Since the Coalition came to power in 2013 Australia has fallen down the Transparency International corruption index from seventh to its current 11. With endless material to attack the Coalition over corruption issues, why is the Albanese-led Opposition apparently incapable of doing so?
Anthony Albanese is seemingly so concerned about not offending any interest groups that he is pleasing no one. Running a Labor campaign in this probable election year ought to be easy: concentrate on Coalition climate change policy denial, corruption, fairness and competence.
Climate change is easy to frame as a threat to today’s and future generations; to property values; to our economic outlook; to our relationships with others who have already made far-reaching climate commitments; and as a threat to our trade relations.
We are rapidly becoming a pariah state, which Joe Biden’s new climate envoy, John Kerry, singled out when he cited our 2019-20 bushfires as an example of the threat.
It is also, as Ross Garnaut showed in his book Superpower, an opportunity for a low carbon future in which Australia can create export opportunities and jobs. Just this week, General Motors said it would cease manufacturing non-electric vehicles by 2035 – an opportunity for a new Australian government to announce it will install charging stations across the country.
On corruption, former Liberal Leader John Hewson, Michael West and Michael Pascoe have done better jobs of articulating the succession of corrupt Morrison Government actions and policies than has the Albanese Opposition.
Writing in The Saturday Paper Hewson listed a score of examples of LNP corrupt action and included some in which Labor was complicit.
Hewson also cited Morrison’s claim about Ministerial Standards that: “The Australian people deserve a Government that will act with integrity and in the best interests of the people they serve.”
Hewson commented: “They certainly do deserve that, but they are not getting it. These are just words, not backed by actions. Although government has set such standards, they are not what motivates our leaders, and so they simply aren’t enforced.”
As a result of Coalition Government corruption Australia has been steadily falling down the Transparency International corruption index. In 2013 we ranked seventh in the international ratings (the higher the ranking the better the performance) and by 2019 we had fallen to 12th with a score of 77 on a 100 point scale.
Just this week TIA released the 2020 ranking and we have moved up a notch – not because we have improved but because Iceland has got worse.
Competence appears a harder argument to sell because Coalition governments have managed to frame themselves as competent economic managers despite abundant evidence that they aren’t. This record also highlights the fairness issue.
As Oxfam’s Lyn Morgain said in The New Daily recently: “Australia’s 31 billionaires raked in nearly $85 billion since the global pandemic was declared in March – an almost unimaginable sum that is enough to give the 2.5 million poorest Australians a one-off payment of just over $33,300 each.”
Meanwhile, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has said wages’ share of total income had fallen below 50 per cent for the first time since 1959 while profits’ share jumped to more than 30 per cent.
Real wages in Australia were lower in 2019 than in 2013 when the Liberals came to power, the third last in 35 OECD countries. Our rankings in terms of productivity, casual employment and many other social and economic indicators are also in decline.
Given that any competent political party would find plenty of material with which to attack the Morrison Government on grounds of competence, why is the Albanese Opposition apparently incapable of doing so?
It can point to hostile media but Labor and other progressive parties have overcome such obstacles before. Modern communication channels provide them with many other ways to prosecute campaigns – witness Victoria’s grassroots campaign that delivered Labor landslide wins in 2014 and 2018.
However, their argument has not been helped by some ‘progressives’ who have focused not on economic inequality and corruption but on wokeness and cancel culture.
The irony is that they share a commitment to cancel culture with the Murdoch media and the Morrison Government, which hound anyone who challenges their world views.
Morrison and the Murdoch media defend George Christensen and Craig Kelly on free speech grounds while hounding Yassmin Abdel-Magied out of the country for saying: “Lest We Forget Manus, Nauru…”.
As for wokeness, its aim of raising awareness of discrimination is admirable, but at times the rhetoric makes them into useful idiot allies of reactionaries diverting attention from deep neo-liberal structural problems.
Some 150 academics, artists and writers – including Gloria Steinem, Margaret Atwood and Noam Chomsky – signed a Letter on Justice and Open Debate published in Harper’s magazine which welcomed protests for racial and social justice and calls for greater equality across society.
