From a nation ablaze, to “I can’t breathe”, with floods, and a once-in-a-century pandemic in between. It has been the longest ever six months of the post-war era in Australia. Politics, and perhaps even “the two-party system”, have been suspended, or at least the circadian rhythms of sound-bites and school bus back-seat squabbling we have come to expect in the daily news cycle. 

His eminence John Howard called it: “… there are no ideological constraints at this time”. Ideology has been (partly) forced into a back seat by facts, science, and the normally profoundly dull world of public service. In response to Covid-19, hundreds of billions of dollars in public welfare spending and stimulus have been splashed around by a Liberal National Party government that one short year ago, was proclaiming the nation “back in black” (next year).  Left is right and down is up, and now we are officially in recession.

Public health bureaucrats such as Brendan Murphy, the Chief Medical Officer of Australia, and his slew of deputies have emerged from their subterranean offices to present Australia’s response to Covid-19 in an apolitical light. What’s more, federalism is back. The power and agency of the state and territory governments in their own jurisdictions has shone through, as Gladys Berejiklian and Daniel Andrews in particular have demonstrated through their determination not to have Canberra dictate the terms of the national response.

All of this, a little surprisingly, has worked out tickety-boo for Scott Morrison. Following his Hawaii holiday from hell around the start of the year, Newspoll records that Morrison’s “Better PM” numbers have leapt a dramatic 17 points between January and June, opening up a sizable lead over Anthony Albanese. Almost all of that leap materialised between the March and April polling, just as the Prime Minister announced its first dramatic crackdown (March 22nd) and a mass closure of pubs, clubs, places of worship and indoor sporting venues.

It’s a paradox; Australians have been trained to switch off when politicians open their mouths, they have a healthy scepticism and distrust of governments, most want to minimise the time and space that politics and political debate consume in their lives. Then a government comes along, and acting on public health advice, closes pubs, clubs, cafes and restaurants, kills organised sport dead, and tells them to stay home. That’s about all the sacred cows carved up. So what does Australia do? Australia does pretty much just what it is told, in droves. Our health response to Covid-19 looks set to be the envy of most of the world, and the Prime Minister, hoisted aloft on the shoulders of public health bureaucrats, channeling Sharks coach Shane Flanagan after the 2016 NRL grand final.

So just how well has Scott Morrison and his team actually performed during the crisis? It is difficult to argue with or to get past the numbers: clearly at aggregate level, Australia’s approach to date has been very successful in minimising the numbers of Covid-19 deaths and cases. This data visualiser from the Financial Times tells the stories of millions across the globe in that now ubiquitous line chart format. The egregious mistakes made in the UK and the US have been avoided here. Sure, the geography helps. But the efforts of Morrison and his team and the decisions that they have made have, overall, contributed net positively to helping Australia reduce the numbers of cases and deaths. In particular, the JobSeeker supplement and $130 billion JobKeeper package announced on March 22nd and March 30th respectively were bold steps by a government naturally disinclined to take such steps, and for that, the government deserves some plaudits.

That’s not to say there have not been serious missteps and highly questionable decisions:

• Communication chaos – in the early stages of the lockdown, the Prime Minister and indeed the National Cabinet struggled to communicate effectively and in a manner that was reassuring to people. Brendan Murphy was clearly not up to the immediate media relations ask of him. Convening National Cabinet meetings in the evening and late evening national press conferences (in which definitions and confusing lockdown conditions were tripped over in a GST cake like fashion) created a fearful muddle for the general public, as Katherine Murphy captured in the Guardian at the time:

Tuesday night’s cascading instructions from Scott Morrison’s podium were stay home everyone, but if you have a job, you are an essential worker, so make sure you keep working. Go to school, but don’t go to the foodcourt. Five at a wedding, 10 at a funeral, 10 at a bootcamp, but no yoga. No waxing, but a hairdresser for 30 minutes is still OK.

Furthermore, Scott Morrison and particularly Premiers Gladys Berejiklian and Daniel Andrews were rarely singing from the same song sheet, issuing quite different advice and suggestions about when lockdowns might happen and when they might be eased. 

Little wonder the country ran out of toilet paper.

• Announcing SuperDrainer – allowing early access to superannuation further encourages draw-down of funds (and in this market, the crystallisation of share market losses) that are inherently meant to be used to help foster greater financial self-sufficiency and comfort in people’s old age.

• JobKeeper targeting flaws – the design of the JobKeeper package effectively excluded large swathes of workers from receiving support, particular artists and entertainment sector workers, casual and gig-economy workers, and those in the university sector. There is the sense that the ideology that the Morrison Government promised to throw out the window has been brought to bear on sectors housing some of its most vehement and effective critics.

• JobKeeper $60 billion error – fundamentally this is a departmental bungle in application form design and processing rather than anything that can be laid at the feet of the government, but $60 billion is a fair chunk of change to miscalculate

• HomeBuilder just plain sucks – the latest high profile Covid-19 support policy (a $25K grant for certain home build/renovation projects) and the least well designed of the lot, slain in 90 seconds by Andrew Leigh in parliament

• COVIDSafe vapourware? – the app was announced with great fanfare on April 26th but since then, the government has provided little details of its efficacy aside from the numbers of people who have downloaded it. Most likely this is because official data suggests the app has been ineffective and pointless to date. 

