It has been a tough week for Anthony Albanese. The prime minister earned headlines for his apparent tetchiness, defended claims his government is “mired in mediocrity”, and has been compared to his predecessor Scott Morrison. But is Albo really the new ScoMo? That’s the question we’re debating in today’s Friday Fight.
Arguing in the negative we have political Rachel Withers. And making the affirmative case is writer and comedian Patrick Marlborough.
Don’t forget to vote for your debate winner in the poll at the bottom of this article!
Anthony Albanese is the new Scott Morrison in that there is nothing new about him. He is a continuation of the void: the mode of governing and politicking that has shaped Australian prime ministers for most of my lifetime. ScoMo was the peak of this polished nothingness, not so much a hollow man than a straight-up absence — atomising narrative and meaning like an antimatter laser beam from an old comic book.
We should consider this mode of void governance as something akin to an artistic movement: the Dadaists, the Situationists, the Voidists, etc. If ScoMo was their perfect specimen, then Albo might be their ideal practitioner, a walking advertisement for a finely-honed process of spiritual and ideological deboning.
It is easy to say that Albo’s woeful messaging is a continuation of ScoMo’s “daggy suburban dad” schtick. Easy, but only half correct. What this conversation avoids is the simple commonality one finds in most middle-aged daggy dads: an absence of self. This obliteration of interiority has left us with leaders with the charisma and propulsion of a lawnmower catalogue. Exciting for some, I’m sure, but not the type of person you’d want to get stuck talking to at a BBQ.
What threads these sorts of men together is a pronounced lack of imagination — a dangerous trait in a prime minister. A lack of imagination begets a lack of empathy, and surely that is where ScoMo and Albo mirror each other almost perfectly. Policies such as the under-16s social media ban — and quotes like “I want to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts” — signal not a certain head-of-the-table fatherliness, but rather a poisonous inability to place oneself in another’s shoes.
Of course, this is a skill our politicians hone. A generation-plus of focus-grouped lackwits have left us with governments with the courage and creativity of an Excel spreadsheet. We’re left with policies so undercooked that they become disastrous, if not downright dangerous. From the social media ban to the $368 billion-dollar AUKUS submarine deal, the NDIS cuts to a backwards approach on housing, Albanese has proven himself to be another Morrison again and again.
Both men’s grating smugness — the result of egos exposed to decades of irradiated partyroom hijinks — masks a similar baseline cruelty. ScoMo’s village-oaf approach to the tragic bushfires received a lot more attention from our media (weirdly obsessed with “rudeness”) than Albo’s sneering glibness towards, say, the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Still, the blank-faced inhumanity is essentially the same. It’s the kind of leadership required to survive in contemporary Australian politics, one that promotes a self-conjured personality disorder that insists upon indifference towards suffering of all stripes.
In that sense, both men are natural endpoints of our proud nation’s long assembly line of dullards, duds and dimwits. But the real question, the one that would have Labor’s rusted-ons squirming in their sleep if they were capable of self-reflection, is whether 2024 Labor is the new Coalition. Perhaps you can measure out the difference between this government and the last with a Geiger counter designed to pick up cringe, but beyond that, it is hard to parse the difference between the two more often than it should be.
At the end of the day, I think Albo would be a fairly successful Coalition prime minister, which may be his main point of divergence from ScoMo.
Read the opposing argument by Rachel Withers.
