Plenty of ideas but no grand plan in Labor campaign launch

Anthony Albanese, left, with Kevin Rudd and Paul Keating at Labor Party campaign launch in Perth on Sunday. Picture: Liam Kidston.

Anthony Albanese has vowed to change Australia by doing very little different.

This is the fundamental contradiction in Labor’s case for change.

The Labor leader delivered a workmanlike speech on Sunday in a low-key campaign launch that stayed true to the low-risk strategy that has put him in an election-winning position.

He offered nothing too ambitious, hitting all Labor’s constituencies. There were plenty of ideas but no grand plan or global vision.

Albanese wants it to feel like change without it being an avalanche, recognising that Australians won’t tolerate radical redesign.

Albanese’s pitch is best summed up as “big goal, small target”.

Inherent in this is a failure to articulate a compelling reason for change other than a rejection of Scott Morrison.

Albanese’s task was to outline a plan that argued that he could do better. By better he really meant cheaper.

He promised cheaper childcare, cheaper electric cars, cheaper medicines, cheaper houses and cheaper power.

This exposes the potential flaw in Labor’s proposition. In claiming to offer cheaper everything, tapping into concerns over cost of living, Albanese has offered little evidence as to how this could be achieved.

Somehow this is all just meant to happen.

Universal cheaper mortgages are meant to be delivered through government funded co-investment for 10,000 lower-income earners.

Cheaper power is to be delivered through renewable energy and a $20bn taxpayer-funded rewiring of the grid.

Cheaper transport will be delivered through electrical vehicle refuelling stations so people don’t have to buy petrol.

Cheaper childcare will be only marginally cheaper than what’s on offer from the Coalition, as will be cheaper medicines through the PBS.

Labor has chosen to govern in the same vein as the Coalition. Its chief argument is that it can do it marginally better.

It has avoided grand plans to reconstruct Australia, despite promising to change it in an undefined way, happy to stand back and let voters take out their anger on Morrison.

This was a speech big on rhetoric, small on detail and absent of proof that Labor could bring down the cost of living for middle Australia other than a promise that it would do better than the other side.

It re-enforced the tendency to play it safe.

And in the end it was probably good enough for the purposes of Labor’s strategy that relies on the government losing the election rather than Labor winning it.