One week, two leaders’ speeches and suddenly the nature of the next election contest is becoming clear.
One speech leaned on blistering rhetoric. The other signalled a major policy shift. In the first there was no policy, but no missing the message. The second contained a substantive change, but it was so wrapped in protective coating that it almost wasn’t there.
Peter Dutton gave the annual Tom Hughes oration at the Sydney Opera House on Wednesday night. It’s the seventh iteration of an event created by the member for the northern Sydney seat of Berowra, Julian Leeser, to honour the Liberal party veteran who was the first MP for that federal electorate.
The location varies each year, as does the speaker, who usually selects the topic. This year, Leeser invited Dutton. Leeser’s office says the MP wanted the speech at the Opera House – the site of a pro-Palestinian protest two days after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel – and focused on antisemitism and Australian values.
That was also the subject of an address Dutton had been due to give to the annual interfaith parliamentary breakfast on 16 November, which Leeser and other MPs and senators attended. Last-minute urgent talks on contentious deportation legislation, rushed into parliament after the high court ruled indefinite detention unlawful, kept Dutton away.
He sent his apologies and his defence spokesperson, Andrew Hastie, instead. Hastie read Dutton’s speech, top-and-tailing it with his own reflections, and conveyed his leader’s regrets. Delivered by proxy on a very busy Thursday morning, the speech received barely any media coverage.
Dutton re-ran it this week, updated, expanded, revved and relocated, guaranteeing that this time it caught public attention. Penny Wong’s comments about accelerating the path to Palestinian statehood were fodder for extra content.
In both versions of his speech, the opposition leader referred to tolerance, importing homeland hatreds, social cohesion, antisemitism and the Opera House protest. In that, he said, Australians could not recognise themselves or their country.
Both versions referred to “moral cowardice”, “moral ambiguity”, “moral equivalence” and a “moral fog”.
Both also said those who did not subscribe to the Australian way of life should leave, that violent non-citizens should have their visas cancelled and be deported, and that a future Dutton government would ensure this occurred. In the months between the two speeches, his Coalition blocked government legislation aimed at jailing those who refused to go.
In the November speech, Dutton called for leadership, including from government and law-enforcement. This week, he said both had failed.
Only in this week’s version did he compare the Opera House protest to the 1996 murder of 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania, a link he insists was about their “social significance” as moments requiring government action. That alone ensured the speech would not go unnoticed.
Dutton’s re-run address left little room for confusion as to how he will present himself to the electorate. It was a campaign speech designed to engage a range of specific cohorts and send a bigger message about himself, his opponent and leadership. Condemnation of immigration and education policy was supported by value statements, not policy specifics.
Filled with high-octane language (his shadow treasurer Angus Taylor called it a “clarion call”), the speech used the Gaza conflict to frame a values-and-identity pitch that focused on family, duty, country, law, liberty and freedom.
This despite the warning from Asio director general Mike Burgess, who provides Dutton with security briefings when required, that especially in relation to the Middle East conflict “words matter”, and Asio “has seen direct connections between inflamed language and inflamed community tensions”. The warning remains current.
On Thursday came a very different speech. Anthony Albanese’s address to the Queensland Media Club was billed as a roadmap to the election and beyond, to a second Labor term. The prime minister foreshadowed a major interventionist shift to subsidising green energy innovation and smart manufacturing, to speed up the transition from fossil fuels and facilitate new jobs for workers moving out of sunset industries.
Albanese’s speech contained extensive descriptions of why Australia had to change, how it must compete with other countries doing the same on a much bigger scale, and how this change would provide certainty, secure the future economy and drive the integration of economic and national security.
But nowhere did he say specifically what he is actually going to do. If the text had not been handed out in advance – and attempts made to explain it – the journalists in the room might well have struggled to figure out what he was revealing.
Its centrepiece was the creation of a Future Made in Australia Act to coordinate the measures he was hinting at. He could not say precisely what function the act would perform. Details to come in the budget.
It was a bit reminiscent of Kevin Rudd’s unveiling in March 2010 of a big shift in health policy. Having quietly shelved his plans for an emissions trading scheme – a move that deeply unsettled key colleagues and would become public soon after – Rudd unveiled a blueprint to take over hospital funding from the states.
The commonwealth would, he announced, become “the dominant funder” of hospitals. But he never managed to explain clearly how that would improve healthcare. About a month later, Julia Gillard replaced him.
The campaign paths that this week’s two speeches signposted currently do not intersect. One relies on activating anger, projecting strength versus weakness, conviction versus equivocation, clarity versus confusion. It says: what you see is what you get. Like it or not, at least you know.
The other is about the big picture, about policy vision, about securing the future and other important stuff. It’s about resetting the economy and grasping opportunity and strengthening the nation to guard against what may come. It excites the people engaged in it. Without a clearer, livelier explanation of what they are doing, and how and why it matters, it may not seem quite as exciting to those who will decide if it happens.
Eventually, these paths will converge. The opposition will need policy substance as well as cut-through commentary. And to get people engaged with its story, the government will need to tell it a lot straighter.
They both matter – words and ideas. But sometimes in politics, words can matter more.
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