April 7, 2025 • 21 mins
US President Donald Trump has officially unleashed chaos on the world's financial markets. It's a strange time to be campaigning for election, but Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton must adjust and carry on. So how is the incredible international volatility impacting the election campaign? Will all this disruption be favourable for the incumbent PM? And do Australian voters really want a candidate promising change at this moment in history?
Regular columnist for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, and former adviser to Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Sean Kelly, joins Jacqueline Maley to discuss.You can read Sean Kelly's column here: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australians-want-change-but-not-if-it-looks-like-donald-trump-20250406-p5lpii.html
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S1 (00:00):
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is inside politics. I'm Jacqueline Maley. US President Donald
Trump has officially unleashed chaos on the world's financial markets.
It's a strange time to be campaigning for election, but
Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton must adjust and carry on.
(00:20):
So how is this incredible international volatility impacting the election campaign?
Will all this disruption be favourable for the incumbent PM?
And do Australian voters really want a candidate promising change
at this moment in history? Here to discuss all this
and more, we have our very special guest, Sean Kelly,
who joins us from Melbourne. Sean Kelly, of course, writes
(00:43):
an excellent column for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Welcome, Sean.
S2 (00:47):
Thanks for having me on.
S1 (00:49):
And listeners won't be able to see this, but Sean
is wearing an excellent sort of tartan lined jacket, which
I previously commented on. Anyway, let's get down to business.
I just want to talk briefly about the developments that
we've seen this week. So the week began rather badly
for Peter Dutton, didn't it?
S2 (01:05):
Well, yes and no. I would say he put into
the newspapers the night before a massive backflip on work
from home, essentially saying they would not be forcing public
servants back into the office.
S3 (01:20):
Look, I think we've made a mistake in relation to
this policy, Sarah, and I think it's important that we
say that and recognise it. And our intention always was
to make sure that we're taxpayers are working hard and
their money is being spent to pay wages, that it's
being spent efficiently. And that, of.
S2 (01:35):
Course, now that was a back down from a policy
that would have affected a fair few public servants. But
the problem for him and the Liberal Party was that
there was a sense out in voter land that people
thought this applied to everybody, or at the least thought
this was the beginning of a push by the coalition
to get everybody back in the office. And I think
(01:55):
the coalition really did miss a trick here. They underestimated
the heat around this issue. I've found whenever I've written
about this issue, straying a little away from my usual
politics beat, there's a really large reaction to it. And
I feel all of the businesses that have been pushing
people to get back to the office and the politicians
who have been doing likewise, aren't properly aware of just
(02:16):
how passionately people feel about this. So, look, it was
bad in the sense that it chews up another day.
It shines a spotlight on how messy his campaign has
been on the on the messiness around the development of policy.
But the reason I hesitate to say it was a
bad start to the week is it has, or it
potentially allows him a reset. When you have a problem
(02:40):
in a campaign, when you have something that is damaging you,
the worst thing a campaign can do is think, well,
we can't change this. It's too late. You can always
change things from the eye of the storm. And so
they made the right decision, I think, to get out
there and flip that. And that then should allow them
to push the debate back onto topics that are a
(03:02):
bit more helpful to them. It's important to remember that
we're still really early in the campaign here. There are
a number of weeks to go. A lot of campaigns
start badly.
S1 (03:11):
Isn't it hard, though, for them now to talk much
about their policy to cut back on the civil service,
which they've already sort of walked back and they've said
that they're not going to do any forced redundancies. I
think they want to get rid of 41,000 public servants,
which they say is the number that the Albanese government
has put on since it's been in power. But they're
now saying that they're going to do that via natural attrition.
(03:34):
I mean, it's a major policy or one of the
very few major policies that they have in quite a
threadbare programme of policies. And that's tainted now too, isn't it?
S2 (03:46):
Oh, look. Absolutely. And they have been confused and confusing
on this policy for a number of months, giving different
answers about how many public servants refusing to say exactly
how those public servants would go. Whether it would be
natural attrition, whether it would be forced redundancies. Peter Dutton
was still refusing to answer this definitively in the last
couple of months. So this absolutely pours a lot of
(04:08):
cold water over that policy. Now, as you say this.
The problem really is that this is one of very
few policies that they have out there. I don't think
that cutting the public service back is a tremendously important
policy in terms of winning voters over. It was probably
a little bit of a signalling policy in terms of
(04:30):
suggesting that the coalition will always be responsible with money
and that traditional conservative messaging. But I don't think you
are ever going to get a huge number of votes
by cutting back on public servants. The difficulty, though, and
you see this in the backflip on work from home,
and you see this on the change in the public
service policy, is that there just aren't enough policies out
there to hold Peter Dutton up as a solid candidate. Candidates.
