At the start of every new government, prime ministers imagine themselves the tamers of chaos. They attempt to reset the operational tempo of politics. This process is invariably interesting because everybody has their own objectives and methodology.
Readers with long memories will recall Tony Abbott coming to the job with a mantra of getting politics off the front page. This was always pretty ironic, given he’d unleashed pure bedlam to delegitimise Julia Gillard, the stoic, who had implored the media to not write crap. Abbott rode the pandemonium to the Lodge, but once unleashed, it proved impossible to subdue. Politics remained on the front page and his prime ministership was over in two years.
Malcolm Turnbull swept in with a certain grandeur and an intention to restore adult, collegiate government, which allowed colleagues to get close enough to kill him. Scott Morrison thought he’d “take charge” after seizing command. This worked for a time but the voters got tired of hearing from a cosplay prime minister who stood for nothing, knew everything and refused to shut up.
The point of this recap is to explain why new prime ministers crave the reset; why they engage in the chaos taming. Governing has been borderline unmanageable in liberal democracies since digital technology upended the orderly habits of the analogue age. All prime ministers since Kevin Rudd have grappled with this phenomenon.
Everyone in recent memory has come to the job with a mantra about how they are going to make things less crazy. Like a procession of control freaks or self-help gurus, Australian prime ministers have telegraphed their shibboleths. Starve the roiling political news cycle. Command it. This inane cacophony must stop. In the process, they’ve articulated parameters to fail against.
Anthony Albanese is the sixth prime minister of Australia’s digital age. From him, we get tone not a mantra. He’s a shower not a teller.
This new government is going like the clappers. In only a few short months, they’ve assembled the nuts and bolts of round one on climate policy and have waded into round two; drafted the architecture for an anti-corruption commission; kicked off procedures to establish a voice to parliament; and circumnavigated the region 10 times to try win the influence race in the Indo-Pacific. There will be a budget in just over a week and another this financial year.
Institutionally, there’s an agenda and it’s being implemented like its five minutes to midnight. But Albanese floats on the surface, cruising like a battleship above a submerged frenzy of whole-of-government machinery. The prime minister is doing everything he can to look nonchalant. Calm. Perhaps even serene.
If you need the mind-focusing counterfactual to absorb this point, cast your mind back to Rudd, the first prime minister of Australia’s digital age. Ground zero dived head first into chaos, sprinting from process to programmatic specificity, galloping at a pace commensurate with his ambition to revolutionise Australia in a nanosecond. It was something, all that. But it wasn’t serene. Having visited 2007 to 2010, now bring your mind back to Albanese.
The prime minister appears before us regularly but he doesn’t zig and zag or impose himself forcefully on public consciousness. Like all prime ministers, Albanese lives by the Sun King mantra – l’etat c’est moi – but quietly. Let’s not fight. Let’s not fuss. Let’s keep it orderly. We can shout or sprint in private but let’s walk in public and do that as a group. The colleagues are as visible as the prime minister. This is a marked change from the presidential style that has dominated politics for the entirety of my reporting lifetime. Ministers carry their own briefs, both internally and externally, and that gives ballast to the whole exercise.
The components of Albanese’s reset strategy are easy to identify. Impose calm by projecting calm. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Can it last? I suspect not because it’s hard to defy gravity. Stakeholders are playing nice now because they want to be part of the new thing and people are beyond relieved to see the back of Morrison. Colleagues are largely controlling themselves because so far so good, and success in politics begets success. Nobody wants to be the person who pulled on the thread that unravelled the becalming strategy.
Perhaps Albanese is a magician. He’s certainly clever so I’m not ruling that out. But chaos is a tenacious and resilient adversary in politics. I can also see Peter Dutton conducting a deep-water surveillance mission underneath the hull of Albanese’s battleship, scanning for structural weaknesses.
Before anyone says “who cares?” – let’s be clear. It’s true the Coalition has fallen on hard times and over the past 48 hours things got really absurd, really quickly.
Earlier this week, I read in the Australian Financial Review the Liberal party had launched the campaign to regain the “teal” seats it lost in the May wipeout. The opening sortie of this was the deputy Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, visiting the electorate of North Sydney and telling the locals who repudiated the Coalition “we see you, we hear you”. So far so good.
Unfortunately for Ley, on the same day this fightback was unleashed, Dutton was raving about Labor’s plan to impose a “tax on cows” on 2GB. Just for the record, nobody in this country is contemplating a tax on cows but Labor is very likely to sign a global pledge to reduce emissions from one of the most potent greenhouse gases: methane.
The official transcript issued by Dutton’s office after the Liberal leader’s appearance on 2GB initially recorded the boss telling Ray Hadley the methane pledge was “attacks on cows”, which added comic piquancy to the proceedings. David Littleproud – a sensible person who periodically feels the need to zip himself into a Barnaby Joyce onesie – also declared the methane pledge (that voluntary, aspirational global goal signed by more than 120 countries) would end the Australian barbecue.
Given the Liberals have lost the electorates of Warringah, Mackellar, North Sydney, Wentworth, Goldstein, Kooyong, Curtin, Bennelong, Higgins and possibly Reid at least in part because of this kind of weaponised lying about climate action, it seemed counterproductive to unleash another instalment while poor old Ley was attempting a necessary gesture of inclusivity to the alienated heartland. But wiser heads than mine determine these forays, obviously.
The great cow tax offensive became even more ridiculous when the National Farmers Federation – which has been hostile historically to Australia signing the methane pledge – ignored the unhinged braying from Dutton and the Nationals and issued a statement saying it had secured specific undertakings from the government during the methane pledge consultations. Livestock emissions would not be taxed. Farmers would get help to change the diets of herds. The cow apocalypse found itself stranded in the remainder bin with the Whyalla wipeout, the $100 lamb roast and the war on the weekend.
So, yes, idiocy and partisan mendacity on a Wagnerian scale. But it would be naive to assume all this thrashing is purposeless. Australians certainly voted for climate action in May 2022. But Dutton continues to sense opportunity. Soaring energy prices – the most complicated element of the domestic inflation picture at the moment – can be sheeted home to the climate transition with some help from media friends. Dutton also thinks Labor’s ambitious Rewiring the Nation program – a plan to retool the power grid to integrate renewables – is a cock-up waiting to happen because of persistent capacity constraints, labour shortages and supply chain problems that can be spun as Labor’s managerial incompetence.
Dutton appears determined to wrest climate action out of the inevitability column and drag it back to where the Coalition has imprisoned this issue for a decade. Climate action is a threat. Labor will cock up the transition because Labor is incompetent.
You’d really hope the emphatic nature of the May election result would end the decade of vandalism. You’d think the Liberals would hear the message. But vandalism, like chaos, is persistent. As I said a minute ago, Dutton is down in the water, probing the underside of the Albanese battleship.
Dutton would be well placed to remember, though, that when it comes to underwater surveillance, there are two possible end points. Your torpedo splits the hull. Or, to borrow from TS Eliot, human voices wake you and you drown.
