Election 2022: Albanese needs to shrug off Green-teal doona
After a shocking first week, Labor hit the stabilisers and Anthony Albanese won the first of the leaders debates convincingly. In a pre-debate chat with Chris Kenny on Sky News I predicted Albo would wipe the floor with Scott Morrison. He allowed some passion to show and it looked good.
Then, like the reverb the morning after a late-night kebab, Albanese’s ill-fated BoosFest visit landed him with Covid. I’d never have thought shaking hands with a bunch of hippies in Byron Bay could be so perilous.
We were reassured that Labor strategists had rehearsed a campaign free of Albo; after all, the small-targeters had delivered a campaign free of Real Albo for most of the first week and a half.
But Covid is clearly a setback. Voters want and need to see more of Albanese. Only time will tell whether Albo and Toto on Zoom over the next week plus a line-up of future Labor leaders will see the party’s poll numbers bounce back to where they were three weeks ago. Nevertheless, Team Albo, rather than acting leader Richard Marles, is a much safer way of handling this uncharted territory.
There’s more than enough of the campaign left for Albanese to make up the lost time, and use his week at home to map out a more authentic final three weeks. As the eloquent Jason Clare noted, it will be the halfway mark of the campaign by the time the Labor leader can leave his Marrickville digs.
The momentum in the campaign is not yet with Labor; for this to happen the party needs to come out hard with a bold and big agenda led from the front by Albanese.
Labor has to have the nightly election coverage filled not with dour press conferences that barely work in print, but with Albo in hi-vis, a hard hat, welding, driving, bowling, just doing things. At the moment Morrison is doing a Peter Beattie and providing the drama and theatre that nail the nightly news slots. When the time comes, Labor’s advancers should have the confidence of street walks and sit-downs in Westfield food courts, especially now Albanese has had Covid. Real Albo meeting real people.
The Morrison team is getting the better of the tactical plays so far. Labor now loves coal, loves boat turn-backs, and Albo has come out strongly for letting “girls play with girls”. The Deves play is more than a dog whistle – it’s brilliant foghorn politics. It shows lefties that Tories can virtue-signal their values, too. The Deves candidacy, let’s be clear, isn’t about winning Warringah. It’s about telling One Nation and Clive Palmer voters, whose preferences will be critical, that the Liberals “are with them”.
The small-targeters had been working hard since 2019 to airbrush Albo’s commitment to trans rights and remove Bill Shorten’s LGBTIQ+ commitments taken to the last election. But Real Albo doesn’t just march at Mardi Gras, he has a long history of fighting for LGBTIQ+ rights, ever since his maiden speech in 1996. In 2011 he railed against people such as acting prime minister Wayne Swan, the soon to be retired party president, who stated marriage was between a biological man and a biological woman. The dilemma for Labor is that by disappointing pro-trans voters, the party hurts itself in seats such as McNamara and Higgins in inner Melbourne yet doesn’t do enough to protect itself in McEwen, north of Melbourne, Dobell on the NSW central coast or Hunter in the heart of NSW coalmining territory.
The sides are level pegging on primaries, a third of the electorate is voting for a non-major party and key Liberal seats are under serious threat of being lost to teal independents or, as John Howard so aptly named them, “anti-Liberal groupies”. Labor is under threat from the Greens in seats such as Griffith in inner-city Brisbane, but I’m confident Terri Butler will hold given her high profile and hard work.
The threat of a hung parliament hangs heavy. And no one, let alone Labor, having lived through the Gillard/Brown/Swan/Milne government announcing midterm a “carbon tax”, would ever want a Labor government to rely on the Greens or, worse, independents again.
The Liberals are playing up the risk of a Labor minority government propped up by Greens and a grab bag of teal independents whose only common loyalty is to billionaire Simon Holmes a Court and his shadowy Climate 200 cabal. The same strategy was delivered by Sir Lynton Crosby when voters, disillusioned by the then Conservative government in the UK, couldn’t stomach Ed Miliband’s Labour being backed in by Alex Salmond’s Scottish Nationalist Party.
The Liberals are also fighting up the pendulum, not just sandbagging marginals. Morrison has highly regarded Australian strategist Isaac Levido back on the campaign. Levido helped Boris Johnson trounce hapless socialist Jeremy Corbyn.
The Liberals are chasing Gilmore, just south of Sydney, Lilley in inner Brisbane, the NT’s Lingiari and Corangamite in Victoria’s western districts. Every seat won from Labor by the Liberals means Labor has to win yet another seat elsewhere making the existing task of seven seats harder again.
Which brings me to the pincer movement on China and the Solomons. Labor has walked into this with eyes wide open, pumping up a China threat and wanting to make the election about national security. Sure, Labor is proud of Gough Whitlam’s diplomacy watershed, but it’s also the party of $100,000 cash in bags and Bob Carr. The Liberals can hardly believe their luck. Labor wants to duke it out on who is tougher on China and who is stronger on borders. It’s a Lazy Susan full of Labor stumbles, a veritable yum cha for Morrison and Dutton.
Morrison is a known quantity. The Liberals’ vote is depressed because people don’t like the government. That vote, however, hasn’t gone to Labor as voters are given the Hobson’s choice of a certain disappointment in Morrison and the perceived risk of an unknown Albanese alternative, made worse by the very real prospect, as it currently stands, of the party being in minority government and backed by Greens and Climate 200 “independents”. So it’s coming down to a campaign frame of “better the devil you know than the Albo you don’t”.
Cameron Milner is a former Queensland Labor state secretary and member of Labor’s national executive. He was Bill Shorten’s chief of staff in 2016. He has worked on 33 election campaigns for Labor across 30 years, most recently the Palaszczuk campaign. He is a director of Next Level Strategic Services, a national government relations firm.