(04:54):
There just aren't enough policies out there telling voters exactly
who he is. And I think this is a really
important point to remember, and I've seen a few people
write about it in the last couple of days, that
politicians fundamentally communicate who they are, not just by whether
they smile at the cameras or by whether they kick
a football, but by the policies they put out there.
(05:17):
And I think politicians who forget that and think that
an election campaign or the three years between election campaigns
can be won simply through rhetoric and making huge mistakes.
S1 (05:29):
Mhm. Yeah. Okay. So we're actually deeper than, than we
give ourselves credit for perhaps that people, even people who
are not particularly engaged with politics or only wake up
to it when they're forced to sort of vote every
three years, they actually look at the policies because they
tell us something about the person that we're electing, if
nothing else.
S2 (05:47):
I think so. I think I think we often forget
about politics is that it's not unlike the way we
evaluate people in day to day life. You can make
a first impression when you meet somebody and their manner
will tell you something, but ultimately, how they behave over
the next weeks and months is going to tell you
whether you really can trust them and the types of
things they're likely to do in particular situations. And I
(06:08):
think we make very similar judgments about politicians over time.
And Peter Dutton, to his immense detriment, I think has
had three years and hasn't really taken that chance. You know,
a lot of people are talking about the the last
week and a half and how bad that's been for
Peter Dutton, and it has been a bad start to
the campaign, but it's actually hard to point to many
(06:28):
massive mistakes he's made. It was clearly a mistake saying
that he'd prefer Sydney over Canberra. I'd love to live
at Kirribilli. That was a distraction, but he hasn't actually
made a huge number of mistakes in the last week
and a half. What he has failed to do is
take opportunities. He didn't use his budget reply strongly enough.
He hasn't announced dramatic policies that might shift the debate.
(06:49):
His approach to Donald Trump wasn't sufficiently different from Anthony
Albanese to make a real splash, to suggest to voters
the ways that he might be a prime minister that
would be different and superior to Anthony Albanese. And I
think that if you are behind in a campaign and
of course, the polls could be wrong, but right now
they suggest that Peter Dutton is behind. You have to
(07:12):
take your chances. And I think that's his major flaw
in this campaign so far.
S1 (07:17):
What do you think about his communication ability? Because we
haven't seen a lot of it, as you say, in
the last three years, we haven't seen a lot of
him communicating to voters off the cuff or interacting with
journalists in any kind of natural environment. We haven't seen
a lot of him on the hustings, and we haven't
really seen him in a toe to toe debate situation,
like we're going to be seeing him this week. I mean,
(07:39):
something like the the work from home policy, if that
had been better communicated or better articulated by Dutton himself,
because he really left the heavy lifting to Jane Hume
on that. I mean, do you think he's very good
at communicating from what we've seen so far?
S2 (07:56):
Look, look, it's a great question. And in a way,
it comes back to all of the problems with the
shaping of Peter Dutton's campaign over the last few years,
which is essentially that he's left everything very late. So
he's left the announcement of policies very late. That means
he's on the back foot now. The work from home policy. Yes,
it's a mistake. Yes, he's reversed it. But imagine if
(08:17):
he'd announced it three months ago and had reversed it
two months ago. We wouldn't now be talking about it
in the midst of an election campaign, and similarly with communication.
He's deliberately, systematically avoided facing the press gallery in Canberra,
the journalists who are going to be most knowledgeable about
the details of any policies, he announced. He has avoided
(08:37):
unfriendly media interviews to a very large extent. And those
things mean that he's not match fit. He's not prepared
to face anybody but the most amicable welcoming of interviewers,
and I think you can really see that. I don't
think he's a terrible communicator, by the way. I think
he does a pretty good job of remaining calm. I
(08:59):
think he does a pretty good job of barreling through
an interview when he needs to, but he is not
good at answering the detail of policies. And I think
in a campaign that can really kill you.
S1 (09:12):
Yeah. And just sort of articulating some sort of vision
or even a sense of personality. In your column this week,
you made an intriguing argument about Australia's appetite for change.
You were basically saying that we often say that we
want change, or we want a certain area or difficulty
or challenge fixed, but when we get presented with an
(09:33):
actual policy, we backtrack and say no. Can you elaborate
on what you mean by that?
S2 (09:38):
Yeah, I think you've seen this in a in a
number of areas over the years. I think you could
see it in the debate around the indigenous voice to Parliament.
Polls would say that Australians wanted something to be done
about indigenous affairs, that they wanted the standard of living,
of Indigenous Australians improved, even that they thought Indigenous Australians
should have more of a say more broadly. But when
a proposal came up to actually change those things, Australians
(10:02):
thought about it and thought, oh no, not, not that change.
We want change. Just not that one. I think the
same thing happened on climate change. Australians were in favour,
drastic favour of wanting something to happen on climate change.
