After five weeks of electioneering, Anthony Albanese has circled back to where he began: Peter Dutton is dark and nasty; Labor is the party of Medicare; there are tax cuts and giveaways for all; the economy is turning the corner; and Labor won’t be a carbon copy of Donald Trump.
The arguments, attacks and offers are the same as they have been during a campaign largely of “me-too” spending and sledging, although the Prime Minister sought to promote a choice for voters on May 3 declaring: “This election is a choice between two fundamentally different visions for the direction Australia should go.”
“In the total absence of anything constructive to help in the present, or anything positive to say about the future, the Liberals are urging Australians to go back to the past. Back to a darker and nastier and more extreme version of the cuts and conflict and culture wars that people rejected less than three years ago,” he said as he revived personal vilification of the Opposition Leader.
This, of course, was a laundry list of achievements over the past three years and offers made over the past five week but it was also notable for the list of things Albanese did not want to talk about or address.
As the frontrunner who vowed to hold Labor’s 78 seats to ensure a majority government and aimed to win even more from the Liberals and Greens, Albanese set himself a higher benchmark than suggested in most of the polling.
He also conceded cost-of-living pressures were hurting Australian families, more needed to be done and although the economy was improving with inflation coming down, interest rates reduced and wages up, Labor needed another three years to fix the mess left by Scott Morrison.
“The government I lead is determined to take Australia forward,” he said on the day he overtook Gough Whitlam’s length of prime ministerial service and became Australia’s 17th longest-serving PM.
Yet when it came to questions about the Coalition’s most telling campaign lines about voters being worse off now than they were three years ago and there was a liar in The Lodge, Albanese was less than forthcoming, adopting a duck and weave position and simply ignoring what the question was.
When asked whether he could tell people they were better off than three years ago, his response was to say they would have been worse off under Dutton; while flashing his Medicare card, he declined to say what bulk-billing rates would be at the end of his second term; he dodged a question of whether Labor would revisit the Indigenous voice to parliament; and he completely diverted a question as to why he couldn’t win the election by telling the truth.
Albanese simply adopted his tried-and-true technique of avoiding a question, answering a completely different question to the one asked, launching into an attack on Dutton as a diversion and using a joke to smother a pointed question.
All in all, Albanese’s National Press Club appearance completed the circle of his intended campaign, and kept his Teflon image intact.
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