Australia is back in election mode and last week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison finally managed to put national security onto the election agenda for 2022.
The clearest sign that Morrison had finally got his national security message up was the way Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese began to look really rattled last week. And rattled he should be because, as both Albanese and Morrison know, national security is where the Coalition has much credibility. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) on the other hand has a weak one.
Before his national security breakthrough last week, Morrison looked as if he was in trouble.
Indeed, Morrison had been struggling for some time to get his messages up in the face of a year-long Labor Party spin campaign that focussed its energies on undermining Morrison’s credibility as a leader by relentlessly running personal attacks on his character.
These nasty personal attacks reached a crescendo at Morrison’s February National Press Club speech when it appeared that ALP spin doctors had actually managed to get a majority of journalists to buy into their long-running “untrustworthy Scotty from marketing” spin-line.
But a week is a long time in politics and the transformation in Morrison’s fortunes was amazing. At the end of the National Press Club’s journalistic pile on, the ALP spin doctors must have been gloating at how their “untrustworthy Scotty” messaging had caught on.
Yet a week later, it was Albanese who looked worried. His flustered delivery told us the shoe was now on the other foot because Labor had lost control of the narrative.
Albanese’s rattled look told us that he believed taking Labor’s weak national security record into an election issue was going to hurt him.
So what happened to put Morrison back in the game?
No surprises there. Of course, they would. They know Morrison will stand firm against Chinese Leader Xi Jinping’s aggression.
Morrison has played a leading role in building the AUKUS and Quad alliances as defensive barriers against Xi’s expansionist plans in the Indo-Pacific and against Taiwan.
So naturally, the CCP would prefer Albanese as prime minister because they know Morrison will build a military alliance to hold the line and block Xi. Labor’s past form shows us that the ALP does not fund the military and would rather negotiate deals with Beijing than push back against CCP aggression.
Xi knows that under Morrison, Australia would never become a Chinese vassal state. But he would draw some comfort from the ALP’s weak track record on defence and border protection.
The Global Times also revealed that for Xi and the CCP, Morrison goes beyond being just annoying because he has demonstrated effectiveness at blocking Xi’s plans.
Having accidentally helped Morrison, it is going to be interesting to see how the CCP’s propaganda machine now try to reverse this mistake.
It was so unedifying that after the event, even some journalists must have had reason to pause and reflect upon just how much they had fallen for a year of the ALP’s grubby spin doctored personal attacks on Morrison. The ALP played the man not the ball and sloppy journalism allowed their spin-team to get away with this for a year.
After more than a year of the ALP keeping their relentless anti-Morrison attacks alive in the news, even some battlers who’d previously voted for Morrison were beginning to believe the ALP’s spin doctored lines.
But the nastiness of the Press Club attacks seemed to give many battlers pause for thought because it was so clear Morrison was not getting a fair go. And so, we saw a curious mood shift after the Press Club’s disturbing spectacle, and there was a discernible closing of the ranks around Morrison from many previously wavering voters and from his own team.
Further, the Press Club pile on was so extreme that it re-energised Morrison. Instead of falling in a heap, Morrison opted to hit back hard so as to break the hold of Labor’s “Scotty from marketing” mantra. And to break this ALP narrative he exploited Labor’s weak points.
For a year, the ALP has spent so much time attacking Morrison-as-person that they had not put up any policies of their own. So there was a policy vacuum.
Morrison obligingly filled this policy vacuum by highlighting his national security strengths and foreign policy successes. And against his successes, he could easily point to Labor’s weak track record in this area.
So why is Albanese so visibly rattled by this shift to a national security narrative?
The reason is clear—Labor has a long record of running weak on defence expenditure and border protection. The last time Labor was in power, they slashed defence spending such that in the 2012-13 budget defence spending as a share of GDP fell to only 1.56 percent. This was the lowest level of defence funding since World War II.
In Labor’s 2016-17 budget, they cut or deferred more than $16 billion (US$11.5 billion) from the defence budget. In their last three years of government, Labor cut defence spending by 17.9 percent in real terms. Not surprisingly, by the time Labor left office, their own 2009 Defence Capability Plan was underfunded by some $8.4 billion (US$6 billion).
The above speaks for itself. Australian voters know that Labor will always prefer to spend on its welfare programs rather than defence.
Morrison just has to remind voters of this. And given that we are living in an era when China’s Xi and Russia’s Putin are building up their military forces, talking tough and working together, Australian voters need little reminding that the world is becoming a much more dangerous place.
Given Labor’s poor record on defence, it is little wonder that Albanese looked so upset at the prospect of national security becoming an election issue.
To make matters even worse, Albanese knows large numbers of the Labor Party support Paul Keating’s views on national security. So, if Albanese tries to match Morrison’s strongly pro-defence line, he runs the risk of annoying his own team.
Keating, a former Australian prime minister, has come out against AUKUS and against helping the West defend Taiwan. He has long advocated that Australia should turn itself into an Asian nation, which seems to involve negotiating a relationship with China where the CCP sets the terms for trading with Australia. A case of accepting vassal status if that’s the price of peace and trade.
Because the ALP’s track record on defence and border protection lends itself to a Keating-type model, Morrison just has to keep hammering away at national security in order to cause trouble for Albanese.
Against that, Labor’s spin doctors will presumably keep pushing their “Scotty from marketing is untrustworthy” line.
Get ready for a nasty election.
