Folks: we need to talk about gaffes. It’s now a matter of record that Anthony Albanese stumbled badly on day one on the hustings after a brain fade about the latest unemployment figure and the official cash rate.
I understand a lot of readers and viewers couldn’t care less about whether or not the Labor leader can recite statistics like a pet shop parrot. This point is fair enough. Sometimes I wonder why we journalists care about it, given a pop quiz is not a test of anything substantive, because anyone (as Adam Bandt put it memorably this week) can actually Google it.
But in this particular instance, it was a bad stumble, not because Albanese couldn’t remember the precise numbers in question, but because he looked, as his mind raced, like he had absolutely no idea what they were (this is a subtle but important distinction).
This fed Scott Morrison’s campaign pitch, which is Albanese knows nothing about the economy, and if you put him in the prime ministership, he’ll be immediately out of his depth. This was a partisan contention hovering on the edge of ears pinned back, pure desperation, until Albanese provided a clickable and shareable cue that could be deployed to underscore the central talking point.
In any case, the point of this isn’t to rehash old ground but to work through what happened next.
By Thursday, the Labor leader (now anointed gaffe-prone, which is better than embattled but probably on the way there) was asked a question about recent developments in the United Kingdom. Boris Johnson appears to be adopting the Australian model of deterrence towards asylum seekers.
Here is Thursday’s exchange between a reporter and Albanese.
Q: “The UK government has announced a five-year refugee resettlement deal with Rwanda and endorsed boat turnbacks. If people smugglers seek to take advantage of an incoming Labor government and send more boats, will you be tough on boat turnbacks and will you consider an offshore resettlement deal?”
Albanese: “We will turn boats back. Turning boats back means that you don’t need offshore detention.”
This is exactly what you’d expect the Labor leader to say.
The point Albanese made was if you keep the interdiction policy, you don’t have a flood of unauthorised maritime arrivals then necessitating yet another Australian government cooking up yet more obscenely cruel and morally repugnant “lock ‘em up and ship ‘em out” responses to prevent Ray Hadley bellowing on 2GB.
If you take the Australian asylum seeker policy cruelty standard as a given (and both of the major parties do in most points of substance) then Albanese’s logic here is impeccable.
If there aren’t masses of new arrivals then Australia doesn’t have to convince other countries to process people that Australia should be processing. Ipso facto.
Perhaps this point was confusing to some observers because it was logic, as opposed to a premasticated talking point.
In any case, the words had barely left Albanese’s mouth when the outing was written up as another gaffe.
The Australian declared in an accompanying commentary the Labor leader’s offshore processing gaffe was “arguably … worse than his first” – (the arguably qualifier being deployed here advisedly).
Sorry, what? In what universe was this: a) a gaffe; or b) worse than the last one?
In the way of things, the bollocks then chased itself. Because Albanese’s non-gaffe was catalogued instantly as a gaffe the Labor leader then had to stop with reporters a second time on Thursday to clarify an observation that didn’t actually require any clarification.
Here is that subsequent exchange.
Q: “So, what do you mean when you say turning back boats means you don’t need offshore detention?”
Albanese: “Well, that’s the preference. At the moment, there aren’t people who have gone into offshore detention in recent times because the boats have been turned back. It’s been effective”.
Q: “But you would keep offshore detention in?”
Albanese: “Yes.”
Glad we cleared that one up.
Funnily enough, there was an actual, measurable gaffe on the same day that managed to fly almost entirely below the radar.
The Labor leader had described one of his health policy announcements this week as having been “fully costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office”.
This was absolute bollocks as it turned out, and the shadow finance minister, Katy Gallagher, later scrambled after the overstatement. “The costing of Labor’s Urgent Care Centre policy is based on work done by the PBO, but for the avoidance of any confusion, has not been formally costed by the PBO,” she said on Twitter.
But perhaps this gaffe was a bit boring.
Or perhaps it didn’t feed anyone’s campaign narrative?
It’s pretty clear that the core objective for Morrison and his amplifiers between now and 21 May is telling voters Albanese is Bernie Sanders in a better suit who knows bugger all about the economy – or alternatively, he’s a closet Noah building an ark to load unworthy queue jumpers on to, because, when it comes to boats, Albanese is no Peter Dutton. No washboard abs. No granite jaw.
Sorry I’ll stop now, and loop back to that alleged PBO costing that never happened. Perhaps that particular inconsistency can fall by the wayside because it doesn’t get the smash-up job done?
In any case, the first week of the campaign demonstrates this contest is particularly gaffe-hungry. Readers and viewers are entitled to wonder why.
My answer is twofold. There’s the phenomenon of amplified partisanship – the trips and slips that serve the objectives of the message war – as we’ve just stepped through.
Then there’s a fundamental content deficiency. In this election, the Morrison government has zero long-term plan to discuss and Albanese is determined not to put policy out there that can be weaponised against him.
That creates a vacuum.
And if there’s a vacuum, you can guarantee that bollocks will quickly fill it, heaping high, because when it comes to Australian politics, the hot takes complex is a hungry beast that cries until it is fed.