But a carbon price. No no no no no thank you.
And I think this it's not just Australia. This happens
around the world. People are broadly in favour of change.
(10:24):
They're broadly in favour of fixing problems. But when you
actually ask them, well what about this thing which is
going to change society in some way or is going
to change your life in some way, they suddenly get very,
very worried about the changes, which is why some of
the most successful changes over the years are governments have
effectively sprung on people mid-term or early in their term,
(10:47):
which means that they've been in place long enough by
the next election for voters to have stopped worrying about them.
You know, you could say Anthony Albanese changes to the
stage three tax cuts. You know, there was an enormous
uproar about them for a couple of weeks and broken promises.
But nobody's talking about them anymore.
S1 (11:03):
No. No one probably notices them very much at all.
You also talk in your column. It was a great column.
I urge people to go and read it if they
haven't already. But you talk about the effect of Trump
2.0 on our domestic election campaign, and it seems like
that effect is absolutely inescapable, particularly this week. There's been
so much volatility in the financial markets, and it really
(11:24):
feels like the global order is being rearranged in a
way that we haven't seen since the Second World War.
You talk about how that volatility might affect Australians appetite
for change, and how it might favour incumbents like Anthony Albanese.
Can you elaborate on that?
S2 (11:41):
Yeah. Well, I think this is the most dramatic example
of the phenomenon I was just talking about people around
the world, and certainly people in Australia, especially young people,
have been saying for quite some time that they want
really dramatic change, they want the system shifted, and Donald
Trump is providing a version of that, and suddenly people
are saying, oh, well, yes, we want dramatic change. We
(12:02):
want the system torn down, but we don't want it
torn down exactly like this by this exact person in
this exact way. And I think what's really interesting about
that in the context of this election, is whether this
drives people away from that idea of change more broadly,
or whether they do just limit their reservations and their
(12:22):
reluctance to Donald Trump. So in the context of our election,
whether that pushes people to Anthony Albanese, just as in
a direct head to head comparison with Peter Dutton, or whether, yeah, sure,
they might in this particular environment choose the incumbent over
the opposition, but whether they actually still like the idea
(12:43):
of change more broadly and still flock to the third
parties the Greens, the community, independents, various other independents. And
I think that's a really interesting question. Obviously, we're not
going to get a sense of that until election night.
Possibly even the days after, depending on how close the
election is. But that, for me, is one of the
most fascinating things about this election. Whether people turn away
(13:06):
from the idea of change more broadly, or whether they
just turn away from the idea of change as wrought
by Donald Trump.
S1 (13:14):
What do you think of the Peter Dutton argument that
he is the better leader to deal with Donald Trump
in the white House, that Albanese has shown himself to
be weak and ineffectual and, you know, famously can't even
get sort of Trump on the phone to argue Australia's
case about tariffs. Do you think that's a persuasive argument
for voters?
S2 (13:35):
I thought the not being able to get a phone
call argument sounded persuasive. I don't think it was real
in the sense that I don't think Donald Trump was
really giving anybody the time of day at that point.
But I thought it sounded like a pretty strong line.
It is a common sense appeal. But I thought Peter
(13:55):
Dutton ended up sounding a little bit silly after the
tariffs were actually announced, when he briefly suggested he could
have got a different deal that was clearly patently false
to anybody following it. And I think in a way
the government really benefited from being able to say, look,
it's 10%. It's the it's the lowest of all of
these crazy tariffs you're seeing around the globe. I think
(14:16):
this is another really interesting aspect of this campaign, the
way things have shifted in various ways. And some of
this is entirely luck. Circumstances which you might have thought
would play against Anthony Albanese, like the imposition of tariffs,
have ended up playing quite well for him. And some
sometimes that's just momentum, sometimes that's just the way events
(14:38):
play out. And I think this is a more broadly
an interesting question about this election, whether it is being
driven much at all by what Anthony Albanese says or
what Peter Dutton says, or whether we're really we're looking
at a political situation that's driven by external factors. First,
you had inflation driving people away from Anthony Albanese, making
(14:59):
it look like Peter Dutton was a very effective campaigner.
And as inflation has come off the boil a bit
and you've got an interest rate cut, you saw people
coming back to the government. Now Donald Trump is driving
voters back to incumbents across the world. You know, I
think we need to be wary of saying, well, Anthony
Albanese has played this brilliantly. It's happening everywhere. Now. All
(15:20):
that said, a week and a half in Anthony Albanese
is having a better campaign than Peter Dutton. But as
I said, it's a week and a half in.
S1 (15:27):
You've worked for Kevin Rudd and you've worked for Julia Gillard,
both of whom were prime ministers, you will recall. Can
you tell us a bit about what it's like to
be inside a campaign, and when that switch is flipped from,
you know, government mode to campaign mode. What changes what
what does a day look like? What, you know, how
many meetings are held. And you know, how much does
(15:49):
sort of the campaign HQ, the party machine take over?
