Skip the policy cuddles Albo, voters deserve the details

Feelings are funny things. For the record, I’m a fan. Being half Italian, let’s just say I’m hardwired to feel big and feel deep.

I remember, at a different time in my life that now feels as if it were a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, saying to a friend that I wished I didn’t feel things as deeply as I did. He pointed out that the alternative was living from a place of shallow indifference. A point well made.

Feelings bring colour to our lives. Feelings punctuate moments and memories. Butterflies in your tummy. The grief of loss. The comfort and beauty of patient, consistent love. You’ll always find me on this side of the fence. Team feelings, if you will.

But as with so many other things in this mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world, I fear the emotional compass has gone haywire. The emotional compass, instead of being instructive in a political sense, has become destructive. It has become a poor substitute for clear thinking. Analytical, rational assessment. Forget objective thinking; how do you feeeeeeel?

Feel-pinions rule the day. An obsession with validation and living “my truth” (whatever that’s supposed to be) has become a weird intellectual manifestation of the sin of sloth.

As we waltz awkwardly into this election campaign, I can’t help but wonder what the fruit our obsession with all of this stuff will be for the future of our country. Will it be an election campaign that is, for all intents and purposes, a policy-free zone? Will it be that we are so obsessed with how we feel about an issue that we don’t bother to interrogate the facts? It very possibly could be. But only if we let it.

Let’s take the Labor Party’s flagship aged-care policy for example. It feels great. Having 24/7 nurses in aged-care homes? That’s policy cuddle if ever there was one.

But Anthony Albanese, in doing his best Bill Shorten, refused to (or couldn’t, I don’t know which is worse) cost the policy and has no clue how many nurses would be needed or where these magical healthcare workers might come from. Ahh, but it feels good, doesn’t it? So easy to get caught up in that, be blinded by the feeling.

Without a costing model, without knowing how many nurses are needed or even if they’re available, it is a 2022 version of “By 1990 no child will be living in poverty”.

Albanese’s Labor seems to think if it says “we care” enough, then nobody will notice its small-target strategy is in fact a no-target offering. Zero detail. Much emotion. Much heavily filtered, obsessively curated content.

I can’t think of anything more disrespectful to Australian voters. This isn’t a game. This is our lives and livelihoods. It’s the future of our businesses and our families. It’s our ability to live the lives of our choosing, and if we are being asked to change the government then in order to do so we deserve the detail. Down to the very letter. Moreover, these are serious times. These are perilous days.

In trying to persuade the Australian public to change horses and ride off into the sunset with him, Albanese’s Labor is feeding us image after curated image, and little more.

While I commend the Opposition Leader for his healthy lifestyle change, a slimmer Albanese remains as substance, detail and policy-free as the original version.

While campaigning in Western Australia this week, the Opposition Leader refused to engage with a member of the public who wanted to ask him a question. A basic question. He fell apart like tissue paper in light rain. If Albanese can’t handle a basic question from a member of the public, he hasn’t got what it takes to lead this country. He doesn’t deserve to.

In some ways I understand why a party would have a crack at keeping detail outside the front door. We’ve shown that we don’t mind. We’ve rewarded that behaviour.

Feelings have become the ultimate god of small things. Across time this has created a soft underbelly. An inability to debate matters of substance.

I also understand that some people simply don’t like the Prime Minister. They don’t like his faith (the bigotry of that is one for another day), his manner and possibly his musical chops. To that I would say that a few weeks ago, as I was being wheeled into theatre for emergency surgery, I didn’t care about the faith of my doctor. Whether I might like him socially. I cared only cared about whether he was the best person for the job.

As we stare down the barrel of the choice before us, we need to put feelings aside; we need to lift the hood of the Labor-Greens alliance and see what’s there.

So far, there’s no engine. Nothing to run on, not even the smell of an oily rag.