Was I the only person in the country to bang my head on the desk when Scott Morrison decided to goad Anthony Albanese about who had worked harder during their respective periods of Covid isolation?
I doubt it. Given there are so many important things to talk about, washing up in a campaign telenovela, a man-off felt particularly grating – about as soothing as nails dragging down a chalkboard.
But once I’d stopped ranting to no one in particular about opportunity costs and diversions and the persistent absence of seriousness, once equanimity was restored, Morrison’s petty mind game assumed more interest, because it tells us something about where we are in this contest.
I mean, we know that, in practical terms, of course. The calendar tells us we’ve reached the midpoint of the campaign. But in reality, the contest begins this weekend.
Australians have returned from holidays. Pre-poll voting opens in a week. Albanese is now out of isolation and has positioned in Perth for his official campaign launch on Sunday. Morrison’s prime ministership is now on the clock.
Obviously Morrison put his prime ministership on the clock three weeks ago, when he drove out to see the governor general. But in the elasticities of campaign time, six weeks to polling day feels like an eternity, while three weeks feels like a nanosecond.
My point is time always accelerates at the back end of a campaign. 21 May has assumed gravitational force. The contest has felt bogged and the tropes tired, but it is about to reset and sprint. Morrison is on the hunt for momentum. The apex predator is prowling on the range, looking for something he can use.
Goading Albanese about his work ethic could just be a preschool sulk. The Labor leader’s proficiency with tactical retreats and dancing between the raindrops genuinely irritates Morrison. They are oil and water, these combatants, because Morrison lives to dominate and Albanese will prevail by default if that’s what the moment demands.
But I don’t think it is a sulk. I think it’s a calculation.
Morrison is trying to needle Albanese into what air force types call a performance take off – where the jet screams down the runway and hurtles into the sky like a rocket. Morrison’s hint of Albanese malingering, or hiding, is a provocation intended to elicit a response, and the prime minister has accompanied the editorialising with a concrete demand that Albanese agree to two leaders’ debates on commercial television next week.
The goading surfaces deep need. Morrison needs Albanese back centre stage to make what remains of the contest a referendum on the Labor leader’s competence. You can’t pin a competitor who isn’t in the ring.
Having had Covid himself, Morrison knows the lingering after-effects of the virus are fatigue and brain fog. Debates, after a day of campaigning, are gruelling encounters, physically and mentally, even for seasoned professionals. So Morrison’s calculation is simple: Albanese is significantly more likely to make a mistake when he’s not 100%.
Again, time is of the essence. Morrison knows he’s got to find a pivot point in the campaign, and finding it is all on him. The prime minister has three weeks to convince voters that Albanese represents unacceptable risk.
At the moment swinging voters are hesitant about the Labor leader. A chunk aren’t yet convinced he’s the antidote for their dissatisfaction. Morrison has to shift that voter hesitation to outright risk aversion. But the problem is the prime minister’s own credibility has taken a hammering. Morrison can contend Albanese constitutes risk (and does in disciplined fashion most days on the hustings) but his disapproval is now so high, voters will discount what they hear.
So Morrison needs Albanese to make that case for him. He needs Albanese to demonstrate that he is out of his depth.
Now Albanese helped with that mission during the first week of the campaign with his stumble on the cash rate and unemployment rate. That vision is in the bank. The Liberals can deploy it in the barrage of negative advertising that generally happens in the closing weeks of a campaign, and the message pretty much writes itself. If the Reserve Bank hikes interest rates, or even if it doesn’t, I’d expect to see Liberal advertisements telling voters if Albanese doesn’t know what the cash rate is, how can you trust him to keep rates low?
So Morrison has that. It feels necessary but not sufficient. So he is hungry for more fallibility to weaponise. So we have the stupid mind game about debates.
Morrison has agreed to debates on Nine and Seven next week and demanded Albanese turn up. Thus far he’s blanked a request from the ABC and a seperate demand from Labor to front the National Press Club in the final week of the campaign.
The choice of debate venues is interesting. It tells us with some precision who the prime minister wants to speak with – and I don’t mean the political editors of the networks, Mark Riley and Chris Uhlmann. I’m talking about viewers.
Fascinating research from a couple of years ago examining Australian media audience polarisation found viewers of commercial TV networks and the subscription channel Sky News are more right-leaning than the ABC television audience, which attracts viewers evenly from across the political spectrum.
Morrison agreed to the first debate, hosted by Sky News, and now wants more time on Seven and Nine. While it’s possible Morrison ends up in a debate hosted by the ABC, or one moderated by Laura Tingle at the National Press Club, it’s more than reasonable to speculate he’d rather avoid both.
Wanting the leaders’ debate on Nine and Seven tells us Morrison is still trying to shore up elements of his base flirting with a protest vote.
It also tells us he’s on the hunt for voters in Labor’s column who can be recruited on cultural affinity grounds.
Some in the government say Morrison is holding up well enough in regional Queensland and in the outer suburbs of big cities. You hear there’s not a lot of warmth for Albanese on this terrain.
But there’s also a growing sense that Liberal incumbents are in serious trouble in metropolitan contests with teal independents – that a number of these seats could fall. You hear the same story from different people on high rotation: Liberal moderates are getting a positive reception themselves from constituents, but Morrison is absolutely, irredeemably, toxic.
It’s possible this pessimism is being promulgated deliberately as part of a mind-focusing exercise – if voters in progressive Liberal heartland are led to believe courtesy of precision backgrounding of journalists that their protest vote will actually work, and possibly even install a Labor government, then they might think twice about voting for Allegra Spender or Zoe Daniel or Kylea Tink.
But if the doom and gloom isn’t tactical, if it reflects reality, then Morrison’s only hope of remaining in power is trying to boost the Coalition’s primary vote in areas of the country where that’s possible, and grabbing seats in the Labor column to offset losses in the teal contests.
If he can’t do that, it’s over. Tick, tock.
