How to make an omelette from an election campaign

# 590

Albo stands tall, in a no-contest

It would be perverse to write about anything other than the election this week, so I’ve held the editorial until it was all over. In theory, that was about 7.45 on Saturday night, when it was already apparent Labor would be returned. After Trump’s reinsertion, it may be hard to take anything for granted in politics, but as the campaign progressed it was increasingly clear that Albo was on his way to another term. The surprise was the magnitude of his victory.

For this, the PM can partly credit the Trump factor. When Trump surged back into power last year it gave right-wing politicians the world over, a tremendous burst of confidence. Suddenly they saw what one had to do to win an election: say the incumbents have made a mess of the economy (even if they hadn’t), and hammer away on an anti-woke, anti-immigrant message.

What they didn’t see coming was Trump’s chaotic first hundred days, which have destroyed his popularity, along with America’s reputation. Pierre Poilievre, the Canadian Opposition leader was the first to pay the price for his copycat Trumpisms, and now Peter Dutton has followed him to the dole queue. Not only did Poilievre and Dutton lose their respective elections, they also lost their seats. The Hard-Boiled Egg turned out to be Humpty Dumpty.

Looking back on an astonishingly inept Coalition campaign it appears the Trumpian temptation short-circuited any conventional attempt at political strategising, if not basic commonsense. The nadir may have been when Dutton told us that Trump was “a big thinker”, praising him for his ‘shrewdness’ after he proposed Gaza should be cleared of Palestinians and turned into a Club Med.

On election night, as the Coalition went down in flames, it was clear they had been coasting, not preparing and costing policies well in advance. Everything seemed to have been cobbled together at the last minute, as if nobody had realised there was an election this year. Instead, they relied on shock and awe, with a big push for nuclear energy being their flagship policy. It proved to be a dumb idea, poorly framed, impossible to cost, and ultimately a gift to Labor. They handed Albo a big stick and collectively dropped their trousers.

Perhaps the Coalition had spent too much time reading the Murdoch press and watching Sky Channel – an alternative realty in which Albo was always the villain and they were superheroes. Perhaps it was just their usual attitude: the Libs and Nats were born to rule, and the Labor upstarts would soon be vanquished. Today, faced with their worst election result of all time, the losers may have learned - if they are capable of learning anything – that to get elected you need to do the work. In this respect, the most damning aspect of the defeat was the way the Teals were re-elected, most with increased majorities. For the Coalition to have had any hope of victory they needed to recapture those urban seats. Instead, they may be left without a single inner-city seat in any Australian capital.

All Dutton had to do to be competitive was to hammer away at the cost of living. Even if Labor wasn’t entirely responsible, as the incumbent party they would have taken a hit. What happened – incredibly – was that Labor grabbed the initiative on cost of living and used it as a weapon against the Coalition. Their message was: “We may not have got it all fixed, but we’re on the way. Do you want to trust the other guys, who are going to increase your taxes to pay for a pie-in the-sky nuclear scheme?”

To hand your greatest strategic weapon to the government was beyond dumb, it was a death wish. When costings were so vague, there was no defence against any of Labor’s most damaging accusations.

As the Coalition lost its grasp of bread-and-butter issues, they turned increasingly to the Culture Wars. The foolishness of announcing that Jacinta Nampijinpa Price would head a department of “government efficiency” in emulation of Elon Musk’s despised DOGE, was an own goal of spectacular proportions. For Ms. Price to spend Christmas wearing a MAGA cap, and spouting: “Let’s make Australia great again!” was to remove any uncertainty about the brutal, punitive nature of this proposal.

Why would the electorate vote for a party that promised to punish them, reverse Labor’s tax cuts, and sack tens of thousands of public servants?

Labor’s response was to emphasise “kindness”, asking: “When did it become ‘weak’ to’ show kindness?” It may sound insipid but for most people kindness proved strangely more appealing than brutality.

The triumphant flourish in this catalogue of unforced errors came with Dutton’s attack on the Welcome to Country ceremonies in the last days of the campaign.