• #BlackLivesMatter protest suppression – fear of the risks of spreading Covid-19 is a legitimate reason to not attend a mass protest. Nevertheless, a pandemic should not be used as a weapon to discourage political activism or freedom of expression; Morrison’s dictum to “stay home” is wilfully over-simplistic. Anthony Albanese has found himself at lockstep with the government and at loggerheads with some of his own team on this issue. A more nuanced position is needed.

This being 2020, some more twists in the tale will be coming soon. For Scott Morrison, however, Covid-19 has so far been successfully controlled locally, his Hawaii hijinks have been banished from the national consciousness and Newspoll indicates that 56% of Australians believe him a better Prime Minister than Anthony Albanese. 

The truism that 2020 has been a shit year so far for all of us, so far, hasn’t applied to #ScottyFromMarketing.

In January, for the first time in over seventeen months, the Prime Minister was not the nation’s preferred Prime Minister, according to Newspoll. It is notable that it has taken a big kahuna brainfart for us to reach this point; the epic reveal of a tin ear that it wasn’t previously clear Scott Morrison had. As the bushfire crisis unfolded and expanded, the Prime Minister’s dissembling unfolded and expanded with it; hiding from the nation on holiday, reluctantly revealing his whereabouts, refusing to return home early, and finally, reluctantly returning with a sheepish mea culpa. Once back, he was unforgivably slow to offer financial support from the Commonwealth; for a number of days the country’s bushfire relief effort was led principally by Celeste Barber. He remains indefatigable in his mission to ignore the connection between the extent of the bushfires and climate change, despite the science being simple enough in this instance that a kindergarten child can comprehend.

It is against this backdrop that Anthony Albanese has surfed from some profoundly middling waters to be adjudged Australia’s preferred Prime Minister; for how long, time will tell. Until this latest polling, it could barely be argued that Labor have a more popular leader in Albanese than they did in Bill Shorten. All of Albanese’s preferred Prime Minister poll results prior to January have been weaker than or equal to Shorten’s ratings in 2019. His net satisfaction ratings have been notably higher, but often below zero. His cachet in the inner-city is solid, but dusty, given his concerted wariness to commit Labor to policy positions at this stage of the election cycle. On climate change, having made a point of “going listening” in rural Queensland, he has been supine and unconvincing, even while the country has burned.

Labor’s Campaign Review [PDF] handily collates most of the common talking points we have all heard regarding why Labor failed to win the election. There is a clear vibe that Labor strategists believe they lost because the party’s agenda was scatter-gun dense and therefore too vulnerable. We can certainly observe that Albanese has committed to little and rarely dared stray from the political centre ground since the election. The unconvincing leadership of Bill Shorten is also widely regarded as one of the key causal factors in the result. Since June 2017, Shorten’s net satisfaction rating in his role as Opposition Leader as recorded by Newspoll was frequently worse than -20, and almost always below -10. Shorten improved his standing as the election campaign drew to a close, but it was clear that a sizable proportion of the population simply did not like the Opposition Leader and could not bring themselves to vote for him.

Viewed in retrospect, public perceptions of the specific individual leading each party would seem to have had a significant role in determining the election outcome. Malcolm Turnbull would almost certainly have struggled to lead the Coalition to victory in May 2019; as Labor’s Campaign Review highlights, Labor had developed negative campaign strategies tuned and proven to be effective against the former Member for Wentworth, but which proved far less impactful to #ScottyFromMarketing. It is notable that the Coalition’s electoral fortunes were improved by changing their leader. Despite the spiral of leadership instability that politically crucified Labor during the Rudd/Gillard years, it is difficult to argue that the general public did not, on balance, approve of the abrupt change in leadership from Turnbull to Morrison. Shades of Hayden and Hawke. Sometimes, might we conclude, will the public get right behind some backstabbing?

Allegedly, Labor’s united senior leadership team heading into May 2019 was one of its key electoral strengths – a core group of respected individuals that had not changed since the previous election. But was it? If Labor had managed to find a more popular leader prior to the 2019 election, like the Coalition did, could they have had a better chance of winning the election? It is a question the party will have to face again. In Albanese, Labor once again have a leader who divides opinion and some swing voters may find it difficult to embrace voting for. His performance during the bushfire crisis has been prime ministerial, but Labor must remember that Albanese does not just have to be able to defeat Morrison. He must have the requisite personal support to defeat whomever the Coalition replaces Morrison with during the next couple of years.

When was the last time you could genuinely say that you observed a “miracle”?

