Election 2022: Hubris at Labor HQ will not erase week from hell
Winston Churchill said “when you’re going through hell, keep going”. And there’s no other way to put Labor’s first week of the election campaign. It was hellishly bad. So, so many mistakes were made and corrections issued that it will go down as the worst opening week of a federal campaign. I won’t list them all here, but if this was strategy prevailing over stuff-up, as some from the party are briefing, Labor supporters are in for a hard five weeks.
Labor “strategists” just three days in wrote the entire week off. Party president Wayne Swan described it as “less than ideal”.
It was a week in which the Liberals talked jobs, jobs, jobs in hi-vis and Labor’s gaffes gifted its opponents a pivot from talk of health to the economy. To paraphrase a quote from Bill Clinton’s campaign adviser from 1992, “It’s the economy, Albo.”
Labor now needs to get its economic playmakers on the field. Jim Chalmers is a future prime minister, steeled by working for Swan as they rescued Australia from the worst of the global financial crisis. He will be exceptional as treasurer, using his vast experience to manage the economy beyond Covid and the Ukraine war-led economic uncertainty. He’s a star player but has been barely seen. Labor needs to get him involved and quickly.
Penny Wong should lead Labor’s response to the Chinese threat in Solomon Islands as the guaranteed Albanese foreign minister. Kristina Keneally, no longer the bus captain of 2019, should be allowed to just cut loose and join Katy Gallagher on the campaign frontline. We need to see much more of Labor’s talented deputy, Richard Marles. Marles needs to move from defence to offence and play a key role.
Albo should let his team shine so that, like the former prime ministers he so admires, he can lead in reflected glory.
I don’t blame Albanese for the first week but those in the campaign team who’ve left him exposed and unknown to voters. Some have said to me the leader’s office is full of “yes” men and sycophants from Albanese’s university and student union past. I totally disagree. Sure, they’ve all known Albo for a long time, most working with him as he fought Tories and served for more than 25 years in the federal parliament. Albo credits them with “getting” him – they have a working knowledge of “the real Albo” the electorate now needs to see.
The small-targeters, though, have given Albo such little exposure to a full campaign press pack; it’s a different type of pressure and he clearly wasn’t well prepped. There’s also a lot of campaign hubris back at the party’s Sydney HQ thinking the next five weeks are an annoying formality and Albo just has to show up to beat ScoMo. Too much time has been spent standing in a closed circle of self-congratulatory motions while missing that voters want a real choice, and deserve nothing less. By pulling Scott Morrison down only half the job is done. By hiding Albo’s light under a bushel they’ve denied the electorate the opportunity to see what he really stands for.
The source of this strategic error can be found in the Weatherill/Emerson report into the 2019 election loss in which they incorrectly lay the blame for the surprise loss on Labor having too much to say, too many good ideas and a leader in Bill Shorten with the courage to ask the people to give Labor a mandate to govern. This report has been used by the small-targeters who now want to say as little as possible, to be policy-lite and vision-poor.
Week two will provide Albanese with the perfect opportunity to face off with his adversary in the first of no doubt three leaders debates, to be hosted by Sky News in Brisbane on Wednesday.
These events, with the preparation and mock debates, suck endless time from leaders’ diaries. The Easter break will have seen long hours of getting across the policy briefs. Leaders are peppered by advisers and media people with questions and lines. They are videoed so that expressions can be modified and edited out; you can’t get caught with a resting bitch face while your opponent talks up foreign policy.
The “leaders debates” have rarely determined the outcome of a general election, but the media cycle alone is worth trying to have a “win” with the faux poll of undecided voters. These are far less the everyman events they are billed to be. Both sides ask “undecideds” to qualify and load up ugly questions for those who slip into the 100-person audience. Nonetheless, they are one of the few times the leaders come together during the otherwise campaign set pieces of daily announcements and press conferences.
No pressure, but Albo has to knock this out of the park to regain momentum in the campaign. Given his parliamentary performances, this should not be too difficult. Beating ScoMo convincingly will see Albo erase the wobbles of the first week.
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.
