Election 2022: Week of blunders rattles Labor leader as momentum shifts

Scott Morrison embraces Josh Frydenberg at a Passover service in Melbourne. Picture: Jason Edwards

Resurrection, hope and renewal.

For Anthony Albanese, the election campaign this Easter has taken on the theme of redemption. For Scott Morrison, there is now hope.

Yesterday was meant to mark a religious détente. The Labor leader and the Prime Minister had called a campaign truce. Yet both leaders sought to capitalise on faith.

The Prime Minister ended the week with Josh Frydenberg at a synagogue in East Melbourne for a Passover service. Albanese attended a Good Friday service in south-west Sydney at St Charbel’s Maronite Church before visiting an aged care home with his girlfriend Jodie Haydon.

Both leaders wanted to leave a positive impression at the end of a difficult week.

But for Albanese it was nothing less than a shocker.

And it wasn’t just a one-day nightmare, the horror endured for a full week. At the end of it, the Labor leader looked rattled and defensive.

There is now policy confusion and contradictory messaging. The optics are of a Labor campaign team in disarray, with a leader not across his brief and not in control.

It was one of the worst starts to a federal election campaign for an opposition leader in living memory – arguably worse than Mark Latham – and one that comprehensively overshadowed the uncomfortable issues Scott Morrison had to face.

Given that voters often tend to tune in to the first and last weeks of a campaign, and pay less attention to the fluff in between, the first impressions that many voters will now have of Albanese will be negative ones. Considering the softness of Labor’s support already, this is significant.

Albanese’s stumbles will have damaged his personal standing at a time when the record levels of popular support for Labor were already in decline. The question for Albanese is now a deeply personal one and goes to his character. Can he recover from here?

The first-day gaffe – failing to nominate two key economic indicators on unemployment and interest rates – was not a failure of the campaign team. It was all on Albanese.

The student who neglected his homework, expecting to get marks for just turning up to the exam, Albanese played directly into doubts about Labor’s economic credentials and its claimed ideological transformation.

The second blunder, on asylum seekers, was also on Albanese. Having left enough ambiguity in his answers to questions over offshore processing, he played into another vulnerability for Labor. He can argue the toss over what he really meant, but haziness on this issue for Labor is electoral death.

Having realised the stuff- up on Monday, the campaign team tried to pivot to health.

But again, Albanese botched it after claiming that their policy on GP clinics had been costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office when in fact it hadn’t.

Not only had the leader mismanaged the economic argument that Labor posed no risk, he mismanaged the pivot to Labor’s core strength. He left the door open to Morrison to do what he does best.

Albanese has enjoyed three years as Opposition Leader having evaded scrutiny of any substance. He has rarely been asked a hard question, and rarely has the answer mattered.

Albanese has now learned a valuable lesson that a leader can’t discover until they do it. All the experience as an opposition leader can’t prepare you for a campaign.

Albanese’s missteps will have a significant psychological impact. For him, as well as the campaign.

It has given Morrison and the Coalition an early advantage but also dramatically altered the dynamics of the campaign machine.

The Coalition has shifted from a defensive posture to an offensive one. It is now a contest of confidence for the Labor leader as he battles to recover over the Easter weekend and reset the contest against an opponent who has been through this before and triumphed.