Australia’s 2022 federal election campaign has formally started. But if the truth be known, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) has been running its election campaign for many, many months.
To understand the opening gambits of the formal election campaign between the two main parties, it is worth unpacking what the ALP’s spin-team has been trying to do for the past year and how this preliminary work was supposed to set the tone for the rest of the 2022 election campaign.
The team must have started the first week of formal campaigning feeling well-satisfied with how months of pre-election work geared to demonizing Prime Minister Scott Morrison had seemingly put the ALP in a strong position for the upcoming fight.
But the first week of campaigning has proved to be something of a disaster. Their plans have not held up, and months of carefully laid messaging is already unravelling and not delivering the results as expected.
So what was the ALP’s plan and what went wrong?
The plan grew out of two lessons they learned from the 2019 election. Former party leader Bill Shorten was deemed to have lost because Morrison convinced voters that Shorten was an untrustworthy party apparatchik who could not be relied upon to speak the truth.
At the same time, Morrison turned himself into “Scomo”—the likeable Aussie bloke from next door whom ordinary Aussie battlers could trust to cover their backs and speak the truth.
So what did the ALP decide to do this time around? They decided to flip the story.
The key to achieving this was to turn Morrison into a thoroughly unlikeable and untrustworthy fellow—the exact opposition of the ordinary Aussie bloke of 2019.
The second part of the ALP’s strategy was to make Anthony Albanese into the good ole Aussie bloke voters could trust and like. So the plan was that in 2022, “Albo” would replace “Scomo.”
But flipping Morrison into the opposite of his 2019 image would be hard work and not something one could do in a few weeks of electioneering.
Instead, any communication campaign to transform Morrison’s image had to be a long exercise of drip messaging to destroy the old “Scomo” one drip at a time.
Some call this “drip-drip marketing,” others call it “cultivation theory,” where one slowly cultivates in a group of people a new way of seeing the world. This approach requires a lengthy period of time to work with.
The ALP, of course, had the time. Indeed, their spin doctors had three years to change Morrison’s profile, three years to vilify him, and they succeeded in what was a brilliantly executed ALP spin campaign.
Hence by the time we reached the beginning of 2022, the ALP team had successfully sold the idea to many Aussies that Morrison was “Scotty from marketing.”
“Scotty from marketing” was the perfect put-down—a carefully crafted memorable line that said so many negative things about the prime minister. It said he was not authentic because marketing is the opposite of authenticity. It also said he was not to be trusted because marketing guys are responsible for inventing stories.
Effectively the ALP’s “Scotty from marketing” line—and the more recent “bullying” label—pitched Morrison as the person Australian battlers could not trust, turning him into a devious, manipulative fellow.
The great irony of the “Scotty from marketing” drip-drip campaign is that it was the product of spin—the pot calling the kettle black.
It was well-executed and worked to inflict real damage. But to make matters worse for Morrison, the ALP’s demonization campaign was given a huge boost by a parallel campaign run by the far-left Crikey website.
Left-activist journalists at Crikey worked hard to build up a narrative that Morrison was a serial liar. Given Crikey attracts left-wing readers, it was not hard to convince such an audience that Morrison was not to be trusted.
But since this readership did not vote for the Coalition, the Liberal Party’s spin-team viewed Crickey’s campaign as unimportant.
However, it turned out Crikey was to become a problem for Morrison precisely because so many mainstream journalists lean to the left—and they do read Crikey. Consequently, once Crickey’s drip-drip “liar-tag” began to solidify into a kind of taken-for-granted truth on the Australian left, it soon began to also spill over into the mainstream media.
It did not take long for the ALP’s “Scotty from marketing” line to merge with Crickey’s “Morrison does not tell the truth” narrative.
Because a high percentage of Australian journalists allowed themselves to be seduced by spin doctored repetition, there was an incremental reframing of Morrison into the inauthentic untrustworthy politician that the ALP’s spin-team wanted him to be seen as.
Morrison was turned into spoiled goods. Proof that the drip-drip demonization campaign had worked was made manifest in the barrage of hostile questioning Morrison faced at the Canberra Press Club in February 2022.
As the ALP watched this journalistic pile-on they must have been feeling really confident of victory in the upcoming election.
But for the ALP plan to work, Scomo had to be seen as the bad untrustworthy guy and Albo had to become the good guy whom battlers could trust to have their backs. There were two sides to this coin. Both sides were needed.
To achieve this, the ALP opted to make Albo a small target who Morrison would find it hard to attack. The small target strategy would be achieved by making sure no words came out of Albanese’s mouth that might upset or worry the battlers. So Albanese would need to be disciplined and only say things approved by his spin-team.
A danger for the ALP spin-team was that Albanese is aligned to the left-wing of his party and left-wing messages are precisely what battlers do not want to hear. So Albo-the-lefty needed to be buried, or at least hidden from sight. Poor old Albo could not be allowed to be himself. Instead, he needed to try and look like Scomo from the 2019 election, the trusted good ole Aussie bloke.
But if the first week of formal electioneering is anything to go by, it seems the spin doctors over-estimated Albanese’s acting skills. Turns out Albanese is finding it hard to play the role of Albo. Indeed, his discomfort is plain for all to see. And this discomfort is making him nervous, defensive, and hence gaffe prone. He has already made four bad gaffes in just the first week.
When Albanese is not following scripts written by his spin doctors, he cannot answer journalist’s questions.
On his first day of campaigning Albo did not know two key economic indicators—the unemployment rate and the interest rate—which suggested he was not up to managing the country’s economy.
Then, Albanese claimed the ALP’s urgent-care clinics policy had been costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office. It had not. This raised doubts about Labor’s entire proposed health policy—a centrepiece of their election promises.
But things got worse for Albo when he mis-answered another question by saying Labor’s policy was to support boat turn-backs and that meant Australia did not need offshore detention centres. After talking to his minders, Albo had to correct this mistake and say his party did support off-shore detention.
Finally, he got Labor’s policy on Temporary Protection Visas wrong. Again, after talking to his minders, Albo came back and told journalists he had misheard the question and so gave the wrong answer.
Albanese cannot afford too many more of these kind of gaffes because they raise serious questions about his ability to perform the role of prime minister.
One week ago, one could smell the confidence of the ALP’s spin-team. But only a few days later it no longer looks so certain that all those months of drip-drip messaging will bear fruit and bring victory for the Labor Party.
