Episode description
Episode description
It’s increasingly obvious the Prime Minister is using the final stages of this Parliament to roadtest a number of different election slogans. Last week it was ‘Australians taking back their lives’, followed by ‘Australians have had a gutful of being told what to do’, interspersed with ‘cost of living’ and ‘can-do capitalism’. This week it was ‘moving forward’. But where are we moving forward to? What’s the destination? What happens at this destination? Who’s going to be there when we get there?All of this is real-life mass focus group testing, to feed back into Liberal Party qualitative research, almost as blasé as the Colgate-Palmolive marketing division testing slogans for soap powder advertisements. That’s what politics has become for Scott Morrison: a marketing exercise and Parliament reduced to a forum to create political slogans and campaign marketing.
It might not be politics as we know it, but it looks more like a Prime Minister at the last chance saloon: rolling two dice to try and reach 18, when we all know the maximum is 12. Also known as desperation. Of course, this may end up in an election victory for the Liberal–National Coalition, but it’s becoming increasingly unlikely.
And in the psychological battle between the two leaders, Anthony Albanese laid a super-size bear trap for Scott Morrison, and he fell right into it. A normal leader would avoid a return to the scene of their biggest humiliation – in Morrison’s case, the holiday trip to Hawaii during the peak of the bushfire catastrophe in 2019 – but Morrison is no normal leader, and he has to win every single battle, even the ones not worth winning. He lied about providing the destination of his holiday to Albanese – easily refuted – when he should have just apologised (again), said that he will never do that again and he learned his lesson. And we all would have moved on.
But it became the news of the day and magnified the issue Labor wanted to focus on: Morrison is a pathological liar and untrustworthy.
Independents are likely to have a big influence in the 2022 election, and we speak with Hayden O’Connor from the Voices of Kooyong, a campaign which wants to unseat the Treasurer and current member for Kooyong, Josh Frydenberg. It’s a tough ask, but they have the determination to consign Frydenberg to the dustbin of history.
And wouldn’t that be a sweet victory.