S2 (15:53):
There are lots of different places you can work in
a campaign. I did one campaign in campaign headquarters. I
remember the air conditioning was broken such that it was freezing.
It was. It was spring, verging on summer, and I
was wearing a gigantic jacket every day. Which just goes
to show, campaigns often get the tiniest things completely wrong
(16:14):
in that environment. There is an enormous amount of pressure
on you not to stuff up. I think that's the
dominant thing. It's almost less about making gains for for
most people working on a campaign because they're not making
the big decisions. But what they are doing is doing
is preparing press releases or answering media calls or checking
policy details. And if you make an error in any
(16:35):
one of those, you could end up being the person
who derails the party's campaign costs your party government. So
that sense of constant pressure is immense. And then you
have the travelling team who are out there with the
Prime Minister or the opposition leader. And that's a very,
very different situation, because again, yes, you have immense pressure
(16:57):
on you not to make mistakes, but mistakes are going
to be made across a 5 or 6 week campaign.
In a way, the pressure is on that other end,
that entrepreneurial element, if you like the, um, you need
to know when you have to make shifts and when
you can try to grab advantages. For example, Peter Dutton
(17:18):
backflipping on work from home. You know, that is a
a massive call that you can you can take input
from everywhere. But ultimately that is a decision that is
going to be made by the leader and that means
the leader in consultation, probably with party headquarters, but also
with the small travelling team of people that he trusts.
S1 (17:35):
Yeah.
S2 (17:35):
And I think that travelling team, um, you know, there's
camaraderie there, but it's very lonely. For that reason, there is,
because it is really a very small group. You're talking
about who can completely shift the dynamics of the campaign.
And if you are behind. And I remember this in
2010 with Julia Gillard, we were behind the the Labor
(18:00):
Secretariat had either stopped polling or stopped advertising, I can't
remember which, but it was an indication of how absolutely
stuffed the campaign was at one point. You might remember
this is when Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard still seemed
to be warring. There was an awful photo opportunity between
them both to try to declare a truce. I think
maybe it did more damage than help. Uh, there were
(18:21):
awful leaks coming out, and, you know, there was a
small group of us who had to try to figure
out what needed to change, and dramatic changes were needed.
And that's and nobody else can really tell you what
to do in that situation. They can provide very, very
valuable advice, particularly, you know, those people who are very
(18:42):
good at polling can provide very useful advice during a campaign.
But ultimately it's a small group of people. And of course,
ultimately it comes down to the leader themselves. And I
think that's that's something people forget a little bit. When
we watch a campaign play out. We think, well, the
leader is under pressure because they have to answer questions
at a press conference. If they have to not make
mistakes and they have to say the right thing and
(19:04):
prosecute the message effectively. But the real pressure is in
making those decisions every day, because ultimately there's only one
head on the chopping block.
S1 (19:13):
What's the atmosphere like in a campaign that's not going well? Um,
you know, within that small cabal of people who are
travelling with with the leader and, you know, have you
I mean, how much sort of psychological bolstering is required
of the leader, him or herself, how much comfort is
required on a personal level for that person?
S4 (19:33):
It's a really good question.
S2 (19:35):
I don't think there is a one size fits all answer,
because every leader is so different from every other leader.
But you point to a really important issue, which is
that it does come down to psychology to a very
large extent. And I think you can see that in
this campaign. I think in the last week and a half,
Anthony Albanese has looked much sharper and much more confident
(19:59):
than he has for a long time. And I don't
think that's because he's suddenly figured out how to campaign better.
I think a huge amount of that is momentum, is
the sense of confidence he would be feeling from the
polls suddenly going his way. And I just don't think
you can overstate how important those mood shifts are.
S1 (20:18):
Yeah. No, I totally agree. And it does come down
to psychology. It's absolutely fascinating. We're recording this before the debate,
the first debate or the People's Forum, I should say,
which is on Tuesday night. So it's going to be
fascinating to see how these two men face up against
each other, because we've never really seen that before. So
I'm sure we'll both be watching. Sean, it's been so
(20:39):
fascinating to have you on, and I will hope that
you will come back again before the end of the campaign.
S2 (20:43):
Thanks so much. It's been great to chat.
S1 (20:45):
And bring your tartan lined bomber jacket with you. Thanks
very much.
S2 (20:50):
Thanks, Jackie.
