Anthony Albanese called in to 3AW on Friday to mark the veteran broadcaster Neil Mitchell’s final shift. Melbourne’s talkback king declined to be sentimental in his last turn around the grounds with a prime minister; Mitchell pushed his guest every which way.
The febrility was ramped up to the point where listeners might have missed the moment where the prime minister said something pretty interesting. “Why is the public turning on you?” Mitchell asked. Albanese said polls came and went, but prime ministers needed to stay focused on the medium term, “not just day-to-day politics, because if you do that, you’ll end up not delivering the sort of government that we need”.
At first blush, Albanese’s observation sounds like a talking point that a cornered politician pulls out in response to a radio host belting them about like they are in a game of knock down clowns – something rehearsed, something rote.
But the prime minister was trying to share a cut-through insight. What he was saying was this: I’m trying to break a pattern that has bedevilled Australian politics since about 2009.
I’m trying to govern, rather than just scheme to survive.
This ambition should win a prime minister plaudits, at least in theory. If you stopped any voter in the street and asked them – what should a prime minister prioritise, winning the politics or governing – most, if not all, voters, would say just bloody govern please. Voters turned on Scott Morrison in May 2022, many viscerally, because he prioritised staging and performance to a degree where Australians felt trapped in a hall of mirrors. It was hard to know what was real.
Albanese won as the anti-Morrison. His mantra was stop performing, start doing. After winning because he wasn’t Morrison, Albanese planned to consolidate his position by modelling orderly government. Joe Biden has followed a similar playbook in the United States. Empathy, respect for institutions, an orderly policy agenda is offered as the antidote to derangement in the legislature, and a raging bull in the White House. These are important experiments, with big stakes.
Albanese has not executed his strategy perfectly. Balls sometimes get dropped. The government can look flat footed when crises, either manufactured or real, loom out of nowhere. As the summer approaches, this group is looking weary because governing is absolutely relentless. It absorbs massive amounts of time and energy. Moustache twirling is considerably less onerous.
In recent months, Albanese has been more effective at communicating his strategy in the world than his strategy at home. Much of the government’s domestic agenda is siloed with individual ministers, who are heads down, bums up in their patches. And the government is still transiting between act one, the first 18 months of legislating election promises, and act two, which is about framing the future. This transition, and its accompanying definitional vacuum, is happening at the peak of the cost of living crunch.
Here’s a statement of the obvious: in politics, a vacuum can make you vulnerable, particularly when voters aren’t happy with their lot.
But Albanese told Mitchell the truth. He is prioritising how things are over how things look, even though that’s a harder row to hoe. It’s really striking to me how this government is different from the last one in almost every respect. Morrison was a command-and-control prime minister; the cabinet barely mattered. The Albanese operation is decentralised. Ministers are running portfolios and policy agendas; work is done in small groups and in cabinet. The deliberations can be robust but thus far, they’ve been constructive, with a minimum of game playing.
I’ve been ringside to government for nearly 30 years. There have been times when I’ve felt deeply anxious about the health of the whole apparatus, particularly during the decade of leadership coups and the accompanying zero-sum politics. The return of a government focused on governing – getting on with substantive things, sometimes not quickly or elegantly enough, but nonetheless ploughing on, trying to do some good rather than fussing obsessively over internecine score-settling, wedging and the dreaded optics – is a welcome development from where I sit.
Voters felt the same way, evidently, for quite a long stretch. If we track the polls, presenting as steady-as-she-goes substantive – while declining to be destructive, posturing, blowhards – worked for the government for much of this year.
But that favourable cycle has turned. Albanese’s voter approval is net negative in Guardian Essential for the first time in his prime ministership. Looking at the two-party preferred measure this far out from an election is about as valuable as consulting a horoscope – but for the record, that’s now close to 50-50.
I believe Biden’s polls are worse. Biden’s lack of reward for effort has some journalists in the US scratching their heads. Molly Jong Fast, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, wrote an interesting piece contending that “boring” (that would be Biden) couldn’t hold its own against “Trumpian chaos”. She speculated that the Biden administration’s “superpower, its ability to slide under the radar while getting a lot done for the American people, may also be its achilles heel, holding back the administration from getting the credit it deserves”.
Tom Nichols in the Atlantic went a step further. He speculated this week that competence could actually cost Biden the next election because the US had entered a “post-policy era” where voters lacked interest in the nuts and bolts of governing. People consume politics now like reality television, or sport. “They want to root for heroes and heels; they want to feel high charges of emotion, especially anger; they want their votes to express a sense of personal identification … Biden can’t fulfil any of those desires. That’s to his credit, but it’s killing him politically.”
Everything is more heightened, and more broken, in the US.
But we do see a similar phenomenon here because there’s an alignment between Dutton and the zeitgeist. Australians are angry. So is Dutton. Sustained cost-of-living pressure has challenged Australians’ collective generosity and turned our focus inward. Those conditions suit Dutton, an authoritarian populist with a long professional history of framing the world as a dangerous place. Albanese, by contrast, is a progressive internationalist who this week mused that Australia would be a better place with more kindness.
Just as Albanese defeated Morrison by being the anti-Morrison, Dutton is now seeking to defeat Albanese (in one term, the Liberal leader declared bullishly this week) by being the anti-Albanese. And just as there’s an alignment between Dutton and the zeitgeist, there’s also an alignment between Dutton’s polarising politics and a social and mainstream media apparatus geared to chasing engagement rather than enlightenment. Pulses of pure politics rates in the engagement economy. Governing – a game of increments? Not so much.
The media ecosystem is now all about making people feel things; this goes to the cultural point Nichols was making in the Atlantic. It’s a zone of high charges of emotion. It’s not a zone of explanation, or nuance. Content needs to be viewed and read, and the content that gets viewed and read is predominantly material that makes people feel something as opposed to thinking deeply about it.
There is a grim determinism associated with this. Just one example from the week: I guarantee more was written, spoken and opined about whether or not ministers should or should not have branded Dutton a protector of child sex offenders (as happened during the parliamentary argy-bargy this week) than about the technicalities and implications associated with the high court’s landmark ruling on indefinite detention.
Dutton said the assertion against him was “the complete opposite of the truth”. “It is one of my life’s passions to make sure that women and kids are safe and I feel very genuinely and deeply about it,” he said, demanding an apology.
The point of me unpacking all this is to make one point clear. We journalists can be too cute by half when we analyse what is or isn’t working in politics. Because we write the first draft of history, it’s very easy to edge ourselves out of the field of vision, and holler from the cheap seats: “look at those idiots”.
Best be honest. If “boring” can’t hold its own against Trumpian chaos (to borrow the Vanity Fair frame) in the national attention span, then we – and the incentives that now determine the flow of information – are a big part of the problem. If trying to govern well can’t compete with spectacle, sensation, moral panic and manufactured division – if that’s now game over – then we really are up shit creek.
