raise them high enough or fast enough, that is.

But whatever, “everything” is going to be at least “different”, and newly challenging, to how it’s been for close enough to a dozen years: when we’ve been able to take the “easy options”, just printing money and postponing reality to manana.

And all this would be difficult enough if someone, if one side, actually “won” on May 21; actually got a majority.

Got a majority in the lower house, that is. We’ve had nearly 30 years now of any government having to always deal with a Senate crossbench. Since 2010 the “new new” is having to also do that in the lower house.

Do you really want to be PM Albo presiding over a Labor-Green government?

Do you really want to be PM ScoMo presiding over a minority whatever government?

Sure, for the putative loser it’s the political dumpster. But for the “winner”?