S1 (20:53):
Today's episode of Inside Politics was produced by Julia Katzel
with technical assistance from Josh towers. Our executive producer is
Tammy Mills. Inside politics is a production of The Age
and The Sydney Morning Herald. To support our journalism, subscribe
to us by visiting The Age or smh.com.au. And sign
(21:15):
up for our Inside Politics newsletter to receive a comprehensive
summary of the most important news of the week, including
analysis and insights, in your inbox. Links are in the
show notes. I'm Jacqueline Maley, this is inside politics. Thank
you for listening.
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is inside politics. I'm Jacqueline Maley. US President Donald
Trump has officially unleashed chaos on the world's financial markets.
It's a strange time to be campaigning for election, but
Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton must adjust and carry on.
(00:20):
So how is this incredible international volatility impacting the election campaign?
Will all this disruption be favourable for the incumbent PM?
And do Australian voters really want a candidate promising change
at this moment in history? Here to discuss all this
and more, we have our very special guest, Sean Kelly,
who joins us from Melbourne. Sean Kelly, of course, writes
(00:43):
an excellent column for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Welcome, Sean.
S2 (00:47):
Thanks for having me on.
S1 (00:49):
And listeners won't be able to see this, but Sean
is wearing an excellent sort of tartan lined jacket, which
I previously commented on. Anyway, let's get down to business.
I just want to talk briefly about the developments that
we've seen this week. So the week began rather badly
for Peter Dutton, didn't it?
S2 (01:05):
Well, yes and no. I would say he put into
the newspapers the night before a massive backflip on work
from home, essentially saying they would not be forcing public
servants back into the office.
S3 (01:20):
Look, I think we've made a mistake in relation to
this policy, Sarah, and I think it's important that we
say that and recognise it. And our intention always was
to make sure that we're taxpayers are working hard and
their money is being spent to pay wages, that it's
being spent efficiently. And that, of.
S2 (01:35):
Course, now that was a back down from a policy
that would have affected a fair few public servants. But
the problem for him and the Liberal Party was that
there was a sense out in voter land that people
thought this applied to everybody, or at the least thought
this was the beginning of a push by the coalition
to get everybody back in the office. And I think
(01:55):
the coalition really did miss a trick here. They underestimated
the heat around this issue. I've found whenever I've written
about this issue, straying a little away from my usual
politics beat, there's a really large reaction to it. And
I feel all of the businesses that have been pushing
people to get back to the office and the politicians
who have been doing likewise, aren't properly aware of just
(02:16):
how passionately people feel about this. So, look, it was
bad in the sense that it chews up another day.
It shines a spotlight on how messy his campaign has
been on the on the messiness around the development of policy.
But the reason I hesitate to say it was a
bad start to the week is it has, or it
potentially allows him a reset. When you have a problem
(02:40):
in a campaign, when you have something that is damaging you,
the worst thing a campaign can do is think, well,
we can't change this. It's too late. You can always
change things from the eye of the storm. And so
they made the right decision, I think, to get out
there and flip that. And that then should allow them
to push the debate back onto topics that are a
(03:02):
bit more helpful to them. It's important to remember that
we're still really early in the campaign here. There are
a number of weeks to go. A lot of campaigns
start badly.
S1 (03:11):
Isn't it hard, though, for them now to talk much
about their policy to cut back on the civil service,
which they've already sort of walked back and they've said
that they're not going to do any forced redundancies. I
think they want to get rid of 41,000 public servants,
which they say is the number that the Albanese government
has put on since it's been in power. But they're
now saying that they're going to do that via natural attrition.
(03:34):
I mean, it's a major policy or one of the
very few major policies that they have in quite a
threadbare programme of policies. And that's tainted now too, isn't it?
S2 (03:46):
Oh, look. Absolutely. And they have been confused and confusing
on this policy for a number of months, giving different
answers about how many public servants refusing to say exactly
how those public servants would go. Whether it would be
natural attrition, whether it would be forced redundancies. Peter Dutton
was still refusing to answer this definitively in the last
couple of months. So this absolutely pours a lot of
(04:08):
cold water over that policy. Now, as you say this.
The problem really is that this is one of very
few policies that they have out there. I don't think
that cutting the public service back is a tremendously important
policy in terms of winning voters over. It was probably
a little bit of a signalling policy in terms of
(04:30):
suggesting that the coalition will always be responsible with money
and that traditional conservative messaging. But I don't think you
are ever going to get a huge number of votes
by cutting back on public servants. The difficulty, though, and
you see this in the backflip on work from home,
and you see this on the change in the public
service policy, is that there just aren't enough policies out
there to hold Peter Dutton up as a solid candidate. Candidates.
(04:54):
There just aren't enough policies out there telling voters exactly
who he is. And I think this is a really
important point to remember, and I've seen a few people
write about it in the last couple of days, that
politicians fundamentally communicate who they are, not just by whether
they smile at the cameras or by whether they kick
a football, but by the policies they put out there.