This is an issue that deserves a little in-depth attention, because if everyone were more honest they would admit that many Welcome to Country ceremonies are more of an ordeal than a source of a shared, warm inner glow.

There is, and never has been, a standardised form for this ceremony, and many believe this to be one of its strengths. Yet it could just as easily be seen as a weakness. I’ve seen it done well by speakers with a sense of history who were capable of conveying something important about Aboriginal life in a brief address. I’ve also seen it drag on and on, as a speaker rambled all over the place, piling one cliché on top of another. I’ve seen it turned into a virtual declaration of war, rather than a welcome. I’ve seen it degenerate into an attempt to sell souvenir merchandise.

There can be few people who have attended these ceremonies, now part of every official event, who haven’t thought: “How long will this go on? Why are we listening to this rambling, irrelevant monologue?” Or worse still: “Oh no, here’s Uncle X, giving us the same talk we’ve heard three times already this week.”

By far the most distressing aspect is the way so many people – and that means, almost exclusively, white people – fall over themselves to praise every WTC address. Having stood with a fixed smile and glazed eyes for 15 minutes, one can only feel sceptical when they subsequently claim to have had a deeply spiritual experience. The twin spectacles of hypocrisy and virtue signalling are hard to stomach, even when the ultimate intentions are good.

The WTC ceremony is a supreme example of a positive gesture considered to be simple, painless and inexpensive when it was first proposed. Today it has become a sticking point, revered by some and loathed by others.

We’re told that the WTC dates back thousands of years, being the greeting one tribal group would extend to another upon entrance to their lands. It was revived in 1976, when Richard Whalley and Ernie Dingo devised a greeting for a group of Māori artists attending the Perth Festival, but has become ubiquitous since 2008, when it was introduced into the ceremonial opening of federal parliament, under the Rudd government.

The inconsistency of the WTC allows its critics to seize on the worst examples and use them to characterise the lot. Some will attack the ceremony on purely racist grounds, but the frustrations of others who see the whole thing as a tokenistic exercise have been fuelled by our inability or unwillingness to encourage some form of quality control. If the WTC was brief, informative and to the point, it would silence most of its critics.

There are two issues that need to be addressed: the way symbolic gestures such as WTC are used as points of self-congratulation by authorities that have made little tangible progress with the goals of ‘closing the gap’; and the pernicious way politicians such as Peter Dutton have attempted to politicise the ceremony to exacerbate social division.

The timing of Dutton’s most recent outburst could hardly have been worse, coming directly after a group of Neo-Nazis booed the WTC during the Anzac Dawn Service in Melbourne. One would think these are not the kind of people a mainstream political leader would rush to appease, but Dutton, after first condemning the abuse, and declaring that the Welcome “was an important part of official ceremonies”, within 24 hours had decided that it was “overdone”, and inappropriate for Anzac Day events.

He claimed to be talking on behalf of “the majority” of veterans, but like so many of the Boiled Egg’s campaign gambits, this reflected nothing more than a few conversations with disgruntled individuals. To extrapolate from the individual to the mass is a perfect example of what philosophers call “the individualistic fallacy”. Ignoring the weight of social factors, historical context and every other circumstance, it imagines that the bloke in the pub is speaking on behalf of the entire polity.

More disturbingly, it was an attempt to trigger memories of the failed Voice referendum, which the Coalition had successfully portrayed as a matter of waste and ideological blackmail.

But to keep pushing in this direction runs the risk of inflaming racist sentiments and age-old prejudices that should be condemned by any politician who seeks to represent all Australians. In other words, what we saw was a political leader willing to sacrifice principle for short-term advantage, decency for expediency. It’s yet another nod to Trumpism, which has succeeded by inflaming hatred among disgruntled voters. Hardly an appropriate model for an Australian politician, it was not only morally reprehensible but plain stupid, because in this country it does not work.

For Dutton to take this path on the eve of election day suggests he was following his true beliefs and instincts. A superior strategist would have avoided such an inflammatory topic, the blindest of the many blind alleys the Coalition pursued during this campaign.

