There is a dual and potentially fatal lesson for both Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton in the Queensland election.
Who dares may not win.
For Dutton the message is this: If a leader goes into an election campaign without an agenda, your opponents will frame it for you.
And the consequences will be a serious erosion of political capital when it matters most.
For the Prime Minister, the warning is more ambiguous, but equally affecting.
A scare campaign built on an issue of confected substance and beyond the foundational concerns of the national electorate is one disposed to a potentially perilous backfire.
The Queensland election result has now become a fundamental test of Albanese’s leadership and poses an immediate challenge to his central command.
Abortion, and its legality, has been elevated to a false concern at a federal level by misguided idiocy. But Albanese is now being dared by senior Queensland cabinet ministers to weaponise the issue to the federal sphere, in the spurious belief that it could expose the Coalition to a new concern.
This is a Labor-confected issue, fuelled by ill-discipline among right wing elements of the Coalition, which has caught out the LNP on moral grounds, and has had some effect at a state level.
If for no other reason that an LNP campaign that has allowed a media vacuum to be filled with nonsense.
Murray Watt, a cabinet minister of questionable ability, has now put the issue squarely in Albanese’s remit. Having been sanctioned to be the federal voice on the Queensland result, Watt has challenged his leader to elevate abortion as a wedge issue for the federal campaign, notwithstanding its absence from constitutional affairs.
And he is not alone. There are those in the Labor left that will now seek to weaponise the issue as part of a federal campaign.
Albanese, a Catholic and a risk-averse leader, would be wisely reluctant to take up the cudgels. But the temptation may test his instincts. This will now become a clear test of his leadership, his moral rigour and his political instinct for the views of conservative ethnic communities in western Sydney.
Albanese was not impressed with Tanya Plibersek’s attempt to resurface the issue in 2019 during the election campaign, having been a witness to the RU486 debate. At a time that Labor is testing tribal loyalties over the Middle East, does Albanese really want to throw fuel on the fire and revisit a polarising issue and be blamed for doing it?
Dutton is naturally relaxed about it. The Coalition’s position, which he will undoubtedly be forced to reconfirm this week when asked, is that this remains an issue for the state and territories. Which it unquestionably is.
And the risk for Albanese is the sense that raising such an issue at a federal level will be seen as a craven political tactic.
The danger for Dutton, however, is the simple lesson from Queensland. Going into a federal election campaign with a small target strategy will allow Labor to fill the vacuum with any nonsense it can concoct, as Malcolm Turnbull proved in 2016 when the Mediscare campaign almost unseated him.
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