What story is this government trying to tell, exactly?
Rounding the bend to an election, its final parliamentary sitting fortnight for the year – and maybe this electoral term – is a blizzard of legislation, ta-daa announcements, and high-profile politically motivated cross-party deals dressed up as reform, some of which are falling over as quickly as they’ve been stood up.
The government party room approved 10 separate pieces of legislation on Tuesday and amendments to 11 more. So any absence of coherence is not for a lack of activity. And yet, that’s how it seems.
Where is the thread that weaves all this busy-ness into the steady reassurance, firm-hand-but-warm-heart, pointing-forward-together kind of governing that people are yearning for as the year ends? Dunno. Can’t see it.
As the politically active seasons retreat into summer, we in the media are being bombarded by embargoed slivers of imminent government reveals.
The few oblique paragraphs from a minister’s speech that will likely – in its entirety – be quite interesting and even newsworthy when delivered in full tomorrow but just isn’t in its deconstructed form, and the single tantalising headline-focused detail from an important proposed change to the law about which we aren’t allowed to know more until after we publish it. All of these morsels are landing in the inbox day after day, with the expectation that we will publish every one, just because they’re there and the government thinks we should.
This is about trying to get multiple days’ media coverage out of every action. No one minister’s office seems to know what anyone else is up to. The missives all come at once, often late in the day, all demanding attention, some actually quite important, crashing and tumbling over each other, embargoed til 10.30pm. It’s meant to show action. But it feels a bit like panic.
Telling your story to Australia takes more than prefab quotes and postbox communication.
It takes inspiration and confidence and, yes, even the v-word: vision. It takes going out there every day, armed with that story and connecting it in a million different ways to every little thing you do and say. It requires talking up the nation that we are and painting the sky with optimistic determination about the country we can be. It takes leaders who speak with their arms open wide and more full stops than commas.
Instead, we have hasty decisions and hardball negotiations all behind closed doors. We have a deal between Labor and the Coalition to introduce some welcome changes to electoral funding and disclosure law but really as a Trojan horse to entrench a financial advantage for incumbency that far and away benefits the major parties most.
The electoral reform package will facilitate ongoing funding streams from third parties to major parties – in Labor’s case, from the unions – while introducing spending caps that, sure, will help stop individual billionaires from buying elections but will also disadvantage newcomer independent candidates. That’s how Labor won Coalition support for it – because although it protects the funding stream from unions that the conservative parties hate, it will also help the Liberals hold off the teal onslaught. So they’ve said OK. Thus far.
Still, they also okayed the government’s plan to cap the number of fee-paying foreign students at Australian universities – and then suddenly reversed this week and decided to oppose it. The positions of both government and opposition were motivated mostly by politics, both focused on the volatile issue of immigration. And when politics and self-interest are the driving force, a deal done one day may not survive until the next.
There is actual reform going on to rein in spending and securing the future of important government programs and services, such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the aged-care system.
This should be part of that missing story about how Australia is building itself up – not just a waffly jumbling Future-Made-in-Australia-series of complicated, enormous investments and winner-picking announcements.
‘The opposition has a story but it’s not a happy one’
“We’ll be going to the election with – we’ve already chosen our slogan as you know, ‘Building Australia’s Future’,” Anthony Albanese told Sky News in an interview on the sidelines of Apec in Peru last weekend. What is Australia’s future exactly? He didn’t quite say.
Important as all this talk of building and the future might be, that alone isn’t what will get people talking over the dinner table. Part of a story, but not the whole thing.
The opposition has a story but it’s not a happy one and it is also absent the v-word. Whenever Peter Dutton speaks, his theme is the same: the prime minister is weak, the government is incompetent, I will stand up for you, I will get things done.
That’s not substance either. But does it reach the dinner table? Yep.
Everything Dutton says is part of his story and his confidence is growing.
He was even willing to give a rare press conference in Canberra on Tuesday, at which he labelled the government and its ministers with variations on the word “embarrassment” five times. He called them a “disaster” four times. The “mess” count was eight. It’s all a shameless string of focus-tested messages but he manages to put it together in a way that makes people listen.
At the moment, he’s like the promo cover for a coming book he wants people to pre-order, sight unseen. He’s watching the polls and the betting markets start to lean in his favour and he keeps on with the confidence trick because he reckons it’s working.
Confronted on Tuesday with the contradiction in his brazen student-caps reversal – given he has called for caps repeatedly – he just laughed it off.
“Look, I’m either too soft or too hard or too much in the middle – I don’t know! I mean, what’s Labor’s line here? All they’re doing at the moment is throwing out personal attacks,” he said. “I think what the last two years – 18 months – has demonstrated is that the more the Labor party attack me personally, the higher my numbers go. I’m happy for that to continue.”
If they want to knock him down a peg, the government’s going to need either a different story or a different way of telling it. Probably time to figure out what that is.