However, they warned that some of the protests also intensified a “new set of moral attitudes and political commitments” that tended to weaken norms of open debate and tolerance of different views, with a “vogue for public shaming and ostracism”.
While Morrison may think his Pentecostal god is bringing him all this good fortune, sadly there is no divine intervention. Simply old-fashioned political incompetence, inconvenient zealotry and a phenomenon in the fishing industry known as shifting baseline.
Noel Turnbull has had a 50-year-plus career in public relations, politics, journalism and academia. He blogs at http://noelturnbull.com/blog/
Comments
19 responses to “Morrison’s not a miracle worker; he just got lucky with an inept Opposition Leader”
Anybody who has handed out ALP how-to-vote cards on election day knows that the men and women in high-visibility shirts do not vote Labor. They are not rude but they are not interested. These are the workers who before Thatcher were the backbone of the trade unions and the ALP. Now their conversations at the cafe tables are about their investment properties and tax arrangements. The problems facing the Labor Party are real and are not a matter of leadership personality. I thought Bill Shorten did a good job and tried his heart out to find common ground. He went close. It is still close.
Tony Abbott opposed for opposition’s sake. Was that a winning plan? The media might like to cover a brawl, but it is not the job of our leaders to please the media. Or is it?
I disagree that the labor leader is inept. He has certainly held his own in parliament when he was able to, notwithstanding the record number of gaggings and divisions the Morrison government has indulged in right throughout their incumbency, as Tony Burke wrote about recently.
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2021/01/28/parliament-debate-gag-labor/
I further disagree on the basis of Albanese’s budget in reply speech that no-one, not even the media gave more than a passing glance to. Here it is by the way.
https://anthonyalbanese.com.au/anthony-albanese-speech-budget-in-reply-parliament-house-canberra-thursday-8-october-2020
The coming election, the fourth in eight years, will also signal a return of an election committee for the Labor party, who have relied on personality power for the last three elections to their detriment. The fact that Albanese is a “doer” has not escaped those in the know. He may not have the catchy phrases and advertising jingles of his adversary, but he has formulated, as he pointed out in his budget reply speech, some beneficial initiatives, that, if he can get them past the lies and misinformation that has characterised the last three elections, all of which have been won by successive lame duck do-nothing Coalition governments, will stand Australia in good stead.
Morrison has only won a single miracle election against an incompetent Labor leader and his name was Shorten.
The one Billy Shorten supporter left in Australia down voted you mate. Come to think of it, it could have been Billy himself.
Morrison has been hit in the arse by a rainbow to have Timid Tony as his opposition. If the ALP doesnt punt the old ducker and weaver soon its going to be another win for the LNP.
Another beautiful Australian expression, Skilts – hit in the arse by a rainbow. I have heard this one before,but not lately. It’s great.
Barney a dear friend passed away this week ‘Fats Pretty Boy” Carney. A wharfie of the old school, a man who extended his happy hour into a lifetime but who knew that the voice of many is more than one. He spoke another dialectic. Of rhythms and rhymes. Every phrase smiled. Slightly. Foreman were called “Pantyhose”. There was the “Hurricane Lamp”. Dim. “Candles”. One blow and he was out. In the Menzies ascendancy workers were sacked for calling “scab”. Voltaire never made it to the waterfront. The metaphor and the rhyme protected a worker who called a foreman Pantyhose (the closest thing to a ….). A work shy mate was “Stand back Stan”. The rainbow never hit blokes like Fats in the arse. He agreed so kindly and generously to allow me to transcribe the wharf verse. I didnt get around to transcribing the dialect and his generation and their words are drifting away. Never knew his Dad. Killed as a conscript in New Guinea before he was born. Mother worked as a barmaid all her working life and brought the banter of the beer home with her sodden shoes and tired smile. A disregarded and despised generation is passing.
A legendary foreman at a north-west enterprise was known as Hydraulic Jack for his ability to lift various items of the firm’s property into his personal possession.
Wonderful Jerry. We had a “Wally Wheelbarrow” – had to push him to make him work. And two right wing officials of the Federated Ironworkers Association. “Spew” – he was always going to bring up with the boss and “Mirrors” – always looking into it.
