History repeating
Anthony Albanese’s complacency puts Labor at risk of repeating previous pre-election mistakes. By Nick Cater.
Call it pre-election nerves, but some Coalition strategists suspect Anthony Albanese’s budget reply speech last week was the political equivalent of the fake secret papers planted on a floating corpse by MI5 in Operation Mincemeat. The ruse convinced the Germans an Allied invasion force was about to land in Greece when the real target was Sicily.
The Coalition’s greatest worry is that Labor’s weapon remains hidden in a bunker. Labor’s greatest worry is there is no such chicanery, and the Opposition Leader’s small-target obsession and growing hubris will cost the party the election.
Albanese broke new ground for a Labor leader in a 30-minute pre-election address that mentioned neither hospitals nor schools. Health and education have always been regarded as Labor’s home turf, with huge warning signs to the Coalition planted at the perimeters. In 2016 Labor’s fraudulent but clever Mediscare campaign came close to winning Bill Shorten the election.
Three years later, Shorten put health at the centre of his budget reply speech, announcing what he called “the most important investment in Medicare since Bob Hawke created it”, a $2.3bn spend on cancer treatment. As things turned out, Shorten’s promise failed to excite voters, but at an election when health will be top of mind it is curious Albanese had nothing to say on it last week save for a tilt to a “stronger Medicare”.
Ditto education funding, a staple of Labor election campaigns and a policy the Coalition steps carefully around, mindful of the power of teachers handing out flyers at the school gate.
Absent, too, was virtually any mention of the rising cost of living outside the prism of wages. Yet polling shows health and cost of living will be cut-through issues in next month’s election. For Albanese to ignore both in a speech days before the official start of the campaign seems perverse.
Instead, he shifted Labor’s attention to aged care, promising pay rises to aged-care workers without any realistic assessment of cost or its impact in a sector where problems run deeper than money. Government spending in real terms on aged care has risen by about 35 per cent under nine years of Coalition government to $23.5bn in 2020-21. Spending on home care and support services has risen by 75 per cent, allowing many more people to stay out of residential care and reducing pressure on the system. Yet a royal commission has given Labor the ammunition to politicise the care of the elderly and Albanese is ready to use it.
The Coalition has gone some way to neutralising health policy since 2013 through nine years of increased funding and its relative success in managing the pandemic. Recurrent spending on public hospitals rose in real terms from $49.3bn in Labor’s full final term in government to $76.7bn in 2019-20. The increase was to a large extent determined by Labor, which locked in future spending, but the Coalition delivered and will happily take the credit.
It would be foolish to underestimate Labor’s ability to cook up fake news about threatened hospitals and spending cuts. Nor should we discount the tendency to dump state government failures in pandemic management on to the Prime Minister’s desk.
Yet despite the huge fiscal cost of the pandemic, the government has reason to be proud. The Australian death toll from Covid-19 per million population is less than a quarter of the G20 average and concern about pandemic management is receding as fear subsides and masks slowly disappear.
Polling commissioned by the Pharmacy Guild of Australia late last month shows healthcare is a potent issue in marginal seats, with 18 per cent of respondents nominating it as important. The result closely matches unpublished data by Compass Polling, which has been tracking the salience of policy issues since late last year. The aggregated results from a sample of 7000 Australians shows health, hospitals and pandemic management are potential vote-deciding matters for a quarter of the electorate, with the proportion rising with age.
The cost of living has been a salient issue for some time and is rising in importance as inflation kicks in. The six-month reduction in fuel-excise duty announced last week in the budget was well received, as this week’s Newspoll bounce confirms. Compass Polling two weeks ago found fuel price was the No.1 cost-of-living concern for 27 per cent of voters. Second comes rent and mortgage costs at 24 per cent. Third is food at 22 per cent, rising to 26 per cent for over-55s.
The government’s one-off cost-of-living payment of $420 to those on low income, including self-funded retirees, was well targeted. Albanese’s tired narrative of mean bosses and parsimonious governments may appeal to some and shore up the union vote. As a public policy response to inflation, however, it is like using petrol to quench a fire. Perhaps Labor is preparing to unleash the son of Mediscare, which in an age when social media has become ever more influential could be more deadly than the original.
The alternative explanation is there is no such ruse and that Albanese, lulled by complacency, has forgotten that elections must be won as well as lost. Perhaps he believes, despite the experience of 2019, that polling outside a campaign is an accurate indication of what will happen. Perhaps he believes Scott Morrison will not be able to narrow the gap and that Labor is safe from a drift in support to Greens and independents.
Business leaders who encountered Albanese last week report he is confident of Labor’s chances and sees the election as a formality. He would do well to recall Shorten’s crestfallen face on a May evening in 2019. Not for the first time, the party’s biggest obstacle to government may be its leader’s conceit.