With Labor lifting its game, the Coalition needs a new miracle

Some may want to reach for the heartburn medication now, but when thinking about the next federal election we must be realistic.

Labor Leader Anthony Albanese speaks to predecessor Bill Shorten on the Opposition frontbench during Question Time.

Some may want to reach for the heartburn medication now, but when thinking about the next federal election we must be realistic.

Remember this: before the 2019 election, pretty much every Coalition MP was grim-faced and resigned to defeat. They were moping about, in the deepest of doldrums, with many turning their attention to life after politics.

Yes, there were a few exceptions; some were valiantly battling on. Of note were Tim Wilson with his campaign against Labor’s proposed franking credit changes and our ever confident, glass-half-full man, Scott Morrison.

Don’t forget, this funk most of the government was in occurred even though Labor had run a toxic campaign crafted around resentment towards Bill Shorten’s “top end of town”. Labor presented with a class war vibe and kamikaze anti-wealth creation policies. Fancy doing a hit on negative gearing in a country where real estate is a national obsession.

It is difficult to overstate how terrible Labor’s election pitch was last time. Distilled down, it looked to me as: “Feeling left behind? Don’t worry, we will stop other people getting ahead. That’ll make you feel better.”

The delivery was terrible, too; Shorten came across as a whinging union rep. Worse, for all his derisive talk about big business and the rich, you got the feeling he hung out with them all anyway behind your back.

Yet even with all that baggage weighing the party down, Labor almost won. So much so that after the results came through, the line of the campaign came from a relieved Prime Minister, who declared his win a miracle.

To focus the mind, various dictionary definitions of the word miracle are: “an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency … an unusual or wonderful event that is believed to be caused by the power of God … an unusual and mysterious event that is thought to have been caused by a god because it does not follow the usual laws of nature”.

So, a miracle then; unexpected, unexplained, inexplicable. Something that has no basis in logic, reason or evidence. A divine gift from above to the incredulous and even the undeserving.

A few questions then arise. Given the last win was a miracle, can we expect another one? Do miracles strike twice? Then, if there was a mood for change in the electorate last time, why wouldn’t there be even more of a mood now?

When it comes to assessing the mood for change, my feeling is it is there. If the mood isn’t at fever pitch, perhaps it is just that after the past two years the electorate is fatigued. But make no mistake – and at the risk of being shouted down for “going woke” – this government is on the nose. It lacks emotional IQ and it is stale, pale and male. There are many who are beyond fed up with it.

What is the Coalition doing about all this? Not that much really. You do get the feeling it would like to something but just don’t know what or how. When it comes to gender balance, the organisation regards quotas with abject horror and instead relies on senior people issuing public decrees: “I want a woman preselected.” This inconsistent and unreliable method of problem correction is preferred to an organised system.

On the Coalition’s reputation as good economic managers, remember Tony Abbott’s “debt emergency”? What an embarrassment that phrase looks now, and no, it cannot all be blamed on Covid-19. This government, or the tail end of it, in its various incarnations, has lost the power to frighten by invoking the horrors of financial waste and government debt. In my estimation, the Coalition starts next year behind and goes into the election as the underdog.

Labor, by comparison, presents this time with a completely different approach. Anthony Albanese looks prime ministerial and has added a key phrase to his repertoire. Labor won’t stop people from getting ahead, he says, while it is busy trying to help those who are falling behind. This is a crucial difference in approach.

Finally, the pandemic has revealed the relevance and power of the states. Who the federal government is, is of less interest now. Of our three layers of government, the federal one often looks the least relevant to our daily lives, meaning a higher risk tolerance when casting a vote.

In any contest, it pays to ask yourself: in this fight, who would I rather be, us or them? This time, if I were Labor, I would be saying: us, all day long.

It has been a pleasure and a privilege, writing for you this year. Merry Christmas and a happy new year.