The dust had barely settled on the Australian federal election on May 3 before the hagiographers, mythmakers and revisionists got to work.  If history is seen as a set of agreed upon facts, there was a rapidly growing consensus that Labor’s imposing victory had been the result of a superb campaign, sparkling in its faultlessness.

This did not quite match pre-election remarks and assessments.  The government of Anthony Albanese had been markedly unconvincing, marked by dithering, short sightedness and a lack of conviction.  It had, rather inexplicably, made the conservative Coalition led by that cruel, simian looking automaton Peter Dutton, look electable.  

Overall, the campaign on the part of both sides of politics was consistently dull and persistently mediocre.  Expansive, broad ideas were eschewed in favour of minutiae and objects of bribery: tax matters, cutting fuel excise, forgiving some student debt, improved Medicare services and child care assistance.  Issues such as the parlous reliance of Australia upon US security interests, not to mention the criminally daft obligations of the AUKUS security pact, or a detailed, coherent policy on addressing environmental and climate challenges, were kept in storage.

What did become evident in the weeks leading up to the poll was that the Coalition policy palette, which never went beyond blotches of law and order (terrorism, criminal refugees, paedophilia forefront themes), mild bribes for “cost of living relief”; and illusory nuclear energy, failed to appeal.  Its campaign lacked the barely modest bite of Labor, largely because it had been eclipsed by such oxygen drawing events as US President Donald Trump’s tariff regime and the death of Pope Francis I. 

It had also misread the........

© Eurasia Review