Gesture politics the stuff of dreams

Labor believes it will probably lose the next election to Malcolm Turnbull.

When Tony Abbott was elected in 2013, senior Labor figures thought it would take three terms to knock off the new government.

Abbott’s poor polls allowed them to think they might do it in one term.

Now they expect Turnbull to win.

This was evident in the astonishingly lame Labor response to the Turnbull government’s magnificently vacuous stunt of announcing a bid for the UN Security Council in 2029.

For the moment, Labor cannot counter Turnbull’s ability to generate waves of positive publicity with completely meaningless and cost-free gestures.

Most new prime ministers are able to make electorally pleasing gestures, essentially symbolic and devoid of substance, in their honeymoon period. It builds up goodwill and establishes a fund of statesmanlike images and ­narratives.

Abbott was never allowed to make such gestures because he never enjoyed even the barest goodwill from either the ABC or the Fairfax press.

Abbott also has a serious distaste for gestures devoid of substance. But such gestures are a key element of postmodern politics, they are a language that all successful leaders must master.

Turnbull is getting his honeymoon in spades. It is enormously to his credit, and to that of Julie Bishop, that they could generate millions of dollars of pro-Coalition publicity from their bitterest enemies at the ABC from a gesture that means nothing and costs nothing.

The ABC’s flagship current affairs program 7.30 was in paroxysms to declare the liberation of the nation from the stifling straitjacket of Abbott into the new world of outward-looking multilateral engagement.

It was determined on this narrative no matter what the facts. It even got the Lowy Institute’s normally sensible Michael Fullilove to make utterances along this line.

Of course a government promising to do anything in 2029, when Turnbull’s grandson will be readying his first bid for parliament, is utterly fatuous.

And the formal objection of the Abbott opposition to Labor’s Sec­urity Council bid had been that it came too late, so this early bid, in terms of formal policy, would have been no problem.

Our last bid, which was successful, in 2008 was against countries that had started in 2001, showing a late bid can succeed, for whatever success is worth.

Turnbull should keep up a string of these meaningless and cost-free gestures, at least one a fortnight until the next election.

We could take advantage of the discovery of water on Mars to set up an exploratory committee to make an eco-friendly Australian manned mission to Mars by 2039, using hyperdrive and wormhole technology.

And to show our commitment to renewables, we could seek to make commercial use of electricity from moonbeams by 2049.

And surely enlightened animal rights activists will appreciate the dolphin communication strategy set to give us a conversation on sustainability with the ocean’s most intelligent creatures by 2069.

And Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek will lamely have to go along in a bipartisan spirit lest they tempt the fates by challenging the Zeitgeist.