Penny Wong won’t be fronting any of the election night television coverage this time around. Back in 2019, Labor’s Senate leader was on the ABC’s election night panel. As Labor lost the election it thought it would win, Wong had to sit, stoic, controlled, analysing the incoming shellacking for hours.
Never again, she says. In a conversation for my podcast this weekend, Wong recalls one of her more terrible nights. She says she knew by 7.30pm Labor was not returning to government, because the scrutineers in Queensland were telegraphing a blow out. “I remember calculating how many hours I’d have to be on television before Bill [Shorten] conceded,” she says.
The trauma remains deep etched, for Wong, and for Labor.
Wong is on the podcast for a conversation about defence and foreign affairs, given Scott Morrison is fully intent on a khaki election. She raises election night in 2019 when I ask her how she is contemplating conducting foreign affairs differently, given oppositions always plan for a transition. Wong corrects my terminology. “We’re planning,” she says. After 2019, “I don’t contemplate. I plan for what we have to do without engaging in any assumption”.
We are starting here this weekend because Wong’s summary neatly encapsulates Labor’s current mindset. Planning. Hoping, but after the 2019 rout, the opposition is too nervous to assume anything.
But with the budget now in sight, and the campaign proper then under way shortly after, Labor is executing a gear change. A political party that thinks and moves as a collective, even during periods of maximum derangement, is entering the season of Anthony Albanese.
Obviously Albanese has led his party for a full parliamentary term, steering colleagues past the trauma of the defeat, so when I say the season of Albanese, I mean Labor is about to learn whether or not the bloke up front can persuade voters he is the man for the moment.
To this end, Albanese is assembling the components of his alternative prime minister story. There were two scene-setting speeches this week – one to a business summit arranged by the Australian Financial Review, and another to a foreign and defence policy related outing at the Lowy Institute.
The spine of Albanese’s pitch to voters is “I represent safe change”. In that spirit, the Labor leader had two messages for the business community. The first was he planned to govern in the consensus style of Bob Hawke. The second was Labor had a growth and productivity agenda. Albanese would champion aspiration as well as fairness.
At Lowy, Albanese wanted to project that he was a person who would bring a level of institutional seriousness back to the prime ministership. He told the foreign policy boffins he intended to “restore a greater sense of responsibility to the office of the prime minister”.
Albanese also picked up some broken pieces from his near past. Asked by Lowy’s executive director, Michael Fullilove, to identify prime ministers he’d admired from a foreign policy perspective, Albanese eventually got to John Curtin (given Curtin, for Labor people, is always the correct answer).
But first, he nominated Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. Albanese said he’d seen Rudd “up close” during his first G20 meeting in London during the global financial crisis, shuttling between Barack Obama and the Chinese delegation. “I saw Australia punching above our weight,” he said. Albanese said Rudd had yanked Australia out of “the naughty corner” in global forums by ratifying the Kyoto protocol.
Lest anyone be accused of having a favourite sibling, Albanese added: “The relationship Julia Gillard forged with president Obama was extraordinary. It led to Julia addressing Washington in a celebrated address, and a great honour for our country, and it led to the increased presence of US Marines in the Northern Territory.”
These reflections felt sincere, but they were also very obviously didactic and rehabilitative. Albanese wanted to project a sense of competence from the recent past – a past in which he’d been a significant actor. Rudd/Gillard/Rudd wasn’t all civil war was his point. That government I was part of wasn’t all rank self-indulgence. We did things too.
In addition to the speeches, Albanese has done the obligatory Women’s Weekly profile – a rite of passage for any prime ministerial aspirant. This Sunday, a let’s meet the “real Albo” 60 Minutes special will bookend Jenny Morrison, Morrison and his ukulele a couple of weeks back.
So you can see where this is all going.
But it’s also reasonable to wonder at this juncture why it has taken the Labor campaign so long to colour between the lines. The simple question is this: why is Operation Define Not At All Scary Albo running so late in the political cycle when opinion polls tell us there’s a reasonable chunk of voters who haven’t yet formed a view about the Labor leader?
If we cast our memories back to 2007, when Kevin Rudd took on John Howard, and won, Rudd was out telling voters “a number of people have described me as an economic conservative” a full five months before the election.
Remember those ads? I bet you do. They are entirely memorable in the sense that peak chutzpah always is. Because Rudd’s serene humblebrag was so ludicrously audacious, the advertisements became a cultural conversation piece, generating a bunch of free media follow-up.
Rudd had wanted to lure the Liberals into talking more about him, so that campaign was more than introductory. It was bait, and the bait worked.
Now obviously Albanese does talk about his values and background frequently. There have also been a couple of dry run marketing prototypes. In March 2021, there was the “Albo’s story” montage prepared for the ALP national conference. Then in December 2021, for a rally in Sydney’s inner west, there was the “better future” pitch.
But neither of those pitches were pushed out forcefully across social media, radio or television to voters who only watch politics out of the corner of their eyes. For weeks, I’ve been wondering when that might change.
Given the log cabin narrative is such a basic building block in professional campaigning, the absence has felt deliberate. I’ve wondered whether Albanese has resisted traditional mass market definitional efforts because, fundamentally, he prefers ambiguity. Albanese has prospered this long in politics, in part, because he knows how and when to dance between the raindrops.
I haven’t been the only person curious. Some Liberals have also been scratching their heads. Is this a lack of money? Is this some kind of deep, risk aversion? In any case, Morrison, of course, is never one to die wondering. The prime minister has sought to exploit the opening Albanese has left by moving to define the Labor leader himself.
If you watch politics closely, you’ll know Morrison’s efforts on this front have intensified significantly over this past month or so. Albanese is weak, and sneaky. The Labor leader is Beijing’s preferred candidate for the election. And so on.
From my vantage point, the tone of this desperate barrage landed somewhere between hyperbole and hysteria.
But Morrison isn’t talking to me, he’s talking to the disengaged voters that determine the outcome of elections, and some of these people would struggle to identify Albanese in a line-up. People who conduct focus groups for a living, whose judgment I trust, tell me people are deeply angry with Morrison at the moment, but they are not yet volunteering a positive assessment of Albanese in the way voters did, unprompted, about Rudd in 2007.
Given Morrison is currently on the rampage, firing indiscriminately, it would make sense for Labor to call time on strategic ambiguity, if this is, in fact, a strategy.
Apparently that’s about to happen. People say a campaign defining the Labor leader and the coming contest is hovering in the wings. I suspect it will surface over the coming week or two, on all major mediums.
Albanese has copped a fair bit of flak since taking the leadership for playing it safe. But if the polls are right, the leader’s political instincts and judgments have, thus far at least, kept Labor in the contest, at a time when the power of incumbency should wipe any political insurgency off the map.
So perhaps he’s right to have left colouring in between the lines this late in the political cycle. Perhaps it’s best to wait until people are fully tuned in.
But if Labor loses because voters ultimately don’t feel as if they have a grip on the Morrison alternative – and therefore aren’t confident Albanese means safe change – holding back will have been a big judgment call to get wrong.
