Shed the small target and let the real Albanese stand up

Labor leader Anthony Albanese in 2019. Picture: AAP

Australian elections can be the contest of ideas, the fulcrum points of our great nation’s history. Think Ben Chifley in 1949, Gough Whitlam in 1972 and John Howard in 1996. Every win preceded a new way of how we as Australians viewed ourselves and our future. Every election represented a clear choice.

Then there are election campaigns. Marketing slogans; carefully choreographed events where leaders, pruned and manicured, meet a select group of individuals, nearly always party members, who provide the backdrop to the day’s announcement.

All sides do it. They fear an unguarded moment, an off-script interaction with an actual voter, such as Howard running along Sydney Harbour and getting heckled, which these days would be airbrushed from the image that campaigns want to project on nightly news, Tweets and edited TikTok videos.

Those who support this approach invariably wear “small target” as a badge of honour. Somehow the wider collective disappointment of an electorate that wants to be challenged, given a real choice, is worth it if the leader tests well in a focus group of seven people with nothing better to do on Friday night than look at photos of politicians and get asked, “Do you like the rim on these glasses or the thinner ones?”

The small-target advocates are once again in the ascendancy inside the Labor campaign machine, but they’ve been there for the past 30 years.

Who can forget the small-target advice to Kim Beazley as opposition leader? The big man with a big heart who was so unknown by the electorate that Howard could cut him down with the line that he “doesn’t have the ticker” for the top job? Labor had to run an ad titled That’s What I Stand For during the election campaign.

They were there again for Julia Gillard in 2010 when, mid-campaign, she had to break free of the small-target guidance with “the real Julia” line to demonstrate what she stood for. Regrettably, it was too late to save the first-term majority government from signing a deal with Bob Brown and the Greens – everyone suitably adorned with focus group approved sprigs of wattle during the photo op – in the event of a hung parliament.

So now we have the small-target strategy on display again. Gone are the bold visions for Australia of Kevin Rudd and Bill Shorten, replaced with the myopic view that a win is a win and that’s all that matters.

The strategy has revolved around “Not Morrison” at presser after presser. Labor policy “reform” is all about “Not Shorten”. The last of the tax reforms, on family trusts, was dumped last Sunday, just in time for the election. This cost socially progressive policies $30bn of revenue to fund a better Australia across the next decade.

We’ve had Anthony Albanese give a headland speech saying he wanted to govern like Bob Hawke, Paul Keating – and Howard. On foreign policy he’ll be just like Rudd and Gillard. Just this week in Queensland he said wanted to be like Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. For all the reflected glory of each of those political giants, voters are being asked to vote for Albanese as prime minister.

To paraphrase the lyric from a song, not by Albo’s favoured artist Billy Bragg but by Eminem, will the Real Albo please stand up?

I want the Albo who, torn in his loyalty to the Labor Party, backed a leadership change in 2012 with that epic line said through tears: “I like fighting Tories. That’s what I do.” I want the Albo who was on my flight to London in 2019 going to a Politics in the Pub event and a meeting with British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

I want the Albo who doggedly backs his South Sydney Rabbitohs and has a local corn ale lager named after him. Australians deserve a prime minister raised Catholic by a single mum in a housing commission flat. It’s time as a nation to have a prime minister from the working class.

But the small targeters want none of that risk. Scared of their own shadow, they advocate image over substance; a photo op over a policy position.

There’s another Eminem song that comes to mind – Lose Yourself – that no doubt the small-target campaign advocates read the wrong way. It has a great line that’s reprised in one of my favourite musicals, Hamilton. It’s about having your one shot at victory; it’s the lyric, “One shot or one opportunity … would you capture it or just let it slip?”

It’s a timely reminder that testing well in focus groups doesn’t predetermine victory; it’s not about being vanilla when the electorate craves something with taste. It’s about being elected for what you want to do, not just promising what you won’t. By being authentic, raw, vulnerable and yet stronger for it.

The big problem for small-target strategies advocated by some within Labor is the void of trust that is allowed to develop for voters. A void that is all too easily exploited by a Liberal campaign machine adept at projecting on to Labor the fear of the unknown.

Albo is one of the most genuine leaders Labor has had the fortune to present to the electorate but, as they did with Beazley and Gillard, the small-targeters with low ambitions for Australia, short on political vision, still could lead Labor to the edge of another election loss.

Right now the polls look comfortable for Labor, but the seat-by-seat races are much closer. Take the crucial state of Queensland, where Albanese rattled off 10 seats he thought Labor could win. The next day The Australian carried a story saying senior Labor strategists thought maybe two seats at best were in play. It’s notable that party elder Wayne Swan has been heading up a Queensland-specific strategy committee since last year.

So, despite the national polls, the election result will be much closer. This means Labor, more than ever, can’t afford to risk staying a small target. I’m hopeful that in the campaign ahead we will see Albo at his best, campaigning as he will govern: with passion, determination and a vast plan for the future of Australia. Now is not the time to remain a small target with the biggest opportunity for our nation ahead of us.

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.