(05:17):
And I think politicians who forget that and think that
an election campaign or the three years between election campaigns
can be won simply through rhetoric and making huge mistakes.
S1 (05:29):
Mhm. Yeah. Okay. So we're actually deeper than, than we
give ourselves credit for perhaps that people, even people who
are not particularly engaged with politics or only wake up
to it when they're forced to sort of vote every
three years, they actually look at the policies because they
tell us something about the person that we're electing, if
nothing else.
S2 (05:47):
I think so. I think I think we often forget
about politics is that it's not unlike the way we
evaluate people in day to day life. You can make
a first impression when you meet somebody and their manner
will tell you something, but ultimately, how they behave over
the next weeks and months is going to tell you
whether you really can trust them and the types of
things they're likely to do in particular situations. And I
(06:08):
think we make very similar judgments about politicians over time.
And Peter Dutton, to his immense detriment, I think has
had three years and hasn't really taken that chance. You know,
a lot of people are talking about the the last
week and a half and how bad that's been for
Peter Dutton, and it has been a bad start to
the campaign, but it's actually hard to point to many
(06:28):
massive mistakes he's made. It was clearly a mistake saying
that he'd prefer Sydney over Canberra. I'd love to live
at Kirribilli. That was a distraction, but he hasn't actually
made a huge number of mistakes in the last week
and a half. What he has failed to do is
take opportunities. He didn't use his budget reply strongly enough.
He hasn't announced dramatic policies that might shift the debate.
(06:49):
His approach to Donald Trump wasn't sufficiently different from Anthony
Albanese to make a real splash, to suggest to voters
the ways that he might be a prime minister that
would be different and superior to Anthony Albanese. And I
think that if you are behind in a campaign and
of course, the polls could be wrong, but right now
they suggest that Peter Dutton is behind. You have to
(07:12):
take your chances. And I think that's his major flaw
in this campaign so far.
S1 (07:17):
What do you think about his communication ability? Because we
haven't seen a lot of it, as you say, in
the last three years, we haven't seen a lot of
him communicating to voters off the cuff or interacting with
journalists in any kind of natural environment. We haven't seen
a lot of him on the hustings, and we haven't
really seen him in a toe to toe debate situation,
like we're going to be seeing him this week. I mean,
(07:39):
something like the the work from home policy, if that
had been better communicated or better articulated by Dutton himself,
because he really left the heavy lifting to Jane Hume
on that. I mean, do you think he's very good
at communicating from what we've seen so far?
S2 (07:56):
Look, look, it's a great question. And in a way,
it comes back to all of the problems with the
shaping of Peter Dutton's campaign over the last few years,
which is essentially that he's left everything very late. So
he's left the announcement of policies very late. That means
he's on the back foot now. The work from home policy. Yes,
it's a mistake. Yes, he's reversed it. But imagine if
(08:17):
he'd announced it three months ago and had reversed it
two months ago. We wouldn't now be talking about it
in the midst of an election campaign, and similarly with communication.
He's deliberately, systematically avoided facing the press gallery in Canberra,
the journalists who are going to be most knowledgeable about
the details of any policies, he announced. He has avoided
(08:37):
unfriendly media interviews to a very large extent. And those
things mean that he's not match fit. He's not prepared
to face anybody but the most amicable welcoming of interviewers,
and I think you can really see that. I don't
think he's a terrible communicator, by the way. I think
he does a pretty good job of remaining calm. I
(08:59):
think he does a pretty good job of barreling through
an interview when he needs to, but he is not
good at answering the detail of policies. And I think
in a campaign that can really kill you.
S1 (09:12):
Yeah. And just sort of articulating some sort of vision
or even a sense of personality. In your column this week,
you made an intriguing argument about Australia's appetite for change.
You were basically saying that we often say that we
want change, or we want a certain area or difficulty
or challenge fixed, but when we get presented with an
(09:33):
actual policy, we backtrack and say no. Can you elaborate
on what you mean by that?
S2 (09:38):
Yeah, I think you've seen this in a in a
number of areas over the years. I think you could
see it in the debate around the indigenous voice to Parliament.
Polls would say that Australians wanted something to be done
about indigenous affairs, that they wanted the standard of living,
of Indigenous Australians improved, even that they thought Indigenous Australians
should have more of a say more broadly. But when
a proposal came up to actually change those things, Australians
(10:02):
thought about it and thought, oh no, not, not that change.
We want change. Just not that one. I think the
same thing happened on climate change. Australians were in favour,
drastic favour of wanting something to happen on climate change.
But a carbon price. No no no no no thank you.
And I think this it's not just Australia. This happens
around the world. People are broadly in favour of change.
