As the US election transfixes the world and viral videos about eating cats and dogs flood the internet, there was just one question asked of Kamala Harris that she deftly avoided directly addressing on debate night that will be the number one question asked of Anthony Albanese in our own upcoming election. I’d go as far as to predict it will be the first question of our own leaders’ debate.
It is the penultimate question to all incumbents in a cost-of-living crisis and it carries immense danger. Unlike Donald Trump, Peter Dutton has the capacity to repeat and stay on message — he is the ultimate custodian of the well-known political vomit principle: repeat, repeat, repeat until whatever you are saying is embedded in voters’ memories.
The question to Harris ended like this: “Your opponent on the stage here tonight often asks his supporters, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago? When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?'”
That’s the key question Dutton wants to amplify, and if you were listening very carefully this week you could hear in the bearpit of parliamentary Question Time the formation of that answer.
In Question Time Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor asked: “Will the treasurer take responsibility for Labor’s bad decisions over the last two years, which have taken our country in the wrong direction and hurt Australian families?”
In response, the treasurer started sentence after sentence with the words “I take responsibility”, listing a raft of economic policies including two surpluses and cost-of-living help rolling out to people right now.
“I take responsibility for the fact that, despite the opposition of those opposite, every Australian taxpayer is getting a tax cut. I take responsibility for the fact that every household is getting energy bill relief. I take responsibility for the fact that early childhood education is cheaper, medicines are cheaper and real wages are growing again. I take responsibility for our part in the fight against inflation.”
Buried in a recent Redbridge poll which revealed very few Australians could name anything the government had done that had improved their lives was one sprinkle of hope for the government. When they could recall something, those tax cuts were spectacularly popular. Imagine if Anthony Albanese had called Dutton’s bluff and called an election on those tax cuts?
This week political research group Redbridge conducted focus groups in Sydney’s west and Melbourne’s west. Director Kos Samaras said: “For the first time in our all our collective years of research, both are expressing their politics in a very similar way and none of it is good news for the incumbent government.”
One participant in the focus group said: “I just haven’t heard anything about what they would actually do to deal with the cost of living.” Another complained: “The Coalition made things worse, but Labor is not making it better.” They are just two comments collected in the focus groups that give a sense of the frustration voters are sharing.
It’s the workers, stupid
Peter Dutton’s articulated strategy is capturing the votes of outer-suburban workers stung by the cost-of-living crisis. The Albanese government knows it and last week there was a sharpening of their lines on workers too.
Tony Burke, who is no longer in the workplace relations portfolio but represents the minister in the house, offered a full-throttled defence of multi-employer bargaining and said workers would lose their pay rises under the Coalition. His message couldn’t have been crisper: Labor wants an industrial relations fight in the suburbs because that’s a fight they’ve won over the last few decades. Burke used the example of Danielle, who works at the Mount Pleasant mine, arguing that she would get a $33,000 pay cut under Dutton because the same-job same-pay provisions “are the only reason she got the pay rise”.
Remember WorkChoices? Labor does, and that’s how they plan to counter the Coalition’s strategy on how workers are feeling. A senior Labor strategist told me that no incumbent can win arguing what they’ve offered in a cost-of-living crisis was enough. The only way they can win is to convince voters that their standard of living would be worse under their opponents.
This week the Minerals Council escalated the issue of industrial relations. Dutton’s message was that he was the best friend they could rely on. The Minerals Council has already provided some support for the opposition’s nuclear reactors policy when so much of the business community has steered clear of it.
Now the Minerals Council is amplifying concerns around Tanya Plibersek’s proposed environment protection authority. That’s a fight that will continue next week in the Senate. Western Australia is where Labor had its greatest electoral success in the last federal election, and almost everything you hear at the moment is about WA.
Those Western Australian seats are our Pennsylvania. Albanese and Dutton know it and all of their decision-making is with the West in mind.
“This is not the Australian Labor Party of the worker,” Dutton told the Minerals Council’s annual conference this week. “Its members are committed to waging environmental and social crusades, especially against certain industries.”
That message was for Western Australia, but Dutton hopes it will resonate beyond the West. He is hoping to galvanise the frustrations of the working class into votes. His timing couldn’t be better for him, with parts of the union movement bitterly divided over Labor’s treatment of the CFMEU. Will the unions mobilise for Labor? Perhaps the threat of IR laws being repealed might focus their attention.
Clearing the barnacles before the election
Speculation that the government was positioning for an election early next year spread through political circles last week, triggered by a tsunami of legislation introduced to parliament and the government being seen to be clearing the barnacles.
The week started with a populist promise by Albanese to ban social media for kids and ended in a historical deal on aged care. Sprinkled in was another fight with Elon Musk, the eccentric billionaire who looks increasingly like he has more power than most nation-states. More on Elon’s tantrum later.
From childcare wage increases to aged care reforms, misinformation and disinformation laws, privacy and doxxing laws, the Brereton inquiry and the initial response to the royal commission into veterans’ suicides, the frenetic activity was difficult to keep up with. One insider told me the government was in a rush to deliver on the remaining parts of its agenda and park the things it no longer wanted to fight about.
Next week the Productivity Commission’s final report into overhauling the childcare system will land, paving the way to a universal childcare second-term Albanese agenda.
After weeks of trouble, it was finally a week of government success. You play politics best on offence not defence, and this week it was all largely offence for the Albanese government. The prime minister finally sounded like he was setting the agenda rather than constantly dodging hits.
