This is the worst campaign I’ve seen. Both sides are at fault. It’s not spiteful or vituperative, but easily the most vacuous and irresponsible. Never has a campaign been more completely disconnected from reality.
Endless giveaways, ridiculous quibbles about costings that are entirely speculative, policies of deep national self-harm and a resolute determination never to mention the fundamental threats and changes transforming the entire world.
These global dynamics have led many nations, including the ones we routinely compare ourselves with, to increase substantially their military and other national security efforts. The Albanese government has degraded many of our existing capabilities and is proposing a barely incremental increase in defence funding, hardly enough even to pay for the AUKUS submarines.
These actions are so perverse you have to reverse engineer a strategic viewpoint, or policy key, to produce any explanation for them. It seems the government must have decided deliberately that it doesn’t want Australia to have any significant military capabilities over the next 10 years.
It may be that somewhere in the labyrinthine thought processes lurks the idea that if there’s a strategic showdown in the next 10 years it will be between China and the United States. If we have no significant capabilities, Washington will be unable to ask us to do anything significant. We’ll give America our flag and our geography, nothing more. This would be a wildly dangerous approach in any circumstances. Now, in the age of the Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean axis, and Donald Trump’s new alliance uncertainties, it’s an act of national insanity.
Because of its comprehensive failure on national security, the Albanese government richly deserves to lose.
But mere honesty compels the conclusion that there’s no way the Dutton opposition deserves to win. Its defence policy, bizarrely released in the very last days of the campaign, is much better than Labor’s. But it’s nowhere near what the nation needs. Perversely, except for the welcome decision to buy a fourth squadron of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, the opposition hasn’t told us anything of the shape of the defence force it wants to build.
Instead, incredibly, it has talked of having a high-powered closed-door conference as soon as it’s elected, involving defence chiefs, private sector leaders and some strategic analysts, to work out what to do. Good grief, am I dreaming? Is this a recurring nightmare?
An opposition led by a former defence minister, with a former assistant defence minister as defence spokesman, is going to ask essentially the same people who have produced two decades of utter defence chaos and failure to come up with new advice, but this time to do it quickly?
Surely the opposition knows in some detail what it wants to do. The very last thing we need is more advice. If we could defend the country with advice we’d be invincible. We have mountains of advice. National forests have been sacrificed to produce advice. We groan under the weight of advice. The nation doesn’t need a government seeking advice. It needs a government that gives orders, that gets something done.
The first thing a Dutton government should do is talk Mike Pezzullo and Peter Jennings into coming out of retirement. Appeal to their patriotism and put them both back in harness to actually get some action, unlike the 10 years of Coalition government that were almost as bad in defence as the three years of Albanese government. Assuming we get another Albanese government, what happens to the nation?
If Dutton wins a net gain of, say, even four seats, this will be overall a poor performance but better than the low ebb of expectations right now. In that circumstance he would probably stay as leader simply because there’s no good alternative. A net win of six seats and he’s secure, I would think.
If he wins no seats, or even goes backwards, Dutton is probably gone. The Coalition could then make big, self-harming mistakes. It could easily decide it lost badly because Dutton was too right-wing. In fact Dutton has not been a noticeably right-wing Opposition Leader. His only big call was to campaign for a No vote on the voice referendum, and this was forced on him by Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and the Nationals.
The Coalition campaign has been strategically cowardly and tactically inept at best. Dutton is the captain-coach of a team with very thin talent. He promoted one of his best, James Paterson. But that’s been his only smart decision. Other talented frontbenchers, Andrew Hastie and Dan Tehan in particular, have been all but invisible in the campaign, until Hastie’s partial re-emergence a few days ago. There’s hidden talent on the backbench, too – people such as Dave Sharma. But the Coalition frontbenchers entrusted with carrying the campaign apart from Dutton have looked like reserve grade footballers doing their best one division above their talent level. Dutton himself has made too many gaffes, repeatedly getting basic facts wrong on national security. Albanese has done the same. But mistakes are easily forgiven when you’re winning. The truth is neither leader looks impressive.
What a contrast to Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd in opposition. They were relentless, on top of all detail, worked from sun up to midnight, left no stone unturned. They worked effectively with colleagues they didn’t like. They were much hungrier for victory than this opposition has been. If the Liberals turn now to a milquetoast “moderate” alternative, they will only increase the enervating sense of Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Australian politics.
Partly this is the political environment. The electorate is very cynical. We’ve had a populist campaign without demagogues. The electorate’s cynicism is so powerful the only thing it believes from politics is a fistful of dollars. It’s a self-perpetuating pathology. The electorate’s cynicism is so great it leads the parties to behave in a way that fully justifies the electorate’s cynicism.
If Albanese wins, it would be better for the nation if it’s just short of a majority. The sensible folks among the crossbenchers would readily guarantee confidence and supply. The government would not be greatly destabilised. But the political culture would at least have registered that the last three years deserved a political penalty. If Albanese is re-elected in majority status, every worst instinct in Australian politics is reinforced.
Poor fellow my country.
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The most likely outcome from this dismal election is a second term for the Albanese government. Whether that’s as a majority or minority government matters, though it’s still just theoretically possible the Dutton opposition could scrape into office as a minority government itself.