Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese muscle in on each other’s turf

Anthony Albanese and Scott Morrison. Picture: Gary Ramage

The c-word that won the Upper Hunter by-election for Gladys Berejiklian was not coal, it was Covid. Like almost every other contest in the past 18 months – except, funnily enough, the Eden-Monaro by-election where federal Labor retained the seat – the transcendent issue influencing voters was the pandemic.

Not even a procession of sordid sex scandals mattered. Any other time they would have sunk a government without trace. The $600 million of taxpayers’ money allocated by Scott Morrison to build a gas plant, which if needed should have been built by private enterprise and had more to do with wooing the blue-collar vote than power supply, also helped secure votes and fractured Labor. Morrison would consider that money well spent.

Despite the reluctance of a few blokes to credit her with the victory at the weekend, it belongs to the NSW leader because she is the steady, rational, stunt-free, public face of the state’s response to the pandemic. Her sensible approach to keep NSW open and functioning as much as possible, which should serve as a model for other leaders – Morrison take note – has given voters confidence they are in capable hands.

Jodi McKay was doomed the minute the result was known, just like other Labor and Liberal opposition leaders in the ACT, Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania. While all these losses were Covid driven, they were in some cases exacerbated by the personal flaws or mistakes of the opposition leaders.

In the most calamitous, which reduced the Liberals to two seats in the WA parliament, there was little discussion of the federal implications or of Morrison’s role. However, Morrison heard one message clearly. Frightened voters reward leaders who go out of their way to keep them “safe”. It was a reminder no Australian politician has been punished for threatening to lock ’em up, lock ’em down or lock ’em out. It triggered one of his infamous lightning pivots.

On March 8, less than a fortnight before the WA election, a very different Morrison told business leaders: “The scientific evidence from Israel and the UK on vaccine efficacy is very encouraging, especially the ability of vaccines to prevent severe illness and transmission. In other words, with sufficient vaccination of the population, we can start treating Covid like a bad flu.”

Ever since the disaster on the western front he has sounded downright complacent about the low vaccination rates and lukewarm about purpose-built quarantine centres, despite the regular breakouts from hotels, leaving himself open to charges that everything he does is dictated by his re-election agenda.

Longtime poll analyst Peter Brent put it troublingly on Monday: “It’s disturbing to contemplate any government deliberately damaging the country by prolonging the pandemic. But what are we to make of its behaviour?”

If the idea takes hold that Morrison’s actions are driven by electoral calculations rather than genuine concern about the health and welfare of Australians and the economy, it will cost him dearly.

One day, faced with crippling debt and the same existential questions Labor is confronting about who or what it stands for – and the challenges to Liberal MPs from hard right candidates are a foretaste – the Liberal Party will be asking itself if the Morrison experiment was worth it. Another win, still more likely than not, will mask the identity crisis for a while, but it will happen.

Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese would be mad to summarily dismiss what happened in the Upper Hunter. Although Labor hasn’t held the seat in a century, has never done well there not even in the best of times, and was never going to win, there are lessons from the result that he can’t ignore, including that it has put the wind up his MPs. They are not yet despairing, but they are anxious and frustrated.

Meryl Swanson, who holds Paterson for Labor, believes Morrison has failed on quarantine and vaccinations, saying the PM needs to give people “less gab and more jab”. She concedes that Covid largely determined the result but that only means despite a comfortable margin, as she comes up to her third election, she has even more reason to be nervous.

The Prime Minister has visited her seat five times, including to announce the gas plant, which she, along with her former boss and electorate neighbour Joel Fitzgibbon, back wholeheartedly.

Warning her party they were in danger of sleepwalking off a cliff, she urged sharper, tougher attacks on Morrison over vaccinations and quarantine.

Morrison seized on it to call his opponents sleepwalkers, then whingers for asking why Australia ranked 113th in the world on Covid vaccinations. Albanese retaliated by describing the government as all smirk and mirrors as well as all shirk and mirrors.

Labor’s tensions show how successfully Morrison has wedged Labor on energy and tax.

Part of Labor’s dilemma is how far to go to differentiate. Kevin Rudd won by being John Howard light.

Morrison is trying to win by being Labor light. Albanese is being thumped on one side by those who fear he is already a mini-Morrison and on the other by those want him to be.

Labor is grappling with its response to the phase three tax cuts, worth an estimated $130 billion over 10 years. It can allow them to proceed, amend them at the upper end to use the savings on worthy measures, as Rudd did in 2007 to upstage Howard, or look responsible and offset the deficit or pledge to rescind them in office. The last is unlikely and views are divided on the rest.

Whatever the decision, Albanese should put his shadow treasurer, Jim Chalmers, front and centre in the public debate, not keep him sidelined because of paranoia.

Labor and Albanese would benefit if one of his best performers was allowed to perform, rather than being pushed back into the shadows to be lampooned by the government.

That is one small but significant change he should make in the wake of the by-election.