I disagree that the labor leader is inept. He has certainly held his own in parliament when he was able to, notwithstanding the record number of gaggings and divisions the Morrison government has indulged in right throughout their incumbency, as Tony Burke wrote about recently.
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2021/01/28/parliament-debate-gag-labor/
I further disagree on the basis of Albanese’s budget in reply speech that no-one, not even the media gave more than a passing glance to. Here it is by the way.
https://anthonyalbanese.com.au/anthony-albanese-speech-budget-in-reply-parliament-house-canberra-thursday-8-october-2020
The coming election, the fourth in eight years, will also signal a return of an election committee for the Labor party, who have relied on personality power for the last three elections to their detriment. The fact that Albanese is a “doer” has not escaped those in the know. He may not have the catchy phrases and advertising jingles of his adversary, but he has formulated, as he pointed out in his budget reply speech, some beneficial initiatives, that, if he can get them past the lies and misinformation that has characterised the last three elections, all of which have been won by successive lame duck do-nothing Coalition governments, will stand Australia in good stead.
Leaders suffer political demise when they compromise away from their original positions, losing credibility. Anthony Albanese has done just that when, on the critical global heating issue, despite his original convictions (https://www.themonthly.com.au/today/paddy-manning/2019/08/2019/1573188153/someone-born-labor) he found it necessary to transfer Mark Butler from the shadow climate position, compromising with the right wing faction. Reminiscent of what Turnbull was trying to do before his fall. It is not until politicians gain respect by sticking to their original convictions on critical issues, on which they were elected, that the cycle of opportunism will continue and people will lose faith in politicians.
I actually think it was a brilliant move by by Albanese to appoint Chris Bowen as Shadow Climate Change spokesman and with his economics background, to emphasise the positive outcomes in terms of job creation by switching to a low carbon economy. This is the only way you can sell it to those disaffected coal mining communities who are more concerned about their future livelihoods than the politics of climate change. That doesn’t mean that Labor will be any less inclined to continue with their climate change agenda. As passionate as Mark Butler has been on climate change, I don’t think he was able to convey this message adequately.
The fatal climate issue has been relegated to politicians, economists, sociologists and bureaucrats for almost 40 years. The one group to whom governments paid lip service but which has otherwise been ignored are climate scientists, thus overlooking the physical reality.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them (Albert Einstein)
That’s all very well, but if the climate scientists’ message is not getting through to some sections of the community, then you have to be a little more street smart to get your message across to achieve the same outcome. That’s what politics is all about. Sometimes presenting raw facts to sway an argument isn’t enough.
Commonsense dictates the ALP doesn’t tackle corruption or challenge the government on its more extreme politics because the ALP is similarly corrupt and extreme. Intuitively, without control of the mainstream media the ALP knows it will suffer more in a Pyrrhic loss. This election for me, at least for the moment, is one where there’s a greater evil I know and is still tolerable, and a lesser evil I don’t know and don’t want to vote for in these uncertain times. I may vote for the Greens or the Sex Party as some readers here have suggested. My point is, the impression for this one Australian who may not represent any other voter is, the opposition doesn’t come across as “inept” – just as Scott Morrison doesn’t come across as “daggy dad” no matter how many times that propaganda is repeated – they come across as corrupt and just as keen as the LNP in pursuing similar well-discussed neoliberal Americanophallic [sic] self-interest.
Tony Albanese’s former comrade in arms Ian MacDonald, from the so called ‘hard” left faction, is currently before the courts in NSW facing charges of conspiracy with Tony’s other comrade Eddie “The Fireman” Obeid to make a lazy 30 million dollars from manipulating coal mining leases. The Fireman got his name from the run of rotten luck he had with his properties spontaneously combusting in the 1980’s. MacDonald like Tony, another boy from the Department of Housing single mum ALP nursery, was called “Eddies Pet Crocodile”. If Tony even raised a squeak about corruption with these two shafters before the courts then he would be gone to Gowings. Taken down by the drop kick and punts (please dont ask for an interpretation of this wharfieism) in the LNP.
Yes, I’ve been a New South Wretch most of my life, with a brief stint as a Queen’s lander. There has been tales of a faraway land called fair Victoria where the people are known as Just and Good.
It is said that when a Victorian moves to Queensland the IQ level of both states rises.