(10:24):
They're broadly in favour of fixing problems. But when you
actually ask them, well what about this thing which is
going to change society in some way or is going
to change your life in some way, they suddenly get very,
very worried about the changes, which is why some of
the most successful changes over the years are governments have
effectively sprung on people mid-term or early in their term,
(10:47):
which means that they've been in place long enough by
the next election for voters to have stopped worrying about them.
You know, you could say Anthony Albanese changes to the
stage three tax cuts. You know, there was an enormous
uproar about them for a couple of weeks and broken promises.
But nobody's talking about them anymore.
S1 (11:03):
No. No one probably notices them very much at all.
You also talk in your column. It was a great column.
I urge people to go and read it if they
haven't already. But you talk about the effect of Trump
2.0 on our domestic election campaign, and it seems like
that effect is absolutely inescapable, particularly this week. There's been
so much volatility in the financial markets, and it really
(11:24):
feels like the global order is being rearranged in a
way that we haven't seen since the Second World War.
You talk about how that volatility might affect Australians appetite
for change, and how it might favour incumbents like Anthony Albanese.
Can you elaborate on that?
S2 (11:41):
Yeah. Well, I think this is the most dramatic example
of the phenomenon I was just talking about people around
the world, and certainly people in Australia, especially young people,
have been saying for quite some time that they want
really dramatic change, they want the system shifted, and Donald
Trump is providing a version of that, and suddenly people
are saying, oh, well, yes, we want dramatic change. We
(12:02):
want the system torn down, but we don't want it
torn down exactly like this by this exact person in
this exact way. And I think what's really interesting about
that in the context of this election, is whether this
drives people away from that idea of change more broadly,
or whether they do just limit their reservations and their
(12:22):
reluctance to Donald Trump. So in the context of our election,
whether that pushes people to Anthony Albanese, just as in
a direct head to head comparison with Peter Dutton, or whether, yeah, sure,
they might in this particular environment choose the incumbent over
the opposition, but whether they actually still like the idea
(12:43):
of change more broadly and still flock to the third
parties the Greens, the community, independents, various other independents. And
I think that's a really interesting question. Obviously, we're not
going to get a sense of that until election night.
Possibly even the days after, depending on how close the
election is. But that, for me, is one of the
most fascinating things about this election. Whether people turn away
(13:06):
from the idea of change more broadly, or whether they
just turn away from the idea of change as wrought
by Donald Trump.
S1 (13:14):
What do you think of the Peter Dutton argument that
he is the better leader to deal with Donald Trump
in the white House, that Albanese has shown himself to
be weak and ineffectual and, you know, famously can't even
get sort of Trump on the phone to argue Australia's
case about tariffs. Do you think that's a persuasive argument
for voters?
S2 (13:35):
I thought the not being able to get a phone
call argument sounded persuasive. I don't think it was real
in the sense that I don't think Donald Trump was
really giving anybody the time of day at that point.
But I thought it sounded like a pretty strong line.
It is a common sense appeal. But I thought Peter
(13:55):
Dutton ended up sounding a little bit silly after the
tariffs were actually announced, when he briefly suggested he could
have got a different deal that was clearly patently false
to anybody following it. And I think in a way
the government really benefited from being able to say, look,
it's 10%. It's the it's the lowest of all of
these crazy tariffs you're seeing around the globe. I think
(14:16):
this is another really interesting aspect of this campaign, the
way things have shifted in various ways. And some of
this is entirely luck. Circumstances which you might have thought
would play against Anthony Albanese, like the imposition of tariffs,
have ended up playing quite well for him. And some
sometimes that's just momentum, sometimes that's just the way events
(14:38):
play out. And I think this is a more broadly
an interesting question about this election, whether it is being
driven much at all by what Anthony Albanese says or
what Peter Dutton says, or whether we're really we're looking
at a political situation that's driven by external factors. First,
you had inflation driving people away from Anthony Albanese, making
(14:59):
it look like Peter Dutton was a very effective campaigner.
And as inflation has come off the boil a bit
and you've got an interest rate cut, you saw people
coming back to the government. Now Donald Trump is driving
voters back to incumbents across the world. You know, I
think we need to be wary of saying, well, Anthony
Albanese has played this brilliantly. It's happening everywhere. Now. All
(15:20):
that said, a week and a half in Anthony Albanese
is having a better campaign than Peter Dutton. But as
I said, it's a week and a half in.
S1 (15:27):
You've worked for Kevin Rudd and you've worked for Julia Gillard,
both of whom were prime ministers, you will recall. Can
you tell us a bit about what it's like to
be inside a campaign, and when that switch is flipped from,
you know, government mode to campaign mode. What changes what
what does a day look like? What, you know, how
many meetings are held. And you know, how much does
(15:49):
sort of the campaign HQ, the party machine take over?
S2 (15:53):
There are lots of different places you can work in
a campaign. I did one campaign in campaign headquarters. I
remember the air conditioning was broken such that it was freezing.
