Anthony Albanese has bemoaned the fact the 2022 campaign is more focused on “soundbites rather than philosophies and values” – a trend he says is alienating voters and boosting support for political disrupters.
The Labor leader appeared solo on the ABC’s Q+A program on Thursday night to field questions from the audience, while Scott Morrison fronted another program on Sky News at the same time.
On the hustings earlier on Thursday, the Labor leader was initially unable to list the six points of his party’s plan to improve the national disability insurance scheme, and was later handed briefing notes by an adviser.
The Q+A host, David Speers, raised that press conference with the Labor leader. Albanese said elections should not be “some bureaucratic gotcha game”.
“The point here is [about] putting people back in charge of the NDIS and at the centre of it – and one of the things I reckon that really alienates people from the political system completely is this idea that politics is about a sort of series of gotchas and game playing,”he said.
What was important was not reciting a list but understanding the impact of the scheme on people’s lives, he said.
He said he understood the value of government assistance, having lacked a support program like the NDIS when helping to care for his mother, a chronic rheumatoid arthritis sufferer, during his childhood, when she “couldn’t use a knife and fork, she had crippled hands, feet”.
The Labor leader returned to that theme in a question from a voter who identified herself as a “new Australian” who was about to vote in a federal election for the first time.
The questioner noted the significant number of independent candidates running this year and asked whether or not this trend underscored voter dissatisfaction with the major parties.
Albanese said he had been born “as a believer with three great faiths – the Catholic church, the South Sydney rugby league football club and the Australian Labor party”. But Australian society had become less tribal and more “disparate”.
He noted that political discourse had changed. “Even the way that this election is being conducted, you know, you get down to soundbites rather than philosophies and values of driving issues forward, you know?
“And that, I think, is helping to alienate people, helping to divide people into camps. I think social media can be problematic.”
Albanese acknowledged that the major parties had also alienated some of their supporters by indulging in leadership instability for the better part of a decade. “I think the chopping and changing of leaders that we had – both sides were guilty of that – left open alienation on those issues.”
The Labor leader said in some areas, parliament didn’t function optimally. He said he believed a majority of parliamentarians in the House of Representatives and the Senate “since at least 2007” favoured serious action on the climate crisis.
The Gillard government legislated a carbon price but then that progress “got unwound”.
In an interview on Sky News, Morrison seized on the Labor leader’s earlier inability to immediately detail his party’s NDIS plan.
“I would’ve thought this deep into the campaign, they would have had some clear plans and the few plans that they have he’d know what they are,” the prime minister said.
“It is a choice and people are looking and they’re going, ‘I can’t see it in this guy, I can’t see it in that other guy from Labor, I can’t see it in Anthony Albanese.’”
Morrison said Albanese was lacking when it came to the detail of key policy areas. He has alleged that Labor policies on aged care and housing had “fallen apart” within days of announcement.
“I know that not everybody agrees with everything I’ve done … But they do know I think things through, they do know I work diligently on the policy detail,” the prime minister said.
“They do know that I seek to fully understand the problems I’m seeking to solve.”
Morrison – who also faced combative questioning on the hustings on Thursday – has thus far declined to be interviewed by the ABC on any major television current affairs program during the campaign, and did not respond to an invitation to conduct a leaders’ debate on the national broadcaster.
