Election 2022: Albanese needs to step up as alternative prime minister

Anthony Albanese and partner Jodie Haydon attend Bluesfest in Byron Bay on Sunday. Picture: Toby Zerna

If Anthony Albanese wants to turn around his first disastrous election campaign week and become prime minister of Australia he’s going to have to stop acting like an opposition leader. And that goes particularly for the type of Opposition Leader he’s been in the past three years, ducking and weaving on policy and responsibility and relying on a small-target policy that meant dumping most, if not all, of the odious Bill Shorten tax-and-spend agenda. The people would see his policies before election day, he said.

As of Monday, the first working day of the second week of the election campaign, Albanese has to start acting like an alternative prime minister.

It’s not just a matter of flicking the switch to vaudeville, changing the narrative of the debate away from the economy and his blunders in the first week or even trying to revert to an agenda that suits Labor and the progressive independents and Greens; it’s about changing what he represents.

For three years Albanese has successfully, relentlessly and politically undermined the Prime Minister’s personal standing and made that a measure of Labor’s success. If the Coalition government failed on vaccination against the Covid pandemic it was Scott Morrison’s fault; if there were quarantine failures in hotels it was the federal government’s fault; and if the economy remained in recession with high unemployment, it was the fault of Morrison and Josh Frydenberg.

Albanese’s response to questions about what Labor would do was that it wasn’t up to him to offer alternatives as he “wasn’t the government”. “Ask the Prime Minister” was his common response to media queries.

That doesn’t wash anymore and Albanese’s abysmal performance in the first week of the campaign has raised fears among his colleagues that Labor is not on track to win key marginal seats, that some of his handpicked candidates are in trouble and that their leader is rattled. Of course, Albanese, the frontrunner in the polls at the start of the campaign, even equalling Morrison for the first time as preferred prime minister in Newspoll, can still win on May 21. But, apart from not panicking and going into a campaign death spiral, there are crucial changes that have to be made to his game plan.

For a start, he is no longer able to say he doesn’t have responsibility and doesn’t have to offer alternatives, as he has done to the Coalition’s policies and actions he has trenchantly criticised.

What Albanese says now matters, like no other time in the past three years. What he says now is Labor policy. What he says now is an election promise. What he says now determines the Labor attitude to managing government. What Albanese says now is a late job application to the Australian people who can’t be brushed aside or ducked any longer on the basis that Labor is not in power.

Now it is serious: Anthony Albanese in Cairns on Saturday. Picture: Toby Zerna

Last year Albanese would have got away with fudging the unemployment figures or the official cash rate; his plan for 24-hour, seven-day-a-week registered nurses in aged care would have gone unchallenged; questionable costing on GPs clinics would not have been pursued; exaggeration about his professional experience involving economic advice to the Hawke government would have been part of the “Albo DJ” story; abandoning his previous calls for a rise in JobSeeker would not have been noticed because he was in opposition; and his spectacular contradiction of effective border protection policy – hard-won centrist Labor policy – wouldn’t have been queried.

The fact Albanese recognised too late that his observation that if you turn back boats you don’t need offshore detention flew in the face of Australia’s successful border protection policy, which shut down people-smugglers, stopped deaths at sea and freed children from detention, was evidence of an awakening that what passes from his lips is what Labor will be expected to do in government.

It is a sorry sight when a political leader has to ask the media to hold another press conference to “clarify” their remarks at a press conference only hours earlier. And when confusion on the same issue continues even into a so-called day of truce. On the campaign trail this is a sign of dysfunction, moving “off message” and the “death spiral” some Labor MPs feel in their guts.

Peter Dutton, the hard man of the Queensland right, Defence Minister and the former minister responsible for border protection, said Albanese’s rejection of offshore processing was unbelievable but noted it was more so because it was “against ALP policy”. Policy is the nub of Albanese’s problem when it comes to being the alternative prime minister. The Labor fear, and possible reality, is that Albanese is just not across the breadth of policy issues because for too long he has concentrated on criticising the Prime Minister and not offering an alternative.

Being a small target is a legitimate political strategy if it is grounded in a firm public view of the leader. But Albanese has run the risk of being a Joe Biden – around in politics for a long time, even holding the number two job, but not making any impact in more than two decades of parliamentary service.

To the Labor leader’s credit he didn’t roll himself into a ball last week when responsible for the worst beginning of a campaign in living memory: he admitted a mistake (something some in the media, especially at the ABC, couldn’t bring themselves to do), apologised, tried to move on, and, even after more blunders, sought to resurrect the successful personal attack on Morrison that has worked so well since the end of 2019.

On the weekend Albanese sought to recover, shift the debate back on to his ground and said: “Now, if we want a national anti-corruption commission, it’s very clear that not only has Scott Morrison failed to legislate for one, not only has he failed to introduce legislation, he’s now saying somehow, once again, in perhaps the greatest underlining element of Scott Morrison’s characteristic of always looking to blame someone else, somehow, it’s the Labor Party’s fault that he hasn’t introduced legislation for a national anti-corruption commission. It fails the laugh test. But it also fails the integrity test.”

Having the advantage of an apparent momentum and strategy shift in the campaign after Albanese’s mistakes, Morrison sent a riposte with a telling twist on the old Labor election battle cry that if you can’t govern yourselves you can’t govern, suggesting if you can’t campaign you can’t run the country. “This election is a choice about who Australians know can manage an economy, can look after their security, in one of the most uncertain and insecure times we’ve seen in the world today,” he said. “My opponents do not have an economic plan, and when you don’t have an economic plan, and when you don’t understand the economy, and when you can’t run a campaign, that means you can’t run the country.”

Albanese has to, and can, get over his miserable start to the 2022 election campaign but he can’t do it based on the three-year template of being an opposition leader who doesn’t appear as an alternative prime minister.