Extraordinary And Plenipotentiary Diplomatist July 19 Edition . | Page 20

GLOBAL CENTRE STAGE
Australia on the right track – lower taxes, more jobs, lower
electricity prices, economy building and congestion busting
infrastructure, AAA balanced budgets.”
Seeing the “daggy dad” with baseball cap in action was
indigestible, but the populist fi gure often is. A person who
has nothing to lose, not even his dignity, is a dangerous
political opponent. He will muck it with the rest of them
and unashamedly woo. And so it proved with the advertised
platform leading to May 18, streamlined and kept to such
slogans and promises as “Building our Economy”, “Backing
Small Business”, “Delivering Tax Relief” and the improbable
“Creating 1.25 Million Jobs”.
Morrison the man of advertising was always in evidence.
When it came to the damaging fl oods in North Queensland,
Morrison seemed gauche in his eff orts to win favour by
donning military colours on his trip to Townsville. But he was
well aware of being in the most marginal seat in Queensland
– the seat of Herbert held then by the Labor Party’s Cathy
O’Toole – and wanted to let people know he could be
buff oonish yet reassuring. Topping that were messages about
“standing by the people” and making sure that, “Supporting
the flood-affected communities and families in North
Queensland [remained] a top priority for our Government”.
Shorten was made out to be the devil incarnate with
dangerously ambitious policies, one best avoided for down-
to-earth voters. “Don’t roll the dice,” went a series of
advertisements from the Coalition campaign machine. Under
Labor, voters would receive higher taxes: “Australians to
pay billions in new taxes.” (That this was a grand fudge was
beside the point.) Question marks were placed under “More
Debt” and “Weaker Economy”. “The Bill you can’t aff ord,”
Morrison threatened, “will just keep rising and rising. If you
can’t manage money, you can’t run the country.”
Had the election been one of the matched policies,
folder to folder, dossier to the dossier, it is hard to have
seen the Liberal-National coalition winning. Such a
campaign was always geared towards defeating Malcom
“Innovation” Turnbull, the previous leader who was removed
in circumstances of much acrimony by a group of plotters
led by the current Home Aff airs Minister Peter Dutton. But
the ALP machine waivered, stuttered, and struggled against
the one-man “Scomo” Show, cheaply pseudo-presidential,
and purposely trimmed of substance. There was a failure
to capitalise on the record of a Coalition government
dysfunctional, suicidal and regicidal. Instead, it proved
markedly positive and “dangerously” visionary. “They did
have,” refl ected the Liberal Party federal president Nick
Greiner on Labor, “a very broad vision. We believed our
best chance would be to say to people: you don’t want more
taxes and more government, you want less taxes and less
government.”
Future Australian political campaigns are bound to shun
detail. In the long run, the economist John Maynard Keynes
famously remarked, we are all dead; in the meantime, test
your costings, explain your budget, and seize the day only
after a fair appraisal of the accounts. 
* Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at
Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University,
Melbourne. Email: [e-mail]
20 • Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Diplomatist • Vol 7 • Issue 7 • July 2019, Noida