Good Fucking Riddance

Late notes on the federal campaign

“The County Election” George Caleb Bingham, 1852.

The campaign’s over. The polls almost closed on the eastern states. And then we might find sanctuary from the aggressive and insulting inanity… Well, not really.

There was plenty of professional chatter about when the election would be called, and for what date, and if we weren’t already, in fact, experiencing a campaign before it became official.

The press gallery made calls and buttonholed folks in corridors. They marked calendars with public holidays and significant sporting events and other occasions that might either commend or discourage a certain date. Political campaigns are Christmas for mid-wits, and they shared the fruits of their industrious inanity with practiced solemnity.

Might the Budget affect the decision – and what of Cyclone Alfred? And still it wasn’t called. Was the Prime Minister scared, or prudent? Never mind that the speculation was of no interest to almost any Australian, or that, like most professional footy chat, there was an absurd gulf between the seriousness of expression and the smallness of subject.

Unfortunately, the election was eventually called – unfortunately because my news feed largely comprised the leaders’ travel schedule, the latest in the “corflute wars” or news about campaign bus mishaps that could be milked for obvious metaphors.

It never seems to matter what decade we’re in, or who the leaders are, or what historic ambience exists – the sum of coverage remains the same: witless and numbing.

To be fair, the inanity of the coverage is roughly commensurate with the campaigns themselves and the progressive dehydration of talent in our politics. Soulless and hysterically cautious, to cover these campaigns with any enthusiasm requires a mind that’s both dim and ambitious.

Albanese fell down some stairs; Dutton grumbled about activists; a fringe candidate said some weird shit a few years ago. Should we have six debates? Or just two? Was the Prime Minister “finding his voice” – and was Dutton suffering from ever having bothered to develop his own?

Dutton aped Trumpian horseshit, then began awkwardly disavowing it. He promised to dismantle working from home, then quickly abandoned that too. He pledged massive cuts to the Australian Public Service, then began anxiously qualifying the numbers.

Dutton was unprepared, scandalously indifferent to policy detail and lamentably impulsive. Remember the caravan story? It was immediately funky. An abandoned caravan was found, containing explosives, and a note describing several Jewish targets. A few addled tweakers were arrested, and from day one it was obvious to me – and anyone else following it – that very little added up.

Nonetheless, Dutton wasted no time in politicising it – whatever it was. For weeks, Dutton said that 1. The plot spoke to a moment of historical danger for Jewish Australians that Albanese was incapable or unwilling of ameliorating, and 2. That the Prime Minister had not been properly briefed by respective law and intelligence services, and was now being evasive in his public statements – presumably because he’d been embarrassingly undermined by these agencies’ lack of faith.

But briefed on what? That synagogues were being firebombed, and that the caravan story was funky as hell, should both have commended discretion and patience to Dutton – a former copper and once the minister responsible for our spy agencies.

But Dutton couldn’t help himself and blew his load. As it was, the caravan was a hoax – as the AFP confirmed in March.

Dutton’s witless lack of discipline was shown again in April, when the defence analysis website Janes reported that Russia had applied to the Indonesian government to establish an airbase in Papua. Just as he had with the caravan, Dutton used this unconfirmed report with unsavoury enthusiasm to bash Albanese, and went as far as saying that the Indonesian president had confirmed it. He hadn’t, and after a day of treating media questions with aggressive obtuseness, Dutton eventually admitted his mistake. “Lamentably impulsive” is too polite.

Dutton floated the idea of a referendum about deporting dual citizens convicted of serious crime, which immediately raised the eyebrows and heart-rates of colleagues. Was it not enough to confirm that non-citizens who commit crimes will be deported after their sentence – and still allow the few examples of conflicted citizenship to be dealt with by the High Court? Having alienated a rump of his own colleagues, the idea was quickly abandoned.

I’m all for serious policy that respects the priorities of average Australians. After all, America’s left helped return Trump: Defund the Police, riotous arson is cool, it’s racist to mention the millions of folks crossing the southern border, the president is fine and you’re hysterical and ageist to suggest he has dementia – etc, etc.

But Dutton isn’t serious. An ordinary person would be embarrassed to propose a whole new nuclear industry without any detail, and mortified by suggesting the Prime Minister had been negligent or poorly informed about an alleged terror plot that never existed and which stunk from the beginning. His gambit as alternative Prime Minister has been to fart in elevators, quickly leave, then refuse to take any questions about whether he was ever there.

Meanwhile, Albanese’s profound ignorance about foreign affairs seems to have turned into a full-blown allergy. More, he’d promised years ago to govern with sobriety and consultation, but it’s proved to be an alibi for a dull, unimaginative and inarticulate man. Albanese sold caution as virtue, but now it just looks like fecklessness.

About housing – a full-blown crisis that risks seriously alienating whole generations – we returned once again to cretinously tinkering with demand-side policies and substantively ignoring supply. Repackaging first home buyer incentives will only rise all prices – we know this. But the raw math was done: there are more home owners than those trying to buy their first one.

*

For decades, Albanese has spoken of his childhood as the principal source of his political ambition. The child of a single mum raised in council flats, our Prime Minister has repeatedly told us that the modesty and insecurity of his origins – and the unflinching love of his mother – has shaped an outsized civic empathy.

He kept sharing his origin story in this campaign, of course. These personal declarations, aside from grounding his political ambition in something soulful, also had the intention of flattering all of us: that Australia was sufficiently egalitarian to allow the ascension of a poor, fatherless boy to the country’s highest office.

It’s no longer enough. It was never enough.

But Albanese got something right, and we might acknowledge it. Since last year I’ve heard about the Prime Minister’s confidence. Heard about his faith in his own re-election. His bright confidence seemed slightly loony to me, as it did to others close to him, but it derived from his sense that Dutton – despite all those flattering pre-campaign polls – was unelectable.

Albanese was convinced that Dutton would be unprepared and that he would shit the bed. That the Australian people, once asked to properly think about him once the campaign was called, would cool on the prospect.

As I write, the polls are an hour from closing in the eastern states – and so we’ll see later tonight if Albanese’s assessment of Dutton is fully vindicated. But Albanese got plenty right in his unflattering assessment of his rival – and he was never terribly worried by him.

Still: these are strange and parlous times, but once again – and completely unsurprisingly – we’ve had a campaign of maximum emptiness. Personally, I don’t think the Albanese government deserve re-election. Their luck is facing a potential government that deserves power even less.