What Dutton showed us was that the WTC remarks may be source of irritation to many, and an invitation for hypocritical fawning on behalf of officialdom, but the general feeling is one of approval. Considering the historical wrongs perpetrated against Indigenous people, a ”welcome” seems a very soft response. The disrespect shown by the extremists was completely unacceptable for the average Australian, including many veterans, who were quick to express an opinion.

There’s a lot that could be tweaked and streamlined with the WTC, but Australians are not ready to follow Dutton’s lead in taking the blowtorch to the ceremony.

It’s ironic, or perhaps reassuring, that in his concession speech, Dutton dropped the strongman disguise and was gracious in defeat. He may have said the word “amazing” more often than a teenybopper describing a Tayor Swift concert, but he was terribly nice about everyone, including Albo, Albo’s mum, and Ali France, who had just nabbed his seat in parliament.

With the results in, and the heat taken out of the leaders’ confrontation, we had confirmation that those attitudes we wistfully call “Australian values” were alive and well. Albo was humble in victory, Dutton gracious in defeat. It’s a decisive reminder of how different we are to the United States, and an excellent illustration of why the Trump template should not be blindly emulated in this country. Please take note, Clive Palmer.

The only other part of the evening that grabbed my attention was when Liberal Senator, James McGrath, given the thankless task of sitting on the ABC’s TV election panel, was asked about the Greens. “They’re horrible people!” he shrieked, sounding like the good boy at school who’d had his balloon popped and his lunch money stolen by louts. Compared to the “horrible, nasty” Greens, the Labor Party was a model of decorum.

It may sound absurd, but the Senator’s spontaneous outburst contains a home truth about the way the Greens have conducted themselves during the last parliament. To block Labor’s modest housing proposals by voting with their arch enemies, the Coalition, was an appalling act of overreach which echoes the way they torpedoed Labor’s carbon pricing scheme in 2009. The Coalition didn’t want a bar of either, but the Greens felt Labor’s proposals didn’t go far enough.

It seems the Greens have never believed the old adage that politics is the art of compromise. By using their power to block legislation on the grounds that it doesn’t achieve their own lofty goals, they came across as arrogant and out-of-touch with the people they seek to represent. Worst of the lot was Max Chandler-Mather, whose high-handed pronouncements on housing affordability were out of all proportion to his ability to frame a realistic policy. Max, alas, seems to have lost his seat in Brisbane. As I write, Greens leader, Adam Bandt, is also struggling to hold his seat, but should creep over the line.

The other great blunder for the Greens was surely the gung-ho way they took up the Palestinian cause in Parliament. Their sanctimonious approach to Gaza aimed to paint Labor as compromised and uncaring, but as the party in government, Labor had little choice but to walk a tightrope. One doubts that anybody on the Labor side approves of the IDF’s brutal tactics, but neither do they want to encourage the political drift towards Anti-Semitism. It may be much easier to make reckless, partisan statements when you only have four seats, but the result is that those four seats have now become two.

The Greens’ campaign was as futile and self-deluding as the Coalition’s. Together they have handed Labor an election victory “for the ages”. So what happens next? Does Labor take this opportunity to push through a raft of progressive legislation that boosts the economy and creates a fairer society? That’s the promise. The danger is that power breeds complacency, and – with the virtual extinguishing of the Coalition as a political force – there’s sure to be a charm offensive on behalf of big business who need to consolidate their connections at the highest level.

As usual, the arts are nowhere to be seen, and we can only expect more of what we’ve been getting for the past three years under Tony Burke’s purview – feelgood identity politics, symbolism over substance, poor spending choices, lack of accountability, a steady drain of interest and excitement. Hey Tony, when are we going to have that coffee?

The art column this week looks at the Dobell Drawing Prize, one of the better Aussie art competitions in a crowded field. The film being reviewed is Riefenstahl, Andres Veiel’s documentary on Hitler’s favourite filmmaker, currently screening as part of this year’s German Film Festival. Few cultural figures have managed to do as many evil things as Leni Riefenstahl and retain their prestige for the following 60 years. Perhaps the lesson for the suddenly gracious Peter Dutton, is that to succeed in this world you have to be a real bad egg, not a pretend one.