Election 2022: No messiah, but we can rely on Albanese for now

Anthony Albanese signs a poster for a young boy while enjoying a coffee the morning after his ‘baby steps of change’ campaign brought victory for Labor. Picture: Getty Images

Election day in Sydney’s inner west had a subdued tone. Volunteers in coloured T-shirts politely asking if you’d like a how-to-vote leaflet; no thrusts at people doing their duty as citizens, a grey, low sky the setting for serious business.

Anthony Albanese is the electorate’s man for the times: Australia has chronic fatigue. With unemployment at 3.9 per cent, Liberal hardheads could not believe the number of baseball bats with Scott Morrison’s name on them. Others looked to history and were blinkered as well.

Where was the euphoria, the red wave that broke for Gough, and Bob and Kevin07? That also missed the point. Voters weren’t on the hunt for a messiah.

The pandemic saw levels of trust in government rise, and each state and territory learned to love their premier or chief minister, and especially their chief health officer, to keep Covid-19 at bay. Even as they rallied parochially behind Annastacia, Gladys, Dan and Mr 90 Per Cent in the West, it was competence and freedom they craved, not transcendence.

Morrison had claimed the quiet Australians for his 2019 miracle, but the next steps weren’t at all clear. The Coalition won with a limited to-do list for a third term and a budget in balance despite a listless economy where capital was on strike, not labour.

The pandemic was a political gift, providing purpose, as well as a challenge to stay ahead of trouble; Covid-19 relegated the opposition to spectators at best, wreckers at worst. Morrison took charge, the captain of Team Australia, while Josh Frydenberg deployed the biggest open cheque book the country is ever likely to see.

Australia has, all things considered, had a “good” pandemic. As always, it’s faith in our specialness, a country and a continent, champions of crisis. We got more big calls right, as a nation. But success doesn’t come cheap. We’ll be left with a monster-sized bill that neither major party has a clue about how to cut and run down.

The pandemic has been a jolt to our rhythms. Our lives and workplaces are still being recalibrated. A reshuffling of national and individual priorities is happening. Relationships are in flux. As the election campaign showed, our expectations of what politicians should and should not do have been refreshed by new actors on the scene.

When it came to the devil we know and the leopard who’d changed his spots, voters recoiled a little less from the latter. We don’t need another hero, they seemed to sing in Tina-like unison, all we want is life beyond the Covid zone.

Some 7 million Australians have been infected with the virus, perhaps even more if we consider the self-reporting that now prevails. It has slowed the country down, for sure, perhaps adding another layer of complacency, or is it bravado?

Albanese has been around a long time and he, like the other man who crisscrossed the country for votes, must have sensed the voters’ weariness. The nation wants to move forward, even if it’s by a tiny bit, because we’re done with the recent past. Labor does not offer revolution. Not even renovation. Just a reset. Press play.

Albanese was always determined but he ran scared, fearful that his take-no-prisoners opponent would have loved nothing more than a six-week bare-knuckle rumble of a campaign. So, for the battler from a housing commission flat, it was defence first, gloves up, protecting the head and ribs.

One of Albanese’s debate mantras was “we can do better”. Gospel-choir incantations of Obamaesque “yes we can” change could not have survived a punchy Morrison, let alone an electorate sick of politics.

So, Labor presented baby steps of change, just a bit more spending on services, no great social switcheroo, no class enemy lurking in every boardroom. The risk was always that change agents in the community, young people looking for inspiration, those sick of how Canberra operates, even idealists in his own party would look at Albo and conclude, yes we can do a lot better than you!

Still, it’s a clear victory despite another fall in Labor’s primary vote, with the bonus of a convulsion in the Liberal heartland. Albanese looked spent in his final campaign interview on Friday. But adrenaline and genuine emotion tested the prime minister elect’s surge-control late Saturday night; in jubilation, he even looked humble, younger, wiser and vindicated, having not strayed from a long game that suited him and the times.

But neither governing nor capital-P politics are ever as easy as winning office. The cartel is crumbling. Election after election, the two major parties are losing market share; their combined primary vote in 2019 was 75 per cent yet between them they were rewarded with 96 per cent of lower house seats.

This super-sized riot of a cross bench has been coming for a long time. One-third of voters now don’t want either of the shrinking giants. Voters, particularly women, are saying they want a different approach to issues and how they are mediated in the national parliament.

Albanese may not be offering tired Australians salvation, but he may be able to focus political might to areas voters want action on: from the overdue symbolic to the pressing practical, with the eagerness that comes from sitting on the bench for nine years and wanting to make an impact on the field.

Going back to Tina, exhausted voters weren’t searching for someone who was simply the best, bursting through the line. But stepping slowly out of the pandemic ruins, they’ve found something they can rely on, while hoping there’s still something better out there.