Extract from ABC News
Analysis
It hasn't been an easy time to be an opposition leader these past couple of years.
At a time of national — nay, global — crisis, it's hard to criticise yet sound constructive. And in Australia, in our Federation, COVID has made the dominant political tension one between the federal leader and state leaders, not one fought across the political divide at the federal level alone.
So, just months from a federal election campaign, Labor's leader Anthony Albanese found himself being asked by the ABC's Andrew Probyn at the National Press Club this week to explain who he was.
That he was still being asked it — by a journalist who pointed out that many voters didn't know the answer — says a lot about the cut-through problems Albanese has confronted since becoming Opposition Leader in 2019.
His
answer was not his rote "log cabin" one. And it was passionate,
delivered with some humour, and canvassed his political origins, as well
as personal ones.
He told the story of his first campaign, driven by a threat to the security of the public housing where he lived from a change of local government:
"My first campaign, I was 12 years old. We organised a rent strike. We took petitions around to everyone. That was my experience of that. That drove me. That was my first political campaign. And by the way, we won."
If Anthony Albanese's problem as 2022 begins is that voters don't know who he is, Scott Morrison's problem is that they do know who he is.
An old marketing man's image problem
The events this week which have leapt out of the Prime Minister's calendar all come with the sound effects of someone smacking into unfortunate reminders of the recent past. None more so than the world's most awkward photo opportunity with the outgoing Australian of the Year Grace Tame.
Some people who spend their lives being rude to other people thought Tame was very rude in the way she dealt with the Prime Minister when he called out to her at an Australia Day function at The Lodge.
Many others celebrated her refusal to pretend everything was okay.
The bigger problem for the PM, though, was that the images brought up so many other memories: other unfortunate hand-shaking incidents during the bushfires; the excruciating moment when banking Royal Commissioner Justice Kenneth Hayne refused to be part of Josh Frydenberg's photo opportunity by shaking hands and smiling with him; the widely circulated photo of Scott Morrison looking at his phone in Parliament, having turned his back on Labor's Tanya Plibersek as she addressed him across the chamber.
And there's last year's appalling mess of allegations of how women are treated in politics, and the Prime Minister's cack-handed approach to it.
In his book The Game, Sean Kelly observes how Morrison, the old marketing man, has based his political success on a series of crisp images rather than any coherent political message.
The problem is, as the Grace Tame episode highlights, all those images — and also the lack of a coherent message or belief system — are now coming back to haunt him.
Another headline this week involved the revelation that Morrison's aged care minister, Richard Colbeck, had gone to the cricket for three days when he had said he was not available to talk to the Senate's COVID inquiry about a crisis in the sector which was seeing thousands of vulnerable old people catching COVID, and some of them dying.
The crisis also saw thousands of aged care workers too sick to work, calls for the defence forces to be brought in to help run homes, and further revelations that aged care homes were short of PPE gear and rapid antigen tests.
Taking it on the chin, getting on with the job
The story only reminded people of bits of the Morrison story that voters really don't like: a seeming lack of any sense of responsibility; the failure to secure supplies of equipment we all need to function and be safe.
And this in a sector which Morrison has repeatedly used to fend off wider criticisms of the government's failure to plan ahead. When repeatedly challenged about the failure to secure enough RAT tests for Australians, the PM has always indignantly defended himself by saying the federal government had secured supplies for the sectors for which it has responsibility — like aged care.
But not to worry, the PM seemed to consign the episode to history on Friday when he said Colbeck would "take that criticism on the chin and get on with the job". Whatever that means.
Then on Friday there was the announcement of $1 billion funding for the Great Barrier Reef. It quickly transpired the funding was over 10 years, so not quite so much as the headline would suggest.
Environment Minister Sussan Ley went on morning radio to spruik it. But when asked how much of the funding would be spent in the next four years, she piously refused to answer, saying this would become clear when the policy was announced later in the morning.
And the politics? The repeated emphasis was on "backing in reef communities", protecting 64,000 tourism jobs, helping with COVID recovery, at a time when several electorates close to the reef are under threat.
In an entire prime ministerial press release about trying to look after the Great Barrier Reef, there was not one reference to climate change, just a couple of coy ones to "adaptation".
The majority of the money — $579.9 million — is not "on water" money, but to "work constructively with land managers to remediate erosion, improve land condition and reduce nutrient and pesticide runoff". All worthy aims but it seems... just a little bit late.
A message for the times
Once again, there are probably too many memories tied up with this, including the one triggered by the splendid assertion by both Morrison and Ley that "this is already the best managed reef in the world", only reminding voters of the furious lobbying last year to stop the reef being placed on a list of world heritage sites "in danger", despite UNESCO's scientific assessment that it should be.
Recent public polling puts health (unsurprisingly in a pandemic) at the top of the list of voters' concerns.
The concern for the Prime Minister should be that health is traditionally Labor territory.
Anthony Albanese talked about health — and education — at the Press Club this week. They were largely generic, almost motherhood statements. We will no doubt hear more explicit policy proposals as the election campaign warms up.
But most significantly in this context, he talked about the importance of the role of government at a time when the Prime Minister has spent months talking about getting government out of people's faces.
The times, he said, demand "a government that steps up to its responsibilities and fulfils its most fundamental roles: to protect our people, to act as a force for good, and to change people's lives for the better".
"Just 'pushing through' this pandemic is not enough. We need to learn from it, we need to use what the last two years have taught us to build a better future."
After a summer when many Australians may have felt government has left them to their own devices, it is a message for the times.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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