The six-week campaign was always intended to help Scott Morrison grind down Anthony Albanese’s lead, but Labor might be hoping that instead it gives it the space to reset an already stumbling campaign and get Albanese fired up and on-point. The looming Easter break would help with that.
Regardless of “gotcha” questions, campaign gaffes and biased journalists, the Labor campaign’s primary problems so far are more fundamental. There is simply no coherent story around what it is offering, nothing that links its broader goals with its agenda for the next three years and longer — and its plans to implement that agenda. As one Labor figure said, we’re seeing jigsaw pieces without the puzzle.
This applies both at the micro and macro level. Take yesterday’s setpiece Medicare event, which also provided the platform for the launch of a relatively modest urgent care clinic trial. Labor can always get good mileage from warning of the need to protect Medicare from the pernicious clutches of the Coalition — Bill Shorten came close to winning in 2016 based on that — and Albanese could relax among the friendly environment of health staff.
But there are big-picture issues in health — workforce challenges, most particularly. We seem to forget that health and caring services is already easily the biggest employing industry sector in the country. Already more than one in seven workers — 2 million of us — work in healthcare, aged care or childcare. The health workforce by itself is the second biggest-employing single industry after retail. But hospitals and healthcare services continue to struggle to manage demand: regional health care in NSW is in crisis; the South Australian government lost the recent election there primarily because of hospital problems; much of Mark McGowan’s hermit kingdom strategy until February was dictated by the fact that the Western Australian health system has profound problems.
These are primarily state government issues, yes, but one’s health doesn’t always observe the rigid demarcations of primary and acute care. The lack of a coherent agenda more broadly for health makes additional spending on mental health or urgent care clinics look like, at best, bolt-ons to a flawed structure.
The problem is more acute at the macro level. Not since the 1990s recession has Australia needed some clear, coherent thinking — about the aftermath of the pandemic and the changes it has wrought; about the urgent need for far more ambitious climate action; about our relationship with China and our failing efforts to somehow bar China from our region; about the impacts of what at the moment seems like an extended war in Ukraine; about the tragedy of aged care. Each of these on their own would be enough for an election campaign, but we face them all at once, along with trivial problems like a long-term budget deficit created by our permanently larger government.
Albanese and Labor should be offering a narrative around these issues, one founded in Labor values, that links values with vision with plans, something that the campaign can fall back on no matter what idiot questions journalists ask. Labor has to give voters a reason to come to them, by showing it has a serious vision, by offering a compelling story.
It doesn’t matter that Morrison is offering nothing of the sort. Morrison doesn’t do vision, by his own admission. But voters know what they get with Morrison. They’ve had three years of it. He’s just promising more of the same. It might be corruption, incompetence, shallowness and inaction, but for some that’s good enough. Labor has to offer more than announcements. If that’s what voters want, they’ll stick with Morrison. That’s all he does.