It was. It was spring, verging on summer, and I
was wearing a gigantic jacket every day. Which just goes
to show, campaigns often get the tiniest things completely wrong
(16:14):
in that environment. There is an enormous amount of pressure
on you not to stuff up. I think that's the
dominant thing. It's almost less about making gains for for
most people working on a campaign because they're not making
the big decisions. But what they are doing is doing
is preparing press releases or answering media calls or checking
policy details. And if you make an error in any
(16:35):
one of those, you could end up being the person
who derails the party's campaign costs your party government. So
that sense of constant pressure is immense. And then you
have the travelling team who are out there with the
Prime Minister or the opposition leader. And that's a very,
very different situation, because again, yes, you have immense pressure
(16:57):
on you not to make mistakes, but mistakes are going
to be made across a 5 or 6 week campaign.
In a way, the pressure is on that other end,
that entrepreneurial element, if you like the, um, you need
to know when you have to make shifts and when
you can try to grab advantages. For example, Peter Dutton
(17:18):
backflipping on work from home. You know, that is a
a massive call that you can you can take input
from everywhere. But ultimately that is a decision that is
going to be made by the leader and that means
the leader in consultation, probably with party headquarters, but also
with the small travelling team of people that he trusts.
S1 (17:35):
Yeah.
S2 (17:35):
And I think that travelling team, um, you know, there's
camaraderie there, but it's very lonely. For that reason, there is,
because it is really a very small group. You're talking
about who can completely shift the dynamics of the campaign.
And if you are behind. And I remember this in
2010 with Julia Gillard, we were behind the the Labor
(18:00):
Secretariat had either stopped polling or stopped advertising, I can't
remember which, but it was an indication of how absolutely
stuffed the campaign was at one point. You might remember
this is when Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard still seemed
to be warring. There was an awful photo opportunity between
them both to try to declare a truce. I think
maybe it did more damage than help. Uh, there were
(18:21):
awful leaks coming out, and, you know, there was a
small group of us who had to try to figure
out what needed to change, and dramatic changes were needed.
And that's and nobody else can really tell you what
to do in that situation. They can provide very, very
valuable advice, particularly, you know, those people who are very
(18:42):
good at polling can provide very useful advice during a campaign.
But ultimately it's a small group of people. And of course,
ultimately it comes down to the leader themselves. And I
think that's that's something people forget a little bit. When
we watch a campaign play out. We think, well, the
leader is under pressure because they have to answer questions
at a press conference. If they have to not make
mistakes and they have to say the right thing and
(19:04):
prosecute the message effectively. But the real pressure is in
making those decisions every day, because ultimately there's only one
head on the chopping block.
S1 (19:13):
What's the atmosphere like in a campaign that's not going well? Um,
you know, within that small cabal of people who are
travelling with with the leader and, you know, have you
I mean, how much sort of psychological bolstering is required
of the leader, him or herself, how much comfort is
required on a personal level for that person?
S4 (19:33):
It's a really good question.
S2 (19:35):
I don't think there is a one size fits all answer,
because every leader is so different from every other leader.
But you point to a really important issue, which is
that it does come down to psychology to a very
large extent. And I think you can see that in
this campaign. I think in the last week and a half,
Anthony Albanese has looked much sharper and much more confident
(19:59):
than he has for a long time. And I don't
think that's because he's suddenly figured out how to campaign better.
I think a huge amount of that is momentum, is
the sense of confidence he would be feeling from the
polls suddenly going his way. And I just don't think
you can overstate how important those mood shifts are.
S1 (20:18):
Yeah. No, I totally agree. And it does come down
to psychology. It's absolutely fascinating. We're recording this before the debate,
the first debate or the People's Forum, I should say,
which is on Tuesday night. So it's going to be
fascinating to see how these two men face up against
each other, because we've never really seen that before. So
I'm sure we'll both be watching. Sean, it's been so
(20:39):
fascinating to have you on, and I will hope that
you will come back again before the end of the campaign.
S2 (20:43):
Thanks so much. It's been great to chat.
S1 (20:45):
And bring your tartan lined bomber jacket with you. Thanks
very much.
S2 (20:50):
Thanks, Jackie.
S1 (20:53):
Today's episode of Inside Politics was produced by Julia Katzel
with technical assistance from Josh towers. Our executive producer is
Tammy Mills. Inside politics is a production of The Age
and The Sydney Morning Herald. To support our journalism, subscribe
to us by visiting The Age or smh.com.au. And sign
(21:15):
up for our Inside Politics newsletter to receive a comprehensive
summary of the most important news of the week, including
analysis and insights, in your inbox. Links are in the
show notes. I'm Jacqueline Maley, this is inside politics. Thank
you for listening.
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