The word describes an event that has been touched by some form of magic, religious or otherwise. It perfectly describes a situation where something irrationally positive occurs, something that cannot be logically processed or that seemingly transcends logic and the rules of natural law. When Josh Frydenberg revealed that his Prime Minister was praying for a miracle on election eve, and Scott Morrison evoked the same word in claiming victory in the Wentworth Hotel’s headlights the following night, it betrayed the truth: this was not an outcome that the Coalition was expecting. Time to slap that Jesus fish on the back window of the Prime Ministerial comcar, if it wasn’t there already. Sometimes, magic does happen.

A miraculous victory for one party in a contest implies a freakish or unnatural defeat for the rest. Such a defeat is difficult to process, and it is tempting to reach for those retrospectively obvious conclusions that were so obvious that they went completely undetected prior to the election. Quite literally years worth of polling suggested a Labor victory on Saturday evening. The betting markets suggested a crushing Labor victory on Saturday evening. The Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten, was widely judged to have been the winner, or at least to have held his own, in the campaign’s three televised election debates. For crying out loud, a much-respected and widely-loved (exceedingly rare qualities for a former Australian politician) party legend passed away in the last days of the election campaign, appealing to the sentimentality of voters. The scene was set perfectly for a passing of the baton that had been anticipated by the political class and the media for what seems like an age.

Even with the fairy dust still fluttering from the rafters and settling on the floor of the Wentworth Hotel’s ballroom, there is a natural urge – a need – to rationalise what happened and to try to explain who dropped that baton and how it was dropped. Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law spoke of technology, but it applies equally to the “miracle” we have just witnessed: any sufficiently complex event is indistinguishable from magic. A federal election with 16.4 million enrolled voters at different stages of their lives, with different political beliefs, and different interpretations of the individual policies put forward by Labor, is a fucking complex event. The media and commentariat do their darnedest to give us all answers, but they do not have the answers. The data is not there, nobody has that data and it is unlikely that anybody ever will. All the media have to guide us are their opinions, anecdotes, simplifications, internal party leaks often with their own agendas, and strict time and/or word limits in getting their work published.

If the exact reasons for the election result will perhaps remain unknowable, there are still some fundamentals to be aired. Let the therapy begin.

Labor was very unsuccessful in convincing non-Labor voters in Queensland and Tasmania and fairly unsuccessful in convincing non-Labor voters in New South Wales about its policy program

Non-Labor voters in Queensland roundly rejected the proposition of a Shorten Labor Government; the only seats in that state set to change hands at the election are likely to be a couple of Labor seats lost to the Liberal National Party (Herbert and Longman). One Nation and Clive Palmer’s megabucks played a role, but should not be wielded as an excuse. If Labor was so reliant on making gains in Queensland, what was the compelling vision that Labor was offering ordinary Queenslanders in this campaign? Or expanding the point, ordinary outer-suburban voters? Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. If I tried, I would be describing a grab-bag of things that don’t necessarily add up to a convincing whole, especially when hedged in voter’s minds against the so-called ‘retiree tax’ and ‘inheritance tax’ phantoms evoked by the Coalition.

The paltry gain of Gilmore in New South Wales was cancelled out by the predictable loss of Lindsay following the mishandling of the Emma Husar saga. Tasmania looks set to contribute two crucial seats to the Coalition’s tally in the House of Representatives, making Scott Morrison’s historic decision to fly there on election day look inspired. In these three states, in particular, the results indicate a complete absence of a clamouring for change by non-Labor voters.

Bill Shorten had a go and he had to go

The broad consensus was that Bill Shorten personally grew into the role he sought during the campaign, despite fundamentally lacking popularity with much of the electorate. He won or at least drew even with the Prime Minister in the three election debates, and as the figurehead of an ambitious, controversial policy program, he did a fairly credible job of rebutting criticism. Shorten’s performance was reminiscent of Kim Beazley’s performance in 1999 and Ed Miliband in the UK in 2015. For Labor or Labour supporters, there is a clear sense of the alternate timeline governments that might have been.

With this result, however, it is also fair to say that Bill Shorten has exhausted his potential as leader. Two bites at the cherry should have been enough; he made an essential choice in stepping down from the leadership on Saturday night.

Current polling methods and (as a result) betting markets are bunkum

It should not be possible, all things being equal, for an Opposition which has won effectively every poll for years – including exit polls and several not too long ago by a landslide margin – to lose the one poll that matters. The current machinery of polling, brutally aggregating across geographies, has generated a margin of error that far exceeds the true split between the parties, rendering completely misleading numbers. We live today in a largely landline-free world where for many, the default cadence is to hang up on cold calls or to not necessarily answer the phone at all. Changes are needed.

A special mention goes to Sportsbet, who paid out $1.3 million dollars on a Labor victory days before the election, in addition to the millions of dollars it likely paid out on the Coalition winning.

In fairness, it is unreasonable to expect betting operators or gamblers to anticipate Scott Morrison’s Queensland ‘miracle’, when quite literally nobody else seriously did. If there is any consolation here at all for Labor, it is that ‘magic’ can indeed be summoned from polling dust; miracles can happen, but only if the party successfully appeals to enough of the right people in the right electorates. It is that simple, and that complicated.