The prime minister, Scott Morrison, is pretending to shop.
“Where’s my basket?” he asks, sparking a flurry among advisers to source a shopping basket. A trolley? (Nope, Morrison signals with his eyes.) A branded hessian bag?
“Perfect. Let’s go!”
“So where’s your turmeric coming from?
“Ah Bundaberg. Great.
“I prefer using fresh turmeric when I cook.”
“I like to cook. That and swimming. It keeps me sane.”
Morrison tells Dom at Doblo’s Farmers Market he plans to cook a “veggie curry for the girls” back in Sydney on Saturday night. He adds fresh galangal to the bag.
“Can’t have too many of these,” he says of Tasmanian shallots, grabbing a few handfuls.
“Where’s the garlic from?” Peru. That gets left on the pile.
Onions? Plenty of those at home.
“Ah, taro”! He says, as if greeting an old friend. Okra jumps in. Baby eggplants – like the ones “Jen and the girls” grew in Canberra. A pomegranate. A cauliflower.
Watching the prime minister winding through the cool rooms, making small talk with owner Dom Doblo, filling his bag with fruit and veg, it’s possible just for a moment to suspend disbelief, imagine for a second that what we are witnessing is real life.
But of course, the swarm of cameras, boom mics and reporters that shadow the prime minister’s every move exposes the charade.
Morrison is aware of every angle, every interpretation of his campaign event. He curates images and conversations for the consumption of the media pack precisely. He is the star actor, while imagining being the spectator. He is the director of his own show.
Despite the best efforts of the cammos, staffers assiduously guide Morrison away from a large statue of a gorilla sitting in a nest of bananas, protecting him from any monkey puns on the evening news.
“So this is what you invested with the instant asset write off?” he asks Dom, already knowing the answer, which was included earlier in the campaign brief to reporters.
“Well it’s a big fridge. It’s a very big fridge,” Morrison says.
“You’d have people just coming here to walk through it in summer – it’s either here or go to the pool!”
It’s strange, after two years of pandemic politics, to be reminded of Morrison back in his natural habitat, pressing the flesh with voters, making small talk. Morrison is softer in this embodiment, he smiles and jokes easily. He knows this is his strength as a politician.
There are none of the awkward pauses that used to plague Malcolm Turnbull when he attempted to mingle with middle Australia. None of the peculiar Abbott-isms that came before that. No risk of onion-eating here.
This is the Morrison machine at its best. Super normal.
It’s oddly captivating, the layers of artifice. Will he really cook that okra? I wonder. Pound fresh turmeric for a veggie curry on Saturday night?
The bill comes to $52.14. He takes out his credit card and pays.
Jumps in a white SUV, and speeds off.
An answer to everything
This make-believe takes place in the seat of Capricornia, held by the Coalition on a 12.4% margin by Michelle Landry, the incumbent since 2013.
The Coalition is feeling comfortable about Queensland. After substantial swings against Labor in 2019, the buffers in the seats north of Brisbane are difficult for Anthony Albanese to overcome at this election.
Morrison began the day in Townsville, in the seat of Herbert, held by the nuggety Phil Thompson on an 8.4% margin. When Kevin ‘07 swept John Howard out of office, the seat of Herbert swung 6% towards Labor. Barring any last minute Albomentum, Herbert is not in play.
The tour of Doblo’s market is the third campaign stop of the day.
“Relentless”, is how one tv journalist who has been captive on the Coalition campaign bus for the past two and a half weeks describes it. “But great pictures”.
Most days are the same. A picture opportunity in the morning. A press conference late morning. A change of location and a third stop – usually a manufacturing plant where the hard hats and high vis come out.
Guardian Australia jumps on the campaign trail in Townsville, where Morrison has landed after spending Anzac day in Darwin. It is week three of the six-week campaign. The Labor leader Anthony Albanese is in isolation in Sydney with Covid.
A ding on the “Scomobile” Whatsapp group advises that the first event on the campaign trail is a visit to the Jean-Pierre wholesale artisan bakery.
Morrison rolls croissants, gently sandwiches bright ruby macaron shells together, making small talk with pastry chefs, clapping his hands like a football coach. “That’s how you do it!”
At a press conference at the TEi steel fabrication plant, the prime minister stands up to talk about a $60m grant program for business energy efficiency and to announce a hydrogen hub for Townsville. But the prime minister is on the defensive.
His first task is to try and tidy up an unwelcome split over the Coalition’s net zero goal after the LNP’s candidate for Flynn, Colin Boyce, suggested there was wriggle room in the commitment.
“What he [Boyce] was referring to was our pathway to it and as technologies change and improve, then, of course, we’re going to get there and we’re going to get there by the best method possible.”
“It is the government’s absolute policy.”
Morrison is also on the back foot over national security, with the government under pressure over whether it has dropped the ball to allow a security pact between China and Solomon Islands to be signed.
But Morrison has an answer to everything.
On a question on rebuilding trust with Emmanuel Macron, he pivots to the Chinese in the Pacific.
Asked question on his remarks that public Icac hearings are a “kangaroo court”, he steers to his rote reply on the integrity commission. The invisible question time folder is always at his fingertips.
Morrison has been in cabinet for almost a decade. In 2009, he became opposition spokesperson on immigration – the most challenging portfolio at the time as the country dealt with boat arrivals, and arguably the issue that won them government in 2013.
