Far from a great movie, the World War II bomber flick Memphis Belle is near forgotten, but it has a great final scene: the Belle returns from its final mission, barely hanging together as a single entity, shell holes in every surface, metal skin sloughing off, and more or less smashes on to the runway.
It comes to mind when watching this Labor campaign. Looks like it’s going to complete its mission and bring something back home — but what? There’s a strong sense this campaign began by being put together on the fly, piloted itself somehow through the flak, and has improbably survived.
That would appear to have been the plan from the start. The whole “vision thing” that a lot of us Whitlam-tragics/Lenin-tragics urge on the party was explicitly rejected. The community was so fragmented and atomised that any elaborated notion of a collective vision would just sound like you were going to spend their money on someone else.
Instead look as piecemeal as possible and offer concrete, micro-targeted solutions — such as two ear clinics for Tasmania, with which Labor began the entire campaign in Bass. Make remarks about the government deliberately disjointed; look responsive and say “I reckon…”; gradually wear away at a much-disliked government.
That has appeared to work for Labor, if both the polls and a perception of the general mood can be believed, but it comes at a tremendous cost. First, you have to throw everything overboard to keep aloft, and so Labor is potentially going into government with no capacity to raise taxes — even on corporations — without some very shifty manoeuvres, limited capacity for decarbonisation, and no position from which to launch a more joined-up “green new deal” and substantial social-democratic renewal.
That is at the root of the premature disappointment many of us are feeling. Labor will — may — get into power just as a decade of global cheap money is ending, with debt, wage pressure and so on to deal with, and instead of responding to that by unleashing a cooperative state-private productivity and infrastructure revolution, it will retreat into austerity budgeting and “wage discipline” enforcement. It will be doing terrible stuff, breaking its promises, causing a sharp “necessary recession”, and quickly become loathed. The new opposition leader will simply say “You can’t trust Labor with the economy” and sail into power after a single term in opposition.
But it has also been unhelpful in the immediate tactical present, insofar as it has given Labor no base to attack from when attacked. In conventional terms, Anthony Albanese has been a mediocre candidate. The “unemployment”/NDIS memory lapses are real, even if the media focus on them was absurd. His responses to questions are often scrambled and mealy mouthed. He lacked assertiveness in response to Scott Morrison. It felt like too many mediocre centre-left campaigns — half-arsed and unable to bring the fight, accepting of an assigned beta status.
That may still prove to have been a great defect, and a missed opportunity. But for the moment, it has to be said, it doesn’t seem to have made a blind bit of difference. Indeed, people seem to like Albo’s aw-shucks style, while Morrison’s aggressiveness may be starting to irritate people — the forceful man starting to sound like the office arsehole.
Paradoxically, to my taste, Morrison is how I want a centre-left leader to speak and sound: making a simple, joined-up case for a program, with a philosophy behind it, and trying to lay down the law to an opponent.
By that preference, the argument for raising the minimum wage in line with inflation should have been announced earlier, as a policy in itself, and hammered relentlessly, so that the actual comments would have slotted in. The phrase that keeps coming up — “things could be better” — could have served as a master theme, far more prominent than it has been.
But once again, the public doesn’t seem to mind, and prefers the stumbling, mixed messages to matching force with force. Last night’s live debate audience seemed to think so, with a clear victory in Seven’s absurd “pub test” audiences preferring Albanese.
Behind it, however, lies a haunting fear — that having thrown everything out, minimised all sense of purpose, Labor falls short, Morrison returns, and not only have we lost but we have failed to establish an alternative in the public mind. It would thus contribute to the general rightward/atomised drift of the country, the further exclusion of real alternatives.
That would be a loss with no upside — because we will have further disappeared into the world of diminished possibility as far as alternatives go.
That would leave us with nothing to show in political terms. Some possibilities will have disappeared from our world because they were not even presented as part of a losing campaign.
For Labor’s “hardheads” that’s of no concern — the conditions of victory or loss worry them not at all, so long as victory it is. For the rest of us that would be to see victory snatched from the jaws of victory as, wings hanging, patches on patches, the metaphor of politics comes in to land.