Since that time, he has faced the daily assault of media questioning. He makes no secret of his disdain for most of the press gallery in Canberra, apart from a few friendlies, and feels no need to answer questions he doesn’t like.
In the frenzy of campaign press conferences it is even more difficult to pin Morrison down. Only once during this campaign – when the press focus was on the government’s broken promise to establish an integrity commission – has Morrison faced sustained pressure.
In The Game, Sean Kelly’s portrait of Scott Morrison, he notes that “one of the truly remarkable facts about Scott Morrison is how few gaffes there have been in his career.”
“He makes mistakes, says things that are obviously false, even lies, but rarely does he say something that makes you think that you are suddenly, briefly, getting a glimpse of something you were not meant to see.”
Morrison’s campaign has so far been largely mistake-free, even if full of political mistruths and lies.
Take the “sneaky carbon tax” which gets a run when Morrison stands up in Rockhampton after having cups of tea with a group of seniors, referring to the safeguard mechanism that the Coalition itself introduced in 2013.
Morrison has no compunction.
“You have got to scrap to win,” he privately tells colleagues.
A simple plan
Despite the national polls pointing to a comfortable Labor win at next month’s election, Morrison displays not a skerrick of self-doubt about the task ahead.
He has been in this position before, having told colleagues that he can once again take them on an unlikely path to victory. Bill Shorten at the last election said the Coalition had a “goat track” to win, compared to its freeway. It is even truer this time round, with the government starting behind on 75 seats. It needs 76 for a majority.
“I know what the path is and I’ll be following it,” Morrison told MPs in February. “And once again I’m asking you to follow me in going down that path and staying focused on that and only that.”
“Do that and we win - it’s that simple.”
While the Coalition dares to dream of a second miracle victory under Morrison, the task at this election is far more difficult than in 2019, when the prime minister was being introduced to voters for the first time.
This time, Morrison is a known quantity. He has baggage to carry up the track.
Across the country, Labor is hammering his record and character, a task made easy by the free character assessments of Morrison offered up by everyone from the then NSW premier to the French president.
Labor’s negative campaign has been brought forward, convinced that converting parked votes its way is best achieved by galvanising public anger towards Morrison.
But despite the effectiveness of Labor’s message, Coalition strategists insist there is still a path to victory.
The logic goes like this:
People have already factored in their anger against Morrison, so why haven’t they yet converted their vote to Labor?
If they haven’t made up their mind yet, then the parked protest vote is soft.
It is in this gap that the Coalition senses opportunity, hammering home the choice between the known and the unknown.
“This election is a choice,” Morrison says on repeat.
“Between a government that you do know and a Labor opposition that you don’t.”
Party strategists also question whether the negative campaign against Morrison has run out of juice. How much lower can Labor’s attack drag the Coalition vote, with it already languishing in the mid 30s?
Can community anger be whipped back to where it was at its hottest? Are the baseball bats out for Morrison?
In parts of the country, yes. But in the parts that matter? That remains to be seen.
“We can win this,” one senior figure says. “It’s not easy, but it’s possible”.
Paint Albanese as a risk
The campaign so far has been framed around the Coalition’s traditional core strengths of the economy and national security, but on both of these issues, Morrison has been on the backfoot.
In Cairns, at a local shipyard on the banks of Chinaman Creek, Morrison is campaigning with the MP for Leichhardt, former crocodile farmer, Warren Entsch.
Morrison is fielding questions on spiking inflation, which has just come in at a 20-year high, undermining the Coalition’s message on strong economic management.
But the prime minister seems to relish the opportunity.
“Well, look, I’ve been around politics a little while and I’ve also been around the economy a long while,” Morrison starts, before turning to his lines on the risk of a change to Labor.
Morrison has two tasks in this campaign. Remind people of his experience. Paint Albanese as a risk. He will do this relentlessly, every day until polling day.
‘I think we are in with a chance’
This is Entsch’s ninth election. He has contested and won every election in the seat since 1996 - apart from in 2007, when Labor won the seat in his absence.
“This is the hardest one to read of all of them,” he tells Guardian Australia.
“And that is because of social media, and the hangover from Trump with all the fake news nonsense.”
He says he doesn’t sense that baseball bats are out for the government, and insists the reception for Morrison has been positive. But Entsch concedes it will be “tough”.
“There is a lot of single issue stuff and a lot of angry people,” Entsch says.
There are 11 parties on the Leichhardt ballot paper, and Entsch says they will all drag down his primary vote and likely preference against him. Across the nation, a similar story is heard, with the unprecedented support for independents and other parties the biggest unknown at the coming poll.
Compared to previous elections, Entsch says this is the first that he has detected the strong influence of social media on voters.
He has had campaign posters defaced with “corruption” graffiti for the first time, had locals yell at him in shopping centres about the “new world order”, and has had countless conversations about fake news.
“They think mainstream politicians are corrupt, they think mainstream media is corrupt and they get all their information from the deep, dark abyss of social media.
“When I say to them you need to balance out your opinions, look at some reputable news, they come back to me and say ‘social media is my truth’.”
Entsch says the election feels a bit like the GST election of 1998, or the Gillard-Abbott contest of 2010 when Australia ended up with a Labor minority government, but hopes as the election draws closer the economic choice will become starker.
“You can never know 100%, but I think we are in with a chance.”
For Morrison, he is confident that all the ingredients are there for a victory. But will it come together? Or will it remain a figment of imagination, a fantasy left behind on the campaign trail.
